Perhaps the immobility of things around us is imposed upon them by our certitude that they’re themselves and not other things, by the immobility of our thinking in the face of them. Yet when I’d wake this way, my restless mind searching and failing to know where I was, all would turn about me in the dark, things, country, years. My body, too numb to move, would try, from the form of its fatigue, to pinpoint the position of its limbs and infer the direction of the wall, the placement of the furnishings, to reconstruct and name the dwelling where it found itself. Its memory, the memory of its ribs, its knees, its shoulders, presented in succession several rooms where it had slept, while around it invisible walls, shifting position according to the form of each imagined room, swirled in the shadows. And even before my thinking, which wavered at the verge of time and form, had identified the home by reconciling the circumstances, it—my body—recalled for each room the type of bed, the placement of the doorways, the quality of light let in the windows, the existence of a hallway, along with the thought I’d gone to sleep with and that I’d reclaim upon waking. My ankylosed side, trying to divine its orientation, would imagine itself, for example, lying facing the wall in a big canopy bed and at once I’d tell myself: “Oh, look, I ended up falling asleep even though Maman didn’t come say good night,” I was in the countryside at the home of my grandfather, dead already several years; and my body, and the side on which I rested, became guardians of a past that my mind should never have forgotten; reminded me of the flame in the nightlight of Bohemian glass, in the shape of an urn, suspended from the ceiling by chains, the chimney of Siena marble, in my bedroom in Combray, at my grandparents’ house, in distant days that in this moment I’d take as real without rendering them precisely and that I’d picture better later when entirely awake.
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Peut-être l’immobilité des choses autour de nous leur est-elle imposée par notre certitude que ce sont elles et non pas d’autres, par l’immobilité de notre pensée en face d’elles. Toujours est-il que, quand je me réveillais ainsi, mon esprit s’agitant pour chercher, sans y réussir, à savoir où j’étais, tout tournait autour de moi dans l’obscurité, les choses, les pays, les années. Mon corps, trop engourdi pour remuer, cherchait, d’après la forme de sa fatigue, à repérer la position de ses membres pour en induire la direction du mur, la place des meubles, pour reconstruire et pour nommer la demeure où il se trouvait. Sa mémoire, la mémoire de ses côtes, de ses genoux, de ses épaules, lui présentait successivement plusieurs des chambres où il avait dormi, tandis qu’autour de lui les murs invisibles, changeant de place selon la forme de la pièce imaginée, tourbillonnaient dans les ténèbres. Et avant même que ma pensée, qui hésitait au seuil des temps et des formes, eût identifié le logis en rapprochant les circonstances, lui,—mon corps,—se rappelait pour chacun le genre du lit, la place des portes, la prise de jour des fenêtres, l’existence d’un couloir, avec la pensée que j’avais en m’y endormant et que je retrouvais au réveil. Mon côté ankylosé, cherchant à deviner son orientation, s’imaginait, par exemple, allongé face au mur dans un grand lit à baldaquin et aussitôt je me disais: «Tiens, j’ai fini par m’endormir quoique maman ne soit pas venue me dire bonsoir», j’étais à la campagne chez mon grand-père, mort depuis bien des années; et mon corps, le côté sur lequel je reposais, gardiens fidèles d’un passé que mon esprit n’aurait jamais dû oublier, me rappelaient la flamme de la veilleuse de verre de Bohême, en forme d’urne, suspendue au plafond par des chaînettes, la cheminée en marbre de Sienne, dans ma chambre à coucher de Combray, chez mes grands-parents, en des jours lointains qu’en ce moment je me figurais actuels sans me les représenter exactement et que je reverrais mieux tout à l’heure quand je serais tout à fait éveillé.
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N o t e s
Would try, from the form of its fatigue, to pinpoint the position of its limbs. I left “form of its fatigue” the same as in the French, la forme de sa fatigue. I’ve thought a lot about whether there’s a way to make this clearer in English, but the problem is I don’t find it easy to grasp.
The scholarship on Proust is vast, and searching on “la forme de sa fatigue” leads to several books and dozens of critical discussions. This article could end up being helpful, because it examines various drafts Proust made of the beginning of Swann’s Way and shows that despite his reputation for expansive writing, when revising he condensed his narration, sometimes at the expense of clarity. Another possible help will be the book Proustian Space, by Georges Poulet.
“The form of its fatigue” also made me think about Proust’s health. Did he experience so many kinds of fatigue, so often, that he associated certain positions with them?
A convincing study of Proust’s health analyzes his correspondence to determine he had the vascular subtype of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. Photos of him show facial characteristics consistent with Ehlers-Danlos, and descriptions of his skin and eyes, such as in this archival obituary, match it, too. During his lifetime he was dismissed as a hypochondriac.
Ankylosed. Proust has a pattern of tossing a unusual word in among more familiar ones. Ankylosed recalls metempsychosis in paragraph 1. Aside from comfort with Greek terms, Proust’s word choice reveals his medical knowledge, likely derived through his doctor father and his own sickness. Other major translations use the word “stiffened.” Ankylosis means the bones have fused, which is what causes this stiffening.