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Serdar Paktin 05/01/2009Proust and the Experience of Speaking Prof. Julia Kristeva

Epicization of the Novel: The Crumbling of the Statue

The construction of a character effigy and infusing that character effigy with

liquefied characterizations in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past: Time

Regained is a very complex and confusing process. This process is, on the one

hand, very concrete and inflexible in building the effigy ; and on the other, very

liquid and transformative within the boundaries of that concrete effigy .

Therefore, the characters of Marcel Proust in are so liquefied, in a sense that

one can never be sure when one speaks if the speaker is the effigy that is

speaking or the narrator (as being the sculptor of the effigy ) is carving yet

another detail into the character effigy . Nevertheless, the characterization is so

concretely statuesque that the character, whoever it is, would act in most cases

in a quite similar manner, but that manner would mean the same thing it

meant the previous time for the narrator.

Let’s take Albertine, for example, in The Captive to examine the significance of

Proust’s sculpting, which makes him so unique among other authors: Marcel,

as the narrator, is a sculptor of the effigy from the outside —and Proust, as the

author, is the sculptor from the inside . The complexity of Proust’s

characterization, therefore, resides in his doubling—as the narrator and the

author, both of whom are sculptors, who struggle to carve the characters in

accordance with their desires. This doubling of sculptors results in the

instability and flexibility of those characters by being carved simultaneously

from two different dimensions. Marcel, the narrator, tries to gain control over

Albertine from the outside. He tries to have complete authority over her

actions—where she goes, how she goes, with whom she goes, etc. Jealousy in




this regard is his sole motivator, his desire to turn her into an effigy , after

completion that she can be dismissed to her niche, where she is to stand

forever with no mental attention is required upon her.

In The Captive , Marcel, the narrator, starts to elaborate on his motivation,

jealousy, and the need to stabilize Albertine first by explaining that there are

“two parallel manias of jealousy”i that arises in men regarding their mistresses.

One leads the man to acknowledge the possibility of an affair that their mistress

might have—and give his consent to it, as long as it takes place under his

overseeing. The other is that the man would not feel bad about it, as long as it

would happen at “a place which he does not know, where he cannot form any

mental picture of what she may be doing.” ii

These two parallel manias take us to Marcel, the narrator, and Proust, the

author, which lead the reader to have an impression of certain types of

characterization by Proust, but never be sure about a specific character’s

‘absolute’ characteristics, because those characteristics are under strict control

of Marcel. This, of course, is due to Proust’s prodigy in language as well as his

unprecedented perception of people, psychology and the world around him. In

addition, that is also due to the conventional understanding of the novel, which,

for the reader’s sake, situates its characters clearly into a framework of a time

and space—actually the modern novelists’ attitude, in constructing a character,

is very similar to what Marcel does to Albertine: try to have complete authority

over ‘absolute’ characteristics of the character, which are almost clearly defined,

consistent and coherent throughout the accumulation of the novel. That helps

the reader to have a sense of attribution to the novel—and makes it

‘understandable.’ But, what if the author situates a set of characters that are




altogether built in as a statuesque character per se —that is to say the character

effigy is constructed as one monumental character itself by infusion of the

series of characters that constitute it? We confront another semblance of the

effigy each time (the difference between the statue of Proust and the effigy of

Marcel is Proust’s statues are instantaneous as they appear once, then freeze

and take their place on their niche—they are more clear-cut but not long

lasting—never to appear again, but Marcel’s effigy is to keep those statues

within a certain framework, so that he can stabilize and eternalize it—that is to

say, more roughly carved but longer lasting, at least in appearance.)

I remembered; I had known a different Albertine, then all at once she had

changed into another, the Albertine of to-day. And for this change I could hold

no one responsible but myself.iii

***

In order to be able to understand what Proust is doing by building statuesque

characterizations through infusion of liquefied characters, which are hardly

distinguishable from one another, into the character effigy that is under the

control of the narrator, Marcel, we need, first, to look at the distinction between

the two types of characterizations (the construction of the character effigy and

the infusion of liquefied characters therein), how they differ from one another

and what happens through this process. That is to say, that difference is

similar to the one that M.M. Bakhtin makes between the Epic character (i.e. the

concrete effigy ) and the character in the novel (i.e. liquefied statues infused into

the effigy ). I will, therefore, call this process: epicization of the novel.

Consequently, I will begin with M.M. Bakhtin’s distinction between epic and the

novel, in which a similar distinction is made between the types of

characterizations that are employed in epic and the novel.




Characterization in the novel is already a complex issue. It takes place in a

multi-dimensional platform, whereas in the epic, the character exists in one-

dimensional platform that takes place in a closed time and space which is,

thereby, free of any sort of reflexion from the outside (not permeable). It’s one

and the whole—it is as it is forever—like an ancient Greek statue on its niche

that keeps the same look on his face since the day it was sculpted. The author

of the epic (or the sculptor of the statue) has the sole control over the character

and how it appears to the audience. The character in the novel, in comparison

to the epic, is in relation with time and space, as well as being in relation to

different levels of language, and thereby, is flexible and is open to reflexions

from the outside , which thereby has an inside, and has “plastic qualities.”iv That

means that it’s not only the author, who has the control of the character’s

appearance, but also the variable circumstances into which he posits him/her.

This may or may not result in the character to appear in various poses—as well

as change their behavior, perception and understanding throughout the novel.

The epic character lives and speaks within a closed frame, which is situated

within a space and time that has no relation to its audience and to their

circumstances. Therefore, we can repeat that the epic is like a statue that is

concrete and absolute. This concreteness makes the epic a complete unity (one

and the whole), in which each of the parts per se that constitute the whole can

be perceived as the whole. This is, I can exemplify, is like what archeologists do,

when they find a few of bones of a dinosaur, by reconstituting it as a whole

through prediction of the rest of the animal from those bones. Another example

to this integration can be given also about archeology and history in regards to

human artifacts that are found in excavations, such as statues, of which the




archeologist finds an arm, a leg or the head—and they reconstitute the statue in

the light of the parts in hand.

We may say that in epic, the parts that constitute the whole can represent the

whole—and the whole can be reconstituted through those parts in the light of

its structure in a similar way. M.M. Bakhtin explains this notion in his essay,

“Epic and the Novel”, by saying that “[t]he epic is indifferent to formal

beginnings and can remain incomplete (that is, where it concludes is almost

arbitrary). The absolute past is closed and completed in the whole as well as in

any of its parts. It is, therefore, possible to take any part and offer it as a

whole.”v He further asserts that “[n]either worldview nor language can,

therefore, function as factors for limiting and determining human images, or

their individualization. In the epic, characters are bounded, preformed,

individualized by their various situations and destinies, but not by varying

‘truths.’” vi

***

When we look at The Captive , we can see that, the existence of those ‘truths’ do

not matter (at least in appearance), as the character (i.e. Albertine) is bounded

and forced by thereof situations and destinies (i.e. Marcel’s impositions on

Albertine) to hide or even to denounce those truths (i.e. becomes predictable

and manageable in appearance, while on the other hand, becomes deeply

clandestine and slippery). Hence, in this novel, Marcel, the narrator, and

Proust, the author, are two sculptors, both of whom are making the same

statue: one “ per via di porre (“by way of addition” as in painting), [and the other]

per via di levare (“by way of removal” as in sculpture).”vii That is to say, on the




one hand, Marcel is bounding Albertine into a plot that is under his constant

control and limiting her social existence to whatever he sees fit—and on the

other, Proust is infusing another aspect into the depth of her liquefied interior.

When Marcel imagines the possibility of such a depth, it drives him crazy and

enforces him to employ more and more per via di levare on Albertine and then

Proust, with the help of infinite colors on his palette, uses per via di porre.

Through this relation Albertine becomes with each carve and with each brush

stroke a visual chess game that removes her from the reality into the memory: a

statue that is carved from inside out—and outside in—which ends up being all

color but not on the canvas—on her niche. A painting in the form of a statue.

Julia Kristeva, in her groundbreaking book, Time and Sense: Proust and the

Experience of Speaking, directs our attention to that double consciousness (or

double existence) of Proust both within (and without) the novel by saying that

“[t]he reversibility of style maintains the ambiguous qualities of the real. By

making his way through salons and clans, Proust made his way through their

respective discourses, to which he added his own in an effort to remain both

inside and outside every social situation he encountered. He was thus able togrant them both tragic [epic] traits and comic [novelistic] traits, which lent theincisive touch of a ‘character’ to these examples of worldly vanity. The character

therefore became a sort of psychology limited by the [epic] clan to which it

belonged, a psychology that was eccentric because it was so biting. Hence animpostor would be exposed for what he was because the narrator’s mobility

predicted all possible poses and postures. The character became a pose : it was

stiff…”

Being both inside and outside of social situations in his life—and of his

characters in his novels—gives Marcel, the narrator, the opportunity to pause

the character (to turn it into an effigy ) and gives Proust, the author, the

opportunity to re-animate them within that moment of pause. This, I would like

to say, is where Proust’s uniqueness strikes out. I see this as a superposition of

knowledge over memory—and only after then undoing the pause and letting the




character make its own move, both within knowledge and memory, under

Marcel’s control. Yet, without Marcel, the narrator, being fully conscious about

the superposition… he would think of it as only one or the other.

Marcel’s aim, in this regard, is to epicize the character, not to bound her into a

closed time and space, but to bound her into a closed effigy , which would stay

the same throughout all time and spaces. In contrary, Proust infuses countless

liquefied characters into the effigy that despite her imposed inertia from

without, becomes more and more novelistic from within—like a statue that

appears different under different lighting through its colors.

These traits of the epic character, shared by and large with other highly

distanced genres, are responsible for the exclusive beauty, wholeness, crystalclarity and artistic completedness of this image of man. But at the same timesuch traits account for his limitations and his obvious woodenness under

conditions obtaining in a later period of human existence.viii

The epic character’s (i.e. the effigy ) limitations and the woodenness under

conditions causes an insurmountable loss of meaning and value in the eyes of

the beholder in time—and epic character, like a Greek statue, becomes a dull

piece of stone that lacks ability to adapt to varying circumstances of the

proceeding time. Here we can say that Marcel, the narrator, by forcing her into

the effigy, is craving for knowledge of Albertine (as he cannot know her

completely, he makes her be the way he wants to know her). Yet Proust, the

author, provides her another complexion each once so that she defies

knowledge.

Let me explain this superposition in Proust through Bakhtin’s statement that

“[i]n the ancient literature it is memory, and not knowledge, that serves as the

source and power for the creative impulse. That is how it was, it is impossible to




change it: the tradition of he past is sacred. There is as yet no consciousness of

the possible relativity of any past.”ix I claim that in Proust, there is this

consciousness—and it is what makes him so unique.

***

We have reached at a point where we can say, Marcel Proust, by situating

himself (as the narrator and the author) both inside and outside of the

characters and situations, is sculpting his statues into the thin air, where they

are only visible to himself (and also to us by reading the novel)—as well as

carving his memories into things (like the “petite Madeleine” or the “paving-

stone”), where they become monuments of feelings, which are again only visible

to himself (and also to us again by reading the novel). This is where memory

clashes into knowledge—where knowledge and memory collide within the thing,

which needs to disappear in order to fixate the embodiment to where it clashed.

To be able to keep them together in that pose the “petite Madeleine” must be

devoured, the “paving-stone” must be removed from its place, Albertine must

die—and Proust himself must die (We will return to the significance of death in

Proust’s writing in this regard). Otherwise, one of knowledge or memory (or

both) would break off from the superposition in a brink of time—vanishing

among the infinite poses within their existential kaleidoscope.

[Therefore, i]t is impossible to achieve greatness in one’s own time. Greatness

always makes itself known only to descendants, for whom such a quality isalways located in the past (it turns into a distanced image); it has become anobject of memory and not a living object of memory and not a living object that

one can see and touch. In the genre of the “memorial,” the poet constructs his

image in the future and distanced plane of his descendents (cf. the inscriptionsof oriental despots, and of Augustus). In the world of memory, a phenomenon

exists in its own peculiar context, with its own special rules, subject to

conditions quite different those we meet in the world we see with our own eyes,the world of practice and familiar contact. The epic past is a special form for




perceiving people and events in art. In general the act of artistic perception and

representation is almost completely obscured by this form. Artistic

representation here is representation sub specie aeternitatis . One may, and infact one must, memorialize with artistic language only that which is worthy of

being remembered, that which should be preserved in the memory of

descendents; an image is created for descendents, and this image is projected on

to their sublime and distant horizon. Contemporaneity for its own sake (that isto say, a contemporaneity that makes no claim on future memory) is molded in

clay; contemporaneity for the future (for descendents) is molded in marble or

bronze. x

Marcel, the narrator, takes his contemporaneity as “for the future” and tries to

keep those things at their places in the same way and for the same reason, but

he knows, subconsciously that he cannot, even if he can, there would be no

value left of them, which would immediately become materialistic (i.e. a simple

biscuit, a random stone, just another woman), a commodity of no value to him:

I usually found in the hall her hat, cloak and umbrella, which she had left lyingthere in case they should be needed. As soon as, on opening the door, I caught

sight of them, the atmosphere of the house became breathable once more. I feltthat, instead of a rarefied air, it was happiness that filled it. I was rescued from

my melancholy, the sight of these trifles gave me possession of Albertine, I ran togreet her.

…. Albertine herself profited just as much by being thus transported out of one

of the two worlds to which we have access, and in which we can placealternately the same object, by escaping thus from the crushing weight of matter

to play freely in the fluid space of mind. I found myself suddenly and for theinstant capable of feeling an ardent desire for this irritating girl. She had at thatmoment the appearance of a work by Elstir or Bergotte, I felt a momentary

enthusiasm for her, seeing her in the perspective of imagination and art. xi

In the excerpt above, Marcel is rescued from his melancholy (that is

contemporaneity for the future) and once again comes back to the reality, in

which he can look at her once again under the light of “artistic perception and

representation” as Bakhtin coins—or in Marcel’s words, “the perspective of

imagination and art” (that is contemporaneity for its own sake). Marcel, thanks

to Proust, is subconsciously aware of his tendency to mold Albertine into an

effigy each time she goes away from his sight, but he simply cannot help

himself. Albertine starts to solidify immediately in his memory, upon exiting




from his personal touch, and thereby enters into somebody else’s. The idea that

Albertine exists in somebody else’s personal sphere is unbearable for Marcel.

This conflict between the solid memory in his mind and the actual Albertine,

who exists at that moment somewhere else, god knows what she is doing, is

driving Marcel crazy (that is to say, having the memory, but not the knowledge

of her). If Albertine did not exist, he would be fine with it, but she does exist

somewhere else—not near Marcel… and therefore, he is left with the effigy in

his mind, which lacks the plastic beauty of “the artistic representation.” Marcel

is aware that solid effigy in his memory and the beautiful molten statue within

his knowledge (but out of his reach) must come to terms with each other, which

is what he is trying to do—to mold her so concretely that she would stand for

the same thing both in his knowledge and in his memory; like a statue that is

bought from an auction, which upon having possession of loses all its charm

and meaning:

Pain alone kept my tedious attachment alive. As soon as my pain vanished, and

with it the need to soothe it, requiring all my attention, like some agonizingdistraction, I felt that she meant absolutely nothing to me, that I must meanabsolutely nothing to her. It made me wretched that this state should persist,

and, at certain moments, I longed to hear of something terrible that she had

done, something that would be capable of keeping us at arms-length until I wascured, so that we might then be able to be reconciled, to refashion in a differentand more flexible form the chain that bound us. xii

It was hard for Marcel, thanks to Proust, to be cured that easily of his

attachment to Albertine, which in her duplicity and under the effect of Marcel’s

obsessions, became an influx of Albertines (i.e. liquefied characters) through the

actual Albertine (i.e. the character effigy ) that made Marcel tighten his grasp

even more on her per via di levare and made Proust thrust another brush stroke

into her per via di porre :




For I possessed in my memory only series of Albertines, separate from one

another, incomplete, outlines, snapshots; and so my jealousy was restricted to

an intermittent expression, at once fugitive and fixed, and to the people who hadcaused that expression to appear upon Albertine’s face. xiii

***

For Marcel and Proust are not only situated both inside and outside of things

and situations, but also they are situated on opposite poles of perceptual

modality, too. That is to say, Marcel from the outside takes a deductionist

approach (or a deductive reasoning) that aims to fix a multiplicity of

appearances into a substantive body by way of removing them one by one out of

the body (or blocking their way out), whereas Proust takes a reductionist

approach (or an inductive reasoning) that aims to add more and more of those

instantaneous appearances into the body where they make a greater unity of

being (or liquefying them to ease their way out). Marcel, through Proust, knows

that he, in fact, needs to have a multiplicity of approaches towards those

instantaneous appearances, instead of his ambition to epicize Albertine and

turn her into an effigy . Therefore, he through his inability to get into her (or

impossibility to take her inside out) he strives to have knowledge of her, what

she does, how she does, with whom she does, which may give him clues of her

internal processes, internal being, which she keeps to herself—which he does

not let her reveal for due to the fear that it may be something that he cannot

bear. Those things that are inside are already incommunicable through

language anyway and they are only revealed through “a series of appearances”

that are like the variety of notes in a song or the multiplicity of hues in painting

that are sensorial, not communicable through language. Proust, the author,

gets inside the narrative and gives us clues of this claim from inside out in




between Marcel and his narrative. Nevertheless, it is Proust, not Marcel, who

appears from the depths of the narration and warns about Marcel’s

deductionism—diffusing hue into the narrative. And after that, Marcel starts to

deduce that hue to a single tone again.

But is it not the fact then that from those elements, all the real residuum which

we are obliged to keep to ourselves, which cannot be transmitted in talk, even by friend to friend, by master to disciple, by lover to mistress, that ineffable

something which makes a difference in quality between what each of us has felt

and what he is obliged to leave behind at the threshold of the phrases in whichhe can communicate with his fellows only by limiting himself to external points

common to us all and of no interest, art, the art of a Vinteuil like that of anElstir, makes the man himself apparent, rendering externally visible in the

colours of the spectrum that intimate composition of those worlds which we callindividual persons and which, without the aid of art, we should never know? A

pair of wings, a different mode of breathing, which would enable us to traverseinfinite space, would in no way help us, for, if we visited Mars or Venus keepingthe same senses, they would clothe in the same aspect as the things of the earth

everything that we should be capable of seeing. The only true voyage of

discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange landsbut to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of

a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds,

that each of them is; and this we can contrive with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil;with men like these we do really fly from star to star. xiv

Here, it is Proust, indeed, from the inside of narrative who diffuses hue to the

narrative, spreads all the colors, while Marcel dived deeper into Vinteuil’s

sonata looking at another picture of “colour[s] which the painter's hand has

conveyed to his palette.” xv Only after the sonata ends, Marcel is handed the

narration back, as he goes on to say that “[t]he andante had just ended upon a

phrase filled with a tenderness to which I had entirely abandoned myself.” xvi

That phrase, in its double meaning, is also the phrase that Proust embedded

both into the narrative and the sonata, while Marcel was as ecstatically

enjoying the music. There, Proust slowly oozed into the narrative with the help

of the music and spread the unseen notes all around, of which Marcel was

unaware. With the end of the sonata and the internal journey through infinite




eyes into infinite universes, he finds himself, to his disappointment, back again

“subside[d] into the most humdrum reality.” xvii

***

In Marcel’s real life, it is not the multiplicity of the eyes, but to deduce the

multiplicity of appearances, for his same eyes, is the challenge for Marcel.

Indeed, the challenge is to mold the same effigy from different women—to

possess and mold them into “bronze” from “clay,” and to put them on their

niche. Because, in Marcel’s perception,

[w]e are sculptors. We are anxious to obtain of a woman a statue entirely

different from that which she has presented to us. We have seen a girl strolling,indifferent, insolent, along the seashore, we have seen a shop-assistant, serious

and active, behind her counter, who will answer us stiffly, if only so as to escapethe sarcasm of her comrades, a fruit seller who barely answers us at all. Well,

we know no rest until we can discover by experiment whether the proud girl on

the seashore, the shop-assistant on her high horse of 'What will people say?', thepreoccupied fruit seller cannot be made, by skilful handling on our part, to relax

their rectangular attitude, to throw about our neck their fruit-laden arms, to

direct towards our lips, with a smile of consent, eyes hitherto frozen or absent— oh, the beauty of stern eyes—in working hours when the worker was so afraid of the gossip of her companions, eyes that avoided our beleaguering stare and, now

that we have seen her alone and face to face, make their pupils yield beneath

the sunlit burden of laughter when we speak of making love. xviii

Marcel acknowledges that he himself, in Bakhtinian terms, is an epicizer—in

his own terms a sculptor; a man whose quest is to possess the women and

install them on their emotional niche, where he will leave them to stand by

themselves only to turn around later in his memory to take a glance at them

once in a while from a distant time and space, where those women one and all,

as parts of the same whole (like the bones of the dinosaur or the arm or leg of

the ancient statue) will come to mean the same thing: his masterpiece. This But

throughout the novel, he assumes another approach rather than installing all

women into the same effigy , to fit all women in Albertine in that very same

effigy . Kristeva explains this process by saying that “he patterns himself after




(or, rather, he projects himself onto) different facets of his protagonists, who

nevertheless preserve the substance of their own figures.” xix To have the

complete possession of a woman inside out, not only to possess her body, but

also to possess her soul—all of her appearances. Marcel, the narrator, by

coalescing into Proust, the author, becomes aware that his endeavor to epicize

Albertine and turn her into that concrete effigy , like that of the “petite

Madeleine,” is not possible, and even if possible, is in fact not what he desires

to achieve as a result—he desires, in fact, her to disappear, so that he can

install her, where she belongs, on niche in his memory.

But while she was speaking, and I continued to think of Vinteuil, it was the

other, the materialist hypothesis, that of there being nothing, that in turn

presented itself to my mind. I began to doubt, I said to myself that after all itmight be the case that, if Vinteuil's phrases seemed to be the expression of

certain states of the soul analogous to that which I had experienced when I

tasted the madeleine that had been dipped in a cup of tea, there was nothing toassure me that the vagueness of such states was a sign of their profundity

rather than of our not having learned yet to analyse them, so that there need be

nothing more real in them than in other states. And yet that happiness, thatsense of certainty in happiness while I was drinking the cup of tea, or when I

smelt in the Champs-Elysées a smell of mouldering wood, was not an illusion. Inany case, whispered the spirit of doubt, even if these states are more profound

than others that occur in life, and defy analysis for the very reason that they bring into play too many forces which we have not yet taken into consideration,

the charm of certain phrases of Vinteuil's music makes us think of them

because it too defies analysis, but this does not prove that it has the samedepth; the beauty of a phrase of pure music can easily appear to be the image of

or at least akin to an intellectual impression which we have received, but simply

because it is unintellectual. And why then do we suppose to be specially profound those mysterious phrases which haunt certain works, including this

septet by Vinteuil?

It was not, however, his music alone that Albertine played me; the pianola wasto us at times like a scientific magic lantern (historical and geographical) and on

the walls of this room in Paris, supplied with inventions more modern than that

of Combray days, I would see, accordingly as Albertine played me Rameau orBorodin, extend before me now an eighteenth century tapestry sprinkled with

cupids and roses, now the Eastern steppe in which sounds are muffled by

boundless distances and the soft carpet of snow. And these fleeting decorationswere as it happened the only ones in my room, for if, at the time of inheriting my

aunt Léonie's fortune, I had vowed that I would become a collector like Swann,

would buy pictures, statues, all my money went upon securing horses, amotorcar, dresses for Albertine. But did not my room contain a work of art more

precious than all these—Albertine herself? xx




That is for certain. Proust have already provided the clues for hereof

acknowledgement throughout the novel, only to lead Marcel to this

consciousness and to show us how the process of epicization in the novel works

through the double existence of Marcel, the narrator, and Proust, the author,

from inside and outside of things while one from the outside tried to carve an a

sculpture; and the other, from inside saturated it with colors so that when there

is nothing left to carve, she could stand out in liquid colors. Hence, we can say

that while Proust is diving deep into his memories of the past, to reconstruct

the lost time and establish monuments into the future (that is to take them

from the realm of the “contemporaneity for its own sake” and put them in the

realm of “contemporaneity for the future”) he starts to carve them out of himself

into the world. Bakhtin, on author’s externalization of the internal, says that

“[t]he way in which this surplus will actually be realized grows out of the

author’s orientation toward form [the effigy] and content [the character], that is,

the ways he sees and depicts individuals. … There always remain in him

unrealized potential and unrealized demands. The future exists, and this future

ineluctably touches upon the individual, has its roots in him.” xxi

***

The epic stands out through infusion of the novelistic into it and that was made

possible by Proust’s double existence both within and without of the things and

situations, that is also to say that that double existence made possible for him

to use “language … to change perception into memory and memory into

perception. [As a result], the narrator constructs time regained while he is in

search of lost time.” xxii The final stage of the epicization of the novel is death—or




to kill Albertine to let the effigy stand for itself, free from Albertine’s existence…

like the death of Swann .

The death of Swann! Swann, in this phrase, is something more than a noun in

the possessive case. I mean by it his own particular death, the death allotted by destiny to the service of Swann. For we talk of 'death' for convenience, but there

are almost as many different deaths as there are people. We are not equipped

with a sense that would enable us to see, moving at every speed in every direction, these deaths, the active deaths aimed by destiny at this person or

that. Often there are deaths that will not be entirely relieved of their duties until

two or even three years later. …. And it is this diversity among deaths, themystery of their circuits, the colour of their fatal badge, that makes so

impressive a paragraph in the newspapers such as this:

"We regret to learn that M. Charles Swann passed away yesterday at his

residence in Paris, after a long and painful illness. A Parisian whose

intellectual gifts were widely appreciated, a discriminating but steadfastly

loyal friend, he will be universally regretted, in those literary and artisticcircles where the soundness and refinement of his taste made him a willingand a welcome guest, as well as at the Jockey Club of which he was one of

the oldest and most respected members. He belonged also to the Union andAgricole. He had recently resigned his membership of the Rue Royale. His

personal appearance and eminently distinguished bearing never failed to

arouse public interest at all the great events of the musical and artisticseasons, especially at private views, at which he was a regular attendant

until, during the last years of his life, he became almost entirely confined to

the house. The funeral will take place, etc.">

From this point of view, if one is not 'somebody,' the absence of a well known

title makes the process of decomposition even more rapid. No doubt it is more or

less anonymously, without any personal identity, that a man still remains Ducd'Uzès. But the ducal coronet does for some time hold the elements together, as

their moulds keep together those artistically designed ices which Albertineadmired, whereas the names of ultrafashionable commoners, as soon as they

are dead, dissolve and lose their shape. We have seen M. de Bréauté speak of

Cartier as the most intimate friend of the Duc de La Trémoïlle, as a man greatly in demand in aristocratic circles. To a later generation, Cartier has become

something so formless that it would almost be adding to his importance to make

him out as related to the jeweller Cartier, with whom he would have smiled tothink that anybody could be so ignorant as to confuse him! Swann on the

contrary was a remarkable personality, in both the intellectual and the artisticworlds; and even although he had 'produced' nothing, still he had a chance of

surviving a little longer. And yet, my dear Charles——-, whom I used to know

when I was still so young and you were nearing your grave, it is because hewhom you must have regarded as a little fool has made you the hero of one of

his volumes that people are beginning to speak of you again and that your namewill perhaps live. If in Tissot's picture representing the balcony of the Rue Royale

club, where you figure with Galliffet, Edmond Polignac and Saint-Maurice,

people are always drawing attention to yourself, it is because they know thatthere are some traces of you in the character of Swann.

To return to more general realities, it was of this foretold and yet unforeseen

death of Swann that I had heard him speak himself to the Duchesse de




Guermantes, on the evening of her cousin's party. It was the same death whose

striking and specific strangeness had recurred to me one evening when, as I ran

my eye over the newspaper, my attention was suddenly arrested by theannouncement of it, as though traced in mysterious lines interpolated there out

of place. They had sufficed to make of a living man some one who can never

again respond to what you say to him, to reduce him to a mere name, a written

name, that has passed in a moment from the real world to the realm of silence.It was they that even now made me anxious to make myself familiar with the

house in which the Verdurins had lived, and where Swann, who at that time was

not merely a row of five letters printed in a newspaper, had dined so often withOdette. xxiii

Death gives Marcel Proust the complete possession of the liquefied statue. And

in death, Albertine becomes free of herself—and of Marcel. She becomes

complete and ascends to a height, where the language goes into a drastic

change. Bakhtin in his essay, “Epic and Novel”, says, about the change in

language in regards to death that “[t]he dead are loved in a different way. They

are removed from the sphere of contact. One can and indeed must speak of

them in a different style. Language about the dead is stylistically quite distinct

from the language about the living.” xxiv That distinction gives Marcel Proust the

complete possession and control of the monumental statue of Albertine. That’s

why, in fact, Albertine is the fugitive in The Captive and the captive in The

Fugitive .

i Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past: Time Regained. “The Captive”, p23ii Ibid. p23iii Ibid.p46iv Kristeva, Julia. Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Speaking. New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1996. p120v Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination (Edited by Michael Holquist). Austin: University of

Texas Press, 2006.p.31vi

Ibid. p35vii Kristeva, p121viii Bakhtin. p35 That will also remind us of Mme. Verdurin’s anger at the party after Ventuil’ssonata, where she says “’Oh! What an evening,’ Mme. Verdurin went on, revealing thus the true

cause of her anger. "Performing a masterpiece in front of those wooden images.” (The Captive,

240)ix Bakhtin. p15 x Bakhtin, p18-19 xi Proust. p45-46 xii Proust. 21-22 xiii Proust. p126




xiv Proust. p220 xv Proust. p214 xvi Proust. p220 xvii Proust. p221 xviii Proust. p120 xix Kristeva. p132 xx Proust. p323-327 xxi Bakhtin. p37 xxii Kristeva, 128 xxiii Captive, 169-171 xxiv Bakhtin. p20

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