The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Names with Power

According to Proust, proper names imply a soul, even for inanimate objects like cities. If something has a proper name, it somehow lives and has some sort of spiritual coherence. And the existence of such names has a specific effect on human beings. It provokes them to join with proper names in a sort of search for what this nominal soul, and their own, might consist of.

Guermantes is such a proper name. Guermantes is a person, in the first instance the Duchess but also her husband Le Duc. Guermantes is also a place, or rather two particular places, a castle in the country and a Parisian residence in the Faubourg St. Germain. Further removed, but also denoted by the proper name, Guermantes is a dispersed set of estates in space, and a corresponding family history which chronicles their acquisition and management in time.

All of these denotations, according to Proust's theory, have a soul to be searched for and explored. But it is not the person or place that is to be investigated; it is the proper noun itself. Thus, for example, the actress Berman, by whom the younger Marcel was captivated, no longer has a soul for him. The concrete person is vacuous and her name has no real significance except as a good actress. No longer an archetype of Woman, she has been reduced to 'that actress', not even a proper noun. Although he admires her theatrical skill, she has lost all power in Marcel's life.

On the other hand, Guermantes is a name with power, not archetypal but singular power. It is a word that, like all proper nouns, has a meaning that exceeds its denotations. It is a word that can only be described as having a life of its own. It is self-referential. And such a proper noun is powerful precisely to the degree of its self-referentiality. It is bigger than its denotation, not in the sense of suggesting something 'beyond' but because it attracts meaning to itself.

So, the Duchess Guermantes, although fashionable, is a fairly unimpressive woman. Out of the context of her proper name she might be considered merely ordinary. But her salon is the most sought-after in Paris. Guermantes castle is insignificant militarily and architecturally; but it us enmeshed in a sort of regal nostalgia which seems a part of the French national psyche since the Revolution. The Guermantes family name itself has no ancient pedigree; but it has emotional and social 'connections' which allow it to be treated as if it had. Its history is a symbol for the history of all of France.

Words with power condense inarticulate feelings into articulate myths and ideals. But however articulate these myths and ideals, they are unanalyzable, first because their articulation is never stable and second because they are infinitely interpretable. Every interpretive statement about them becomes a component of their meaning and adds to their power.

This power of proper names appears to be supernatural, even more mysterious and potent than language in general. It emanates mysteriously from human interaction but is beyond the control of any individual, as all language is. But there is a character to proper nouns which is decidedly religious, even doctrinal. As Marcel says with some obvious religious emotion,

"... the presence of Jesus Christ in the host seemed to me no more a mystery than [the Duchess's] house in the Faubourg being situated on the right bank of the river and so near my bedroom in the morning. I could hear its carpets being beaten. But the line of demarcation that separated me from the Faubourg St. Germain seemed to me all the more real because it was purely ideal."

It is not possible to escape the power of these proper nouns. One cannot ignore them or unilaterally refrain from using them in one's vocabulary because they intrude continuously and intimately into one's life. Encountering Le Duc, for example, without knowing who he is or without using the correct form of address will evoke a humiliating response.

On the other hand, attempting to actively resist this power is futile. The power does not exist in the concrete embodiment of Le Duc, or his castle, or even of his wealth. It exists in his name itself. Its power is that of vocabulary not of politics or armaments. It is a power that is immune from individual effort to displace it. As is always the case with language, fighting it means isolating oneself utterly from one's fellow. The name derives its potency for all intents and purposes from another dimension.

Therefore one must submit to the power of these proper nouns, either by merely accepting their mythical and ideological demands, or by assimilating these demands into one's own personality. In this matter event, one discovers the motivation of ambition for the first time: the active desire to become a part of the word with power.

The recognition of ambition marks Marcel's transition into adulthood. The grown-up world is not one of the concrete reality of things. It is a world of the symbolic reality of proper names. Of course symbolism has always been important for Marcel - one thinks of the meanings suggested by church steeples, as well as the actress in previous volumes, for example. But the symbolism of these things was directed toward an ungraspable beyondness, a primitive spirituality, that evoked searching, as it were, past the symbol to some other reality. These symbols represented something internal to Marcel, whether purpose or destiny, he knew not. But they called him forth into himself.

Marcel's emergent adult symbolism is of a radically different sort. The symbols of proper nouns point not beyond themselves but only to themselves. This is the psychic sump of their self-referentiality. Their profound self-referentiality will eventually blind Marcel to his infantile symbolic quest altogether. His iconic symbolism will be steadily replaced by a sort of heretical symbolism which narrows and closely binds Marcel's perception. This is the Guermantes Way.

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