Albertine; Or, the Limits of Representation

Abstract

Proust's fifth volume La Prisonnihre opens with a decisive retreat to the interior on the part of its narrator, Marcel: ce fut du reste surtout de ma chambre que je perlus la vie extdrieure pendant cette piriode (Besides, it was from my room above all that I perceived outside life during that time).' This sentence alerts us to what will become almost unbearably palpable in the course of the volume: the claustrophobic atmosphere, the restriction of the scene of action to Marcel's room. The few exceptional scenes that intrude on this atmosphere of interiority (notably the death of Bergotte and the performance of Vinteuil's unpublished septet) serve only to heighten Proust's sharp division of public and private realms by briefly reinserting the noisy world of salon politics into what will in fact make up the major drama of this volume: the politics of sexual intimacy, the continuing work of interpretation. The evident restrictions on movement and visual perception inherent in such a withdrawal mask a much more fundamental retreat: a retreat whose primary concern is language. Marcel's withdrawal renders inessential the language of worldliness-mots d'esprit and anecdotes, what Walter Benjamin calls the physiology of chatter2-which dominates the preceding volume. It becomes a way of stripping away the static interferences and unassigned frequencies of worldly discourse; it is a purging of voices which has in view the revelation (or construction) of a new language, one which I will examine in the pages which follow.3 To do so we must first situate Marcel's repudiation of the world in terms of the trajectory of fascination. For Marcel's retreat is by no means a solitary one-it is a retreat with Albertine. And Albertine's function in this text is that