#references to real life stuff are as boring as they were in the early oughts but i'm not here for that

[zincbot]

ah there's new futurama

[marginalgloss]

the light of day

‘…The only real social advantages are those that create life, that can disappear without the person who has benefitted by them needing to try to cling on to them or to make them public, because on the same day a hundred others will take their place. Remember as she might the words of the Queen, Mme de Villeparisis would have bartered them gladly for the permanent capacity for being invited everywhere which Mme Leroi possessed, just as, in a restaurant, a great but unknown artist whose genius is written neither in the lines of his shy face nor in the antiquated cut of his threadbare coat, would willingly trade places with the young stock-jobber from the lowest ranks of society, who is sitting with a couple of actresses at a neighbouring table to which in an obsequious and incessant chain come hurrying owner, manager, waiters, bell-hops and even the scullions who file out of the kitchen to salute him, as in the fairy-tales, while the wine waiter advances, as dust-covered as the bottles, limping and dazed as if, on his way up from the cellar, he had twisted his foot before emerging into the light of day…’

I noted some time ago that the second volume of In Search of Lost Time took me a while to finish. The third, The Guermantes Way, seems to have taken me even longer, though in truth I would find it hard to say for certain whether that’s really the case. In recent months I’ve found myself falling out of the habit of obsessively noting the start and end dates of my reading (via goodreads) and though I still write about every book I finish, I have neglected any kind of accurate online record of my current reading. 

Perhaps my heart was never really in that aspect after all. I like recording my thoughts after a fashion but the comparative aspect doesn’t appeal. I find I am like this with other things as well: I like to keep information, but I never know how to organise my life around it. I track my credit card and bank account spending with devotion but I’m not sure I spend less money as a result. 

This is a roundabout way of saying that I’m not usually interested in debating about books with other people. But I’d be lying if I said the urge doesn’t sometimes come upon me. I saw a colleague with A Little Life tucked under her arm going into the lift earlier today and all kinds of half-remembered thoughts about that big, weird, frustrating book swirled through my head; but of course I could never say anything. It was nice to know that I’d captured some of those feelings at the time, even if I’m reluctant to ever refer back to them. I sometimes think: I would like to talk about these feelings, even if I don’t want to argue about them. 

The Guermantes Way is built around something of this same tension. The shape of the book so often puts the individual, the narrator, against various awkward crowds. He is old enough now to enter society, and in his case society means an ever-changing impressionistic backdrop of faded French aristocracy. The question of what he ought to be doing there only resolves itself in terms of whether he should speak up or be silent, and for the most part he is silent; he listens, and for the most part is overlooked entirely. The result is frequently fascinating, but it is also the noisiest, and sometimes the most interminable, of the series so far.

That it is frequently boring (there is no other word) is exactly the point. The narrator will only say this in the most roundabout way possible, but the people for whom he is supposed to nurture an admiration turn out to be dullards. Their shallow preoccupation with heritage is a constant example: whereas the narrator is content to expound for pages on the potency of a few words or a single name, these people will reel off lists of names and places and dates like it was nothing at all, and demand credit for the weight of the words alone. 

Another example: the notorious Dreyfus affair is mentioned throughout, being the chief topic of contemporary controversy. But for the narrator the details of the case are less significant than the way in which it becomes a social battleground for the people around him. While he expresses a certain amount of distate at the explicit anti-semitism, it is hard to imagine the narrator becoming especially animated about anything or anyone in a social situation. On the page — writing for the reader, with the benefit of recollection — he is effusive and fulsome. In person he is entirely unassuming, and easily overlooked. 

Perhaps this novel is an attempt to link those two worlds: the world of individual felt sensation, the feelings of a mind alone and adrift, noticing things, as anyone does, and which contains those moments of startling beauty so frequent in Proust’s writing; and what is commonly called the real world, where all of that is put away and where humans talk and belong together as social creatures, and where those beautiful moments either hang on the air forever as soon as they are put into words memorable and fine, or where they shrivel up and vanish on the breeze. 

For the most part I think The Guermantes Way shows the gap between these worlds can never quite be bridged. But there are exceptions, most frequently where the narrator is alone with one or two other persons. The early sequences with Sainte-Loup are charming for the wide-eyed love and esteem, largely unrequited, with which he regards his friend. Later, Albertine appears again, a strange refugee from the previous novel in a few short scenes, where the narrator’s desires as a young man become much more apparent than they were before. 

And then there is, near the end of the book, a long and fairly bizarre confrontation with M. de Charlus. Earlier in the book, this older and somewhat decadent gentleman effectively propositions the narrator into a relationship — taking him for a sort of up-and-coming ingenue, Charlus seems to want him for a lover, or an apprentice, or both. But over the course of a few hundred pages the narrator effectively ignores his offer, thinking it the best way of evading any responsibility. We think no more of it until he visits Charlus later, and the older man explodes:

‘“…I think you do yourself an injustice when you accuse yourself of having said that we were friends. I do not look for any great verbal accuracy in one who could all too easily mistake a piece of Chippendale for a rococo chair, but I really do not believe,” he went on, with vocal caresses that grew more and more sardonically winning until a charming smile began to play about his lips, “I do not believe that you can ever have said, or thought, that we were friends! As for your having boasted that you had been presented to me, had talked to me, knew me slightly, had obtained, almost without solicitation, the prospect of becoming my protégé, I find it on the contrary very natural and intelligent of you to have done so…I will even go so far as to say,” he went on, switching suddenly and momentarily from haughty anger to a gentleness so tinged with melancholy that I thought he was going to burst into tears, “that when you left unanswered the proposal I made to you here in Paris, it seemed to me so unbelievable on your part, you had who struck me as well brought up and of a good bourgeois family,” (on this adjective alone his voice gave a little hiss of impertinence), “that I was ingenuous enough to imagine all the tall stories that never happen, letters miscarrying, addresses misread…”’

Charlus goes on and on like this, the clauses and sub-clauses piling up, in a sequence which goes on for perhaps fifteen pages. The climax comes with an act of violence: words having failed him, the narrator picks up Charlus’ silk hat and tears it to pieces. It is the only scene of really aggressive confrontation in the whole of Proust’s series thus far, and it is deliberately overwrought (like Charlus himself) to the point of absurdity. It is one of those perfect little set-pieces in this book which we wash up upon, like islands of wonder. 

Today we would probably call Charlus a psychopath. It is as much as the narrator can do to wonder if he would be capable of murder. But for all his instability, in the vivid expression of his manic emotional states he seems more like a human being than many of the strange automata who populate the salons and ballrooms of this novel. And what is he doing if not putting to voice the same kind of incessant, imaginative self-regard that drives the narrator himself? Those lines above, fuelled by doubt, about imagining the tall stories that never happen — letters miscarrying, addresses misread — are the stuff of novels, and the stuff of this novel in particular. Proust is confronting the torrent of his own immense verbosity, and the only recourse is to silence, and a simple act of unswerving defiance.