The Guermantes Way: Chapter One (18th post)

I suspect that the vast majority of those readers who give up on Proust do so at some stage of The Guermantes Way. While it contains much of interest, half of its pages are devoted to two society parties at the respective homes of Mme de Villeparisis and Mme de Guermantes, and during those 400 pages of inconsequential chatter, genealogy and snobbery, it can be difficult not to start thinking of more profitable ways of spending one's time. I intend to focus rather on the other half and make only a few comments about Marcel's attendance at those two events.

Since we were last in Marcel's company at Balbec, he and his family have moved into a flat in the Duke and Duchess of Guermantes' Parisian hôtel particulier in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. The building also houses little shops and workrooms of shoe-makers and tailors, along with the apartment of Mme de Villeparisis, who will be company for Marcel's grandmother as she has started suffering from an undiagnosed illness (pp.3-10 V Scott Moncrieff, pp.4-10 II Kilmartin).

Occupying one of the work rooms below the family's new flat is a waistcoat-maker, of whom Marcel remarks: “I am bound to say that my first impression of Jupien had been far from favourable. At a little distance, entirely ruining the effect that his plump cheeks and vivid colouring would otherwise have produced, his eyes, brimming with a compassionate, mournful, dreamy gaze, led one to suppose that he was seriously ill or had just suffered a great bereavement. Not only was he nothing of the sort, but as soon as he opened his mouth (and his speech, by the way, was perfect) he was quite markedly cynical and cold. There resulted from this discord between eyes and lips a certain falsity which was not attractive, and by which he had himself the air of being made as uncomfortable as a guest who arrives in morning dress at a party where everyone else is in evening dress”. A first impression would not be Proustian if it were not in some way equivocal, so: “I soon discerned in him a rare intellect, and one of the most spontaneously literary that it has been my privilege to come across, in the sense that, probably without education, he possessed or had assimilated, with the help only of a few books skimmed in early life, the most ingenious turns of speech” (pp.17-18 V SM, pp.15-16 II TK). We shall meet Jupien again in a startling passage at the beginning of the next volume, Cities of the Plain.

Marcel's long obsession with the name “Guermantes” is showing signs of strain: he hopes to find “the mystery of [the Duchess's] name” in her drawing-room full of her friends, “since I did not find it in her person when I saw her leave the house in the morning on foot, or in the afternoon in her carriage” and “frequently, I saw her at her window, in the courtyard, in the street, and for myself at least […] I did not succeed in integrating in her the name of Guermantes” (pp.28-29 V SM, pp.23-24 II TK). The disappointment that Marcel invariably feels when a place does not live up to what he had imagined from its name, is here repeated with people: there is always a gulf of disillusionment between their nominal essence and their real essence. However, as we shall see shortly, his hopes of getting to know her appear to improve when one day he visits the theatre to see Berma again.

Sarah Bernhardt
 (model for Berma)
in Phèdre

Before that, Marcel makes a discovery that corrects the impression he had formed when he first saw the great actress: previously, he had viewed her and the play Phèdre as absolute forms existing by themselves apart from the world of current experience, and he had hoped to absorb, if he tried hard enough, a small part of this transcendent art. As he watches Berma for the second time, he sees things differently. “But now, like a hill which from a distance seems a patch of azure sky, but, as we draw nearer, returns to its place in our ordinary field of vision, all this had left the world of the absolute and was no more than a thing like other things, of which I took cognisance because I was there, the actors were people of the same substance as the people I knew, trying to speak in the best possible way these lines of Phèdre, which themselves no longer formed a sublime and individual essence, distinct from everything else, but were simply more or less effective lines ready to slip back into the vast corpus of French poetry,of which they were merely a part.” And it is now, in this indifferent state of mind, that Marcel, no longer seeking it, finally grasps Berma's greatness “and then–oh, the miracle–like those lessons which we laboured in vain to learn overnight, and find intact, got by heart, on waking up next morning, like, too, those faces of dead friends which the impassioned efforts of our memory pursue without recapturing them, and which, when we are no longer thinking of them, are there before our eyes just as they were in life–the talent of Berma, which had evaded me when I sought so greedily to seize its essential quality, now, after these years of oblivion, in this hour of indifference, imposed itself, with all the force of a thing directly seen, on my admiration”. Marcel realises his earlier mistake: “Formerly, in my attempts to isolate the talent, I deducted, so to speak, from what I heard the part itself, a part common to all the actresses who appeared as Phèdre, which I had myself studied beforehand so that I might be capable of subtracting it, of receiving in the strained residue only the talent of Mme Berma. But this talent which I sought to discover outside the part itself was indissolubly one with it”. Unlike other actors, whose acting is noticeably separate from the role, Berma's acting was fully absorbed in the role with zero superfluity. Marcel is able to appreciate her art this time because he longer applied “the test of a pre-existent, abstract and false idea of dramatic genius, and I understood now that dramatic genius was precisely this” (pp.51-57 V SM, pp.40-45 II TK).

While this “awakening from dogmatic slumber” might be considered an important development in Marcel's artistic and intellectual life, a perhaps more important development, this time in his social life, occurs when, at the end of the interval, he looks up to one of the boxes and is greeted by a wave and a smile of recognition from Mme de Guermantes (pp.70-71 V SM, p.55 II TK). This small gesture has an immediate and disproportionately large effect on Marcel: “And now every morning, long before the hour at which she would appear, I went by a devious course to post myself at the corner of the street along which she generally came, and, when the moment of her arrival seemed imminent, strolled homewards with an air of being absorbed in something else, looking the other way and raising my eyes to her face as I drew level with her, but as though I had not in the least expected to see her” (p.71 V SM, p.55 II TK). His infatuation increases: “I was genuinely in love with Mme de Guermantes. The greatest happiness that I could have asked of God would have been that He should overwhelm her under every imaginable calamity, and that ruined, despised, stripped of all the privileges that divided her from me, having no longer any home of her own or people who would condescend to speak to her, she should come to me for refuge. I imagined her doing so.” But soon he realises that this tactic of bumping into her is not working: “I felt that I was annoying her by crossing her path in this way every morning” and he comes up with another tactic: using his friendship with her nephew Saint-Loup in the hope that the latter will speak favourably of him to his aunt. Marcel therefore goes to visit his friend in Doncières (pp.84-87 V SM, pp.65-67 II TK).

He enjoys his time with Robert and his military friends, but his thoughts eventually return to the reason he is there: Mme de Guermantes. In the meantime, however, we are treated to a perceptive and amusing description of the difficult process of falling asleep for insomniacs. “After having desperately, for hours on end, with shut eyes, revolved in their minds thoughts similar to those which they would have had with their eyes open, they take heart again on noticing that the last minute has been crawling under the weight of an argument in formal contradiction of the laws of thought, and their realisation of this, and the brief 'absence' to which it points, indicate that the door is now open through which they will perhaps be able, presently, to escape from the perception of the real, to advance to a resting-place more or less remote on the other side”. And this leads Marcel to expand upon an idea which was initially broached in the opening pages of the novel concerning the first moments of waking up: “One is no longer a person. How then, seeking for one’s mind, one’s personality, as one seeks for a thing that is lost, does one recover one’s own self rather than any other? Why, when one begins again to think, is it not another personality than yesterday’s that is incarnate in one? One fails to see what can dictate the choice, or why, among the millions of human beings any one of whom one might be, it is on him who one was overnight that unerringly one lays one’s hand? What is it that guides us, when there has been an actual interruption—whether it be that our unconsciousness has been complete or our dreams entirely different from ourself? There has indeed been death, as when the heart has ceased to beat and a rhythmical friction of the tongue revives us. No doubt the room, even if we have seen it only once before, awakens memories to which other, older memories cling. Or were some memories also asleep in us of which we now become conscious? The resurrection at our awakening—after that healing attack of mental alienation which is sleep—must after all be similar to what occurs when we recapture a name, a line, a refrain that we had forgotten. And perhaps the resurrection of the soul after death is to be conceived as a phenomenon of memory” (pp.110-113 V SM, pp.84-86 II TK). Those initial questions are reminiscent of the, to us, silly questions young children ask but which, in attempting to answer, we find too profound for us.

After a fortnight in Doncières, he is struck by the pain of his love. “There were evenings when, as I passed through the town on my way to the restaurant, I felt so keen a longing for Mme de Guermantes that I could scarcely breathe; you might have said that part of my breast had been cut open by a skilled anatomist, taken out, and replaced by an equal part of immaterial suffering, by an equivalent load of longing and love.” This is the same identification of suffering with love that he had first experienced with Gilberte and later with the little band of girls. In fact, he realises the similarity of his yearning when, looking at the stars and wondering if Mme de Guermantes is also looking at them, or reflecting that a passing breath of air might be bringing him a message from her, he is reminded of having had the same hope of the breeze carrying him a message from Gilberte across the cornfields of Méséglise (pp.156-158 V SM, pp.119-120 II TK) (see my 6th post here).

Unfortunately, Robert is busy with his mistress and therefore unlikely in the near future to be available to take Marcel to meet Mme de Guermantes. Marcel hits upon a pretext which will enable Robert to ask his aunt to meet Marcel alone – Robert should tell her that his friend would like to see her Elstirs (p.165 V SM, p.125 II TK). Having thus achieved the aim of his trip to Doncières, Marcel can now leave. But what actually precipitates his departure is anxiety about his grandmother, which suggests that Proust's intention for the whole Doncières episode, centring as it does on Marcel's somewhat ridiculous motive regarding Mme de Guermantes, is to act as a contrast to, and thus heighten, Marcel's much more serious concern for his grandmother. His departure occurs in the following way.

Robert suggests that Marcel should talk to his grandmother on the telephone. There follow five pages of literary brilliance with which Proust endows the call. The whole passage is too long to quote in full, but the reader can search for its opening words “One morning, Saint-Loup confessed to me that he had written to my grandmother” and then read until “I went on vainly repeating: 'Granny! Granny!' as Orpheus, left alone, repeats the name of his dead wife” (pp.176-181 V SM, pp.133-137 II TK). The passage does several things all at once: it portrays how at this time the phone is still regarded as miraculous; with its burlesque evocation of “Vigilant Virgins”, “Guardian Angels”, “Danaids of the Unseen”, “Priestesses of the Invisible” etc, it humorously touches upon the difficulties that can still aggravate a caller even now; and, buried in the above, it puts forward the idea that the separation of the nearby voice from the distant speaker is “but a premonition of an eternal separation”. And so the voice of Marcel's grandmother “tore my heart” - the “isolation of the voice was like a symbol, a presentation, a direct consequence of another isolation, that of my grandmother, separated, for the first time in my life, from myself”.

Marcel leaves Doncières full of concern for his grandmother. “I had to free myself, at the first possible moment, in her arms, from the phantom, hitherto unsuspected and suddenly called into being by her voice, of a grandmother really separated from me, resigned, having, what I had never yet thought of her as having, a definite age, who had just received a letter from me in an empty house, as I had once before imagined Mamma in a house by herself, when I had left her to go to Balbec” (p.186 V SM, p.141 II TK).

Next time, in another remarkable and lengthy passage (which I intend on this occasion to quote in full), we shall find out whether Marcel succeeds in freeing himself of this phantom when he rejoins his grandmother.