#the guermantes way

I recently resumed In Search of Lost Time: Vol. III The Guermantes Way, and find myself once again enthralled by the range, pattern, pace, and sweep of Proust’s sentences. Hardly a page goes by that I don’t feverishly copy one down in my journal–which, as I’m sure you can imagine, slows down the pace of my reading.

Here are two sentences that range in style and achievement. The first is a wonderful example of Proust’s great ability to illustrate ideas through rather abstract similes. 

“The immobility of that thin face, like that of a sheet of paper subjected to the colossal pressure of two atmospheres, seemed to me to be held in equilibrium by two infinites which converged on her without meeting, for she held them apart. Indeed, looking at her, Robert and I, the two of us did not see her from the same side of the mystery.”

The following passage from a few pages later shows Proust continuing a  description of the characters’ inner thoughts, while recognizing a perfunctory need to advance simple plot action:

“But what would be the use of plying Rachel with questions when he already knew that her answer would be merely silence, or a lie, or something extremely painful for him to hear, which would yet explain nothing. The porters were shutting the doors; we hurriedly climbed into a first-class carriage; Rachel’s magnificent pearls reminded Robert that she was a woman of great price; he caressed her, restored her to her place in his heart where he could contemplate her, interiorised, as he had always done hitherto–save during this brief instant in which he had seen her in the Place Pigalle of an Impressionist painter–and the train moved off.”

I love how the pace quickens as we move from the exterior world of the train station, to the interior world of Robert’s thoughts, and ultimately the narrator’s speculation and judgement of Robert’s predicament. The materiality of Rachel’s pearls serves as another entry point for the interior world of Robert’s thoughts. The real world and all of its abrupt movements punctuate the inner dream and illusion, grounding or returning Robert and the narrator to the real. You get a sense or premonition here that Robert will experience great difficulty in passage across this  boundary between his desire-fueled image of Rachel, and the forces of the real world, the “Rachel when from the Lord” of the streets. This is exactly the boundary illustrated in the simile above, the “two infinites which converged on her without meeting.”