Chapter 2 - Contexts

Summary

In Time Regained, after long illness and absence from society life, the Narrator returns to one last matinée at which he meets many figures from his distant past. Time has changed them, aged and distorted their faces, their gait. M. d'Argencourt in particular catches the Narrator's eye:

[It was] as a puppet, a trembling puppet with a beard of white wool, that I saw him being shakily put through his paces …, in a puppet-show which was both scientific and philosophical and in which he served – as though it had been at the same time a funeral oration and a lecture at the Sorbonne – both as a text for a sermon on the vanity of all things and as an object lesson in natural history.

(TR, 290; 2306)

No longer in control of its movements, the human body is depicted as puppet-like. The spectacle is described as scientific and philosophical, then the analogies used expand its potential interpretation yet further: a funeral oration might have a spiritual or philosophical dimension but is unlikely to be scientific; a university lecture might be scientific or philosophical. The further suggestions of a sermon on vanitas and a lesson in natural history again reinforce the original terms whilst expanding their range further still. In offering readers these divergent yet complementary possible contexts for thinking about this guignol-like figure, Proust underlines the multiple ways in which people and events may be viewed and understood.