Abstract
The Guermantes' conversation is so full of kinship links that the narrator quickly becomes lost, as if in a book or unknown territory, among all these family names that are also place names. Then suddenly, unexpected connections emerge, as in a forest where two sides are suddenly discovered from the same perspective: "I cannot say how many times during that evening I heard the words cousin and cousine. On the one hand, M. de Guermantes, almost at every name pronounced, cried out: 'Mais c'est un cousin d'Oriane!' with the same joy as a man who, lost in a forest, reads at the end of two arrows, arranged in opposite directions on a signpost and followed by a very small number of kilometers: 'Belvédère Casimir-Perier' and 'Croix du Grand-Veneur', and understands by this that he is on the right path." (II, 823).
The "signpost" or "signpost post" as a sign of recognition or as a "memorial" recurs elsewhere in Proust's writing, and this time the context is that of the literary forest. It's in a fragment of Cahier 4, "like friendly signposts showing us that we have not made a mistake" (CSB, 311 [1]). The image appears again - or rather, already, as Cahier 4 is old - in a comparison. Now, the comparative situation is no longer a mundane conversation, but the memory and recognition of literature: "The writers we admire cannot serve as guides, since we possess within us, like the magnetized needle or the carrier pigeon, the sense of our orientation." The new writer who would like to create a work of art finds himself alone in the face of literature, and history is of no use to him, since he has nothing to fall back on. In Proust's non-dialectical, non-progressive view of history, everything has to be redone by the aspiring writer, to be reinvented, to be traversed anew as if nothing had happened. In a previous lecture, we mentioned the image of the "inner compass", which the narrator then applied not to literature, but to love, so we weren't exaggerating its importance, since it returns here in the form of the "magnetized needle". And this time, Proust himself associates the magnetized needle with the carrier pigeon, not to talk about love, but about "our sense of direction" in literature.
The idea that there is a "sense of direction" in literature is therefore Proust's idea: "But while guided by this inner instinct we fly forward and follow our path, at times, when we cast our eyes right and left on the new work of Francis Jammes or Maeterlinck, on a page we didn't know from Joubert or Emerson, the anticipated reminiscences we find there of the same idea, of the same sensation, of the same effort that we are expressing at the moment, please us like friendly signposts that show us we have not made a mistake, or, as we rest for a moment in a wood, we feel confirmed in our course by the wing-draught passage close by of fraternal ramiers that have not seen us. "
