"O Sole mio!": The Sun in Proust's "Séjour à Venise"

Abstract

The episode in A la recherche du temps perdu commonly called the "Sejour a Venise" is perhaps the most extraordinary version of what Paul de Man calls Proust' s "solar myth." It also has a complex textual history in the writing of the ever-unfinished "Recherche." At the end this episode, Mm-eel refuses to go to the train station with his mother and remains on the hotel terrace listening to a gondolier sing "O sole mio!" The song seems to stop the sun's movement and to turn Venice into a heap of stones surrounded by so much hydrogen and oxygen in the form of water. Only what Proust calls "habit" leads Marcel to see Venice as the great historical city that Ruskin described, that the Doges ruled, that Turner painted, and that Marcel (and Proust) so much admired. Only the spontaneous return of "inveterate habit," something that comes from "caverns darker than those from which flashes the comet which we can predict," that is, from a source wholly unknown and unknowable, puts Venice back together and gives Marcel the strength to break his paralysis of will and follow his mother to the train. Our sense of self and the solidity of its circumambient world, this episode implies, are sustained by a force that comes not from within the self but from beyond it, from something that is wholly other to that self, though special to that self alone.