John Attridge

The narrator of À la recherche du temps perdu is exquisitely sensitive to noise. We know this in part through the testimony of his closest companions, some of whom express concern at different moments in the novel about their friend’s susceptibility to auditory disturbance. In Le Côté de Guermantes, for instance, Saint-Loup recommends a hotel at Doncières because it is “assez adapté à votre hyperesthésie auditive” (“more or less adapted to your over-sensitive ears”) and in La Prisonnière the chants of street hawkers prompt Albertine to ask, “Cela ne vous gêne pas, tous ces bruits du dehors? . . . vous qui avez déjà le sommeil si léger?” (“Don’t you mind all those noises from outside? . . . you sleep so lightly”). By this point in the novel, the reader has had numerous opportunities to verify the narrator’s sensitivity to “ces bruits du dehors” for herself, beginning with the whistle of distant steam-engines on the first page of Du côté de chez Swann. From the late-night revelers who keep the narrator awake after seeing La Berma for the first time in À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur, to the analysis of matutinal street sounds at the beginning of La Prisonnière, the text of À la recherche du temps perdu displays a marked interest in acousmatic sonic ephemera, each detailed description testifying to the narrator’s “hyperesthésie auditive.” This trait of phonosensitivity bears an obvious resemblance to one of Proust’s own most famous personal characteristics. The solicitude shown by Saint-Loup and Albertine, for instance, resembles the kind of concern that Proust himself inspired in friends like Reynaldo Hahn, who once described his anxiety, in a letter to Proust’s parents written while the pair were holidaying together in Normandy, that “le seul bruit de ma plume” (“the mere noise of my pen”) would disturb his companion’s sleep. With the interviews and articles that accompanied the publication of Du côté de chez Swann, this biographical detail became a prominent part of Proust’s public persona. André Levy’s promotional interview, published in Le Miroir on December 21, 1913, offered a detailed, picturesque rendering of the famous “chambre . . . toute tapissée de liège” (“bedroom . . . all carpeted with cork”), designed to prevent “les moindres bruits des appartements voisins et de la rue” (“the slightest noises of the neighbouring rooms and of the street”) from interrupting Proust’s creative reverie. For Levy, moreover, there was an obvious connection to be made between Proust’s sound proofed working conditions and the central conceit of his unfinished novel: ensconced in the “silence immense” of the reclusive author’s bedroom, Levy writes, “il semble bien qu’on soit hors du temps” (“it truly seems that one is outside of time”) (Lhomeau and Coelho, Marcel Proust, 295). Four decades after his death, Proust’s housekeeper, Céleste Albaret, added her recollections to the now well-established biographeme of Proust’s sensitivity to noise. Musing on the rationale behind her employer’s noise-cancelling domestic regime, she, too, posited a connection between silence and the search for lost time: “toute la recherche de M. Proust . . . a été de se mettre hors du temps pour le retrouver. Quand il n’y a plus de temps, c’est le silence. Il lui fallait ce silence, pour n’entendre que les voix qu’il voulait entendre, celles qui sont dans ses livres” (“M. Proust’s entire quest . . . was to put himself outside of time in order to find it again. When there is no more time, there’s silence. He needed this silence, so as to hear only the voices that he wanted to hear, those that are in his books”). Precisely echoing Levy’s formulation, Albaret concludes that the suppression of noise was a way for Proust to put himself “hors du temps.”