Time Regained (31st post)

 In the first half of Time Regained, as we have just seen, Marcel finds himself in wartime Paris following “long years” in a sanatorium. He then leaves the city and spends “many years” in a second sanatorium before once again returning to Paris in the final part of the novel.

The trees no longer speak to Marcel.
Pic: Narcisse Virgilio Diaz De La Pena

On the journey back to Paris, Marcel's recurring doubts about his literary talent surface once more when the train stops in open countryside. “The sun was shining on a row of trees that followed the railway line, flooding the upper halves of their trunks with light. 'Trees,' I thought, 'you no longer have anything to say to me. My heart has grown cold and no longer hears you' (Hudson XII p.195, Kilmartin III p.886, Enright VI p.202). We have already noted a similarity between Proust's reflections on immortality and Wordsworth's ode on the subject (see my 25^th post), and here again we could compare Marcel's deadening of sensibility to the poet's complaint in the same ode that when he was young all of nature seemed “apparelled in celestial light” but it is no longer like that now he is a man: “the things which I have seen I now can see no more”. However, Marcel hopes that “human beings may yet inspire in me what nature can no longer say”.

With this aspiration, he sets off for the party at the Prince and Princesse de Guermantes'. On his way there, he once more runs into Charlus (see my 30^th post), who again is so changed as to be almost unrecognisable. This is going to be a motif with everyone Marcel meets at the party. Charlus, who is now white-haired and hunched with staring eyes, is recovering from an attack of apoplexy. As a result, his bodily movements are difficult, his voice is inaudible, his pronunciation is erratic and he had lost his sight for a while. Nevertheless, he manages to recite to Marcel a list of his family and friends who have died, “less, it seemed, with any emotion of grief that they were dead than with satisfaction at having survived them”. In a monotonous tone, he enumerates: “'Hannibal de Bréauté, dead! Antoine de Mouchy, dead! Charles Swann, dead! Adalbert de Montmorency, dead! Baron de Talleyrand, dead! Sosthène de Doudeauville, dead!' And each time the word 'dead' seemed to fall upon the defunct like a shovelful of earth, the heavier for the gravedigger wanting to press them ever deeper into the tomb” (SH XII pp.200-205, TK III pp.891-896, DE VI pp.207-212).

We will wait until the next post to look at the section that now follows concerning Marcel's resolution to devote what remains of his life to literature, and will here skip straight to the party, which acts as a swansong before he retires from society to concentrate on writing.

After entering the room where the party is under way, he finds it is full of old people, each of whom he does not at first recognise, as a result of “this destructive action of Time”, or what Beckett calls in his essay on Proust “the poisonous ingenuity of Time” (SH XII pp.277-291, TK III pp.959-971, DE VI pp.285-298). Marcel's failure to recognise other guests and his reflections upon the phenomenon is overly repeated (a fault which we should hope Proust would have rectified had he lived long enough to revise his text). Even close old friends such as Bloch and Gilberte prove difficult to identify, the former now going under the name of Jacques du Rozier while no longer looking Jewish and sporting a monocle, and the latter appearing to Marcel as “a stout lady” who he concludes has approached him by mistake. This is a possibility because he realises that he too has changed so much as to no longer resemble the Marcel that the other guests had known. In a passage even more clumsily constructed than that in which the narrator's forename is given as Marcel for the first time (see my 25^th post), Proust unnecessarily sets himself the problem of avoiding revealing Marcel's surname when one of the servants refers to him with the words “'Look, there's father …'” which the narrator follows with “(and then my surname), and as I had no children this could only be an allusion to my age”. The awkwardness is exacerbated in the translation because the French word “père” means both father and old man, a duality which the English word “father” lacks. Meanwhile, Marcel reveals to Bloch that Hedwige, the former Princesse de Guermantes, had died and that the prince had since married Mme Verdurin (whose husband had also died). So the changes in society people are not just physical but also social: “For the most characteristic feature of this new society was the prodigious ease with which individuals moved up or down the social scale” (see the comparison with Wharton's Age of Innocence in my 2^nd post) (SH XII pp.287, 289, 311, 320, 324, TK III pp.969, 995-1004, DE VI pp.296, 326-335, 363).

As if to emphasise this prodigious ease, it is revealed that for a number of years the Duc de Guermantes has been having an affair with Odette (SH XII p.394, TK III p.1068, DE VI p.408), a woman who had earlier been of such low station and morals, that the duke and duchess professed to having been hurt by her marriage to their friend Swann (see my 22^nd post). But now he is so enamoured he begins to display the same jealousy as Swann had at the beginning of his relationship with Odette, history tragically repeating itself with Marcel and Albertine, and now farcically with the superannuated duke.

In the next and final post, we will consider the events that lead to Marcel's resolution to become a writer and how Time is regained.