So Marcel has won. His mother settles down in his bedroom, he climbs back into bed, and she begins to read to him from one of his favourite books, George Sand's François le champi. Her familiar voice soothes him and his anguish begins to abate. But now he discovers, to his sorrow, that in the new world he has entered every victory is also a defeat.
But how can this be? Marcel has triumphed. He has made his plans and carried them out as boldly as any Caesar or Napoleon. As a result he has acquired his objective: his mother is there with him in his room. But the fact that he has had to scheme for this has ineradicably affected the situation. He looks at his mother and sees her as if for the first time. She is no longer the ground of his being but a person in her own right, someone with a will and desires of her own, yet capable of being influenced by external events. And what he sees is a woman no longer young, a woman with a few tell-tale grey hairs already on her head — in other words a woman subject to time, a woman being carried inexorably towards the moment when, whatever he may do to try and stop it, she will no longer ever come to him when he calls.
His victory over her has made him understand for the first time that the only victor in such conflicts is Time, and that once we engage in combat with him we can only ever lose. Such understanding, however, is worse than useless. This scene is to be repeated with almost monotonous regularity in the course of Marcel's life. What he desires from every woman he falls in love with is that she should come to him of her own accord. But since this does not happen he has to use all his guile and seductive skill to win her. Having done so, though, he finds that it is no longer the same woman. His prisoner now, she is no longer the person he so desperately desired. And the more he tries to cling to her, the more he tries to bind her to him, the more anxious she becomes to escape. And the more he senses her anxiety, the more he clings to her and tries to hold her. Inevitably he loses her, as he had, that fateful night in Combray, in effect lost his mother.
The world for Marcel before that night was a world of happy iteration. Days went by, each new and exciting precisely because it did not threaten to be in any essential way different from all the others. Because it was a world grounded in trust it was a world suffused with aura, a world of reciprocity, in which what you looked at looked back at you. After that night it is as if Marcel had been projected violently into time and change, desire and frustration. What had simply been life had suddenly become a drama, a story, his story. That is why the details of that fateful night constitute his first clear memory, and that is why this is where the novel proper starts. Not just this novel, of course, but the novel as a form, a way of making sense of experience. The novel, this novel suggests, is always in search of a lost paradise, of the paradisal state which existed before it was propelled into existence, and it will not rest till that state is found again.
But this novel is a little different. After all, it does not start with the mother's withholding of her goodnight kiss, but earlier and elsewhere. And when iteration gives way to linearity Marcel finds that he has fallen (so to speak) into his life, that unique life which can only be his and no one else's; but also that, in a curious secular echo of the myth of the Fortunate Fall, his sense of loss is precisely what drives him and enables him to write; and writing, he will discover, many thousands of pages later, is what will allow him to overcome, at least partially, the trauma of that night, to draw the scattered pieces of himself into a whole, even as he recognises that such wholeness is only a dream of wholeness, something he can reach out for and touch but never actually grasp.
5 The Room
When, in a room by ourselves, we hold one hand in the other, we do not call that ‘holding hands’. When, in a room by ourselves, we reach out towards our hand in a mirror and meet only the coldness of the glass, we do not call that touching. On the contrary, both are a sour parody of touch, born of and fuelling our sense of dejection, the sense of existing in a world which remains stonily indifferent to our needs and desires.
Yet there is, of course, one kind of solitary touching which does seem to bring one back into the world or bring the world back to one, and it is hardly surprising that it is Proust, once again, who has explored this with the greatest acumen and tact. It is just after Marcel has discovered to his sorrow that ‘identical emotions do not spring up simultaneously in the hearts of all men in accordance with a pre-established order’, that he recounts how ‘[s]ometimes to the exhilaration which I derived from being alone would be added an alternative feeling which I was unable to distinguish clearly from it, a feeling stimulated by the desire to see appear before my eyes a peasant-girl whom I might clasp in my arms’. Pursuing this memory he comes to understand that the woman he thus desires to hold in his arms, if she was in some sense brought into being by the woods and meadows through which he wandered daily, was also, in a sense, the incarnation of those woods and meadows, a single living being through whom he might possess the entire landscape. ‘For at that time’, he says, ‘everything that was not myself, the earth and the creatures upon it, seemed to me more precious, more important, endowed with a more real existence than they appear to full-grown men.’ In desiring a woman one does not then, as in later life, think of the pleasure she will give us, ‘for one does not think of oneself, but only of escaping from oneself [car on ne pense pas à soi, on ne pense qu'à sortir de soi]’.
Soi, oneself, is the self when it feels dead, cut off from the source of life, even though for the young Marcel this is more an itch of the body than a conscious attitude, as it was for Wordsworth and Coleridge in their moods of dejection. It is the condition of knowing that one is alive but not being able to feel it, of feeling rather that there is life but it is elsewhere and that one is somehow cut off from it. That vague unfocused longing, which feels as if it would be appeased by the touch of another is so frustrating precisely because it seems as though so little is required to bring it to fulfilment, yet that little is nothing less than everything. Marcel may long for the peasant-girl with every fibre of his being, but she does not appear. ‘Alas,’ he says,
it was in vain that I implored the castle-keep of Roussainville, that I begged it to send out to meet me some daughter of its village, appealing to it as to the sole confidant of my earliest desires when, at the top of our house in Combray, in the little room that smelt of orris-root, I could see nothing but its tower framed in the half-opened window as, with the heroic misgivings of a traveller setting out on a voyage of exploration or of a desperate wretch hesitating on the verge of self-destruction, faint with emotion, I explored, across the bounds of my own experience, an untrodden path which, for all I knew was deadly — until the moment when a natural train like that left by a snail smeared the leaves of the flowering currant that drooped around me.
Rarely have the dynamics of desire and addiction been better caught, not even in the classic accounts of alcoholism and drug addiction, such as Under the Volcano and William Burroughs' Junky. In the mirror I contemplate myself as nothing but surface, yet what I need if I am to come alive is for a path to open up that will lead me into myself and so back into the world. That is what drink seems to be able to do with the Consul in Lowry's novel, and that is what masturbation here seems to do for Marcel. But the conclusion of the episode provides us with the inevitable corollary: what seems to be a means of bringing us back into touch with the world, a particularly satisfying means, since we can control it ourselves and are not therefore dependent on the whims of others, turns out to alienate us ever more from the world as the means become an end in itself. ‘I ceased to think of those desires which came to me on my walks, but were never realised, as being shared by others, or as having any existence outside myself’, writes Proust. ‘They seemed to me now no more than the purely subjective, impotent, illusory creations of my temperament. They no longer had any connection with nature, with the world of real things, which from then onwards lost all its charm and significance.’