Consider the lantern in Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. <br /><br />This magic lantern is a symbol for the novel itself--or, let's say, for art in general. A lantern is a medium which captures or reveals time which is otherwise lost (all art does this). A lantern allows a child to present something captured. A lantern is close to a toy, but it is a start, a beginning. <br /><br />A lantern is age appropriate. It is the right "tool" for the narrator at that age. Anyone with a lantern may grow up to use more evolved ways to present captured time. <br /><br />A book, a painting by Elstir, a sonata by Vinteuil--they can be a grown-up way to do what the lantern does for the child. <br /><br />In the opening pages of Du côté de chez Swann (1913), the narrator recalls his boyhood after a madeleine dipped in tea triggers old, and hidden memories. He recalls Geneviève de Brabant (the legend of Genevieve of Brabant) coming alive through a lantern that projected colorful slides onto walls and a ceiling. His age is not stated. Age 5? <br /><br />In this medieval legend, a nobleman’s wife is wrongly accused of adultery with the evil Golo. Geneviève escapes execution and hides in a cave for years with her child before being discovered by her husband and reinstated. The Merovingians--a dynasty of French kings--ruled at this time. <br /><br />A lantern sounds fun, right? Not for the neurotic narrator, who is disturbed by his bedroom losing stability when the lantern is used: "But I cannot express the discomfort I felt at such an intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room which..." <br /><br />The setting is a boy's bedroom in Combray, France, in the 1870s. As each new slide is projected, the narrator's "great-aunt" reads aloud text (from a booklet that came with the slides?) <br /><br />The "great-aunt" who reads is given no name. This mother of the bed-ridden Aunt Léonie is not technically the narrator's "great-aunt." She is really a cousin of the grandfather. <br /><br />The maternal grandmother has two unmarried sisters. They are technically great-aunts to the narrator. But each is called "aunt." Confusing, eh? Céline and Flora are minor characters. <br /><br />The novel's "Combray" is based on Illiers, where Proust's father was raised, but, in the novel, characters who live in Combray were based on his mother's family! It's backwards--get it? <br /><br />Did Françoise or another servant keep dust off the lantern? <br /><br />The narrator reports, "Someone had indeed had the happy idea of giving me, to distract me on evenings when I seemed abnormally wretched, a magic lantern, which used to be set on top of my lamp while we waited for dinner-time to come; and, after the fashion of the master-builders and glass-painters of gothic days, it substituted for the opaqueness of my walls an impalpable iridescence, supernatural phenomena of many colors, in which legends were depicted as on a shifting and transitory window.
