Close Readings of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time Volume II: Within a budding Grove
Place-Names – The Place pg. 316 – 321
David Bazzano
Proust lived and wrote during an exciting as well as tumultuous era for French and Western European cultures as the rise of modernism and industrialism socially interacted with the daily lives of the general public. Along with the introduction of new technologies also came new forms of thought and expression such as existentialism and idealism (traits and feelings the author as well as the narrator both share) which challenged not only the centrality of religious attitudes but also the ascribed status of individuals. As a result the era that Marcel is entering is a process of diffusion which has ultimately left himself (and in reality many others) confused about the relationship with the natural world. During his time traveling to Balbec the actuality of these events unfold before him as the time-space continuum is altered both mentally and physically by the experiences manifested from the locomotive, and also the confrontations with structure and agency as he witnesses the social order of things en route from Cosmopolitan Paris to the coast.
“…in the pale square of the window, above a small black wood, I saw some ragged clouds whose fleecy edges were of a fixed, dead pinkm not liable to change, like the colour that dyes the feathers of a wing that has assimilated it or a pastel on which it has been depositied by the artist’s whim. But I felt thatm unlike them, this colour was neither inertia nor caprice, but necessity and life. … for I felt that it was related somehow to the most intimate of life of Nature….If a person can be the product of a soil to the extent of embodying for us the quintessence of its peculiar charm, more even than the peasant girl whom I had so desperately longed to see appear when I wandered by myself along the Meseglise way, in the woods of Roussainville, such a person must have been the tall girl whom I now saw emerge from the house and, climbing a path lighted by the first slanting rays of the sun, come towards the station carrying a jar of milk.” -pg 316-17
In particular the entrance of the country woman who provides coffee and milk to the patrons on board manifests before him not only as a similarity to his fantasy of a peasant woman in Combray, but also as an exotic romance which forces him to recognize unforeseen emotions about ones destiny and furthermore, habit and its conflict with beauty or happiness.
One aspect of the narrator which relates to Proust is the fascination with impressionism and its emphasis on the depiction of reality and the passage of time. Exhibitions from artists such as Monet, Renoir, Manet, and Sisly captivated the author by their representations of landscapes which is clear in description throughout the novel, but on a more complicated level, a recipe for conjuration of the narrator’s mind.
What becomes clear after reading the beginning of this passage is the influences of the the Parisian impressionist mindset which continues to be repeated throughout the novel – especially the Monet influence of rooftops and lighting effects. These depictions however, also convey a romance or contemplation which reflects itself among individuals (particularly women) and repetitively is not just described but occurs before, during, and after these moments of epiphany or sense of clarity to the young narrator such as when the milk lady enters the train. From this point onward he is transfixed on this moment for the duration of its occurrence creating a memory as it is unfolding.
“Flushed with the glow of morning, her face was rosier than the sky. I felt on seeing her that desire to live which is reborn in us whenever we become conscious anew of beauty and of happiness. We invariably forget that these are individual qualities, and, mentally substituting for them a conventional type at which we arrive by striking a sort of mean among the different faces that have taken our fancy, among the pleasures we have known, we are left with mere abstract images which are lifeless and insipid because they lack precisely that element of novelty, which is peculiar to beauty and to happiness. And we deliver on life a pessimistic judgment which we suppose to be accurate, for we believed that we were taking happiness and beauty into account, whereas in fact we left them out and replaced them by syntheses in which there is not a single atom of either. So it is that a well-read man will at once begin to yawn with boredom when one speaks to him of a new ‘good book’ because he imagines a sort of composite of all the good books that he has read, whereas a good book is something special, something unforeseeable, and is made up not of the sum of all previous masterpieces but of something which the most thorough assimilation of every one of them would not enable him to discover, since it exists not in their sum but beyond it. Once he has become acquainted with this new work, the well-read man, however jaded his palate, feels his interest awaken in the reality which it depicts.” pg 318
Importantly, what many of us forget daily are the actual separations between beauty and happiness which all too often is conjoined together as a similar entity that has certainly taken young Marcel by surprise upon seeing something independent from his frame of references. Only from our memories, and prior convictions of the true state of particular emotions can we understand or make sense of the unknown. Arguably our judgment of newly introduced people or things in our lives are determined by previous encounters, or by assimilation of a personality, a face, voice, or kinesics can we replace the feeling of uncertainty with familiarity. The pessimistic nature of humanity is the fact that we often don’t realize it and take what we perceive to be as beauty and happiness as the limit of what has been already experienced, or for the yearning of an impossible paradise. Marcel understands this almost immediately when encountering the lady on the train as for a moment time has frozen and the realization that his assumptions of reality are disproved and he in a sense, becomes reawakened. Such as the stubborn well-read person rediscovering what a work of art is, so to is Marcel by observing a new world to explore through the woman in front of him.
“ As a rule it is with our being reduced to a minimum that we live; most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their serviced. But on this morning of travel, the interruption of the routine of my existence, the unfamiliar place and time, had made their presence indispensable. My habits, which were sedentary and not matutinal, for once were missing, and all my faculties cam hurrying to take their place, vying with one another in their zeal, rising each of them, like waves, to the same unaccustomed level, from the basest to the most exalted, from breath, appetite, the circulation of my blood to receptivity and imagination. I cannot say whether, in making me believe that this girl was unlike the rest of women, the rugged charm of the locality added to her own, but she was equal to it. Life would have seemed an exquisite thing to me if only I had been free to spend it, hour after hour, with her, to go with her to the stream, to the cow, to the train, to be always at her side, to feel that I was known to her, had my place in her thoughts. She would have initiated me into the delights of country life and of early hours of the day.” pg. 319
Habit creates the perimeters in which we find normalcy and regularity in the world which plays an important role in who we choose to participate in our lives as well as what we find enjoyable. However, habit can conflict with the predetermined structure and agency present among all societies but in relation to France in the 19th century certainly included ones ascribed status and social doxa within. In other words, the capacity of individuals to make free choices juxtaposed to the influences or limitations set for an individuals societal role can conflict with what we choose to take for granted. When Marcel is faced with this woman his conceptions of normality are provoked by the lady’s difference in lifestyle being a farmhand in a rural setting. This is not only exotic but also challenging in that his role as a sophisticated Parisian who dares not work under the sun permits him to avoid such confrontations in a typical setting. These feelings ultimately grow and redevelop within minutes it seems as the train departs before his chance to speak with her and is obliged to view her again, as another memory.
“ I saw her leave the station and go down the hill to her home; it was broad daylight now; I was speeding away from the dawn. Whether my exaltation had been produced by this girl or had on the other hand been responsible for most of the pleasure that I had found in her presence, in either event she was so closely associated with it that my desire to see her again was above all a mental desire not to allow this state of excitement to perish utterly, not to be separated for ever from the person who, however unwittingly, had participated in it. It was not only that this state was a pleasant one. It was above all that (just as increased tension upon a string or the accelerated vibration of a nerve produces a different sound or colour) it gave another tonality to all that I saw, introduced me as an actor upon the stage of an unknown and infinitely more interesting universe; that handsome girl whom I still could see, as the train gathered speed, was like part of a life other than the life I knew, separated from it by a clear boundary, in which the sensations aroused in me by things were no longer the same, from which to emerge now would be, as it were, to die to myself.” pg 320
An aspect of this passage which struck as peculiar is the reference to “speeding away from the dawn” which has a similar demeanor to time travel. With the public access of locomotives (as well as the advancement of its own ingenuity) and vehicles, a sense of time speeding up, and breaking away from points of lightness or darkness became a profound realization for many turn of the century individuals whose reference to time and distance underwent drastic change with the new convenience of travel. As this form of time warp is happening to Marcel, the ideas of parallel worlds, and pre-destiny flood his thoughts as he sees the woman at the station in rear-view, making the memory occur faster than organically. This moment of contemplation has almost traumatized a part of his very soul into sticking with the woman he is departing from which rings true to popular resurrections of Greek and Roman mythology and philosophy. These feelings of dis-attachment, and the frustrations that agency has on individuals wanders his mind finally to the questioning of hierarchy where he says:
“But alas, she must be for ever absent from the other life towards which I was being borne with ever increasing speed, a life which I could resign myself to accept only by weaving plans that would enable me to take the same train again some day and to stop at the same station, a project which had the further advantage of providing food for the selfish, active, practical, mechanical, indolent, centrifugal tendency which is that of the human mind, for it turns all too readily aside from the effort which is required to analyse and probe, in a general and disinterested manner, an agreeable impression which we have received. And since at the same time, we wish to continue to think of that impression, the mind prefers to imagine it in the future tense, to continue to bring about the circumstances which may make it recur – which while giving us no clue as to the real nature of the thing, saves us the trouble of re-creating it within ourselves and allows us to hope that we may receive it afresh from without.” pg 321
His realization of classism is apparent in his awareness of his life expectations instilled by his surrounding kinship and social order, but this moment rings quite important to the character as for one of the first times his ability to perceive the life he was given, next to the life he can, could, or should lead in an alternate setting if not for the current order of things. Moments such as this are still familiar with the present as the lives we lead still carry core-values from how society has positioned us. Furthermore in conclusion, are memories just an image? A boring time stamp which become more eventful or important to us in the future than the actual event really had? Or is memory romantic and residual? A place for your mind to go wander and visit once in a while? Proust is keen on the assumption that without time, our memories have no holding or purpose and without feeling, our memories are but nothing except photographs from someone else family scrapbook.