I. On surgery
or; is Marcel sleeping?
In my introductory letter I mentioned that regards, marcel was memoirist in orientation, and “about” Proust to the extent that I’m curious how two years spent reading La Recherche will fashion a particular frame around a particular life—one that (surprise!) turns out to be mine.
By fate or happenstance, this project’s launch coincided almost exactly with a surgery I’d expected to be scheduled in late March. That it was sooner has been a blessing; I am in any case laid up in bed for a while yet as I begin reading Swann’s Way and set out on this long task. My confinement feels a bit uncanny, like a funhouse mirror stood up between Proust & I: thinking, as I am—propped by pillows and suddenly seeming quite breakable—of the last three years of Proust’s life, his own confinement to his cork-lined bedroom, the race against time to finish his enormous novel—this journey we, too, have become joined in.
This opening sequence of Swann introduces us to the narrator, his mother + father, his grandparents, great-aunt Léonie, Françoise the maid, and, of course, M. Swann (as well as passing reference to Odette, Swann’s wife)—also to Combray, that geography of the narrator’s youth, and an outline of the social climate in which these characters revolve. We even encounter Proust’s famous madeleine, soaked in lime blossom tea—and are, in turn, introduced to his ongoing fascination with what he calls involuntary memory, here imaged as an “exquisite pleasure” that is both instantiated by and simultaneously infiltrates the senses, bringing the whole of the narrator’s past to him again, a “precious essence.” To all these things we’ll return.
Two days ago now I walked through the gold-gilt and glass doors of a perfectly anonymous Midtown office building. On entry, the lobby is a horizon of indistinguishable marble surfaces. It gives the space a disorienting illusion of flatness.
I am Dorothy in the Emerald City—a foreign body, homely bumpkin, agape and astonished. This, I think, is the kind of building Lydia Tár’s PR firm would run operations out of. Although I’d been instructed to dress comfortably, and have (stretch khakis, Birkenstocks, the Annie Ernaux sweatshirt Harron gave me for Christmas), I feel suddenly self-conscious and small against the gleaming expanse of this fortress. The women entering and leaving the building appear otherworldly in their immaculacy, as though plucked from advertisements. As usual I feel or fear I’ve conned everyone on the matter of my class status—am I recognizable as the interloper I am in this world of wealth accumulators?
The doorman—whose trim suit is the sole slash of black against all that white—asks who I am being seen by and, when told, directs me to the elevator that will take me some thirty stories into the air.
In the waiting room I fidget for half an hour. I post some inanity on twitter and scroll; I try (fail) to read the book I’d brought (the remarkable third volume of Helen Garner’s diaries1); I anxiously tug the tops of my socks up my calves. I’d worn them for luck—a custom gift, emblazoned with my dog’s inquisitive face, an image duplicated from a photo my friend had screenshotted on instagram—Olive’s head disembodied, repeating, against a pale lilac cotton canvas scattered with hearts.
I gaze on this imprint of her expression—as if, in the intensity of my regard, some uncommonly benevolent omen might reveal itself. Beside me my boyfriend checks his email with one hand; with the other he squeezes my knee. He turns back to his own book—another apparition of Annie Ernaux in this event (the recent translation of Do What They Say Or Else)—as I turn my look outward, onto the tops of buildings stood like sentinels in the distance beyond the window.
On the wall opposite this window is a massive screen, playing, not television, but a looping film of fish swimming in electric blue water, a bizarre digital aquarium, something, I suppose, intended to shroud the room in a kind of calm. (Writing this now, having gotten 20 or so pages into Swann, I am reminded of the magic lantern situated in the narrator’s chambers, which, contrary to its intended effect of easing him into the darkness of night, “destroy[s] the familiar impression” he had of the room: “Now I no longer recognized it, and felt uneasy in it, as in a room in some hotel or chalet.”)
I am excited, yes. Also petrified. I’ve never had major surgery, nor have I been placed under general anesthesia. (I had laughing gas when my wisdom teeth were removed; I’ve never even broken a bone.) Nevertheless it seems I am all the time in doctor’s offices lately, having managed two minor health scares in recent months, and then the negotiation process between my GP and the surgical team, as well as frequent, droning calls with the insurance company, and the seemingly endless submission of my biological material to my dear friends at Quest Diagnostics, who never seem to have done with their hunger for my blood.
We—or rather, they—this vast network of professionals who are meant, I believe, to know my body better than I could ever hope to—must ensure there’s no terrible secret hiding in that blood, no rupture, rift, or other specter in the outline of my corporeal form—anything that might give legitimate reason to bar me from the procedure. Mainly I trust these professionals, even if I am skeptical of the bureaucratic apparatuses of the system, the gates kept, the relentless tedia intended to dissuade people from seeking care. At a number of moments, I am furious, however, sensing, as I do, that any knowledge produced by my occupancy in this body is considered a kind of mumbo jumbo, the allegedly immaterial detritus of feelings.
At still other moments I think how I am lucky to be covered during this process, and then think how this is a peculiarly American sensibility—this pitiable but persisting feeling of gratitude when our healthcare system cares for our health. I was uninsured for a decade before this past year, because the yearly fine issued against the uninsured cost significantly less than the annual accrual of monthly payments made by the insured—but now I have become ravenous; I think: I will schedule everything, I will trek to a medical establishment every fucking day if it means getting my/self in order before this support network crumbles beneath my feet.
(This another fiction—this belief that if I can manage to check a dozen lines off an itemized medical list, the world will be righted on its axis, and I will become free of its constraints, or somehow have sneaked my body beyond the ravages of capitalism.)
Harron calls—I answer, whispering, I can’t talk long—I am to be admitted at any minute. She tells me I’ll be fine, that I’ll do great, that going under is like being transported beyond the bad parts and across space-time, but that walking into the OR will be a disorienting experience. “It’s like going into Studio 54,” she says, “wait—shit, not that, Area 51, you know, where they keep the aliens.” I laugh. “Wouldn’t it be fab,” she continues, “if when you walked into the operating room the nurse went ‘welcome to your boob job' and offered you a key bump?”
(I say, or think I say, that I miss my cocaine days, which is only a little true—what I miss, I think, is the particular friction of conversation on it, the sense that everything you’re saying and everything everyone is saying to you has never been said before, and is brilliant, and will change your life. But it’s mostly the drug’s voice, and years of those conversations eventually cause them to drag, make them sag with the melancholy of unoriginality, make them look quite a bit like wasted time—all the connections you thought you’d made which were mainly excuses to go into single-stall restrooms with strangers in the glamorous way.)
After she and I hang up Kevin, too, comforts me, reminding me I’ll be under for only an hour, and that then he’ll be taking me home. That he’s here for me, to care for me. And I think how I’ve never had this before, this solidity with a man. He is not, I say to myself, going to abandon me in this moment of profound fragility. I am allowed, finally, to be breakable; my vulnerability is not a circumstance in which I have committed some terrible wrong, but is a condition of my being human, one prism of my life, another vision of my resiliency.
It’s true I feel alien when I am led into the OR. I am laid on a table, strapped in, and a parade of masked attendants begin to hook me up to various devices that are wholly unintelligible to me. There are beeps and the ambient fuzz-hum of infinite technologies. The nurse, Mary2, is chatty and warm, she asks what sort of music I like. The anesthesiologist apologizes for the pinch as she inserts the needle of the IV into the crook of my elbow. “You have good veins,” she says, something every medical professional tells me, “you brought me the good shit.” A moment later my entire body is washed in pleasure—Mary asks if I’m enjoying my “happy juice.” I’m laughing. Everything is warm. I’m telling them, play whatever music they like. After all—I won’t even be here.
I wake in the recovery room.
*
Swann’s Way—and as such, La Recherche3—begins in sleep; or rather, it commences on the narrator’s unsettled relationship to it.
For a long time I would go to bed early.4 Sometimes, the candle barely out, my eyes closed so quickly that I did not have time to tell myself: 'I’m falling asleep.' And half an hour later the thought that it was time to look for sleep would awaken me.
There is much made of the subterranean un-consciousness of sleep in this first section. It is the eccentric Aunt Léonie’s “great claim to distinction” that she never sleeps—a false one, as we find out, and even the narrator overhears her reminding herself “‘I must not forget that I never slept a wink.’” It is nevertheless a claim the household has agreed to pay respect to, an unspoken domestic conspiracy meant to legitimate and assuage Aunt Léonie's sense of her invalidism.5 For the narrator, sleep is an untoward displacement—an exile from the habitualisms of time and identity, yes, but also, importantly, from the pleasures of the social and familial. Bedtime, for the child, appears fearful primarily because it disciplines through a mandate of solitude.
In the house at Combray, the narrator is banished early to his room when M. Swann comes to visit. Sleep evades him, for the kiss that his Mamma would usually bestow upon him in bed6 is given, instead, downstairs: he must labor to protect its private flame during the journey to his chambers, to hold onto the preciousness of this intimacy against the psychic interferences of his travels. Sleep severs the subject from the confidences of memory; it robs one of sense: “when I awoke in the middle of the night, not knowing where I was, I could not even be sure at first who I was; I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal’s consciousness.” Sleep returns us to our basest state, strips us of the accoutrements of the interpersonal dynamic.
But all is not lost. On waking, memory extends itself like a rope “let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being […and I] would gradually piece together the original components of my ego.” The narrator wonders in this moment whether the furnishings of his room would have an existence, an identity or mobility of their own, were it not for their subordination beneath the suffocating weight of the human ego.7 He remarks that—from the confusion of waking—all that surrounds him must surely revolve, is nearly caught in the state of motion it exists in when we aren’t looking at it—the years, places, even the things. The rooms and their positions are composed from memory, they are conjured into existence—like Adam naming the kingdom of animals—by the recalibration of the narrator’s consciousness in waking: “my brain […] had reassembled the circumstances sufficiently to identify the room.”
I can’t say I recall much about my youthful sleeping patterns. In point of fact, I can’t say my memory of any period before the 8th grade remains to me with particular clarity. By my mother’s and sister’s accounting I often stayed awake long past bedtime, unlawfully reading, hidden beneath the blankets with the aid of one of those clip-on lights. Hidden, because my mother would otherwise notice the glow and come in to the bedroom, demand I cease my unquenchable habit and get enough sleep before school. I was a quiet child, serious, never to be found without a book—often I was sat with the grown-ups. It wasn’t that I had no friends—I did, though I have always been too cagey, I think, for popularity—but that I often felt the textures of fictional worlds more richly and deeply than I did my own.
I believe this was in no small part a matter of class—that is, of what experiences were afforded to my mother, my sister, and me. There wasn’t money for much of anything, and besides this, no time, as my mother worked multiple jobs. When I was old enough to, usually I looked after my sister. (In all likelihood I became a gluttonous reader, too, because the local library was a five minute walk from our house, and the functionally infinite universes harbored there were free.) I notice on this reading of the book that “social position” emerges quite early on as a guiding anxiety in Swann: Aunt Léonie disapproves of M. Swann, as the narrator’s grandfather does not, for his dining with princesses and Ducs, for what she sees as his ‘adventuring’ above his station. Léonie
had actually ceased to ‘see’ the son of a lawyer of our acquaintance because he had married a ‘Highness’ and had thereby stepped down—in her eyes—from the respectable position of a lawyer’s son to that of those adventurers, upstart footmen or stable-boys mostly, to whom, we are told, queens have sometimes shown their favours.
M. Swann not only associates with those above his class, but—it is intimated—is appraised complicatedly by the rest of the family for a quite different reason—because of his “marriage with a woman of the worst type, almost a prostitute.” (Needless to say, M. Swann discreetly fails to have Mme. Swann accompany him when he comes calling.)
It is the servant class who do the lion’s share in the management of the family’s sleeping habits. We have seen that Françoise (the maid) shores up Aunt Léonie’s sense of her own incapacities and insistence on a kind of ontological sleeplessness. It is Françoise, too, to whom the narrator turns when he wishes to send a note down to his mother, asking after that longed-for bedtime kiss. The congenital fear that props up his insomnia becomes another duty for Françoise to smooth over, with her having to determine an appropriate moment in the dinner to quietly convey the boy’s message to his mother.
It is a funny thing, by which I mean a difficult one, to communicate with any clearness what insomnia feels like to the slumberer whose nights are situated within a peaceable kingdom. I have never been an easy sleeper. I am beset not only by a difficulty with falling into the territory of the unconscious, but with the staying there too. One such unanticipated feeling is the humiliation of defeat: to wake at 2am and concede that no further rest will arrive that night often seems to me a pathetic posture, a testament to my body’s superior unruliness, or else my mind’s incapacity to subject that body not only to a force of will but to the physical need, to the very thing—the revitalizing value of refractory time—that is good for it. But there’s nothing doing.
When I slept alone, or in any case when I was single and slept only beside my dog (who is able to wake and sleep ad infinitum through any time of day), I had the cold comfort of turning on a dim lamp and reading until morning, or glazing over like a miserable little bedbound donut while reruns of Law and Order: SVU played on the TV. There is a responsibility you have to your partner, however, which is not to inflict your sleeplessness on them—which means that, in the cosmic frigidity of the Insomniac Hour, now I am mainly conscripted to the dulleries of my mind palace, my thoughts, the persistent and punishing orchestration in my brain of each millisecond of the following day. I have often felt in the sunny hours an irrepressible longing for night—for rest—knowing, in a place dug deep down, the likelihood that this desire would be smashed, razed, burned, annihilated by the limitations of what my body will suffice.
On the night after the operation I was woken by the sound of a car alarm angrily repeating, seemingly every hour, for somewhere between five and fifteen minutes each time—though who can say, I was as if frozen in the bed, my upper body swollen and numb, my legs elevated and numb, my consciousness hovering in an uncanny between-space of drugged stupor. That first night I took the Tramadol I’d been prescribed—hearing, too late, the warnings of my friends that the use of any opioids would fuck my sleep more deeply than it is already fucked. This warning will echo and land like the thud of a hammer against my temples throughout the long night. What I will feel in the morning on waking is as much the strickenness of total exhaustion as a delineable sensation of pain.
For the narrator of La Recherche, to wake in the middle of the night without understanding it is the middle of the night is to be struck with the relief of morning—in mistaking the extinguishing of the gas lamps by the servants for a “streak of daylight,” he finds himself elated at the possibility that it is time to be cared for, to be attended to, to be in the world of the people again. But it is a bad reading; the beam of hope appears only at the moment of its foreclosure. As memory situates him again in consciousness, what dawns is, instead, a horror: the sudden knowledge that he “must lie all night suffering without remedy.”
Of the first part of “Combray,” Lydia Davis remarks that it, “having opened at bedtime, closes—itself like a long sleepless night—at dawn.”8 On that night after my surgery, when that awful car alarm repeatedly ignited me, I would wake, and drift, and wake, and drift, each time thinking—now, I am ready to learn the incremental process of my recovery—only to have the gas lamp extinguished once more, to see it is still dark out, and I am still laid up here, counting the moments until I am able to begin.
How to End a Story ruthlessly dissects the dissolution of Garner’s marriage to Murray Bail, and is a text I hope we’ll return to later in this project—Garner is reading and frequently references Proust’s Search during the year most exhaustively represented in the volume: 1997.
Mary is a pseudonym. Other names have been used with permission.
I don’t know if it’s snobbish, insufferable, or otherwise to play between English + French—any editor would compel a choice, but I don’t want to choose. Nor do I have to! I like the idea of peppering the project with French!
In the French, Proust writes Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure. Richard Howard, in conversation with The Paris Review, remarked of his own translation of this sentence—“Time and again, I have gone to bed early”—that it was his way of preserving what he sees as the one instance in the non-dialogic narration of La Recherche where Proust uses the passé composé. As he considers, his version embeds La Recherche’s overarching thematic of recurrence into the matter of its language—that is (if I’m reading him correctly), Proust’s sense of the overlapping transparencies of temporality is more evident in this vision than in those that mark the past off as The Past. I don’t much know what to do with the trouble of translation throughout this project. Everyone seems to have their preference. My choice of the Moncrieff has mainly been a matter of practicality. I’ve read Swann’s Way twice before—on both occasions I used the Lydia Davis, mostly because I just like Lydia Davis and prefer her translation of Bovary. In any case my French is rudimentary—functionally nonexistent on a scholarly level, so the ‘problem’ of reading the novel in English will be an ambivalent and ongoing one.
Aunt Léonie is the greatest delight of these first 80 pages for me. This whole scene is wonderful, but I especially love that “in the morning Françoise would not ‘wake’ her, but would simply ‘go in’ to her […] and when in conversation [Aunt Léonie] so far forgot herself as to say ‘what woke me up,’ or ‘I dreamed that,’ she would blush and at once correct herself.”
I am reminded of the kisses and sidewise penetrations of fairy tales here, which may condemn heroines to eternal sleep or death—as the bite of an apple in Snow White, the prick of the spindle in Sleeping Beauty)—or, conversely, wake or transform them (the kiss of the loved one as the inciting event of metamorphosis). Fascinatingly, the wicked Bluebeard makes a cameo in this section (p 11). It is fable calibrated, in part, through a reversal of gendered power dynamics, with Bluebeard’s wives assuming the penetrative role by utilizing a forbidden key to unlock his most secret chamber. (For a fabulous retelling of this tale, find Angela Carter’s story “The Bloody Chamber” pronto!!!)
I can’t help but be reminded of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, of Andrew instructing Lily Briscoe to “Think of a kitchen table then, when you’re not there”—or of the section “Time Passes,” in which Woolf attempts to imagine a sort of life for the Ramsey’s house without all the people in it.
This remark I’ve culled from Davis’ introduction to her own translation of Du côté de Chez Swann, found in that edition but also in Essays: Two, a collection dominated by her work with, on, and around Proust.
I find it fascinating how he places so much emphasis on the fear he experiences at being discovered awake, of disrupting his parents’ routine/expectations, and yet when he ultimately exposes himself, he encounters understanding and kindness (albeit with hesitation from his mother.) It’s revealing that he gets what he wanted/needed emotionally, but in his recollection, he sees this as a painful moment:
“I ought then to have been happy; I was not. It struck me that my mother had just made a first concession which must have been painful to her, that it was a first step down from the ideal she had formed for me, and that for the first time she, with all her courage, had to confess herself beaten...[T]his evening opened a new era, must remain a black date in the calendar.”
He narrates as if he had these thoughts in the moment, but surely a child wouldn’t have this kind of insight. Nor would he have known it was a step down, let alone the first step. We can only identify steps and results in retrospect. Yet he wants the reader to place these thoughts with his younger self. At the same time, he frames this as what he believes to be his mother’s thoughts, when in reality they are a backwards projection of his own perspective on his relationship with his mother in total. It’s impossible for Proust or his reader to know how his mother perceived this in the moment or in retrospect.
Not entirely sure what to make of this or if there’s a conclusion to pull from it. But it was an interesting moment where the larger project’s emphasis on types of memory grows complicated (surely not for the last time!)
Regarding the end note, it has always been a complication of War & Peace how extensively French was used, and Tolstoy did his own translations, though things about it varied through editions. The translation I have translates his translation from Russia in the footnote, instead of actually originally translating the French (despite that both translators are fluent French speakers.)
Anyway, you are doing much better than I at getting something from this novel. I am about to start book 3 and have little to say about it, though despite In Search of Lost Time being one of the most gratuitously self-indulgent things I've ever read I have somehow grown attached.