Reading Proust - A Running Commentary

 When Descartes sought to discover what he could know for certain, he discarded everything he could doubt, and by this method found that the only thing he knew for sure was that in doubting, he was thinking . Hence, the famous “cogito, ergo sum”. However, Descartes' certainty is solipsistic and this creates other philosophical problems, in particular what philosophers call the “problem of other minds”. Any Proust reader who has studied philosophy will have noticed passages over which the ghost of Descartes (and sometimes Plato) seems to hover. For instance, in the first chapter of The Captive, taking the Cartesian method one step further, Marcel tells us that the real life of another person is unknowable to us ( p.74 IX Scott Moncrieff, p.56 III Kilmartin ). This could be taken as the theme of this section of the novel: the impossibility of Marcel knowing what is going on in Albertine's mind. All he has to go one are suspicions, confessions and the reports of others: each of w...

   The third chapter of the second part of Cities of the Plain in some ways echoes the second part of Swann's Way and could, for the sake of symmetry, have been called Charlus in Love. As in Swann's affair with Odette (and also Saint-Loup's with Rachel), the relationship is unbalanced: the pursuer's passion is far greater than that of the pursued. Morel, like Odette and Rachel, is inconstant and repeatedly fobs off Charlus, sometimes resorting to fabrication. And Charlus, like Swann, bluffingly responds with pretence as each player struggles for dominance in a game of make-believe. A violinist by Vlaho Bukovac Matters come to a head when Morel tells Charlus that he has an engagement and leaves Charlus alone and disappointed, “the tears trickling down and melting* the paint beneath his eyes”. Charlus, “waddling obesely”, goes to a caf é, where he drinks beer to fortify himself and writes a letter to Morel saying that he is going to fight a duel the next day against some...