Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (50 page)

Tired, in chest pain, bending over gingerly to take off his boots, the narrator is invaded by "an unknown, a divine presence" (II, 273). This presence is, of course, the grandmother who still lives
in
the protagonist, in the form of
memoire involontaire,
a magic inner space where our past is ever green and vital, which we can only access through the whims of associative connections and serendipitous linkage. Proust's character relives his first visit to Balbec, becomes once again (briefly) the hurting young boy whose pain was alleviated in only one way: through the ministrations of the loving grandmother. This miraculous recall—so utterly unlike the mechanical feats of retrieval and storage made possible by our

computer age—completes the early experience, adds to its plenitude, enables the older man to come into his estate by actually possessing what had merely "happened" earlier. And it is only through this renewed contact with the "reborn," living grandmother that the narrator finally experiences the actual horror: she is dead. It is here that Proust expands and complicates the picture of mourning offered to us by Freud and Kubler-Ross, and it is here that literature amplifies our understanding of what death really might mean. There are two deaths, Proust is saying: the first is the brutal, unstoppable fate of flesh which condemns all living creatures and flaunts its dreadful authority. This is the one on record. But insofar as we are talking about mourning, about the reality of death for a loved one, then the focus must shift to the mental and emotional life of the survivor, and it is there that a second death occurs, never really simultaneous with the first one. Traditional mourning acknowledges this much.

But Proust goes on to say that this second death, which may come even years after the first one, constitutes a farewell of remarkable density and richness, unlike the abrupt cessation of the first death. There is something stunningly humanistic in Proust's vision here, and the "
in
-
termittences du coeur'''
register for us just how haunting and beautiful this "second exit" can be. Only now does the narrator measure the extent and depth of his loss, because only now have the extent and depth of the loved one fully reappeared, writ large in this scene of incapacity: he bends down to remove his boots, re-becomes the sick-to-heart young boy of the past, and now knows that the balm-giving grandmother can never again come to his aid, even as he reexperiences her earlier life-saving efforts. Dead though she is, his life is saturated with her presence, and so she still lives.

Memory is life's great double-edged sword: it restores the past to us in all its fullness, while simultaneously flaunting its own virtuality, its status as mere memory, its tidings of absence that mock and undo the miraculous presence. Our experience of the death of others is utterly cued to this delayed-action, double scenario. Whereas the so-called

stages of grief map out our incremental severing of ties, Proust recon-ceives the matter altogether and grants the survivor a bittersweet reprieve: you get a second chance at this death, with the result that your loss is all the more horrible (now that you "know" what you have lost, now that you "know" that you have lost it for good), and yet this second act may have a resonance and volume that do justice to the actual scope of human love. This particular story—this heartbreaking game of hide-and-seek, of finders and keepers, losers and weepers—is not on record anywhere at all. No corpse, no funeral oration, no gravestone, no obituary, none of these markers of mortality, is in on this secret: that the dead haven't died yet, not entirely, not on the inside. Memory knows this story; literature can tell it. This is Proust's quarry.

Now the narrator replays his life with his grandmother, sees with shocking clarity the hurt he has caused her in her life, a hurt that now boomerangs entirely since his very perception of it is self-lodged, self-harming, "for as the dead exist only in us, it is ourselves that we strike without respite when we persist in recalling the blows that we have dealt them" (II, 786). But the bulk of the narrator's leave-taking of the (long) dead grandmother takes place in the dreams that now come to the bereaved man, dreams which refract what Proust calls "the agonizing synthesis of survival and annihilation, once more re-formed, in the organic and translucent depths of the mysteriously lighted viscera" (II, 787). I have repeatedly used the term
illumination
as a way of characterizing the work of literature, and I would submit that nothing can be darker for most of us than our own "viscera." Yes, doctors sometimes shine their light into our orifices and cavities, just as modern imaging provides its own miraculous readout of what is transpiring inside the murky body. We therefore know about the fluids and even blockages that live in our somatic pathways, but how do we account for love? Where does it live and lodge? Isn't memory the body's magic script for reversing entropy? And dreams turn out to be our nightly conduits for a kind of affective traffic that never stops, that outlives the deaths of all players except the dreamer.

Nothing in Proust's long novel quite matches the exquisite oneiric account of the grandmother's second death. The narrator is on a journey in search of his grandmother, embarking "upon the dark current of our own blood as upon an inward Lethe meandering sixfold" (II, 787). Tall, solid forms appear, as he explores this unknown space "beneath somber portals," with the certainty that she still exists, but diminished, so that she is en route to extinction and must be found soon if she is to be found at all. The darkness and the wind increase while the boy remembers that he has forgotten, for weeks on end, to write to the grandmother, thinks of how distressed she must be, living in "that little room which they have taken for her, no bigger than what one would give to an old servant, where she's all alone with the nurse they have put there to look after her, from which she cannot stir, for she's still slightly paralysed and has always refused to get up! She must think that I've forgotten her now that she's dead; how lonely she must be feeling, how deserted!" (II, 788). As happens so often in dreams, the desperate search is continually thwarted; he cannot remember where she lives, his father (who is to guide him) does not show up, the wind picks up still further. Then the father is sighted, and he explains that the grandmother is provided for in her little room, that she has inquired about her grandson, has been told that he was going to write a book, had seemed pleased, had wept.

When one knows about Proust's own carefully guarded sexual secrets and the amount of personal guilt that he harbored vis-a-vis his mother, these lines receive a very personal stamp; yet they also speak a larger, more general story of remorse (has one ever loved enough? does one ever realize it in time? has one ever said one's full to the loved one?). The boy beseeches his father to lead him to the grandmother, but the yearned-for encounter is fraught with problems, is eroding in front of our eyes: " 'Quick, quick, her address, take me to her.' But he says: 'Well... I don't know whether you will be able to see her. Besides, you know, she's very frail now, very frail, she's not at all herself, I'm afraid you would find it rather painful. And I can't remember the exact num-

her of the avenue.' 'But tell me, you who know, it's not true that the dead have ceased to exist. It can't possibly be true, in spite of what they say, because grandmother still exists.' My father smiles a mournful smile: Oh, hardly at all, you know, hardly at all. I think it would be better if you didn't go . . .' " (II, 789). The dream closes with the boy waking up in his Balbec hotel room, looking out to the sea, then turning away from it toward the wall of his room. And, with perfect circular logic, this wall is the old wall that served as a magic membrane which united (united, not divided) the boy and his grandmother a year earlier, as he tapped his small and frantic message of hurt, and she responded with her answer of love: "those answering knocks which meant: 'Don't fuss, little mouse, I know you're impatient, but I'm just coming' " (II, 790).

This dreamed farewell is neither sappy nor escapist; he never quite finds the dying lady even in the dream. But the pursuit itself, the fashioning of that small room where she lingers, not quite dead, awaiting the boy's communication, pleased and moved that he is writing, the recovery of the grandmother's priceless love, all this constitutes a rival scenario to the specter of the beast on the bed. Just a dream, we might say. Yet this rival story captures something exquisite and profound about his experience of love and loss: the insistently diminished condition of the grandmother, the futile efforts to find her, to tell her how much he still cares, all of this conveys with heart-wrenching detail not only the dismantling of death but the pathos of love, the failure either to save those we love or even to make them know how much we love. We see this as a story, one that adds something to the Little Red Riding Hood saga of the dead woman as beast on a bed whom someone has taken away. Something precious is also being added to the data of our lives here, in that the brutal trauma of death in its somatic form turns out not to be the final act, can be replayed in the mind of the bereaved in gracious and humane fashion. Arguably this second death is far more painful than the first, but it transforms the Gothic tale of abduction ("where was my grandmother?") into a fuller story of leave-taking, it too addressed to the question: "where was my grandmother?"

I want to say that Proust's depiction of the grandmother's "deaths" constitutes precisely that "public utility" that I believe art to be. And this leads to the point of my book. Like any other literary icon, Proust is ordinarily to be found on some ideal library shelf in the mind, filled with other presumable masterpieces that we may get around to reading, if the hustle and bustle of real life ever permits us the time to do so. The very bulk of Proust's novel virtually ensures that it will be given this honorific status: much praise, little reality. At the same time, all of us today are conversant with the host of pharmaceutical, medical, and how-to resources that we regard as supremely practical, meant to be consulted or taken if we are in a bad way, located also on some shelf, a real (not ideal) shelf in our medicine cabinet where we go to find help for pain. I am hardly prescribing dosages of Proust for heartache, but I am saying that his depiction of a dreadful common event—no one is without loved ones who will die—is at once visionary and practical in that he shows us something about the way the machinery actually works: our machinery, our processes of mourning and recovery, our own story of love and loss that turns out to have far more twists and turns, indeed far more life, in it than our lazy received notions suggest. How poor and cheating Kubler-Ross's categories look, when contrasted with the odyssey of death-recovery-loss that Proust's narrator undergoes. Not that Kubler-Ross and Freud are wrong, but that life is actually more complex, more wonderful, more capacious than their formulas indicate.

As a professor who has been teaching undergraduates for three decades, I have come to see the "death of the grandparents" as a frequent rite of passage undergone by my students during their tenure at university. For many of them, it is the first encounter with death. (In our culture of increased longevity, it may soon be the case that college-age students' first encounter with death will be the death of great-grandparents.) Given the shocking physical contest that such deaths often stage—the entropic endgame—Proust enriches the saga they have witnessed by suggesting that the physiological end is not as definitive as it appears. Whether the young are capable of absorbing this wisdom is

another matter. But it is unarguably true that this novel consoles, offers a vision of solace that borders on recuperation in its repeat performances of memory and dream. Wisdom literature? Not really. Rather, a fuller look at some of the stark facts of life through the prism of fiction, jolting us toward a more generous, more imaginative, more surprising view of what life has in store for us.

PROUST: FORGETTING AND REMEMBERING, OR DEATH AND RESURRECTION

But Proust has still more to say about death, and we have still more to learn. His book records a second major death, that of Albertine, the protagonist's mistress, the desired fugitive of the book, the
"etre de fuite,"
the creature of flight that Marcel can never quite "possess," even though lie seeks to with all his might through bullying, blackmail, and even physical incarceration. Along any normative lines whatsoever, this particular love relationship is nasty business, spurred by a maniacal need for control and its corollary: endless anxiety and jealousy. I suspect that many readers lose patience with this part of the book, largely because it has a diseased taint to it, yet we would do well to attend to its aftermath, for that is where Proust demonstrates his sovereign understanding of death's role in the affairs of the heart.

Albertine's dying, in contrast to the protracted illness and death of the grandmother, is narratively offstage. The young man learns, by telegram, that the escaped girl has been killed in a riding accident. Proust handles the following period of
Trauerarbeit
in classic Freudian fashion: the narrator is shown cutting each one of the cords that tied him to Albertine, the object of his libidinal attachment. This is
no
easy matter: "So that what I should have to annihilate in myself was not one, but innumerable Albertines. Each was attached to a moment, to the date of which I found myself carried back when I saw again that particular Albertine" (III, 498). This death triggers something properly seismic: the narrator revisits the past, scene by scene, to notify his former selves

that Albertine is no longer alive. This too turns out to be a dizzying exercise, since there are lots of folks involved: "It was not Albertine alone who was a succession of moments, it was also myself. ... I was not one man only, but as it were the march-past of a composite army in which there were passionate men, indifferent men, jealous men—jealous men not one of whom was jealous of the same woman" (III, 499).