Proust Moment, April 20, 2003

Prelude to a Kiss

Does it put too crude a point on things to suggest there’s something rather Freudian, certainly something Oedipal, about Marcel’s relationship with his mother? Yes, Nabokov would blanch at the idea, but look at how Proust renders the following scene in terms of foreplay and consummation; he yearns for completion, even as he knows that it will end all the joyful yearning.

In Search of Lost Time is not biography, but it’s about biography, among other things; in the Proustian world, memory is inspiration, and memories are the materials of ones’s own private art. You take them, you examine them, you focus your interior vision on seeing them as richly as possible. I think sometimes Proust is at his most florid when Marcel is trying to remember; the facts of his life might be as banal as yours or mine, but maybe life is only as banal as you remember it, and an artist looks beneath the surface, and draws out all the color. So Marcel’s memories have a certain overripe exoticism. In the magic lantern of Marcel’s overcharged, feverishly aesthetic recollections, his relationship with his mother is a virtual marriage, no less than the marriage between Christ and His church:

“So much did I love that good night that I reached the stage of hoping that it would come as late as possible, so as to prolong the time of respite during which Mamma would not yet have appeared. Sometimes when, after kissing me, she opened the door to go, I longed to call her back, to say to her `Kiss me just once again,’ but I knew that then she would at once look displeased, for the concession which she made to my wretchedness and agitation in coming up to me with this kiss of peace always annoyed my father, who thought such ceremonies absurd, and she would have liked to try to induce me to outgrow the need, the custom of having her there at all, which was a very different thing from letting the custom grow up of my asking her for an additional kiss when she was already crossing the threshold. And to see her look displeased destroyed all the sense of tranquillity she had brought me a moment before, when she bent her loving face down over my bed, and held it out to me like a Host, for an act of Communion in which my lips might drink deeply the sense of her real presence, and with it the power to sleep.”

--"Overture," Swann's Way