Film and Fiction: Hitchcock's Vertigo and Proust's "Vertigo"

Abstract

My subject is the relation between Proust's In Search of Lost Time and the 1958 Hitchcock film, Vertigo, and finding any relation between the two works may itself seem a vertiginous search. Vertigo, often called Hitchcock's masterpiece,' has been compared to such literary models as the tales of Orpheus and Eurydice, Pygmalion and Galatea, Tristan and Isolde,2 Adam and Lilith, and Faust, but no one to my knowledge has made explicit reference to Proust as a possible source. Thomas Narcejac, the coauthor of the French novel, D'Entre les morts3 (since rebaptized Sueurs froides after the French title of the Hitchcock film), upon which the film is based, assures me that it was Orpheus he had in mind and not Marcel,4 and indeed, in many ways the two works are diametrically opposed: where might we find a common thread between Proust's novel, which is so adamantly subjective that it resists all attempts to narrate its events, which is built upon a series of flights of fancy and endlessly prolonged metaphors, which takes no time to sum up and a lifetime to read, and Hitchcock's cinema, often taken as a model of narrative technique, an art which, in the space of two hours, always tells a story, and generally does so with such economy and concentration that it sometimes gives the impression of being filmed by an objective, impersonal force?5 But this incongruity between Proust and Hitchcock seems to me to furnish much of the interest of discussing them together, for it is closely related to the entire question of the compatibility (or incompatibility) of Proust with cinema: after all,