Living and Dying with Marcel Proust by Christopher Prendergast

Author:Christopher Prendergast [Prendergast, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781609457617
Publisher: Europa Editions
Published: 2021-11-26T06:00:00+00:00

23 See Chapter 11, ‘Lost, Found and Lost Again.’

24 See Chapter 11, ‘Lost, Found and Lost Again.’

8

THE GEOMETER AND THE WEAVER

I

Readers of Proust in a position to access the monumental second Pléiade edition of the Recherche have at their disposal both the novel and a massive selection of hand-written drafts, gathered as a collection of ‘sketches’ extracted from the ‘notebooks’ that Proust filled as he conceived, developed and revised the manuscript. For the non-specialist, the inclusion of the sketches can seem disproportionate and thus dispiriting. (Just how likely is it that the reader, having completed the 420 pages of Du côté de chez Swann will then intrepidly proceed to the 358 pages of the appended sketches?) The latter are nevertheless fascinating on their own terms, as the womb from which the novel is born and a treasure trove of textual possibilities entertained, if finally discarded.25

One of the most intriguing is the will-o’-the-wisp appearance/disappearance of the painter Pierre Bonnard in the sketches for Du côté de chez Swann. There is a two-fold mystery here: firstly, why Bonnard didn’t cross the threshold from the sketches into the novel itself and secondly, given that he didn’t, why he shows up in the sketches at all. For anyone interested in the relation of Proust to contemporary painting, these are deep questions, although the answer might lie in the fact that the sketch was of one of the Verdurin gatherings, to which a society painter such as Paul Helleu (whose name comes up at the Verdurins in Sodome et Gomorrhe) was in several obvious respects more suited.

While on the subject of names, there is one stopping-off point in the manuscript jungle that is absolutely not to be missed. A pure incarnation of ‘lastness,’ it consists of the last words of the last paragraph of the last notebook entry for the last volume, Le Temps retrouvé. In it, Proust returns one more time to the great themes of ‘memory’ and ‘forgetting,’ with a special place given to the phenomenon of the forgotten proper name that is suddenly remembered. The name in question is ‘Gilberte,’ initially obliterated and then recalled in one of the several non-recognition scenes of the ‘Bal de têtes’ sequence. (‘My looks continued to search her features for the name I could not find.’) But, as with the Bonnard mention, there is something that is not carried over into the novel, namely an extended metaphor that posits the name as a junction point akin to the longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates of earth geometry: ‘But with the loss of memory, a name becomes the geometrical location of so many lines of forgetting, not only the indefinitely stretched longitudinals, but also a latitudinal that has struck one just yesterday, the name that I know better than any other, that I cannot recover, but which is suddenly there: Gilberte.’

We do not know why this intricate terminal image of the name as a geometrical figure was not included in what Proust bequeathed as the then ‘final’ version of Le Temps retrouvé.

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