“In places where the trees still kept their leaves, they seemed to have undergone an alteration of their substance from the point at which they were touched by the sun’s light...at this hour in the morning, almost horizontal, as it would be again.  at the moment

when in the gathering dusk it flamed up like a lamp, projects afar over the leaves a warm and artificial glow, and sets ablaze the topmost boughs of a tree that itself remains unchanged, a sombre, incombustible candelabrum beneath its flaming crest.” (1)

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The final section of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way––“Place-Names: The Name”––explores the epistemic problem of the disjunction between memory and reality. By confronting the paradox of “seek[ing] in reality. the pictures that are stored in one’s memory,” (2) Proust’s narrator comes to recognize that physical places exist according to their own temporalities––temporalities that are indifferent to, and therefore “unmappable” (3) within, the chronological order(s) of human memory. Whereas memory-derived temporality is measured and integrated into the self via referential–– linguistic and visual––links between places, names and the embodied experiences with which we associate them, nonhuman temporalities are immeasurable. While nonhuman time is manifest in the transference of energy and the lithification, accumulation and growth of organic matter, it is only through the presence of a perceiving subject (the generator of memories) that physical change becomes referentially organized into “particular image[s]” with particular names. (4)

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It is the beyond-referentiality of nonhuman time(s) to which the narrator refers when he calls the years, once decoupled from any particular memory, “fugitive.” (5) Working backwards from this final recognition of temporal “fugitivity,” Swann’s Way can be mapped to uncover a narrative force of desire, the object of which exists beyond the realm of human relations and human temporality. The “object” of desire is not an object or person at all, but a way of experiencing, and being in relation to, time itself. Through inter-scenic “thought-experiments” that draw on the expanded referential fields (both visual and linguistic) of thermodynamic, geological and arboreal temporalities, the narrator locates, and experiences, the limits of memory-temporality (temporality mediated by human memory). The limits of “chrononormativity” (6)––the sense of being “bound” to human memory––impel him to imagine, if not to fully experience, the beyond-referentiality of nonhuman time.

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Thermodynamic Temporality // A zone of heat (7)

 

Interior atmospheres in Swann’s Way are often set aglow. Characters view and make sense both of themselves and one another (in salons, halls, bedrooms, hallways and dining rooms) through sources of incandescence. At times, this “glowing” effect is derived from flames in an open-hearth; at times its source is a gas or oil lamp; sometimes it flickers from a single bedside candle; and when “electric lighting [is] installed everywhere,” it is summoned by the flip of a switch. (8) In the chronology of the narrator’s life, the inaugural moment in which the temporality of heat and light––combinations of which create the effect of incandescence–– registers within the narrative, and alters the narrator’s embodied relationship to time, is during his childhood “travels” between states of sleep and non-sleep when he is in Combray. The opening passages of Swann’s Way, in which the narrator’s relationship to time is mediated by the suffering associated with going to sleep (and not being able to stay asleep), exemplify how the body, when it is not “guarded” by a fully conscious mind, can experience thermodynamic temporality as a form of psychic relief from the “chains” of time as measured by a ticking clock. (9)

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In the sleeping / non-sleeping scene with which Swann’s Way opens, time is measured for the narrator by sleep, and sleep exists on the other side of suffering produced by the separation from his mother. This associative link between the passage of (night)-time and the “anguish” (10) of having to say goodnight to his mother––and therefore accept a loss of time that could be spent with her if not (he imagines) for the bedtime ritual––is endurable only by keeping close watch over the passage of time by constantly checking its progress relative to visual referents. It is by traversing thresholds of light and heat that the narrator measures the progress of his sleep or the lack thereof: he falls asleep when the candle is “barely out;” reawakens when it is “no longer burning;” checks the time by striking a match; and is momentarily taunted by the glimmer of “daylight” coming from under the door, the promise of which is immediately “extinguished” when the last servant “turns down the gas,” indicating that it is only midnight and there are, in fact, hours of non-sleeping left to endure. (11) These consultations of time, the narrator claims, are the manifestation of “Habit! That skillful but slow-moving arranger…[.]” (12) His deference to the clock––in the form of light and darkness––is the product of a compulsion to position (arrange) the sensory experiences of the body in a given moment within a larger chronological order.

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Bringing his narrator into proximity with the limits of chronological order as measured by habit is the narrative mode by which Proust renders other, nonhuman or extra-human forms of time––time(s) measured by elemental change as opposed to mechanized progress––desirable. In Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Elizabeth Freeman offers an assemblage of contemporary concepts that help to articulate the specific affordances of non-normative times that Proust’s narrator comes to perceive, desire and (albeit in limited ways), experience. The fundamental disjunction on which the narrator lands in the closing pages of Swann’s Way–– between memory and reality––and its embodiment in a form of childhood sleep-suffering, can be understood as a version of what Freeman terms “chrononormativity.” Chrononormativity converts “mere existence into a form of mastery in a process [it is] the use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity.” And it is through the socialization–– the “binding” ––of chrononormativity that “schedules, calendars, time zones...wristwatches” seem like “somatic facts.” (13) When the narrator imagines time as a “chain of hours,” the bedtime ritual figures as a domestically-sanctioned chrononormativity: he is made, repeatedly––and against his will––to separate from his mother at a certain time each night. The compulsory habit of time-checking acts as an “anesthetic effect” (14) by which to endure the experience of being “bound into socially meaningful embodiments through temporal regulation.” (15) Evident in the father’s disapproval of his son’s bed-time anxieties is a message: it is “socially meaningful” for the narrator to tolerate periods of separation from his mother.

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It is only the hope of “being assuaged” from this chrono-normative order at some future moment that makes the “hours of anguish” (the hours that comprise “bedtime”) endurable. Relief from the sleep-suffering dyad is not, in other words, attainable in present, real-time. It is only once the narrator “revisit[s]” the “rooms in which [he] had slept during [his] life,” and in turn recalls specific, embodied sensations that relief is relocated and applied to his past. He recalls material elements that made them “habitable,” and his sleep-related sufferings endurable. He remembers sensing on cold nights the warmth of a fire “intermittently” breaking out into flame and wrapping him in a protective alcove, a smoky “zone of heat.” And he recalls summer nights when he would travel beyond the boundaries of the room to occupy the “open air,” feeling himself to be “a part of the warm night.” Importantly, both the “zone of heat” and the movements of “open air” are expressions of atmospheric change that register not along mechanistic, “chrono-normative” markers, but by the presence (and maintenance) of low-level, thermal output and radiation. (16)

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In the glowing atmosphere of an intermittent, flickering flame, entropy––the transference of energy––overshadows the “insolent indifference of [the] clock.” (17) And in turn, the “zone of heat” and the shifting gusts of air mark a passage of time that is indifferent to the mechanistic insolence of the clock. These are experimental images that lead the narrator beyond the referentially limited categories of “asleep” and “awake.” Recollecting these moments of physical relief thus allows the narrator to identify an elemental––as opposed to chronological––continuity among “shifting and confused gusts of memory.” (18) These moments in Swann’s Way reflect a conscious negotiation between the narrator’s actual relationship to time, which is punctuated by references to the clock and to various sources of light, and his desired (potential) relationship to time, which “break[s] its ranks” from the “chain of the hours.” (19) The “zone of heat,” because it is “dug out of the room,” is a protected and separate space of liminality, characterized by a “flicker[ing]” state of consciousness, that exists outside of the “ordered procession” associated with that room. Critically, the “boundaries” of this zone are punctuated not by visual referents or by the ticking of a clock, but rather, by physical alterations in temperature and movements of air. The order he “breaks rank” from when he enters the zone of heat, therefore, is that of the associative / referential links, generated by the conscious mind, between his bedroom, the clock, and the experience of anxiety and suffering. Thermodynamic temporality in this sequence operates as a third category between the dyad of asleep / awake. It is a time neither here nor there, measured neither by the mechanistic rhythms of the literal, nor the biological clock, but by enigmatic combinations of light and temperature that register through a combination of embodiment (the somatic effects of the “zone of heat”) and thought-experimentation (imagining time as an intermittent flame).

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Interspersed between the narration of habitual sleep-acts (as the narrator recollects when, and by what means, his younger self measures the progress of his sleep), however, are passages of exposition that take place in future moments, separate from the domain of sleep. Following a sequence of “I would” statements (“I would go to bed early...I would ask myself what time it could be...I would lay my cheeks gently against the comfortable cheeks of my pillow...” [20]), Proust––via his narrator––theorizes and attempts to interpret and then reinterpret the apparent “immobility” (21) of his sleeping/non-sleeping habits and the suffering with which it is associated. The first instance of this theorization begins with the generalizing statement, “When a man is asleep, he has a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly bodies.” Embedded in the abstract framing of “sleep-time” as a form of physical imprisonment is its expression in once-lived habit: “instinctively he consults them when he awakes...reads off his own position on the earth’s surface and the time that has elapsed during his slumbers." (22)

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The abstract, general condition of temporality, initially located in a specific habit, is re- framed in the subjunctive language of theorization: “Suppose that, towards morning, after a night of insomnia...he will have no idea of the time, but will conclude that he has just gone to bed.” The habit of time-checking, shown in relation to temporality as an existential condition of imprisonment, results in self-abandonment: the narrator “could not even be sure at first who [he] was; I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence.”  (23) There is an implicit scientific method in this sequence of suppositions. The narrator identifies a “problem” (insomnia) relative to a hypothetical “setting” (the “order of the heavenly bodies”), in order to infer / predict the lived-condition it will produce in/on its subject (a “rudimentary sense of existence”). It is thus by placing the rhythms of the body––as driven by habit––in relation to a generic concept of time that the narrator comes face to face with the “abyss of not-being” generated by losing track of time. If losing, even for a moment, the position of one’s body relative to larger chronological schema results in the loss of his identity, the narrator’s “scientific method” (of switching between the recollection of habitual acts and theoretical exposition) brings him to the realization that memory is the “rope let down from heaven” that leads him back to the “original components of [his] ego.” Evident in this (self)loss-(self)retrieval paradigm are the limitations of temporality as “chained” (bound) to habit: in associating certain actions with certain time(s) (in this case, the time of suffering), grooves or what the narrator calls “ropes” of memory are formed, the stable referentiality of which renders any period of “lost time” ––unchecked time––intolerable. (24)

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In real time, which is marked and singularly driven by habit, the narrator’s experience is limited to chrono-normative time––to time that can, and therefore must, be checked. By contrast, the alternation between lived experience (a mix of “anguish” and “satisfaction,” which is expressed in more than hours and minutes: it is elemental, thermodynamic, and elicits bodily and emotive sensation), and abstract theorization allows the narrator, via thought-experimentation, to recognize the limits of memory-driven temporality. Relief from the suffering of such referentiality is therefore attainable only through the application of a “future / conditional tense” to the enumeration of past actions. The subjunctive mode of theorization transcends the temporal-referential memory-grooves and “ropes” that are the source of his anxiety of lost time (the loss of the narrator’s self, as well as the loss of his mother). Proust’s narrative mode of “intermittence” (which corresponds aesthetically to intermittent flame in his “zone of heat”) thus brings the narrator to perceive not-quite-human temporality as a desired state: namely, thermodynamic temporality.

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Geological Temporality // I had accumulated there a store of dreams... (25)

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If thermodynamic temporality is characterized by intermittence and liminality carved out of chrononormative time, geological time is characterized by processes of accumulation and lithification superimposed over chrononormative time (if not obstructing, then slowing down and/or altering the efficacy of its ongoing production). In Swann’s Way, Proust mobilizes the referential field of geological morphology, therein bringing his narrator into relation (however provisional) with forms of time that operate beyond, and are therefore not beholden to, the disjuncture between one’s memories and the actual, physical “things” that constitute reality. A passage that exemplifies Proust’s mobilization of other-than-subjective temporality––theorized via geological change––occurs at the tail end of his Combray recollections, before the transition to “Swann in Love.” It functions as a transition from first-person to second-hand experience: from “all these memories” (the narrators’) to the memories of Swann, not only imagined, but to a certain extent, lived through the narrator. Geology extends the narrator’s referential field, making such “superimposition” of memories conceivable:

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All these memories, superimposed upon one another, now formed a single mass, but had not so far coalesced that I could not discern between them––between my oldest, my instinctive memories, and those others, inspired more recently by a taste or ‘perfume,’ and finally those which were actually the memories of another person from whom I had acquired them at second hand––if not real fissures, real geological faults, at least that veining, that variegation of colouring, which in certain rocks, in certain blocks of marble, points to differences of origin, age, and formation. (26)

 

The central analogy of this passage theorizes a whole––a “single mass”––composed not only of distinct parts, but of distinct parts layered one on top of the other. The geological process of lithification operates as a figure for the narrator’s perception of, and relationship to time, suggesting that the remembering-self (the self as a memorializing/memory-making agent) is only an outgrowth of different types or “blocks” of memories. Under this analogy, the three kinds of memory Proust enumerates are “instinctual” (embodied); involuntary (spontaneous, unconscious, elicited by sensation), and transposed (originating in the lived experience of another, and subsequently integrated into the self). And these three memory-types correspond figuratively to different processes of geological deposition that together form “masses” or outcroppings of rock. The “sediment” of lived experience forms the impression (if not the actuality, as the narrator implies) of a single, coherent mass. Instinctive memories figure the “bedrock” of the self; involuntary memories figure the surfacing of “fossilized” (past) versions of the self, and transposed memories figure the “deposition” of external sediment into the self. Enumerating, by reference to geology, the distinct origins and formative processes of his memories provides a vocabulary and conceptual language for a certain relation to temporality; namely, one in which memory––if it is a multiplicity––ceases to be the singular means of “positioning” oneself relative to time. A single “unit” / “mass” of geological growth, because it contains multiple kinds of physical change (lithification, faulting, veining...etc.) also comprises and spans multiple scales of time. A single self, thought through this scalar multiplicity, can thus position itself in relation to more than linear, productive temporality but also compacted and combined (lithified) temporalities.

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Embedded in this multi-part figure of geological growth is also a paradigm of temporal inversion. Rather than the self being a memory-generator, it is the compaction and “superimposition” of memories that generate the “mass” of a conscious self. Just as the visualization (and corresponding language) of thermodynamic temporality allowed the narrator to experience time as the embodiment of intermittent heat, light and darkness, the language of geological temporality, based in the morphology of raw matter according to chemical reactions and tectonic movements, pushes the narrator’s relationship to time slightly beyond––to use Freeman’s language––the “bindings” of time in the form of arbitrary intervals corresponding to habit and productivity. And although a force of stratification is at work in the figural formation of a “geological self,” the structure it ultimately yields is not hierarchical: dissimilarities and variants between temporal strata remain legible; veins of minerality traverse between and across strata, and some of the layers retain a mobility, having been “transplanted” from external sources. Involuntary and transposed memories are perceived in terms not of circumscription within a single self, but of the sharing between and across multiple selves (the transposition to which the narrator refers to as his “psychic inheritance” of Swann’s memories and experiences).

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It is important to note in this passage the slippage, made explicit by the narrator, between metaphor and reality. By shifting the material referent from multidimensional forms (the “faults and fissures”) to a superficial visual effect (“veining and coloration”), the geological metaphor anticipates its own referential imprecision: “if not real fissures...than at least that veining...” Without the mediating “if...then” sequence, the metaphor would risk implying that there are deep, structural fractures that separate and distinguish the boundaries between different kinds of memories (their origin, age, and formation). (27) Still drawing on the language of geology, Proust shifts––in order to limit––the metaphorical referent to “veins...variegation...coloring,” suggesting that what differentiates memory-“types” registers primarily on a superficial, signifying level as opposed to on a formal, structural level.

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Knowledge of what separates/distinguishes involuntary and instinctual memory comes home to the narrator not despite, but precisely because of, the referential slippage between metaphor and reality––the imprecision, in other words, of using “faults and fissures” as compared to “veining and coloration.” Ultimately, the referential shift yields a certain kind of knowledge; namely, of “discernment” between structure and signification relative to the embodiment of memory. Whereas “faults and fissures” represent memory as structurally “fractured” along deep, temporal faults, “veining / variegation / coloration” represents memory as compacted growth––the growth of multiple epochs lithified into one mass––with a range of meaning. The language of geological morphology allows the narrator to recognize conceptual and material differences between “veining” (signification) and “faulting” (structural distinction), creating a referential field in which the signified (rather than structural) basis of the time- memory link is affirmed and reified. If the knowledge thus gained is that there are no “true” differences between different epochs of the narrator’s life––any such differences are caused by one’s interpretation––then this passage represents a critical acceleration in the narrative’s progress toward the object of desire (to experience the “fugitivity,” the beyond-referentiality of nonhuman time). Geological time, operative here in metaphor, provides the images and language with which to perceive a reality in which time is measured not by the “ordered procession” of distinctly (structurally)-marked eras, but by slow, accumulative, nearly-indiscernible change.

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Arboreal Temporality // For the trees continued to live by their own vitality... (28)

 

Throughout the Combray years and beyond, the figure of the hawthorn tree and the scent of its flowers are for the narrator “inseparable from the mysteries” of “holy ground”––of consecrated space. He recalls having “first fallen in love with hawthorns” during the “Month of Mary” (May) because of their proximity to––their “arrange[ment] upon” ––the church altar itself. When the narrator makes contact with the altar (for genuflection), the hawthorns exude a force of sacrality so powerful that it competes with the sacrality of the altar. And the medium of this sacred, arboreal force is the “intermittent odour” of hawthorn flowers transmitting to the narrator “the murmuring of an intense organic life,” and causing the “whole alter [to quiver] like a hedgerow explored by living antennae.” (29) This organic “murmuring,” moreover, is said to occur “despite” the “motionless silence” of the hawthorns. Rather than simply adding to––ornamenting––the sacrality of the altar, the presence of the hawthorns thus expands the referentiality of “murmuring” beyond the self-referential sound of human prayer to include a more-than-human frequency that registers not through the intervals of sound (as the hawthorn’s are silent), but instead through intervals of scent. The language of “intense organic life” provides the narrator a referential field that goes beyond the visual (signifying) and ritualistic (structural) elements of religion to include the mystery of nonhuman “action.”

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Although the temporal dimension of these early encounters is somewhat opaque, in forming a strong association between people (“a young girl in white”) and place (the hawthorn- adorned church and altar), the beyond-human––“organic” ––life exemplified by the hawthorns prefigures the narrator’s later desire to break (in order to ultimately accept) that very link. Once integrated into the narrator’s early perception as a force of non-human agency (it is their scent that “murmurs” and shakes the alter), the intermittent scent of the hawthorns progressively amplifies through the years, absorbing the narrator into its “rhythm,” the expression of which he will compare to “those melodies which one can play a hundred times in succession without coming any nearer to their secret.” (30) The agency of the hawthorns is thus linked to a kind of infinite, and therefore, atemporal return––the rhythmic interval––that can never be exhausted.

His absorption into rhythmic atemporality of the intermittent “murmuring” scent of the hawthorns is so complete that later in life he will recognize: “often I have wanted to see a person again without discerning that it was simply because she reminded me of a hedge of hawthorns.” (31) The desire to “to see a person again,” in other words, is in reality the desire to be re-absorbed into the arboreal a-temporality with which that person has been grafted in memory.

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When the narrator’s consciousness turns (at the end of “Place-Names: The Name”) to the trees in the Bois de Boulogne, a place in which many “distinct elements” of the narrator’s memory are “assembled,” the woods elicit from him an “obscure desire” that runs in the opposite direction as the hawthorns. (32) The woods “[exist] for a purpose alien to the life of its trees.” (33) Whereas in the previous instance, a particular woman signifies a particular hedge of hawthorns, the trees in the Bois signify “the life of feminine humanity.” (34) The narrator admits, however, that the particular kind of feminine humanity with which he associates the Bois is embedded in a past he cannot, despite his efforts, recreate. It is an image composed of days past, now buried beneath the strata of processual, aesthetic and industrial change, evident in everything from the style of hats the women wear, to the vehicles they ride (once horse-drawn carriages and now motor- cars). (35)

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What the narrator recognizes as the “mechanical” (36) inevitability of these altered (superficial, aesthetic) components becomes a point of comparison and disjunction between the trees themselves, and the “assembly that used to gather beneath” them. (37) Seeing, as a “single mass,” the “new components of the spectacle” (38) (the park in its present embodiment) and comparing its temporal scale to that of the trees, a disruption––a “nonconformity” (39) ––occurs in his tendency to graft the arboreal onto the feminine. He abandons his previous desire to “animate” and “infuse” the spectacle (of the Bois) with “consistency and unity,” (40) the features of feminine humanity that he longs for. There is no consistency between the “real wood” and the “Elysian Garden of Woman.” (41) Whereas the trees will continue to live under the “reign” of “their own vitality,” (42) the women “[are] just women...” who will “grow old” and become “spectres of what they had once been.” (43) Even when the trees, over time, “under[go]...alteration[s] of their substance... a tree [itself] remains unchanged, a sombre, incombustible candelabrum beneath its flaming crest.” (44) Like the “intermittence” of the hawthorn scent (and before it, the intermittence of the thermodynamic “zone of heat”), the seasonal cyclicality, a form of intermittence, and the long temporal scale of tree-life provide the narrator an expanded referential field. As with the “flickering” liminality of thermodynamic time and the “accumulative” lithification of geological time, the image and conceptual apparatus of “grafting” (and the de-grafting it ultimately yields) allows the narrator to position the temporality of his memories relative to and, ultimately, separate from the inexhaustible branching-out of arboreal time.

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The closing atmosphere of “Place-Names: The Name” is characterized by “inhuman emptiness.” The woods of the Bois de Boulogne, a place in which many “distinct elements” of the narrator’s memory were once “assembled,” is now “deconsecrated” ––cleansed of the “fetishistic attachment...it did once animate.” (45) Having experimented with the expanded referential and visual fields of multiple nonhuman time(s) throughout the course of his recollections, the narrator admits himself into an alternate “Way” (46) of perceiving time, one that attempts––because it desires––to decouple the reality of the trees from the “pictures” with which they have been “graft[ed]” (47) by human memory. And although the narrator’s penultimate statement, that “the places we have known do not belong only to the world...on which we have mapped them for our own convenience,” affirms the moral logic behind the decoupling of human memory from physical places (that places are ends in themselves), moral reasoning is not what leads the narrator to his final realization.

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What leads him there is something like temporal mourning. If––under the narrator’s new “way” of perceiving time / memory––places are only “the memory of particular image[s],” and those images are only “regret for a particular moment,” (48) decoupling presupposes the loss of both memory and reality. Places are only the images of lost moments; both place and one’s memories of the place are––once decoupled––irretrievable. If the limiting factor in this paradigm is the “image” to which a given place or (a given memory of the place) corresponds, it makes sense, therefore, that what the narrator has been seeking throughout the novel––his desire––is to locate and experiment with other, less imbued, images of time. Rather than regret the “images” that correspond to lost time with his mother, he recalls a “cave of warmth,” a thermodynamic “intermittence” that protected him from, by making “habitable,” the environment of lost time.

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And rather than regret the “images” of lost love (and therein, wasted time) acquired second-hand from Swann, he imagines the recollective-self as a growth, a force of accumulation composed of multiple lithified memories. Yet––or, to use the narrator’s qualifier, “alas” ––there is in the end, resulting from his final thought-experimentation with arboreal temporality, a suggestion that the imagined “fugitivity” of unmappable, non-chrononormative, nonhuman time(s) does not offer a way out of, or beyond, the embodied experience of loss. Although the narrator recognizes, with the aid of nonhuman time(s), the paradox of “seek[ing] in reality...for the pictures that are stored in one’s memory,” (49) to be indifferent to the lost time embedded in that paradox would require an even greater, impossible, fugitivity.

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Notes

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1 Proust, Marcel, Swann’s Way. Modern Library ed. (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 600.

2 Ibid., 606.

3 Ibid. The narrator realizes that “the places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience” (606, emphasis added).

4 Ibid: “the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment...” (606).

5 Ibid.

6 Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Duke University Press, 2010), 1-4. Freeman defines chrononormativity as “the use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity.” Later on, I draw on chrononormativity to articulate––in contemporary terms–– the narrator’s childhood experience of, and anxiety surrounding, “bed-time” as a time comprised singularly of his ability (or inability) to perform what Freeman calls “socially-meaningful” habits (“Introduction: Queer and Not Now,” 3).

7 Swann’s Way, 7.

8 Ibid., 381.

9 Ibid. The “punctuating” sound of trains show the narrator “in perspective the deserted countryside through which a traveler is hurrying towards the nearby station.” In this image, he is the traveler who must traverse “strange surroundings” and “unaccustomed activities” in order to arrive at the destination of morning––marking his survival of the night (2); his “body...[is] a faithful guardian” of that which his mind tries to forget (6), and he feels that when “a man is asleep, he has around him the chain of the hours” (4).

10 Recalling Swann’s early visits at Combray, the narrator remembers his childhood desire “not to think of the hours of anguish which I should have to spend that evening alone in my room, without being able to go to sleep...” (31).

11 Ibid., 1-7.

12 Ibid., 8.

13 Freeman, Elizabeth. “Introduction: Queer and Not Now,” in Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Duke University Press, 2010), 1-4.

14 Swann’s Way, 11.

15 Freeman, 3.

16 Swann’s Way, 7-9: “revisits...the rooms in which I had slept during my life” (7); what made those rooms “without [habit],” our minds “would be powerless to make any room seem habitable” (9); “intermittently breaking out into flame...a zone of heat” (7); “a part of the warm night...open air” (7-8).

17 Ibid., 8.

18 Ibid., 7.

19 Ibid., 4.

20 Ibid., 1-15.

21 The narrator’s first “hypotheses” ––thought-experimentation––regarding the limits of time bound into and understood via habit begins with, “perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves and not anything else...” (5).

22 Ibid., 4.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid., 554.

26 Ibid., 263.

27 In geology, a fissure is a fracture or crack in rock along which there is a distinct separation (U.S. Geological Survey, Glossary, “fissure”).

28 Swann’s Way, 601.

29 Ibid., 155, 158.

30 Ibid., 194.

31 Ibid., 261-262.

32 Ibid.: “distinct elements” (600), “assembles” (600), “obscure desire” (601).

33 Ibid., 601.

34 Ibid., 602.

35 Although the narrator’s lamentation of change coheres around the appearance and fashion of “feminine figures,” it extends to technology and industrialization: he reminisces both on the “charm” of “little women’s hats” (which have been exchanged for “garments that are not even made of cloth”), and the “the height of the victoria,” now being replaced by “motor cars...” (Ibid., 602-606).

36 Ibid., 546.

37 Ibid., 604.

38 Ibid., 603.

39 In geology, a nonconformity is “a break in time in an otherwise continuous rock record.” Unconformities are a type of geologic contact—a boundary between rocks—caused by a period of erosion or a pause in sediment accumulation, followed by the deposition of sediments anew” (Jim Davis, “What is an Unconformity?” Utah Geological Survey).

40 Swann’s Way, 603.

41 Ibid.: “real wood” (606, emphasis added), “Elysian Garden of Woman” (606).

42 Ibid., 601.

43 Ibid., 606.

44 Ibid., 600.

45 Ibid.: “inhuman emptiness” (606); “assembles...distinct elements” (600); “deconsecrated forest” (606),

“fetishistic attachment” (603).

46 Both definitions of a “way” ––one meaning an approach or method, and the other meaning an identifiable path or passage for getting/transporting somewhere––could be used to describe how the narrator’s perception of time shifts throughout the novel. With reference to the novel’s title, the narrator’s “way” of perceiving time (his method) relative to human memory is in the end of the novel characterized by the attempt to see a way out of (his passage from) the hold that memory has on his perception of places and things.

47 Swann’s Way, 602.

48 Ibid., 606.

49 Ibid.