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There seems to me something unsatisfactory about any reading of the book that does not resist as well as endorse Le Temps retrouvé in the performance of this harmonising and integrating role. Proust’s last volume is a guide for the perplexed and does indeed illuminate many corners left dark by earlier volumes. Moreover the supremely accommodating selfhood of Le Temps retrouvé, far from merely altering retroactively what has gone before, confirms and blazons forth a notion that has already made many premonitory appearances. We need a guiding, stabilising notion of human individuality with which to battle our way through the intricacies of Proust’s text, and, late in the book but also earlier, Proust provides us with one. But what do we lose when we adhere too closely to the ontological telos of the book? We lose, I shall be suggesting in what follows, a whole range of paradoxes, dissonances and unusual consonances, and with them a vein of disturbing moral speculation. We lose also the sheer oddity of Proust’s final volume. The reader who has felt his or her perplexities dissolve as the general teleological pattern of the book emerges is invited to look again, and more fondly, at certain of its perplexing details. It could be that Proust was in need of a resonant exit-speech when he promoted involuntary memory to its crowning role, and that his narrator’s celebrated ‘quest’ in fact gives no more than a lightweight intellectual superstructure and an air of righteous striving to a mental adventure of a less than public-spirited kind.
The strangeness of this adventure, and the extravagant expenditure of time and ingenuity into which it periodically leads the narrator, may be observed with special clarity in Le Côté de Guermantes. Among many passages in which the supposedly overriding ontological programme of the novel is not only absent but unthinkable even as a premonition, I have chosen the scenes of jealousy and recrimination between Saint-Loup and Rachel in which the narrator figures as a singularly elastic terzo incomodo (II, 456–81; III, 176–207). The psychological drama here belongs quite as much to the narrator as to the enraged and acrimonious lovers whom he observes. Indeed his monologue is punctuated by silences on the one hand and by cascading repetitions on the other, and in each case displays the symptoms of an urgent undeclared passion. When a chance encounter with two of Rachel’s former fellow-prostitutes threatens to reveal to Saint-Loup more of her past than she would care to have him know, it is the anxiously repetitious narrator rather than either of his companions who dominates the scene:
Il ne fit pas qu’entrevoir cette vie, mais aussi au milieu une Rachel tout autre que celle qu’il connaissait, une Rachel pareille à ces deux petites poules, une Rachel à vingt francs. En somme Rachel s’était un instant dédoublée pour lui, il avait aperçu à quelque distance de sa Rachel la Rachel petite poule, la Rachel réelle, à supposer que la Rachel poule fût plus réelle que l’autre. Robert eut peut-être l’idée alors que cet enfer où il vivait, avec la perspective et la nécessité d’un mariage riche, d’une vente de son nom, pour pouvoir continuer à donner cent mille francs par an à Rachel, il aurait peut-être pu s’en arracher aisément et avoir les faveurs de sa maîtresse, comme ces calicots celles de leurs grues, pour peu de chose. Mais comment faire?
(II, 460)
He not only glimpsed this life, but saw also in the thick of it a Rachel quite different from the one he knew, a Rachel like those two little tarts, a twenty-franc Rachel. In short, Rachel had for the moment duplicated herself in his eyes; he had seen, at some distance from his own Rachel, the little tart Rachel, the real Rachel, if it can be said that Rachel the tart was more real than the other. It may then have occurred to Robert that from the hell in which he was living, with the prospect and the necessity of a rich marriage, of the sale of his name, to enable him to go on giving Rachel a hundred thousand francs a year, he might easily perhaps have escaped, and have enjoyed the favours of his mistress, as the two counter-jumpers enjoyed those of their girls, for next to nothing. But how was it to be done?
(III, 181)
In a sense, of course, the narrator is simply adopting Saint-Loup’s uncertainties in the act of describing them, and allowing his own eloquence to be dulled by a passion that can do no more than impotently repeat the beloved’s name. But there is too much writing of this kind for such an explanation to be fully satisfactory. The economic dimension of this passage has already been set forth, and in similarly stammering terms: the ‘Rachel … Rachel’ refrain to be found here continues a lengthy ‘vingt francs … vingt francs’ refrain from a few pages earlier (II, 457; III, 177–8), and this trifling amount – Rachel’s prostitutional price – has been insistently played off against the excessive amounts that her lover must now expect to pay in order to keep her, or that he might now be tempted to pay in order to uncover her secrets. These calculations in francs proliferate in the text at this point and acquire a fantasmatic life of their own. And while it is not surprising to be told that passion has a price-structure and is subject to market forces, it is perfectly alarming to find these home truths reiterated and rephrased over several pages. A delirious monetary system has invaded the text and is busily translating its characteristic psychological idiom into cash terms. Why? What was it that worried the narrator so much, once upon a time, and that now so unsettles the telling of his tale?
On the face of it, this is an elaborate Proustian conceit on the familiar themes of duplication and duplicity. Rachel is not what she seems. Or rather, like her namesake in La Juive (1835), the Halévy-Scribe opera from which the narrator extracts for her the nickname ‘Rachel quand du Seigneur’ (I, 567; ‘Rachel when from the Lord’ (II, 175)), she is two people at once and bears two different prices. Scribe’s Rachel is both Jew and Christian; Proust’s is both sexual commodity and an idolised lady ‘of great price’. But the social and financial dédoublement of Rachel prefigures another play of alternating perspectives, and one with which the novel is henceforth to be hugely preoccupied: the play between heterosexuality and homosexuality. And the martyrdom that awaits Scribe’s heroine in the closing scene of La Juive is to be assumed not by the modern Rachel of A la recherche but by the narrator himself, whose path towards knowledge of human sexuality is to be, in its later stages, slow, cruel and disconsolate. The disarray of the narrative during this episode, and its feverish fluctuations of tone, are so marked yet so little explained that we read on ‘for the plot’, demanding to know more.
The revelation that Saint-Loup is a homosexual prompts, it will be remembered, the long, melancholy coda of Albertine disparue. At the end of a volume in which an immitigable sense of loss has become the ground of consciousness – in which Albertine’s flight and death bring uncontrollably to the narrator’s mind the absences with which she had tormented him when present and alive – the discovery that Saint-Loup is ‘comme ça’ (IV, 241; ‘one of those’ (V, 762)) provides consciousness with its culminating loss, its final unthinkable extremity. At the very moment when it was impossible to imagine things worse, worse they became. The vulgar monosyllabic ‘comme ça’ rings out as a portent and a malediction. And, in a sentence from Albertine disparue that in many editions of the novel is used to bring the volume