Okay, a word about all the church stuff. Archbishops, saints, churches, resurrection.
I’m not proselytizing here. I’m talking in a fictional sense. And I think the same could be said for Marcel Proust. Devoted to learning, yes. In adoration of cathedrals, yes. Taking a stand on the Dreyfus Affair, yes (if one can assume that Proust’s position on the Affair had something to do with his Jewish heritage.) But not a church-goer in the traditional sense. Even if the final epiphany included tripping over the uneven paving stones in the Guermantes courtyard as if in Venice, in the cathedral (and if you’ve ever been there, they are certainly uneven). Taking all that into consideration, I believe the religious imagery in the text stands for the ‘word’ made flesh, in a textual sense. I’ve talked about this a little bit elsewhere. Charles Swann as the flesh of the sign – char being flesh, Swann being the signe/cygne.
To this end, the opening paragraph reads like an awakening from a death, a resurrection into the sainthood of writing. It’s a trope of grand and ballsy proportion. The author returns from the long journey he’s taken to embrace his calling as author and begins the writing of his book. He appoints himself saint of writing a la St. Mark. Or rather the Saint of the Mark.
Many have written about memory – about the sensory ‘impressions’ leaving their mark in the sandbanks of memory. They are then brought back to life or reincarnated in episodes of involuntary memory.
So when I speak of saints in the text, I’m referring to Names, and to the hagiography of Saints in the style of Jacobus Voragine, author of The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints. A guy who excelled at mixing fact and fiction with strange etymologies kind of in line with the curé of Combray, or Brichot, or Dr. Cottard. There are certain signs I can see. I think of Marquis or Marquise as signs of Saint Mark or Marque, Mme de Marsantes as an admixture of Marque and Saint, the Marquis de Saint Loup as the mark of a saint in disguise [see the post ‘The Masked Saint‘ ]
It seemed to me he was himself what the book was talking about, right? The author linking himself, metaphorically, etymologically, or however, to St. Mark’s Cathedral, appointing himself saint of the ‘mark,’ saint of the book, with Tante Leonie as his sidekick, the lion with her paw right on the text. Sacrilegious? Yes. Awesome? Yes.
His own little inside joke. Making me reflect on all those sketches he did for Reynaldo, drawing himself into the stained glass panels as a saint, metaphorically speaking. Sacrilegiously.
And so interesting to think that the story of Geneviève de Brabant and Golo that overtakes his room (those magic lantern slides) is taken from the Golden Legend!
