Proustian Rereadings, from the Légende Dorée

Abstract

Critics have concentrated on the visual aspect of the magic lantern scene at the beginning of À la recherche, neglecting the story from the Légende dorée of Geneviève de Brabant which is being told. My rereading focuses on the retellings of the tale: the great-aunt's readings; the characters' differing versions; Marcel's internalization of the message when, alone with the picture images, he recalls and retells himself the story; the tale as archetype. I begin with the intertext, the elevating tale of Geneviève. I then consider how Proust builds up the narrative and the point at which Marcel projects his guilty conscience about his over-ardent desire for his mother onto Golo. I locate this moment of identification as being the point when Golo stops, thwarted in his designs, to listen, as Marcel does and as a fictional character cannot do, to the great-aunt reading the 'sermon'. I end by relating the suspended death sentences which hang over Geneviève and Golo to the narrator's theories of desire. The scene represents the child's symbolic initiation into the moral order. It also sets up the listening devices through which the narrator will sound himself out, and warns us that this narrative voice may lie.