THE FATHER FIGURE IN MARCEL PROUST’S A LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS

PERDU

Julie Elise Grenet

A DISSERTATION

PRESENTED TO THE FACULTY

OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE

OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

RECOMMENDED FOR ACCEPTANCE

BY THE DEPARTMENT OF

FRENCH AND ITALIAN

Adviser: André Benhaïm

March 2010
 UMI Number: 3401574

All rights reserved

INFORMATION TO ALL USERS

The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted.

In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript
and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed,
a note will indicate the deletion.

UMI 3401574
Copyright 2010 by ProQuest LLC.
All rights reserved. This edition of the work is protected against
unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.

ProQuest LLC
789 East Eisenhower Parkway
P.O. Box 1346
Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1346
© Copyright by Julie Elise Grenet, 2010. All rights reserved.
 Dissertation Abstract

This dissertation entails a critical investigation of paternal influence on the writer-

narrator’s process of artistic development in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps

perdu. It examines how father figures (both biological and surrogate) hold central places

in the novel’s formal structure, linking core thematic and theoretical networks of

association through which the narrator articulates his social and aesthetic theories. It also

examines the socio-historical implications of the various roles this archetypal authority

figure plays. The narrator’s father and grandfather are associated with sensuality and

nature, often flowers, a vital symbol of the passage of time and of timeless renewal. They

are present in the scene initiating the theme of romantic love when the narrator first

encounters Gilberte, and the scene when the narrator’s grandfather walks in Swann’s

garden with Swann’s father immediately following his wife’s passing initiates the theme

of coping with death and loss. The moment when the narrator’s father is compared, in an

extraordinary multifaceted image, to the quintessential patriarch, Abraham, serves as a

big bang from which many of the most central themes—like the Oedipus complex,

homosexuality, Judeity, sadism and Time’s destructive capacity—emerge.

Notwithstanding the tendency in Proustian psychoanalytic criticism to focus on

maternal influence, both parents are inextricably complementary contributors to their

son’s literary vocation in a sort of reversed Aristotelian paradigm linking the mother to

art and culture and the father to visceral, subjective experiences of nature. In planning a

trip to Venice and Florence the father connects the present to an as-yet unrealized future,

creating a mirror image of involuntary memory, effectuating a temporal manipulation

iii
similar to what occurs in narrative. Liminal figures illustrate that Proust does not simply

reverse the mother-nature/father-culture paradigm. Paternal Aunt Léonie, integrating the

maternal and the paternal, is a caricatural portrait of the artist underscoring their

complementary influence.

By insisting the mother stay with the narrator in the bedtime scene, the father

creates the conditions necessary for a transfer of desire from the mother to the world of

literature through their nocturnal reading, in contrast to the popularly-held view that he

fails to assert his authority to resolve the narrator’s Oedipus complex. The metaphorically

dense father/Abraham image inaugurates an era of literary, polysemious word-play,

suggesting a Lacanian interpretation of the Oedipal scene better reflects what is at

stake—the narrator’s entry into the symbolic order of language.

Swann and Charlus, typically regarded as surrogate fathers, in fact perform

maternally-associated functions. Swann not only commands dubious paternal authority in

his own household but provides reproductions (maternal function par excellence) of

artworks for the narrator’s cultural education while sharing the grandmother’s

misconceptions about art. When the narrator sees the homosexual encounter of Jupien

and Charlus, another highly-cultured art admirer, he does not conclude that Charlus

resembles a woman but that he is one, based on his homosexual behavior, anticipating the

idea that gender is not essential but performative long before the heyday of structuralism

and “gender studies.” Charlus, who represents the Sodom side of the Sodome et

Gomorrhe paradigm finds his structural counterpart in Vinteuil, the artist role model who

is also a father and whose lesbian daughter links him to Gomorrah.

iv
 Acknowledgements

I wish to thank my professors and colleagues at Princeton. I am especially grateful to my

adviser, André Benhaïm, for his stimulating feedback and steady encouragement. Many

thanks go to my second reader, Thomas Trezise, for his diligent readings of my work, to

David Bellos and Michael Wood for serving on my committee and to Suzanne Nash and

François Rigolot who helped me to organize my thoughts early on in this process. I am

grateful for the helpful input of Marie-Hélène Huet, Volker Schröder and Göran Blix at

the time of my proposal defense and it was a pleasure teaching under the direction of

Efthymia Rentzou and Murielle Perrier. April Alliston and the members of her

dissertation writers’ workshop gave invaluable commentary and support. I am deeply

appreciative of the incredible French and Italian Department staff, Kathleen Allen,

Ronnie Pardo and RuthAnne Lavis. I am ever so grateful for the caring mentorship of

Martine Benjamin. Martine presented her work in several conference panels which she

helped me to organize. Participating in these conferences was a source of thought-

provoking feedback and I am grateful to the other panel participants—Brigitte Mahuzier,

Katherine Elkins, Catherine Webster, Pascal Ifri, Yaëlle Azagury, Hollie Markland

Harder, Suzanne Guerlac and Priya Wadhera—for sharing their work with me and

reflecting on mine. Michael Bishop’s input was also greatly appreciated and my

correspondence with Marcel Müller, who was so generous with his time, was

unspeakably instrumental in helping me to conceptualize this project. Many thanks go to

my colleague and friend, Marie-Hélène Koffi-Tessio and to Judith Rustin, Beth Meehan,

Emily Moore and Malia Du Mont for their devotion and support. Finally, Philippe, this

dissertation is for you. I don’t know how I ever would have gotten here without you.

v
 Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter One: The Father as Foundational Element of the Fictional Framework 16

The Exotic Anamorphic Abraham 18

À l’Ombre d’Abraham en Fleur: the Foundational Father-Flower 29

Gilberte, or Daddy’s Girl 35

Pastoral Patriarchal Prefigurations 46

Les Intermittences des Fleurs: From Nature Scene to Nature Seen 50

Les Fleurs du Malade: Resemblances between the Narrator and his 59

Father/Flower

Chapter Two: Separate but Equal: Complementary Maternal and Paternal 64

Influences on the Narrator’s Development

Paternal Parity 67

Father-Nature and Mother-Culture? The Dissemination of Parental 72

Roles and Temporal Representations

Crosspollinations: Variations on the Father-Nature and Mother-Culture 84

Inversion

Oedipus Wrecks: Rereading the Father’s Role in the Familial Triangle 90

Genesis and Literary Generation 99

Chapter Three: The Narrator’s (M)other Fathers 109

De l’autre côté de chez Swann: Swann’s Maternal Side 118

Charlus’ Pseudo-Paternal Version of Inversion 134

Vinteuil: Portrait of the Paternal Artist 161

Conclusion 177

Works Consulted 195

vi
 Introduction

It is the goal of this present study to examine the father figure as he is incarnated

in Proust’s masterpiece, À la recherche du temps perdu through close reading of this text

informed by Proust’s earlier writings and his correspondence. The notion of the father

figure, as I intend to consider it, is one that takes root in and yet far exceeds the frame of

the parental father as a psychological entity existing within a family structure. I shall

begin by situating this abstract notion of paternity in Proust’s contemporary socio-

historical and political context. In the course of this study, I also hope to elucidate the

place occupied by the father at the crux of several overlapping networks of associations

and recurrent metaphors; ones that bring together discourse on nature, (flowers in

particular), homosexuality, aesthetic theory, and that put into question prevailing norms

of gender roles and relations to show how he functions as an essential structural element

of the novel’s construction. I hope to disengage a sense of what “fatherhood” comes to

mean for Proust’s narrator on a more symbolic plane, that is, in more general terms of

generation and (re)production in art and aesthetic theory, a sense of how, in La

Recherche, “paternity” plays a role in the process of literary creation and the place it

takes in the age-old stereotype of the author “giving birth” to his work.

To begin, I would now like to turn from authorship to authority by opening a

discussion of Proust’s position on paternalism in the politics of the patrie. Although this

study of the father figure goes far beyond the narrator’s blood relations, as a staring point,

the questioning of the role of the father figure can be anchored in the narrator’s family’s

relative stability—by which I mean to evoke both the stability of the narrator’s familial

relations as well as their generally consistent adherence to normative familial paradigms,

1
i.e. the relative stability of the narrator’s relatives—thanks to which his childhood world

of Combray appears quite remarkable. For, if, as has often been maintained, Combray

can be qualified as somewhat resembling a sort of idyllic or even Edenic paradise lost, it

is my belief that this sense is largely attributable to the fact that here, where the context is

that of the narrator’s family, love relations appear to escape being subject to the ever

disorienting and deceiving sexual trompe l’œil that renders the work’s adult love

relationships impossibly painful and ultimately untenable elsewhere throughout La

Recherche.1 For, in other respects, Combray evidently eludes the paradisiacal paradigm

through its many moral ambiguities and is certainly not the time and place of an

indisputably happy childhood. It is, however, exceptional through its remarkably stable

distribution of authority by gender roles in the family context. Although the narrator’s

father does somewhat blur the lines of gender as we shall see, his patriarchal authority

over the family is clearly asserted and maintained. To take one example that appears as if

it could have been extracted from one of the popular guides to marital relations and

behavior of the era, the narrator’s mother makes visible efforts to remain demure and

deferent to his father and his father’s so-called “superiorities.”2 The irony that may render

these mysterious superiorities suspect, irony that is attributable, no doubt, to the very

conspicuousness of the mother’s efforts to respect these so-called superiorities, in no way

1
On the paradisiacal aspect of Combray, see, for example, Juliette Hassine,
Marranisme et hébraïsme dans l’œuvre de Proust (Fleury-sur-Orne, France: Libraire
Minard, 1994) 18.
2
“[…] ma mère, évitant de faire du bruit pour ne pas le troubler, le regardait avec
un respect attendri, mais pas trop fixement pour ne pas chercher à percer le mystère de
ses superiorités.” Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié, 4
vols. (Gallimard, “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade” 1989) I, 11. Subsequent references to this
work will be given parenthetically.

2
impugns the model of gender hierarchy and authority in the family, but rather reinforces

it since, in this way, her conscious effort to maintain the gender paradigm is put on

display. This fore-grounding may presumably be what is responsible for making these

efforts so perceptible to the child and thus memorable to him in adulthood. Whether or

not one should subscribe to the father’s “superiority,” his authority, whether it be in

sending the young narrator to bed, in opposing the grandmother’s philosophy of taking

walks in the garden in rainstorms as a way to foster robust health, or in his decision on

the direction the family should take in their excursions du côté de chez Swann or du côté

de Guermantes, tends to prevail.

To a large extent, the portrait of the narrator’s family in Combray is a realist one,

reflecting the predominant values or ideals of Third Republic France’s bourgeois society

and I believe that it is important to note that Proust, as a product of his milieu, is indeed

inevitably engaged in contemporary dialogue concerning paternity and paternally-

modeled authority and is not divorced from such a significant question of his day. I shall

make the following very general remarks in the interest of preliminary contextualization

as well as to try to more specifically define what the term “father figure” may actually

mean when placed in the historical context of La Recherche.

Proust’s adherence to the notion of paternal authority in the familial context of

Combray is very much in keeping with popular notions held by his contemporaries. In the

political context of the young republic’s struggle to establish and maintain stability and to

leave the age of monarchs and emperors behind, notions of paternal authority, of patrie,

occupy a prominent role in the collective consciousness and in contemporary discourse.

For many political and social theorists, both of a republican and of a royalist or

3
reactionary bent, commit what Alain de Benoist characterizes as the age-old error, dating

back to Aristotle, of conflating the relationships and bases of political power with those

of familial structures of authority and obedience, and vice versa.3 The traditional Ancien

Régime justification for the absolute power of the king which grants him the status of a

legitimate paternal authority over his people is not necessarily abolished by the parricidal

impulse of the Revolution that had led to the execution of Louis XVI in 1793. On the

contrary, what seems to take place on the socio-political level is a shifting of emphasis

from approbation of paternal authority as “naturally” incarnated in the king to its

approbation on the smaller social scale of the family unit, of the père de famille, regarded

as a miniature representation, or metonymic reenactment, if you will, of structures of

obedience and authority to the fatherland more in keeping with the philosophy of a

democratically structured society.

Quite generally speaking, the all-too-human perceived need for guidance by a

paternal authority is not abolished or denied, but rather often diffused in modes of

thought contemporary and analogous to the evolution of a republican political system.

Whereas, on the political stage, a heated struggle between proponents of centralized and

decentralized governmental power is being acted out, the desire for a paternal authority is

frequently transferred, conceptually, by an inexact analogy, to the private sphere. Thus, to

some extent, the political conflict between royalist and republican modes of thought is

played out in terms of shifts in how the ideal family structure is conceptualized as well.

Analogies are drawn between philosophical conceptions of political power structures and

of familial ones, and, as both spheres lack in coherent theoretical and empirical (not to

3
Alain de Benoist, Famille et société : Origines, histoire, actualité (Le
Labyrinthe, 1996) 13-22.
4
mention imperial) clarity of realization, these two spheres cross-contaminate. Thus, as the

process of (more or less willing) adjustment to a republican system of government takes

place, a shifting of the gaze from the authority of the king of the state to the authority of

the king of the family occurs simultaneously, at a time when the family itself is

undergoing major alterations in its own hierarchical structure.

As Philippe Ariès observes: “La famille ancienne était centrée autour de l’autorité

paternelle et de la gestion domaniale. La famille moderne s’organise en fonction de

l’enfant et de son avenir.”4 During the Third Republic, following a social trend long in

development, the father indeed loses some aspects of his legal authority. For example, by

a law of 1889, the courts may rule that his absolute power over his family may be

forfeited in cases of drunken debauchery or behavior that poses a threat to his children’s

moral or physical well-being, and in 1898 this may go so far as to deprive him of custody

of his children in the case of criminal behavior. As Theodore Zeldin notes: “Male

supremacy was challenged […] by the limitation of paternal authority in the interests of

children.”5 Proust is writing at the time of the child’s heyday in the history of the

development of the bourgeois family, a time when emphasis has been shifted away from

prioritizing the collective continuity (of which the father is the nucleus and the leader and

thus in a sense the only truly significant entity) toward active and careful cultivation of

one’s progeny.6

4
Philippe Ariès, Histoire des populations françaises et de leurs attitudes devant
la vie depuis le XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Editions Self, 1948) 479.
5
Theodore Zeldin, France 1848-1945, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973-77)
361.
6
It is perhaps noteworthy that this notion of cultivation is doubly pertinent to our
proposals in that it implies the concept of cultural development as well as the connotation
5
 However, it is not at all certain that, globally, this turn inward toward the family

did not, in fact, in many ways compensate the father for authority that may have been

diminished in the legal sphere. The increasing privacy of family life in effect shielded

him from public observation and in this respect may have served to widen the inevitable

gap between his weakening situation de juris and his authority as master of his domain de

facto which it may have often actually solidified. Nonetheless, to the extent that

legislation presumably lagged behind and in effect served as a mechanism for affirmation

and approbation of dominant trends of social behavior, the father had already taken a

more “democratic,” less authoritarian stance in his role as head of his household as well

as a more active interest his child’s development and in the securing of his child’s

success and his future.

In turning our attention to the Combray narrative, as far as questions of the

father’s despotic or benevolent authority are concerned, we need to recognize the limited

perspective imposed by the text. In the first-person “autocracy” that is La Recherche, to

the extent that all behaviors and all points of view are filtered through that of the auto-

diegetic narrator, to use the terminology of Gérard Genette, what is fore-grounded is the

narrator’s self-perceived lack of power.7 Whether or not the control exercised by his

father was excessively authoritarian—and I believe that it was not, for reasons that shall

be explained below—is subject to some debate. One cannot know whether the father’s

decisions were truly as arbitrary and erratic as they appeared to the child from whose

perspective they appear to be narrated. For example, one of the cited abrogations of his

of nurturing plant life or flowers. Floral metaphors, as we shall see, are central to the
network of associations stemming from the father figure in La Recherche.
7
Gérard Genette, Figures III (Editions du Seuil, 1972) 253 and passim.
6
so-called right not to be sent to bed until a later time is incited by the grandfather’s

remark that he appears tired. In this instance, or, more accurately, from this perspective,

the decision to send him to bed early is neither despotic nor arbitrary, nor suggestive of

the father’s indifference to his son but simply grounded elsewhere than in the narrator’s

direct experience. Had the young narrator also simply appeared tired at other times when,

from the narrator’s point of view, his father “arbitrarily” sent him to bed or denied him

the right to take his habitual walk? This is impossible to know. Therefore, shifting our

initial gaze from whether the father was or was not despotic instead to the significance of

the narrator’s perception of his own position of power or lack of power in relation to his

father leads to an interesting insight. It highlights the father’s function in defining the

parameters of the narrator’s sentimental education that is so central to La Recherche.

Without resolving the ambiguities concerning the extent and legitimacy of the father’s

exercise of power, this shift brings attention to the significance of the narrator’s

perception of being powerless to fulfill his desires, a state that is equally and consistently

true throughout La Recherche and that is one of the fundamental principles that will be

upheld and reinforced as the work progresses. It attributes his early experience of this

essential principle to his experience with his father, showing how his father initiates his

realization of this universal self-perceived state. The narrator is equally impotent, for

example, in relation to the family’s servant, Françoise, when to him his fate depends on

whether or not she will deliver to his mother the note urging her to come kiss him

goodnight while the family is receiving Swann. Furthermore, quite apart from any

question of excessive or non excessive familial authority, paternal or otherwise, the

narrator laments his powerlessness, his absolute inability, to conjure up by force of will

7
the fantasized peasant girl he longs to meet on his solitary excursions—a prelude to the

narrator’s struggles with this same position of impotence when faced with the contrary

wills of Gilberte and Albertine. Through repeated experience, the narrator will

progressively learn to formulate the universality of this principle, of the subject’s

impotence, in any and all social relations. Looked at in this light, we therefore see the

father as a preliminary emissary of one of the dominant principles of the Bildungsroman

that is, in part, La Recherche. In fact, the importance of this principle of which the father

is a preliminary emissary cannot be overestimated, for the choice to become an artist, to

become a master of the masterpiece—defined as the world one creates, according to the

narrator’s later formulation of what constitutes or is constituted by a great work of art8—

represents the narrator’s ultimate response to this perception of his impotence in the

world he inhabits.

For our purposes at this stage, it is important to rapidly note that the dominant

vocabulary used in political discourse to formulate or frame questions pertaining to

authority is prominently featured in Proust’s lexicon in Combray where the father’s

authority is referred to in terms of “pactes octroyés”, “principes” and “droit des gens” (I,

35). In the father’s erratic orders that break with the young narrator’s consecrated habits

and rituals, there is an implicit element of parodical debate not only on the respective

roles of legislated and authoritarian rule, the potential dangers and merits or even the very

possibility of such thing as a benevolent dictator, but perhaps even on the amount of

8
“Grâce à l’art, au lieu de voir un seul monde, le nôtre, nous le voyons se
multiplier et autant qu’il y a d’artistes originaux, autant nous avons de mondes à notre
disposition […]” (IV, 474).
8
authority that should rightfully be granted to precedent-based (as opposed to legislated)

law.

Generally speaking, in the broader socio-historical context, the model of the

father as benevolent dictator of his family seems to have represented the ideal. With

chaotic regime change and governmental instability, having the family led by a clearly

defined authority ostensibly offered a comforting counterbalancing force. Although the

limited first-person perspective of the Combray narrative makes the extent and the

intended use of the father’s authority impossible to ascertain with certainty, there is

substantial evidence that the benevolent dictator model is the one that is most closely

represented. The narrator’s father commands authority that is respected and obeyed, but

he is neither unapproachable (thus the incessant discussions between the father and the

grandmother on the aforementioned walks in the rainy garden) nor suppressive of

opposing views (as attested by her vocal disapproval of the stupidity of his education).

His “autocratic” decisions that chagrin his son, like the ostensibly arbitrary decision to

cancel a habitual walk or the order to go to bed early, do not seem to be motivated by any

sadistic desire to torment his son, nor by a gratuitous satisfaction in his command of

authority; for when, in the monumental and emblematic bedtime scene of Combray, it

does become apparent to him that his child is suffering, he is sympathetic and makes the

decision to end that suffering. As the narrator himself suggests, his father seems simply

unaware of the catastrophic emotional effect that such decisions provoke. The fact that

the father is ignorant to the extent of his child’s torment does not necessarily deserve to

fall into the opposing and perhaps even more treacherous category of indifference. In

fact, such a reading seems somewhat anachronistic. In the context of late nineteenth

9
century child rearing, for the mother to be the overwhelmingly principle caretaker and the

father to be more distant falls perfectly into the norm, just as does the familial focus on

the promotion of the child’s future and his well-being. Several of the father’s actions are

consistent with this vision. Just as in the case of the bedtime scene where the realization

of his son’s suffering is immediately followed by a measure to alleviate it, his initial

objection to his son’s desire to pursue a literary career appears genuinely motivated by

concern for the latter’s well-being. Once he is informed by Norpois that literature can be

an acceptable and even prestigious career, the father becomes its advocate, going so far as

to have his son present to Norpois a sample of his writing.9 He will further support this

decision, against the concerns of the narrator’s mother, citing his son’s entitlement to

happiness and the importance of his finding satisfaction in his career (I, 473).

Questions concerning the role of the father in Combray will be explored in detail

in the first chapter of this study where I aim to elucidate how Proust accords the

narrator’s father and grandfather primary roles in the structure of La Recherche. Indeed,

in Combray fathers are frequently featured in exotic images and in conjunction with

abundant images of fecund forms of flora and fauna, and first and foremost of flowers.

Flowers (naturally) are an ideal Proustian metaphor for sensualism. They are also rather

emblematic of the search for lost time as they seem to be a spatial representation of a

desire to trump time, of a desire to extend modest spatial dimensions into

disproportionately lengthened temporal ones, cunningly exploiting our inability to

9
Norpois possesses many traits that resemble those of Proust’s own father who
was an extremely well-renowned, widely-published and influential contributor to the
field of medicine and who, in his career, performed many diplomatic functions, traveling
for international conferences on hygiene, his field of medical expertise. Marie Miguet-
Ollagnier explores these connections in the third chapter of the first part of Gisements
profonds d’un sol mental: Proust (Presses Universitaires de Franche-Comté, 2003) 25-35.
10
distinguish the flower we behold in the present from those that existed in previous

seasons.

In addition to his connection to floral imagery, the father is also found at the crux

of a network of seminal images and themes of mythological proportions which ostensibly

contain the potential to portray, in germ, many of the most significant themes that are

developed in the course of the work. Particular attention is paid to the great extent to

which the father/Abraham image announces essential features of the novel’s structure. It

is my belief that the moment in the bedtime scene in Combray where the father is

compared to Abraham, the quintessential patriarch, is the seminal moment of La

Recherche, the moment of the big bang, out of which practically all of the major themes

of and questions begged by the work are presented. As I hope to demonstrate, upon close

observation one finds that father figures may often be featured presences in scenes of the

novel whose significance is not necessarily immediately apparent but that with hindsight

one may recognize to have prefigured essential advancements in the narrator’s aesthetic

formation and on his path to fulfillment of his literary vocation. Though perhaps less

frequently or prominently featured than their maternal counterparts, they tend to appear

in the text at crucial moments in the narrator’s theorizing discourse on the creation of art

as well as in lavish descriptions of sensual experience that foster the narrator’s realization

of his literary vocation by inspiring his imagination.

In the second chapter I engage psychoanalytic criticism in an investigation of the

role of the narrator’s mother and grandmother in the development of his understanding of

his artistic calling as it functions in relation to the role of the father. The field of Proustian

criticism is filled with an abundance of richly thought-provoking analyses of the mother’s

11
function in À la recherche du temps perdu. This fascinating figure plays a critical role in

the narrator’s development of his literary vocation, a role whose defining characteristics

have been presented, assessed and reassessed in felicitous contributions to the evolution

of the field of literary criticism and debate. In contrast, it is quite surprising to note the

relative paucity of critical studies that have taken as their primary object of interest the

role of the father in Proust’s work.10 Yet I believe that their roles are inextricably

complementary. This observation pertaining to the critical imbalance between studies of

maternity and paternity, of the tendency of gender studies to focus on the feminine, is

certainly not limited to Proustian criticism. It is my hope that this present analysis will

engender dialogue and reflection on what it means to talk about gender.

A significant part of the “revolutionary” aspect of La Recherche appears to lie in

how parental gender differences play out as influential to the narrator’s process of

developing his literary vocation. As I aim to show, despite the fact that the narrator’s

mother and grandmother play enormously significant key roles in initiating him into the

world of literature and in igniting his passion for reading, the association, inherited from

classical antiquity, of mother with nature and father with culture, does not appear to be

simply reversed in Proust’s work, but rather nuanced and complicated when the father’s

role in the development of his son’s literary vocation is brought to light.

As is the case with all great writers, Proust’s views, while not so detached from

contemporary thought so as to be unrecognizable, are nonetheless revolutionary in many

10
There have been a number of studies of the influence of Proust’s father, Adrien
Proust, on his son. For example, this is the focus of Christian Péchenard’s Proust et son
père (Paris: Quai Voltaire, 1993). Though knowledge of Proust’s relationship with his
father has undoubtedly informed this reading, because the subject has already been
explored, this study instead focuses on the influences of father figures on the narrator
within the fictional framework of the text.
12
respects. In the framework of La Recherche, the adherence to a Combray “norm” or

template comprised of fixed hierarchical gender relations within the family serves as a

kind of measuring stick for prevailing normative conceptions of gender roles against and

out of which the narrator’s perceptions and attitudes will alter and grow as later

revelations and experiences of extra-familial milieux contradict the narrator’s childhood

experiences. The narrator’s familial love relationships stand in stark contrast to romantic

love relationships in which, almost always, at least one of the lovers or potential lovers is

plagued by some degree of gender dysphoria. Needless to say, when reading À la

recherche du temps perdu, nothing could be farther from the truth than to assert that

Proust’s system of gender relations takes on any appearance of stability. In fact, quite to

the contrary, to a great extent for Proust it is the constant blurring or obfuscation of

gendering characteristics that itself becomes the rule. Indeed, after the Combray narrative

there almost inevitably comes a moment when nearly all of the principal characters of La

Recherche betray in some way their adherence to their ostensibly designated sex.

It is principally extra-familial father figures who serve as the emissaries of

deviations from the established norm to create a new adjusted set of standards particular

to La Recherche. These “other fathers” are the subject of the third chapter. Turning to

these other fathers helps to elucidate in what ways Proust does and does not break with

traditional conceptions of gender and paternity in the context of artistic creation. In this

regard, a study of these other fathers is most auspicious in helping to understand the

subsequent course of the narrator’s sentimental education, particularly in terms of how

the question of paternal authority enters into the narrator’s quest for vocational and vocal

maturity and independence as a writer who will seek to give expression to his

13
observations of those people who have surrounded him and to thereby extend but also

define their temporal existence in his work through the cultivation of his own voice.

After a brief recounting of the role of a few relatively minor father figures, the

first character examined in depth in chapter three is Swann. Swann appears to be

endowed with many characteristics associated with the narrator’s mother and

grandmother, and I argue that he should be re-classified not as a substitute father figure

for the narrator, as he is generally regarded, but rather as a figure with far more maternal

affinities than paternal ones.

Charlus, who introduces the narrator to the world of male homosexuality, is of

course one of the most significant “other fathers” of La Recherche. He holds a key spot in

the work’s structure as he renders explicit the Sodom side of the Sodome et Gomorrhe

paradigm, whose presence the father-Abraham image had tacitly implied. Like Swann, he

is perhaps even a “mother father” both due to similarities with the narrator’s mother and

grandmother and to the fact that he is revealed as a member of what the narrator refers to

as the race of hommes-femmes, putting gender categories and roles into question.

Vinteuil’s masterpiece is the final master piece in the puzzle, in the network of

associations established between creativity and the paternal, examined in this third

chapter. The sublime music of Vinteuil and the desire to create art that it inspires in the

narrator represent one of the most concrete examples of the links established in La

Recherche between the exemplary nature of paternal influence and the narrator’s nascent

realization of his literary vocation. Vinteuil, the work’s only artist role-model who

actually is a father, is equally emblematic of “the Father” as he is of “the Artist.”

Structural homologue to Charlus who represents Sodom, Vinteuil is intimately linked to

14
the introduction into the work of the Gomorrah side of Sodome et Gomorrhe, particularly

in regards to his extraordinary paternal relationship with his daughter’s lesbian lover. In

addition, he is also intimately linked to the narrator’s interrogation of sadism, another

principal theme of the work, since he is survived by his daughter and her lover who

cruelly tormented him in life as they do his pictorial image in death. This father is thus a

far more integral and indispensable part of the construction of À la recherche du temps

perdu than other fictional artist role-models who serve to inspire the narrator’s creative

ambitions, like Bergotte and Elstir, and his work seems to enjoy a superior status

accordingly.

In the conclusion, the nature of the “parental” relationship that exists between an

artist and his creation, the work to which he gives birth, is brought into question.

Examples of the narrator’s use of this parental metaphor when referring to the fruits of

his own future creation are noted along with variations in the metaphor’s formulation.

Ultimately, the way in which a text is posited as both attached to its author, in terms of

his unique vision, but also as an entity that functions independently of his control in the

reader’s encounter with it, suggests that the relationship is one of both maternal and

paternal intonation, showing that the complementarity, observed in chapter two, between

the influences of the mother and the father on the narrator’s artistic development is

equally pertinent when the question is looked at from the vantage point of the projected

product of the narrator’s creation.

15
 Chapter One
The Father as Foundational Element of the Fictional Framework

Appearing in essential foundational scenes of À la recherche du temps perdu, the

narrator’s father and grandfather are situated at the core of a network of associations that

bind the work together, indispensable elements of its structure. The relative infrequency

of their presence in the text, particularly when compared to the abundance of passages in

which the narrator’s mother or grandmother are featured, should not be considered a sign

of their triviality. On the contrary, when the text is examined closely, one finds that the

passages in which the father, the grandfather, or both appear are often of quite substantial

symbolic significance. They are often passages where essential thematic materials or

building blocks are introduced into the text, where the narrator’s creative imagination is

significantly stimulated and engaged, where central tenets of the narrator’s aesthetic or

social theory are elaborated. This chapter explores three such foundational scenes, the

bedtime scene, the passage in which the narrator first encounters Gilberte and the one in

which the narrator’s grandfather walks in Swann’s garden with Swann’s father right after

Swann’s mother has passed away.

Not only the familial father figure’s appearance but also the mode of his

appearance seems to be symbolically charged. His brief, sporadic, and rather

unpredictable eruptions into the text appear, in and of themselves, to announce or mirror

the mechanism of instances of involuntary memory, the ostensibly arbitrary provocations

of sensual experience that create the impression of simultaneously experiencing past and

present occurrences and of thereby transcending time. What’s more, these passages in

which the narrator’s father and/or grandfather are present are quite often ones in which

16
flowers, a vital symbol of the passage of time as well as of timeless renewal, are key as

well. For example, the grandfather flashes instantaneously and almost imperceptibly in

and out of the text at a moment in Combray when the young narrator, while lamenting the

fact that he feels that he will never be able to become a successful writer, suddenly and

unexpectedly feels inspired, sensing a deeper significance hidden behind the banal

everyday pleasures of his walks in the countryside:

[…] il me parut plus affligeant encore […] de n’avoir pas de dispositions

pour les lettres […] tout d’un coup un toit, un reflet de soleil sur une
pierre, l’odeur d’un chemin me faisaient arrêter par un plaisir particulier
qu’ils me donnaient, et aussi parce qu’ils avaient l’air de cacher au-delà de
ce que je voyais, quelque chose qu’ils invitaient à venir prendre et que
malgré mes efforts je n’arrivais pas à découvrir. Comme je sentais que
cela se trouvait en eux, je restais là, immobile, à regarder, à respirer, à
tâcher d’aller avec ma pensée au-delà de l’image ou de l’odeur. Et s’il me
fallait rattraper mon grand-père, poursuivre ma route, je cherchais à les
retrouver, en fermant les yeux […] (I, 176).1

A simple detail, such as the narrator needing to catch up with his grandfather, may seem

merely anecdotal and trivial. However, the context surrounding the remark—the

narrator’s quest to uncover a hidden essence or truth that might inspire literary creation—

is not. The narrator could just as easily have been portrayed as needing to catch up with

his parents, rather than with his grandfather specifically.2 The fact that it is, indeed,

specifically with his grandfather that the narrator must catch up would certainly not seem

to be of any particular significance as an isolated incidence. However, rather than being a

singularity, this remark seems to fit an observable cumulative pattern of association

between father figures and moments in the text when the narrator is making significant

1
Emphasis added.
2
Later in the text, in a different passage, the narrator does indeed begin a
sentence: “Mais d’autres fois tandis que mes parents s’impatientaient de me voir rester en
arrière et ne pas les suivre […]” (I, 171).
17
strides in his trajectory toward fulfillment of his literary destiny. Further examples

revealing this pattern of coincidence will be the focus of this chapter.

Because of such coincidences, the paternal presence appears to function in the

text as a signal that an important development or revelation that will lead to the narrator’s

enhancement of his literary potential is taking place. The moment in the bedtime scene

when the narrator’s father is compared to Abraham, the quintessential patriarch, is

perhaps the single most momentous example of how the father functions as a crucial

structural element in the text. It is a sort of big bang where many of the most important

themes of La Recherche are revealed.

The Exotic Anamorphic Abraham

It is interesting to note that no literal physical portrait accompanies the narrator’s

descriptions of his father’s behavior and the hypotheses concerning its psychological

motivation. On the contrary, however, the physical description of the father is quite

extraordinary and ostentatiously divorced from the literal level. It is a purely figurative

description given in the most magnificent metaphorical terms. This disjuncture signals

the importance of the father in the text’s complex symbolic system and calls for his

examination not only as a fictional character but also as a metaphorical abstraction

generative of multiple levels of meaning.

The context leading up to the climax of the monumental bedtime scene and the

extraordinary rendering of the father’s image is the following: Every evening of his

childhood at Combray, the narrator despairs at the thought that he will soon be forced to

18
go to bed and be separated from his mother. His sole consolation is his mother’s

goodnight kiss at his bedside. However, on nights when a guest is at dinner, he is sent

upstairs to bed with only a rapid, furtive kiss, knowing that his mother will not be coming

to deliver his cherished embrace. One such night when Swann has come to dinner and

even the rapid, furtive kiss has been denied, after having firmly adopted the resolution

that he will not go to bed without having kissed his mother goodnight at any cost, the

young narrator defies his parents’ order to go to bed, silently awaiting his mother in the

dark corridor (I, 35). When his mother sees him she glares at him in anger, and as the

child sees the light of his father’s candle flickering in the stairwell while he climbs the

stairs, the narrator is sure that he has committed the most heinous of acts and expects a

terrible punishment upon his father’s imminent arrival. Contrary to his expectations, the

father is sympathetic to his son’s despair and suggests that his mother spend the night

with him in his room to console him. At this moment, the father’s physical portrait is

rendered in mythical proportions, in a simile comparing him to the biblical figure of

Abraham, the patriarchal figure par excellence:

Je restai sans oser faire un mouvement ; il était encore devant nous, grand,
dans sa robe de nuit blanche sous le cachemire de l’Inde violet et rose qu’il nouait
autour de sa tête depuis qu’il avait des névralgies, avec le geste d’Abraham dans
la gravure d’après Benozzo Gozzoli que m’avait donnée M. Swann, disant à Sarah
qu’elle a à se départir du côté d’Isaac (I, 36).

This comparison to the biblical figure of Abraham is mediated through an

ekphrastic description of Abraham’s rendering in a work by Benozzo Gozzoli. It is in this

figurative and meta-referential realm that this typical nineteenth century bourgeois father

calls to be examined as an aesthetic abstraction. His description serves as the central

point of entry into the narrator’s recounted experiences and recollections of his childhood

19
in Combray for a network of exotic and sensual images. Here, in great concentration,

strange new worlds penetrate into this seemingly unexceptional home. The closer one

looks at this image, the more it becomes apparent how original and peculiar it truly is,

how its singularity springs from its plurality—its multiple layers of meaning and the odd

indeterminacy of their interplay.

In this incredibly dense, multilayered paternal image, on the formal level, in terms

of the establishment of a network of associations whose configuration serves to structure

À la recherche du temps perdu, almost all of the major themes of and questions begged

by the work seem to be encoded and enclosed. They are concentrated here, at the climax

of the bedtime scene, as if waiting to disperse the seeds of La Recherche, such that this

properly seminal father/Abraham figure may very well be considered the nodal point of

the novel’s structure.

The father-as-Abraham image enters the text by way of a reference to a Benozzo

Gozzoli fresco in which he is supposedly gesturing to Sarah. However, as indicated in a

note by Jo Yoshida in our reference edition (I, 1114), this painting appears never to have

existed. Although Gozzoli did paint frescoes representing Abraham in scenes from the

Old Testament; none of them depict this gesture to Sarah. Why then should Proust have

chosen to compare the narrator’s father to this particular artist’s representation of

Abraham?

This Combray scene takes place in a dark corridor, lit only by the flickering of

two candles such that this chiaroscuro would seem to call for, imply, or even demand an

allusion to the famous gesture of Rembrandt’s Abraham whose prominence in our

cultural iconography renders its presence practically inevitable. What’s more, the

20
narrator’s dramatic sentiment of his impending doom serves to reinforce the

appropriateness of a reference to Rembrandt’s spectacular depiction of Abraham on the

verge of sacrificing Isaac. By the choice to represent the father’s physical appearance

through a reference to Gozzoli, a relatively minor and obscure painter, Proust provokes a

sense of displacement, of cultural disorientation for the reader, a signal that the quaint

familiarity of what has so far been the stereotypical nineteenth century French town and

the quasi-anecdotal family that inhabits it is suddenly subject to revision. In the first step

toward this revision, the reader’s imagination is called upon to chase away and replace

Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro in order to construct a new image that is unfamiliar, that is not

preconceived and that is composed, like the work of Gozzoli, primarily of bright colors.

It is specifically the bright colors of the father’s white dressing robe and his purple and

pink Indian cashmere, whose importance will be discussed below, to which, through this

ekphrastic description, attention is redirected.

Proust’s substitution of Gozzoli for Rembrandt is a kind of displacing gesture of

epistemological negation, an erasing of what we know or thought we knew—

Rembrandt’s Abraham— from the picture, provoking a forced re-focalization of the

reader’s gaze through the young diegetical narrator’s. Since a reproduction of Gozzoli’s

Abraham had been given to him by Swann, for the young narrator, Gozzoli’s Abraham

may indeed have been more familiar to him than Rembrandt’s. Perhaps it is in fact more

accurate to speak of the Gozzoli-Rembrandt substitution not as a forced re-focalization

through the gaze of the young narrator and not as an erasure of Rembrandt, so much as of

a Gozzoli over-paint, a superposition, a deliberately perceptible covering of Rembrandt

that serves to emphasize the status of this image of the father as a palimpsest composed

21
of multiple layers as well as constituting a reminder of the young narrator’s frame of

reference and of its dissonance or distance not only from our own perspective but also

from that of the adult narrator and of Proust. Rembrandt is, after all, one of the few

privileged artists cited by Proust in La Prisonnière when years later the narrator explains

his theory that all great artists re-create the same beauty, re-present in their own work the

same great work of Art (III, 879). Rembrandt also figures prominently in Contre Sainte

Beuve as well as Proust’s Essais et articles, that is, in Proust’s early articulations of his

aesthetic theory in critical modes before his plan to write La Recherche had crystallized.

In À la recherche du temps perdu the difficulty, and to a large degree impossibility, of

discerning the adult narrator’s perspective from that of the voice that recounts or re-

adopts his earlier point of view in order to more accurately portray his past is the primary

challenge of Combray and, indeed, of the whole of La Recherche. This aesthetic of

superposition, which we observe in this scene in the narrator’s Gozzoli over-paint by way

of which he portrays his father, is one of the principle characteristics that make the text so

complex and so rich; it is central to Proust’s literary innovation and the imperative to

rethink time that he imparts to his reader at the end of Le Temps retrouvé, as, for

example, when in describing the book that he is on the verge of writing, he praises:

tous ces plans différents suivant lesquels le Temps […] disposait ma vie
[…] ajoutaient une beauté nouvelle à ces résurrections que ma mémoire
opérait […] puisque la mémoire, en introduisant le passé dans le présent,
supprime précisément cette grande dimension du Temps suivant laquelle
la vie se réalise (IV, 608).

This depiction of the father, with its ekphrastically evoked complex superposition of

temporal layers, therefore introduces and anticipates this re-examination of how time is to

be portrayed in narrative that is so vital to the Proustian oeuvre.

22
 This Gozzoli-inspired description of the father multiplies not only temporal layers

but spatial ones as well. The turban-like Indian cashmere wrapped around his head

metonymically motivates the image of Abraham in the desert just as it summons the

presence of India into the text. Like the Gozzoli-Rembrandt superposition, these

geographical references function as emissaries of estrangement and disorientation for

both the reader as well as the young narrator. However, apart from their exoticism, where

exoticism is to be understood as a mysterious, unknown quality fit to excite the

imagination, and imagination is taken in its original sense of dream images,3 nothing in

the young child’s experience properly unites these two lands. It is the father himself, seen

by the son as an exotic stranger incarnating mysterious signs beckoning to be filled with

meaning, who links Combray to diverse images of exotic foreign lands in the narrator’s

mind.

The profound cultural disorientation and the reorientation that is solicited by the

father/Abraham image leads toward the Orient—to both that of Abraham and of India,

due to the turban-like Indian cashmere that the father has wrapped around his head. In

fact, more precisely, this impossible conflation leads less to the Orient than to an

orientalism, that is, to the representation of a fantastical, exotic and imaginary Orient as it

3
“Imagination n.f. est un emprunt (v. 1175) au latin impérial […] et se dit
d’abord d’une image de rêve. […]”Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, ed.
Alain Rey, vol. 2 (Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert, 1998) 1784.
These recollections are, after all, incited by the narrator’s nostalgic reminiscing after
having momentarily thought himself in his old, childhood bedroom in Combray when
first awakening from sleep: “L’être qui s’éveille, et qui, en s’éveillant, reprend
conscience de son existence, reprend donc conscience d’un laps de vie singulièrement et
tragiquement contracté. Qui est-il ? Il ne le sait plus, et il ne le sait plus, parce qu’il a
perdu le moyen de relier le lieu et le moment où il vit, à tous les autres lieux et moments
de son existence antérieure. Sa pensée trébuche entre les temps, entre les lieux.” Georges
Poulet, L’Espace proustien (Gallimard, 1982) 13.
23
is falsely conceived by the West. In this regard, Proust is following in the established

literary and cultural tradition of some of his predecessors whom he admired.4

This association between the narrator’s father and the Orient also has a substantial

corresponding literal (as opposed to literary) biographical resonance. Proust’s father was

a famous physician and prolific writer of medical treatises who often attended

international hygiene conferences throughout the course of his career. In 1869, shortly

before his marriage to Jeanne Weil and the birth of Marcel in 1871, he had been sent on a

mission to evaluate the sanitary check-points on the border between Russia and the

Persian Empire in order to learn about the path by which cholera spread during epidemics

and the measures that could be taken to prevent these epidemics from spreading to

France. As Marie Miguet-Ollagnier recounts:

Le médecin et son escorte ont voyagé à cheval en suivant les anciennes

routes des caravanes et en s’arrêtant dans les caravansérails. Plusieurs de
ses ouvrages ont utilisé les souvenirs personnels et les enseignements
scientifiques tirées de cette mission. Marcel Proust aimait les beaux tapis
persans que son père avait ramenés.5

4
In Proust et ses modèles: les Mille et Une Nuits et les Mémoires de Saint-Simon,
Dominique Jullien remarks that “ils [les contes] sont […] médiatisés par le rêve européen
d’un Orient de fantaisie, tradition que Galland [translator of the masterpiece], pourtant
orientaliste sérieux, a involontairement contribué à créer. […] L’Orient sera donc pour
l’Europe l’image des fastes et de la volupté.” (Paris: José Corti, 1989) 191. And Alain
Buisine reminds us of the orientalism of several of Proust’s principal literary influences:
“Très grand admirateur de Pierre Loti dont toute l’œuvre, depuis Aziyadé jusqu’aux
Ultimes visions d’Orient [sic] ne cesse de réécrire et d’embaumer sa fascination pour la
Turquie, spectateur passionné de Racine dont les tragédies orientales, Bajazet et Esther,
n’arrêtent pas de faire retour dans l’ensemble d’À la recherche du temps perdu, Proust
connaît également fort bien les Lettres persanes de Montesquieu dont il propose un
pastiche dans Lettres de Perse et d’ailleurs. Enfin n’oublions pas non plus, parmi ses
lectures préférées, L’Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem de Chateaubriand, Les Orientales de
Victor Hugo, et surtout le Voyage en Orient de Gérard de Nerval” (“Marcel Proust: le
côté de l’Orient,” Revue des Sciences Humaines 214 (1989) 135.
5
Gisements profonds d’un sol mental: Proust (Presses Universitaires de Franche-
Comté, 2003) 38.
24
Proust, therefore, found much in his father’s history to pique his interest in distant, exotic

lands and on which to base an association of the narrator’s father with a theme of

exoticism and the cultivation of his son’s imagination.

That Proust deliberately creates the association between the narrator’s father and

the Orient seems particularly evinced by the extraordinary nature of the exotic image so

employed. Since this supposed image by Gozzoli of Abraham gesturing to Sarah does not

literally exist, Proust has recourse to a gesture that is, properly speaking, invisible, given

in reference to an engraving (a reproduction) of a fresco by an obscure artist who had

never actually produced it in the first place; recourse to a fictional image, the

reproduction of a production that is itself fundamentally imaginary. Though Abraham

may be the foundational figure of the universal patriarch, once he is compared to the

narrator’s father he is displaced to an obscure, unknown and imaginary origin. He

appears as if from out of nowhere—or from out of everywhere, a geographically multiple

and indeterminate Orient—an almost ubiquitous, mythic figure that emerges out of the

darkness in an imposing image that is colorful and bright. Combray’s patriarchal

Abraham is an unknown, mysterious, fresh and exotic one.

Not only the image of the father itself, but even the language in which it is

described is “exotic.” For instance, Yoshida’s above-mentioned annotation signaling the

absence of any Gozzoli painting corresponding to this Abraham image also signals the

peculiarity and lexical ambiguity of the expression that Proust uses to describe the

image’s portrayal of Abraham’s gesture which is qualified as intended to indicate that the

mother must part from her son, “qu’elle a à se départir du côté d’Isaac.” The archaic

employment of the verb, “se départir,” surmises Yoshida, may have simply been the

25
result of an erroneously literal translation into French of the title of another Gozzoli

Campo Santo fresco, “Abraham Parting from the Angels,” that Proust would have

encountered in the work of John Ruskin (I, 1114). In this conglomeration of eras and

cultures that gather around the biblical father/Abraham image, beginning in 15th century

Italy with Gozzoli and leading to the farthest reaches of the Orient, it would seem as if

this exotic paternal figure could not even be spoken of without adopting what for Proust

and his narrator is a foreign language. This paternally-inspired foreign language recalls

Proust’s remarks, made in a letter to Madame Straus, concerning what is required in order

to become a truly original writer. “Les seules personnes,” he declares, “qui défendent la

langue française […] ce sont celles qui ‘l’attaquent.’ Writers, he contends, “ne

commencent à écrire bien qu’à condition d’être originaux, de faire eux-mêmes leur

langue.” With his typically hyperbolic epistolary flourish, he exclaims: “La seule manière

de défendre la langue, c’est de l’attaquer, mais oui, madame Straus !” and rejects the

“dogme grammatical [qui nous] tient dans ses chaînes.”6

Beyond the linguistic ambiguities regarding the possibly mistranslated title of the

work, there are further questions regarding to which work the title may actually refer.

Before they were destroyed in the Second World War, there were indeed Gozzoli

frescoes representing scenes from the life of Abraham in the Campo Santo in Pisa.

However, as we have seen, the particular image evoked by the narrator, in which

Abraham is supposedly gesturing to Sarah, did not figure among them. A scene in which

Abraham gestures, in the manner described by Proust, to indicate to Sarah that she must

part from Isaac, that “elle a à se départir du côté d’Isaac,” could be found neither among

6
Choix de lettres (ed. Philip Kolb, Plon, 1965) 162-63.
26
the frescoes of the Campo Santo nor in Genesis, remarks Yoshida—unless, that is, the

image in question were perhaps that of a gesture made not to Sarah but rather to Hagar.

The equivocal verbal expression “se départir du côté de” appears to be a conflation of “se

partir de,” meaning “to part from,” signifying that she must leave the child, and of “partir

du côté de,” or “to depart in the direction of,” which would imply that she must part

along with the child. This oxymoronic lexical ambiguity therefore serves to expand the

biblical intertextuality of the image, to bring Hagar and Ishmael more or less implicitly

into the text in addition to Sarah and Isaac whom the narrator specifically references. In

Marranisme et hébraïsme dans l’œuvre de Proust, in the section entitled “La lecture à

rebours : Isaac ou Ismaël,” Juliette Hassine argues that, in accordance with the

possibility generated by this lexical ambiguity, in the bedtime scene, of Abraham’s two

sons it is indeed Ishmael, rather than Isaac, who seems to better fit the bill as his story

more closely parallels the narrator’s. The narrator, like Ishmael, she argues, is banished,

then saved by an arbitrary act of grace despite the fact that he has violated God’s laws

and despite his failure to promise any act of repentance, since his behavior is judged to be

independent of his volition.7

It is my belief that the lexical ambiguity is deliberate and inclusive.8 This

intertextual link to Ishmael takes the father’s myriad exotic associations yet another step

7
Juliette Hassine, “La lecture à rebours: Isaac ou Ismaël,” Marranisme et
hébraïsme dans l’œuvre de Proust (Minard, 1994) 187-199.
8
The ambiguity of the expression “se départir du côté de” recalls another
ambiguity concerning the “deux côtés,” le côté de chez Swann (Méséglise) and “le côte
de Guermantes.” As I will discuss further below, the absolute geographical discontinuity
that they represent in the young narrator’s mind on the contrary binds them together
conceptually in their dialectical relation. Many years later, their “fictionally conceived”
unity will be affirmed as a genuine geographical unity when, in Le Temps retrouvé, the
narrator will learn from Gilberte that the two paths do indeed meet.
27
further, not only toward the Jewish Orient but also the Arab and Muslim one, toward the

other people engendered by Abraham, the descendants of Ishmael. This interpretation is

consistent with the conglomeration of disparate images of the Orient instilled by the

juxtaposition of the biblical Abraham and the Indian cashmere (as well as its mediation

through the work of an early Italian Renaissance painter), a conglomeration that I believe

to be indicative of a desire to represent exotic imprecision, an ostentatious indication of

the narrator’s freedom to exercise the creative power of his imagination.9

In this wildly exotic rendering of the father, in this imprecise reference to an

uncertain fresco painted by Gozzoli and generative of a highly indistinct orientalism,

emerges a diffuse and indeterminate Oriental patriarch. In this image of the father as an

Abraham garbed in Indian cashmere, the implicit presence of Ishmael and Hagar suggests

that the Arabian Thousand and One Nights may also be implicitly invoked by association

and all the more since this text is of mixed origin with the framework story and a number

of the tales attributable to the Indian narrative tradition.10 This work is repeatedly

mentioned throughout the course of La Recherche and is a work which the narrator

announces, in the concluding pages of Le Temps retrouvé, that he would like his own

9
Albert Mingelgrün proposes that Proust’s many references to Genesis represent
a desire to return to the most profound and essential primordial essences that precede
structuralization so that this structuralization may be accomplished by the artist:
“Création recommencée et graduée de l’espace-temps depuis l’incohérence native, tel
semble bien être le mouvement du texte […].”Albert Mingelgrün, Thèmes et structures
bibliques dans l’œuvre de Marcel Proust (Lausanne: Editions l’Age d’Homme, 1978) 37.
10
More important, perhaps, than the fact of the multicultural origins of the text is
the indistinctness in perception of the different cultures comprising the “Orient”:
“L’imprécision géographique qui s’attache, dans l’imaginaire européen, au terme
d’Orient, va de pair avec une imprécision historique, par laquelle l’Orient musulman tend
à se confondre avec l’Orient sémitique de l’Ancien Testament. Plusieurs passages de la
Recherche […] mettent en parallèle, sous une même appellation d’exotisme, l’Orient
biblique et l’Orient de Scheherazade.” Dominique Jullien, Proust et ses modèles: les
Mille et Une Nuits et les Mémoires de Saint-Simon (Paris: José Corti) 1989, 194.
28
forthcoming writing to somehow resemble as a re-creation of the same kind of universal

truths conveyed in a form adapted to his own contemporary world view.11 However, in

Combray, at the most inchoate stage of the narrator’s spiritual vocational journey, it

would appear that The Thousand and One Nights can so far only be explicitly present in

the form then known to the young narrator, in the hypocoristic, commodified version, the

version that appears on his Aunt Léonie’s plates where scenes from the Arabian

masterpiece are painted and which the young narrator, like his aunt, finds so amusing.12

However, as we shall observe in chapter two, this moment when the father/Abraham

permits his son to spend the night with his mother sets in motion the narrator’s shift into a

new, literature-oriented era in which such a limitation would no longer obtain.

À l’Ombre d’Abraham en Fleur: the Foundational Father-Flower

When the narrator evokes the “robe de nuit blanche” that his father is wearing,

even if the nominal complement “de nuit blanche” qualifies “robe,” literally indicates that

he is wearing a robe that is white, the sequence of the words “nuit” and “blanche” also

11
“Ce serait un livre aussi long que Les Mille et une Nuits peut-être, mais tout
autre. Sans doute, quand on est amoureux d’une œuvre, on voudrait faire quelque chose
de tout pareil, mais il faut sacrifier son amour du moment, ne pas penser à son goût, mais
à une vérité qui ne vous demande pas vos préférences et vous défend d’y songer. Et c’est
seulement si on la suit qu’on se trouve parfois rencontrer ce qu’on a abandonné, et avoir
écrit, en les oubliant, les ‘Contes arabes’ ou les ‘Mémoires de Saint-Simon’ d’une autre
époque” (IV, 621).
12
“Les assiettes peintes, qui représentent l’appel de l’exotisme, du merveilleux et
de l’aventure, mais proportionnés toutefois à l’appétit diminué de la vieille dame (Tante
Léonie), s’inscrivent sans difficulté dans la routine de son existence au point de constituer
une habitude de plus, et de coïncider, momentanément avec un autre appel de l’inconnu,
infiniment plus exotique et troublant aux yeux de ce prince persan de province, le
mystère qui pèse sur les invités de Madame Goupil.” Jullien, Proust et ses modèles, 101.
29
simultaneously spells out the phrase “nuit blanche,” or “sleepless night,” providing an

accurate characterization of this singular sleepless night that the anguished child spends

listening to his mother read François le champi. This monumental “nuit blanche” makes

its way into the text via the father’s “robe de nuit blanche;” it makes its way into the text

in such a way that the experience of this extraordinary sleepless night is first presented as

an attribute of the father’s corporal image. Its interpretation left up to the imagination of

the young narrator who does not know the meaning of “champi,” this word is imbued

with ’“une couleur vive, empourprée,” leading us back once again to the father’s attire, to

the purple and pink Indian cashmere he has wrapped around his head. 13 Most decidedly,

in this scene, it is in these bright colors—the bright colors brought into the text by

superimposing over Rembrandt the painting of Gozzoli—that the imaginary, strange and

unknown, takes on its charm.

Coiffed with this purple and pink Indian cashmere, it is as if the father’s head has

been made to resemble the corolla of a flower. The narrator finds himself “à l’ombre,” in

the shadow of his father/Abraham who is there before him, “grand, dans sa robe de nuit

blanche,” in the form of a flower. It is as if Proust, through this symbolic floral

representation of the father, is planting the seeds, hinting toward a preliminary

anticipation or sketch of À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. Standing “à l’ombre de son

père en fleur,” through the figure of his father, the narrator is being exposed to essential

materials that will become the building blocks of his œuvre.

13
“Aussi tous les changements bizarres qui se produisent dans l’attitude
respective de la meunière et de l’enfant et qui ne trouvent leur explication que dans le
progrès d’un amour naissant me paraissaient empreints d’un profond mystère dont je me
figurais volontiers que la source devait être dans ce nom inconnu et si doux de
« Champi » qui mettait sur l’enfant, qui le portait sans que je susse pourquoi, sa couleur
vive, empourprée et charmante.” (I, 41).
30
 In the bedtime scene, the father-as-Abraham, dressed like a flower, becomes his

son’s advocate and temporarily saves him from despair. Similarly, in chapter XXII of

Genesis, Abraham takes on an analogous role as advocate when he negotiates (though

ultimately futilely) with God in an attempt to save Sodom from destruction. By way of

these conjunctions, this image of the father/Abraham/flower is a locus where Sodom and

flowers unite. It prefigures Sodome et Gomorrhe I, placed at the center point of the

structure of La Recherche, where the narrator witnesses the homosexual encounter of

Charlus and Jupien, the narration of which is interlaced with and compared to the union

of a flower and a bee in an elaborate extended metaphor.14 In addition to signaling

sensuality, flowers are signs of artistic sublimation of the search for lost time par

excellence thanks to the particular nature of their temporal existence. Synchronic

creations, they suddenly blossom in spectacular beauty; then, following the inevitable

laws of diachronic time they perish. Yet they seem to carry the senses towards the extra-

temporal by their glorious renaissance the following spring, in this new birth which

makes itself felt as a kind of transcendence that links synchronic and diachronic time in

the bond of their imaginary identity (since flowers always perfectly resemble each other

from one year to the next). In Sodome et Gomorrhe, where the narrator compares the

14
Juliette Hassine has noted the link between Abraham in the bedtime scene and
Sodome et Gomorrhe: “Le père évoque bien le personnage biblique d’Abraham qui a eu
le mérite de plaider en faveur des gens de Sodome. Le drame du coucher anticipe sur un
autre, celui de Sodome et Gomorrhe […].” However, we do not agree with the conclusion
she draws from this observation, that “[…] dans cet univers complexe et insaisissable, le
Père en ne se souciant pas des principes et en ne s’inquiétant pas du ‘Droit des gens’
participe de ce monde où l’arbitraire dénoue tous les drames, où le fils qui devait être
immolé est sauvé, où l’inceste est toléré à l’inverse de tous les interdits” (op. cit. 141).
Not only does the father’s conduct appear to us as non-arbitrary, as we have seen in the
introduction and will continue to demonstrate in the final section of this chapter, but, as
we shall also see, in chapter two, prohibitions such as incest do not appear to be tolerated.
31
miraculousness of the successful homosexual encounter with the miraculousness of the

successful encounter of the flower and the bee that will permit the flower’s reproduction,

he also describes as analogous the onerous maledictions of homosexuals and Jews, the

children of Abraham, recalling the earlier paternal Abrahamic incarnation of the bedtime

scene.

In the prodigious bedtime scene, the father’s vivid and imposing pictorial

representation has stimulated his son’s imagination in an urgent call for interpretation and

interrogation that will have itself transcended time by surviving in the narrator’s

memory.15 The image of the father creates a unique and eminently memorable experience

in which is brought together a multitude of sensorial images that transcend space and

time and which posit and unite the central building blocks of the entire novel’s

elaboration. The appearance of the father in the narration is conjoined with central

thematic elements such as homosexuality and Judeity, brought together in the sign of a

flower, a transcendent symbol of mortality and perennial reincarnation. The father figure

unites these various elements in images that evoke the Orient of the biblical figure of

Abraham, of the Arabian land of the tales of The Thousand and One Nights, of colorful

India, all under the auspices of a modern reproduction of an ersatz Gozzoli image from

the early Italian Renaissance.16

15
As Albert Mingelgrün puts it: “Nous voudrions pour notre part insister sur les
composantes esthétiques de l’importance stratégique du passage. Réel ou inventé, le
tableau biblique qui vient tout à coup s’inscrire au milieu d’un épisode somme toute
banal d’une enfance surprotégée donne une sorte d’extension au personnage du père déjà
présenté comme grand. Son attitude, ses gestes comme fixés à leur tour sur la gravure
s’en trouvent idéalisés, dépassant l’ici et maintenant pour rejoindre un lointain biblique et
légendaire.” 94.
16
Despite the actual inexistence of the Benozzo Gozzoli painting that inspired the
comparison between the narrator’s father and Abraham, Proust perhaps chooses to
32
 The simile that compares the narrator’s father to Abraham is motivated by a

supposed image in which he is indicating to Sarah that “elle a à se départir du côté

d’Isaac.” That the intended primary meaning is that she must separate from Isaac is

confirmed by the father’s reply. “Nous ne sommes pas des bourreaux !” he exclaims to

the mother while he is explaining why she should instead spend the night with their

tormented child (I, 36). But in fact, this very metaphor of the executioner that the father

uses (or that Proust has him use) in order to represent his sympathy and indulgence for

his son and to insist upon what they are not, urgently begs the very question. For in the

Bible, Abraham, who obediently left with Isaac to sacrifice him in deference to God’s

command, had he not been willing to become the executioner and in fact on the brink of

doing so?17 It is in this manner that the father functions to so explicitly shine the spotlight

on the theme of sadism that is so crucial an element of La Recherche.

associate the father with this particular artist for paronomastical reasons; for the name
Benozzo Gozzoli cataphorically evokes the Geneviève de Brabant and Golo from the
earlier scene of the narrator’s magic lantern, another scene that highlights pictorial
superposition. The father/Abraham inspired by Benozzo Gozzoli is joined with
Geneviève de Brabant and Golo by sonorous similarity, a kind of embryonic version of
the narrator’s reveries about the semantic poetry of proper names (a subject to which
Proust accords two subtitled sections, “Nom de pays : le nom” in Du côté de chez Swann
and “Nom de pays : le pays” in À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs) that serves as a point
of departure for his creative imagination. “C’est parce que le Nom propre s’offre à une
catalyse d’une richesse infinie qu’il est possible de dire que, poétiquement, toute la
Recherche est sortie de quelques noms.” Roland Barthes, “Proust et les noms,” Le Degré
zero de l’écriture suivi de Nouveaux Essais critiques [Seuil, 1972] 128.) The projected
images of Geneviève de Brabant and Golo onto the walls of the narrator’s bedroom
(analogous to the superposition of Gozzoli over Rembrandt) serve to de-familiarize that
space in much the same way that the father/Abraham image de-familiarizes and
exoticizes the father’s identity. Both the images of the magic lantern and of the father-as-
Abraham send the narrator on voyages through time and space through an awakening of
his imagination.
17
The same question is begged with respect to the Arabian Abrahamic avatar,
King Shahryar of the Thousand and One Nights, who nightly grants Scheherazade a stay
of execution so that she may continue to amuse him with her tales. This is another link
33
 Many if not most of the principle themes that are to be developed in La Recherche

are introduced into the text or anticipated by way of this father/Abraham who, with his

head resembling a colorful corolla, unites Sodom and flowers. In this pivotal foundational

scene where the narrator is launched into his literary destiny, his father is linked to

themes such as floral sensuality, through the Indian cashmere’s pictorial transformation

of his head into a colorful flower, spatial and temporal exoticism in the conjunction of

this Indian cashmere with the biblical Abraham, the Oedipus complex through the

father’s command that the mother spend the night with their child, and the ravaging of the

physical body by time, since he wraps his head in the Indian cashmere in order to cure or

prevent migraine headaches. Indeed, the thematic building blocks of the entire Recherche

seem packed into this single, incredibly dense image of this Abrahamic floral father,

ostensibly ready to explode to plant the seeds of the work and give life to the entire

Proustian microcosm.

What’s more, the paragraph in which the Abraham comparison is evoked is quite

singular in that it contains an isolated occurrence of one of the rare narrative breaks into

the present of the enunciation that participate in the meta-referential articulation of the

work’s theoretical framework. The paragraph begins: “[o]n ne pouvait remercier mon

père ; on l’êut agacé par ce qu’il appelait des sensibleries,” continues with the Abraham

comparison and then concludes in this present of the narration that sets it apart from the

diegesis of the bedtime drama itself:

between exotic associations inspired by the image of the father and the narrator’s literary
vocation. Indeed, at the end of La Recherche, the narrator, explaining his anxiety over
whether he would live long enough to complete his oeuvre, muses: “[e]t je vivrais dans
l’anxiété de ne pas savoir si le Maître de ma destinée, moins indulgent que le sultan
Sheriar, le matin quand j’interromprais mon récit, voudrait bien surseoir à mon arrêt de
mort et me permettrait de reprendre la suite le prochain soir” (IV, 620).
34
 Il y a bien des années de cela. La muraille de l’escalier, où je vis monter le
reflet de sa bougie n’existe plus depuis longtemps […]. Il y a bien longtemps
aussi que mon père a cessé de pouvoir dire à maman : « Va avec le petit. » La
possibilité de telles heures ne renaîtra jamais pour moi. Mais depuis peu de temps,
je recommence à très bien percevoir si je prête l’oreille, les sanglots que j’eus la
force de contenir devant mon père et qui n’éclatèrent que quand je me retrouvais
seul avec maman. En réalité ils n’ont jamais cessé ; et c’est seulement parce que
la vie se tait maintenant davantage autour de moi que je les entends de nouveau
[…] (I, 36-7).

In this exceptional juxtaposition of past and present, the narrator describes two

things that he had held back in the presence of his father—his thanks, his gratefulness

toward his father, and his tears which have flowed ever since. Following the analogy of

the juxtaposition, the tears which have flowed ever since this moment are like the traces

of his past in his memory, the flow of time recaptured, the material of his magnum opus.

It is almost as if the thanks toward his father and the tears of time were one and the same,

as if the flow of tears, the writing, made to flow with the help of his mother, were, like

the tears, in some way destined toward his father. It is time now to investigate how these

raw materials are progressively organized in other foundational scenes into an aesthetic

theory under paternal influence or supervision.

Gilberte, or Daddy’s Girl

The father-flower association and the association between fathers and the

development of the narrator’s creative imagination that are initiated by the Abraham

image pervade and motivate the seminal passage of À la recherche du temps perdu in

which the narrator first sees and falls in love with Gilberte. During the scene of their first

encounter, the narrator is taking a walk with only his father and his grandfather, and they

35
decide to go “du côté de chez Swann” to see Swann’s park at Tansonville with its

beautiful flowers specifically because they believe that Gilberte’s mother, Odette, a

demimondaine to be avoided at all cost, has left for Reims (a near anagram for

“mèr[e]s”). Not only therefore is there a double paternal presence, but a maternal absence

is the very condition upon which the scene is predicated.

When the grandfather, referring to Swann, suggests, not without great irony, that

“[…] comme sa femme et sa fille partaient pour Reims […] [n]ous pourrions longer le

parc, puisque ces dames ne sont pas là […]” (I, 134) there is a certain ambiguity as to

which “dames” are in question. It is possible that the ironic and pejorative “ces dames”

might refer not to Odette and Gilberte, or not only to Odette and Gilberte, but also to the

narrator’s mother and/or grandmother whose strict scruples, had they been there, might

have precluded them from taking such a risk as to take the path to Tansonville.

The importance of the maternal absence is signaled by the subtle effacement of

the narrator’s mother and grandmother from the scene. Prior to this passage in which this

particular excursion is described in great detail, the narrator recounts the walks that he

used to take as a child with his family at Combray in the imperfect tense, marking their

recurrent, iterative nature. In the recounting of the typical family excursion, the

participation of both the mother and the father is signaled. The mother’s usual presence

during these walks is indicated by the rather prosaic remark that on days when the family

took the much longer walk du côté de Guermantes his Aunt Léonie would get worried

“[…] et maman me disait: ‘Mon Dieu ! voilà Françoise qui nous guette, ta tante est

inquiète ; aussi nous rentrons trop tard.” (I, 132). In contrast, the father’s usual

participation in these excursions is signaled by a far more substantial observation. The

36
narrator attributes the origin of his mistaken, quasi-mystical childhood belief that the two

different ways constitute two mutually exclusive worlds to something his father always

used to say, making him a sort of unwitting inventor of the notion of the deux côtés:

“Comme mon père parlait toujours du côté de Méséglise comme de la plus belle vue de la

plaine qu’il connût et du côté de Guermantes comme du type de paysage de rivière, je

leur donnais, en les concevant ainsi comme deux entités, cette cohésion, cette unité qui

n’appartiennent qu’aux créations de notre esprit;” (I, 133). At the same time as it signals

the father’s habitual presence during family excursions, this example illustrates the

continuous association between the father and the stimulation of the narrator’s

imagination in ways that make him envision voyages to exoticized places. The unity of

the two ways, which the narrator here assigns to a world of creative fantasy that he deems

separate from reality, will later reveal itself as nothing more than the actual banal and

simple truth that the two paths do indeed meet. Yet when the idea of this unity originates

in the father’s words, it demonstrates his power to render ordinary places strange and

unfamiliar and to guide his son in voyages from one world to another, from the real to the

imaginary.

Although the narrator does not explicitly mention that his mother is not a

participant in the scene of the first encounter with Gilberte, her absence is heavily marked

by the repeated references throughout the scene to his father and grandfather exclusively,

coupled with the absence of any reference whatsoever to his mother or grandmother. To

the double paternal presence that is signaled repeatedly throughout the course of the

scene corresponds the double maternal absence—the absence of both the narrator’s

mother and grandmother—which is further emphasized by the aunt’s absence in addition

37
to the supposed absence of Gilberte’s mother that makes the scene possible. The fact that

the maternal absence remains essentially implicit might perhaps hint at the notion that it

literally “goes without saying,” that it is a necessary requirement of the scene’s structure.

We may also note in passing that in this entirely paternally structured scene, it is

Gilberte’s father’s presence along with his daughter that would have rendered the

encounter between the two youths not only possible but a necessary social obligation:

“[…] j’aurais voulu […] qu’un miracle fît apparaître Mlle Swann avec son père, si près

de nous, que nous n’aurions pas le temps de l’éviter et serions obligés de faire sa

connaissance” (I, 135).

Though the desired sighting of Swann does not occur, the presence of Charlus is

belatedly brought to the narrator’s attention when Odette (who was mistakenly supposed

not to be there) calls out to Gilberte. This scene is thus not only the first sighting of

Gilberte, the narrator’s first love, but also of Charlus, future father figure to the narrator

whom he describes here as “un monsieur habillé de coutil et que je ne connaissais pas

[qui] fixait sur moi des yeux qui lui sortaient de la tête” (I, 140).18

18
In a letter to Henri Ghéon, Proust insists upon the structural importance of the
apparence of Charlus (whose role as a father figure to the narrator will be discussed here
in chapter three) in this passage: “Certaines personnes trouvent que j’ai repris une
situation bien banale, en montrant Swann confiant naïvement sa maîtresse à M. de
Charlus, qui, croient ces lecteurs, trompe Swann. Or ce n’est pas cela du tout. M. de
Charlus est un vieil homosexuel qui remplira presque tout le troisième volume et Swann
dont il a été amoureux au collège sait qu’il ne risque rien en lui confiant Odette. Mais j’ai
mieux aimé passer pour banal dans ce premier volume que d’y ‘annoncer’ une chose que
je suis alors censé ne pas savoir. Quand on aura lu le troisième volume si l’on se reporte
au premier, au seul passage où M. de Charlus apparaisse un instant, on verra qu’il me
regarde fixement et alors on comprendra pourquoi. […].” Marcel Proust,
Correspondance, ed. Philip Kolb, 21 vols (Paris: Plon, 1970-98) XIII, 25-26. Cited in I,
140, note 1.
38
 Charlus’ very clothing, the only material detail of his appearance cited by the

narrator, is a metonymic symbol of the diagonal, cross weaving together of the themes

that constitute the fabric of La Recherche. As Proust’s letter indicates, Charlus’ presence

here is purely structural, a laying of the groundwork—or in this case the garden soil,

which suggests that Charlus, suddenly discovered standing in the garden, immobile,

might himself be a sort of flower—preparing the transition from the narrator’s biological

fathers to other paternal figures who are to continue his worldly education19. This first

sighting of Charlus amidst the flowers in the garden (like the implicit link between the

father/Abraham image and Sodom, for whose salvation Abraham bartered with God) also

surreptitiously paves the way for the metaphor of the mating of the flower and the bee

that is interlaced with the narrator’s discovery of Charlus’ homosexuality as he spies

upon the amorous encounter of Charlus and Jupien in the opening of Sodome et

Gomorrhe and as the importance of this dominant theme of the work becomes manifest.

The silent, immobile Charlus, planted and nearly undistinguished from the flowers in the

garden as he would likely have remained had it not been for Odette’s call, inscribes into

this scene of the narrator and Gilberte’s nascient heterosexual desire a symbolic

anticipation of the narrator’s future witnessing of homosexual desire.

In addition to Charlus, another father figure, Vinteuil, may also be implicitly

implicated in this scene through floral associations and the contribution of these floral

associations to the work’s structure. The hawthorns, the flowers behind which the

19
The fact that Gilberte Swann and Charlus, a Guermantes, both first appear to
the narrator in this scene is another indication that the “deux côtés” do indeed meet as the
narrator will not learn until the end of La Recherche. In addition, Charlus’ rapid
appearance and disappearance in and out of the text is another example of a paternal
presence coming and going from the text like an unpredictable but deeply meaningful
flash in the manner of an involuntary memory.
39
narrator first sees Gilberte, are repeatedly associated with Vinteuil throughout Combray.

As Raymonde Debray-Genette argues, because the rhetorical tropes of metaphor,

metonymy and synecdoche create thematic links that advance the plot, hawthorns are not

merely descriptive but play an active role in the narrative of La Recherche:

[l]a première description des aubépines est insérée dans un long paragraphe
consacré pour l’essentiel à M. Vinteuil et à sa fille, qui commence ainsi : “Comme
nous y rencontrions parfois M. Vinteuil…” et se poursuit par un développement
sur la sévérité de ses mœurs. Se développe alors la description des fleurs, fermée
par : “M. Vinteuil était venu avec sa fille se placer à côté de nous”. La
concaténation est si voulue que la deuxième description commencera après la fin
du paragraphe consacré au double caractère masculin/féminin, “bon
diable”/“jeune fille éplorée” de Mlle Vinteuil. […]. Les figures sont narrativement
motivées.20

This passage cited by Debray-Genette describes meeting Vinteuil at the church in

the “mois de Marie” (I, 110). In much the same way, the structural dialectic in the

Gilberte scene between the white, innocent, “Catholic” hawthorns like the ones adorning

the church, and the pink hawthorns just beyond which the narrator encounters Gilberte,

object of his sexual desire, recalls, as Debray-Genette notes, the association between

these flowers and the dialectic of the innocent, contrite daughter and the lesbian sadist

responsible for her father’s demise that characterizes Mlle Vinteuil. In addition, then, to

the subtle introduction into the Gilberte scene of the future father figure, Charlus, who

will open the narrator’s eyes to the world of male homosexuality, Vinteuil, the only artist

of La Recherche who himself is a father, is also subtly inscribed into the fabric of this

scene, particularly in his role as father to his lesbian daughter by way of which he serves

as Charlus’ homologue pairing male with female homosexuality. The floral narrative

motivation thus extends to add another pillar to the passage’s structure such that the

20
“Thème, figure, épisode: Genèse des aubépines,” Poétique 25 (1976): 62. Re-
published in Roland Barthes, ed. Recherche de Proust (Seuil, 1980) 105-41.
40
narrator’s first encounter with his first love object occurs with Sodom and Gomorrah

symmetrically hovering in the background.

Equally important as the fact that it is the narrator’s fathers who lead him to his

first love is the particular nature of the love-object to whom they lead him. The narrator’s

gross misapprehension of Gilberte’s appearance affirms the link between his paternal

figures and the exercise of his imagination. Though the encounter that inspires his first

love is entirely a meeting of the gaze and despite the fact that Gilberte’s eyes are black,

the narrator’s passion is inspired by her blue eyes, as he later represents them to himself

in his own mind:

Ses yeux noirs brillaient et comme je ne savais pas alors, ni ne l’ai appris
depuis, réduire en ses éléments objectifs une impression forte, comme je n’avais
pas ainsi qu’on dit, assez “d’esprit d’observation” pour dégager la notion de leur
couleur, pendant longtemps, chaque fois que je repensai à elle, le souvenir de leur
éclat se présentait aussitôt à moi comme celui d’un vif azur, puisqu’elle était
blonde : de sorte que, peut-être si elle n’avait pas eu des yeux aussi noirs—ce qui
frappait tant la première fois qu’on la voyait—je n’aurais pas été, comme je le fus,
plus particulièrement amoureux, en elle, de ses yeux bleus (I, 139).

In other words, the Gilberte with whom he falls in love and to whom his fathers

lead him is not the “real,” “objective,” Gilberte but rather a creature of his fancy. Unlike

the pattern that governs most of the narrator’s initial encounters in La Recherche,

encounters that he has often already figured to himself in his imagination and that are

subject to “correction,” this actual encounter paradoxically gives way to an even more

imaginary Gilberte who receives an equally imaginary physical incarnation such that

there is further “illusionment” rather than disillusionment. This Gilberte to whom his

fathers lead him does not truly exist but in the narrator’s mind, displacing the “real”

Gilberte (just as was the case, incidentally, for the Abraham of the Benozzo Gozzoli

engraving, another instance where a physical encounter made the character somehow less

41
concrete) who arguably becomes not a little bit more but a little bit less “real.” This

properly imaginary Gilberte is exotic, erotic, a fictional figure of the narrator’s fantasy

and phantasm.

The narrator’s claim that his preoccupation with Gilberte, his assumption that he

would not be able to meet her, had initially rendered the contemplation of Tansonville

indifferent to him is contradicted by the very existence of the passage, belied by the

narrator’s own detailed descriptive and metaphorical language that so colorfully recreates

the site. This incongruity marks the temporal distance between the diegetical narrator, his

past self, and the narrator of the moment of enunciation. The temporal markers, “je ne

savais pas alors, ni ne l’ai appris depuis […]” (I, 139) indicate that the adult narrator of

the moment of enunciation is clearly distinguishing himself from the diegetical narrator.

Yet even the pronounced temporal layering cannot abolish the paradox of the assertion

that the blackness of her eyes is precisely what is most striking in Gilbert’s appearance

the first time that they are seen, “ce qui frappait tant la première fois qu’on la voyait,” for

there can be only one first time. The surreptitious shift from the first person to the passive

pronoun “on” does not alleviate but rather accentuates the aporia, for how could he know

what “one” first finds Gilberte’s most striking feature to be if this supposed finding

explicitly contradicts his own experience? By leading the narrator to this imaginary

Gilberte, the father guides him toward the realm of fiction. Focus is shifted back to the

text as text, as confabulation unbound by reality, the fruit not merely of memory, but of

conjoined creativity and imagination. Or as the narrator famously puts it in the Madeleine

scene: “Chercher ? pas seulement : créer” (I, 45).

42
 Just as symbolically significant as the fact that the narrator’s fathers lead him to

his first love is the flower-strewn path by which they lead him there. The oriental

exoticism observed in the father/Abraham image reappears in this paternally-structured

scene in a somewhat surprising and paradoxical manner, and once again in conjunction

with floral imagery, in the following description of the lilacs at the park’s entry:

Quelques-uns [des lilas], à demi cachés par la petite maison en tuiles

appelée maison des Archers, où logeait le gardien, dépassaient son pignon
gothique de leur rose minaret. Les Nymphes du printemps eussent semblé
vulgaires, auprès de ces jeunes houris qui gardaient dans ce jardin français les
tons vifs et purs des miniatures de la Perse (I, 134).

The same white hawthorns that serve to implicitly inscribe Vinteuil and his daughter into

the passage, playing on the dialectic of the innocent, white (Catholic) hawthorn and the

sexual, rose-colored one, also serve to situate it within the paradigm of the forbidden,

Edenic paradise. It is, after all, because of a sinful woman, Odette, that the narrator’s

access to this garden has heretofore been denied. But, in the case of the lilacs, their

unexpectedly orientalized description mirrors, on the one hand, the narrator’s initial

perception of the park as utterly other in the sense that it is foreign and forbidden; yet, on

the other hand, this orientalization simultaneously allows the text to exceed the limits of

the familiar Christian model of the forbidden Eden. The flowers found in the park,

particularly the hawthorns, play a distinct semiotic role, engaging the Church’s

iconography, often evoking innocent matrons or maidens, like the Virgin Mary herself:

[…] leur parfum [the hawthorns’] s’étendait aussi onctueux, aussi

délimité en sa forme que si j’eusse été devant l’autel de la Vierge, et les fleurs,
aussi parées, tenaient chacune d’un air distrait son étincelant bouquet d’étamines,
fines et rayonnantes nervures de style flamboyant comme celles qui à l’église
ajouraient la rampe du jubé ou les meneaux du vitrail et qui s’épanouissaient en
blanche chair de fleur de fraisier (I, 136).

43
But like the flowers of the “allée bordée de capucines [qui] montait en plein soleil vers le

château” (I, 34), where playing on the double sense of “capucines” can conjure both

flowering plants and Capuchin nuns, the hawthorns find both their counterparts and their

counterpoints in the lilac “houris” who guard the gate at the park’s “Persian” perimeter.

This new set of innocent virgins—virgins destined to be given to the pious man in the

Islamic tradition—effectuate the transposition from the forbidden Catholic Edenic

paradise to the Muslim one, portraying this border as a site of paternal permission for

penetration of this formerly forbidden (feminine) space. With her strikingly black eyes,

Gilberte, in fact, perfectly fits the description of the houri; for this word derives from a

Persian adjective describing eyes whose white surface offers a striking contrast with the

blackness of the iris. Offered to his view as the quintessential object of paternalistic

fantasy, the narrator’s memory of the “imaginary” Gilberte with her captivating blue

rather than black eyes marks a successful subjective appropriation of an essential element

of his oeuvre, this love-object to whom he was led by his fathers.

In the garden, the inadequacy of the provincial Catholic linguistic and iconic

semantics in his quest for spiritual engagement with the hawthorns leads the narrator

promptly to comparisons with another transcendent domain, the world of art:

Mais j’avais beau rester devant les aubépines à respirer, à porter devant
ma pensée qui ne savait ce qu’elle devait en faire, à perdre, à retrouver leur
invisible et fixe odeur, à m’unir au rythme qui jetait leurs fleurs, ici et là, avec une
allégresse juvénile et à des intervalles inattendus comme certains intervalles
musicaux, elles m’offraient indéfiniment le même charme avec une profusion
inépuisable, mais sans me laisser approfondir davantage, comme ces mélodies
qu’on rejoue cent fois de suite sans descendre plus avant dans leur secret […].
Alors me donnant cette joie que nous éprouvons quand nous voyons de notre
peintre préféré une œuvre qui diffère de celles que nous connaissons, ou bien si
l’on nous mène devant un tableau dont nous n’avions vu jusque-là qu’une
esquisse au crayon, si un morceau entendu seulement au piano nous apparaît
ensuite revêtu des couleurs de l’orchestre, mon grand-père m’appelant et me

44
 désignant la haie de Tansonville, me dit : “Toi qui aimes les aubépines, regarde un
peu cette épine rose; est-elle jolie !” (I, 136, 137).

Though the narrator first formulates the comparison to the masterpiece and the

musical metaphor on his own, it is with the guidance of his grandfather that to this

experience a new dimension, the dimension of color, is added, that the joy of his contact

with the hawthorns is augmented and that the expansion of this kind of spiritual

encounter with nature is lead further into analogy with the world of art not only in terms

of music but also in terms of painting, in effect establishing the authority of this

comparison by validating it in multiple media. The Church’s symbolism binding the

innocent white hawthorns to the pure Virgin Mary proves itself to be arbitrary after all

since hawthorns, as it turns out, are equally apt to bloom in an awe-inspiring rose color

and they also show themselves equally apt to participate in a different symbolic language

than that of the Church: a poetic literary language.

In the narrator’s poetic literary language, not only do fathers find themselves

associated with flowers, but flowers themselves might be described in rather masculine

terms as, for example, in the following description from shortly before the narrator’s

grandfather had revealed the pink hawthorns to him:

C’est ainsi qu’au pied de l’allée qui dominait l’étang artificiel […] que le
glaïeul, laissant fléchir ses glaives avec un abandon royal, étendait sur l’eupatoire
et la grenouillette au pied mouillé, les fleurs de lis en lambeaux, violettes et
jaunes, de son sceptre lacustre (I, 134-35).

It is difficult to imagine a more masculine symbol of the force of “mother nature” than

the armed gladiolus’ phallic “sceptre lacustre” (whose force is emphasized by the

derivation figure “glaïeul”/“glaive” the plant having derived its name from a shape-based

analogy with the sword). With its “fleurs de lis en lambeaux” and “laissant fléchir ses

45
glaives” the triumph appears post-orgasmic. The “sceptre lacustre” is both phallic and

liquid—spermatic—as if to prefigure the future “lutte érotique” with Gilberte which

brings the narrator to orgasm. Through the narrator’s poetic language, and in particular

the rhetorical figure of personification, nature is made to imitate man with the primacy of

the word anticipating the leap from the ejaculation of sperm to the ejaculation of ink onto

the page such that the father-flower seems written into learning about and preparing for

the act of writing.

Pastoral Patriarchal Prefigurations

The link between fathers and flowers is founded very early on in Combray in a

scene that, at first glance, appears to be essentially little more than anecdotal and is

announced and experienced by the narrator as such: the scene in which the narrator

recounts his grandfather’s walk in the park with Swann’s father immediately after the

death of Swann’s mother. The scene appears to be part of a structured pattern of

associations since, from a retrospective point of view, its symbolic significance can be

seen to far exceed what at first may have appeared to be primarily picturesque. Figuring

very near to the beginning of Du côté de chez Swann, the following anecdote is part of

the initial introduction of Swann into the text with the narrator’s description of how

Swann used to come to visit his family in Combray. Just as father-flower associations

underlie the birth of fantasy and love, as in the scene of the narrator’s first encounter with

Gilberte, as this scene demonstrates, they also sustain themes of death and mourning:

M. Swann, quoique beaucoup plus jeune que lui, était très lié avec mon
grand-père qui avait été un des meilleurs amis de son père, homme excellent mais

46
 singulier, chez qui, paraît-il, un rien suffisait parfois pour interrompre les élans du
cœur, changer le cours de la pensée. J’entendais plusieurs fois par an mon grand-
père raconter à table des anecdotes toujours les mêmes sur l’attitude qu’avait eue
M. Swann le père, à la mort de sa femme qu’il avait veillée jour et nuit. Mon
grand-père qui ne l’avait pas vu depuis longtemps était accouru auprès de lui dans
la propriété que les Swann possédaient aux environs de Combray, et avait réussi,
pour qu’il n’assistât pas à la mise en bière, à lui faire quitter un moment, tout en
pleurs, la chambre mortuaire. Ils firent quelques pas dans le parc où il y avait un
peu de soleil. Tout d’un coup, M. Swann prenant mon grand-père par le bras,
s’était écrié : « Ah ! mon vieil ami, quel bonheur de se promener ensemble par ce
beau temps. Vous ne trouvez pas ça joli tous ces arbres, ces aubépines et mon
étang dont vous ne m’avez jamais félicité ? Vous avez l’air comme un bonnet de
nuit. Sentez-vous ce petit vent ? Ah ! on a beau dire, la vie a du bon tout de
même, mon cher Amédée ! » Brusquement le souvenir de sa femme morte lui
revint, et trouvant sans doute trop compliqué de chercher comment il avait pu à un
pareil moment se laisser aller à un mouvement de joie, il se contenta, par un geste
qui lui était familier, chaque fois qu’une question ardue se présentait à son esprit,
de passer la main sur son front, d’essuyer ses yeux et les verres de son lorgnon. Il
ne put pourtant pas se consoler de la mort de sa femme, mais pendant les deux
années qu’il lui survécut, il disait à mon grand-père : « C’est drôle, je pense très
souvent à ma pauvre femme, mais je ne peux y penser beaucoup à la fois. »
« Souvent, mais peu à la fois, comme le pauvre père Swann », était devenu une
des phrases favorites de mon grand-père qui la prononçait à propos des choses les
plus différentes. Il m’aurait paru que ce père de Swann était un monstre, si mon
grand-père que je considérais comme meilleur juge et dont la sentence faisant
jurisprudence pour moi, m’a souvent servi dans la suite à absoudre des fautes que
j’aurais été enclin à condamner, ne s’était récrié : « Mais comment ? c’était un
cœur d’or ! » (I, 14-15).

This passage, occurring so near to the beginning of the text appears to me to be of

quintessential importance and perhaps even capable of serving as a kind of codex to

certain key aspects of the social and aesthetic value system of La Recherche because of

the many thematic lines of association in which it participates or which it initiates. The

father/flower association is particularly enhanced by the fact that the scene takes place in

M. Swann’s park at Tansonville where we discover the lush flora that so enchants the

narrator’s father and grandfather which the narrator will later describe in very extensive

detail in the scene where he first sees Gilberte, as we have just seen (I, 133-141).

Interestingly, apart from the presence of the narrator, both scenes take place exclusively

47
between fathers and in both the very condition that renders the scene possible is the

absence—and in the case of the grandfather’s story about Swann’s father the death, the

most irremediable form of material (as opposed to memorial) absence—of a maternal

figure.

The young narrator is inclined to think that this man, this excellent yet strange

man whose temperament and thoughts could be radically changed by an insignificant

detail on a whim and who was capable of experiencing such profound joy in the park

when his wife had just died, must have been a monster. If he is a monster, it is only in the

etymological sense of its Latin root “monstrum,” derived from “monere” in its meaning

of “to direct attention to.” For in retrospect, one can see that this “singular” character

directs attention to a property shared by several of the principal characters of À la

recherche du temps perdu—Charlus, Swann, the narrator himself whose feelings for

Albertine can change from boredom to intense amorous jealousy instantaneously (for

example at her mention that she knows Mlle Vinteuil). In fact, over the course of La

Recherche, the narrator will de(-)monstrate the universality of this trait, show that it is an

essential part of his general theory of the human condition; it is shared by anyone who

knows or has known the inseparable emotions of jealousy and love.

In addition to introducing this thematic content into the work, on the level of

form, Swann le père’s “souvent mais peu à la fois” could serve to most accurately

describe the rhythm of À la recherche du temps perdu’s system of progressive revelations

tending toward the narrator’s realization (in both the concrete and abstract senses of the

term) of his vocation in writing. It mirrors the way in which the writing of the work is

structured in patterns of repetition of occurrences with gradual conceptual advancements

48
which manifest the narrator’s experience of grappling to get a hold of the fleeting

sensations of lost time.

The narrator’s grandfather’s tendency to often cite “souvent, mais peu à la fois,

comme le pauvre père Swann” in the most diverse of contexts indicates that he has

avoided the very pitfall that prevents Swann from realizing his artistic potential, what

Deleuze describes as “[…] la manie de Swann, qui n’aime jamais tant Giotto ou Botticelli

que quand il en retrouve le style sur le visage d’une fille de cuisine ou d’une femme

aimée.” 21 It is because Swann sees a resemblance between Odette and a figure in a

Botticelli fresco, because he has named her and labeled her as such, that he falls in love

with her and that, years after their love affair, she remains, in his eyes, fixed as a

Botticelli. Unlike Swann, whose imagination gets co-opted by the name and who falls

into a sort of onomastic idolatry, the grandfather does not allow his catch phrase to be

contained by its original context and allows for a temporal mobility between the sign, the

symbol, and that which it designates.22

The young narrator relinquishes his opinion of Swann’s senior out of faith in the

judgment of his own grandfather who assures him that his conclusion is erroneous. Once

again, a juridical lexicon (which in contrast to a religious one implies consideration of

21
Gilles Deleuze, Proust et les signes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1964) 49.
22
“Si le nom propre a chez Proust cette fonction œcuménique, résumant en
somme tout le langage, c’est que sa structure coïncide avec celle de l’œuvre même :
s’avancer peu à peu dans les significations du nom (comme ne cesse de le faire le
narrateur), c’est s’initier au monde, c’est apprendre à déchiffrer ses essences : les signes
du monde (de l’amour, de la mondanité) sont faits des mêmes étapes que ses noms; entre
la chose et son signifiant s’interpose le signifié : le nom n’est rien, si par malheur on
l’articule directement sur son référent […] c’est-à-dire si l’on manque en lui sa nature de
signe.” Roland Barthes, “Proust et les noms,” Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (Editions du
Seuil, 1972) 134.
49
multiple points of view) enters into the text in association with the father figure. The

narrator considers his grandfather a judge whose sentence establishes the jurisprudence

that the narrator chooses and, as he asserts, will subsequently often choose to follow

against his own natural inclinations. Paternal authority is asserted but simultaneously

justified in accordance with the benevolent dictator model that seems to characterize the

narrator’s father.

The grandfather’s sentence is one of pardon. Whereas the narrator had already

presumed Swann’s father guilty, the grandfather’s judgment penetrates beyond the

surface appearance in a soul-searching manner, for he asserts that this person who had

appeared to the narrator as monstrous in fact had a heart of gold. In other words, the

narrator affirms that at the time of this scene, as well as subsequent to it, his grandfather’s

“jurisprudence” has repeatedly served as a hermeneutical device to help the narrator to

reflect critically on his own judgment and avoid potential errors in his assessments of

character, or at least be aware that he must be weary of first impressions and of their

probable fallibility.

Les Intermittences des Fleurs: From Nature Scene to Nature Seen

This “exoneration” of Swann le père is also ostensibly the narrator’s first lesson

concerning the natural and innocent co-habitation of profound suffering and ecstatic joy

in face of the wonders of nature. And this is one of the more difficult life lessons with

which the narrator grapples repeatedly throughout the course of the work. Indeed, the

narrator has a nearly identical experience to that of Swann’s father, as it had been told to

50
him by his own grandfather, in Sodome et Gomorrhe, when the narrator makes his second

visit to Balbec, in the concluding pages of the section entitled “Les Intermittences du

cœur.” Here he decides to take a walk “[m]algré la pluie récente et le ciel changeant à

toute minute” (III, 177) just as Swann’s father had decided to walk in the park despite his

wife’s recent death and his mood changing from minute to minute; and he is certainly

following in these paternal footsteps when, despondently mourning his grandmother’s

death during his second visit to Balbec, he is suddenly enraptured by the view of a

blossoming orchard, an orchard which he had previously seen with his now defunct

grandmother at a time when it was barren:

[…] je partis me promener seul vers cette grande route que prenait la
voiture de Mme de Villeparisis quand nous allions nous promener avec ma grand-
mère ; des flaques d’eau que le soleil qui brillait n’avait pas séchées, faisaient du
sol un vrai marécage, et je pensais à ma grand-mère qui jadis ne pouvait marcher
deux pas sans se crotter. Mais dès que je fus arrivé à la route ce fut un
éblouissement (III, 177).

The fruitfulness of this experience in the blossoming apple orchard, its most

significant pedagogical nature, is highlighted by the fact that its felicitous outcome is

antithetical to the narrator’s original intention. His choice to take this path had been the

result of a masochistic desire to wallow in and fortify his mourning so as not to forget his

grandmother, a desire to punish himself for his previous self-perceived neglect of the

dying woman and insufficient grief at her death. However, the sight of these beautiful

apple trees gives him a taste for life’s pleasures, nourishes his desire to return to life, to

permit himself to live. “[…] [C]e fut un éblouissement” is his own version of Swann

Père’s “Ah ! on a beau dire, la vie a du bon tout de même […] !” (I, 15).

In the orchard, “les pieds dans la boue et en toilette de bal” (III, 177), the flower-

covered trees are anthropomorphized and the recollection of how the grandmother used to

51
muddy her skirt gives way to admiration of these new figures with their feet in the mud

dressed up in dazzling luxurious attire for a festive social occasion such that his thoughts

are further distanced from his dead grandmother and turned toward the jeunes filles en

fleurs. The anthropomorphized flowers form a bridge from the grandmother to Albertine,

for but one page after the orchard scene the narrator affirms that “[…] Albertine

recommençait […] à m’inspirer comme un désir de bonheur” (179). The father had in a

way prepared this transition when just one page earlier, he mediates for the second time a

dream that the narrator had of his dead grandmother. In both dreams, the father dialogues

with the narrator in order to help him understand that he must let go of his regrets and

move on:

Alors ma grand-mère m’apparut assise dans un fauteuil. Si faible, elle

avait l’air de vivre moins qu’une autre personne. Pourtant, je l’entendais respirer ;
parfois un signe montrait qu’elle avait compris ce que nous disions, mon père et
moi. […] “Tu vois tout de même, lui dis-je, il n’y a pas à dire, elle a saisi
exactement chaque chose […]. Mais pourquoi ne veut-elle pas m’embrasser ? –
Regarde, sa pauvre tête retombe.—Mais elle voudrait aller aux Champs-Elysées
tantôt.—C’est de la folie ! –Vraiment, tu crois que cela pourrait lui faire mal,
qu’elle pourrait mourir davantage ? Il n’est pas possible qu’elle ne m’aime plus.
J’aurais beau l’embrasser, est-ce qu’elle ne me sourira plus jamais ? –Que veux-
tu, les morts sont les morts” (III, 175-6).

Because this dialogue with the father takes place in the narrator’s dream, the father’s

remarks are not properly his, but rather representative of how the narrator himself

subconsciously conceives of and interprets his father’s role in helping him to surpass his

state of mourning. That the narrator subconsciously places his father in this mediating

role reinforces a posteriori the notion that the father figure has been deliberately assigned

this function of guiding the return from mourning to living. This role originates in the

scene of the grandfather with Swann’s father on the day of Swann’s mother’s death and is

subsequently relayed to the narrator’s father in the final scene of “Les intermittences du

52
cœur.” The father’s exercise of this function in the narrator’s dreams is yet another

example of his continuous connection to themes of (re)birth and creation.

This link between the father and creation also emphasizes his association with

creativity and, more specifically, with creative word-play.23 In the second dreamt

dialogue, the polysemic saturation of “sa pauvre tête retombe” (where “retombe”

literally means that her head is falling again but also figuratively suggests its return to the

“tombe”) and of “elle voudrait aller aux Champs-Élysées tantôt” (coupling the narrator’s

wish that she would like to return to the old site of their excursions with the idea that she

would like to return to the dwelling of the dead) underscores the notion of her death, even

in his desperately desired denial of it. It is successfully and progressively penetrating the

narrator’s consciousness so that he may come to accept the conclusion, (the conclusion

whose reinforcement his own subconscious has attributed to his father), that death is

irremediable and that his only alternative is to let his dead grandmother go and to follow

his own path toward life and artistic, literary self-creation.

The situation of this passage of “Les Intermittences du cœur” in Sodome et

Gomorrhe, at the center of La Recherche, greatly accentuates its significance as an

important turning point. It is this experience that signals the end of the narrator’s period

of mourning that allows him to continue his éducation sentimentale. Immediately

following this scene opens, both literally and figuratively, a new chapter:

Dans ma crainte que le plaisir trouvé dans cette promenade solitaire

n’affaiblît en moi le souvenir de ma grand-mère, je cherchais de le raviver en
pensant à telle grande souffrance morale qu’elle avait eue ; à mon appel cette
souffrance essayait de se construire dans mon cœur, elle y élançait ses piliers
immenses ; mais mon cœur sans doute était trop petit pour elle, je n’avais pas la

23
The father’s association with word-play will be further explored in the
following chapter.
53
 force de porter une douleur si grande, mon attention se dérobait au moment où
elle se reformait tout entière, et ses arches s’effondraient avant de s’être rejointes
comme avant d’avoir parfait leur voûte, s’écroulent les vagues (III, 178).

Though this metaphor of monument and sea announces that the narrator cannot support

the pillars of his grandmother’s memory, the scene in the orchard has, in fact, contributed

significantly to the construction of pillars of the aesthetic theory on which La Recherche

is built. The scene demonstrates the key role of pleasurable sensual experiences in the

development of the narrator’s poetics.

In harmony with the title of the passage, “Les Intermittences du cœur,” the

weather in the orchard is, appropriately, intermittent. In the beginning a “brise légère

mais froide faisait trembler légèrement les bouquets rougissants […] [p]uis aux rayons du

soleil succédèrent subitement ceux de la pluie […] [qui] enserrèrent la file des pommiers

dans leur réseau gris” (III, 177-78). The conceptual bridge from the experience of the

narrator’s grandfather and Swann’s father in the park at Tansonville to the narrator’s

experience in the orchard may also be constructed of or at least corroborated by the play

of the sun and wind on the flowers which is common to the two passages. As Jean-Pierre

Richard remarks:

Ce combinat de brise et de soleil peut en effet sinon vaincre la mort, du

moins la faire oublier, en effacer provisoirement l’image. Prenons-en pour
témoin, comique cette fois, le légendaire père Swann, veuf éploré on s’en
souvient, mais vite consolé par le contact du beau temps, des fleurs, de la lumière.
« Sentez-vous ce petit vent ? » disait-il le jour de la mort de sa femme au grand-
père de Marcel. « Ah ! on a beau dire, la vie a tout de même du bon, mon cher
Amédé ! »24

It is the intermittence of the sun, wind and rain as they interact with the flowering trees,

which we see in the scene of the narrator in the orchard, that gives its very definition to

24
Jean-Pierre Richard, Proust et le monde sensible (Editions du Seuil, 1974) 58.
54
the spring, this transitional season of rebirth and of new creation: “Mais ceux-ci [les

pommiers] continuaient à dresser leur beauté, fleurie et rose, dans le vent devenu glacial

sous l’averse qui tombait : c’était une journée de printemps” (III, 178).

In accordance with the recurrent father-flower associations, the father is most

often associated with the spring season.25 From the very first pages of Combray, the

father, who examines the barometer and repeatedly asks the gardener if he thinks the

weather will improve (I, 11), is shown to be interested in meteorology. This interest could

be interpreted as a kind of continuous concern for the fate of flowers, particularly in their

tenuous nescient state. It also marks a certain sensitivity to temporal contingency, an

awareness of the passage of time made perceptible by atmospheric variations. As Richard

explains, the relation of the two “temps”:

[…] va, semble-t-il, en sens inverse de celui qui liait l’espace à ses
contenus atmosphériques. Car s’il pouvait apparaître que le climat servait,
le plus souvent, à unifier le lieu, à en assimiler en lui le désir d’éclatement
ou de disparité, il en va tout autrement de son commerce avec la
temporalité : entretenue par lui bien au contraire et comme nourrie dans sa
puissance déjà si forte d’hétérogénéité et de dissociation.26

The father renders explicit the motivation for the homonymy of “le temps,” the weather,

and “le temps,” time, in particular when he plans the narrator’s trip to Venice and

Florence (I, 381-86). This trip is ultimately aborted because the narrator falls ill. He falls

“under the weather” because his father, in measuring time by seasonal fluctuations while

planning the voyage, has made him sense that he, like the cities which had so far only

25
The association between the father and the spring is yet another line of the
text’s thematic organization that can be traced back to the father/flower/Abraham image,
for as Juliette Hassine reminds us “[…] le patriarche ou le roi Abraham avait substitué le
sacrifice du chevreau aux sacrifices humains […]. Le sacrifice de la Pâque ou le ‘Pesakh’
relevait d’une civilisation pastorale.”Marranisme et hébraïisme, 161.
26
“Proust météo,” Amicitia Scriptor: Littérature, histoire des idées, philosophie,
eds. Annie Becq, Alain Mothu and Charles Porset (Paris: H. Champion, 1998) 332.
55
existed for him as quasi-mythical abstractions, are in fact concrete in their temporal

contingency, under the yoke of passing time. In this way, the father pushes the narrator

toward the realization of his imperative to capture in narrative lost time.27

In his description of what he observes while contemplating the orchard and once

again evoking the Orient, the narrator remarks that “l’horizon lointain de la mer

fournissait aux pommiers comme un arrière-plan d’estampe japonaise […]” (I, 177). The

two terms of the simile are placed such that art does not imitate nature, but nature

imitates art. The reversal of the classical mimetic aesthetic roles of art and nature is not

new to the work in this final passage of “Les Intermittences du cœur.” Nevertheless, it

appears to have acquired a more vigorously elaborated and deliberate formulation as a

fundamental principle of the work's aesthetic system, much more so, for example, than in

the Gilberte scene. This time there is a more explicitly articulated contemplation of

important aesthetic principles concerning the relationship between nature, man and art;

for instance, when the narrator asserts in clear causal language that the nature scene

touches one to the point of tears because of the ostensible combination of art and nature:

“elle touchait jusqu’aux larmes parce que, si loin qu’elle allât dans ses effets d’art raffiné,

on sentait qu’elle était naturelle.”28 The ennalage by way of which this assertion is made

in the impersonal, “on,” which in the earlier scene seemed to signal that the narrator’s

27
This scene, as well as further implications of the father’s interest in
meteorology, will be examined in detail in the following chapter.
28
This aspect of Proustian aesthetics shares much of Baudelaire’s conception of
the relationship between art or artifice and beauty. For example, in his criticism of the
landscape paintings of the Salon de 1859, Baudelaire condemns “[…] le fameux défaut
moderne qui naît d’un amour aveugle de la nature, de rien que la nature” and asserts that
“[…] un site naturel n’a de valeur que le sentiment actuel que l’artiste y sait mettre.”
Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois, 2 vols. (Gallimard,
« Bibliothèque de la Pléiade » 1975-76) II, 660.
56
experience was not clearly conceptually anchored in his self29 is here, in “Les

Intermittences du cœur,” indicative of a more inclusive “on” pointing more toward

generality or universality. For, now, the narrator is “translating” his and Swann’s father’s

common experience which Swann’s father had instinctively perceived but without

possessing the narrator’s ability to understand it.

In this sublime nature scene in the orchard, in this passage that repeats the

fundamental experience of le père Swann in the park, it is the detailed descriptions, the

narrator’s metaphorical language, that replace the old man’s silent gestures of wiping his

forehead and rubbing his eyes and the lenses of his pince-nez—his typical, familiar

response to any difficult question that bewildered him. For both Swann’s father and the

narrator, the bewildering question of how such joy can erupt in a time of mourning is

identical, inviting the juxtaposition of these two scenes. However the narrator adds to

Swann’s father’s ecstatic aesthetic experience the articulation, through his beautiful,

poetic language, of aesthetic elements that the grandfather and Swann’s father’s more

anecdotal version of the analogous experience lack.

The narrator is now able to comprehend that all aesthetic experience is anchored

in the “moi,” that the sensing of an artistic will in what is in fact a display of nature is

attributable to the rousing of his own artistic perception of it. As Debray-Genette remarks

in reference to the scene of the narrator’s walk in the Bois de Boulogne at the end of Du

côté de chez Swann, “L’enfant confond. L’adulte est celui qui sépare et distingue.

L’écrivain, celui qui fait s’interpénétrer, se surimposer, les éléments hétéroclites. Le

29
An example of this being his statement of what “on” first found to be Gilberte’s
most striking feature and its utter discordance with his own experience of what most
struck him. See supra p. 41-42.
57
narrateur sait aussi, ce que ne savait pas le jeune héros, que l’exaltation qu’il éprouvait

‘n’était pas causée par l’admiration de l’automne, mais par un désir.’”30 With the narrator

progressively coming to accept that his grandmother is dead with the help and guidance

of his father, it is as if he were moving up a generation in his level of understanding. He

is now able to assimilate Elstir’s lesson that art trains the eye to see beauty that it would

otherwise have overlooked. Just one page after this scene that closes “Les Intermittences

du cœur” the narrator explains that:

[…] mes yeux instruits par Elstir à retenir précisément les éléments que
j’écartais volontairement jadis, contemplaient longuement ce que la première
année ils ne savaient pas voir. Cette opposition qui alors me frappait tant entre les
promenades agrestes que je faisais avec Mme de Villeparisis et ce voisinage
fluide, inaccessible et mythologique, de l’Océan éternel, n’existait plus pour moi
(III, 179).

This is an essential step toward the understanding that beauty is in the “I” of the

beholder. The mimetic idea of observing objective boundaries that structure sensory

perception in order to re-create discreet images is abandoned for a subjective unifying

vision whereby co-presence in the narrator’s consciousness becomes a platform for

perceptual continuity.31 In other words, there are no “objects” to be captured or

represented in art, only subjective experiences to be re-created. In Le Temps retrouvé, the

narrator will formulate the metaphor of art as an ocular device serving to help each

individual to better observe not outside phenomena but within himself. Swann’s Father’s

literal ocular device, his pince-nez that he nervously rubs along with his eyes when

30
Raymonde Debray-Genette, “Thème, figure, episode,” 70.
31
“[…] the spatio-temporal unity of place is constituted by the subject as its
center and apex, participating by its bodily presence in a site which it subsequently,
through memory and reflection, reproduces and, in all senses comprehends. The ‘space’
which the operation of the writer presupposes and in which he moves, is the interior
space of subjectivity.” Samuel M. Weber, “The Madrepore,” MLN 87.7 (Dec. 1972) 929.
58
confronted with something that he cannot understand, an idea that he cannot clearly see,

prefigures the narrator’s metaphorical ocular device for subjective introspection:

En réalité, chaque lecteur est quand il lit le propre lecteur de soi-même.

L’ouvrage de l’écrivain n’est qu’une espèce d’instrument optique qu’il offre au
lecteur afin de lui permettre de discerner ce que sans ce livre il n’eût peut-être pas
vu en soi-même (IV, 489-90).

Les Fleurs du Malade: Resemblances between the Narrator and his Father/Flower

At the moment when the narrator’s father stands before him as an imposing

Abrahamic father/flower in the bedtime scene, telling the mother to spend the night with

their chagrined child, his behavior is described by the narrator as god-like in manner, as

unpredictable, incomprehensible and arbitrary.32 Nonetheless, there is ample textual

evidence that speaks to the contrary, suggesting that his behavior is anything but. For

example, in the introduction, we mentioned that the father’s decision to send the narrator

to bed was not arbitrary in that it appeared to be a logical decision based on the

grandfather’s observation that the narrator appeared tired: “‘Le petit a l’air fatigué, il

devrait monter se coucher. On dîne tard du reste ce soir.’ Et mon père qui ne gardait pas

aussi scrupuleusement que ma grand-mère et que ma mère la foi des traités dit : ‘Oui,

allons, va te coucher;’” (I, 27). This non-arbitrariness of the father’s behavior is thus

reinforced specifically in direct discourse, that is, in words spoken by the father and

grandfather, rather than paraphrased by the narrator.33 This is again the case when,

32
“Même à l’heure où elle se manifestait par cette grâce, la conduite de mon père
gardait ce quelque chose d’arbitraire et d’immérité qui la caractérisait et qui tenait à ce
que généralement elle résultait plutôt de convenances fortuites que d’un plan prémédité »
(I, 37).
33
Although there is always the possibility that the adult narrator is misquoting
what they had said, due to the higher degree of performativity of direct discourse as
59
according to her “principles,” the mother explains to the father that she should not spend

the night with their son because “on ne peut pas habituer cet enfant…” and the father

replies, “Mais il ne s’agit pas d’habituer […] tu vois bien que ce petit a du chagrin, il a

l’air désolé, cet enfant ; voyons, nous ne sommes pas des bourreaux ! Quand tu l’auras

rendu malade, tu seras bien avancée !” (I, 36). This reply suggests not only that the

father’s conduct is not at all arbitrary but that he presupposes an empirical relationship of

cause and effect between a condition such as the nervousness from which the son suffers

and illness—illness, perhaps, such as the neurological disorder of which he, himself, is a

victim—that he seeks to pre-empt in his child. In other words, the father may very well

be trying to prevent his nervous son from developing this nervous ailment from which he,

himself, is suffering; these “névralgies,” due to which he wraps his head in the purple and

pink Indian cashmere, becoming the father/flower34.

It is particularly in retrospect that this association, as well as its significance, is

substantiated and rendered apparent. Indeed, much later in La Prisonnière, this cause and

effect relationship between nervousness and nervous illness is rendered explicit in a

opposed to indirect discourse, according to the “pact” (to use the terminology of Philippe
Lejeune), or to the “horizon of expectations” (to use that of Hans Robert Jauss) regulating
our conception of reading, it is generally considered to be the most unmediated level of
narrative discourse. Should Derrida be correct in denying the privileged stature of
performative language as he does in “Signature, événement, contexte” (Marges de la
philosophie, [Éditions de Minuit, 1972] 365-93) from a psychoanalytic perspective, this
would only serve to highlight the importance of this direct discourse; for, if it indeed
were a misquote, the fact that the adult narrator should supply this potentially
disculpating “evidence” would be all the more telling, a more revealing representation of
what has taken place in his mind in terms of how he now conceives of the scene, what he
believes to be “true” (or a contributing factor to the “truth”) concerning his father’s
behavior and its motivations.
34
From his floral attire to his physical frailty many of the father’s traits seem
quite feminine. What may appear to be “maternal” compassion when he yields to the
narrator’s wish to have his mother remain with him shows itself to be nonetheless
grounded in “masculine” logic and is enforced with patriarchal authority.
60
parallel situation that invites a comparative juxtaposition. This time suffering from the

withholding of Albertine’s kiss, “[…] pourquoi ne m’a-t-elle pas embrassé ?” (III, 902),

no longer wondering whether or not he will succeed in obtaining his mother’s kiss as in

Combray but frantically fretting over whether or not Albertine will leave him, the

narrator explains: “[…] je finissais par avoir mal à la tête […]. Il y a ainsi certains états

moraux, et notamment l’inquiétude, qui, ne nous présentant que deux alternatives, ont

quelque chose d’aussi atrocement limité qu’une simple souffrance physique” (III, 903).

In La Prisonnière, where the adult narrator revisits Combray in an attempt to

better understand his own behavior toward Albertine in terms of his parents’ handling of

him when he was a child, it would seem that he has since made considerable progress

toward the end of better understanding the complexity of his father’s motives, that a

simple black and white categorization of them as “arbitrary” or as “authoritarian” might

be too reductive. Thus, long after the bedtime scene, he will have posited other

hypotheses concerning his father’s nature and motives and will have achieved a more

nuanced, experience-enriched, and sophisticated understanding of him that brings

similarities between his own sensitive personality and his father’s to light. Such is the

case, for example, when he wonders:

[…] peut-être chez mon père lui-même la froideur n’était-elle qu’un aspect
extérieur de sa sensibilité ? Car c’est peut-être la vérité humaine de ce
double aspect, aspect du côté de la vie intérieure, aspect du côté des
rapports sociaux, qu’on exprimait dans ces mots qui me paraissaient
autrefois aussi faux dans leurs contenu que pleins de banalité dans leur
forme, quand on disait de mon père : « Sous sa froideur glaciale, il cache
une sensibilité extraordinaire ; ce qu’il a surtout, c’est la pudeur de sa
sensibilité. » Ne cachait-il pas, au fond, d’incessants et secrets orages, ce
calme au besoin semé de réflexions sentencieuses, d’ironie pour les
manifestations maladroites de la sensibilité, et qui était le sien, mais que
moi aussi maintenant j’affectais vis-à-vis de tout le monde, et dont surtout

61
 je ne me départais pas, dans certaines circonstances, vis-à-vis
d’Albertine ? (III, 616).

In this description of his father, echoes of the narrator’s own voice—his stormy character,

his sententious reflections, his ironic treatment and manifestations of his own

sensitivity—prominently resound. Notably, these observations advance the theoretical

framework of La Recherche highlighting an important hypothesis about the duplicity

inherent in human nature that the narrator incorporates into his greater social theory.

Since the hypothesis is posited (albeit with modal attenuation) as perhaps a “vérité

humaine,” it exceeds the particular case of his father, and is pedagogically asserted as a

universality. And in accordance with the atavistic philosophy that pervades the whole of

La Recherche, when the narrator seeks to better understand himself by examining

patterns of behavior among members of his family, he poses the rhetorical question,

“Aussi, qui donc peut, plus qu’un nerveux, être énervant ?” (III, 617). This observation

comes only a few lines after his having explored resemblances between himself and his

father by fleshing out a portrait of his father’s nervousness and agitation when describing

how with Albertine, he himself had adopted

[…] la façon brusque de mon père qui ne nous signifiait jamais une
décision que de la façon qui pouvait nous causer le maximum d’une
agitation en disproportion, à ce degré, avec cette décision elle-même. De
sorte qu’il avait beau jeu à nous trouver absurdes de montrer pour si peu
de chose une telle désolation, qui en effet répondait à la commotion qu’il
nous avait donnée (III, 617).

Thus, here in La Prisonnière, the father’s nervousness is clearly posited. However, in the

bedtime scene of Combray, where the narration adheres more closely to his earlier, more

primitive, restricted, and naïve childhood point of view and level of understanding, the

father’s nervousness could only be surmised from a few, sparse textual clues. Among

62
these clues is the aforementioned instance of direct discourse in which the father suggests

to his wife that she stay with and comfort their son, since letting him get worked up and

possibly sick with anxiety would be counterproductive. Another clue is the fact that

before bed, as he was chronically sick with migraine headaches, the father habitually took

the prophylactic measure of wrapping his head in the turban-like “cachemire de l’Inde”

that suggests his transformation into a father/flower which, as we have observed, is so

generative for the narrator of exotic fantasy and imagination.

As all of the preceding examples aim to demonstrate, when the narrator’s father or

grandfather appear in the text, no matter how ostensibly trivial the occurrences of the

diegetical level of the narrative may appear, seminal themes that contribute to the work’s

structure and meaning are generally in play. The father’s frequent association with

exoticism is linked to the stimulation of the narrator’s creative faculties. The recurrent co-

textual presence of fathers with flowers indicates that the presence of the father often

signifies that the narrator is situated in a place—a park, a garden—or on a scenic

promenade that is conducive to a reflection on the relationship between nature and art and

thus key in helping the narrator to develop his aesthetic theories and his own literary

voice. Based on the extremely significant symbolic role of the narrator’s father that we

have observed in these foundational scenes as well as the father/son resemblances we

have just examined, in the chapter that follows, I shall aim to debunk the common notion

that the narrator’s mother is the parent primarily responsible for the narrator’s literary and

cultural education. It is my goal to demonstrate that both the narrator’s father and mother

play essential and complementary roles in their son’s path toward his literary vocation.

63
 Chapter Two
Separate but Equal: Complementary Maternal and Paternal Influences on the
Narrator’s Development

Proustian criticism, particularly psychoanalytic readings, tend to overwhelmingly

link the narrator’s artistic proclivities, viewed as symptoms of repression of his latent

desire for his mother and/or her latent desires for him, to his childhood experiences with

her.1 Regarded by some as a benevolent influence and others as an obstacle to the

narrator’s self-realization to be overcome by the narrator’s assumption of his artistic

calling, she has taken center stage while the role of the father has for the most part fallen

by the wayside.2 Yet the importance of the narrator’s father (and grandfather), his

1
One notable exception is Christian Péchenard’s Proust et son père (Paris: Quai
Voltaire, 1993). While this work raises many interesting points concerning the
significance of paternal influences in Proust’s work with which we concur, it primarily
seeks to reverse the common valuing of maternal over paternal influences whereas we
aim to question the validity of this largely unipolar paradigm. Marie Miguet-Ollagnier’s
Gisements profonds d’un sol mental: Proust (Presses Universitaires de Franche-Comté,
2003) also examines the father as does Michel Schneider in Maman (Gallimard, 1999).
These authors mainly study Proust’s father whereas, though we take biographical
considerations into account, we are focusing on the narrator’s father.
2
For instance, as part of a greater argument that “La recherche, qui sans la mort
de la mère aurait pu ne pas être écrite, est placée tout entière sous son regard” (Proust,
Freud et L’Autre [Les Editions de Minuit, 1984] 35-6), Jean-Louis Baudry studies
examples from La Recherche and from texts that Proust had written prior to it like
“Sentiments filiaux d’un parricide” and “La Confession d’une jeune fille”—a short story
in Les Plaisirs et les jours—as well as several pieces of his correspondence, to show that,
from the very beginning, Proust’s writing was always haunted by an obsession with his
mother’s death. (Baudry reads Vinteuil, for example, as a fictional transposition of
Proust’s mother. I believe, however, that the fact that Vinteuil is a single parent who fills
both maternal and paternal roles suggests that he exceeds the scope of purely maternal
representation, as we shall see in chapter three.) While Baudry’s claim is very well
argued, we see no reason to exclude the influence of the death of Proust’s father as well,
especially if the scope of study were to be broadened to include other texts. For example,
in a letter he wrote to the Comtesse de Noailles on December 3, 1903, right after his
father’s passing, Proust lamented: “[…] il y avait des jours où je me révoltais devant ce
qu’il avait de trop certain, de trop assuré dans ses affirmations, et l’autre dimanche je me
rappelle que dans une discussion politique j’ai dit des choses que je n’aurais pas dû dire.
64
centrality to the crucial foundational scenes we examined in the previous chapter,

suggests that he too plays a vital role such that the father and mother are inexorably

complementary and necessary contributors to their son’s ultimate fulfillment of his

literary vocation. Rather than being more or less summarily dismissed from the text while

the mother steps in to play a colossal role, the father is incorporated into a realm most

commonly reserved for representations of the female or the maternal, that of sensual

natural and floral imagery. Furthermore, the father’s inclusion in this symbolic realm of

flowers and nature scenes occurs at certain moments in the text where the narrator’s place

in the world of art and literary production appears to also be in question.

It is not my aim here to dispute the importance of the mother’s influence on the

narrator’s development, its nature in terms of the possible benevolence or malevolence of

her intentions, or the degree of consciousness or latency motivating the actions of both

mother and child. Instead I would like to adopt a point of view that rather than

conducting an ethical evaluation of their intentions (which I suspect to be highly

equivocal as is the case with virtually all of Proust’s characters) and that rather than

seeking to demonstrate the imprint or traces (qualitative or quantitative) that the mother’s

interactions and relations with the narrator have left on his psyche, seeks to investigate

Je ne peux pas vous dire quelle peine cela me fait maintenant. Il me semble que c’est
comme si j’avais été dur avec quelqu’un qui ne pouvait déjà plus se défendre. Je ne sais
pas ce que je donnerais pour n’avoir été que douceur et tendresse, ce soir-là.” In the
letter, Proust also accuses himself of having been for his father “le point noir de sa vie”,
“son seul nuage” (Choix de Lettres, ed. Philip Kolb, [Plon 1965] 110-11). And in another
story from Les Plaisirs et les jours, “La Mort de Baldassare Silvande,” it is a boy’s
reaction not to his mother’s but to his uncle’s death that is in question. Were this to be
read as a masculinization of the mother figure, her displacement into the paternal realm
would nonetheless signal its influence.

65
the functional roles that she occupies as well as the functional roles that she does not—

roles that I believe fall to the father.

In the most general and simplified of terms, it seems that in À la recherche du

temps perdu the following dichotomy structures the fundamental parental contributions to

the narrator’s realization of his literary vocation: while the igniting of the narrator’s

passion for art, culture and reading are essentially maternal functions, as are the mimetic

skills of parody or pastiche that constitute the initial steps of the son’s path to learning to

become a writer, his skills are able to come to fruition because they are complemented by

sensual experiences guided by or associated with the father, often in association with

flowers. As we saw in the last chapter, in the bedtime scene, the father is compared to

Abraham and appears with a purple and pink turban-like wrap that simultaneously turns

his head into a kind of flower and him into a curious cross between a biblical patriarch

and an oriental prince. When the narrator first sees Gilberte he is taking a walk with only

his father and grandfather and it is the latter who points out to him the famous pink

hawthorns behind which he catches sight of his first love. It is the comical anecdote of

Swann’s father, overwhelmed by the sight of his blossoming garden while walking with

the narrator’s grandfather right after the death of Mme Swann, exclaiming ‘Ah! mon vieil

ami, quel bonheur de se promener ensemble par ce beau temps’ (I, 15) and proclaiming

that he thinks of his poor dead wife often but only a little at a time that provides the

narrator with a prefigurative template for how to lose himself in the joys of a budding

grove and finally turn his attention away from his dead grandmother and toward the

jeunes filles en fleurs. Such paternally-guided sensual experiences are ones that stimulate

the narrator’s creative imagination and without which he may not have been disposed to

66
reflect upon his own subjective relationship to worldly phenomena and ultimately to

develop his own poetic voice. In other words, whereas father figures are associated with

personal creativity and thus fall on the side of writing, mothers seem to be often

associated with reading and various forms of citation or parody such that the maternal

model is one in which bonds are created between the narrator as a reading subject and the

work of another. Both of these aspects, le côté maternel and le côté paternel, are

paramount to the narrator’s successful artistic development when, and indeed because

eventually, the deux côtés, like the paths leading the way to Swann’s and the way to the

Guermantes’ do meet and form a complete circuit. The prevalent idea that the cultivation

and maintenance of the narrator’s artistically sensitive nature originates primarily in his

relations with his mother may be omitting the vital formative dimension of paternal

influence.

Paternal Parity

In Combray, the narrator asserts that even the act of mercy, in which his father

permitted him to have his mother stay with him for the night, perpetuated the air of

arbitrariness that seemed to generally characterize his father’s actions (a proposition

whose problematic nature we examined in the previous chapter). However, the narrator

then continues to analyze the nature of his father’s behavior at which point his tone shifts

from affirmative to hypothetical:

Peut-être même que ce que j’appelais sa sévérité, quand il m’envoyait me

coucher, méritait moins ce nom que celle de ma mère ou ma grand-mère,
car sa nature plus différente en certains points de la mienne que n’était la
leur, n’avait probablement pas deviné jusqu’ici combien j’étais

67
 malheureux tous les soirs, ce que ma mère et ma grand-mère savaient
bien; mais elles m’aimaient assez pour ne pas consentir à m’épargner de la
souffrance, elles voulaient m’apprendre à la dominer afin de diminuer ma
sensibilité nerveuse et fortifier ma volonté. Pour mon père, dont l’affection
pour moi était d’une autre sorte, je ne sais pas s’il aurait eu ce courage:
pour une fois où il venait de comprendre que j’avais du chagrin, il avait dit
à ma mère “Va donc le consoler” (I, 37).

Whereas the narrator’s positive assertions about his relations with his (grand)mother have

been the subject of much critical discussion, these hypotheses concerning the father,

though clearly posited as uncertain under the modal influence of “peut-être,”

“probablement” and “je ne sais pas,” have for the most part not been substantially

questioned.

For example, in Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and of Art Leo Bersani

focuses exclusively on the mother in relation to the young narrator’s difficulties in

achieving self-individuation, “At Combray, in spite of Marcel’s efforts to have his mother

with him at night, he partly approves of her resistance […],” ostensibly subscribing to the

narrator’s explanation of the courageous and benevolent motivations for the

(grand)mother’s reactions to his suffering and thus tacitly accepting as true the narrator’s

hesitant hypothesis that his father’s intervention to alleviate it was attributable to his lack

of courage.3 But Bersani does not go on to question the meaning of the father’s purported

lack of courage. Rather, he frames the narrator’s efforts to accomplish self realization in

solely maternal terms, as for example when he describes what he calls the young

narrator’s “discontinuous states” which he labels “two antagonistic needs, the need for

his mother at night and the need to experiment and explore, to achieve self-individuation

3
Leo Bersani, Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and of Art (New York: Oxford
UP, 1965) 49.
68
during the day.4 Bersani’s astute observations are quite engaging. However, they may

omit part of the story. For as we observed in the previous chapter, some of the narrator’s

most influential afternoon adventures unfold under the aegis of paternal stewardship.

Like Bersani, Randolph Splitter makes the mother the sole anchor of the paradigm

guiding the narrator’s struggle to accomplish self definition and expression:

When his mother comes to spend the night with him, Marcel wishes she
would go away again, partly because he is afraid of being overwhelmed by
his own emotions […]. He would rather love at a distance, in his own
imagination, preferring self-sufficiency to anxious dependence on another
person.5

Splitter’s argument is very compelling but once again, as is so often the case in Proustian

criticism, it is only the mother-child relationship that has been made the object of critical

attention. That the father is the one who, in giving the permission for the mother to stay

with the child, creates the very condition upon which the narrator’s internal struggle

between a desire to keep his mother or send her away is predicated, does not fall within

the scope of his inquiry.

Jeffrey Melhman however, in his analysis of the bedtime scene, does indeed

remark a parallel between the narrator and his father concerning the question of a

common lack of will or lack of courage which he sees displayed in his failure to assert his

paternal authority, or “paternal principal,” in order to challenge his son’s weakness:

The structuring of the child’s desire within an extremely unstable triangle

is what Freud referred to as the Oedipus complex. In fact, though, that
triangle will soon collapse. For Marcel’s crucial failure that night is

4
Bersani, 49.
5
Randolph Splitter, Proust’s Recherche: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation
(Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981) 32-3.
69
 initially the default of another, his father. The catastrophe is averted not by
generosity, but by a failure of paternal principle.6

Nonetheless, despite the merit of having recognized the textual analogy between the

narrator and his father in this domain of purported pusillanimity, in the end, he too is

primarily concerned with the maternal. Melhman’s reading remains problematic because

he does not seem to evaluate this shared father-son characteristic as generative of

meaning in and of itself. He does not ask, for example, to what degree a certain nervous,

“uncourageous” character, like the one he attributes to the father, might be inherent in an

artistically-oriented nature and its manifestation in the child’s excessively dependent

relation to his mother a symptom of this artistic nature, rather than a cause. Nor does he

address to what degree or even why the parental role as defined in the Freudian Oedipal

drama should be the measure of the father’s failure or success in the first place. With

Freud’s resolution of the Oedipus complex as a presupposed ideal pattern by which to

define parental functions, he expediently characterizes the father’s role in the bedtime

scene as a failure of paternal authority, then passes over this paternal “failure” as if it

were but an inconsequential means to an end which, by contrast, he defines as truly

meaningful—the establishment of a guilt-inducing fusion of the narrator with his mother

which he credits as being constitutive of the narrator’s identity as a writer.7

I would like to argue that it is the father’s lack of courage, or more precisely, the fact that

the narrator characterizes the father’s decision to have his son comforted as such, that

underscores their likeness and renders problematic the narrator’s claim in the passage

6
Jeffrey Mehlman, “Proust’s Counterplot,” A Structural Study of Autobiography
(Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1974) 24.
7
“[…] the internalization of the highly ambivalent mother-son relationship […]
seemed the turning point in Marcel’s decision to be what he is (that is, to become an
artist).” Mehlman, 34-5.
70
cited above that his mother and grandmother understood his suffering in a way that his

father, more different from him than they were, did not. The narrator characterizes his

father as someone who he surmises would not have had the courage to witness and

perpetuate his son’s suffering, even if that suffering were in the child’s interest. This

aversion to witnessing suffering resembles an attenuated version of the narrator’s as it is

manifested when the narrator believes his grandmother to be suffering because she is

being taunted by his great-aunt who gives his grandfather cognac despite the doctor’s

orders that he not consume liquor. “Déjà homme par la lâcheté,” he flees the scene in

order to sob on his own in the water-closet (I, 12).8 Do these parallels between the

narrator’s self-proclaimed lack of will-power and desire not to witness his grandmother’s

suffering and the father’s hypothesized lack of courage and desire not to witness his son’s

suffering not suggest that the father’s sensitive nature might be more similar to that of the

narrator than are that of his mother and grandmother, at least during his childhood at

Combray? The reader appears to be invited to ask this question just as, as we have seen in

chapter one, the narrator questions his father’s nature much later in La Prisonnière,

wondering if his outward appearance was not, in fact, contrived to conceal his great

sensitivity.9

8
“Déjà homme par la lâcheté” may also suggest the father and the narrator’s
similarity. While “homme” may signify the gender-neutral “mankind,” it might also be a
gendered assessment of “man” as essentially cowardly following from his assessment of
his father, his primary male role model.
9
[…] peut-être chez mon père lui-même la froideur n’était-elle qu’un aspect
extérieur de sa sensibilité ? Car c’est peut-être la vérité humaine de ce double aspect,
aspect du côté de la vie intérieure, aspect du côté des rapports sociaux, qu’on exprimait
dans ces mots qui me paraissaient autrefois aussi faux dans leurs contenu que pleins de
banalité dans leur forme, quand on disait de mon père : « Sous sa froideur glaciale, il
cache une sensibilité extraordinaire ; ce qu’il a surtout, c’est la pudeur de sa sensibilité. »
Ne cachait-il pas, au fond, d’incessants et secrets orages, ce calme au besoin semé de
71
 In the end, there is of course (thankfully) no way to verify the narrator’s

conflicting signals as to which of his parents most closely identified with the nervous

nature to which he eventually attributes his artistic proclivities. But the similarities

suggested between the narrator and his father, signs of his potential influence on or

contribution to his son’s sensitive, artistic character, reveal that, like the mother and

grandmother, he too is quite pertinent in this domain.

Father-Nature and Mother-Culture? The Dissemination of Parental Roles and

Temporal Representations

Whereas the narrator’s mother and grandmother are constantly reading (even

emblematized as readers in the bedtime scene where the mother reads a book given to

him by his grandmother), citing Mme de Sévigné or else imitating her style of speech (an

oral form of pastiche) and in the case of the grandmother perpetually concerned with

providing the narrator with books and reproductions of artworks for the purposes of the

narrator’s cultural education, the father is most often represented in nature scenes, with

flowers, in connection with sensual images such as those analyzed in the previous

chapter. Add his purported lack of courage and the question arises: Has Proust simply

reversed the Aristotelian mother-nature/father-culture paradigm inherited by our culture?

In and of itself, the fact that the mother and grandmother take charge of the

child’s education and wish to provide him with a rich culture générale is perfectly normal

réflexions sentencieuses, d’ironie pour les manifestations maladroites de la sensibilité, et

qui était le sien, mais que moi aussi maintenant j’affectais vis-à-vis de tout le monde, et
dont surtout je ne me départais pas, dans certaines circonstances, vis-à-vis d’Albertine ?
(III, 616).

72
and does not suffice to suggest a Mother-Culture/Father-Nature inversion. The question

arises, however, due to the repetition of this pattern as a consistent and exclusionary

relational dialectic in Combray wherein the father is continually associated with nature

and the mother is not only associated with books and art but seems even to be nature-

averse. In other words, it is the apparent exclusivity of their interests during the narrator’s

childhood—the fact that the father rarely seems to be associated with “culture” and the

mother rarely, if ever, associated with nature, flowers and sensuality—and not the

interests per se that are striking.

This division between maternal associations with cultural productions and

paternal associations with natural ones is nowhere more apparent than in the emblematic

reaction of each parent to the narrator’s beloved hawthorns. In stark contrast with the

scene in which the narrator is lead to Gilberte by his father and grandfather who marvel at

the beauty of these blossoms, his mother is remarkably indifferent to them as well as to

their effect on the narrator:

Cette année-là, quand un peu plus tôt que d’habitude, mes parents eurent
fixé le jour de rentrer à Paris, le matin du départ, comme on m’avait fait
friser pour être photographier, coiffer avec précaution un chapeau que je
n’avais encore jamais mis et revêtir une douillette de velours, après
m’avoir cherché partout, ma mère me trouva en larmes dans le petit
raidillon, contigu à Tansonville, en train de dire adieu aux aubépines,
entourant de mes bras les branches piquantes, et, comme une princesse de
tragédie à qui pèseraient ces vains ornements, ingrat envers l’importune
main qui en formant tous les nœuds avait pris soin sur mon front
d’assembler mes cheveux, foulant aux pieds mes papillotes arrachées et
mon chapeau neuf. Ma mère ne fut pas touchée par mes larmes, mais elle
ne put retenir un cri à la vue de la coiffe défoncée et de la douillette
perdue. Je ne l’entendis pas : « Ô mes pauvres petites aubépines, disais-je
en pleurant, ce n’est pas vous qui voudriez me faire du chagrin, me forcer
à partir. Vous, vous ne m’avez jamais fait de peine ! Aussi je vous aimerai
toujours » (I, 143).

73
Once again, the mother appears as a central element in a recurrent pattern or network of

associations that situate her in relation to works of art throughout La Recherche. She

privileges the cultural production, the photograph for which the narrator has been

specially dressed and coiffed, over the hawthorns and her son’s sentimental (and

physical) attachment to them as he embraces the anthropomorphized flowers, failing to

appreciate not only the scene’s humor, its sublime absurdity, but also the emotive aspect

of her son’s incongruous personification and hyperbolic sentimentality. On the narrative

as opposed to the intradiegetical level,10 this maternal association with cultural

productions and works of art goes far beyond her privileging of the photograph due to the

scene’s intertextuality with Racine’s Phèdre.11 The mother, in having had the narrator

primped and primed for the photograph has unwittingly created a mise en scène for a

Racinian parody to be acted out in a declamatory style whose maudlin hyperbole may

also be an elementary pastiche of what the narrator (who has never yet been to the

theater) imagines the acting style of La Berma must be. Thanks to the implicit presence

of La Berma in addition to the narrator’s mother’s, the links in this passage between the

cultural and the maternal are twofold.

To take another example, whereas the narrator’s father is perfectly at home in

nature and able to navigate the Combray countryside with the greatest ease, his mother

cannot find her bearings on the country roads or even distinguish the entrance to their

own familiar garden from the others they pass on their scenic excursions:

10
The distinction at play is between the level of enunciation as opposed to the
level of the narrator as protagonist.
11
The parallel between the narrator’s description and the following lines from
Phèdre is signaled in our edition of reference (I, 1167, note 1): “Que ces vains ornements,
que ces voiles me pèsent !/Quelle importune main en formant tous ces noeuds,/A pris
soin sur mon front d’assembler mes cheveux ?” (1.3.158-60).
74
 Tout d’un coup, mon père nous arrêtait et demandait à ma mère : « Où
sommes-nous ? » Epuisée par la marche, mais fière de lui, elle lui avouait
tendrement qu’elle n’en savait absolument rien. Il haussait les épaules et
riait. Alors, comme s’il l’avait sortie de la poche de son veston avec sa
clef, il nous montrait debout devant nous la petite porte de derrière de
notre jardin qui était venue avec le coin de la rue du Saint-Esprit nous
attendre au bout de ces chemins inconnus. (I, 113-14).

Equally emblematic of the pattern of association linking the mother with culture

and the father with nature are the two Venices. On the one hand there is the “paternal”

Venice of Combray that along with Florence activates and exists only in the young

narrator’s imagination after the father announces vacation plans.12 On the other, there is

the “maternal” Venice, that is, the actual city that much later the adult narrator visits with

his mother in Albertine disparue on his Ruskinian pilgrimage.13 In stark opposition to the

young narrator’s wild fantasies of the foreign and the exotic when as a child he imagines

the paternal Venice stands the narrator’s process of comparing and contrasting the

maternal Venice with Combray, his assimilation of the new through the familiar,

rendering it no less admirable, but less exotic:

Certes les humbles particularités qui faisaient individuelle la fenêtre de la

chambre de ma tante Léonie, sur la rue de l’Oiseau, son asymétrie à cause
de la distance inégale entre les deux fenêtres voisines, la hauteur excessive
de son appui de bois […] l’équivalent de tout cela existait à cet hôtel de
Venise, où j’entendais aussi ces mots si particuliers, si éloquents qui nous

12
That the very name of Florence evokes vivid floral images also illustrates the
link between the father, the flower and the narrator’s creativity.
13
“Après le déjeuner, quand je n’allais pas errer seul dans Venise, je montais me
préparer dans ma chambre pour prendre des cahiers où je prendrais des notes relatives à
un travail que je faisais sur Ruskin” (IV, 224). This is clear point of convergence between
the narrator and Proust who spent seven years translating, annotating and commenting
(even pastiching), in essays, articles and prefaces, the work of John Ruskin. As Proust
had limited knowledge of English, his translations owed much to the collaboration of
Marie Nordlinger and his mother with whom he visited Venice in the spring of 1900. He
returned to Venice a second time without them in October of that same year. On Ruskin’s
significance to Proust see Edward Bizub, La Venise intéieure: Proust et la poétique de la
traduction (Neuchâtel, Editions de la Baconnière 1991).
75
 font reconnaître de loin la demeure où nous rentrons déjeuner, et plus tard
restent dans notre souvenir comme un témoignage que pendant un certain
temps cette demeure fut la nôtre ; mais le soin de le dire était, à Venise,
dévolu, non comme il l’était à Combray et comme il l’est un peu partout,
aux choses les plus simples, voire les plus laides, mais à l’ogive encore à
demi arabe d’une façade qui est reproduite dans tous les musées de
moulages et tous les livres d’art illustrés, comme un des chefs d’œuvre de
l’architecture domestique au Moyen Age ; (IV, 204).

The aim of the voyage to the maternal Venice is to observe its monuments and the

venerated works of other artists; it is to relate to the stones of Venice (to quote one of

Ruskin’s titles) as cultural objects of study.14 In the maternal Venice, the narrator’s

relation to art as receptor, rather than creator, is accentuated by the fact that, as in the case

of the Venetian window featured in museums and art books, the agency of speech is

given to the monumental object. It is as if the narrator has come to Venice to hear its

architecture speak and tell its narrative.

In this rare return to the present of the narrative that makes it all the more

remarkable, the mother is monumentalized, incorporated into Saint Mark’s Church:

[…] il ne m’est pas indifférent que dans cette fraîche pénombre, à côté de
moi il y eût une femme drapée dans son deuil avec la ferveur respectueuse
et enthousiaste de la femme âgée qu’on voit à Venise dans la Sainte
Ursule de Carpaccio, et que cette femme aux joues rouges, aux yeux
tristes, dans ses voiles noirs, et que rien ne pourra plus jamais faire sortir
pour moi de ce sanctuaire doucement éclairé de Saint-Marc où je suis sûr
de la retrouver parce qu’elle y a sa place réservée et immuable comme une
mosaïque, ce soit ma mère (IV, 225).

The maternal Venice of stone, of the monument, of art and architecture that have resisted

time, is the antithesis of the floral, ephemeral paternal Venice which is conspicuously

subject to time’s passage as we shall see below. Together, the two parentally-associated

14
Venice and in particular its most venerated monument of study, Saint Mark’s
Church, are also read through the cultural mediation of Ruskin since the narrator and his
mother enter the church by way of the baptistery as Ruskin recommends in Saint Mark’s
Rest.
76
portraits of this city represent synchronic and diachronic time, the immutable (maternal)

monument and the ephemeral (paternal) flower.

The father’s Venice is associated with images of lush flora and fecundity that are

so profuse as to exceed the limits of nature, to render these cities super-natural, in other

words to deliver them into the realm of imagination and interior, subjective speculation

about the essence of works of art:

Quand mon père eut décidé, une année, que nous irions passer les
vacances de Pâques à Florence et à Venise, n’ayant pas la place de faire
entrer dans le nom de Florence les éléments qui composent d’habitude les
villes, je fus contraint à faire sortir une cité surnaturelle de la fécondation,
par certains parfums printaniers, de ce que je croyais être, en son essence,
le génie de Giotto. […] je traversais rapidement—pour trouver plus vite le
déjeuner qui m’attendait avec des fruits et du vin de Chianti—le Ponte
Vecchio encombré de jonquilles, de narcisses et d’anémones. Voilà (bien
que je fusse à Paris) ce que je voyais et non ce qui était autour de moi (I,
382-83).15

This paternal Venice (along with Florence) is so stimulating to the narrator as to produce

a visceral reaction, an excitement that ultimately renders him too ill to go.16

15
The (maternal) cultural reference to Giotto, in what remains nonetheless a
(paternal) nature and florally-dominated representation of these cities is another point of
convergence, showing the complementarity of each parent’s domain of contribution to
their son’s development. The narrator, future author, channels the subjective creativity
inspired by the father’s Venice/Florence into the poetic domain when he remarks that he
cannot find a place for all of the images flooding his imagination under the aegis of
Florence’s name. Still, the distinction at play is not one of a paternal realm of names
(poetics) and a maternal realm of places (reality). In fact, no one seems more connected
to a place than the father in relation to Combray where his excursions are navigated with
awe-inspiring ease. The distinction, rather, is one between a paternal Venice/Florence
that inspires creative and imaginative speculation, i.e. one that is subjective, and a
maternal Venice/Florence that, as a repository of monuments and shared cultural
references, is objective.
16
Thus, here too, in this circumstance generated by the father’s decision
concerning the vacation plans, the connection between internal, emotional excitation and
potential illness (such as the menace of suffering from “névralgies”) is put on display.

77
 A fascinating progression in the narrator’s way of conceiving of what for him are

exotic lands, each step of which is linked to the father’s words, takes place in the

narrator’s imagination of this “paternal” Venice. Furthermore, this passage is one of the

more didactic ones to the extent that the enunciating narrator continually exposes the

errors of his past ways of thinking. He explains the first two steps of how he used to

mentally conceive of unknown lands prior to the father’s announcement of the plans for

the trip to Florence and Venice. In the most primitive stage, climate changes in his

immediate environment would evoke thoughts of a particular place whose image was

based on hearsay. For example, on windy and rainy days, he would dream of Balbec

which he always imagined as tempestuous and foggy, based on Legrandin’s (poetically

rather than “realistically” motivated) description. Next, the name of a city itself would

evoke a particular and very simplified, codified and inalterable image of the place:

Sans doute si alors j’avais fait moi-même plus attention à ce qu’il y avait
dans ma pensée quand je prononçais les mots « aller à Florence, à Parme,
à Pise, à Venise », je me serais rendu compte que ce que je voyais n’étais
nullement une ville, mais quelque chose d’aussi différent de tout ce que je
connaissais, d’aussi délicieux, que pourrait être pour une humanité dont la
vie se serait toujours écoulée dans des fins d’après-midi d’hiver, cette
merveille inconnue : une matinée de printemps. Ces images irréelles,
fixes, toujours pareilles, remplissant mes nuits et mes jours, différencièrent
cette époque de ma vie de celles qui l’avaient précédée […] (III, 383).

At this onomastic stage, the narrator certainly does not fully transcend his

erroneous ways of thinking which consist, as he affirms, in believing that the images he

projects to himself of these cities “correspondaient à une réalité indépendante de moi” (I,

384). Nonetheless, when the father announces the vacation plans these images themselves

become multidimensional with the added dimension being perhaps the most essential one

of all—Time.

78
 Florence and Venice become even more “real” to the narrator (in the somewhat

oxymoronic sense of “definite possibilities”) when the father announces specific travel

dates, extracting

toutes deux non plus seulement de l’Espace abstrait, mais de ce Temps

imaginaire où nous situons non pas un seul voyage à la fois, mais d’autres,
simultanés et sans trop d’émotion puisqu’ils ne sont que possibles […] car
ces jours uniques, ils se consument par l’usage, ils ne reviennent pas, on
ne peut plus les vivre ici quand on les a vécus là ; (I, 385).

At this stage of his development, his hunger for aesthetic and artistic pleasure in

his voyages is less excited by books (no doubt à la Ruskin whose language is echoed

throughout the passage) than by the train schedule which seems to promise the possibility

of experiencing the fantasized treasures of these “exotic” lands as future realities:

Je ne pus plus contenir ma joie quand mon père, tout en consultant le

baromètre et en déplorant le froid, commença à chercher quels seraient les
meilleurs trains […] Ainsi elle [la cité de marbre et d’or (Venise)] et la
Cité des lys n’étaient pas seulement des tableaux fictifs qu’on mettait à
volonté devant son imagination, mais existaient à une certaine distance de
Paris qu’il fallait absolument franchir si l’on voulait les voir, à une
certaine place déterminée de la terre et à aucune autre, en un mot étaient
bien réelles (I, 385).

Here, the father’s consultation of the barometer, a practice noted early in Combray and

often cited by critics to demonstrate the banality of his interests,17 serves the important

function of aligning l’espace et le temps (time) by way of le temps (the weather).18 The

17
For example, Serge Doubrovsky denounces the narrator’s father as “à la fois
pesant et falot, débonnaire et faible, ‘métérologiste’ du dimanche […]”La Place de la
Madeleine: écriture et fantasme chez Proust (Paris: Mercure de France, 1974) 121.
Jeffrey Mehlman calls Swann “[…] a fantasized parent to replace the inept and
vacillating one who, in the novel, can think of nothing better to do than talk about the
weather” (22).
18
Jean-Pierre Richard notes “[…] la complicité profonde, active, des deux
‘temps,’ le temps qu’il fait et le temps perdu, ou à perdre et retrouver, le temps du climat
et celui de l’instant, du futur, de la mémoire,” asserting that “[l]a météorologie
proustienne contribue à agiter, voire à secouer le temps vécu, écrit-vécu […].” “Proust
79
father’s measurement of time by weather patterns and seasonal cycles is part and parcel

of his engagement with and attunement to nature. Moreover, beyond merely marking this

natural attunement, the father’s practice of reading the barometer, a tool to predict, that is,

to construct, a virtual future suggests that he functions as a sort of oracle, projecting or

creating a vision of the future in the present, a process not dissimilar to that of the

conception of a narrative. As the narrator tells us in La Prisonnière, he resembles his

father “avec exagération […] jusqu’à ne pas me contenter de consulter comme lui le

baromètre, mais à devenir moi-même un baromètre vivant […]” (III, 586).19 To not

merely read but to become the barometer means to become the oracular device, a medium

between reality and virtual reality—an artist.20

météo,” Amicitia Scriptor: Littérature, histoire des idées, philosophie, eds. Annie Becq,
Alain Mothu and Charles Porset (Paris: H. Champion, 1998) 332.
19
“De ceux [les petits personnages intérieurs] qui composent notre individu, ce ne
sont pas les plus apparents qui nous sont le plus essentiels. En moi, quand la maladie aura
fini de les jeter l’un après l’autre par terre, il en restera encore deux ou trois qui auront la
vie plus dure que les autres, notamment un certain philosophe qui n’est heureux que
quand il a découvert, entre deux œuvres, entre deux sensations, une partie commune […]
je crois bien qu’à mon agonie, quand tous mes autres « moi » seront morts, s’il vient à
briller un rayon de soleil, tandis que je pousserai mes derniers soupirs, le petit personnage
barométrique se sentira bien aise, et ôtera son capuchon pour chanter : « Ah ! Enfin, il
fait beau. »” (III, 522). Among the most essential of the narrator’s selves, the most
primordial is thus the “petit personnage barométrique.” He directly precedes, perhaps
even sustains, the “philosophe,” who discovers common factors, fulfilling the role of the
writer who, as defined in Le Temps retrouvé, “en rapprochant une qualité commune à
deux sensations, […] dégagera leur essence commune en les réunissant l’une et l’autre
pour les soustraire aux contingences du temps, dans une métaphore” (IV, 468).
20
Not only does the narrator describe the ‘petit personnage barométrique’ as one
of the most essential of the ‘petits personages intérieurs [qui] composent notre individu’
but the process of becoming someone or something else is the one with which Proust
chooses to open La Recherche. In the incipit, the narrator becomes the subjects about
which he was reading when he fell asleep, putting this process of becoming someone or
something else at the forefront of that of engaging with a text: « [J]e n’avais pas cessé en
dormant de faire des réflexions sur ce que je venais de lire, mais ces réflexions avaient
pris un tour un peu particulier; il me semblait que j’étais moi-même ce dont parlait
l’ouvrage: une église, un quatuor, la rivalité de François Ier et de Charles Quint » (I, 3).
80
 In the paternal Venice scene of Combray, the father’s subjugation of “virtual”

time to weather profoundly affects the narrator. It is the combination of the two “temps,”

the fixing of what has heretofore been an abstract time to a particular place, Venice,

existing within a particular climate that serves to render it not only real but surreal:

Mais je n’étais encore qu’en chemin vers le dernier degré de l’allégresse ;

je l’atteignis enfin […] quand j’entendis mon père me dire : « Il doit faire
encore froid sur le Grand Canal, tu ferais bien de mettre à tout hasard dans
ta malle ton pardessus d’hiver et ton gros veston. » À ces mots je m’élevai
à une sorte d’extase ; ce que j’avais cru jusque-là impossible, je me sentis
vraiment pénétrer entre ces « rochers d’améthyste pareils à un récif de la
mer des Indes »21 ; par une gymnastique suprême et au-dessus des mes
forces, me dévêtant comme d’une carapace sans objet de l’air de ma
chambre qui m’entourait, je le remplaçai par des parties égales d’air
vénitien, cette atmosphère marine, indicible et particulière comme celle
des rêves, que mon imagination avait enfermée dans le nom de Venise, je
sentis s’opérer en moi une miraculeuse désincarnation ; elle se doubla
aussitôt de la vague envie de vomir qu’on éprouve quand on vient de
prendre un gros mal de gorge, et on dut me mettre au lit avec une fièvre si
tenace, que le docteur déclara qu’il fallait renoncer non seulement à me
laisser partir maintenant à Florence et Venise mais, même quand je serais
entièrement rétabli, m’éviter d’ici au moins un an tout projet de voyage et
toute cause d’agitation (I, 385-86).

The father’s paradoxical rendering of the imaginary more real—surreal—by subjugating

it to time creates a state of intense ecstasy. The mental operations this provokes in the

narrator are miraculous, they exceed his forces. It is as if his father has manipulated the

course of time right before him, rendered time, the immaterial, perceptible to the

narrator’s body, forcing him out of his body, a kind of giving birth—maternal function

par excellence—to the self, made possible by paternal influence. Surreal and

supernatural, this sort of future lived in the present provokes powerful sensations of not

only ecstasy, but also of disincarnation and illness, specifically a sore throat (the source

of the spoken word) and nausea, a feeling of needing to vomit. It is akin to a mirror image

21
This is a modified version of a quote from Ruskin’s Stones of Venice.
81
of the experience of involuntary memory, whereby the sensation of living the past in the

present also leads to an ecstasy that disincarnates the narrator, to the extent that it makes

him feel like he has transcended or escaped from Time by way of bringing something up

out of the depths of himself, a kind of spiritual emesis. The father’s Venice, linking the

present to an as-yet unrealized future, emphasizing the diachronic passage of time, is the

ostensible counterpart to the mother’s Venice that is resuscitated in Le Temps retrouvé

by involuntary memory, linking the present to the past, the image of a bygone

synchronous moment. What’s more, the father’s subjugation of his son’s imagination to

time seems subtly linked in the narrator’s mind to writing; for the time of the imaginary

made real by his father is measured in spilled ink:

[…] je sentis que c’était vers la semaine qui commençait le lundi où la

blanchisseuse devait rapporter le gilet blanc que j’avais couvert d’encre,
que se dirigeaient pour s’y absorber au sortir22 du temps idéal où elles
n’existaient pas encore, les deux Cités Reines […] (I, 385).

The surface onto which the ink is spilled does not appear to be indifferent either. The

white vest, like the father/Abraham’s white robe in the bedtime scene, the fabulous white

night at the origin, the new era inaugurating the narrator’s literary destiny, is a kind of

blank white page asking to be filled with ink.

In À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, this very question of how the narrator

conceives of his existence in time is one which, in his early adulthood, the narrator

22
This use of the nominal infinitive “sortir,” this form of grammatical tension
between noun and verb, rather than the substantive “sortie,” accentuates the virtual and
somewhat oxymoronic nature of this time perceived primarily as abstract (verbal,
immaterial) though also in the process of being actualized (rendered concrete,
“nominal”). By introducing the verbal quality of “sortir” into the text, Proust emphasizes
the verbal, the process, to the detriment of the realized, purely nominal “sortie.” In this
manner, the nominal infinitive is performing the same kind of temporal “disincarnation”
as the narrator, himself, is undergoing.
82
explicitly details as a reaction to a comment made by his father when finally approving

his son’s decision to become a writer:

Théoriquement on sait que la terre tourne, mais en fait on ne s’en aperçoit

pas, le sol sur lequel on marche semble ne pas bouger et on vit tranquille.
Il en est ainsi du Temps dans la vie. Et pour rendre sa fuite sensible, les
romanciers sont obligés en accélérant follement les battements de
l’aiguille, de faire franchir au lecteur dix, vingt, trente ans, en deux
minutes. […] En disant de moi : « Ce n’est plus un enfant, ses goûts ne
changeront plus, etc. », mon père venait tout d’un coup de me faire
apparaître à moi-même dans le Temps, et me causait le même genre de
tristesse que si j’avais été non pas encore l’hospitalisé ramolli, mais ces
héros dont l’auteur, sur un ton indifférent qui est particulièrement cruel,
nous dit à la fin d’un livre: « Il quitte de moins en moins la campagne. Il a
fini par s’y fixer définitivement, etc. » (I, 473-74).

In this example, as in the example of the paternal Venice where the narrator is

made aware of his existence in time by the father’s rapprochement of the present and the

future, the father is likened analogously to an author, because of the way an author

manipulates time, when he permits the narrator to pursue a career in writing, giving him

poetic license.23 By insisting that he is old enough to decide his own future and seek his

own happiness, the father’s remark that the narrator may become a writer, makes his son

aware that he has reached the threshold at which the seemingly indeterminate potential of

childhood has come to an end and that he must choose the path—write the narrative—of

his future. This occurs in much the same way as when Venice had been pulled out of

abstract space and time as the father’s words had made the narrator realize that a day

23
The analogy is reinforced stylistically by the symmetry of the citations of the
father and the hypothetical exemplary author, both consisting of a tertiary rhythm in
which the third term is “etc.” The surprising grammatical syllepsis of the plural
demonstrative “ces héros” followed by the singular referent, “il,” that ostensibly
represents only one character reinforces the idea of the paradoxical nature of Time whose
imperceptible passing reinforces the illusion of individual synchronous self-identity,
obfuscating the differentiated selves that make up the “individual” in its diachronic flow.
83
lived in Venice would indeed be spent there, foreclosing the possibility of its

actualization elsewhere.

The pathos induced in both of these scenes by the father’s temporal manipulations

(and in the case of the Venice scene the illness induced as well), seems inexorably linked

to this experience of time as passing and ephemeral. The rude break from habit that

spiritual and intellectual development and evolution require, and that is required for

authorship, is necessarily painful. And, as we shall explore later in the chapter, the pain

of “castration” that the father must inflict is the toll exacted for entry into the symbolic

realm of language. The shock is both ontological and ethical—the narrator has suddenly

been made aware of his being, of his existence, in Time, his subjugation to it and his

responsibility to determine how he will progress in it. The father, conceived of by the

narrator as an author, provokes the narrator to prefigure himself as a future author, to

impose on his present an image of his future, to foreshadow what he will be poised to

become at the end of La Recherche in order to fulfill his literary destiny: a recluse who

will shut himself off from the world in order to rewrite it in his magnum opus.

Crosspollinations: Variations on the Father-Nature and Mother-Culture Inversion

The father’s declaration of his son’s freedom to pursue his chosen career and his

pleasure as a writer has the antithetical effect of making the narrator feel not free but as

though he has been forcibly aged. In this comparison that the father’s kind words inspire,

the narrator’s self-imagined future coincides with the present of his great-aunt Léonie, a

84
sort of caricatured portrait of the artist.24 Later, in La Prisonnière, the narrator

acknowledges their similarities explicitly:

[…] peu à peu, je ressemblais à tous mes parents […] et pas seulement à
mon père, mais de plus en plus à ma tante Léonie. Sans cela, Albertine
n’eût pu être pour moi qu’une raison de sortir, pour ne pas la laisser seule,
sans mon contrôle. […] bien que chaque jour j’en trouvasse la cause dans
un malaise particulier, ce qui me faisait si souvent rester couché, c’était un
être, non pas Albertine, non pas un être que j’aimais, mais un être plus
puissant sur moi qu’un être aimé, c’était, transmigrée en moi, despotique
au point de faire taire parfois mes soupçons jaloux, ou du moins d’aller
vérifier s’ils étaient fondés ou non, c’était ma tante Léonie (III, 586).

Tante Léonie as well as the narrator’s grandmother and grandfather are liminal

characters who combine traits of both the mother and the father. It is largely due to them

that it is difficult to assert that Proust simply reverses the mother-nature/father-culture

paradigm. The narrator’s grandmother is equally devoted to both the “nature” and

“culture”categories (and quite comically so, due to the extremity of her exaggerated

efforts in their service.) For example, du côté paternel her belief in nature’s salubrious

effects leads her to take walks in the garden in the pouring rain, or to insist on opening

wide the windows of the dining room at the Grand Hôtel of Balbec so that the narrator

will not be deprived, even temporarily, of the fresh marine air.25 Du côté maternel, she is

24
The similarities between the narrator and his great aunt are multiple: both
progressively become increasingly reclusive, both pretend not to sleep—the narrator is to
write his great work as a nocturnal endeavor—both perpetually declare themselves ill,
use go-betweens to find out information about others and are jealous and suspicious of
those around them (such are the relations, for example, between Léonie and Françoise),
and both come to prefer to live indoors in their room to observe and hypothesize about
the external world, recreating their own image of it, rather than living in it. While the
narrator says that he comes to resemble all of his relatives, it is nonetheless interesting to
note that he specifically mentions his similarities not with his mother and father, but with
his father and his paternal aunt, Léonie.
25
This caricatural attribution of the belief in nature’s salubrious effects to the
narrator’s grandmother is no doubt inspired by Proust’s father, the renowned medical
hygienist. See Daniel Panzac, Le Docteur Adrien Proust (Paris, L’Harmattan, 2003).
85
perpetually trying to procure reproductions of monuments and landscapes for the

narrator, rendered with the highest possible degree of cultural mediation, preferring

paintings over photographs. She also risks her health walking back to the bookstore in the

heat to exchange the books she had purchased for the young narrator (correctly deemed

age-inappropriate by the father) for volumes of George Sand, insisting that she could not

resign herself to giving him something poorly written. And she and the narrator’s mother

are constantly citing Mme de Sévigné. After the grandmother’s death, the mother’s

resemblance to her is such that the narrator will watch his mother mutate into her image.

Yet by the solicitude she lavishes on the narrator to calm the anguish he suffers in his

new room in Balbec, her conduct is far more reminiscent of the father’s than that of the

mother in the bedtime scene where he insists that the mother stay with and comfort their

distressed child.26

The narrator’s grandfather, who is very eager to talk to Swann about political

figures and Saint-Simon, is a most (if not the most) avid admirer of flowers and gardens.

He also makes the categories of “nature” and “culture” overlap to the extent that he

becomes the historian and the storyteller of Swann’s gardens, explaining how they have

changed over time (such as the addition of the artificial pond in whose proximity the

26
The grandmother not only combines traits of the narrator’s mother and father
but of Proust’s as well, like their deaths. The “petite attaque” she suffers in the public
restroom of the Champs-Élysées (II, 608) recalls the stroke Proust’s father suffered, in
just such a place, on November 24, 1903, followed two days later by his passing. Right
after her episode in the restroom, the narrator’s grandmother speaks in citations to
comfort him by demonstrating that she is mentally sound (II, 607-8) as did Proust’s
mother on her deathbed. Both Proust’s mother and the narrator’s grandmother, betrayed
by their slurred speech, fail to disguise the severity of their illness.

86
narrator meets Gilberte) and of course reciting the anecdote of Father Swann’s

aesthetically motivated exclamation in the park on the day of his wife’s death.

Most important, perhaps, is the fact that the transportation of the narrator to the

Combray of his childhood takes place when the madeleine and cup of tea offered him by

his mother gives way to the madeleine and infusion of his aunt, Léonie. In other words,

the first involuntary memory of À la recherche du temps perdu is a recollection of his

paternal aunt, Léonie, or Madame Octave, who commands the patriarchal authority of her

late husband. She represents a balanced integration of the two sexes, the mother and the

father, and it is she whom the narrator-as-future-author ultimately comes to most closely

resemble. As the narrator states in the above citation, for him, to progressively resemble

all of his parents ultimately signifies resembling tante Léonie.

As is always the case with Proust, no inversion is ever simple. What may be

somewhat surprising is the fact many of the father’s traits, such as his sensuality, his

association with flowers and nature, his “floral” attire, his frailty, reverse stereotypical

notions of what is masculine and what is feminine. In the bedtime scene, the father’s

decision to grant his son’s wish in and of itself reverses the classic gender roles that the

reader would expect of each parent; for it is the mother who advocates unyieldingly

upholding the “law” (the rule that the narrator leave her be and go back to bed) and the

father who asserts his authority to the astonishing end of “enforcing” leniency and

compassion. However, the mother-nature/father-culture paradigm does not seem to be

simply reversed, not only because of the liminal roles of the narrator’s other relatives, but

because of the way that Proust nonetheless sustains prevailing paradigms of gender roles

in the family, particularly in relation to authority. Indeed, throughout Combray the

87
mother consistently defers to her husband’s patriarchal authority and the father does not

hesitate to exercise it. Even if certain decisions of this “benevolent dictator” of his family,

such as the one he makes in the bedtime drama, are ones that would most often be

categorized as feminine whereas the mother’s unyielding principles about discouraging

the narrator’s sentimentality, even in the face of her child’s suffering, lend themselves

more easily to the masculine stereotype, his “maternal” compassion nevertheless remains

firmly grounded in “masculine” logic and reason. As we observed in the previous

chapter, the father’s clemency seems quite possibly motivated by the most sensible goal

of trying to prevent his son’s unchecked nervousness from developing into a nervous

ailment. Far from representing a moment of maudlin oversensitivity, this is a pragmatic,

reasoned decision based on his own empiric experience suffering from “névralgies.”

Within this coherent, logical framework, the father’s masculine authority remains firmly

grounded, outweighing his ostensibly feminine qualities so that they do not subject it to

doubt. It is, in fact, a testimony to his authority that he may indulge in compassionate

clemency at will, whereas the mother, on the other hand, feels compelled to follow the

established rules.

Maintaining normative patterns of authority and gender relations in the narrator’s

family in fact serves a structural purpose in La Recherche. It allows these patterns to

serve as a backdrop, foregrounding by contradistinction variations that the narrator later

discovers, thus giving sense and cohesion to the narrator’s struggle to make sense of

them. This is particularly the case in relation to extra-familial paternal influences who

serve as “surrogate” father figures to the narrator and whose role in the narrator’s process

88
of gradually coming to comprehend the semiotic significance of these variations will be

examined in the following chapter.

If the father’s frailty as revealed by his nervous headaches, or his sensitivity, as

revealed by his act of clemency are also examined from the point of view of the structural

function that he plays in the narrative, these traits appear to be remarkably less pertinent

as signs of femininity than of artistic inclination. The important role that sensitivity and

suffering play in creating a literary work is one that the narrator explores in Le Temps

retrouvé:

Il n’est pas certain que, pour créer une œuvre littéraire, l’imagination et la
sensibilité ne soient pas des qualités interchangeables […] Un homme né
sensible et qui n’aurait pas d’imagination pourrait malgré cela écrire des
romans admirables. La souffrance que les autres lui causeraient, ses efforts
pour la prévenir, les conflits qu’elle et la seconde personne cruelle
créeraient, tout cela, interprété par l’intelligence, pourrait faire la matière
d’un livre non seulement aussi beau que s’il était imaginé, inventé, mais
encore aussi extérieur à la rêverie de l’auteur s’il avait été livré à lui-même
et heureux, aussi surprenant pour lui-même, aussi accidentel qu’un caprice
fortuit de l’imagination (IV, 480).

It appears, therefore, that what is at stake during the narrator’s childhood,

particularly when it is a matter of indulging his sensitivity and of the development of the

notion of his existence in time and the relation of time to artistic creation, may be less a

question of the inversion of the mother-nature/father-culture paradigm in terms of

submitting gendered patterns of social behavior to critical inquiry (although these

inversions do hint at the mounting importance of this question in volumes to come) than a

consistent symbolic distribution of parental roles. From a functional point of view, the

narrator’s father sustains traditional notions of gender hierarchy, particularly of male

authority, as he plays his role in setting his son on the path to authorship. It is as if there

is a necessary inversion of the gender inversions that serves to keep the essence of

89
authority—the root of authorship—firmly grounded in the paternal in obedience to his

symbolic structure. As we shall see below in relation to how the father’s act of clemency

functions in the unfolding of the Oedipal drama, at points where he might seem to

slightly stray from gender norms, he appears instead to be serving a more structural

symbolic agenda in La Recherche that consists of upholding a division of the narrator’s

parental instruction into two equally essential contributions to his literary education.

Where the mother exposes him to artworks that serve as models of how to write, the

father helps him to acquire an openness to the sensuous impact of autonomous subjective

experience so that he will feel called to write and so that he can discover what he will be

called to write. This role distribution, firmly anchored in the bedtime scene, transcends

the intradiegetical level of the text, in terms of defining the narrator and his parents as

protagonists, serving to structure the overarching narrative framework of À la recherche

du temps perdu, organizing it into coherent patterns of association.

Oedipus Wrecks: Rereading the Father’s Role in the Familial Triangle

At the moment when the father stands as an imposing Abrahamic figure before

the narrator and his mother and must decide the child’s fate—that is, whether access to

the mother will be granted or denied—his behavior completely diverges from the primary

Freudian model of the Oedipal scene. Though the Gozzoli fresco, cited by the narrator, of

Abraham signaling to Sarah that she must separate from her son inspires the Abraham

simile, it is important to note that at the same moment the father is actually doing the

contrary—insisting that the mother stay with her son. Rather than enacting the symbolic

90
castration of the Freudian paradigm that establishes the triumph of paternal (social) law

over the narrator’s wishes, he grants the child’s wish to keep his mother with him and not

to be forced to relinquish her to his father. However, contrary to what one might expect

and to what many critics maintain, his deviation from this oedipal paradigm does not

seem to result in perversion, in his failure to achieve its final result. Paradoxically, by

permitting his son to spend the night with his mother the father does indeed succeed in

interrupting his son’s desired union with her. What’s more, not only does the father

paradoxically perform the Oedipal function of interrupting the mother-son dyad

successfully by permitting it, but this is done in such a way that the rejection of a desire

for the mother seems to the narrator to come from within himself: “J’aurai dû être

heureux : je ne l’étais pas,” he explains, concluding: “Si j’avais osé maintenant, j’aurais

dit à maman : ‘Non, je ne veux pas, ne couche pas ici’” (I, 38).

In having continually insisted on the importance of analyzing the narrator’s father

not only as a character but also (and perhaps more importantly) as a metaphorical

abstraction, I have maintained that his presence at critical moments of the narrator’s

development, the fact that he occupies key nodal points in the structure of À la recherche

du temps perdu, indicates that he is greatly significant. My analysis presupposes an

implicit distinction between the narrated or signified father, the fictional character, and

the narrative or signifying father who functions in the text as a metaphorical abstraction

or hermeneutic device conveying meaning within and sustaining the work’s structure. In

other words, it is not my intention to assert that the narrator’s father, as fictional

character, consciously and intentionally sets out to disrupt the narrator’s Oedipal desires

and to hand over the narrator to his mother for the purposes of initiating and

91
administrating the early steps of his literary, cultural education. However, from a

functional point of view, the role assigned to and executed by the father in this scene is

such that this indeed appears to be the outcome that he achieves.27 Or, put another way,

Proust’s text is structured in such a way that the actions of the narrator’s father seem to

be causally related to progressive steps toward the narrator’s literary development.

The mother’s reading aloud of George Sand’s François le Champi (a book given

to him by his grandmother) during the night she spends in the narrator’s room is

generally credited with confirming that the mother-child relationship in Combray is

charged with incestuous tensions. To cite but a few examples, in Forme et signification

Jean Rousset affirms that Proust’s choice of this book is quite significant because it is the

story of a foundling who eventually comes to marry his adoptive mother.28 Julia Kristeva,

insisting also on the significance of the fact that the mother in François le Champi is

named Madeleine like the famous little cake that resuscitates the first involuntary

memory of La Recherche, comes to much the same conclusion: “on est donc fondé à

penser que c’est précisément le thème incestueux, celui de la mère pécheresse, qui a

retenu et maintenu l’attention de Proust sur François le Champi, par delà ses réticences

vis-à-vis du style de G. Sand.”29 Serge Doubrovsky, following Philippe Lejeune30 in his

27
It should be noted, however, that in another passage the father, as fictional
character, does effectuate the separation of the narrator from his mother in a very
concrete way. The day before the narrator’s first departure for Balbec, he learns, to his
despair, that his mother will not be accompanying him and his grandmother because she
will instead be staying in a house near Paris that his father, who had expected to be
leaving for Spain with Norpois, decides to rent upon learning that unanticipated
obligations instead require him to be at the ministry. (II, 6)
28
Jean Rousset, Forme et signification (J. Corti: 1962) 157.
29
Julia Kristeva, Le temps sensible: Proust et l’expérience littéraire (Gallimard:
1994) 24.
30
Philippe Lejeune, “Écriture et sexualité” Europe 49 (1971) 113-143.
92
observation that the rhythm of the Madeleine scene and the way that the madeleine

inspires joy in the narrator closely parallel the narrator’s experience in the masturbation

scene of Contre Saint Beuve, remarks:

En somme, on pourrait dire que, grâce à la liaison masturbation/mère, par

une sorte de glissement, une régression orale euphorisante (perceptible
dans tout ‘Combray’) viendrait masquer, en la recouvrant exactement, la
jubilation orgasmique, objet de la jouissance interdite.31

Examples of this sort of interpretation linking the bedtime drama scene to incestuous,

Oedipal impulses are innumerable. So I shall conclude with Alain Roger who, in his

critique of what he calls psychoanalytic criticism’s tendency to re-state the obvious,

remarks: “Tiens, tiens, une histoire d’inceste dont l’héroïne, en plus, s’appelle Madeleine,

et épouse François, l’orphelin, son enfant, au village de Mers, le merveilleux pluriel…

Mais voilà que c’est moi qui apporte de l’eau à ce mauvais Moulin…”32

The Oedipal implications of Combray I culminating in the bedtime drama are

incontrovertible. Yet I would argue that when attention is focused on the role of the father

in this scene there may be another way to read them that allows for a more expansive

understanding of what may be happening and of comprehending the shift into what the

narrator calls a new era, one that might be called a literary era, an era of writing. What is

at stake may not be the ultimate result of the Oedipal conflict but rather the way in which

the father accomplishes a distribution of maternal and paternal roles with regard to each

parent’s contribution to the narrator’s development of his literary sensibilities and

capacities. As head of the household/quintessential biblical patriarch, the father in effect

delegates responsibilities, creating a distribution of parental roles between himself and

31
Serge Doubrovsky, La Place de la Madeleine (Mercure de France, 1974) 36.
32
Alain Roger, Proust: Les plaisirs et les noms (Paris: Denoël, 1985) 26.
93
the mother, or, more specifically, he seems to “give” the child to his mother so that she

may engage him in activities critical to the narrator’s early literary education, learning

activities which he supplements.33

Though I do not necessarily agree with his assessment of the roles of the

narrator’s mother and father, I am inclined to agree with Philippe Willemart in his

interpretation of the role of François le Champi as a sort of transitional object onto which

the narrator’s Oedipal desire for his mother might be displaced:

Lire François le Champi, revient à retrouver l’Œdipe sous l’identification

aux personnages à défaut de pouvoir le faire avec la liseuse. L’inceste
entre personnages existe bien sûr, mais déplacé à un second degré, c’est-à-
dire, du personnage-héros au personnage-François le Champi sous le mode
métonymique.34

It is important to note that it is thanks to the father’s insistence that the mother spend the

night with the narrator in his room, despite her resistance, that this transfer of Oedipal

desire from the mother-son relationship to the text has the occasion to occur. But, even

before this scene, the father has already had a hand in preparing the conditions for this

outcome. François le champi, a gift from the narrator’s grandmother, is only there to be

read in the first place because the father had opposed the grandmother’s original

selections which he had accurately deemed age-inappropriate, “l’ayant presque traitée de

folle en apprenant les livres qu’elle voulait [lui] donner […]” (I, 39).35

33
As we have already observed in detail in the previous chapter, these
supplements include sensual experiences of nature, guidance of the narrator to Gilberte,
his first romantic love-object, and stimulation of the narrator’s imagination in ways that
make him envisage exotic lands and question the notion of Time. Other ways in which
the father contributes to the narrator’s development as a writer will be discussed below.
34
Philippe Willemart, Proust: poète et psychanalyste (L’Harmattan: 1999) 29.
35
John E. Jackson analyzes the role that the grandmother’s aesthetic and
pedagogical priorities, as manifested in her way of choosing gifts for the narrator, plays
in La Recherche, explaining that “[…] la caractérisation de la grand’mère servirait bien
94
 If the incestuous Oedipal wishes have been transferred to the novel, François le

Champi, they then appear themselves to be evacuated from the text by the mother’s

interpretive reading:

[…] quand c’était maman qui me lisait à haute voix, […] elle passait
toutes les scènes d’amour. Aussi tous les changements bizarres qui se
produisent dans l’attitude respective de la meunière et de l’enfant et qui ne
trouvent leur explication que dans les progrès d’un amour naissant me
paraissaient empreints d’un profond mystère dont je me figurais volontiers
que la source devait être dans ce nom inconnu et si doux de « Champi »
qui mettait sur l’enfant, qui le portait sans que je susse pourquoi, sa
couleur vive, empourprée et charmante (I, 41).

This de-sexualization of the text through the mother’s reading appears to be yet another

crucial element of the structure of La Recherche that is linked to the father/Abraham

image. In the young narrator’s imagination, François le Champi is transformed into an

enchanting and mysterious impression of bright, purplish colors which, because the

narrator cannot understand the character’s psychological development, become its sole

point of coherence. There appears to be a sort of assimilation and diffusion of François le

Champi into elements of the corporeal image of the father who, moments before, stood

towering over the narrator and his mother “grand, dans sa robe de nuit blanche sous le

cachemire de l’Inde violet et rose qu’il nouait autour de sa tête depuis qu’il avait des

névralgies” (I, 36). As we remarked in the previous chapter, attributes of the father’s

imposing physical depiction, such as his “robe de nuit blanche,” seem to guide the

narrator’s sensual experience of this astonishing “nuit blanche.” In this instance, the same

vivid purplish colors that characterize the father/Abraham’s astonishing turban-like

purple and pink Indian cashmere appear to re-invent François le Champi and to infuse the

moins à des fins susceptibles d’influer sur l’enchaînement de l’histoire qu’à constituer
l’image d’une position esthétique qui entre en conflit avec celle du narrateur.” (“Les
cadeaux de la grand’mère” Littératures 20 [1989] 64.)
95
image of him that forms in the young narrator’s mind, notably supplanting the censored

sexual content of his eponymous story (and thus sustaining the mother’s blanchissement).

The father’s successful operation of his role as interrupter of the child’s desire for

his mother is able to occur because once the child is permitted to really spend the night

with his mother he can no longer imagine or fantasize what it would be like to experience

the realization of this wish. The narrator can no longer fantasize the now-realized wish to

spend the night with his mother, but in the place of this evacuated fantasy he can—and

does—fantasize about the book.

Through the substitution of the book for the mother as object of fantasy that

results from the father granting his son permission to spend the night with her, the

Proustian principle that fictional creation (or re-creation) always trumps the actualized

reality of an experience is the lesson that the father incidentally imparts. This is where a

shift of seismic proportion, toward an age of literary imagination, begins to occur.

At this initial stage in his development, the young narrator does not yet

understand this lesson on the relationship between reality and fiction, on the subordinate

and inferior status of the former in relation to the latter. This is a lesson which he will

assimilate progressively throughout the course of La Recherche and which will

eventually lead to his realization of his artistic calling. But because of the narrator’s

inability to comprehend this lesson at the time, his explanation of why he changed his

mind about wanting his mother to stay after having being granted this favor is instead

focused elsewhere, on a kind of guilt provoked by having pained his mother by

vanquishing her ideals. While the following quote about the narrator’s supposed guilt at

having felt that he defeated his mother’s principles has been very frequently analyzed in

96
Oedipal terms, to my mind an equally prominent aspect of the text, the narrator’s

insistence on the mother’s sudden aging, has been largely passed over in silence:

Il me semblait que si je venais de remporter une victoire c’était contre elle,

que j’avais réussi comme auraient pu faire la maladie, des chagrins, ou
l’âge, à détendre sa volonté, à faire fléchir sa raison et que cette soirée
commençait une ère, resterait comme une triste date. [. . .] Certes, le beau
visage de ma mère brillait encore de jeunesse ce soir-là où elle me tenait
si doucement les mains et cherchait à arrêter mes larmes; mais justement il
me semblait que cela n’aurait pas dû être, sa colère eut été moins triste
pour moi que cette douceur nouvelle que n’avait pas connue mon enfance;
il me semblait que je venais d’une main impie et secrète de tracer dans
son âme une première ride et d’y faire apparaître un premier cheveu
blanc (1, 38).36

The lexical concentration of terms that describe the mother as having become old seems

to suggest that at the very moment when the father “gives” the mother to the narrator, the

child may in fact begin to no longer find her desirable. If the father has indeed

successfully accomplished the Freudian function of interrupting the child’s desire for his

mother as I have been arguing, it is possible to read this passage somewhat differently—

as a sort of exercise in authorship. The narrator surpasses the Oedipal stage and leaves his

childhood behind not by becoming older himself but by displacing the aging onto his

mother. The sad new era in his life is etched onto her. He feels as though he has forcibly

aged his mother with a trace of his hand, i.e. performed the kind of temporal

manipulation that, as we observed in the case of the paternal Venice and of the father’s

granting him permission to pursue his literary ambition, he associates with being a writer.

The narrator’s profession of guilt for having vanquished his mother’s ideals, weakening

her as illness or old age might, entails a shift in emphasis: incestuous impulses become

36
Emphasis added. This insistance on the mother’s aging was even more
accentuated in an earlier version of this scene where the narrator adds the terms
“première diminution forcée,” “première renonciation” and “premier vieillissement.”
(Esquisse XII, Cahier 8, I, 693).
97
creative ones. The image of the mother who has been aged suddenly and strikingly, rather

than through a subtle and gradual process, is made to announce the future living specters

of the scene at the end of Le Temps retrouvé where the narrator, struck at the matinée

Guermantes by the ravages of time that he discovers on the faces and bodies of those he

used to know, reaches the conclusion that he is called to write a work that not only seeks

to represent timeless truths but one that also grapples with Time’s relentless passage:

Sans doute la cruelle découverte que je venais de faire ne pourrait que me

servir en ce qui concernait la matière même de mon livre. Puisque j’avais
décidé qu’elle ne pouvait être uniquement constituée par les impressions
véritablement pleines, celles qui sont en dehors du temps, parmi les vérités
avec lesquelles je comptais les sertir, celles qui se rapportent au temps, au
temps dans lequel baignent et changent les hommes, les sociétés, les
nations, tiendraient une place importante. (IV, 510)

Writing, he concludes is the only possible way to elude the force of time’s relentless

destruction.

At the end of La Recherche, the narrator cites “cette soirée, où ma mère avait

abdiqué” (IV, 621) as the origin of his own “descent” in Time that decided his fate,

ultimately leading him to the realization of his literary destiny. But it should not be

forgotten that it is the father, who we have seen to be associated with temporal

manipulation, who actually commands this abdication, insisting, over the mother’s

objection, that she stay with and comfort their child. Paradoxically, in so doing, he

ostensibly initiates a seismic shift, re-orienting the narrator’s attention from oedipal

sexuality to a new era of textuality.

98
Genesis and Literary Generation

The father’s incarnation as the biblical Abraham is central to the transfer process

by way of which the narrator surpasses the oedipal stage and gains access to the world of

literature, to a rich palimpsest of intertextual language, as well as to language and word-

play in general. The father in the guise of Abraham brings with him in his ekphrastic

gesture a mother who, by analogy, has taken on the guise of Sarah, a mother, that is to

say, who is of the age of a grandmother, one who, as in Genesis, should not biologically

have been able to reproduce and would not have done so were it not for divine

intervention. Notably, it is precisely at the moment when the narrator has attained what

he calls his “puberté du chagrin” (I, 38) that his father gives to him his Sarah-mother,

who has surpassed, so it would seem, the age of sexual desirability. Her sudden aging is

attributed to a god-like temporal manipulation, a power that, as we have seen, the narrator

elsewhere assigns to his father but also to “the author,” master and creator of his work of

art.

There is a comedic dimension to the scene, as in the Bible itself where Abraham,

and in a succeeding passage Sarah, laughs at the announcement that she is to bear a son in

their old age.37 The scene’s comedic dimension is made possible by the temporal distance

separating the painful childhood experience of the diegetical narrator-protagonist from

the enunciating narrator of the moment of the narration and it stems largely from the

incongruous comparison of the narrator’s father to Abraham and thus of his mother to

Sarah and himself to Isaac by extension. The humor is underscored by the polysemic

37
This is why the son is given the name “Isaac” which means “he laughs.”
99
possibilities that this biblical context opens up within the abundant religious terminology,

the lexicon of the sacred with which all of Combray I has already been infused. Prior to

the father/Abraham’s portrayal, however, this lexicon participates in comic hyperbole

based more strictly on Catholic religious connotations and associated with the narrator’s

mother. For example, the giving of her goodnight kiss is called a “rite” (I, 13) and the

kiss itself is described as an “hostie pour une communion de paix” (I, 13) and a

“viatique” (I, 27). At the moment when the father/Abraham appears on the scene, and

with him another degree of religious intertextuality, what has so far been restricted to a

more provincial use of religious terminology38 expands to a far more polysemic system of

signification. Surpassing the former, more simplistic and limited use of the religious

lexicon of his youth used to designate things such as the nightly maternal bedtime kiss as

a “rite,” the narrator now exercises his right to use this religious lexicon to truly write,

that is, to appropriate and engage it in a far more complex and polyphonic co-temporal,

intertextual narration. This is the case, for example, with the “sauve-toi” (I, 35) that the

mother says to her son when she is belatedly hoping to avoid his father’s seeing him out

of bed. This “sauve-toi” is quite comic because it plays on the semantic double entendre

in the French expression that can mean both “save yourself” in a spiritual sense,

ironically corroborating the narrator’s hyperbolic association of his plight with that of

Isaac, as well as “take off,” or “get out of here,” in its colloquial use as his mother

undoubtedly intends it. For Abraham, divine intervention is necessary to prevent the

sacrifice of Isaac. However, in this passage, it is the narrator’s father who exercises the

power to accord salvation. The narrator is “saved” when his father sees him waiting in the

38
It is certainly provincial to the extent that it, like all of Combray I, is limited to
the single experience and geographical location of the narrator’s nightly bedtime drama.
100
hallway, saved, that is, at the very moment when he has just cried to himself “je suis

perdu !” (another clever play on words that exploits the polysemic possibilities of this

expression meaning “I am done for” or, with more religious overtones, “I am damned”

or, in a biological context “I cannot be saved, I am condemned to die,” as it indeed had

appeared to be the case with Isaac). In this manner, not only the biblical intertextuality

but also a more expansive engagement in co-temporal, polysemic word-play is

attributable to the motivation stemming from the father/Abraham’s striking physical

image.

It is tempting to see, in this scene, a sort of irreverent biblical parody motivated

not only by the passage’s religious lexicon and references to Abraham, Isaac and Sarah

but also by certain structural parallels between the biblical narrative and Proust’s. For

instance, in both, a central narrative role is played by a covenant or a pact. In both

Genesis and Proust’s text there is a sequence of events wherein the pact at first appears to

be violated, but finally is not, culminating in a miraculous salvation. In Genesis, it is a

question of God’s covenant with Abraham to whom he promises the paternity of a great

nation through Isaac’s offspring. This covenant initially appears to be violated when

God’s command that Abraham sacrifice Isaac seems to preclude the fulfillment of the

promise that he will become the father of a great nation through Isaac’s lineage. In

Combray, it is a matter of a pact governing when the narrator is to be sent to bed,

separated from his mother. The narrator’s father, who does not respect “les pactes plus

larges octroyés par [s]a mère et [s]a grand’mère” (I, 35) at first violates the pact when he

sends the narrator to bed earlier than usual. Finally, both stories finish with the terms of

the pact being restored: the imminent sacrifice of Isaac is thwarted and the narrator is

101
given, rather than separated from, his mother. This inexplicable act of salvation that

renders the narrator what he calls a few “heures si différentes de ce que j’avais eu le droit

d’espérer” (I, 37), hours so different from that for which he should ever have dared to

hope, mimics in a burlesque fashion the miraculous divine intervention that takes place to

avert the death of Isaac, an outcome so different from that for which Abraham should

ever have even dared to hope. (Although, in the end, it might also be the narrator’s

paternity, in terms of his fatherhood to his future text, that is really at stake and, as we

shall see below, the sacrifice may not be averted after all.)

An irreverently burlesque biblical parody may thus be seen in the narrator’s

hyperbolic description of his bedtime drama. In this instance, the exaggeration that lies at

the core of Proustian poetics confronts the literal banality of the situation (the narrator’s

father suggests that his mother spend the night in his room since she is not tired and he is

a visibly chagrined child) and the hyperbolic literary intertextuality by way of which this

circumstance is rendered in excessively dramatic terms that exploit a religious lexicon

and establish a biblical juxtaposition. But it is not for its hyperbolic proportions that it is

any less “true” a representation of the diegetical narrator’s experience. On the contrary,

as is so often the case, what would be a rather banal experience for an adult is

experienced by the child as an emotional catastrophe. This is a prime example of

Proustian comedy as it is understood by Walter Benjamin: “His style is comedy, not

humor; his laughter does not toss the world up but flings it down—at the risk that it will

102
be smashed to pieces, which will then make him burst into tears.”39 From “rire” to

“écrire,” the flow of tears and the flow of ink run together.

In the bedtime scene, it is at the same time as the narrator’s father “becomes”

Abraham that he is comically described less like a father than like the Heavenly Father,

above and beyond the law he imposes: “Même à l’heure où elle se manifestait par cette

grâce, la conduite de mon père gardait ce quelque chose d’arbitraire et d’immerité […]”

(I, 37). There is an infantile conflation of his father, whom the young narrator conceives

of as transcending rules and regulations to the point where it is inappropriate even to

speak of intransigence, per se, to the point where one cannot “proprement parler

d’intransigeance” (I, 36), with God. For the son, the father represents absolute, divine,

authority such that he imagines that it surpasses not only his own capacity to comprehend

but that of the whole of humanity. The narrator does indeed seem sufficiently impressed

by the force of paternal authority to consider the symbolic, oedipal castration a success.

But a Lacanian interpretation of the oedipal drama, rather than a Freudian one, may

perhaps be a better approximation of what occurs in this scene in terms of what paternal

function is most urgently at stake.

At the oedipal threshold of the bedtime drama, the mother’s principles, taken for

“pacts,” for symbols of a mutual agreement, are replaced by a more authoritative version

of the “law” put into place by the symbolic father/Abraham’s intervention. But the

function of the law that is at stake in this oedipal scene appears to exceed that of the

regulation of the narrator’s psychosexual development in terms of his being forced to

abandon his mother as object of desire in order to adopt cultural norms (as is at issue for

39
Walter Benjamin, “ The Image of Proust,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn,
(New York: Schocken Books, 1968) 207.
103
Freud). In fact, an event with such implications that is analogous to the symbolic act of

castration is recounted at the very beginning of La Recherche when the narrator evokes

having his curls cut:

[…] en dormant j’avais rejoint sans effort un âge à jamais révolu de ma

vie primitive, retrouvé telle de mes terreurs enfantines comme celle que
mon grand-oncle me tirât par mes boucles et qu’avait dissipée le jour—
date pour moi d’une ère nouvelle—où on les avait coupées (I, 4).

Like the symbolic castration of the bedtime scene, this earlier symbolic act of castration

also marks the narrator’s passage into a new era. By having his curls cut the narrator is

separated from his mother to the extent that this event represents the installation of a

gender differentiation that clearly defines him as distinct from his mother—relegated to

the opposite sex—where, previously, no such distinction prevailed—so far so Freudian.

In the bedtime scene, however, beyond the question of the narrator’s psychosexual

acculturation, the question of his entry into the symbolic order of language also appears

to be at stake, as in accordance with Lacan’s understanding of the oedipal conflict.

To look at this passage in Lacanian terms, in the narrator’s version of the story of

Abraham, Isaac and Sarah, the sacrifice of the child is not truly averted. There does,

indeed, appear to be a sacrifice of the narrator/Isaac who previously took solace and

comfort in the presence of his mother. This extraordinary night which he spends with her,

however, constitutes a “triste date” (I, 38) and her presence fails to function as the

guarantor of his inner peace. In other words, he now must learn to seek the object of his

desire elsewhere, in a world regulated by paternal law.40 After the painful sacrifice of

40
« C’est dans le nom du père qu’il nous faut reconnaître le support de la fonction
symbolique qui, depuis l’orée des temps historiques, identifie sa personne à la figure de la
loi. » Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, 2 vols. (Éditions du Seuil, 1999) I, 276. For Lacan the « nom
du père », or the « non » du père, designates the symbolic paternal function of
104
familiar, reassuring maternal pacts and rites begins a new era of paternal law in which the

narrator must learn to write his own personal narrative for himself, create his own story,

his own identity—split between narrator and narrated—using language, the words of the

“other,” a system of symbols that precedes and exceeds him.41 And this shift into

symbolic language may be evidenced in the parodical intertextuality with Genesis that the

image of the father/Abraham inspires.

That the young narrator does not see what we see, that he does not see what the

mature, adult narrator sees and allows us to perceive in the bedtime scene, is indicated by

the ironic distance that makes a comical recounting of such painful childhood memories

possible. This ironic distance, as revealed in the comical Genesis parody, helps to discern

the presence of polyphonic co-temporal layers of the narrative. But it may also be the

trace of a symbolic “castration,” of the separation not just from the mother but from the

illusion of an integral self, a trace of the temporal fragmentation of the self that occurs in

language and that the text represents in ludic fashion. In the words of Doubrovsky,

Proust’s book is a “[…] mise en place de la distance, transparente et infranchissable, qui

divise Je referent et Je référé, sujet de l’existence (‘héros’) et sujet du discours

constituting a barrier to the child’s desire for the mother and also of replacing that desire
for the mother by substituting for it a metaphorical representation of the law initiating the
child into the world of symbolic representation : « […] la métaphore du Nom-du-Père
[est] la métaphore qui substitue ce Nom à la place premièrement symbolisée par
l’opération de l’absence de la mère » II, 35.
41
“Les symboles enveloppent en effet la vie de l’homme d’un réseau si total
qu’ils conjoignent avant qu’il vienne au monde ceux qui vont l’engendrer ‘par l’os et par
la chair’, qu’ils apportent à sa naissance avec les dons des astres, sinon avec les dons des
fées, le dessin de sa destinée, qu’ils donnent les mots qui le feront fidèle ou renégat, la loi
des actes qui le suivront jusque-là même où il n’est pas encore et au-delà de sa mort
même […]. » Lacan, Écrits I, 277.
105
(‘narrateur’).”42 Or as Samuel Weber puts it, there is a “surplus of figural meaning which

dislocates the univocity of the narration and inscribes it in a signifying chain, in another

scene: the scenario of the narrative voice itself.”43 The sad new era initiated by the

father’s imperative, by the language of the father who instructs, rather than asks, the

mother to stay with their son is an era whose commencement the narrator proclaims to be

one in which his excessive sensitivity, a characteristic essential to his identity as a writer,

is no longer challenged. It may also be the moment of the mitigated inaugural experience

of at once feeling compelled to conceive of oneself in time, as a self perpetually

differentiating from itself in the course of its life narrative, yet also simultaneously

liberated into a world of creation, of narrative and of word-play. 44

Beginning with the father’s incarnation as a flower-resembling biblical Abraham

and a multicultural figure of exotic otherness and continuing through subsequent

associations of him with nature scenes of floral fecundity, Proust implicates and

integrates him in the narrator’s progressive transfer from the world and words of others to

the stimulation to craft a fictional world based on his own experience and creativity. In

the previous chapter we saw how the father’s associations with flowers and exotic lands

gave the narrator access to materials of his future oeuvre and encouraged the

development of his imagination. In addition, the young narrator associates his father with

writing, with author-ity in general:

42
Doubrovksy, 120.
43
“The Madrepore,” MLN 87:7 (Dec. 1972) 948.
44
For an interesting Lacanian reading of the bedtime drama, see Charles Bouazis,
Ce que Proust savait du symptôme (Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1992) 240-252.
Bouazis’ reading differs from ours in that he considers the father’s performance in the
bedtime drama as a failure to execute the symbolic castration. Bouzis sees writing, “la
quête de l’enfant, qui est quête de l’interprétation des signes” (246) as the child’s ultimate
response to this failure through writing.
106
 Et ces rêves m’avertissaient que puisque je voulais un jour être écrivain, il
était temps de savoir ce que je comptais écrire. Mais dès que je me le
demandais, tâchant de trouver un sujet où je pusse faire tenir une
signification philosophique infinie, mon esprit s’arrêtait de fonctionner, je
ne voyais plus que le vide en face de mon attention, je sentais que je
n’avais pas de génie ou peut-être une maladie cérébrale l’empêchait de
naître. Parfois je comptais sur mon père pour arranger cela. […] peut-être
cette absence de génie, ce trou noir qui se creusait dans mon esprit quand
je cherchais le sujet de mes écrits futurs, n’était-il aussi qu’une illusion
sans consistance, et cesserait-elle par l’intervention de mon père qui avait
dû convenir avec le Gouvernement et avec la Providence que je serais le
premier écrivain de l’époque (I, 171-72).

In contrast, at the point where the text ceases to parody Genesis begins the mother’s

reading aloud of François le Champi where written words are doubly the words of the

“other,” the words of George Sand filtered through the mother’s interpretive reading (an

activity akin to the artistic interpretation of Racine by la Berma—another mother figure

who represents the initial stages of learning the craft of language, mastering the language

of another). Thanks to the father’s intervention in the bedtime drama, the narrator is able

to enter his “puberté du chagrin,” a metaphor for writing, the era of “nocturnal emissions”

like those that will become his future oeuvre,45 translating his sensitivity into an

ejaculation of ink onto the page. At this stage, the young narrator’s use of language is not

mastered, not yet submitted to his creative will, and the child, who does not yet have this

kind of ability to manipulate language is reduced to tears. It is as if the father, by

permitting him access to the mother’s reading of François le Champi, introduces him into

the world of language and initiates the early stages of his apprenticeship—reading,

citation and imitation, introduction to cultural productions—under the mother’s tutelage

45
« Moi, c’était autre chose que j’avais à écrire, de plus long, et pour plus d’une
personne. Long à écrire. Le jour, tout au plus pourrais-je essayer de dormir. Si je
travaillais, ce ne serait que la nuit. Mais il me faudrait beaucoup de nuits, peut-être cent,
peut-être mille » (IV, 620).
107
so that his flow of tears may someday, through artistic sublimation, become the flow of

ink.

108
 Chapter Three
The Narrator’s (M)other Fathers

The connections we have noted between the narrator’s father and grandfather and

questions concerning his evolution as a writer are observable in relation to other father

figures as well, other links in the chain that contribute to the network of associations

between fathers and the development of the narrator’s literary potential.1 For example,

the Curé and Brichot could be viewed as minor father figures to the extent that the

discourses they pronounce on the etymological roots of different place names help to fuel

the narrator’s reveries about their poetic potential. Another example is Docteur Percepied

in whose moving carriage the narrator composes what appears to be his first piece of

writing, his piece describing the Clochers de Martinville (I, 177-80). What’s more, earlier

in the text, as so often is the case with the narrator’s father and grandfather, Docteur

Percepied appears concurrently with imaginative reveries about flowers and nature

scenes. And he does so in a context where a work of literature is also under consideration

and these elements are united:

Puis il arriva que sur le côté de Guermantes je passai parfois devant de

petits enclos humides où montaient des grappes de fleurs sombres. Je
m’arrêtais, croyant acquérir une notion précise, car il me semblait avoir

1
In the case of relatively minor characters like le Curé, Brichot, Doctor
Percepied, Norpois and Legrandin, I am using the term “father figure” somewhat loosely
to designate those older males who function as role models in that they serve in some
way to foster the narrator’s reflections about writing. A distinction could be made, for
example, between these men and someone like the Duc de Guermantes. The narrator, of
course, reflects upon the Duc de Guermantes in the course of his narrative. In fact, the
Duke has the privilege of being the very last character evoked in La Recherche when, in
the very last paragraph, the narrator’s final reflections on Time are related to watching
him try to advance on his unsteady “jambes flagéolantes” as if on huge stilts composed of
his many years (IV, 624-25). These remarks, however, reflect the narrator’s own,
subjective take on the Duke, based on his own observations. In contrast, the characters I
am calling “father figures” spark the narrator’s reflections based on inter-subjective
interactions.
109
 sous les yeux un fragment de cette région fluviatile, que je désirais tant
connaître depuis que je l’avais vue décrite par un de mes écrivains
préférés. Et ce fut avec elle, avec son sol imaginaire traversé de cours
d’eau bouillonnants, que Guermantes, changeant d’aspect dans ma pensée,
s’identifia, quand j’eus entendu le docteur Percepied nous parler des fleurs
et des belles eaux vives qu’il y avait dans le parc du château (I, 170).

The descriptions that Docteur Percepied had given of the flowers and streams around the

Guermantes château melded in the narrator’s mind with what he had read about this

region, forming a kind of hybrid of the real and the imaginary. It is this partially real,

partially imaginary place, whose image Percepied had helped to construct with his

descriptions of the area, that the narrator believes he is witnessing when passing by the

Guermantes way. In much the same way that the walk taken with his father and

grandfather, during which he first saw Gilberte, and his grandfather’s stories about

Swann’s gardens had contributed to the narrator’s conceptualization of a partially real,

partially imaginary notion of Swann’s way, Percepied’s descriptions help to furnish the

narrator with an amalgamation of the real and imaginary that constitutes his mental

picture of the côté de Guermantes. Thus, in this regard, he serves as their structural

counterpart in the network of associations linking father figures with flowers and nature

scenes that stimulate the narrator’s creativity.

Norpois too is a father figure who participates in the paternal network of

associations with writing. Even though his influence may appear primarily negative when

he belittles the writing sample the narrator had written in Percepied’s carriage, thereby

discouraging the narrator, causing him to doubt his talent as a writer, this too, in a sense

may be seen as a felicitous contribution to the history of the narrator’s creative

development. Norpois’ disapproval of Bergotte’s style and of the narrator’s Bergotte-like

piece on the Clochers de Martinville quite arguably prevents the narrator from precocious

110
and premature blossoming into no more than a mere Bergotte imitator. By delaying and

deferring the narrator’s vocational production until a time when the narrator is more

advanced in his understanding of both art and the meaning of the world around him,

Norpois may very well in fact have been the narrator’s artistic savior.

It is also worth noting that it is thanks to the assurance given by Norpois to the

narrator’s father that a career as a writer could be as influential and prestigious as a career

in diplomacy that the father’s fears for the narrator’s well-being are allayed, allowing him

to become a supporter of his son’s literary ambitions. He can therefore later affirm in

contradiction to the narrator’s mother’s objections to this career choice, that “il faut avant

tout prendre du plaisir à ce qu’on fait. […] et il est capable de se rendre compte de ce qui

le rendra heureux dans l’existence” (I, 473).

That the father goes so far as to have the narrator read his piece on the Clochers

de Martinville to Norpois when he is their dinner guest for the first time is also very

telling. The narrator describes this event, asserting:

Mon père avait pour mon genre d’intelligence un mépris suffisamment

corrigé par la tendresse pour qu’au total, son sentiment sur tout ce que je
faisais fût une indulgence aveugle. Aussi n’hésita-t-il pas à m’envoyer
chercher un petit poème en prose que j’avais fait autrefois à Combray en
revenant d’une promenade (I, 447).

The narrator’s claim that there is an element of “mépris” in his father’s estimation of his

intelligence seems to itself be a méprise on the order of what we observed above

concerning the narrator’s quite possible misinterpretation of his father’s behavior as

motivated by arbitrary authoritativeness.2 Just as this earlier judgment of his father

seemed rather plausibly to be a misconception based on the limitations of his perspective

2
See supra p. 6-8 and p. 59-63.
111
at the time, the text’s gentle mocking of the father’s naive over-appreciation of Norpois

and of the care the family takes to impress their dinner guest suggests that it is highly

unlikely that the father would have been willing to risk displeasing Norpois or giving him

a negative impression. Therefore, had he not had faith in the narrator’s talents, he would

most certainly have hesitated before having the narrator show Norpois his writing, or,

more likely, would not have done so at all. Thus, this occurrence is ostensibly a powerful

testament to the significance of the father’s faith in his son’s literary potential.

A precursor to Bergotte, the first actual writer whose acquaintance the narrator

makes in La Recherche is Legrandin, who spends weekends and holidays in Combray,

though, curiously, there is no evidence at any point of the narrator actually having read

his work:

C’était un de ces hommes qui, en dehors d’une carrière scientifique où ils

ont d’ailleurs brillamment réussi, possèdent une culture toute différente,
littéraire, artistique […] Plus lettrés que bien des littérateurs (nous ne
savions pas à cette époque que M. Legrandin eût une certaine réputation
comme écrivain et nous fûmes très étonnés de voir qu’un musicien célèbre
avait composé une mélodie sur des vers de lui), doués de plus de “facilité”
que bien des peintres […] (I, 66).

Despite the overcharged excesses of Legrandin’s convoluted speech, his poetic

words (in particular his descriptions of Balbec which greatly augment the narrator’s

desire to go there) do nevertheless impress and inspire the imagination of the young,

inexperienced narrator.3 In fact, the grandiosity of the Balbec that the narrator pictures

based on Legrandin’s poetic descriptions leads him inevitably to disappointment when

the actual Balbec fails to live up to the one he imagined. The source of this one prominent

3
“[…] j’avais retenu le nom de Balbec que nous avait cité Legrandin, comme d’une
plage toute proche de ‘ces côtes funèbres, fameuses par tant de naufrages qu’enveloppent
six mois de l’année le linceul des brumes et l’écume des vagues’” (I, 377).
112
example among the many experiences of disappointed expectations that rhythm the

Bildungsroman that is, in part, La Recherche, Legrandin thus contributes to the narrator’s

process of progressively coming to understand that art does not mirror or give access to a

deeper reality but rather helps one to perceive a particular vision of it.

Legrandin’s poetic speech, however, is fundamentally not his own. Laden with

pastiches and/or citations—of Saint Paul, Paul Desjardins, Anatole France, Balzac, Saint

Matthew—as is Swann, whose example we shall study in more depth below, Legrandin is

thus linked to the maternal realm of reading and mimesis, of acquiring a solid culture

générale. The reading suggestions that he makes to the narrator also place him in the

maternal camp with Swann.

Legrandin’s life trajectory seems to be the reverse of the narrator’s, which further

limits his capacity to serve as a paternal role model, though he nevertheless perhaps helps

to counterbalance the narrator’s doubts and fears about his potential in the literary

domain, (doubts which are subsequently reinforced by Norpois’ discouraging remarks)

by recognizing in the narrator a kindred, creative spirit: “Vous avez une jolie âme, d’une

qualité rare, une nature d’artiste, ne la laissez pas manquer de ce qu’il lui faut” (I, 67). An

expert, no doubt, in letting an artistic nature lack what it requires, Legrandin, who is first

introduced into the text primarily as a man of a poetic nature, follows a trajectory that

leads progressively further away from poetry, into the realms of high society and

homosexuality.4 In contrast, the narrator learns of these two realms but eventually

4
Although it should be noted that during the narrator’s youth in Combray already,
Legrandin invites the narrator to dine alone with him and gives voice to his aesthetic
appreciation of his young guest, evoking his love for “le clair de lune quand la brise de
votre jeunesse apporte jusqu’à moi l’odeur des parterres que mes vieilles prunelles ne
113
sacrifices the pleasure of actively participating in the first and of observing the second in

order to devote himself to his art into which they will feed.

The Proustian comedy is exquisite when Legrandin, who professes to abhor

snobbism, pretends not to see the narrator and his family while in the presence of his

aristocratic acquaintances so as not to be obliged to greet them, or when he speaks in

poetic gibberish doing everything he can to avoid having to directly answer the narrator’s

father’s question as to whether or not he has any contacts in Balbec, where plans are

being made to send the narrator and his mother and grandmother on vacation, because he

fears that they will call on his sister. And yet, for all of the comic irony provided by

Legrandin’s hypocritical snobbism, for instance by the fact that he is found frequenting

Mme de Villeparisis’ salon after warning the narrator not to sacrifice his poetic potential

in the vain pursuit of social status, Legrandin can nevertheless be considered a sort of

paternal mentor counseling the narrator not to follow the misguided path that he, himself,

chooses. His warning, however, is of course ineffectual and unnecessary, if not frankly

counterproductive to the narrator’s development, since, as Gilles Deleuze affirms of the

role played by the signs emitted by le monde in the narrator’s education “l’apprentissage

serait imparfait, et même impossible, s’il ne passait par eux.”5 In the end, what is

important is not whether or not the narrator passes through high society but where this

passage finally leads him. Thankfully, it leads him in the opposite direction than

Legrandin, ultimately into the world of literary creation.

distinguent plus” (I, 126). The narrator does not understand the significance of this any
more than he will the motivation of Charlus’ erratic (or [n]e[u]rotic) behavior in Balbec.
5
Proust et les signes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964) 13.
114
 Legrandin’s homosexuality places him into the category of what the narrator calls

hommes-femmes, which will be examined in detail later in this chapter in relation to

Charlus. Like Charlus, Swann and Vinteuil who are the most influential father figures to

the narrator, Legrandin, however flawed or deficient a role model of an author he may be,

fits into the general pattern of the maternal-paternal hybrid that seems to characterize

those who possess an artistic nature. Unlike more minor participants in the paternal

network of associations linking father figures to writing, like Percepied, Norpois, the

Curé or Brichot, the most influential “other” fathers to the narrator, like the homosexual

Legrandin, who, for all of his egregious stylistic flaws is nonetheless a writer, seem to

share the common characteristic of exhibiting certain anomalous gender associations or

of breaking with stereotypical definitions of masculine gender roles, as we have seen to

be the case to some degree in the connection between the narrator’s mother with culture

and his father with nature.6

6
The minor paternal figures do, however, exhibit many parallels with Proust’s
own father. Like Percepied, Proust’s father was a doctor. (Although the name
“Percepied” was actually that of a mailman in Illiers.) Like Norpois (and the narrator’s
father as well), Proust’s father’s career included a significant diplomatic component since
he was sent on international missions to evaluate sanitary checkpoints and participated in
numerous international conferences on hygiene. Adrien Proust also taught medicine and,
like Brichot, held a professorship. And, like Legrandin, he can certainly be described as a
man “d’une carrière scientifique où [il a] d’ailleurs brillamment réussi,” though George
Painter explains that he was modeled on Dr. Henri Cazalis, a colleague of Dr. Proust’s
who wrote symbolist poetry under a pseudonym. (Marcel Proust: A Biography [London:
Chatto and Windus, 1989], 37). As for a resemblance with the Curé, early accounts of
Adrien Proust’s life like Robert Le Masle’s Le Professeur Adrien Proust (Paris: Librairie
Lipschutz, 1935) claim that in his youth he had intended to become a priest (33). Later
accounts, such as Jean-Yves Tadié’s biography, Marcel Proust (Gallimard: 1996) simply
note that Dr. Proust had been a boarding student at the ancient petit seminaire in Chartres
(45) and the fact that the Collège de Chartres boarding school was housed in what had
been the seminary is cited by Daniel Panzac as the source of an erroneous belief that
Adrien had been destined for the priesthood in the history of Adrien Proust’s illustrious
career that he traces in Le Docteur Adrien Proust (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003 [16]). For an
115
 As noted in the previous chapter, despite his firm command of paternal authority

in the family, the narrator’s father has some ostensibly feminine characteristics that may,

at first glance, seem to indicate that Proust is manipulating common conceptions of

gender. Yet, upon further scrutiny, it would appear that these variations do not indicate

how Proust re-evaluates categories of gender in general so much as how he re-evaluates

gender roles and categories in relation to how they may be altered or subverted in the

case of the artist, or of someone with artistic proclivities. A kind of symbolic incarnation

of tensions between function and form, between performative and essentialist models of

gender, the narrator’s somewhat “feminine” and “frail” yet authoritative father/flower is a

homologue to other “surrogate” or supplementary father figures who lead the narrator to

explore and analyze relationships between social authority, creative propensity and

sexual identity. One recurrent notion in À la recherche du temps perdu is that of atavistic

heredity. Thus, if in the manner of a benevolent dictator of his family, the narrator’s

father fulfills his role as patriarchal head of the household with undisputed command, his

more effeminate characteristics serve the purpose of demonstrating how the heightened

sensitivity underlying the narrator’s artistic propensities remains nonetheless rooted in his

paternal heritage.

By remaining firmly anchored in the normative paradigm of paternal male

authority, the narrator’s father plays a role in helping to define how other paternal

influences help the narrator to further develop and grow toward his literary vocation. He

serves as a backdrop that, by contrast, helps to fore-ground more ambiguously

engaging series of studies that explore traces of Adrien Proust in La Recherche, see
Marie Miguet-Ollagnier’s Gisements profonds d’un sol mental: Proust (Presses
Universitaires de Franche-Comté, 2003).

116
determined or determining variations in gender identity that come to light with other

adult male role models to the narrator who advance his understanding of what it means to

be an artist. Indeed, obfuscation of gendering characteristics and culturally-determined

expectations of gender identification emerges with great prominence once the narrator

has reached his majority, most explicitly in Sodome et Gomorrhe when Charlus’

inversion is revealed. But from the very beginning they are already at play in the case of

Swann who in many ways resembles a maternal influence more than a paternal one.

Vinteuil, no doubt the most significant artist role model of La Recherche, not only plays a

maternal role to his daughter (according to the narrator’s mother who pities him “la triste

fin de [sa] vie […] tout absorbée d’abord par les soins de mère et de bonne d’enfant qu’il

donnait à sa fille” [I, 157]), but also owes his success to having failed to assert paternal

authority by banishing his daughter’s lesbian lover without whose efforts his greatest

work would never have posthumously become known. Turning to these three “(m)other”

fathers, who more clearly represent deviations from the norm than the narrator’s

biological father, helps to elucidate how Proust does and does not break with traditional

conceptions of gender and paternity and even how he subscribes to contradictory models

of gender identification. As we have seen to be the case with the narrator’s father and

grandfather, these other fathers also help to structure À la recherche du temps perdu both

in their relations to the narrator and to each other.

117
De l’autre côté de chez Swann: Swann’s Maternal Side

In the previous chapter, we noted the pattern whereby in the narrator’s family it is

primarily the mother and grandmother who function as emissaries of art and culture while

the father is most often associated with flowers and sensual scenes of natural fecundity.

Though he is generally, almost universally, regarded by Proustian criticism as a surrogate

father to the narrator,7 from the perspective of this functional paradigm, Swann (and to a

certain extent Charlus) appears to have much greater affinities with the narrator’s

maternal influences, rather than with his paternal ones.

Swann’s ties to the maternal camp, to initiating the narrator into the world of art

and culture, are multiple. On the very real, material, level, he is the mother and

grandmother’s primary source of information on cultural artifacts that they wish to

acquire for the narrator’s education, and quite often the provider of these cultural

productions as well. It is he, for example, who had given the narrator the reproduction of

7
To cite a few examples: Serge Doubrovsky, dismissing the father, remarks: “Son
‘idéal du moi’, il [the narrator] devra constamment le chercher ailleurs, dans la série sans
cesse ouverte des identifications paternelles imaginaires: Swann, d’abord, bien sûr […],”
La place de la madeleine : Écriture et fantasme chez Proust (Mercure de France, 1974)
121. The very first sentence of the first chapter of Juliette Hassine’s Marranisme et
hébraïsme dans l’oeuvre de Proust (Minard, 1994) begins: “Le personnage de Swann,
père spirituel du narrateur […],” 13. Julia Kristeva asserts that: “Tel un père désirable,
c’est Swann qui avait depuis toujours accaparé la mère et l’univers […]”Le temps
sensible : Proust et l’expérience littéraire (Gallimard, 1994) 66. Jeffrey Mehlman claims
that: “[…] Swann occupies the role of Oedipal father, a fantasized parent to replace the
inept and vacillating one […]” A Structural Study of Autobiography (Ithaca: Cornell UP,
1974) 22. J-F. Reille remarks: “c’est à cause d’un gêneur que Marcel n’aura pas sa
consolation [the goodnight kiss]. Ce gêneur, c’est Swann, qui ainsi fait son entrée en
scène sur les positions du père, lui-aussi gêneur [annoyed by such “rites absurdes”] 54
and “Proust a donné à Swann la même sexualité qu’à Marcel: s’il se substitue au père,
c’est pour satisfaire son désir sous la forme qui lui est propre.”Proust: Le Temps du désir
(Les Editeurs Français Réunis, 1979) 199.
118
the Benozzo Gozzoli image that had inspired the narrator’s comparison of his father to

Abraham in the bedtime scene, leading André Benhaïm to remark:

Comme un ange, ou un prophète, c’est lui qui avait donc donné à l’avance
à l’enfant le moyen de lire la scène, d’interpréter le drame à venir.
Seulement voilà : dans le même temps, [Marcel] a commencé à hériter du
principal défaut de Swann, l’iconolâtre qui cherche sans cesse la
ressemblance entre les êtres et les personnages des peintures. « Grâce » à
Swann, l’enfant vient de faire de son père la figure d’Abraham.8

In his capacity as purveyor of works of art, Swann is also the propagator of false

notions about its meaning and purpose. His idolatrous way of valuing art that leads him to

make identifications between people and works and to value people in relation to his

artistic identifications finds its counterpart in the grandmother’s false notions about art

that are like the mirror image of his own in terms of their relationship to temporal

representation. For the grandmother, as for Swann, works of art are valued not in and of

themselves, not as hermeneutical devices serving to help a subject to observe the world

through their lens in order to disengage a subjective, internal meaning as eventually

comes to be the narrator’s understanding when he himself is ready to create his chef

d’oeuvre. On the contrary, for Swann and the grandmother, art functions as a sign in

direct relation to an external referent. Swann’s love for Odette is ignited and sustained by

the fact that she reminds him of Botticelli’s representation of Zipporah in a fresco in the

Sistine Chapel, Scenes from the Life of Moses, and he cherishes Odette as a kind of living

Botticelli. Thus, according to Swann’s conception, a work of art anticipates or points

forward toward an external referent that can subsequently be identified in the real world.9

8
Panim: Visages de Proust (Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2006) 225.
9
“Mais si on avait écouté Swann, les cortèges des rois mages, déjà si
anachroniques quand Benozzo Gozzoli y introduisit les Médicis, l’eussent été davantage
encore puisqu’ils eussent contenu les portraits d’une foule d’hommes, contemporains non
119
For the narrator’s grandmother, a work of art also relates to an extrinsic reality, but

projected toward the past such that its value is historical, abiding in its capacity to reflect

a bygone era.

En réalité, elle ne se résignait jamais à rien acheter dont on ne pût tirer un

profit intellectuel […] Même quand elle avait à faire à quelqu’un un
cadeau dit utile, quand elle avait à donner un fauteuil, des couverts, une
canne, elle les cherchait « anciens », comme si leur longue désuétude
ayant effacé leur caractère d’utilité, ils paraissaient plutôt disposés pour
nous raconter la vie des hommes d’autrefois que pour servir aux besoins
de la nôtre (I, 39).

Like what the narrator encounters in the “maternal” Venice, discussed in the previous

chapter, where monuments and works of art seem to appropriate language to tell of the

past, this historically instructional function is the task the grandmother assigns to a work

or object in order for it to authenticate its artistic value in her estimation. Though the

Venetian works and monuments as well as the objects acquired and admired by the

grandmother may indeed have great value and contribute to the narrator’s understanding

of art, it is not exclusively for the reasons that are determinant in this maternal

conception. As John E. Jackson maintains:

[…] la grand’mère réfléchirait une position esthétique ou poétique que le

texte retiendrait comme l’un de ses moments, au sens hégélien du terme,
c’est-à-dire à la fois comme une étape nécessaire et comme une étape à
dépasser.10

Unlike the grandmother’s and Swann’s, the Proustian aesthetic does not demand a

divorce from present-day functionality as requisite to defining a work as beautiful. In

fact, to a certain extent, present-day functionality defines for the mature narrator the very

purpose of the literary text which serves the reader as an instrument for subjective

de Gozzoli, mais de Swann, c’est-à-dire postérieurs non plus seulement de quinze siècles
à la Nativité, mais de quatre au peintre lui-même” (I, 525-26)
10
“Les cadeaux de la grand’mère,” Littératures 20 (1989) 64.
120
introspection: “L’ouvrage de l’écrivain n’est qu’une espèce d’instrument optique qu’il

offre au lecteur afin de lui permettre de discerner ce que sans ce livre il n’eût peut-être

pas vu en soi-même” (IV, 489-90). Yet the grandmother, turning to Swann for material

support, seeks to distance the reproductions of artworks she gives to the narrator from the

present and from direct experience as much as possible:

Elle [the grandmother] eût aimé que j’eusse dans ma chambre des
photographies des monuments ou des paysages les plus beaux. Mais au
moment d’en faire l’emplette, et bien que la chose représentée eût une
valeur esthétique, elle trouvait que la vulgarité, l’utilité reprenaient trop
vite leur place dans le mode mécanique de représentation, la photographie.
[…] elle se renseignait auprès de Swann si quelque grand peintre ne les
avait pas représentés, et préférait me donner des photographies de la
Cathédrale de Chartres par Corot, des Grandes Eaux de Saint-Cloud par
Hubert Robert, du Vésuve par Turner, ce qui faisait un degré d’art de plus.
[…] L’idée que je pris […] était certainement beaucoup moins exacte que
celle que m’eussent donnée de simples photographies (I, 39-40).

While the grandmother expects art objects to be abstracts from the past relocated in but

disengaged from the present, Swann’s artistic sensibilities lead him to extract people

from the present to relocate them in the past. For example, he seeks to remove Odette

from the present in order to make her resemble as closely as possible a Botticelli figure

with which he has identified her:

Swann possédait une merveilleuse écharpe orientale, bleue et rose, qu’il

avait achetée parce que c’était exactement celle de la Vierge du
Magnificat. Mais Mme Swann ne voulait pas la porter. Une fois seulement
elle laissa son mari lui commander une toilette criblée de pâquerettes, de
bleuets, de myosotis et de campanules d’après la Primavera du Printemps
(I, 607).

Even Swann’s choice of whom to frequent is seen to be motivated by his removal of them

from their present circumstances, denying what they are now in order to resituate them as

what they used to be in relation to a famous artist:

121
 Pourtant, quand il nous parlait des gens qu’il venait d’aller voir, je
remarquai qu’entre celles qu’il avait connues jadis le choix qu’il faisait
était guidé par cette même sorte de goût, mi-artistique, mi-historique qui
inspirait chez lui le collectionneur […] c’était souvent telle ou telle grande
dame déclassée qui l’intéressait parce qu’elle avait été la maîtresse de
Liszt […] (I, 511).

Not temporal substitutions but rather temporal cross-weaving and superposition are of

course the hallmark of the Proustian text and the search for lost time. Yet in Swann’s and

the grandmother’s conceptions, art operates a temporal substitution of one era for

another, displacing what remain utterly discreet moments, in a sense halting diachronic

time. In neither case do artworks participate in a temporal mélange or superposition like

the kind of temporal combination that occurs in involuntary memory, where a bygone

synchronic moment is pulled into the diachronic flow of the present, or like the temporal

reorganization we have witnessed as twice provoked by the father’s words, pulling

together present and future, as first when he proposes the voyage to Venice, then when he

advocates in favor of the narrator’s literary vocation: “mon père venait tout d’un coup de

me faire apparaître ã moi-même dans le Temps” (I, 474). Swann’s way of conceiving of

time in art consigns him to the maternal epoch of childhood where the diachronic

fleetingness of time has not yet become perceptible, where a night spent without mother’s

kiss is an eternity with no hope of a new day in sight.

What’s more, Swann’s appreciation for certain people based on their relationships

with famous artists reproduces the critical error of another maternal figure, and one also

associated with the grandmother through their schooldays friendship, Mme de

Villeparisis who exemplifies the kind of critical error that Proust denounces in Contre

Sainte-Beuve. As William Carter explains:

122
 In the novel what could be called the “Sainte-Beuve syndrome” is
attributed to various characters and dramatized in conversations with them
about authors. Mme de Villeparisis exhibits this syndrome when she
judges writers not by their works but by whether they are brilliant
conversationalists. Mme de Villeparisis finds fashionable men, whose wit
makes them sparkle in her salon, superior to men of greater achievement
who lack social graces.11

For the narrator, the name provides only a point of departure for his imagination.

It could never subsume the object to which it is applied under its aegis and fix its identity.

The very name “Swann” itself successively represents for the narrator the reason why his

mother will not come to kiss him goodnight, the father of Gilberte, the illness-ravaged

dreyfusard, the Jew. In contrast, years after the birth of Gilberte and his marriage to

Odette, Swann “aimait encore en effet à voir en sa femme un Botticelli” (I, 607). Swann

is doomed to remain a “célibataire de l’art” (IV, 470) because his imagination gets

blocked by the name. He gets trapped in the act of nomination and cannot, therefore,

progress to the act of creation. In other words, he is locked into the maternal era of

childhood, “l’âge où on croit qu’on crée ce qu’on nomme” (I, 89).12

Apart from his role in aiding the narrator’s mother and grandmother in acquiring

artworks for his early cultural education, from the very beginning of La Recherche there

is a deep complicity established between Swann and the narrator’s maternal figures in

Combray that serves to situate him within the maternal paradigm. This maternal Swann is

the one with whom the narrator’s relationship is originally founded. When Swann first

enters the young narrator’s life at Combray, because his father had been one of the

narrator’s grandfather’s closest friends, despite the fact that Swann is already an adult

11
Marcel Proust: A Life (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2000) 479.
12
Furthermore, in contrast to the obligatory assignment of the paternal
patronyme, choosing the given name and nicknames or pet names is essentially a
maternal function.
123
with a wife and child, he exists to the members of the narrator’s family community

primarily as the “fils Swann,” that is, a Swann defined by the patronym but from whose

patriarchal authority he is removed, as is the lot of a mother. During his tempestuous love

affair with Odette, the grown-up Swann will gladly retreat to Combray, retreat from the

pain of his raging jealousy, in order to re-assume this comforting identity assigned to him

by the matriarchal Léonie: “[…] cette personnalité que lui attribuait ma grand-tante de

‘fils Swann’, distincte de sa personnalité plus individuelle de Charles Swann, était celle

où il se plaisait maintenant le mieux” (I, 304).

The depth of Swann’s maternal complicity is brought to light when the narrator’s

mother suggests to her husband that he speak to Swann, not of his scandalous wife but of

his daughter “à cause de laquelle disait-on il avait fini par faire ce mariage,” and the

father refuses, calling this idea ridiculous. She fails to convince the father, whose

patriarchal status would have lent his words a symbolic value and signified the stance of

the whole family regarding the permissibility to speak of Gilberte. And so she decides to

take Swann aside to speak with him privately for a moment “mother to mother”:

“Voyons, monsieur Swann, lui dit-elle, parlez-moi un peu de votre fille; je suis sûre

qu’elle a déjà le goût des belles œuvres comme son papa” but when they are interrupted:

“Nous reparlerons d’elle quand nous serons tous les deux, dit-elle à mi-voix à Swann. Il

n’y a qu’une maman qui soit digne de vous comprendre. Je suis sûre que la sienne serait

de mon avis” (I, 23-4). In other words, the “fils Swann,” both rival to the narrator for his

mother’s attention and her complicitous peer who shares in an exclusive language that

only a mother would understand, even as an adult remains within the category of “women

124
and children.”13 What’s more, just as the narrator’s mother thinks that “un mot d’elle

effacerait toute la peine que dans [leur] famille on avait pu faire à Swann depuis son

mariage” (I, 23), Swann exercises the exact same kind of “orgueilleuse charité” toward

Vinteuil in relation to his daughter, finding in her infamy “une raison d’exercer envers lui

une bienveillance dont les témoignages chatouillent d’autant plus l’amour propre de celui

qui les donne, qu’il les sent plus précieux à celui qui les reçoit” and asking if Vinteuil

will not one day send his daughter over to play at Tansonville (I, 147).

Swann’s participation in a maternal language goes yet a step further. Fervently

reverential readers and admirers of Mme de Sévigné, the narrator’s mother and

grandmother like to pepper their conversations with citations, references to her work, or

imitations of her style that sound as if they could have been citations (a sort of oral form

of pastiche, a technique that, as we know, was central to Proust’s own literary

cultivation).14 Interestingly, this kind of citation-laden speech is also a characteristic

shared by Swann:

La Berma dans Phèdre, dans Le Cid, ce n’est qu’une actrice si vous

voulez, mais vous savez je ne crois pas beaucoup à la “ hiérarchie ! ” des
arts ; (et je remarquai comme cela m’avait souvent frappé dans ses
conversations avec les sœurs de ma grand-mère que quand il parlait de
choses sérieuses, quand il employait une expression qui semblait
impliquer une opinion sur un sujet important, il avait soin de l’isoler dans
une intonation spéciale, machinale et ironique, comme s’il l’avait mise
entre guillemets, semblant ne pas vouloir la prendre à son compte […] (I,
96-7).

13
“On croyait Swann une figure paternelle ? Un terzo incomodo, celui dont la présence
‘fait chaque fois obstacle à l’amour’ de la mère ? Swann a dédoublé le visage de celle-
ci.” Benhaïm, 275.
14
For example, towards the beginning of Du côté de chez Swann the narrator recalls that
“[e]lle [his grandmother] s’extasiait sur une réponse que le giletier lui avait faite, disant à
maman : ‘Sévigné n’aurait pas mieux dit !’ et en revanche, d’un neveu de Mme de
Villeparisis qu’elle avait rencontré chez elle: ‘Ah ! ma fille, comme il est commun !’ (I,
20).
125
When the narrator’s great aunts try to speak about art with Swann, the narrator remarks

his habit of giving material information about a work, such as the date of its creation or

the museum in which it is displayed, in order to avoid giving his personal impression of it

(I, 16-17). Furthermore, Swann not only speaks about art like a maternal figure, like

someone who is citing and reciting, but also frequently does so with maternal figures. It

is perhaps not without significance that Swann, whose connection to the narrator’s family

takes root in the fact that his father was a friend of the narrator’s grandfather, nonetheless

not only speaks about art like a mother, but does so with the grandmother and her sisters,

other maternal figures in the narrator’s family. Like the mother and grandmother who

incessantly quote Madame de Sévigné, Swann is always citing or even re-citing rather

than creating and ostensibly has no voice of his own. In other words, whether it be by

giving the narrator reproduced images of artworks, by re-citing the views of others or by

regurgitating facts, Swann’s essential functions are all a form of the maternal function

par excellence—reproduction.

To call Swann a surrogate father to the narrator would imply that he compensates

for a parental lack and contributes something to the narrator’s education that the

narrator’s father does not. However, in Proust’s reversed version of the mother-

nature/father-culture paradigm, in relation to the narrator’s parental relations, Swann does

not substitute for a paternal lack, for what the father does not provide, but rather

contributes to the cultural education that his mother and grandmother do provide with his

help and collaboration. Thus, Swann’s role is indeed rather parental and essential but

seems essentially maternal; and since he habitually takes refuge from his torturous love

affair with Odette as the “fils Swann,” as if integrating himself into the narrator’s family

126
life at Combray, it seems appropriate to evaluate him in relation to Combray’s

exceptional, inverted father-nature/mother-culture model.

Of course, no inversion in Proust is ever a simple one. As we have noted in the

previous chapter, although Proust reverses the mother-nature/father-culture paradigm in

relation to the interests and influences of the narrator’s parents, with the mother

complying with the father’s will and the father acting as the clear head of the household,

he nonetheless leaves the archetypal hierarchical structure of patriarchal authority intact.

Therefore, to the extent that authorship (or any other artistic creation) can be interpreted

as an exercise of authority, the artist role models of La Recherche do ostensibly serve as

paternal influences, as true mentors and roles models, where the narrator’s parents do not.

Thus, Bergotte, the role model of “the author,” Elstir, that of the “the painter” and

Vinteuil, that of “the musician,” seem to be deserving of the title of “surrogate father

figures” whereas Swann, who remains at the level of the amateur and the collector, at

best the critic, though even his study of Vermeer goes unfinished, does not. As Jean

Rousset puts it: “Swann et Charlus sont dans la Recherche des pendants, mais en négatif,

des grands créateurs, Elstir et Vinteuil.”15

It is particularly difficult to acknowledge Swann as functioning as a true paternal

role model for the narrator since the only way in which the narrator expresses a desire to

resemble Swann is physically: “Quant à Swann, pour tâcher de lui ressembler, je passais

tout mon temps à table, à me tirer sur le nez et à me frotter les yeux” (I, 406). Notably, it

is the narrator’s father who voices his criticism of the ridiculous error of wanting to

resemble Swann: “Cet enfant est idiot, il deviendra affreux” (I, 406). In fact, what the

15
Forme et signification (José Corti: 1962) 148.
127
narrator wishes to resemble is not Swann himself but someone associated with and loved

by his love object:

Ce nom, devenu pour moi presque mythologique, de Swann, quand je

causais avec mes parents, je languissais du besoin de le leur entendre dire,
je n’osais pas le prononcer moi-même, mais je les entraînais sur des sujets
qui avoisinaient Gilberte et sa famille, qui la concernaient, où je ne me
sentais pas exilé trop loin d’elle […] (I, 142).

Here, Swann’s significance, or the attraction of his name, derives from his

connection to the narrator’s beloved Gilberte in much the same way that Odette’s

significance for Swann derives from her perceived connection to Botticelli or that art

objects prized by the grandmother derive their significance from their ability to teach

about the past. In all of these cases, value is determined by relations of association or

contiguity, an inherently metonymic conception of value antithetical to the mature

narrator’s.16 Put another way, if Genette’s theory of the “métaphore métonmymique” is

an accurate description of how metaphor and metonymy function together in the

Proustian aesthetic, these associations with Swann lack the second step where the

metonymical associations and relations of contiguity feed into the metaphorical register.17

16
“On peut faire se succéder indéfiniment dans une description les objets qui
figuraient dans le lieu décrit, la vérité ne commencera qu’au moment où l’écrivain
prendra deux objets différents, posera leur rapport, analogue dans le monde de l’art à
celui qu’est le rapport unique de la loi causale dans le monde de la science, et les
enfermera dans les anneaux nécessaires d’un beau style. Même, ainsi que la vie, quand en
rapprochant une qualité commune à deux sensations, il dégagera leur essence commune à
deux sensations, en les réunissant l’une et l’autre pour les soustraire aux contingences du
temps, dans une métaphore” (IV, 468).
17
“Il va de soi que le ‘rapport’ à poser entre ‘deux objets différents’ est le rapport
d’analogie qui dégage leur ‘essence commune.’ Ce qui est moins évident, mais qui paraît
à peu près indispensable pour la cohérence de l’énoncé, c’est que ces deux objets font
partie de la collection des objets qui ‘figuraient’ (ensemble) dans le lieu à décrire:
autrement dit, que le rapport métaphorique s’établit entre deux termes déjà liés par une
relation de contiguïté spatio-temporelle. […] seule la croisée d’une trame métonymique
128
 Indeed, though they represent necessary steps in his education, the examples

furnished by Swann, in particular the story of his love for Odette told in Un Amour de

Swann are only valuable as counter-examples, demonstrating what the narrator must not

ultimately come to resemble but must surpass as a passing phase. Proust’s exceptional

break with the first person narrative of La Recherche in Un Amour de Swann to tell

Swann’s tale in the third person serves to establish the distance that must be kept with

regard to Swann’s example, a distance that effectively obviates the assimilation of

Swann’s experience too directly into the narrator’s own story of self-definition. Although

the story of Swann’s jealous pursuit of Odette prefigures the narrator’s experience with

Albertine, the lessons to be learned from this story are nonetheless not specific to Swann

as a role model but are gnomic in nature such that the portrait of love and jealousy that is

developed in Un Amour de Swann is universally applicable and universally applied—

Charlus is similarly jealous in relation to Morel, Saint-Loup is jealous of his mistress,

Rachel of whom Gilberte is later jealous, etc.18 In fact, as jealousy is an inherent and

inexorable component of Proust’s conception of love, the narrator could not have had any

experience with Albertine that was fundamentally different from that of Swann with

Odette. Claiming that Swann is a key model for the narrator, Tadié cites the fact that

“Surtout, les aventures et sentiments amoureux du narrateur répètent ceux de Swann :

l’angoisse de l’enfant qui attend sa mère à Combray rappelle déjà celle de l’amant

et d’une chaîne métaphorique assure la cohérence, la cohésion ‘nécessaire’ du texte.”

Figures III (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972) 60.
18
“Malgré moi, toujours poursuivi dans ma jalousie par le souvenir des relations
de Saint-Loup avec ‘Rachel quand du Seigneur’ et de Swann avec Odette, j’étais trop
porté à croire que du moment que j’aimais, je ne pouvais pas être aimé […]” III, 508.
129
d’Odette.”19 Similarly, Alain Roger asks “ N’a-t-il [le narrateur] pas tout vécu sous le

signe de Swann, modelant son amour plus ou moins consciemment à l’image du sien, les

autres médiations, de Bergotte ou d’Elstir, ne pouvant s’exercer que sous la condition du

premier Médiateur […].20 Strictly speaking, however, Swann’s experience of love and

jealousy for Odette is hardly an initiatory model for the narrator at all precisely because it

parallels what the narrator has actually already experienced for himself by the time he

learns of it. From a purely epistemological standpoint, the narrator’s experience with his

mother may well be the template or model that helps him to relate to and allows him to

comprehend and make sense of the story of what had happened with Swann and Odette

and not the other way around. What is ultimately at stake is the narrator’s ability to not be

like Swann—or any other lover—by renouncing the pursuit of love for the pursuit of

literary fulfillment, an example that Swann does not set. In this sense, he does not

function as a mentor or paternal figure showing him what path to follow.

What’s more, at times, Swann’s patriarchal status within his own family is

significantly weakened or put into question. This occurs, for example, when the youthful

Gilberte decides to attend a concert on the anniversary of her grandfather’s death, despite

her father’s strong objection. If, in Proust’s day, the good bourgeois woman leaves

behind her maiden name and family of origin to reconstruct her social identity around

that of her husband, specifically redefining herself as his wife and the mother of his

children, the opposite dynamic seems true for Swann who is reinvented as the husband of

Odette and the father of Gilberte. For instance, as we have observed, “Swann” at one

point signifies for the narrator first and foremost the father of the girl of whom he is in

19
Proust et le roman (Gallimard, 1971) 227.
20
Proust : Les plaisirs et les noms (Paris: Denoël, 1985) 169.
130
love such that he longs to hear the name “Swann” in order to feel that the distance

separating him from Gilberte has been reduced. Yet if Swann is at this point reduced to

the onomastic representation of his paternal role, adding insult to injury it is this very role

that Gilberte ruthlessly undercuts when many years later after Swann’s death when

Odette has remarried, Gilberte renounces his patronym, his symbolic paternity, in order

to take on the more elegant name of her step-father, Forcheville. At times she even denies

Swann’s paternity outright by insinuating that she is the illegitimate daughter of some

more illustrious sire (IV, 166).

Not only does Swann seem reduced to his relational function to Gilberte through

his feckless paternity, but he seems similarly emasculated, if not simply more at ease, in

the feminine, if not maternal, role, in his relational identity as the husband of Odette.

[…] il était arrivé qu’au « fils Swann » et aussi au Swann du Jockey,

l’ancien ami de mes parents avait ajouté une personnalité nouvelle […]
celle de mari d’Odette. Adaptant aux humbles ambitions de cette femme,
l’instinct, le désir, l’industrie, qu’il avait toujours eus, il s’était ingénié à se
bâtir, fort au-dessous de l’ancienne, une position nouvelle et appropriée à
la compagne qui l’occuperait avec lui (I, 423).

In relation to his wife, Swann’s status as head of the household seems, at times,

remarkably tenuous. Certainly her questionable reputation excludes the possibility of

frequenting or being frequented by Swann’s more illustrious social relations.

Nonetheless, if Odette as Mme Swann cannot control from whose company their

household is excluded, she seems to determine almost exclusively who will be included

in their social circle. In fact, Swann appears helpless even to control the flow of who

comes in and out of his own home. After learning one evening from Gilberte that Odette

is still entertaining after seven o’clock, he exclaims:

131
 Pensez, depuis deux heures de l’après-midi ! […] Et Camille me disait
qu’entre quatre et cinq heures, il est bien venu douze personnes. Qu’est-ce
que je dis douze, je crois qu’il m’a dit quatorze. Non, douze ; enfin je ne
sais plus. […] Et depuis un moment que je suis dans ma bibliothèque, les
coups de sonnette n’ont pas arrêté ; ma parole d’honneur, j’en ai mal à la
tête (I, 502).

This Swann, father of Gilberte who is no longer in love with but married to Odette, seems

much less like the patriarchal head of their family than just another of Odette’s admirers.

When the narrator goes to admire her on her afternoon walks, he notes that “toute une

suite l’environnait” including “Swann, quatre ou cinq hommes de club qui étaient venus

la voir le matin chez elle ou qu’elle avait rencontrés.” (I, 625). Without even the

conjunction “et” to separate Swann and set him apart from the “quatre ou cinq hommes

de club” in her company, he is textually reduced to an item in an enumeration of his

wife’s devotees.

The cruel irony of Swann’s tortured love and jealousy of Odette is that his

attraction to her is inspired by the identification that he makes with Botticelli’s

representation of Zipporah, but that, were it not for this resemblance, he wouldn’t find

her particularly appealing:

« Dire que j’ai gâché des années de ma vie, que j’ai voulu mourir, que j’ai
eu mon plus grand amour, pour une femme qui ne me plaisait pas, qui
n’était pas mon genre ! » (I, 375).

Proust’s use of this citation directly quoting Swann speaking in the first person allows for

a smooth transition at the end of Un Amour de Swann from the third person narrative

back to the “je” of the narrator. But if Swann is passing on the verbal baton, so to speak,

it is not as a father might impart his legacy to his son, but on a note of defeat and failure.

It is the emasculated Swann who has been denied the patriarchal dignity of his own

household who performs this narrative relay, as emphasized by the polysemic potential of

132
“genre.” Perhaps beyond just not representing Swann’s type, Odette doesn’t represent his

gender of predilection either. He prefers the younger, less feminine Odette—in other

words, the one who dressed in drag to be photographed as Miss Sacripant—to the

feminine, elegant Mme Swann into whom she has blossomed and whom the narrator

admires as she appears at the Arc de Triomphe for her walk, “luxuriante comme la plus

belle fleur” (I, 625). Perhaps more suited to the feminine role himself, he would prefer for

Odette to be the one who wears the (Sacri)pants in the family.21

If Swann is to be considered as a kind of surrogate or substitute, is it indeed for

the mother. It is when Swann has come to visit that his presence is substituted for hers,

that the narrator’s access to his mother is denied. Of course, this would be the

consequence of the arrival of any visitor, but, as the narrator observes, “le monde se

bornait habituellement à M. Swann” (I, 13). Whereas in this context “monde” indicates

visitors or company, indicating that the family’s visitors were generally limited to Swann,

if “monde” were taken literally, then this statement would be just as apt, even more apt,

to describe, even epitomize, the narrator’s relationship with his mother: le monde se

bornait habituellement à maman. But it is equally true that “le monde se bornait

habituellement à Swann” if the “monde” taken into consideration is that of the textual

world. As the narrator explains after the revelations in the Guermantes library that bring

him to the brink of his literary vocation:

21
Benhaïm points out Swann’s preference for this partially masculinized Odette,
“l’Odette de la photo-fétiche” and that “Swann a non seulement épousé un homme, mais
un vrai : un soldat. ‘Sacripant’ ne dit pas autre chose. Dans sa lignée […] on trouve
l’Orlando innamoreto (le fanfaron) de Boïardo, le miles gloriosus (le soldat glorieux) de
Plaute, le Matamore (tueur de Maures) de Corneille (dans son Illusion comique), bref
toute une troupe à la fois théâtrale et militaire.” 86.
133
 En somme, si j’y réfléchissais, la matière de mon expérience, laquelle
serait la matière de mon livre, me venait de Swann, non pas seulement par
tout ce qui le concernait lui-même et Gilberte. Mais c’était lui qui m’avait
dès Combray donné le désir d’aller à Balbec, où sans cela mes parents
n’eussent jamais eu l’idée de m’envoyer, et sans quoi je n’aurais pas
connu Albertine, mais même les Guermantes, puisque ma grand-mère
n’eût pas retrouvé Mme de Villeparisis, moi fait la connaissance de Saint-
Loup et de M. de Charlus, ce qui m’avait fait connaître la duchesse de
Guermantes et par elle sa cousine, de sorte que ma présence même en ce
moment chez le prince de Guermantes, où venait de me venir brusquement
l’’idée de mon œuvre (ce qui faisait que je devais à Swann non seulement
la matière mais la décision), me venait aussi de Swann (IV, 494).

This explanation of Swann’s originating role for the narrator’s writing can be summed up

in one word, derived from the Latin “mater”, or “mother”: Swann is the future text’s

matrix.

Charlus’ Pseudo-Paternal Version of Inversion

To the extent that the highly cultured baron de Charlus has a profound

understanding of literature, painting and music and can properly be said to more or less

appreciate all of the arts, though he himself is not an artist, he, like Swann, appears to fit

more neatly into the category of maternal influence than that of paternal influence in

terms of Proust’s reversed paradigm of associations of father with nature and mother with

culture. As Jean Rousset remarks, upon his death “Swann disparaît moins qu’on ne le

pense. En effet, il est relayé et continué” by Charlus, who “comme Swann qu’il prolonge

[est] un artiste, mais un artiste manqué, un artiste de la vie et non pas un artiste de l’art

[…].”22 The gender-related ambiguities suggested by Swann’s maternal identifications

are carried to their extreme in the case of Charlus, another sort of paternal figure to the

22
Jean Rousset, Forme et signification (José Corti, 1962) 147-48.
134
narrator who not only has much in common with the narrator’s mother and grandmother

in terms of engagement with cultural productions, but may even belong, according to the

narrator’s professed views on homosexual identity, to the female gender.

Like the narrator’s mother and grandmother, Charlus peppers his conversation

with quotations. He cites Mme de Sévigné the very day he makes the narrator’s

acquaintance in Balbec. In fact, in a strong indication of Charlus’ maternal affinities, the

narrator’s grandmother takes a liking to Charlus, is particularly impressed by his sensitive

reading and admiration of Mme de Sévigné’s Letters and expresses this admiration in

terms that prefigure the narrator’s subsequent discovery of Charlus’ “true” feminine

nature:

Ma grand-mère était ravie d’entendre parler de ces Lettres exactement de

la façon qu’elle eût fait. Elle s’étonnait qu’un homme pût les comprendre
si bien. Elle trouvait à M. de Charlus des délicatesses, une sensibilité
féminines (II, 121).

For Viviane Forrester, Charlus represents “le double masculin de la mère.” She points out

the way that Charlus reenacts the bedtime scene after the narrator’s grandmother tells him

of her grandson’s nervousness and distress at bedtime: “Or, que fait M. de Charlus ? Ému

par la tristesse de l’enfant, il monte à son chevet, comme la mère. Et, comme la mère il

monte un livre à la main.”23

Nonetheless, despite these characteristics that align Charlus with the maternal

camp, and its connections with reading and culture, Charlus seems in many ways far

more liminal than Swann. In terms of his belonging to the categories of “nature” and

“culture,” Charlus’ position is more ambiguous than Swann’s to the extent that he bridges

the nature/culture divide by initiating the narrator to many new facets of “human nature.”

23
“Marcel Proust : Le texte de la mère” Tel Quel 78 (1978) 73.
135
Unlike Swann who, as we have observed, often seems content to occupy a more

stereotypically maternal or feminine role, Charlus, as we shall examine later, often sets

explicitly paternal goals.

The most important aspect of human nature for which Charlus is responsible for

educating the narrator is, of course, that of homosexuality. So doing, he not only bridges

the gender divide as a member of the race of hommes-femmes but puts that divide

between “male” and “female” into question in such a way that also calls the separation

between nature and culture into question as well, in ways that we shall examine below.

Rather than emphasizing the aspect of attraction to what is the same as in a

gender-separatist conceptual model of homosexuality, in describing Charlus’ sexuality,

and in more general terms, Proust prefers the word “inverti” to that of “homosexual,”

ostensibly subscribing to the gender-transitive view of the homosexual male as a woman

trapped in a man’s body, anima muliebris in corpore virili inclusa. As Leo Bersani

observes, “there is […] no same-sex desire in La Recherche; the appearance of same-sex

desire, Proust implies, should merely alert us to a biological mistake in sexual identity.”24

Proust’s espousal of this kind of essentialist point of view is evidenced in observations

that the narrator makes throughout Sodome et Gomorrhe I upon witnessing the

homosexual encounter of Charlus and Jupien:

De plus je comprenais maintenant pourquoi tout à l’heure, quand je l’avais

vu sortir de chez Mme de Villeparisis, j’avais pu trouver que M. de
Charlus avait l’air d’une femme : c’en était une ! Il appartenait à la race de
ces êtres moins contradictoires qu’ils n’en ont l’air, dont l’idéal est viril,
justement parce que leur tempérament est féminin, et qui sont dans la vie
pareils, en apparence seulement, aux autres hommes […] (III, 16).

24
Homos (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP, 1995) 144.
136
As in this example, the narrator repeatedly insists that Charlus is, in essence, a woman. In

many ways, this is a rather backward-looking stance, even in relation to some theories

espoused by certain of Proust’s predecessors and contemporaries. As remarked by

Antoine Compagnon: “Contrairement à Krafft-Ebing ou à Gide, qui distinguaient

plusieurs espèces de ‘l’amour qui n’ose pas dire son nom,’ Proust le réduit à une seule

physiologie.”25 He goes on to explain that, for Proust, variations in patterns of

homosexual behavior are like secondary attributes to what remains the fundamental

model, the gay male as a woman in a man’s body:

Sodome et Gomorrhe I énumérait et classait différents comportements

invertis. Ceux-ci […] sont acquis et non innés. Mais la diversité des
manifestations individuelles de l’inversion ne peut faire perdre de vue
qu’elle constitue, selon Proust, une espèce. Sa doctrine de l’homme-
femme […] est déterminée par l’incorporation d’une âme féminine, par la
réincarnation d’un lointain ancêtre féminin.26

Despite the fact that, in Proust, differing patterns of homosexual behavior may be treated

reductively as mere incidental variations to a single, essential, physiology (the backward-

looking model of the gay man as a woman in a man’s body), long before the age of

structuralism and “gender studies,” Proust does, nonetheless, seem to provide an opening

for embarking on a more modern conceptual path moving away from biological

predetermination and toward a model that is performative, dependent on culturally-

defined patterns of behavior. According to the narrator’s logic, despite Charlus’ male

body, in choosing a man as an object of sexual desire he is behaving like a woman,

therefore revealing that he is a woman. Notably, in this paradigm, a man’s act of desiring

a man is sufficient to re-categorize his gender as female.

25
Proust entre deux siècles, (Paris: Seuil, 1989) 274.
26
Compagnon, 274-75.
137
 That Charlus’ inversion is revealed in his behavior is asserted throughout La

Recherche. For example, he is behaving like a woman, or even a female relative or

ancestor, when he makes a polite and timid entry in Mme Verdurin’s salon,27 squeals

with delight that he prefers the strawberry-flavored beverage to the orangeade28 or when

he is the only man to sit among the ladies at parties.29 This is, of course, in and of itself

not a break with an essentialist model of gender identification to the extent that the

narrator insists that these behaviors reveal that Charlus is, in essence, female.

Nevertheless, the Proustian preliminary gesture toward a more performative model of

gender and sexual identity takes place in a shift of emphasis from the nature of Charlus’

essence to the revelation of that essence to the narrator, from a static view to one that is

process and interpretation-oriented. Charlus, in effect, becomes a woman once he has

been observed behaving like one. It is in effect the narrator’s discovery and subsequent

social re-categorization of Charlus that constitutes or constructs his gender for the reader.

The surprising image of Charlus as a pregnant woman in the moment of this re-

discovery/re-construction of Charlus’ sexual identity can, in a sense, be seen as a kind of

27
“Ainsi le désir habituel qu’avait M. de Charlus de paraître viril et froid fut-il
dominé (quand il apparut dans la porte ouverte) par ces idées de politesse traditionnelles
qui se réveillent dès que la timidité détruit une attitude factice et fait appel aux ressources
de l’inconscient. Quand c’est dans un Charlus, qu’il soit d’ailleurs noble ou bourgeois,
qu’agit un tel sentiment de politesse instinctive et atavique envers des inconnus, c’est
toujours l’âme d’une parente du sexe féminin […] qui se charge de l’introduire dans un
salon nouveau et de modeler son attitude […]” (III, 299).
28
“Mais en entendant M. de Charlus dire de cette voix aiguë et avec ce sourire et
ces gestes de bras : ‘Non, j’ai préféré sa voisine, la fraisette’, on pouvait dire : ‘Tiens, il
aime le sexe fort’ […]. Sans se le dire précisément on sent que c’est une douce et
souriante dame qui vous répond et qui paraît maniérée parce qu’elle se donne pour un
homme et qu’on n’est pas habitué à voir les hommes faire tant de manières” (III, 357).
29
“[…] les maîtresses de maison laissaient, dans une fête, le baron avoir seul une
chaise sur le devant dans un rang de dames, tandis que les autres hommes se bousculaient
dans le fond” (II, 564).
138
superlative demonstration of the narrator’s role in creating this re-categorization or re-

conceptualization of Charlus as belonging to the female gender. To a certain extent, what

is brought to light is perhaps not as much the truth about Charlus’ nature as the shift in

the narrator’s way of seeing him:

Jusqu’ici je m’étais trouvé en face de M. de Charlus de la même façon

qu’un homme distrait, lequel, devant une femme enceinte dont il n’a pas
remarqué la taille alourdie, s’obstine, tandis qu’elle lui répète en souriant :
« Oui, je suis un peu fatiguée en ce moment », à lui demander
indiscrètement : « Qu’avez-vous donc ? » Mais que quelqu’un lui dise :
« Elle est grosse », soudain il aperçoit le ventre et ne verra plus que lui
(III, 15).

This is in accordance with the more generalized theory that our identities are socially

constructed, as the narrator asserts from the beginning of La Recherche:

[…] notre personnalité sociale est une création de la pensée des autres
[…] Nous remplissons l’apparence physique de l’être que nous voyons de
toutes les notions que nous avons sur lui, et dans l’aspect total que nous
nous représentons, ces notions ont certainement la plus grande part (I, 19).

Only, in the case of Charlus, it is his sexual identity (in both conflated senses of “sexual,”

that of relating to sexuality and that of relating to gender) that is re-constructed out of the

new notions the narrator now has of him. Thus, this shift in emphasis from the

ontological to the epistemological, from the description of Charlus’ female essence to the

manner in which Charlus is perceived by the narrator and by the narrator’s changing

perception and identification or understanding of him, brings the Proustian text into line

with Judith Butler’s assertion that “what we take to be ‘real,’ what we invoke as

naturalized knowledge of gender is, in fact, a changeable and revisable reality.”30 For Eve

Kosofsky Sedgwick, this shift of emphasis from what the homosexual may or may not be

to how he is perceived is the key to the “efficacy of M. de Charlus for the novel as a

30
Gender Trouble, (New York and London: Routledge, 2006) xxiv.
139
whole” through which Proust presents “the spectacle of the closet as the truth of the

homosexual.”31

In Sodome et Gomorrhe I, we read:

En M. de Charlus, un autre être avait beau s’accoupler, qui le différenciait

des autres hommes, comme dans le centaure le cheval, cet être avait beau
faire corps avec le baron, je ne l’avais jamais aperçu. Maintenant l’abstrait
s’était matérialisé, l’être enfin compris avait aussitôt perdu son pouvoir de
rester invisible […] (III, 16).

Here, despite the accentuation of the process of perception and visibility inherent in the

claim that the now-understood being had lost its power to remain invisible, the

essentialist idea is still strongly upheld since Charlus’ “being” has presumably existed

prior to its perception by the narrator. Yet this essentialist interpretation is also somewhat

undermined. Such a conception of the woman in a man’s body depends upon two

important culturally-determined presuppositions: a mind/body dualism and the

assumption that the mind (or spirit or soul) constitutes a person’s essence, what he or she

“is,” while physical characteristics are purely accidental and contingent properties that do

not define one’s true being.32 In this example, the essentialist conception is problematized

since the previously unobserved being (presumably the female) is presented as co-

existing within the new Charlus along with the Charlus the narrator had formerly known.

Not only does the male/female split not clearly occur along mind/body lines (no more

than a centaur is a human’s soul in a horse’s body) but as the verb “s’accoupler” and the

expression “faire corps avec” indicate, the narrator does not describe the new Charlus as

31
Epistemology of the Closet, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1990) 231.
32
For a historical perspective on this question, see Elizabeth V. Spelman,
“Woman as Body: Ancient and Contemporary Views” Feminist Studies 8.1 (1982) 109-
31.
140
“really being” only the female entity who completely replaces the old Charlus, a Charlus

entirely reduced to an illusion, as the idea of him “really being” a woman would seem to

require. Apart from these logical conundrums that it instigates, odd it is, as well, that the

analogy used to describe the dissipation of the illusion, the materialized abstraction of

Charlus’ femininity, should itself take the elusive form of an illusion, the mythical

centaur, a being never to be found in the material world.33

Critics have long pointed out the multiple inconsistencies in the presentation of

Charlus’ sexuality and gender. Sedgwick points out, for example, that although Proust

seems invested in presenting Charlus’ inversion as a classic case of the female soul

trapped in a male body, what he actually presents is, in fact, “a far more complex and

conflicted cluster of metaphorical models”:

At the crudest level, the explanation that Charlus desires men because
deep down he is a woman […] is seriously undermined […]. What the
narrator has witnessed […] is not at all a conquest of this female-gendered
self by another self contrastively figured as male. Instead, the intervening
pickup between Charlus and Jupien has been presented in two other
guises. Primarily it is seen as a mirror-dance of two counterparts ‘in
perfect symmetry’, tacitly undermining the narrator’s decision to reject the
term “homosexuality” on account of its reliance on a model of similarity.
At the same time […] the transaction is figured as the courtship by a male-
figured Charlus of a female-figured Jupien.34

33
It is perhaps also worth noting the moral ambiguity of this analogy. While in
Greek mythology centaurs generally represent savage creatures ruled by passion, the
centaur, Chiron, whose name somewhat resembles that of Charlus orthographically, is
known for his wisdom, particularly in medicine—the profession of Proust’s father—and
serves as an instructor, a mentor, to many Greek heroes such as Heracles, Achilles, Jason,
and Asclepius, the god of medicine.
34
Sedgwick, 219. Like Sedgwick, Elisabeth Ladenson notes a further discrepancy
in Proust’s representations of non-heterosexuality: Though the male version (despite the
above-mentioned inconsistencies) is an “inverti,” representing a gender transposition and
in a sense keeping male-male sexual relations in a heterosexual paradigm since one of the
men desires the other because he “really is” a woman, Albertine and other supposed
lesbians are not men in women’s bodies but represent a true model of homosexual
desire—desire for sameness: “No ‘Race des Oncles,’ even if there existed such a term, is
141
Ultimately, however, not only because of the problematic nature of (re)defining gender

through sexuality and if for no other reason than that it would be grossly inaccurate to

suggest an equivalency between female gender identity and maternity (and all the more

so in the Proustian microcosm where children are so few) whether Charlus may be

considered a maternal or a paternal influence on the narrator has little to do, for present

intents and purposes, with the ambiguities surrounding what may be his “true” gender.

What is interesting, on the contrary, is Charlus’ place in La Recherche’s networks of

associations with paternity and paternal functions.

When Charlus makes his first explicit appearance in the text, it is in the scene in

which the narrator first sees Gilberte, which, as we noted in the first chapter, is entirely

paternally dominated, a scene predicated on maternal absence (the erroneously supposed

absence of Gilberte’s mother, Odette) and where the narrator is talking a walk with only

his father and grandfather. Like Gilberte, Charlus is seen by the narrator for the first time

in this scene as well, and, as the grandfather indicates, he is widely believed to be

Odette’s lover, an idea to which the grandfather himself subscribes.35 Charlus is therefore

ever theorized in complementarity to the tantes […].” Proust’s Lesbianism, (Ithaca and
London: Cornell UP, 1999) 41-2.
35
This idea may or may not be erroneous. Despite his inversion, in La
Prisonnière, Charlus does claim to have been one of Odette’s many lovers back in the
day (III, 803) and it is also specified that Charlus sometimes has sexual relations with
women: “Mais il était arrive à M. de Charlus que la monotonie des plaisirs qu’offre son
vice l’avait lassé. […] Parfois […] il allait passer la nuit avec une femme […]” (III, 716).
Although La Recherche appears to leave the question as to whether or not Charlus ever
was Odette’s lover open, a letter written by Proust to Henri Ghéon seems to suggest that
this was not the case: “Certaines personnes trouvent que j’ai repris une situation bien
banale, en montrant Swann confiant naïvement sa maîtresse à M. de Charlus, qui, croient
ces lecteurs, trompe Swann. Or ce n’est pas cela du tout. M. de Charlus est un vieil
homosexuel qui remplira presque tout le troisième volume et Swann dont il a été
142
first perceived in the garden as present in the place of Swann not merely in Swann’s

capacity as Odette’s husband but, notably, occupying the place of Gilberte’s father in the

mother-father-child triad.

As also remarked in chapter one, prior to this first explicit appearance, Charlus

makes an implicit entrance into the text through the paternal network of associations

established in the bedtime scene, the ostensible moment of the textual big bang out of

which the central themes of La Recherche originate. This occurs through the comparison

of the narrator’s father to the biblical Abraham, the quintessential patriarch and also the

advocate of Sodom and Gomorrah, who bartered with God to try to save the cities of the

plain from destruction. Wrapped in a “cachemire de l’Inde violet et rose,” the father at

that moment resembles a flower, marking the first point where Sodom and Gomorrah and

flowers unite and establishing a symbolic precedent for the second one, Sodome et

Gomorrhe I, where the narrator witnesses the homosexual encounter of Charlus and

Jupien whose narration is interwoven with the narrator’s attempts to observe the

“courtship” of an orchid and a bee. What’s more, the bedtime scene’s analogy between

Abraham and the narrator’s father is relayed to Charlus in Sodome et Gomorrhe I where

echoes of Genesis and of God’s promise to Abraham define the homosexual and his

descendants:

Ces descendants des Sodomistes, si nombreux qu’on peut leur appliquer

l’autre verset de la Genèse : « Si quelqu’un peut compter la poussière de la
terre, il pourra aussi compter cette postérité », se sont fixés sur toute la
terre […] (III, 33).

amoureux au collège sait qu’il ne risque rien en lui confiant Odette.” Cited in note 1 of I,
140 on I, 1166.
143
 The fact that Charlus has implicit associations with the roles played by both

parents in the bedtime scene—with the mother in that he reenacts the bedtime scene when

he goes to the narrator’s bedside in Balbec, book in hand, and with the father through the

network of associations with Abraham and floral imagery—further emphasizes the

ambiguity surrounding Charlus’ gender identifications. Charlus’ homosexuality puts him

at the crossroads of “nature” and “culture” as do the alternating themes of Sodome et

Gomorrhe I, floral mating and Jewish heritage, that constitute the narrator’s discourse

about homosexuals. As noted by Jeanne Bem, “Dans S. et G. I le Narrateur prend tour à

tour deux voix, celle du sexologue [“nature”] et celle du mythologue [“culture”], et ces

deux voix prétendent cerner l’homosexualité comme un savoir.”36 Interestingly, in both

cases, a paternal function is brought under consideration. The paternal reproductive

function of fertilization and the spreading of one’s seed is not only at stake for the

fertilization of the orchid but, as the Genesis reference demonstrates, for the Jewish

patriarch and his posterity as well. Compagnon notes the importance of the thematic of

posterity: “Voilà, d’ailleurs une clé de l’équivalence constamment posée, sans que Proust

l’explique jamais, entre l’inversion et le judaïsme. Tous deux sont transmis par les

femmes, instituée par une lignée feminine.”37 In other words, as Compagnon makes

explicit, just as belonging to the Jewish faith is transmitted by matriarchal geneology,

Proust’s inverts too would seem to be of maternal lineage since they are reincarnated

female ancestors. Given the importance of maternal lineage, it is perhaps all the more

noteworthy, therefore, that the idea of lineage is cast, through Sodome et Gomorrhe I’s

36
“Le Juif et l’homosexuel dans ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’ :
fonctionnements textuels” Littérature 37 (1980) 102.
37
Compagnon, 275.
144
intertextuality with Genesis in reference to Abraham’s descendants, in pointedly

patriarchal terms. In fact, patrilineage is invoked as a common point not only for

homosexuals and Jews but also for homosexuals and ancient Greeks, their illustrious

cultural ancestors. As the narrator explains, inverts take comfort in the place of

homosexuality in history, “ayant plaisir à se rappeler que Socrate était l’un d’eux” (III,

18).

In Proust’s conception, a patrilineal chain of homosexual ancestors ostensibly

holds the privileged place where culture has not yet separated itself from nature:

Il est vrai que les invertis à la recherche d’un mâle se contentent souvent
d’un inverti aussi efféminé qu’eux. Mais il suffit qu’ils n’appartiennent
pas au sexe féminin, dont ils ont en eux un embryon dont ils ne peuvent se
servir, ce qui arrive à tant de fleurs hermaphrodites et mêmes à certains
animaux hermaphrodites, comme l’escargot, qui ne peuvent être fécondés
par eux-mêmes, mais peuvent l’être par d’autres hermaphrodites. Par là les
invertis, qui se rattachent volontiers à l’antique Orient ou à l’âge d’or de la
Grèce, remonteraient plus haut encore, à ces époques d’essai où
n’existaient ni les fleurs dioïques ni les animaux unisexués, à cet
hermaphroditisme initial […] (III, 31).

As Marcel Muller argues quite compellingly, in Sodome et Gomorrhe I the transition

from nature to culture is conceived of as a kind of fall from grace and the homosexual,

insofar as he may be closer to a primordial natural state, may represent a sort of original

integrity:

Si nous parlons d’« inversion », nous dit en somme Marcel Proust, c’est
faute d’avoir vu que l’’hétérosexualité (ou commerce avec l’autre) est une
chute dans l’altérité, et que le prétendu inverti est en réalité dans le droit
fil de la nature, puisque son organisation instinctuelle est antérieure à la
division des sexes. Fidèle à l’esprit de la création il est celui qui a
conservé—ou, si l’on préfère, retrouvé—le Bien originel.38

38
“‘Sodome I’ ou la naturalisation de Charlus” Poétique 8 (1971) 474. Once
again we find evidence of Proust’s double inversion: a preliminary inversion by way of
which the association of mother with nature and father with culture is reversed and a
secondary inversion by which the value generally assigned to each term is reversed,
145
 All of this is of course not to say that the invert is unequivocally superior to his

heterosexual counterpart, for nothing could be more ambiguous than Proust’s stance in

relation to both his moral and aesthetic value. However, the trouble is not with the natural

traits, the “disposition innée” which he seems to have inherited from his patriarchal

ancestors. It arises from the posturing necessary to situate himself in relation to cultural

norms that have strayed from nature:

[…] l’opprobre seul fait le crime, parce qu’il n’a laissé subsister que ceux
qui étaient réfractaires à toute prédication, à tout exemple, à tout
châtiment, en vertu d’une disposition innée tellement spéciale qu’elle
répugne plus aux autres hommes (encore qu’elle puisse s’accompagner de
hautes qualités morales) que de certains vices qui y contredisent […] (III,
18).

Or, as Lawrence Schehr remarks, “the only condemnable behavior is that which society

foists on the individual who, through painful effort, seeks to make gender and sexuality

coincide.”39

Charlus is particularly representative of a “disposition innée” tainted by cultural

posturing. Notably he blurs the line between the homosexual and the homosocial, often in

relation to typically paternal functions as the age difference between him and the younger

men whose amorous attention he seeks would suggest. Charlus’ exercise of homosocial

functions in the service of his homosexual desire is apparent in his patronage of Morel,

which, as the etymology of the word “patronage,” derived from the Latin “pater,”

where nature finds itself superior to culture—the conception wherein creation of a work
of art is not a “domination” of nature, not the transformation of natural raw materials into
something of a higher order, but rather requires “sensibilité” to precede “intelligence,”
where “un grand écrivain n’a pas, dans le sens courant, à l’inventer [le seul livre vrai]
puisqu’il existe déjà en chacun de nous, mais à le traduire” (IV, 469).
39
French Gay Modernism (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press,
2004) 65.
146
indicates, represents a paternal function. Charlus makes the same homosexual overture in

the guise of homosocial serviceability—the offer of providing social connections and

protections—to the narrator who, unable to decode and comprehend what is being

offered, more or less inadvertently refuses it. Apart from any question of sexual

complications, eschewing Charlus’ patronage no doubt protects the integrity of the

narrator’s own paternal authority as creator of his future work.

Unlike the narrator, the violinist Morel becomes Charlus’ protégé and as La

Recherche progresses, the paternal element within Charlus’ relationship with Morel is

made increasingly prominent and explicit. In La Prisonnière, the narrator explains that

Charlus:

[…] était travaillé maintenant d’une maniaque envie d’adopter, et que

certaines personnes autour de lui craignaient qu’elle ne s’exerçât à l’égard
de Charlie [Morel]. Et ce n’est pas extraordinaire. L’inverti […] éprouve
le besoin d’entrer de même dans toutes les fonctions sociales de l’homme
qui n’est pas inverti, d’entretenir comme l’amant des danseuses et le vieil
habitué de l’Opéra, aussi d’être rangé, d’épouser ou de se coller avec un
homme, d’être père (III, 747).40

His paternal desire manifests itself in various, often confused, ways such that it seems

ever-present yet never completely accurately defined. For instance, he wishes that Morel

would take the name “Charmel” because “il aurait voulu que Morel tint tout de lui, même

son nom.” (III, 449). The act, in either event patriarchal, of providing a name could

symbolize the union of man and wife as well as that of father and son. While

40
This kind of homosexual father-adopted son relationship may have been
inspired by suspicions surrounding Abel Hermant and his adopted son of whom Proust
writes with sarcasm to Mme de Noailles in March 1908: “Car je me refuse à croire à
l’affreuse hypothèse. Bien que la solennité des sacrements d’une forme juridique comme
l’adoption ne serve plus guère qu’à y ajouter quelque saveur à la banalité des situations
irrégulières, je ne puis croire qu’il ait voulu parer des dehors infiniment respectables de
l’inceste une banale aventure d’homosexualité.” Cited in Compagnon, 135.
147
simultaneously playing upon suggestions of the uxorial nature of the patronymical

dependency under which Charlus wishes to place Morel, the text nonetheless insists

rather heavily on the paternal implications motivating this desire. Earlier in the

paragraph, in reaction to a cruelly insolent remark made by Morel, Charlus is described

as having bowed his head in silent sadness “avec la faculté de croire que rien n’a été

remarqué de la froideur, de la dureté de leurs enfants qu’ont les pères idolâtres” (III, 448).

If the act of providing a patronym is patriarchal, the name “Charmel” itself is

obviously inexactly representative of this socially symbolic practice. For Charlus, it has a

romantic appeal since it is the place name of the property where the two go to meet. And

who knows if this place were not chosen based on poetic sensibility since the charm of

“Charmel” may also lie in its phonetic mingling of the names “Charlus” and “Morel,”

reflecting the mingling of the two lovers in their romantic trysts. At the same time,

however, “Charmel” could be taken to symbolize the impossibility of such mingling

since, as Charlus himself acknowledges as an argument in its favor, apart from also

resembling “Charlus” it also resembles Morel’s own first name, “Charlie.” Therefore,

“Charmel” could also be taken for a contraction of “Charlie Morel,” reflecting an extreme

self-sufficiency and evincing the integrity of the violinist’s identity as hermetically sealed

off from any external influence or relation—paternal, romantic or other—whatsoever.

The fact that the musician “pensant à la réputation artistique attachée à son nom de

Morel” (III, 449) would refuse any patronymical alteration reinforces the idea that artistic

endeavors constitute, in and of themselves, a sort of ultimate exercise of paternal

authority. This is perhaps the reason why the paternal aspect of Charlus’ desire to give

Morel a patronym ultimately yields to the romantic/matrimonial, when, in light of

148
Morel’s refusal, Charlus instead contents himself for the time being “de faire faire à

Morel des bagues symboliques portant l’antique inscription: PLVS VLTRA CAROL’S”

(III, 449). These rings Charlus gives to Morel are all the more telling of his desire to

possess Morel like a wife in light of the fact that, in an earlier diatribe against the

deplorable effeminacy of young men that Charlus had pronounced in Balbec, it is noted

that “Il n’admettait même pas qu’un homme portât une seule bague” (II, 121). Yet despite

this strong current of matrimonial associations, that the significance of the performance

of the act of name giving trumps the significance of the name itself for Charlus and that

he nonetheless conceives of this act in paternal terms is evidenced by his willingness to

turn to adoption in order to accomplish it when he shows himself “à défaut de Charmel”,

résigné à adopter Morel et à lui donner un des titres de la famille Guermantes desquels il

disposait” (III, 449).

Charlus repeatedly demonstrates paternal ambitions (or formulates his ambitions

as paternal, even when they exceed the bounds of a relationship so defined) regardless of

his lack of success, which perhaps renders the iterative nature of his attempts to fulfill

paternal ambitions all the more remarkable. Ladenson is right to insist that “Charlus is

not, despite all of his mentoring, a paternal figure; he is above all a vieille tante.” She is

also right to point out how striking it is that his nickname among members of his family,

derived from “Palamède,” should be “Mémé” and not “Papa.”41 Still, though his paternal

ambitions or exercise of paternal functions may fail or be undermined, they remain

formulated in paternal terms nonetheless, even if they are riddled with confusion, as

41
Ladenson, 121-22.
149
seems to be the case in Charlus’ desire to give a name to Morel and as is often the case

when Charlus tries to represent the nature of their relationship.

To take another example, after having managed to “avoid” the fictitious duel that

he had invented as a ruse to make Morel come to him, a duel against two regiment

officers who Charlus claims made insinuations about the nature of his and Morel’s

relations, Charlus remarks:

« Je conclus de toute cette histoire, mieux terminée que vous ne méritiez,

que vous ne savez pas vous conduire et qu’à la fin de votre service
militaire je vous ramène moi-même à votre père, comme fit l’archange
Raphaël envoyé par Dieu au jeune Tobie » (III, 460).

Charlus is making reference to the biblical book of Tobit wherein Tobias (Tobie), guided

by the archangel Raphael, returns to and cures the blindness of his father (Tobit). But if

Charlus’ comparison of himself to a divine angel, which Proust highlights in the

following citation by capitalizing “Père” and “Moi,” accords well with his comically

exaggerated self-satisfaction, there is nevertheless a shifting of roles in his statement that

remains somewhat less coherent. Having either failed to see or else chosen not to see

Morel’s dissatisfaction, (which is all the more ironic since Tobias, to whom Charlus is

comparing Morel, cures his father’s blindness in the biblical story) Charlus then exclaims

to the narrator:

« Avez-vous remarqué, quand je l’ai comparé au fils de Tobie, comme il

délirait de joie ? C’est parce que, comme il est très intelligent, il a tout de
suite compris que le Père auprès duquel il allait désormais vivre, n’était
pas son père selon la chair, qui doit être un affreux valet de chambre à
moustaches, mais son père spirituel, c’est-à-dire Moi. » (III, 460).

In this remark, Charlus has thus evacuated Morel’s/Tobias’ actual father in order to take

his place as the father to whom the son will devotedly return. However, quite

paradoxically, he has done so without relinquishing his place in the earlier analogy as the

150
guiding angel, Raphael. In addition to this doubling of his role as both father to Morel

and one performing the angle’s paternal function of guiding him, Charlus also doubles

the nature of his exercise of this paternal guiding function, adding to the physical aspect

of guiding—bringing Morel back to Paris—a spiritual sense which he further develops:

« Quel orgueil pour lui ! Comme il redressait fièrement la tête ! Quelle

joie il ressentait d’avoir compris ! Je suis sûr qu’il va redire tous les jours :
‘Ô Dieu qui avez donné le bienheureux archange Raphaël pour guide à
votre serviteur Tobie dans un long voyage, accordez-nous à nous, vos
serviteurs, d’être toujours protégés par lui et munis de son secours.’ Je n’ai
même pas eu besoin, ajouta le baron, fort persuadé qu’il siégerait un jour
devant le trône de Dieu, de lui dire que j’étais l’envoyé céleste, il l’a
compris de lui-même et en était muet de bonheur ! » (III, 460).

Whereas Charlus’ earlier reference to Raphael and Tobias is stated as a verbal

comparison with himself—he will bring Morel back as Raphael brought back Tobias—

the words Charlus puts into Morel’s mouth as what he “expects” Morel will say leave the

comparison with himself implicit: Morel will ask God (The Father) for Raphael’s

guidance. According to Charlus’ explanation, it is Morel’s presumed unspoken

understanding that the Raphael in question is a metaphorical substitution for Charlus that

would give his prayer its true meaning. But the question arises as to why, in his own

purely hypothetical and phantasmatic conception of what Morel would think and say,

Charlus would figure his own role as merely implicit. Charlus also places himself in the

role of Morel’s father implicitly in another reference to Tobias, when in La Prisonnière,

after the traumatic break-up orchestrated by the Verdurins that has rendered him ill,

Charlus asks the archangel Raphael to bring Morel back to him like the young Tobias and

then insinuates to his visitors that “si Brichot lui ramenait rapidement son jeune Tobie,

peut-être l’archange Raphaël consentirait-il à lui rendre la vue comme au père de Tobie”

151
(III, 827).42 In this reference to Tobias and Tobit, as in the previous one, there is a certain

amount of instability in the analogy. This time, it is Brichot who is in the ambiguous

position of both playing Raphael’s role as guide and the paternal role of Tobit as

benefactor of Raphael’s sight-restoring ability.43 As a result, Charlus both implicitly

poses himself in the place of the father, when at first asking the archangel to guide Morel

to him as he guided Tobias to his father, but subsequently yields the place of the father to

Brichot, whose sight is to be restored, if the logic of the analogy is strictly followed to its

conclusion. In other words, Charlus implicitly assigns himself the role of Morel’s father,

but he does so in confused and unstable analogies that are to some degree self-

undermining, thus demonstrating both a will to exercise a paternal role and an apparent

inability to really do so or even clearly imagine himself doing so. Despite this difficulty,

Charlus does, in fact, become a father of sorts when he adopts Jupien’s niece. However,

the failure of this paternity is noted by Richard Goodkin:

[…] as soon as Charlus has married off his adopted daughter and thus
assured the transmission of his heritage, she immediately dies. It is as if
his attempt to transform his identity from avuncular to paternal were being
rejected by the narrative.44

42
Although this passage of La Prisonnière in which Charlus references Tobit and
Tobias occurs later in the text than the one from Sodome et Gomorrhe II examined above,
in the genetic history of the novel’s composition it was written much earlier than the
other which was added by Proust to the corrected proofs of Sodome et Gomorrhe II in
1922 shortly before his death. Of the two, the later-composed version is more complex,
suggesting Proust’s increasingly complicated vision of Charlus’ relationship to paternity.
43
There is a slight inaccuracy here to the extent that Raphael instructs Tobias on
how to cure his father’s blindness (Tobit 11.7-8) so that in the biblical rendition it is the
son, not the angel, as Proust seems to suggest, who actually does so (Tobit 11.10-14).
44
Around Proust (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991) 149 note 19. As we shall see
below, this marriage also represents another attempt by Charlus to create a homoerotic
relationship out of a paternal one, this time with the young lady’s husband; and this
attempt is favored, rather than hindered, by her demise.
152
 Before rejecting the idea, the narrator poses a highly provocative question

concerning Charlus’ displays of what appears to be paternal affection toward Morel: “Y

avait-il enfin une pointe d’inceste, dans cette affection paternelle ?” (III, 747). When the

narrator cites what he calls more probable explanations for Charlus’ behavior than

incestuous inclinations—that he wishes to adopt because his homosexual encounters do

not satisfy his “besoins affectifs, restés vacants depuis la mort de sa femme” (III, 747),

that Charlus, like all inverts, wishes to exercise the full range of men’s social functions—

it is difficult not to suspect a strong element of preterition.45 Perhaps, when all is said and

done, what is truly scandalous about Charlus’ sexuality is neither its same-sex orientation

nor even the masochistic pleasures in which he indulges in Jupien’s brothel where he is

insulted, beaten, and bound. Perhaps the veritably scandalous aspect of Charlus’ sexuality

lies in his desire to adopt paternal roles in relation to his lovers in order to violate the

incest taboo.

Indeed, in Jupien’s brothel, the narrator notes that the young men sent to pleasure

Charlus seem to somehow resemble Morel:

Je vis entrer l’homme des abattoirs, il ressemblait en effet un peu à

Maurice mais, chose plus curieuse, tous deux avaient quelque chose d’un
type, que personnellement je n’avais jamais dégagé, mais que je me rendis
très bien compte exister dans la figure de Morel, avaient une certaine
ressemblance sinon avec Morel tel que je l’avais vu, au moins avec un
certain visage que des yeux voyant Morel autrement que moi, avaient pu
composer avec ses traits (IV, 396).

45
This passage on Charlus’ desire to adopt Morel is also a late addition, a passage
that Proust added to La Prisonnière’s manuscript progressively adding complexity to
Charlus’ character in the realm of the paternal.
153
Leaving aside the thorny question of how the narrator could insist upon a resemblance

that he hadn’t really seen,46 one is left with the fact that Charlus’ lovers of predilection all

seem to share certain traits, a sort of family air. It is possible that these young men all

share characteristics that Charlus finds attractive. Or, inversely, what makes these young

men attractive to Charlus could be the fact that they look as if they could be brothers, that

they share similar, “fraternal” traits. This second explanation is consistent with the

emphasis placed on posterity in Sodome et Gomorrhe I, with the idea that inverts are of a

common descent. In other words, the young men’s resemblance could be the result of

their homosexuality, or what André Benhaïm calls “une ressemblance de l’inversion.

Comme s’il s’agissait d’une affaire de famille.”47 As we have observed, descendants of

Sodom do, after all, seem to share a common patriarchal heritage.

Beyond any question of family resemblance that may characterize homosexuals in

general, the very concept of familial relations seems to often play a role in Charlus’

sexual fantasies and desires. For example, Charlus reveals the role or importance of

sadomasochistic fantasies to his sexual fulfillment in a troubling familial context, long

before the narrator bears witness to his sexual adventures in Jupien’s brothel. Following

the matinée at Mme de Villeparisis’, right after having enquired about Bloch by asking

the narrator if he is young and handsome and upon having had confirmed that Bloch is

Jewish, Charlus suggests that the narrator might arrange for Bloch to put on a spectacle,

possibly “quelque divertissement biblique,” for his entertainment:

46
Perhaps the narrator wishes to hinder the development of any suspicion of
homosexuality on his part that might arise from the idea that he ever would have seen
Morel “that way,” or from the idea developed in Sodome et Gomorrhe I , that “it takes
one to know one,” an idea explored by Sedgwick (221-223).
47
Benhaïm, 57.
154
 « Vous pourriez peut-être arranger même des parties pour faire rire, Par
exemple, une lutte entre votre ami et son père où il le blesserait comme
David Goliath. Cela composerait une farce assez plaisante. Il pourrait
même, pendant qu’il y est, frapper à coups redoublés sur sa charogne, ou,
comme dirait ma vielle bonne, sur sa carogne de mère. Voilà qui serait fort
bien fait et ne serait pas pour nous déplaire, hein ! petit ami, puisque nous
aimons les spectacles exotiques et que frapper cette créature extra-
européenne, ce serait donner une correction méritée à un vieux chameau »
(II, 584-85).

In his excitement about what he calls an exotic spectacle, it is all too tempting to also

read “erotic spectacle.” Indeed, Charlus’ excitement is such that the narrator notes: “En

me disant ces mots affreux et presque fous, M. de Charlus me serrait le bras à me faire

mal” (II, 585). Charlus would like to see the attractive, young Bloch beat his parents as

he, himself, later is seen to be beaten in Jupien’s brothel. That his desire to see Bloch beat

his parents is homoerotically charged, mixing the homoerotic with the incestuous, is also

evidenced by the fact that the biblical character whose role he would like for Bloch to

play is that of David, who is not only an icon of male beauty, but also often read as a

representative of biblical homosexuality in his relationship with Jonathan, son of King

Saul.48 It may also be recalled that later, in the passage where Charlus picks up Morel at

the train station in Doncières, Charlus attributes to him “l’air d’un jeune David capable

d’assumer un combat contre Goliath” (III, 257). The story of David and Jonathan is not

48
For example, homosexual interpretations have been given to verses such as 1
Samuel 18.1: “[…] the soul of Jonathan was bound to the soul of David, and Jonathan
loved him as his own soul,” 1 Samuel 18.3-4: “Then Jonathan made a covenant with
David, because he loved him as his own soul. Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that
he was wearing, and gave it to David, and his armor, and even his sword and his bow and
his belt,” 1 Samuel 20.30: “Then Saul’s anger was kindled against Jonathan. He said to
him, ‘You son of a perverse, rebellious woman! Do I not know that you have chosen the
son of Jesse [David] to your own shame, and to the shame of your mother’s nakedness?’”
and 2 Samuel 1.26: “I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan; greatly beloved were
you to me; your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.”
155
merely tinged with homosexuality, but a sort of incestuous homosexuality at that, since

David is married to Jonathan’s sister making them brothers-in-law.

Here, the textual conjunction of homosexuality and Judeity, as refracted through

the lens of Charlus’ disturbing anti-Semitism, serves to complement the sadomasochistic

nature of his erotic desires, mingling love and hate in the incestuous context of a family

drama. All the more disturbing, since Charlus bills the scene as a laughing matter and an

amusing farce, is the intensity and violence of his anti-Semitism as evidenced by his use

of litotes: he would like to witness “une lutte entre votre ami et son père où il le blesserait

comme David Goliath.” But David did not, of course, merely injure Goliath; he killed

him. If Charlus wishes to see Bloch “hurt” his father as David did Goliath, he is in fact

taking pleasure in the idea of witnessing a spectacle of parricide. As for Bloch’s mother,

his “charogne de mère,” that “vieux chameau,” taken literally Charlus is advocating

watching Bloch beat a dead horse, or, rather, a dead camel.

The mix of homoeroticism and anti-Semitism comes into play in another of

Charlus’ outraged tirades against Bloch that he conducts though “le jeune Israélite avait

produit sur M. de Charlus une impression tout autre que l’agacement” (III, 489). Here

too, his bile is aimed not only at Bloch but at his whole family as he rails against the fact

that they have rented “La Commanderie.” He finds their inhabiting of a locality built by

the Knights of the Order of Malta to be a sacrilege that offends his French catholic

nationalism and he expresses indignation that Bloch’s father’s office is located in the rue

des Blancs-Manteaux (III, 491). This sacrilegious tendency is one that he attributes to all

Jews: “Dès qu’un Juif a assez d’argent pour acheter un château, il en choisit toujours un

qui s’appelle le Prieuré, l’Abbaye, le Monastère, la Maison-Dieu” (III, 490). But the

156
narrator is careful to specify that the tirade was launched as a ruse for Charlus to learn

Bloch’s Paris address, thus motivated by attraction rather than repulsion, soliciting the

narrator’s remark that “ce discours [est] antijuif ou prohébreux—selon qu’on s’attachera

à l’extérieur des phrases ou aux intentions qu’elles recelaient” (III, 492). The attraction

reaches beyond Bloch as an individual pulling all of Bloch’s family, his Semitic lineage,

into Charlus’ love-hate, sadomasochistic eroticism. If Charlus’ anti-Semitism, in the

service of his eroticism, may add to his excitement by turning his attraction to Bloch into

a sadomasochistic family affair, it is also possible that his desire to see Bloch maim and

murder his parents reflects a desire to see Bloch orphaned, so that Charlus, as potential

lover to Bloch, might also simultaneously occupy, in relation to his young lover, the kind

of paternal role that he offers to the narrator and wishes to play, as we have seen, in

relation to Morel.

In time, “les manières conjugales de M. de Charlus avec Morel” increasingly play

out “à l’imitation d’un ‘ménage’ ou d’une ‘paternité.’” (III, 716). This relationship, in

which Charlus plays the role of both spouse and father, already conceived of by Charlus

in such a way that he takes comfort in “l’adoucissement d’une paternité fictive” (III,

715), therefore incestuous in its own right, seems to take on another degree of projected

incestuousness at the time when Morel becomes the fiancé of Jupien’s niece. When

Morel discloses his matrimonial intentions to Charlus, we are told that “il était doux au

baron d’accompagner son jeune ami dans des visites où il jouait le rôle de futur beau-père

indulgent et discret” (III, 556-57). Charlus seems to be playing the role of father to

Morel, and therefore of future father-in-law to Jupien’s niece by extrapolation. Indeed, he

157
looks favorably on this marriage as a way to extend the grip of his (paternal) authority on

Morel:

L’amour de M. de Charlus pour Morel reprenait une nouveauté délicieuse

quand il se disait : sa femme aussi sera à moi, ils n’agiront que de la façon
qui ne peut me fâcher, il obéiront à mes caprices et ainsi elle sera un signe
(jusqu’ici inconnu de moi) de ce que j’avais presque oublié et qui est si
sensible à mon cœur que pour tout le monde, pour ceux qui me verront les
protéger, les loger, pour moi-même, Morel est mien (III, 560).

As Charlus sees it, Morel’s marriage bond to Jupien’s niece would in fact be a symbol of

the bond between Morel and himself. This somewhat paradoxical view does nonetheless

make a certain amount of sense when the nature of Charlus’ pre-existing relationship

with the girl is brought into consideration. As Jupien’s lover, Charlus’ relation to Jupien’s

niece, whom Proust sometimes calls Jupien’s daughter, is implicitly paternal. Long

before Charlus has taken the official step of becoming the young lady’s adopted father

and providing her with the title Mlle d’Oloron, he has already long exercised paternal

functions in her favor. Charlus supports the livelihood of Jupien and his niece by sending

his relations to patronize their dressmaking shop. What’s more, prior to becoming his

adopted daughter, she owes her social livelihood to Charlus as well. The girl’s charming

manners, complemented by his protection:

faisaient que beaucoup de clientes pour qui elle avait travaillé, la

recevaient en amie, l’invitaient à dîner, la mêlaient à leurs relations, la
petite n’acceptant du reste qu’avec la permission du baron et les soirs où
cela lui convenait (III, 557).

The question therefore arises as to which of the two—Morel or Jupien’s niece—Charlus

plays the role of father and to which of the two he plays that of future father-in-law when

he accompanies Morel on these courtship visits. In effect, it is as though Charlus were

158
poised to preside over the marriage of his own two children, a kind of incestuous

marriage securing for Charlus a double bond of paternity.

It is perhaps worth noting that it is only after Morel has abandoned Jupien’s niece,

when Charlus’ paternal relations will therefore not have the benefit of being shored up by

their union, that Charlus decides to formally adopt the girl. To the extent that inverts may

be considered, in the Proustian cosmos, as members of a single family with common

descendants, the brilliant marriage that she is then able to make with the young

Cambremer effectuates another sort of doubly incestuous paternal bond for Charlus since

the young man is also rumored to be “comme ça” (IV, 241). Already “related” to Charlus

in their common homosexual heritage, Cambremer’s marriage to Charlus’ adopted

daughter creates for Charlus another relationship whose potential is at once paternal and

homoerotic:

Toute la faveur de M. de Charlus se porta après le mariage de sa fille

adoptive sur le jeune marquis de Cambremer ; les goûts de celui-ci, qui
étaient pareils à ceux du baron, du moment qu’ils n’avaient pas empêché
qu’il le choisît pour mari de Mlle d’Oloron, ne firent naturellement que le
lui faire apprécier davantage quand il fut veuf (IV, 251).

In La Prisonnière, the narrator regrets that Charlus, so artistically talented, never

became a writer (III, 713-14). But the fact that he never could become a writer is perhaps

illustrated in his endless pursuit of incestuous paternal relations. As Goodkin eloquently

argues, La Recherche is an “avuncular” narrative that effectuates a sort of “collapse of

the parental axis of narration,” a narrative that refuses linear temporal representation: “If

Marcel is to connect the generations by becoming a narrator, then this narrative link must

be an alternative to the parental link […].”49 He calls the bedtime scene a sort of “false

49
Goodkin, 34, 30.
159
start” where spending the night with his mother is representative, for the narrator, of

“moving into the next generation before the time is right.”50 But, as we observed in

chapter two, the father’s granting of permission for the mother to stay with the narrator in

the bedtime scene actually appears to function as a deterrent to incestuous inclinations,

allowing for the shift of the child’s Oedipal impulses away from his mother and onto the

book, François le champi, and orienting the child toward the realm of the literary in

general. Looked at in this light, it would appear that the unsuccessful transfer of Charlus’

incestuous romantic impulses away from paternal channels might be what in fact makes a

literary career impossible for him, what prevents him from investing in literary “progeny”

as the narrator, however indirectly, or “avuncularly,” is able to do. The contrast between

the two helps to shed light on what contributes to the narrator’s successful development

as an author.

Not only might Charlus serve as a productive counter-example, reinforcing for the

narrator the importance of sublimating and redirecting incestuous erotic impulses into

literary production, but, as Schehr points out, Charlus’ homosexuality contributes greatly

to the narrator’s generation of a rich “metaphoric web.” Schehr remarks how in scene of

courtship between Charlus and Jupien in Sodome et Gomorrhe I:

the narrator’s metaphors are a poetic rewriting of the dance of the

characters; they are the linguistic fulfillment in the enunciation of the
embroidered radar pings of the text. […] The web of metaphors subsumes
even the prosaic statements about homosexuals, turning all the general
statements not into some universal of self-loathing but rather into the
banality that they are; the commonplace, with denotative remarks of the
opinion becoming due fodder for the poetics of the text.51

50
Goodkin, 35.
51
Schehr, 58.
160
In his attempts to understand and decipher Charlus’ enigmatic semiotic emissions, the

narrator is drawn into the engaging exercise of learning how to comprehend and how to

create alternative linguistic codes—a vital step in the development of his own singular

literary language. Unlike Charlus, the narrator will cultivate a thriving “paternity” and he

will do so in relation to his own creation, in giving life to his own work of art.

Vinteuil: Portrait of the Paternal Artist

While Charlus, as failed potential artist, is intimately linked in his paternal

functions to Sodom, Vinteuil, arguably the work’s most unambiguous example of the

accomplished artist, is intimately linked to Gomorrah. While, as we have observed, the

narrator’s father forms a symbolic bridge to Charlus through his associations with the

biblical patriarch, Abraham, the parallel allusions to the biblical cities of Sodom and

Gomorrah through the paternal figures of Charlus and Vinteuil also make a striking

contribution to the symbolic structure of A la recherche du temps perdu. In their

symmetrical representations of the two cities of the plain, these two father figures are

essential to the work’s structure, like its central pillars.

Vinteuil’s connection to Gomorrah is constituted by his daughter’s

homosexuality, which plays an extremely important role in the narrative of La Recherche.

Thus, Vinteuil is not merely a great artist who just happens to also be a father, but it is

specifically as a father, in his paternal capacity in relation to his lesbian daughter, that his

role in the plot takes on much of its particular significance. Long before the narrator’s

discovery of the courtship of Charlus and Jupien, a similar chance encounter had

161
rendered him the witness of the ritual foreplay of Vinteuil’s daughter and her lesbian

lover as he watched through the window. This scene at Montjouvain, in which the

amorous pair takes pleasure in spitting on the father’s portrait, takes place during the

narrator’s youth in Combray and is the very first introduction of the theme of same-sex

love into La Recherche at the same time as this expectoration spectacle highlights and

initiates the exploration of the complex and crucial theme of sadism. At the end of

Sodome et Gomorrhe, Albertine informs the narrator that she knows the lesbian couple at

the very moment when he had thought himself bored with her and ready to break off their

relations. Albertine’s possible intimacy with Mlle Vinteuil and her “amie” refuels the

narrator’s amorous jealousy and his suspicion regarding her sexuality, and in an abrupt

reversal intended to help him appease his anxieties, rather than bringing their relations to

an end, the narrator decides he must marry her and takes her “prisoner” at his parents’

home in Paris.

The great composer’s actual fatherhood to his lesbian daughter, which plays so

crucial a role in the plot, extends into an extraordinary paternal relationship with his

daughter’s lover as well, redoubling his paternal ties. In fact, the father-daughter nature of

the relationship between Vinteuil and his daughter’s lover is accentuated by the fact that

she is never named but rather always identified as “l’amie de Mlle Vinteuil,” in other

words, under the Vinteuil patronym. It is thanks to this “daughter” who had spent “des

années à débrouiller le grimoire laissé par Vinteuil” (III, 766) that his musical genius had

been able to come to be fully recognized and celebrated. Without her, other than the

sonata, all of his compositions would have remained undecipherable:

Indéchiffrables, mais qui pourtant avaient fini à force de patience,

d’intelligence et de respect, par être déchiffrées par la seule personne qui

162
 avait assez vécu auprès de Vinteuil pour bien connaître sa manière de
travailler, pour deviner ses indications d’orchestre : l’amie de Mlle de
Vinteuil (III, 765).

Mlle Vinteuil’s lover therefore not only bears the Vinteuil name in her textual

representation, but is also solely charged with the responsibility of transmitting the

musical legacy of the Vinteuil name.

It is rather remarkable that M. Vinteuil’s daughter’s lover is described as the only

person who had lived long enough in his company to be able to sufficiently understand

how he worked. Why this should not more readily be the case with Mlle Vinteuil herself

is anything but self-evident. This more intuitive scenario is expressed by the narrator’s

mother: « Pauvre M. Vinteuil, disait ma mère, il a vécu et il est mort pour sa fille, sans

avoir reçu son salaire. Le recevra-t-il après sa mort et sous quelle forme ? Il ne pourrait

lui venir que d’elle » (I, 158). Vinteuil does, indeed, posthumously get his due from his

daughter; but only insofar as her relationship with her partner ultimately furnishes him

with this spiritual daughter who saves his work from oblivion.52

The sort of “adoptive” paternal relationship that exists between Vinteuil and his

daughter’s partner is somewhat reminiscent of the one which, as we have observed,

Charlus seeks to establish with the young musician, Morel. Both of these unconventional,

quasi-paternal relationships also engage Vinteuil’s music in the realm of redemption. Just

52
One possible, though far from self-imposing, explanation for why Mlle de
Vinteuil’s partner and not Mlle Vinteuil herself should be the only person who had lived
close enough to him to be able to decipher his work is that, because of the fact that his
wife had died leaving Vinteuil to perform “les soins de mère et de bonne d’enfant” (I,
157), his relationship to his daughter was established as a primarily maternal one so that
it was only much later when her lover had arrived on the scene that he truly assumed a
paternal role, in particular one of transmitting a professional legacy. Whether or not this
be the reason, since she is the one who sustains the musician’s artistic legacy, redeeming
the glory of the Vinteuil name, Mlle Vinteuil’s partner in some respects seems more his
true heir than his natural daughter.
163
as Charlus’ paternal mentoring of Morel ultimately serves in the establishment not only

of Morel’s but also of the composer’s recognition as a great artist, Vinteuil’s paternal

relationship with his daughter’s lover serves the same end. The narrator remarks the

parallel situations of l’amie de Mlle Vinteuil and Morel in terms of the role played by

their homosexual “vice” in making Vinteuil’s music known and saving it from obcurity.

He notes that Charlus’ relations with Morel “faisaient désirer au baron de donner le plus

de retentissement possible aux succès artistiques de sa jeune idole” and that:

à ces œuvres, tout autant que les relations de Mlle Vinteuil avec son amie,
avaient été utiles celles du baron avec Charlie, sorte de chemin de traverse,
de raccourci, grâce auquel le monde allait rejoindre ces œuvres sans le
détour […] (III, 768).

Though the narrator’s comparison of Morel and Mlle Vinteuil, the two interpreters of

Vinteuil’s work, is framed in terms of their homosexual relationships rather than directly

framed in terms of their unconventional father-child relationships, the comparison also

draws upon notions of familial relation when the narrator reasons as to why Mlle

Vinteuil’s lover devoted herself to the difficult task of deciphering Vinteuil’s

compositions, as to why “[d]e relations qui ne sont pas consacrées par les lois, découlent

des liens de parenté aussi multiples, aussi complexes, plus solides seulement, que ceux

qui naissent du mariage” (III, 766).53

Also like the Charlus-Morel adoptive father-son relationship, the father-child

relationship of Vinteuil and his daughter’s lover is the object of suspicions of “incest.”

For example, Doctor Percepied ridicules Vinteuil with the following tawdry insinuations:

53
In fact, one of the examples used to illustrate this principle is predicated on a
sort of substitute father-daughter relation: “Une bonne fille qui portera par simple
convenance le deuil du second mari de sa mère n’aura pas assez de larmes pour pleurer
l’homme que sa mère avait entre tous choisi comme amant” (III, 766).
164
 “Hé bien ! il paraît qu’elle fait de la musique avec son amie, Mlle Vinteuil.
[…] C’est le père Vinteuil qui m’a encore dit ça hier. […] Moi je ne suis
pas pour contrarier les vocations artistiques des enfants, Vinteuil non plus
à ce qu’il paraît. Et puis lui aussi il fait de la musique avec l’amie de sa
fille. Ah ! sapristi on en fait une musique dans c’te boîte-là” (I, 145-46).

While Charlus and Morel’s “incestuous” romantic relationship helps to expose and

circulate Vinteuil’s work, the relationship between Vinteuil and his daughter’s partner

goes a step further actually giving life to works of art, works which otherwise would have

perished along with the composer. So, despite Dr. Percepied’s cruel, sarcastically-

intended raillery, the true nature of the “(re)productive” activities of Vinteuil and his

daughter’s partner proves that their “making music together” is indeed to be rightly be

understood in a literal, rather than a sexual sense.54 In fact, not only were Mlle Vinteuil’s

partner’s efforts in transcribing her “father’s” music, made possible by her familial co-

habitation with the musician, but they were inspired by the fact that “du vivant même du

grand musician elle avait appris de la fille le culte que celle-ci avait pour son père” (III,

765). In other words, her efforts in preserving Vinteuil’s works were motivated by the

fact that, while living in his home, she had developed for him a paternal veneration.

The paternal nature of Vinteuil’s relations with his daughter’s lover is also

evidenced by the fact that they fit squarely into the recurrent Proustian paradigm

characterizing a child’s relationship with its parents as inherently sadistic. This view is

articulated, for example, in 1907 in a piece written for Le Figaro, “Sentiments filiaux

d’un parricide:”

54
Dr. Percepied’s name [“Piercefoot”] may indicate his prejudicial predisposition
to interpret Vinteuil’s relationship with his daughter’s partner sexually and incestuously
since his name recalls that of Oedipus, Greek for “swollen foot,” so-named because he
was abandoned after birth with his feet pierced and bound in a failed effort to ensure that
he would not fulfill the prophecy of killing his father and wedding his mother.
165
 Au fond, nous vieillissons, nous tuons tout ce qui nous aime par les soucis
que nous lui donnons, par l’inquiète tendresse elle-même que nous
inspirons et mettons sans cesse en alarme.55

In Sodome et Gomorrhe, this same (grand) parent-child dynamic is manifested, for

instance, when the narrator finally experiences his grandmother’s death as an irrevocable

reality and reflects upon their former relations:

peu à peu voici que je me souvenais de toutes les occasions que j’avais
saisies, en lui laissant voir, en lui exagérant au besoin mes souffrances, de
lui faire une peine que je m’imaginais ensuite effacée par mes baisers
comme si ma tendresse eût été aussi capable que mon bonheur de faire le
sien […] (III, 155).

The inherent sadism of the child toward his or her parent (to say nothing of the sadism of

the parent toward the child) is most poignantly and memorably manifested in the passage

of the bedtime scene, explored in the previous chapter, when the narrator blames himself

for having weakened and aged his mother. As we have observed, the narrator’s gesture of

aging his mother suggests a positive resolution of the Oedipus complex. It appears to be

indicative of the successful initiation of a new age of increased independence constituting

a crucial first step into the realm of artistic creation, an age in which the young narrator

has become aware of time’s passage and is thus primed to contemplate and execute the

kinds of temporal manipulations that characterize the creation of a narrative. However, it

55
Contre Sainte-Beuve précédé de Pastiches et mélanges et suivi de Essais et
articles (Gallimard, « Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, » 1971) 158-9. The curious choice of
the demonstrative pronoun “ce,” which is normally used to denote an inanimate object,
rather than the more logical “ceux,” which would indicate animate objects, highlights or
corroborates the notion of sadism in that it dehumanizes, making cruel treatment all the
easier to conceive. The anacoluthia resulting in the displacement of the provoked alarm
from the person who would experience it onto his or her quality of “tendresse,” the
grammatical object of “mettre en alarme,” effaces the person to the same end. This
article, including an ending cut out of Le Figaro, was republished by Proust in 1919 as
part of the collection Pastiches et mélanges regrouping texts he had published between
1900 and 1908. It is a commentary written about Henri van Blarenberghe, an
acquaintance of Proust’s who murdered his mother and then killed himself.
166
may also be characterized as sadistic to the extent that the writing of his future text

implies an appropriation of her life for incorporation into his narrative, as the image of

the trace of his “main impie” suggests.56 This incorporation paves the way for the total

dissolution of her individual essence in a text that will seek to represent general, universal

laws of human psychology. 57 In the case of Mlle Vinteuil’s partner, a similar dynamic

can be observed.

The narrator specifies about Vinteuil that “il eût été difficile de ne pas

comprendre qu’il était en train de mourir de chagrin, et de supposer qu’il ne se rendait

pas compte des propos qui couraient” (I, 146). The direct cause-and-effect relation

between the child’s sadistic behavior and the parent’s demise is most clearly manifested

by the fact that, due to the great chagrin she had provoked by her scandalous co-

habitation with his daughter, “l’amie de Mlle Vinteuil était quelquefois traversée par

l’importune pensée qu’elle avait peut-être précipité la mort de Vinteuil” (III, 766).

It is the desire to make up for the pain she had caused this father figure that

assures that Mlle de Vinteuil’s lover will adopt the role of his child in transmitting his

legacy. However, the sadistic acts of the couple seem also, themselves, to have played an

essential role in the creation of Vinteuil’s oeuvre. In a very fine analysis tracing parallels

56
Cf. Doubrovsky for whom eating the madeleine is a symbolic consumption of
the mother and part of the narrator’s effort “de devenir sa propre mère, de s’enfanter lui-
même dans le langage” (126).
57
[…] l’œuvre est signe de bonheur, parce qu’elle nous apprend que dans tout
amour le général gît à côté du particulier, et à passer du second au premier par une
gymnastique qui fortifie contre le chagrin en faisant négliger sa cause pour approfondir
son essence. […] si la vocation s’est en fin réalisée dans les heures où on travaille, on
sent si bien l’être qu’on aime se dissoudre dans une réalité plus vaste […] (IV, 483).

167
between descriptions of Vinteuil’s sonata and the scene at Montjouvain, in his discussion

of what he calls the “Sapphic sublime,” Stephen G. Brown explains that:

Mlle Vinteuil’s sadism […] gives rise to M. Vinteuil’s own art […]. […]
Proust explicitly situates the origins of Vinteuil’s sonata in F sharp for
piano and violin in the suffering induced by the daughter’s scandalous
behavior. Indeed, this music seems to comprise a sonorous transformation
of the illicit caresses of Mlle Vinteuil and her friend […].58

In other words, the work itself represents his musical transcription of those acts, a kind of

appropriation of them into his artistic creation.

The notion that Vinteuil’s art and the parentally-directed sadism he suffered

spring from the same source is also reinforced by the inversely proportional nature of the

lesbian’s sadistic and artistic pursuits:

[…] elles [the profanations of Vinteuil’s portrait] étaient allées se raréfiant

jusqu’à disparaître tout à fait au fur et à mesure que ces relations
charnelles et maladives, ce trouble et fumeux embrasement avait fait place
à la flamme d’une amitié haute et pure. […] Du moins, en passant des
années à débrouiller le grimoire laissé par Vinteuil […] l’amie de Mlle
Vinteuil eut la consolation d’assurer au musicien dont elle avait assombri
les dernières années, une gloire immortelle et compensatrice (III, 765-66).

Mlle Vinteuil’s lover may, in part, be responsible for having precipitated Vinteuil’s

death but, inversely, she is responsible for having preserved his music’s “life.” But this

music that she preserves sublimates her sadism and that of his daughter, effectuating a

kind of exculpation. In a sort of mirror image of the narrator’s “sadistic” act of preparing

to incorporate his mother into his text, paving the way for the complete dissolution of her

individual essence, Vinteuil’s incorporation of the couple’s sadistic acts into his oeuvre

will redeem them to the extent that, in his work, they will detach from the pair, dissolving

58
“The Curse of the ‘Little Phrase’: Swann and the Sorrows of the Sapphic
Sublime” College Literature 30.4 (2003) 96.

168
into the psychological generalities of human nature that great works capture. Thus, in

preserving the music that redeems her sins, she redeems both Vinteuil’s legacy as well as

her own and that of his daughter. As Louis de Beauchamp puts it, with Vinteuil, we

penetrate “dans le mystère de l’économie du salut, dans la voie du rachat car […]

Vinteuil apparaît comme le rédempteur des fautes de cette fille adorée.”59

The most significant redemption achieved by Vinteuil’s music is, of course, that

of the narrator himself. The moment when the narrator hears Vinteuil’s septet constitutes

an essential turning point in La Recherche, and the narrator explicitly marks the

conceptual revolution it inspires, a revolution in which his confidence in the transcendent

nature of art is, finally and after much wavering, established as absolute and unshakeable.

Earlier in the day on which he first hears the septet, the narrator had disparagingly mused

upon Art’s lack of value:

[…] fruit de mes réflexions […] l’idée que l’Art […] n’était pas quelque
chose qui valût la peine d’un sacrifice, quelque chose d’en dehors de la
vie, ne participant pas à sa vanité et son néant, l’apparence d’individualité
réelle obtenue dans les œuvres n’étant due qu’au trompe-l’œil de l’habileté
technique. […]. (III, 702-3)

However, announcing the magnitude of the impact that discovering Vinteuil’s septet will

have on him later that evening, he then reveals that “[…] dès cette soirée même, mes

idées sur l’art allaient se relever de la diminution qu’elles avaient éprouvée l’après-midi

[…]” (III, 702-3). Indeed, while listening to Vinteuil’s septet, the narrator proclaims: “Je

savais que cette nuance nouvelle de la joie, cet appel vers une joie supraterrestre, je ne

l’oublierais jamais” (III, 765). And he ponders whether he too will ever be able to create

59
Le Côté de Vinteuil (Plon, 1966) 74.
169
such joy, giving to discourse on the purpose and meaning of art and artistic creation, in

addition to a theoretical articulation, an intimate, personal dimension as well.

Like other central themes of La Recherche which, as we observed in chapter one,

are ostensibly rooted in the narrator’s early childhood experiences with his father, the

development of the theme of artistic creation in relation to the work of Vinteuil appears

to be no exception, participating actively in the paternal network of associations

established in Combray. Traces of the narrator’s experiences with his father pervade

reflections made about the nature and meaning of Vinteuil’s work, especially the septet.

For example, there are very strong echoes of the narrator’s experience of taking walks

with his family in his youth (specifically of the role played by his father in helping the

narrator and his mother to become re-oriented at the end of an excursion) and the

narrator’s description of his experience of first hearing the septet. In Combray, we read:

Tout d’un coup mon père nous arrêtait et demandait à ma mère : « Où

sommes-nous ? » Épuisée par la marche, mais fière de lui, elle lui avouait
tendrement qu’elle n’en savait absolument rien. Il haussait les épaules et
riait. Alors, comme s’il l’avait sortie de la poche de son veston avec sa
clef, il nous montrait debout devant nous la petite porte de derrière de
notre jardin […] (I, 113-14).

Notably, in language that very closely parallels that of this description of the narrator’s

father as guide in Combray, the description of the narrator’s first hearing of the septet

also reveals a similar process of being led from a state of complete disorientation to one

of sudden revelation and recognition:

Le concert commença, je ne connaissais pas ce qu’on jouait ; je me trouvai

en pays inconnu. Où le situer ? Dans l’œuvre de quel auteur étais-je ? […]
Comme quand, dans un pays qu’on ne croit pas connaître et qu’en effet on
a abordé par un côté nouveau, après avoir tourné un chemin, on se trouve
tout d’un coup déboucher dans un autre dont les moindres coins vous sont
familiers, mais seulement où on n’avait pas l’habitude d’arriver par là, on
se dit tout d’un coup : « Mais c’est le petit chemin qui mène à la petite

170
 porte du jardin de mes amis *** […] » […] ainsi tout d’un coup je me
reconnus au milieu de cette musique nouvelle pour moi en pleine sonate
de Vinteuil […] la petite phrase, enveloppée harnachée d’argent, toute
ruisselante de sonorités brillantes, légères et douces comme des écharpes,
vint à moi, reconnaissable sous ces parures nouvelles (III, 753-54).

Through this parallel in descriptive language, the initial hearing of the Vinteuil septet is

presented as a kind of homecoming through the garden door, repeating and continuing the

orientation/revelation function attributed to the father in Combray, recalling the outdoor

excursions so strongly associated with the narrator’s father and grandfather early in La

Recherche.

In his description of first hearing the septet, not only does the narrator evoke the

same kind of garden imagery as associated with the narrator’s father early on in La

Recherche but he also makes reference to The Thousand and One Nights in a way that

seems to tie into the paternal network of associations initiated by the father, garbed in an

exotic turban-like head wrap, in the bedtime scene. Just before the “magical apparition”

of the little phrase which allows him to identify the composition as Vinteuil’s, the

narrator had longed for some kind of guide—the role played by his father in the Combray

excursions—to reveal to him in whose work he was aurally enveloped:

J’aurais bien voulu […] être un personnage de ces Mille et Une Nuits […]
où dans les moments d’incertitude surgit soudain un génie ou une
adolescente d’une ravissante beauté, invisible pour les autres, mais non
pour le héros embarrassé, à qui elle révèle exactement ce qu’il désire
savoir. Or à ce moment, je fus précisément favorisé d’une telle apparition
magique (III, 753).

The intertextual reference not only links the experience of hearing Vinteuil’s

music to the narrator’s past excursions with his father; it also prefigures the concluding

pages of La Recherche in which the narrator compares his own future work to a new sort

of Thousand and One Nights such that associations of the paternal network can once

171
more be observed to relate to the theme of self-development in the realm of artistic

production. Just as the narrator’s recognition of Vinteuil’s artistry depends upon the

pattern of repetition and continuation that the little phrase establishes in the evolution of

Vinteuil’s work from the sonata to the septet, the comparison between the narrator’s

future work and The Thousand and One Nights is attributable, in part, to a common

structure based on patterns of repetition and continuation.60 Of course, patterns of

repetition and continuation—such as the refracted language of the description of the

paternally-guided Combray excursions that we discover in the description of hearing the

septet—constitute the rhythm of the whole of Proust’s Recherche as well.

The comparison of Vinteuil’s music to The Thousand and One Nights continues a

few pages later with the remark that“[u]ne page symphonique de Vinteuil […] dévoilait

comme un trésor insoupçonné et multicolore toutes les pierreries des Mille et Une Nuits.”

(III, 758). Linked in one instance to both Vinteuil’s music and the Arabian tales through

his guiding function, here the father seems also to be linked to them (or implicitly to link

them) in the realm of color; for these references to the Arabian tales recall the bedtime

scene’s presentation of the narrator’s father as a colorful, exotic and multicultural

60
This holds true on two levels. First, on that of the process of writing
(l’énonciation): the constant re-launching of the narrative of the Arabian tales through the
nightly-repeated sparing of Sheherazade’s life so that she may pick up and continue her
storytelling corresponds to the reprieve sought by the narrator, anxiously wondering if “le
Maître de ma destinée […] le matin quand j’interromprais mon récit, voudrait bien
surseoir à mon arrêt de mort et me permettrait de reprendre la suite le prochain soir.” (IV,
620). Second, similar patterns of repetition and continuation are observed on the level of
the projected product of the narrator’s labors (l’énoncé). Having sought to represent “une
vérité qui ne vous demande pas vos préférences et vous défend d’y penser […] on se
trouve parfois rencontrer ce qu’on a abandonné, et avoir écrit, en les oubliant, les “Contes
arabes” ou les “Mémoires de Saint-Simon” d’une autre époque” (IV, 621), In other
words, his future work might be a kind of repetition and continuation of the “truth”
conveyed by the Thousand and One Nights (or Saint-Simon’s Memoires) but adapted to
his own vision of the world.
172
Abraham (and one whose wellspring of compassion in the bedtime scene, at least at the

time, could well be described as a “trésor insoupçonné”). Similar color schemes seem to

characterize the father resembling Abraham in his “robe de nuit blanche sous le

cachemire de l’Inde violet et rose qu’il nouait autour de sa tête depuis qu’il avait des

névralgies” (I, 36) and Vinteuil’s “rougeoyant septuor” and “blanche sonate” (III, 759).

Notably, the “névralgies” that give the father’s “cachemire de l’Inde violet et

rose” its raison d’être, and that we have seen to be a possible link between the narrator

and his father, also reappear in relation to the music of Vinteuil.61 In describing the

movement of the septet, the narrator evokes:

[u]ne phrase d’un caractère douloureux […] mais si profonde, si vague, si

interne, presque si organique et viscérale qu’on ne savait pas, à chacune de
ses reprises, si c’était celles d’un thème ou d’une névralgie (III, 764).62

61
It might also be remarked that Vinteuil’s music and the theme of “névralgies”
also converge around Mme Verdurin who claims to be plagued by this and other ailments
provoked by the emotional turmoil of hearing certain musical masterpieces. Though this
may be a ridiculous affectation that Proust assigns to her in order to condemn these kinds
of socially-motivated posturing and pretensions, as Stéphane Chaudier quite rightly
remarks, music nonetheless does leave a physical imprint on Mme Verdurin’s body that
argues forcefully for the transformative power that Proust attributes to the musical
medium: “Vérité ou mystification ? Mme Verdurin apprécie-t-elle ou non la musique
‘avancée’ ? Peu importe: si l’âme musicienne a sa poésie, le corps a aussi la sienne. La
musique s’y incarne. Elle le transfigure: les tempes de la Patronne deviennent de ‘belles
sphères brûlantes, endolories et laiteuses, où roule immortellement l’Harmonie’. La
vision hyperbolique—le front devient sphère--, la triade adjectivale où alternent les
liquides—‘brûlantes, endolories et laiteuses’—la noble allégorie de l’Harmonie et la
prosopopée du corps rompent avec la référence triviale au rhumatisme. Elles proclament
le martyre de la Patronne. Elles instituent l’évidence d’un corps possédé par la musique
[…]” “‘Un mystique chant du coq’ : Proust et la musique,” Autour de Proust: Mélanges
offerts à Annick Bouillaguet, ed. Jeanyves Guérin (Travaux et recherches de l’UMLV,
2004) 100.
62
The narrator makes the same kind of comparison between a musical motif and a
“névralgie” earlier in La Prisonnière in an analysis of Wagner arrived at via Vinteuil. He
is playing Vinteuil’s sonata on the piano when he remarks “[e]n jouant cette mesure, et
bien que Vinteuil fût là en train d’exprimer un rêve qui fût resté tout à fait étranger à
Wagner, je ne pus m’empêcher de murmurer : ‘Tristan !’” (III, 664). He continues to
reflect upon Wagner and observes: “ Je me rendais compte de tout ce qu’à de réel
173
 While other of Proust’s fictional artist father figures like the writer, Bergotte and

the painter, Elstir inspire the narrator to write and help him to articulate theories about

what makes a work or an artist truly great, Vinteuil, the only artist who literally is a

father, seems to play a more privileged and integral role in the narrator’s artistic

development, just as he does in the narrative plot. In fact, the narrator learns of Bergotte’s

death on the very day that he first hears Vinteuil’s septet, suggesting a sort of

supersession on the part of the musician, a sort of symbolic evolution from a more

dependent realm of maternal influences and associations to a more independently-

oriented paternal realm of guided self-discovery. Bergotte, the grandmother’s favorite

writer, as well an intimate friend of the Swann household (where the narrator is

introduced to him), is, after all, quite steeped in the maternal realm. The narrator’s

development as a writer with his own independent voice, though beginning with the

Bergotte-like passage he writes about the clochers de Martinville, depends upon his

ability to leave behind this first, primary model with which he identifies and that he

emulates and to evolve beyond it. As we have observed, this function of helping the

narrator to detach from primary attachments of the maternal realm is executed by the

father, who initiates the process, in the bedtime scene. As Stéphane Chaudier remarks,

when Norpois disdains the affectatious style of Bergotte’s prose, “malgré sa bêtise, ce

‘vieux serin’ voit juste.”63 In Combray, the narrator does refer to pages of Bergotte’s

l’oeuvre de Wagner, en revoyant ces thèmes insistants et fugaces qui visitent un acte, ne
s’éloignent que pour revenir, et parfois lointains, assoupis, presque détachés, sont à
d’autres moments, tout en restant vagues, si pressants et si proches, si internes, si
organiques, si viscéraux qu’on dirait la reprise moins d’un motif que d’une névralgie (III,
665).
63
Chaudier, 102.
174
work as a “père retrouvé” but, ironically, what motivates the appellation is the fact that he

recognizes in them ideas that he has already had himself:

Un jour, ayant rencontré dans un livre de Bergotte […] une plaisanterie

que le magnifique et solennel langage de l’écrivain rendait encore plus
ironique mais qui était la même que j’avais souvent faite à ma grand-mère
en parlant de Françoise, une autre fois où je vis qu’il ne jugeait pas
indigne de figurer dans un de ces miroirs de la vérité qu’étaient ses
ouvrages une remarque analogue à celle que j’avais eu l’occasion de faire
sur notre ami M. Legrandin […] il me sembla soudain que mon humble
vie et les royaumes du vrai n’étaient pas aussi séparés que j’avais crus,
qu’il coïncidaient même sur certains points, et de confiance et de joie je
pleurai sur les pages de l’écrivain comme dans les bras d’un père retrouvé
(I, 95).

In other words, Bergotte’s work becomes like a “père retrouvé” for the narrator when it

functions as a mirror of the narrator’s own thoughts and ideas. What the narrator

rediscovers is his faith in the truth value of his observations of his own life experience

such that, following the logic of the analogy, Bergotte’s fatherhood to the narrator

consists in a resemblance to the narrator, is based on Bergotte reflecting the narrator’s

own observational and creative capacity. It is almost as if the tearfully joyous discovery

of this lost father is truly a self-discovery that all but evacuates Bergotte himself from the

picture, positing the narrator as his own father insofar as what he discovers is the value of

his own experience and generative creativity.

Unlike Bergotte, in terms of the truth value that each artist imparts to the narrator,

Elstir appears to remain Vinteuil’s equal. Like Vinteuil, what he shares with the narrator

through his work is not an artistic model or style to emulate, but rather insight into the

nature of the process or function that every truly great artist engages in and accomplishes.

Elstir’s artistic conception, like Vinteuil’s, helps to teach the narrator that, to be an artist,

175
he must strive to represent the unique spectacle of what he sees through the lens of his

own, singular, subjective vision:

Le seul véritable voyage, le seul bain de Jouvence, ce ne serait pas d’aller

vers de nouveaux paysages, mais d’avoir d’autres yeux, de voir l’univers
avec les yeux d’un autre, de cent autres, de voir les cent univers que
chacun d’eux voit, que chacun d’eux est ; et cela nous le pouvons avec un
Elstir, avec un Vinteuil, avec leurs pareils, nous volons vraiment d’étoiles
en étoiles. (III, 762)

Though Elstir may be his equal in terms of artistic genius, he is nonetheless less

central a figure in À la recherche du temps perdu than Vinteuil. It is Vinteuil, the

narrative’s doubly paternal father figure to both his daughter and her lover, the artist

whose paternity is central to his identity, who is also most integral to the plot and seems

most influential in terms of the narrator’s reflections on his own literary vocation. In the

passages concerning Vinteuil’s septet, what is in question is not just the nature of what it

means to be an artist, to accomplish the task of creating a new world, that is, a singular

way of seeing the world that renders it new—which the narrator notably calls the artist’s

“patrie inconnue,” “patrie intérieure” and “patrie perdu” (III, 761). Indeed, what is

explored is also the primordial, preliminary question of the very value of Art and whether

the narrator, himself, is willing and able to undertake the task, the arduous endeavor, of

creating his own great masterpiece to assume his literary destiny. Of the joy provoked in

the narrator by Vinteuil’s septet, he finds himself compelled to ask: “Mais serait-elle

jamais réalisable pour moi ?” (III, 765).

176
 Conclusion

As we have demonstrated, despite Proustian criticism’s tendency to focus on the

influence of the mother, the narrator’s father, and father-figures in general, do indeed

play essential roles in the unfolding of the narrator’s story of how he evolves on the path

to his vocational destiny as a writer. Though the narrator’s father (and grandfather)

appear far less frequently in the text than his mother and grandmother, and though his

role may often appear derisory on the surface, the significance of the background imagery

against which he appears as well as the importance of what is taking place and what is at

stake concurrently in the text at the relatively rare moments when he does appear, suggest

his deeper significance.

I have argued that, in Combray, the narrator’s father and/or grandfather take part

in what appear to be essential foundational scenes at certain defining moments in the

narrator’s developmental trajectory, all of which feature nature or floral imagery. For

example, I examined how the presence of the father and grandfather in the scene in which

the narrator first encounters Gilberte places them at the center of the foundational scene

initiating the central theme of romantic love. Likewise, the double-paternal presence of

the narrator’s grandfather and Swann’s father in the ostensibly deceptively anecdotal

passage in which the two men walk in the park on the day of the latter’s wife’s demise

places the father figure at the center of the foundational scene initiating the central theme

of coping with death and loss.

Most important, at the brief moment in which he occupies the text at the climax of

the bedtime scene, the narrator’s father, depicted as resembling an Italian Renaissance

painter’s supposed representation of the patriarch Abraham, appears in an incredibly

177
metaphorically dense image that superposes multiple temporal, spatial and cultural

references. In carefully examining this extraordinary, colorful and exotic ekphrastic

image of the father, I demonstrate how he seems to incarnate several of the work’s most

central themes which he appears to prefigure, initiate and unite, themes like the Oedipus

complex, homosexuality, Judeity, temporal superposition, as well as the destruction of

the body by Time and sadism. Thus, he appears like a locus or a primary source of the

materials for the narrator’s future artistic endeavors—like the seed of La Recherche.

Though many critics accept the young narrator’s claims in Combray that his

father’s demeanor was generally detached, his behavior authoritarian and arbitrary and

that the narrator’s mother and grandmother were far more aware of his anxious suffering,

than was his father, I juxtapose these claims with later ones made in La Prisonnière

which suggest the contrary, providing evidence of strong personality resemblances

between father and son. I also argue that the Indian cashmere that the father has wrapped

around his head in the bedtime scene, a prophylactic measure against recurrent neuralgia,

suggests that he suffers from a nervous disorder that may subtly signal a connection to

the narrator’s own excessive sensitivity and nervousness, positing a father-son

resemblance in a domain intimately related to the narrator’s creative propensity, a first

link between the narrator’s father and his son’s future vocation in writing.

Whereas Proustian critics often claim that the narrator’s (or Proust’s) ambiguous

and troubled relationship with his mother is what most fundamentally motivates La

Recherche, I argue that both maternal and paternal contributions to the narrator’s

education are essential to the development of his literary vocation and that, despite a

quantitative discrepancy that favors the narrator’s more prominently featured mother,

178
both paternal and maternal influences function concurrently to generate the narrative.

Looking at several examples, the most substantial of which being the contrasting ways in

which two portraits of Venice—one with maternal associations and one with paternal

associations—stand in stark opposition, I trace a pattern linking the mother to art and

cultural objects and the father to more visceral, subjective experiences of nature. I show

how, in making plans for a trip to Venice, considering the weather and consulting train

schedules, the father becomes a sort of oracle for the narrator, joining le temps (weather)

with le temps (time), superposing what is imagined will be a future experience with the

present moment. This temporal manipulation, which I characterize as a mirror image

counterpart to involuntary memory which superposes present and past, creates a strong

physical and emotional reaction in the narrator who experiences it as ecstatic and surreal.

This, I argue, constitutes an exercise in temporal manipulation similar to what authors

execute in writing. The father’s later proclamation of his approval of the narrator’s desire

to become a writer effectuates a similar temporal manipulation, provoking the narrator, in

a disorientingly concrete way, to conceive of himself in the role of a master of temporal

manipulation through authorship.

The father’s association with “nature” and the mother’s with “culture,” and the

reaction of each parent to the narrator in the bedtime scene where the father responds to

the narrator’s distress compassionately and leniently while the mother advocates rigid

adherence to the rules, lead me to question whether Proust has simply reversed the

classical Aristotelian paradigm. I conclude that he does not, citing the examples of the

narrator’s grandmother and grandfather, who both mingle characteristics of each

category, as does Aunt Léonie. I underscore the importance of this matriarchal widow

179
who wields paternal authority, not only because she is representative of both sexes and

the purveyor of the involuntary memory-invoking madeleine, but also because she is the

relative whom the narrator claims to most closely resemble. Notably, this resemblance is

based on characteristics of the future narrator as writer who, like his aunt, will shut

himself off from the world in order to re-create it in his imagination.

Since the father at all times maintains his authority, what is at stake with him, in

my view, is not so much the questioning of gender roles, but rather the establishment of a

structural pattern of associations linking each parent to a different, essential aspect of the

narrator’s education—the mother with reading, introduction to cultural productions and

mimetic functions like pastiche and citation and the father with exercise of the

imagination, personal creativity and writing. The father’s “feminine” characteristics, like

his compassion and sensitivity, are far less pertinent as signs of gender bending, I submit,

than as signs of an artistic inclination since an artist must both have knowledge of culture

and the capacity to create from imagination, must be sensitive to nature (including human

nature) and be intelligent.

The view, held by most critics, that the father’s granting of permission for his son

to spend the night alongside his mother constitutes a failure of the father to assert his

authority in order to resolve the narrator’s Oedipus Complex is one that I challenge.

Instead, I see the role attributed to him by Proust as one of distributing parental

responsibilities between himself and his wife. Whereas the father, as a role model, shows

the narrator how to appreciate sensual pleasures and in particular how to be sensitive to

the inspirational powers of flowers and nature, the mother, I argue, is charged with the

function of igniting the narrator’s passion for literature and cultural objects, a task she

180
undertakes that special night in reading François le Champi to the narrator. Contrary to

the view of most critics who see a confirmation of persisting Oedipal desire between the

narrator and his mother in her reading of this story of developing romantic love between

a mother and her adopted son, like Philippe Willemart, I propose that François le Champi

functions as a transitional object allowing the narrator’s Oedipal impulses to be

reoriented away from his mother by being transferred to the book. I recall that it was the

father’s insistence that the mother stay with her son, over her objection, a sort of

delegation of paternal authority, which had set the conditions for this transfer, resulting in

a successful interruption of the narrator’s desire for his mother and a shifting of that

desire into the domain of literature.

Sexual desire is further evacuated through the mother’s reading of François le

Champi since she skips over love scenes. As a result, the narrator cannot understand the

story and, lacking any logical cohesion, in the narrator’s imagination François becomes

associated with vague notions of purplish colors. This, I assert, is further evidence of

paternal and maternal complementarity in the task of reorienting the narrator’s desire into

the world of literature since these color schemes seem to draw from the image of the

father as Abraham, garbed in purple and pink cashmere.

The narrator cites his guilt for having vanquished his mother as sickness,

melancholy or old age might, accusing himself of tracing the first wrinkle onto her soul

with his “impious” hand and of causing her first white hair to appear. While numerous

critics link his feeling of guilt to prevailing Oedipal impulses, my reading of this

statement differs. I propose that the emphasis on the mother’s having been aged not only

suggests that the narrator no longer finds her sexually desirable, but also deserves more

181
attention as the source of the guilt. I suggest that the guilty trace of his hand is, in fact, the

trace of writing, the performance of the kind of temporal manipulation later demonstrated

by his father, the gesture of the author aging his mother to appropriate her life for

incorporation into his narrative.

If the image of the father as the biblical Abraham by analogy transforms the

mother into Sarah, who gave birth in her old age, thereby reinforcing the father’s

successful disruption of the narrator’s Oedipal desire for his mother, I argue that it also

opens up a space for polyphonic, co-temporal and intertextual narration. The enunciating

narrator is able to reconstruct his experience in the bedtime scene in his narration as a

rather comical parody of Genesis that grows out of the single, powerful image of the

father as Abraham, adding literary depth and dimension to the narrative. However, I

contend that the sacrifice of the narrator/Isaac might not be averted as it is in the Bible. In

accordance with a number of critics (though not necessarily drawing the same

conclusions), I suggest that a Lacanian interpretation of the Oedipal scene better reflects

what is at stake in the bedtime scene, beyond the question of the narrator’s psychosexual

development. At stake is the narrator’s entry into the symbolic order of language and the

sacrifice of the feeling of security and self-identity that his mother’s presence used to

afford him, this sacrifice that necessarily accompanies the “castrating” shift into the

realm of language and writing wherein he is split into narrator and narrated.

Turning next to a number of other, relatively minor father figures, I note that they

too show evidence of relating to the theme of the narrator’s literary vocation. I note,

however, that the most influential extra-familial father figures all exhibit, to varying

degrees, certain characteristics that break with common gender and/or sexual stereotypes.

182
 Though Swann is almost universally referred to in Proustian criticism as a

surrogate father figure to the narrator, I posit that he in fact has much more in common

with the role assigned by Proust to the narrator’s maternal figures than his paternal ones

in terms of the reversed Aristotelian paradigm, in which he associates father with nature

and mother with culture, and that I have shown Proust to use to distinguish the roles of

the narrator’s parents. Swann helps the narrator’s mother and grandmother to present him

with a rich cultural background and, I assert, is not a surrogate father figure who supplies

what the narrator’s father lacks, but, on the contrary, is a supplementary maternal

influence offering more of what the narrator’s mother and grandmother provide.

Swann also holds a number of false notions about the meaning and nature of art

that are similar to those held by the narrator’s grandmother and that stand in opposition to

the Proustian aesthetic whose principles the narrator progressively learns. I recall that,

whereas for Proust and eventually the narrator, art is a kind of hermeneutic device, a sort

of lens through which to look at the world in order to disengage a subjective meaning,

Swann’s views on art are based on idolatrous identifications and, to him, art functions as

a sign in direct relation to an external referent. Swann values people in relation to artistic

identifications and the value of a work of art depends, for him, on its ability to anticipate

or point forward to someone or something observable in the real world. This is why, for

example, Swann falls in love with Odette because he finds that she resembles a

representation of Zipporah in a Botticelli fresco. Both Swann and the grandmother

believe that the artwork displaces an object from one discreet moment into another era in

a way that seems to halt diachronic time, contradicting the Proustian aesthetic which is

based on temporal cross-weaving and superposition as in the involuntary memory model

183
where a bygone synchronic moment is pulled into the diachronic flow of the present. I

claim that Swann’s conception of the relationship between art and time is also maternal in

nature because of this suppression of time’s diachronic aspect which recalls the maternal

epoch of childhood in which its passing is imperceptible. Swann’s idolatrous artistic

identifications also conceptually trap him in the maternal childhood era of “L’âge où on

croit qu’on crée ce qu’on nomme” (I, 89) such that once he has named Odette a Botticelli

he is forever caught in this association. This contrasts with Proust’s conception of the

function of the name which, for the narrator, is only an imaginative point of departure,

leaving open the possibility of continuous conceptual evolution.

As further evidence of Swann’s maternal associations, I cite the fact that during

his painful love affair with Odette he retreats to Combray where he has always been

known as the “fils Swann.” This milieu is a sort of comforting realm of women and

children where the narrator’s mother pulls him aside to speak with him “mother to

mother” about Gilberte. Here, he speaks about art both with and like the narrator’s

maternal figures, using extensive citations as do the narrator’s mother and grandmother;

or he speaks with a tone of ironic distance signaling his own speech as citation or

imitation of the speech of others. I therefore submit that his speech is not production but

reproduction, the maternal function par excellence.

I also examine the way that Swann’s patriarchal status in his own family is

denied. Whereas the norms of his social context would have the wife leave her family of

origin to reconstruct her social identity around that of her husband, Swann, in fact, is

reinvented as the husband of Odette and it is she who determines their social relations.

184
Even his patriarchal transmission of his surname is undone when, after his death, Gilberte

takes on the more elegant patronym of her stepfather.

The common claim that Swann’s torturous, jealous affair with Odette serves as a

guide or initiatory model to the narrator for his future romantic experiences is one that I

reject. On the contrary, it is because the narrator has already, himself, lived the

experience of torturous, jealous love in relation to his mother that he is able to relate to

and comprehend Swann’s story. I contend that Swann’s incredulous exclamation that he

had suffered so and experienced his greatest love affair with a woman “qui n’était pas

[s]on genre” (I, 375), both suggests the possibility that he might have preferred a partner

not of Odette’s gender and also underscores, given the emasculated role he plays in his

family, his questionable belonging to the masculine gender. In calling Swann the source

of all the materials for his work in Le Temps retrouvé, the narrator all but calls Swann the

mother of the text, its matrix.

Like Swann, the highly cultured Charlus, whose feminine sensibility is remarked

by the narrator’s grandmother, has many maternal characteristics. Yet Charlus seems far

more liminal to me than Swann in relation to the reversed paradigm linking father with

nature and mother with culture. He bridges the two aspects because his primary function

is to introduce the narrator to new facets of “human nature,” in particular homosexuality,

or inversion as Proust prefers to call it, seeming to favor a gender-transitive, essentialist

definition of a homosexual male as a woman trapped in a man’s body, or, a man who is,

in essence, a woman. Still, I argue, Proust’s text does seem to create an opening for a

more modern way of conceiving of the homosexual that de-emphasizes biological

predetermination in favor of identifications that are performative. For, though the narrator

185
comes to the essentialist conclusion that Charlus really “is” a woman, he does so based

on witnessing him performing an act that is normatively defined as female behavior, the

act of choosing a man as his object of desire. The subtle shift in emphasis from merely

defining what Charlus “is” to the revelation to the narrator of what he “is” constitutes the

beginning of a conceptual re-orientation from the ontological to the epistemological that

could be made compatible with the notion that gender is not an immutable natural

phenomenon but a variable, cultural one.

Turning my attention away from the question of Charlus’ “true” gender but to the

paternal functions he performs, I recall that he first explicitly appears in La Recherche in

Combray, during the scene in which the narrator first sees Gilberte, where, alongside

Odette, he is occupying Swann’s place in the mother-father-child triad. I contend that his

first implicit appearance in the text is through the paternal network of associations

initiated in the bedtime scene’s image of the father as the biblical Abraham, since, in

Genesis, Abraham barters with God to try to save Sodom and Gomorrah from

destruction, an association that I see reinforced by the comparison in Sodome et

Gomorrhe I between the descendants of Sodom and of Abraham.

In Proust’s conception, Charlus’ homosexuality places him at the crossroads of

nature and culture where, as critics such as Marcel Muller and Lawrence Schehr point

out, the ethical questionability comes not from homosexuality itself but from the

culturally-imposed duplicitous posturing that society demands of those who do not fall

into hetero-normative categories. Charlus’ form of disingenuous social posturing, I

observe, often takes the form of disguising homosexually-motivated desires as

homosocial offers of paternalistic mentorship. I examine some examples of the way in

186
which the paternal element within Charlus’ role as mentor to Morel becomes increasingly

prominent but also increasingly ambiguously defined such that Charlus seems to reveal at

once his desperate desire to perform paternal functions and his inability to clearly

conceive of himself in the paternal role.

At one point, the narrator suggests that Charlus’ affection for Morel may be

tinged with an element of incest, prompting me to question whether the truly scandalous

aspect of Charlus’ sexuality is not its same-sex orientation or the sado-masochistic

pleasures he enjoys in Jupien’s brothel but rather his fundamental urge to violate the

incest taboo. I ask if this is what might inspire him to repeatedly frame sexual

relationships and fantasies in paternal and familial terms. Charlus’ incessant search for

relations that are both paternal and incestuous in nature might be what prevents him, I

argue, from ever being able to realize his creative potential. The narrator, I affirm,

preserves his authorial integrity first by having misunderstood and thus by default having

rejected Charlus’ early offer of “paternal” mentorship and second by doing what Charlus

could not—channeling incestuous impulses into what will become a parental relationship

with a work of his own creation.

Though Charlus never develops his artistic potential, Vinteuil, his structural

homologue, is the most important model of the artist in La Recherche. Through their

parallel representations of Sodom and Gomorrah the two, I contend, function as its

central structural pillars. Vinteuil, I point out, is not merely a great artist who,

incidentally, is also a father. He is a great artist whose paternal relation to his daughter

and her lesbian lover are central to the plot. In addition to influencing how the narrator

perceives the very value of artistic creation, it is the Vinteuil household that first brings

187
female homosexuality to his attention, an occurrence that eventually greatly influences

his relationship with Albertine as well. I call attention to the fact that his paternal role is

expanded to include an exceptional paternity to his daughter’s lover who is only ever

known in the text as “l’amie de Mlle Vinteuil,” in other words under the Vinteuil

patronym. Vinteuil’s quasi-adoptive paternal relationship with his daughter’s lover, I

remark, resembles that of Charlus and Morel and both of these unconventional paternal

relationships contribute to making Vinteuil’s musical genius known, exposing and

circulating his oeuvre. I underscore that in taking on the responsibility of deciphering his

music and thus saving it from oblivion, Mlle Vinteuil’s lover assumes the role of a child

transmitting the legacy of the family name.

I also contend that Vinteuil’s relationship to his daughter’s partner further

resembles a paternal one because it is built on the sadism that, for Proust, always seems

to characterize a child’s treatment of its parents. While the scandalous relationship

between Vinteuil’s daughter and her lover may have caused his heartbroken demise, it

also gives life to his works by inspiring Mlle Vinteuil’s lover to devote herself to

transcribing and preserving his music as an act of redemption. But, as Stephen G. Brown

shows, the music itself seems to be a sonorous transcription of the sadistic acts of

profanation performed by the lesbian pair such that his creativity and their sadism seem

to be inextricable causally related.

Made possible by the redemption that the preservation of Vinteuil’s music

affords to his daughter and her lover is the redemption of the narrator’s lost faith in art

that it inspires. I show how this redemption is also tied to the narrator’s early experiences

with his father in Combray, remarking close parallels between the language used to

188
describe the experience of first hearing Vinteuil’s septet and the walks the narrator used

to take with his father, noting analogous patterns of disorientation and revelations that

mark both the father as guide in nature and the little phrase as guide from Vinteuil’s

septet to the sonata. I note that references to similar color schemes and to the Thousand

and One Nights—the work to which the narrator compares his future writing—also serve

to associate the narrator’s description of hearing the septet with the originary and exotic

father/Abraham image of the bedtime scene, as does the narrator’s comparison of hearing

the septet to neuralgia.

I note that while other artist role models like Bergotte and Elstir play vital roles in

the history of the narrator’s creative trajectory, it is nonetheless Vinteuil, the only artist

role model who also is a father, who is most essential to La Recherche because of the

central role that Vinteuil’s family story plays in the plot. Bergotte, who ultimately

represents a model that the narrator must evolve beyond in order to find his own authorial

voice and whose many ties to the maternal realm include the fact that he is the

grandmother’s favorite author and an intimate friend of Swann’s family, dies, I recall, on

the day that the narrator first hears the septet, signaling a sort of relay. Elstir, though he

ostensibly remains Vinteuil’s equal in terms of the value of his work, nonetheless also

appears to be less indispensable to the unfolding of La Recherche than the father/artist

Vinteuil. I underscore the narrator’s association of art with the notion of paternity when

he lauds the contributions of great artists like Elstir and Vinteuil, calling the unique

vision of the world that their works create that of their “patrie inconnue,” “patrie

intérieure” and “patrie perdu” (III, 761).

189
 There are other questions that lie beyond the scope of this study but whose

potential as further objects of inquiry I would like to signal. A far more detailed

examination than what is presented here would certainly be called for as my current aim

is simply to suggest some lines of inquiry and present their contours rather than to engage

in their thorough analysis. For instance, having looked at the way in which father figures

contribute to the narrator’s development as an author has led me to wonder if the narrator

might conceive of himself in a paternal role in relation to his own work. In À la recherche

du temps perdu, as in earlier sketches and his correspondence, Proust does make repeated

references to the relationship between an artist and his work in terms that evoke a parent

and its child. In Le Temps retrouvé, this metaphor of the work of art as child appears, for

example, in the narrator’s insistence that “[…] les vrais livres doivent être les enfants non

du grand jour […] mais de l’obscurité et du silence” (IV, 476). But the question remains

as to whether the artwork-as-child metaphor implies that its creator is its mother or its

father. As the editors of our Pléiade edition of Le Temps retrouvé indicate, Proust often

compared his novel to a child, as in sketches for Contre Saint Beuve from 1908 evoking

maternity, pregnancy and childbearing. In 1912, however, in a letter to Mme Straus, he

shifted to a paternal conception, referring to himself as his work’s father (IV, 1310).

At first glance, several of the most vivid images in La Recherche would suggest

that the narrator’s prevailing model is that of maternity. For example, his fear that an

accident might cut short his life becomes all the more terrifying once he feels himself

“porteur d’une oeuvre” (IV, 614) evoking a sort of creative, spiritual pregnancy, a

metaphor he had used much earlier in Le Côté de Guermantes when describing Bergotte

leading “la vie végétative d’un convalescent, d’une accouchée” after having passed the

190
bulk of his thoughts on to his books (II, 624). The maternal model is also evoked in

metaphors of nourishment, like when the narrator describes as one of the tasks demanded

of an author by his work that he must “le suralimenter comme un enfant” (IV, 610).

Indeed, the image of the author as mother is made explicit when the narrator describes the

idea of his work as “comme un fils dont la mère mourante doit encore s’imposer la

fatigue de s’occuper sans cesse” (IV, 619).

Such maternal conceptualizations place emphasis on the suffering and martyrdom

of the author/parent and are consistent with the Proustian notion that a child is inherently

sadistic toward its parents, a principle we examined in relation, for example, to the

narrator’s guilt-ridden characterization of his treatment of his mother in the bedtime

scene. But this emphasis on suffering and martyrdom is not exclusive to maternal

relations, as we observed, for example, in the paternal context of the relationship between

Vinteuil and his daughter and her lover.

Another reproductive model, a horticultural one comparing the author to a seed,

recombines elements of the maternal model, participating in the same themes of

providing nourishment and suffering a martyr’s death, but in a realm that ostensibly

excludes the maternal/paternal dialectic:

Et je compris que tous ces matériaux de l’œuvre littéraire, c’était ma vie

passée […] emmagasinés par moi sans que je devinasse plus leur
destination, leur survivance même, que la graine mettant en réserve tous
les aliments qui nourriront la plante. Comme la graine, je pourrais mourir
quand la plante se serait développée […] (IV, 478).

Reminiscent of the narrator’s reflections on plant reproduction that are interlaced with

descriptions of Charlus and Jupien’s sexual encounter in Sodome et Gomorrhe I, the seed

metaphor invites consideration of auto-fecundation, which the narrator calls a “ruse

191
apparente des fleurs” from which he extracted “une conséquence sur toute une partie

inconsciente de l’œuvre littéraire” (III, 5), as another possible configuration. This concept

of self-generation puts into question whether artist and artwork are to be considered two

properly discreet entities at all or whether the narrator conceives of his work as a sort of

extension of his own being, an object not separate from himself. This way of

conceptualizing art as contiguous with the artist’s self, dovetails nicely with the narrator’s

epiphany that “tous ces matériaux de l’œuvre littéraire, c’était ma vie passée” (IV, 478)

and the notion that the “livre essentiel, le seul livre vrai, un grand écrivain n’a pas […] à

l’inventer puisqu’il existe déjà en chacun de nous, mais à le traduire” (IV, 469).

Nonetheless, there is no reason why the reproductive metaphor of the seed must

necessarily be limited to the auto-generative association from Sodome et Gomorrhe I

which presents itself as just one of varying possibilities. Despite the shift from artist as

parent to artist as seed that this reproductive model effectuates, the parental implications

of this metaphorical conception are not entirely lacking, to the extent that they resonate

with the pattern of association between fathers and nature that we have observed

throughout La Recherche. In addition, the author as seed, pollinated ovule, is a metaphor

that emphasizes complementary and maternal and paternal necessity, a conception which

is in keeping with what we have maintained throughout this study, and might very well

suggest that the narrator is both mother and father to his work. This interpretation of the

narrator/author as mother and father to his work seems to fit nicely with the narrator’s

belief that “un homme né sensible et qui n’aurait pas d’imagination pourrait malgré cela

écrire des romans admirables” if the strong impressions created by his sensitivity could

then be “interprété par l’intelligence” (IV, 479-80). Here, his formulation for creating a

192
work seems to require that he be both father to his work of art, drawing upon the

sensitivity that we have observed in the paternal realm, as well as the work’s mother,

exercising cultural intelligence in its construction.

An attempt to answer this question of whether the work of art may be considered

the “child” of the artist or whether the narrator conceives of it is as a continuous

extension undifferentiated from himself opens up another line of inquiry regarding how

the narrator/artist conceives the work (both in the sense of “how he creates it” and “how

he comprehends it”). The literary work, as the enlightened narrator of Le Temps retrouvé

defines it, is the product of both a unique sensitivity to impressions, a sensuality and

sensitivity that we have seen associated with the narrator’s father and grandfather, and a

demanding intellectual process, a process for which the narrator’s mother and

grandmother prepared him through his cultural education. It couples the arduous efforts

of “la recréation par la mémoire d’impressions qu’il fallait ensuite approfondir, éclairer,

transformer en équivalents d’intelligence” (IV, 621) with those rare, unique flashes of

sensory experience that signal the existence of a greater reality hiding behind quotidian

appearances, a reality which the narrator says “m’avait fait considérer la vie comme

digne d’être vécue (IV, 609). Both a long and laborious gestational process and one

motivated by occasional, punctual, orgasmic experiences of joy, a parent-child

relationship between the artist and his work seems to be implied as authorship, so

defined, requires the practice of maternal and paternal generative and caretaking

functions. Both attached to the narrator in that it is composed of his life experiences and

detached from him, an instrument offered to the reader like a new lens through which to

193
look at the world, the work ostensibly presents itself as the product of a maternal and a

paternal source.

These few lines of inquiry, inspired by my musing whether the narrator might not

see himself as a father to his text, in light of the paternal influences on his literary destiny

that this study sought to uncover, are but a minute sampling of the infinite questions

begged by Proust’s magnificent A la recherche du temps perdu. Having sought to restore

him to his rightful place alongside the mother in Proustian criticism, this study hopes to

have made the significance of the paternal parent more apparent through this recherche

du père perdu.

194
 Works Consulted

Primary Sources

Baudelaire, Charles. “Salon de 1859.” Oeuvres completes. Vol. 2. Ed. Claude Pichois.
Gallimard, 1975-76. 608-682.

Larbaud, Valéry. “Le Couperet.” Enfantines. Gallimard, 1918. 31-66.

Proust, A. et Ballet, G. L’Hygiène du neurasthénique. Paris: Masson et Cie, 1897.

Proust, Marcel. Choix de lettres. Ed. Philip Kolb. Plon, 1965.

---. Correspondance avec sa mère. Ed. Philip Kolb. Paris: Plon, 1953.

---. Correspondance. Ed. Philip Kolb, 21 vols. Paris: Plon, 1970-98.

---. A la recherche du temps perdu. Ed. Jean-Yves Tadié. 4 vols. Gallimard, 1987-89.

---. Contre Sainte-Beuve précédé de Pastiches et mélanges et suivi de Essais et articles.

Eds. Pierre Clarac et Yves Sandre. Gallimard, 1971.

---. Contre Sainte-Beuve suivi de Nouveaux mélanges. Ed. Bernard de Fallois. Paris:
Gallimard, 1954.

---. Jean Santeuil précédé de Les Plaisirs et les jours. Eds. Pierre Clarac et Yves Sandre.
Gallimard, 1971.

Secondary Sources

Books

Ariès, Philippe. Histoire des populations françaises et de leurs attitudes devant la vie
depuis le XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Éditions Self, 1948.

Augé, Marc et al. Le Père: Métaphore paternelle et fonctions du père: l’Interdit, la

filiation, la transmission. Paris: Denoël, 1989.

Aydemir, Murat. Images of Bliss: Ejaculation, Masculinity, Meaning. Minneapolis: U. of

Minnesota Press, 2007.

Barthes, Roland et al. Recherche de Proust. Seuil, 1980.

Baudry, Jean-Louis. Proust, Freud et l’Autre. Les Editions de Minuit, 1984.

195
Beauchamp, Louis de. Le Côté de Vinteuil. Plon, 1966.

Beckett, Samuel. Proust. London: John Calder, 1965.

Béhar, Serge. L’Univers medical de Proust. Gallimard, 1970.

Benhaïm, André. Panim: Visages de Proust. Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2006.

Benoist, Alain de. Famille et société : Origines, histoire, actualité. Le Labyrinthe, 1996.

Bernard, Claudie. Le passé recompose: Le roman historique français du dix-neuvième

siècle. Paris: Hachette, 1996.

Bersani, Leo. The Fictions of Life and of Art. New York: Oxford UP, 1965.
---. Homos. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard UP, 1995.

Bizub, Edward. La Venise intérieure: Proust et la poétique de la traduction. Neuchâtel:

Editions de la Bacconnière, 1991.

Bloch-Dano. Madame Proust. Paris: Editions Grasset et Fasquelle, 2004.

Bowie, Malcolm. Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction. London: Cambridge UP,
1987.

---. Proust Among the Stars. New York: Columbia UP, 1998.

Bouazis, Charles. Ce que Proust savait du symptôme. Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1992.

Buisine, Alain. Proust et ses lettres. Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1983.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Carter, William. Marcel Proust: A Life. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000.

Compagnon, Antoine. Proust entre deux siècles. Paris: Seuil, 1989.

Couffignal, Robert. L’Épreuve d’Abraham. Toulouse: Association des Publications de

l’Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail, 1976.

Deleuze, Gilles. Proust et les signes. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964.

Delumeau, Jean and Daniel Roche, eds. Histoire des pères et de la paternité. Paris:
Larousse, 1990.

Doubrovsky, Serge. La place de la Madeleine: Ecriture et fantasme chez Proust. Paris:

Mercure de France, 1974.

196
Finkielkraut, Alain. La Sagesse de l’amour. Gallimard, 1984.

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. New
York : Norton, 1961.

---. The Ego and the Id. Trans. Joan Riviere. Ed. James Strachey. New York: Norton,
1960.

---. The Interpretation of Dreams. Ed. and trans James Strachey. New York: Avon , 1965.

---. Introductory Lessons on Psycho-Analysis. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. New York:
1966.

Genette, Gérard. Figures III. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972.

Goodkin, Richard. Around Proust. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991.

Gray, Margaret. Postmodern Proust. Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania Press, 1992.

Hassine, Juliette. Marranisme et hébraïsme dans l’œuvre de Proust. Mignard, 1994.

Hellens, Franz et al. Hommage à Marcel Proust. Paris: Le Disque vert, 1952.

Henry, Anne. Proust Romancier: Le tombeau égyptien. Paris: Flammarion, 1983.

Jauss, Hans Robert. Pour une esthétique de la réception. Trans. Claude Maillard.
Gallimard, 1978.

Jullien, Dominique. Proust et ses modèles: les Mille et Une Nuits et les Mémoires de
Saint-Simon. Paris: José Corti, 1989.

Krafft-Ebing, Richard von. Psychopathia Sexualis. Trans. Franklin S. Klaf. New York:
Arcade Publishing, 1965.

Kristeva, Julia. Questions d’identité. Oxford: Legenda, 1998.

---. Le temps sensible: Proust et l’expérience littéraire. Gallimard, 1994.

Lacan, Jacques. Les Complexes familiaux dans la formation de l’individu. Navarin

Editeur, 1984.

---. Ecrits. 2 vols. Seuil, 1999.

Ladenson, Elisabeth. Proust’s Lesbianism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999.

197
Le Bras, Hervé and Emmanuel Todd. L’Invention de la France: Atlas anthropologique et
politique. Librairie Générale Française, 1981.

Lejeune, Philippe. Le Pacte autobiographique. Paris: Seuil, 1975.

Le Masle, Robert. Le Professeur Adrien Proust. Paris: Librairie Lipschutz, 1935.

Lévinas, Emmanuel. L’Ethique et l’infini. Fayard, 1982.

---. Totalité et infini. Martinus Nijhoff, 1971.

Lucey, Michael. Never Say I: Sexuality and the First Person in Colette, Gide and Proust.
Durham: Duke UP, 2006

Maugue, Annelise. L’Identité masculine en crise au tournant du siècle 1871-1914. Paris:

Editions Rivages, 1987.

Mauriac, Claude. Proust par lui-même. Seuil: 1961.

Mayeur, Jean-Marie. La Vie politique sous la Troisième République 1870-1940. Seuil,

1984.

Mehlman, Jeffrey, et al. French Freud: Structural Studies in Psychoanalysis. Spec. Issue
of Yale French Studies 48. New Haven: Yale UP, 1972.

Metzger, Bruce M. and Murphy, Roland E. The New Oxford Annotated Bible. New York:
Oxford UP, 1991.

Miguet-Ollangnier, Marie. Gisements profonds d’un sol mental: Proust. Presses

Universitaires de Franche-Comté, 2003.

Milly, Jean. Introduction. Les Pastiches de Proust. By Marcel Proust. Paris: Armand
Collin, 1970.

Mingelgrün, Albert. Thèmes et structures bibliques dans l’œuvre de Marcel Proust.

Lausanne: L’Age d’homme, 1978.

Muller, Marcel. Préfiguration et structure romanesque dans A la recherche du temps

perdu. Lexington, KY: French Forum Publishers, 1979.

---. Les Voix narratives dans la Recherche du temps perdu. Genève: Droz, 1965.

Painter, George. Marcel Proust: A Biography. London: Chatto and Windus, 1989.

Panzac, Daniel. Le Docteur Adrien Proust. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003.

198
Picon, Gaëtan. Lecture de Proust. Gallimard, 1995.

Poulet, Georges. L’Espace proustien. Paris: Gallimard, 1963.

Raimond, Michel. Proust romancier. Paris: SEDES, 1984.

Rauch, André. Le Premier sexe: Mutations et crise de l’identité masculine. Paris:

Hachette Littératures, 2000.

Recanati, Jean. Profils juifs de Marcel Proust. Paris: Editions Buchet/Chastel, 1979.

Rey, Pierre-Louis. A l’Ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs de Marcel Proust: Etude critique.
Genève : Editions Slatkine, 1983.

Reille, J-F. Proust: Le temps du désir. Les Editeurs Français Réunis, 1979.

Richard, Jean-Pierre. Proust et le monde sensible. Seuil, 1974.

Robert, Marthe. D’Œdipe à Moïse: Freud et la conscience juive. Calmann-Lévy, 1974.

Roger, Alain. Proust: Les plaisirs et les noms. Paris: Denoël, 1985.

Rousset, Jean. Forme et signification. J. Corti, 1962.

Ruskin, John. Selected Writings. Ed. Dinah Birch. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004.

Schneider, Michel. Maman. Gallimard, 1999.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: U. of California Press,

1990.

Schehr, Lawrence. French Gay Modernism. Urbana and Chicago: U. of Illinois Press,
2004.

Soupault, Robert. Marcel Proust du côté de la médecine. Plon, 1967.

Splitter, Randolphe. Proust’s Recherche: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation. Boston:

Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981.

Tadié, Jean-Yves. Marcel Proust. Gallimard, 1996.

---. Proust et le roman. Gallimard, 1971.

Willemart, Philippe. Proust: Poète et psychanalyste. L’Harmattan. 1999.

199
Wolf, Arthur P. and William H. Durham eds. Inbreeding, Incest and the Incest Taboo.
Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005.

Wright, Elizabeth. Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice. London: Routledge,

1984.

Zagdanski, Stéphane. Le Sexe de Proust. Gallimard, 1994.

Zeldin, Theodore. France 1848-1945. Vol 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973-77.

Articles and Essays

Auerbach, Erich. “The Brown Stocking.” Mimesis. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1953. 525-552.

Bales, Richard. “La Cathédrale de Proust et ses fidèles.” La Cathédrale. Ed. Joëlle
Prungnaud. L’Université Charles de Gaulle-Lille 3, 2001. 195-201.

Barthes, Roland. “Proust et les noms.” Le Degré zero de l’écriture suivi de Nouveaux
Essais critiques. Seuil, 1972. 121-144.

Bataille, Georges. « Proust et la mère profanée » Critique (1946): 601-611.

Bayard, Pierre. “Is it Possible to Apply Literature to Psychoanalysis? ” Trad. Rachel
Bourgeois. American Imago 56.3 (1999) 207-219.

Benhaïm, André. “From Baalbek to Baghdad and beyond.” Journal of European Studies
35.1 (2005): 87-101.

---. “Unveiling the Synagogue: Beyond Proust’s Cathedral.” Contemporary French and
Francophone Studies 9.1 (2005): 73-85.

Bem, Jeanne. “Le Juif et l’homosexuel dans ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’:

fonctionnements textuels.” Littérature 37 (1980): 100-12.

Benjamin, Walter. “Pour le portrait de Proust.” Œuvres I : Mythe et violence. Trans.

Maurice Gandillac. Denoël, 1971.

--. “The Image of Proust.” Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken
Books, 1968. 201-215.

Bergler, Edmund. “Proust and the ‘Torture-Theory’ of Love.” American Imago 10

(1953): 265-288.

Bizub, Edward. “La suprise du père.”Marcel Proust: Surprises de la Recherche. Eds.

Raymonde Coudert and Guillaume Perrier. Textuel 45 (2004) 45-56.

200
Blanchot, Maurice. “Le Chant des Sirènes.” Le Livre à venir. Paris: Gallimard, 1959.

Bowie, Malcolm. “Proust and Italian Painting.” Comparative Criticism 25. Edinburg UP
2004. 97-122.

Brown, Stephen G. “The Curse of the ‘Little Phrase’: Swann and the Sorrows of the
Sapphic Sublime.” College Literature 30.4 (2003): 89-113.

Buisine, Alain. « Marcel Proust: Le Côté de l’Orient. » Revue des sciences humaines 214
(avr. 1989): 123-144.

Chaudier, Stéphane. “‘Un mystique chant du coq’: Proust et la musique.” Autour de

Proust: Mélanges offerts à Annick Bouillaguet. Travaux et recherches de
l’UMLV, 2004. 91-109.

Compagnon, Antoine. “La Recherche du temps perdu de Marcel Proust.” Les Lieux de
mémoire. Vol. 3. Ed. Pierre Nora. Gallimard, 1992. 927-967.

Coudert, Raymonde. “La Recherche, ou le roman d’un fils?” Bulletin Marcel Proust 50
(2000): 45-58.

Debray-Genette, Raymonde. “Thème, figure, episode: Genèse des aubépines.” Poétique

25 (1976): 49-71. Rpt. in Recherche de Proust. Ed. Roland Barthes et al. Seuil,
1980. 105-41.

de Man, Paul. “Reading (Proust).” Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau,

Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979. 57-78.

Derrida, Jacques. “Signature, événement, contexte.” Marges de la philosophie. Editions

de Minuit, 1972. 365-93.

Donnan, Thomas M. “Vinteuil’s Music as Central to Marcel’s Artistic Calling.” Romance

Quarterly 37.4 (1990): 419-31.

Duren, Brian. “Deuil, Fétichisme, Écriture: La Venise de Proust.” Littérature 37 (1980):

113-28.

Eells, Emily. “Nos pères nous ont dit: Proust et La Bible d’Amiens de Ruskin.” Bulletin
Marcel Proust 54 (2004): 51-63.

---. “Images of Proustian Inversion from Ruskin.” Ruskin and Gender. Eds.
Dinah Birch and Francis O’Gorman. Palgrave, 2002.

Finn, Michael R. “”Norpois, Père ou mentor ?” Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France

93.1 (1993) 116-32.

201
Forrester, Viviane. “Marcel Proust: Le texte de la mère.” Tel Quel 78 (1978): 70-82.

Fraisse, Luc. “D’Emile Mâle à Proust: Comment la cathédrale devient symbole de la

Recherche.” La Cathédrale. Ed. Joëlle Prungnaud. L’Université Charles de
Gaulle-Lille 3, 2001. 183-194.

Gamble, Cynthia. “Adrien Proust et John Ruskin: La Mort inspiratrice du travail

proustien.” Bulletin Marcel Proust 54 (2004): 37-50.

Genette, Gérard. “Proust Palimpseste.” Figures I. Seuil, 1966.

Gracq, Julien. “Proust considéré comme terminus.” Proust suivi de Stendhal, Balzac,
Flaubert, Zola. Editions Complexe, 1986.

Hillenaar, Henk. “Un Amour de Proust.” Marcel Proust Aujourd’hui 1 (2003): 61-80.

Hochart, Patrick. “Dire Bonsoir: La ‘Présence réelle’ et ses surprises.” Marcel Proust:
Surprises de la Recherche. Eds. Raymonde Coudert and Guillaume Perrier.
Textuel 45 (2004): 217-225.

Hue, Jean-Louis and Pierre-Edmond Robert, eds. Le Siècle de Proust de la Belle époque
à l’an 2000. Spec. Issue of Magasine Littéraire 2.4 (2000) : 3-114.

“Imagination.” Dictionnaire historique de la langue française. Ed. Alain Rey. Vol 2.

Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert, 1998.

Jackson, John E. “Les Cadeaux de la grand’mère.” Littératures 20 (1989): 63-71.

Jordanova, L.J. “Natural Facts: A Historical perspective on science and sexuality.”

Nature, Culture and Gender. Eds. Carol MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern.
Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 1980. 42-67.

Kolb, Philip. “Inadvertent Repetitions of Material in A la recherche du temps perdu.”

PMLA 51:1 (1936): 249-262.

Lacan, Jacques. “Au-delà du complexe d’Oedipe: VI Le Maître châtré.” Le seminaire de

Jacques Lacan. Vol. 17. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 1991. 99- 115.

---. “Les Entours du trou: XXIII La Grand’Route et le signifiant ‘être père.’”

Le seminaire de Jacques Lacan. Vol. 3. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil,
1981. 321-331.

Lacoursière, Roy B. “Proust and Parricide: Literary, Biographical, and Forensic-

Psychiatric Explorations.” American Imago 60.2 (2003): 179-210.

Lejeune, Philippe. “Ecriture et sexualité.” Europe 49 (1971): 113-43.

202
Leriche, Françoise. “Attention, un train peut en cacher un autre…” Marcel Proust:
Surprises de la Recherche. Eds. Raymonde Coudert and Guillaume Perrier.
Textuel 45 (2004): 87-110.

Levin, Harry and Justin O’Brien. “Proust, Gide and the Sexes.” PMLA 65.4 (June, 1950)
648-53.

Link-Heer, Ursula and Lisa McNee. “Multiple Personalities and Pastiches: Proust père et
fils.” SubStance 28.1 (1999): 17-28.

Littmann, E. “Alf Layla wa-Layala.” Encyclopedia of Islam. Eds. P. Bearman,

Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W.P. Heinrichs, 2nd ed. 8 July, 2009
<http://www.brillonline.nl/subscriber/entry?entry=islam_COM-0044>.

Lunel, Armand. “Marcel Proust, sa mère et les Juifs.” Europe 502-03 (fév-mars, 1971):
64-7

MacCormack, Carol. “Nature, Culture and Gender: A Critique.” Nature, Culture and
Gender. Eds. Carol MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern. Cambridge, England:
Cambridge UP, 1980. 1-24.

Magny, Claude-Edmond. “Proust ou le romancier de la reclusion.” Histoire du roman

français depuis 1918. Paris: Seuil, 1950. 169-225.

Mahuzier, Brigitte. “Unbuttoning Proust.” Modern Language Studies 29 (1999): 49-59.

Mehlman, Jeffrey. “Proust’s Counterplot.” A Structural Study of Autobiography. Ithaca:

Cornell UP, 1974. 20-64.

Mein, Margaret. “Le Thème de l’hérédité dans l’oeuvre de Proust.” Europe 502-03
(1971): 83-99.

Muller, Marcel. “‘Sodome I’ ou la naturalisation de Charlus.” Poétique 8 (1971): 470-78.

Rpt. in Recherche de Proust. Ed. Roland Barthes et al. Seuil, 1980. 55-67.

O’Brien, Justin. “”Albertine the Ambiguous: Notes on Proust’s Transposition of Sexes.”

PMLA 64 (Dec. 1949): 933-52.

Ornter, Sherry. Ïs Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?.” Woman, Culture, and

Society. Eds. Michelle Zimbalist-Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere. Stanford:
Stanford UP, 1974. 67-87.

Ottavi, André. “Swann et l’investissement iconique.” Europe 502-02 (fév-mars, 1971):

57-61.

203
Perrot, Michelle. “Figures et roles: La figure du père.” Histoire de la vie privée. Vol. 4.
Paris: Seuil, 1999. 121-132.

Richard, Jean-Pierre. “Proust météo.” Amicitia Scriptor: Littérature, histoire des idées,
Philosophie. Eds. Annie Becq, Alain Mothu, Charles Porset. Paris: H. Champion,
1998. 327-34.

Riffaterre, Michael. “The Intertextual Unconscious.” Critical Inquiry 13.2 (1987): 371-
385.

Sellam, Sabine. “La Musique dans l’esthetique d’A la Recherche du temps perdu.”
Travaux et recherches de l’UMLV: 111-131.

Solliers, Jean de. “Proust et la musique.” Europe 502-03 (1971) 61-3.

Spelman, Elizabeth V. “Woman as Body: Ancient and Contemporary Views.” Feminist

Studies 8.1 (1982) 109-31.

Toffol, Bertrand de. “Proust et le temps qu’il fait: Un point de vue atmosphérique.”
Bulletin d’Informations proustiennes 22 (1991) 83-97.

Topping, Margaret. “Artists and Alchemists in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu.”

French Studies 60.4 (2006): 466-78.

Viers, Rina. “Évolution et sexualité des plantes dans ‘Sodome et Gomorrhe.’” Europe
502-03 (1971) 100-113.

Weber, Samuel, M. “The Madrepore.” MLN 87.7 (Dec. 1972): 915-61.

Wittig, Monique. “The Trojan Horse.” The Straight Mind and Other Essays. Boston:
Beacon Press, 1992. 68-75.

Zilboorg, Gregory. “The Discovery of the Oedipus Complex—Episodes from Marcel

Proust” The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 8 (1939): 279-302.

204