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I ought to have been happy; I was not. It struck me that my mother had just made a concession which must have been painful to her, that it was a first step down from the ideal that she had formed of me, and that for the first time she, with all her courage, had to confess herself beaten. It struck me that if I had just scored a victory it was over her; that I had succeeded, as sickness or sorrow or age might have succeeded, in relaxing her will, in altering her judgment; that this evening opened a new era, must remain a black date in the calendar. —SW 29, my emphasis A BLACK DATE IN THE CALENDAR IN A LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU (1922–27) Proust provides two case studies that usefully illustrate the theories of Otto Rank regarding the neurotic origins of the creative impulse. The first involves Marcel’s long apprenticeship to art; the second foregrounds the career of the “old music master of Combray,” Vinteuil. This Rankian reading of A la Recherche is driven by (and therefore must commence with) a series of questions: does Marcel ’s suffering constitute a “neurosis”? If neurosis is rooted in pathological fear, what is the fear from which Marcel suffers? Is there evidence in the narrative of a cause/effect relationship between neurosis and creativity? As the aforementioned passage evinces, the reader need search no further in The Search than its inciting “action,” than this “black date in the calendar” to discover evidence of the protean symbiosis between neurotic 21 chapter one The Kiss of Death: Desire in the Garden of Good and Evil conflict and the symbolic realm of invention—which either affords an escape from conflict, a means of objectifying it, or a means of escaping it by objectifying it. The final six words of the aforementioned passage inform the origin of Marcel’s conflict, even as they generate shock waves of meaning that resonate throughout A la Recherche. On the level of imagery, “date” and “calendar ” metonymically reinforce the master trope of time, while “black” tropes on the darkness that lies at the very heart of Combray, and of the novel itself—concretized in the blackened bedroom, spiritualized in Marcel’s neurotic fears. Further, “black” resonates with connotations of death: in this case, the death of innocence and joy, the death of the “ideal” self (“a first step down from the ideal she had formed of me”). This death of the ideal self in the “drame coucher” (good night kiss crisis) enervates the need to recuperate this self, prompting a search for its material counterparts in art, nature, nobility , love, and friendship. This outward search is, moreover, a surrogate for the real search: a quest for the means to liberate from within the self an ideal self, concretized under the sign of the “artist.” The Search is nothing if not a struggle to recover an ideal self lost in this originary “black date in the calendar.” This passage is not only an obituary for the death of Marcel’s ideal self, but masks matricidal impulses that prefigure the death of the mother (“beaten,” “a victory over her,” “sickness or sorrow or age”). If “black date in the calendar” is an emblem of death, it is also signifies the darkness of birth. If on the one hand it conjures the tomb (and the tomb of the ideal), then on the other it evokes the womb: that mysterious neurotic darkness in which art is born. This “black date” connotes not only the death of an ideal self, but its rebirth through art as a direct consequence of the torment it spawns. It is altogether fitting, therefore, that a work that is nothing if not a bildungsroman of the artist commence with that “black date” on which the narrator’s creative impulse is born, amidst the separation anxieties associated with the “good night kiss,” which is for Marcel a “kiss of death,” as well as a kiss of eternal life insofar as it signifies the death of an ideal self to profane desire and its redemptive rebirth to art. The kiss, conferred in the darkness of night, is an ambivalent emblem of Marcel’s “separation anxiety” and “merger hungry” personality. Consequently , it is invested at once with the savor of the profane and the sacred, of original sin and eternal salvation, of damnation and redemption, of oblivion and immortality. This ambivalent conflation of the profane and the...

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