Within A Budding Grove: Place-Names: The Place (15th post)
How to introduce characters in a novel? Here is some actual advice given to novice writers: “provide a brief description or summary of the character's physical appearance (age, height, hair colour and clothing style), personality (shy and reserved or outgoing and charismatic) and background (occupation, family and past experiences)”.
Yet this is not how the great writers go about it. There are two ways of introducing characters: by having them appear or by referring to them before they appear (Godot being the exception).
At one extreme, where introduction and appearance coincide, we can think of literary characters who suddenly and dramatically appear on the scene. In Great Expectations, for example, the young narrator, Pip, has just introduced himself to the reader and is in the churchyard where his father, mother and five brothers are buried. Without any warning, Dickens then introduces the startling character of Abel Magwitch:
“‘Hold your noise!’ cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch. ‘Keep still, you little devil, or I’ll cut your throat!’ A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.”
At the other extreme, where appearance is delayed after the character's introduction, the narrator in the Heart of Darkness has been discussing, on the basis of hearsay, the central figure Mr Kurtz for the best part of the novella before eventually encountering him for the first time. He sees him being carried on a stretcher:
“He looked at least seven feet long. His covering had fallen off, and his body emerged from it pitiful and appalling as from a winding-sheet. I could see the cage of his ribs all astir, the bones of his arm waving. It was as though an animated image of death carved out of old ivory had been shaking its hand with menaces at a motionless crowd of men made of dark and glittering bronze. I saw him open his mouth wide—it gave him a weirdly voracious aspect, as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him. A deep voice reached me faintly. He must have been shouting. He fell back suddenly. The stretcher shook as the bearers staggered forward again, and almost at the same time I noticed that the crowd of savages was vanishing without any perceptible movement of retreat, as if the forest that had ejected these beings so suddenly had drawn them in again as the breath is drawn in a long aspiration.” As equally dramatic after a hundred pages as Magwitch's entrance after one page – although we are none the wiser as to the age, height, hair colour etc of either man.
How does Proust introduce a major figure? Very often with an element of ambiguity, ambivalence or mistaken perception, and nearly always with a subsequently disappointing effect on Marcel. There are no sudden or dramatic entrances. And sometimes Marcel already knows of the character before clapping eyes on him or her for the first time, ie the character is introduced before he or she appears. This was the case with Mme de Villeparisis and is also true of the two new characters of Robert de Saint-Loup and Baron de Charlus.
Robert de Saint-Loup
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| Clément de Maugny (the main model for Robert de Saint-Loup) |
Baron de Charlus
The introduction of Charlus is more complicated. He is a nephew of Mme de Villeparisis and is an uncle of Robert. They are awaiting his arrival at Balbec and, for Marcel and the reader, his reputation precedes him. Robert informs Marcel that his uncle Palamède is “double-dyed in his nobility”, insolent, aloof, proud, haughty, brutal, egotistical, hedonistic, widowed and a trend-setter (pp.65-66 IV SM, pp.804-805 TK). (Incidentally, when I picture Charlus it is never as in Boldini's portrait of Robert de Montesquiou – I tend to imagine someone like the British actor Simon Callow or, later on, the American actor F. Murray Abraham).
One morning, Marcel is passing the casino when he has the sensation of being watched. He turns and sees “a man of about forty, very tall and rather stout, with a very dark moustache, who, nervously slapping the leg of his trousers with a switch, kept fastened upon me a pair of eyes dilated with observation. Every now and then those eyes were shot through by a look of intense activity such as the sight of a person whom they do not know excites only in men to whom, for whatever reason, it suggests thoughts that would not occur to anyone else—madmen, for instance, or spies. He trained upon me a supreme stare at once bold, prudent, rapid and profound, like a last shot which one fires at an enemy at the moment when one turns to flee, and, after first looking all round him, suddenly adopting an absent and lofty air, by an abrupt revolution of his whole body turned to examine a playbill on the wall in the reading of which he became absorbed, while he hummed a tune and fingered the moss-rose in his buttonhole. He drew from his pocket a note-book in which he appeared to be taking down the title of the performance that was announced, looked two or three times at his watch, pulled down over his eyes a black straw hat the brim of which he extended with his hand held out over it like a visor, as though to see whether some one were at last coming, made the perfunctory gesture of annoyance by which people mean to show that they have waited long enough, although they never make it when they are really waiting, then pushing back his hat and exposing a scalp cropped close except at the sides where he allowed a pair of waved 'pigeon's-wings' to grow quite long, he emitted the loud panting breath that people give who are not feeling too hot but would like it to be thought that they were. He gave me the impression of a 'hotel crook' who had been watching my grandmother and myself for some days, and while he was planning to rob us had just discovered that I had surprised him in the act of spying; to put me off the scent, perhaps he was seeking only, by his new attitude, to express boredom and detachment, but it was with an exaggeration so aggressive that his object appeared to be—at least as much as the dissipating of the suspicions that I must have had of him—to avenge a humiliation which quite unconsciously I must have inflicted on him, to give me the idea not so much that he had not seen me as that I was an object of too little importance to attract his attention. He threw back his shoulders with an air of bravado, bit his lips, pushed up his moustache, and in the lens of his eyes made an adjustment of something that was indifferent, harsh, almost insulting. So effectively that the singularity of his expression made me take him at one moment for a thief and at another for a lunatic.” (pp.68-70 IV SM, pp.807-808 TK).
An hour later, Marcel sees the man again, this time with Robert and Mme de Villeparisis. The latter introduces him as “my nephew, the Baron de Guermantes”, before correcting herself and giving him his proper title of Baron de Charlus. Marcel realises for the first time that Mme de Villeparisis is a central part of the Guermantes family and is suddenly elevated in his eyes (pp.72-73 IV SM, pp.809-810 TK).
Proust has used the technique of introducing the character and then delaying his appearance, but with a twist he also employed with Mme de Villeparisis (see my 14th post here): both characters make their entrances anonymously, the marquess as an eccentric old lady, the baron as a suspected thief, spy or lunatic. This dumbshow view of Charlus like a villain seen through a keyhole in a silent movie is significant because it creates a feeling of unease around him, which is reinforced on subsequent meetings.
In fact, his introduction is even more complicated. Charlus first appeared anonymously and briefly in the Combray section when Marcel saw him in the distance with Mme Swann in the grounds of Swann's house at Tansonville, just after the name “Gilberte” was wafted through the pink hawthorn to Marcel's ears (see my 6th post here). At the time Marcel did not know who he was, although his grandfather later referred to Charlus. And the reader then hears of Charlus again in the (temporally) earlier Swann in Love section when he acted as a support to his friend Swann during his turbulent romance (although there is a strong suggestion that he was actually betraying Swann with Odette). When Marcel meets Charlus in Balbec, unlike the reader, it is improbable that he knows of Charlus' role in the earlier episode because he has not yet become the narrator of that section of the novel. However, it does not take him long to work out that Charlus was the man he saw during his childhood years in the grounds of Swann's house on the Méséglise (or Swann's) way. He asks Robert: “All those mistresses that, you told me, your uncle M de Charlus had had, wasn’t Mme Swann one of them?” (p.74 IV SM, p 811 TK). Robert ridicules the idea. Marcel is not convinced.
Proust maintains the unease about Charlus when the baron invites Marcel to tea with his aunt later that day, but upon Marcel's arrival with his grandmother, they find that Mme de Villeparisis is not expecting them, and Charlus pretends he is equally surprised. Marcel twice reminds him of the invitation, but both times Charlus ignores him (pp.78-81 IV SM, pp.814-816 TK).
The ambiguity with which Proust likes to cloak his new characters is more sustained than usual in Charlus' case. His behaviour, as we have seen, is odd, alternating between friendliness and dismissive indifference, and his sexuality is obscure. According to Robert, “he was thoroughly unfaithful to my poor aunt” and “must have had any number of women” (p.68 IV SM, p.807 TK), although he alone doubts that number includes Odette. But is his reputation as a ladies' man underlined or undermined by his strong dislike of effeminacy, his hatred of young men, his feminine sensibility, his refinement of feeling “such as men rarely show”, his voice which in its higher range “seemed to be embodying choirs of betrothed maidens”, his “shrill, fresh laughter of schoolgirls”, his handkerchief which he tucked away “with the scandalised air of a prudish but far from innocent lady”, his unexpected visit to Marcel's room at night and his abrupt departure from it, and his strange remark that Marcel “doesn't give a damn for his old grandmother while inappropriately pinching Marcel's neck? (pp.83-90 IV SM, pp.818-823 TK).
I would suggest this is one of the great entrances in literature. It is subtle. We are not presented with anything so artless as Charlus' height, hair colour, occupation, etc, and we are left uncertain as to what we have here – there is complexity and there are hints as to how this character might unfold. We suspect Proust is holding the ace of spades, but he is not going play his hand straightaway.
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