In the penultimate scene before the famous Maternal Kiss the Narrator goes to hell and back trying to hang on to an experience (his mother's bedtime kiss) which is denied him one evening when M. Swann is visiting at dinnertime. This scene combines so many Proustian issues that you find yourself wanting to run sticky note footnotes all down the side or making a hyperlink out of every word.
One evening in Combray the routine of the Narrator's existence is disturbed by the arrival of the Swann, whose importance and simultaneous unimportance to the family the Narrator has already described. The Narrator is focused on getting his night time kiss from his mother, in fact he is so afraid of the real
thing slipping away from him, of his apprehension (in the old fashioned sense of the term) not being enough
to handle the evanescence of the experience, that he describes spending
an entire family dinner, as a child, strategizing to get the most out
of the one kiss he was permitted to give his mother in public. Art
and the sacred, the workmanlike task of getting ready for the sitter
and the determination of the artist to sacralize a single moment in
time are all intermingled:
“And so I promised myself that
in the dining room, as they began to eat and drink and as I felt the
hour approach, I would put beforehand into this kiss, which was bound
to be so brief and furtive, everything that my own efforts could
muster, would carefully choose in advance the exact spot on her cheek
where I would imprint it, and would so prepare my thoughts as to be
able, thanks to these mental preliminaries, to consecrate the whole
of the minute Mamma would grant me to the sensation of her cheek
against my lips, as a painter who can have his subject for short
sittings only prepares his palette, and from what he remembers and
from rough notes does in advance everything which he possibly can do
in the sitter's absence.”
To his horror the Narrator is sent up
to bed without the longed for kiss and “set [s] forth without
viaticum.” (29) The entire setting of this horror—the
very scent of the staircase—become intertwined with the Narrator's
sense of grievance and loss. This “made it perhaps even
crueller to my sensibility because, when it assumed this olfactory
guise, my intellect was powerless to resist it.” (30) The
intellect, the will, is over come (as usual) by the sensual triggers
associated with an emotional state. The experience becomes so
tangled between sight, sound, smell, physical pain (“a
toothache”), drama (“ as of a little girl whom we
attempt, time after time, to pull out of the water,”) or
even literature (“or a line of Moliere which we repeat
incessantly to ourselves”) that the Narrator doesn't know
whether he would prefer to be completely unconscious or fully
conscious in order to allow his “intelligence [to]
disentangle the ideas” and go from the imaginary, dream
state to the reality of the actual toothache pain.
The Narrator describes the entire
process of going to bed as digging his “own grave”
and wrapping himself “in the shroud” of his
nightshirt. He then “bur[ies]” himself in the iron
bed. After this description of horror who can blame him for devising
a “desperate stratagem” for he is a “condemned
prisoner” and isn't he entitled to beg for mercy? Now he
jumps from the prison metaphor to one that straddles his reality and
what he perceives to be the experience of the servant, Francoise.
The Narrator “had a suspicion that, in her eyes, to carry a
message to [his] mother when there was a guest would appear as flatly
inconceivable as for the door-keeper of a theater to hand a letter to
an actor upon the stage.” Francoise is not only a door
keeper and functionary, she is also an atavistic throwback to the Old
Testament, a hierophant, or a disciple of a cruel mystery:
“On the subject of things which
might or might not be done she possessed a code at once imperious,
abundant, subtle, and uncompromising on points themselves
imperceptible or irrelevant, which gave it a resemblance to those
ancient laws which combine such cruel ordinances as the massacre of
infants at the breast with prohibitions of exaggerated refinement
against “seething the kid in his mother's milk” or “eating of
the sinew which is upon the hollow of the thigh.” (30-31)
Francoise's code comes from somewhere
unclear to the Narrator and his family—she's nothing but a little
village peasant woman, after all, but the Narrator attributes her
strict moral code, her conviction that there are things that are
“done” and “not done” to something “latent”
in her, something in her “past existence in the ancient
history of France, noble and little understood, as in those
manufacturing towns where old mansions still testify to their former
courtly days, and chemical workers toil among delicately sculptured
scenes from Le Miracle de Theophile or Les quatre fils Aymon.”
*1
In order to bring his mother to his
side, and successfully use Francoise as his messenger—a prefiguring
of the many times the adult Narrator and his friends will have to
resort to intermediaries to trick a love object into an
assignation?--the Narrator insists to Francoise that it is not he who
has requested to see his mother but the mother who has requested that
the Narrator send her a little note to be delivered during dinner.
Of course Francoise, who is often compared to a lower order or
something primitive, “disbelieves” him for “like
those primitive men whose senses were so much keener than our own,
she could immediately detect, from signs imperceptible to the rest of
us, the truth or falsehood of anything that we might wish to conceal
from her.” But despite her animal nature and her
preternatural senses when Francoise attempts to determine, just from
looking at the sealed envelope, “to which article of her code
she ought to refer the matter” she is stumped. In other
words, when confronted with a written document whose meaning is
hidden from her, she must fall back on obedience and carries the
letter away. The educated child triumphs, momentarily, over the
adult whose authority is merely circumstantial and dependent on her
vague and atavistic code.
The Little Note
The Narrator's note goes
down to his mother and now he imaginatively follows it. Although the
“little note” is bound to make him a laughingstock in the eyes of
Swann (who is at the dinner and already occupies an important place
in the Narrator's imagination, standing in for society, for wit, for
something bigger and more interesting than the rather stodgy and
unpleasant father and grandfather) the Narrator's anxiety subsides.
The little note “would at least admit me, invisible and
enraptured, into the same room as herself, would whisper about me
into her ear.”
The dining room, the stage, the salon, the dance, society itself are
all places where, in the future, the Narrator will find himself
exiled from his love object and this is true for Swann as well, the
Narrator's doppleganger. The lover can only imagine, from outside,
the pleasures the lover is enjoying and in a typically Proustian
clause that winds from place to place the Narrator throws in this
bitter animadversion that his mother, in that
“forbidden and unfriendly dining-room,”
is enjoying “ pleasures that were baleful an of
a mortal sadness” because “Mamma was tasting of
them while I was far away.” These pleasures are described
mysteriously as a dessert composed of opposites “the ice
itself—with burned nuts in it” but
this contradictory and rather chilly sounding dessert (ice cream?) is
at once transformed, by the note being put into his mother's hand
into an open door and a different experience entirely not “ice”
and “burnt nuts” but “a ripe fruit which
bursts through its skin,” because the knowledge that the
note would be read “was going to pour out into my intoxicated
heart the sweetness of Mamma's attention while she was reading what I
had written.” The dining room here merely prefigures the
places where a man, Swann, the Narrator, will later be denied
entrance, or not invited. But the note itself bursts those
boundaries, however temporarily, because while he imagines his mother
is potentially about to read the note, or reading it “I was no
longer separated from her; the barriers were down; an exquisite
thread united us.”
We must end this section by
agreeing with Francoise “Its hard lines on parents having a
child like that.”
How often does Proust, in the form of
the Narrator, refer to some notion of atavism, of the influence of
geography, food, literature and architecture on the almost animal and
unconscious mentality of people? Given his half Jewish status and the
permanent “unfrenchness” of the Jewish immigrants to the French
imaginary –so powerfully demonstrated in the Dreyfus affaire--you
have to wonder whether Proust isn't describing a state of French
Nature which he must (in his heart) believe can never be accorded to
Jews, even if nominally they like others are part of the post
Revolutionary French Ideal.
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