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Combray
This article is about Combray as it appears in C. W. Smith's work. For the Proustian town, see w:Combray.
Combray is a dog that appears in C. W. Smith's essay *Fellow Disjecta, Oh Sunny Danger Time* (2024), the text in which Leif and Katita recur as living collaborators in a solar-punk anarchist community across the Great Dividing Range. The dog's name is an explicit reference to Combray, the iconic fictional town at the opening of Proust's w:In Search of Lost Time — the site of involuntary memory, of time recovered through sensation (the madeleine cake dipped in tea).
Significance
Combray appears in the essay as a minor companion during the narrator's visits, embedded in anecdotal passages about morning walks and the recollection of time. The naming is an intertextual gesture: where Proust's Combray is the village-womb of memory, Smith's Combray is a living being whose presence—a dog encountered in a specific place at a specific hour—triggers the kind of involuntary recollection that Smith's oeuvre obsesses over. The empty world meditations and the rondo structure of ''Surplus of the Seen'' both hinge on this Proustian recovery of the lived past: returning to what was lived, misremembering it, and re-seeing it as if for the first time.
Appearances
Combray is mentioned nowhere else in Smith's published or announced work [citation needed], making it a unique talisman of that particular essay. The name may recur in *Their Most August Public Organ* or *Surplus of the Seen* (forthcoming) but verification is not yet possible. Some scholars have speculated that Combray is a stand-in for Smith's actual dog, encountered during research for the essay, but this remains unconfirmed.