ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the way the dual narratological structure of A la recherche du temps perdu is used to undermine any potential certainty which might otherwise characterize Marcel's experience. Combray is the setting for two episodes in which Marcel learns his earliest lessons in cruelty: the first experienced with his own mother and the second witnessed at Montjouvain, between Mlle Vinteuil and her lesbian lover. Marcel's apprehension of the sadism scene at Montjouvain reinforces the notion of a fundamental link between love and pain. He is spatially positioned directly outside the window looking in, the reverse of the baiser du soir situation. The discomfiture which marks Marcel's experience of movement underlines his habitual inaction, both physical and creative, and his stasis as observer of a world to which he belongs but in which he prefers to play no active role beyond that of detached spectator who controls the objects of his perception by carefully enframing them.
