A Room of Proust’s Own

If Proust is anything like his alter ego Marcel, and I suspect that he is, he most definitely valued the privacy and solitude offered to him by his bedroom.

In The Guermantes’ Way, while Marcel is still a young man, he is fraught with the disabling symptoms of his illness. He is confined to his bedroom for many of his days and often sleeps abnormal hours. This room is such a familiar space for him that it becomes another layer of skin, contained in which is an inside-outside aspect of himself. With the doors locked, the windows shut, he can move about in this space without falling under the gaze of others. He can go uncensored in this room. So, the room is similar to writing: the former is an intermediary space between the private, inner self, and the public, outside world, while the latter is a mediating space that transports what is inside to the outside. Consider Marcel’s musings about his room:

“The walls held the room in a close embrace, separating it from the rest of the world… the doors, if I left them open when I withdrew into this innermost retreat, were not content with tripling [the room’s] dimensions without spoiling its harmonious proportions, and not only allowed my eyes to enjoy the delights of extension after those of concentration, but added further to the pleasure of my solitude—which, while still inviolable, was no longer shut in—the sense of liberty.”

For Marcel, the room signifies a freedom from the gaze of the public, and thus serves as a sort of passageway for him to access that part of himself that may be a little bit “truer” than the self he has to present to others, outside this room – the performing self. The walls confine him, but the limits they impose are rather comforting to him, like an “embrace.” He needs structure, containment, rules in order to feel a sense of security in exposing himself. Likewise in writing, Proust needs to have the structure of language to support his thoughts, to contain them. He finds solace in the rules and linearity of writing because then he knows everything, all his thoughts will be “locked in,” tightly held in the embrace of the words. He can fully expose himself in words, without ever facing the public who reads them. It is the inside-outside space that, by way of imprisonment, frees him.

In honour of my absolute favourite American poet, Emily Dickinson, who died on this day in 1886, I leave you the following poem of hers. In many ways, it says it all, and I tried to echo her in my reading of Proust today:

I dwell in Possibility -


A fairer House than Prose -


More numerous of Windows -


Superior for Doors –

Of Chambers as the Cedars -


Impregnable of Eye –


And for an everlasting Roof


The Gambrels of the Sky –

Of Visitors - the fairest -


For Occupation –

This -


The spreading wide my narrow Hands


To gather Paradise –

-natalie