Reading Proust: Madam Swann At Home
One of the many interesting puzzles about In Search of Lost Time involves the age of the narrator or, rather, narrators. In Swann’s Way there is clearly an older, overarching narrator augmenting the narration of a young boy. In Within A Budding Grove, the second book of the novel, the narrator begins as a slightly older boy, though of undetermined age. Meanwhile, the overarching narrator (possibly multiple older narrators of various ages) is present throughout to provide details that the boy/teenager does not yet comprehend.
The book is divided into two lengthy parts. “Madam Swann At Home” consists of about 300 pages while “Place-Names: The Place” becomes the longest section of the novel thus far weighing in at about 400 pages. The reader is uncertain of the amount of time that actually passes in Part One. Though two separate New Year’s Days are mentioned, the story reads as if a longer period of time has passed than it may seem. The boyish narrator is more sophisticated than in the first book, but he is still a boy. The reader is told that “two years” passes between Part One and Part Two. The narrator is clearly an adolescent in the second part of Within a Budding Grove, though we still don’t precisely know his age.
Proust begins at the dinner table. The boy’s family has invited the Marquis de Norpois, an ambassador of France. This fellow encourages the boy’s interest in literature and writing and makes it possible for the boy to see a performance of Berma, Proust’s fictional acting artist. Due to the actress’ sensational reputation, the boy has desired to see Berma perform for years but his father was opposed to it, largely due to his sickly nature and the advice of his doctor against going out in public like that. When M. de Norpois states the boy would benefit from the experience, the father relents.
The Berma performance is another splendid passage of the novel, capturing the life of being among a late 19th-century audience at a theater. But, in true Proustian form, the boy is disappointed by the actress’ performance. It does not resonate with him no matter how hard he tries. It is only when there is rapturous applause at the end that the boy, joining in with the enthusiasm, applauds loudly as well, feeling he had just seen something great that he didn’t quite understand. Perhaps M. de Norpois can explain it to the boy later, he thinks.
At their next dinner together, M. de Norpois reads a prose fragment the boy has written. The Marquis learns that the boy is a fan of Bergotte and goes into a diatribe on how the author is a “flute-player” who doesn’t really offer anything of significance. The boy takes the double blow of having his piece critiqued as badly written and his favorite author being ripped to shreds as well.
This is a devastating moment for the boy. “Shattered by what M. de Norpois had just said to me with regard to the fragment which I had submitted to him, and remembering at the same time the difficulties that I experienced when I attempted to write an essay of merely devote myself to serious thought, I felt conscious once again of my intellectual nullity and that I was not cut out for the literary life.” (page 63)
“I felt dismayed, diminished; and my mind, like a fluid which is without dimensions save those of the vessel that is provided for it, just as it expanded in the past to fill the vast capacity of genius, contracted now, was entirely contained within the straitened mediocrity in which M. de Norpois had of a sudden enclosed and sealed it.” (pp. 63-64) The boy has an existential crisis about writing and loses his motivation to pursue it.
Later that evening, the boy reads a newspaper clipping that gives the Berma performance an enthusiastic review. In reading it, something happens to the boy. “As soon as my mind had conceived this new idea of ‘the purest and most exalted manifestation of dramatic art’, it, the idea, sped to join the imperfect pleasure which I had felt at the theater, adding to it a little of what it lacked, and the combination formed something so exalting that I exclaimed to myself: ‘What a great artist!’” (pp. 71-72)
All the while, interspersed with it in the prose, the overarching narrator tells us about life between Swann, Odette, and Gilberte. Odette knowing Swann’s intellectual superiority compared with herself. Swann’s fascination with the painter Vermer and Odette learning much of that. Swann still dealing with jealousy for his wife, Odette having tea parties, and Gilberte meeting the boy to play at a park along the Champs-Elysees. Once they were playing and started to wrestle over an envelope Gilberte was holding and would not let the boy have.
“I tried to pull her towards me, and she resisted; her cheeks, inflamed by the effort, were as red and round as two cherries; she laughed as though I were tickling her; I held her gripped between my legs like a young tree which I was trying to climb; and, in the middle of my gymnastics, when I was already out of breath with the muscular exercise and the heat of the game, I felt, like a few drops of sweat wrung from me by effort, my pleasure express itself in a form which I could not even pause for a moment to analyze.” (page 90) The sensual, now sexual, journey of the young narrator is developing further, adding to what we saw in Swann’s Way.
Next we get another Proustian element, twisted occurrences. While the boy can play with Gilberte at the park he is not allowed to come to her home. The Swann’s don’t particularly care for the sickly boy. The boy attempts to get an introduction to the Swann home through M. de Norpois, but, the boy overplays his request with too much enthusiasm, the ambassador decides not to mention the boy to the Swanns.
The boy has a mischievous friend named Bloch. In the presence of Dr. Cottard, the boy’s physician, Bloch lies that he had seen Mme Swann recently and she thinks highly of the boy. Dr. Cottard takes this to mean that the boy already knows Mme Swann and thus facilitates the boy to finally meet Gilberte and Odette in their home. The boy is immersed in the world of Mme Swann’s home life, a life of leisure and polite parties.
At one such party, the boy hears the little phrase in Vinteuil’s sonata of which he knows Swann is fond. At first, the composition doesn’t affect the boy much at all. But, gradually, the piece reveals itself. “…even when I heard the sonata from beginning to end, it remained almost wholly invisible to me, like a monument of which distance or a haze allows us to catch but a faint and fragmentary glimpse. Hence the melancholy inseparable from one’s knowledge of such works, as of everything that takes place in time. When the least obvious beauties of Vinteuil’s sonata were revealed to me…those that I had first distinguished and preferred in it were beginning to escape, to elude me. Since I was able to enjoy everything that this sonata had to give me only in a succession of hearings, I never possessed it in its entirety: it was like life itself.” (page 141)
This is interesting not only because of the artistic, aesthetic implications but it also reveals a “succession” of hearings by the narrator. The elegant banality and routine of Mme Swann’s lifestyle is in a sense timeless, yet time passes. For the reader, we don’t know how many times the boy heard the sonata and over what period of time this “succession” takes place. This part of the novel allows for more time to pass than it seems, in my opinion. Or, it could be yet another older narrator butting in to talk about the experience of the piece after the boy matures. Time, or certainly memory, has this murky quality to Proust.
Proust ponders how the passage of time allows for a masterpiece of art to be widely known. “The reason why a work of genius is not easily admired from the first is that the man who created it is extraordinary, that few other men resemble him. It is his work itself that, by fertilizing the rare minds capable of understanding it, will make them increase and multiply.” (page 142)
By happy coincidence, Bergotte is a friend of Charles Swann. The boy ends up setting near the author at yet another luncheon. While not disappointed with Bergotte, the boy still finds his manner of speaking to be almost completely at odds with the way he writes. It takes some adjustment for him to relate to the man. The boy learns that Bergotte does not think very highly of M. de Norpois’ world view. The boy feels more comfortable around the easy-going Bergotte compared with the hypercritical ambassador and this makes an impression on him.
“…I felt on the one hand so intensely in sympathy with the work of Bergotte and on the other hand, in the theater, a disappointment the reasons for which I did not know, those two instinctive impulses could not be so very different form one another, but must be obedient to the same laws; and that that mind of Bergotte’s which I loved in his books could not be alien and hostile to my disappointment and to my inability to express it. For my intelligence must be one – perhaps indeed there exists a single intelligence of which everyone is a co-tenant, an intelligence towards which each of us from out of his own separate seat, there is on the other hand but a single stage.” (page 195)
Shortly afterwards, Bloch “overthrew my conception of the world and opened for me fresh possibilities of happiness…by assuring me that…women never asked for anything better than to make love.” (page 205) He takes the boy to a “house of assignation.” The boy meets some of the women there but does nothing because, well, he’s a boy. But, here again, the problem of his age crops up. While in the house, the boy notices a sofa that once belonged to his aunt, which was randomly sold after her death. He has a peculiar memory of this sofa, in this place, at this time.
“…I remembered only long afterwards that it was upon the same sofa that, many years before, I had tasted for the first time the delights of love with one of my girl cousins…” (page 208) The phrase “many years before” strikes me as rather odd. He’s a boy, recently just a child, it would seem. Yet he is thinking about something that happened to him years ago.
Obviously, the narrator as a boy already has an advanced, if vaguely understood, sense of sexuality. Once again, In Search of Lost Time is about many things, with the evolution and expression of the narrator’s sexual nature being a strong thread tying the novel together. I find this passage striking. He must have been 10 or so when he played around with his cousin. Of course, it is also possibly that, as a boy, his sense of time is somewhat skewed and “many years” for him means a couple of years ago. Still, it is an extraordinary admission made in a passing, matter-of-fact manner.
Most of the remainder of “Madam Swann at Home” is about the boy visiting Gilberte and Odette at their Parisian home, the endless social gatherings for adults and for children, the stylish manner in which the Swanns live, and, particularly, about his growing attraction for Odette’s mature, mysterious style and beauty. Meanwhile, much as with the Swann-Odette saga of book one, the boy sees Gilberte one day with another boy and, with possessiveness and jealousy, eventually sublimates his love for the girl into indifference.
This is certainly the most difficult thing the narrator has yet experienced in the novel. He copes by going out in the evenings “to drown my sorrows in the arms of women whom I did not love.” (page 275) Again, this is puzzling to me. Did the boy seek comfort from his sufferings in the house of assignation? Who were these “women” that he did not love and what does it say that this young boy “drowns his sorrows” with them? I can’t see how the narrator can be older than 12-13 at this point; still fairly young for that sort of “comfort.”
Setting that aside, this section of the novel also affords Proust the opportunity to further develop his rather dark and twisted theory of love. The reader has seen examples of Proustian love in the Swann-Odette relationship and somewhat mirrored in the Gilberte relationship as well. In brief, it is not so much that the object of our desire possesses qualities that are lovable, rather, love is more about the attraction and projection of love upon the object of our desires. This ultimately leads to an unsatisfying cycle of magnetism, sparking physical pleasure that becomes habitual behavior. Gradually, this gives way to jealousy and obsession when the object of our love focuses their attention to other possible partners. Obsession gives way to neurotic resentment and, finally, indifference.
Proust had a pleasurable yet frustrating sex life. Part of this was brought on by his homosexuality at a time when that was certainly unacceptable, it was the turn of the 20th century after all. But most of it had to do with his passionately possessive personality in the relation to others, sexual or otherwise. A couple of quotes will suffice to sample this perspective as Proust explores it in this part of Within a Budding Grove.
“We are, when we love, in an abnormal state, capable of giving at once to the most apparently simple accident, an accident which may at any moment occur, a seriousness which in itself it would not entail. What makes us so happy is the presence in our hearts of an unstable element which we contrive perpetually to maintain and of which we cease almost to be aware so long as it is not displaced. In reality, there is in love a permanent strain of suffering which happiness neutralizes, makes potential only, postpones, but which may at any moment become, what it would long since have been had we not obtained what we wanted, excruciating.” (pp. 213-214)
“When we are in love, our love is too big a thing for us to be able altogether to contain it within ourselves. It radiates towards the loved one, finds there a surface which arrests it, forcing it to return to its starting-point, and it is this repercussion of our own feeling which we call the other’s feelings and which charms us more then than on its outward journey because we do not recognize it as having originated in ourselves.” (pp. 252-253)
Even after he becomes indifferent to Gilberte, the boy continues to visit the Swann home. Now, however, it is largely to interact with Madam Swann, who enjoys the boy’s maturity for his age and treats him kindly. Poetically enough, the end of Part One is a sort of replay of the conclusion of Swann’s Way. Madam Swann is gloriously attired and out for an early May afternoon stroll through Paris so that she might be seen and become to object of multiple male gazes. This time, however, the boy is at her side.
“And as the average span of life, the relative longevity of our memories of poetical sensations is much greater than that of our memories of what the heart has suffered, now that the sorrows that I once felt on Gilberte’s account have long since faded and vanished, there has survived them the pleasure that I still derive – whenever I close my eyes and read, as it were upon the face of a sundial, the minutes that are recorded between a quarter past twelve and one o-clock in the month of May – from seeing myself once again strolling and talking thus with Mme Swann, beneath her parasol, as though in the colored shade of a wisteria bower.” (pp. 297-298)
Here the (much older) overarching narrator has taken over again, putting the memory into a grander context that will continue to unfold as the novel progresses. As with so many little things throughout the novel, Proust allows the reader to experience the present moment as it happens but also reflects back upon this moment as a memory of his future self. At the heart of this is the very search for “lost time” itself, which will be elaborated upon far more in the five books to come.
The book is divided into two lengthy parts. “Madam Swann At Home” consists of about 300 pages while “Place-Names: The Place” becomes the longest section of the novel thus far weighing in at about 400 pages. The reader is uncertain of the amount of time that actually passes in Part One. Though two separate New Year’s Days are mentioned, the story reads as if a longer period of time has passed than it may seem. The boyish narrator is more sophisticated than in the first book, but he is still a boy. The reader is told that “two years” passes between Part One and Part Two. The narrator is clearly an adolescent in the second part of Within a Budding Grove, though we still don’t precisely know his age.
Proust begins at the dinner table. The boy’s family has invited the Marquis de Norpois, an ambassador of France. This fellow encourages the boy’s interest in literature and writing and makes it possible for the boy to see a performance of Berma, Proust’s fictional acting artist. Due to the actress’ sensational reputation, the boy has desired to see Berma perform for years but his father was opposed to it, largely due to his sickly nature and the advice of his doctor against going out in public like that. When M. de Norpois states the boy would benefit from the experience, the father relents.
The Berma performance is another splendid passage of the novel, capturing the life of being among a late 19th-century audience at a theater. But, in true Proustian form, the boy is disappointed by the actress’ performance. It does not resonate with him no matter how hard he tries. It is only when there is rapturous applause at the end that the boy, joining in with the enthusiasm, applauds loudly as well, feeling he had just seen something great that he didn’t quite understand. Perhaps M. de Norpois can explain it to the boy later, he thinks.
At their next dinner together, M. de Norpois reads a prose fragment the boy has written. The Marquis learns that the boy is a fan of Bergotte and goes into a diatribe on how the author is a “flute-player” who doesn’t really offer anything of significance. The boy takes the double blow of having his piece critiqued as badly written and his favorite author being ripped to shreds as well.
This is a devastating moment for the boy. “Shattered by what M. de Norpois had just said to me with regard to the fragment which I had submitted to him, and remembering at the same time the difficulties that I experienced when I attempted to write an essay of merely devote myself to serious thought, I felt conscious once again of my intellectual nullity and that I was not cut out for the literary life.” (page 63)
“I felt dismayed, diminished; and my mind, like a fluid which is without dimensions save those of the vessel that is provided for it, just as it expanded in the past to fill the vast capacity of genius, contracted now, was entirely contained within the straitened mediocrity in which M. de Norpois had of a sudden enclosed and sealed it.” (pp. 63-64) The boy has an existential crisis about writing and loses his motivation to pursue it.
Later that evening, the boy reads a newspaper clipping that gives the Berma performance an enthusiastic review. In reading it, something happens to the boy. “As soon as my mind had conceived this new idea of ‘the purest and most exalted manifestation of dramatic art’, it, the idea, sped to join the imperfect pleasure which I had felt at the theater, adding to it a little of what it lacked, and the combination formed something so exalting that I exclaimed to myself: ‘What a great artist!’” (pp. 71-72)
All the while, interspersed with it in the prose, the overarching narrator tells us about life between Swann, Odette, and Gilberte. Odette knowing Swann’s intellectual superiority compared with herself. Swann’s fascination with the painter Vermer and Odette learning much of that. Swann still dealing with jealousy for his wife, Odette having tea parties, and Gilberte meeting the boy to play at a park along the Champs-Elysees. Once they were playing and started to wrestle over an envelope Gilberte was holding and would not let the boy have.
“I tried to pull her towards me, and she resisted; her cheeks, inflamed by the effort, were as red and round as two cherries; she laughed as though I were tickling her; I held her gripped between my legs like a young tree which I was trying to climb; and, in the middle of my gymnastics, when I was already out of breath with the muscular exercise and the heat of the game, I felt, like a few drops of sweat wrung from me by effort, my pleasure express itself in a form which I could not even pause for a moment to analyze.” (page 90) The sensual, now sexual, journey of the young narrator is developing further, adding to what we saw in Swann’s Way.
Next we get another Proustian element, twisted occurrences. While the boy can play with Gilberte at the park he is not allowed to come to her home. The Swann’s don’t particularly care for the sickly boy. The boy attempts to get an introduction to the Swann home through M. de Norpois, but, the boy overplays his request with too much enthusiasm, the ambassador decides not to mention the boy to the Swanns.
The boy has a mischievous friend named Bloch. In the presence of Dr. Cottard, the boy’s physician, Bloch lies that he had seen Mme Swann recently and she thinks highly of the boy. Dr. Cottard takes this to mean that the boy already knows Mme Swann and thus facilitates the boy to finally meet Gilberte and Odette in their home. The boy is immersed in the world of Mme Swann’s home life, a life of leisure and polite parties.
At one such party, the boy hears the little phrase in Vinteuil’s sonata of which he knows Swann is fond. At first, the composition doesn’t affect the boy much at all. But, gradually, the piece reveals itself. “…even when I heard the sonata from beginning to end, it remained almost wholly invisible to me, like a monument of which distance or a haze allows us to catch but a faint and fragmentary glimpse. Hence the melancholy inseparable from one’s knowledge of such works, as of everything that takes place in time. When the least obvious beauties of Vinteuil’s sonata were revealed to me…those that I had first distinguished and preferred in it were beginning to escape, to elude me. Since I was able to enjoy everything that this sonata had to give me only in a succession of hearings, I never possessed it in its entirety: it was like life itself.” (page 141)
This is interesting not only because of the artistic, aesthetic implications but it also reveals a “succession” of hearings by the narrator. The elegant banality and routine of Mme Swann’s lifestyle is in a sense timeless, yet time passes. For the reader, we don’t know how many times the boy heard the sonata and over what period of time this “succession” takes place. This part of the novel allows for more time to pass than it seems, in my opinion. Or, it could be yet another older narrator butting in to talk about the experience of the piece after the boy matures. Time, or certainly memory, has this murky quality to Proust.
Proust ponders how the passage of time allows for a masterpiece of art to be widely known. “The reason why a work of genius is not easily admired from the first is that the man who created it is extraordinary, that few other men resemble him. It is his work itself that, by fertilizing the rare minds capable of understanding it, will make them increase and multiply.” (page 142)
By happy coincidence, Bergotte is a friend of Charles Swann. The boy ends up setting near the author at yet another luncheon. While not disappointed with Bergotte, the boy still finds his manner of speaking to be almost completely at odds with the way he writes. It takes some adjustment for him to relate to the man. The boy learns that Bergotte does not think very highly of M. de Norpois’ world view. The boy feels more comfortable around the easy-going Bergotte compared with the hypercritical ambassador and this makes an impression on him.
“…I felt on the one hand so intensely in sympathy with the work of Bergotte and on the other hand, in the theater, a disappointment the reasons for which I did not know, those two instinctive impulses could not be so very different form one another, but must be obedient to the same laws; and that that mind of Bergotte’s which I loved in his books could not be alien and hostile to my disappointment and to my inability to express it. For my intelligence must be one – perhaps indeed there exists a single intelligence of which everyone is a co-tenant, an intelligence towards which each of us from out of his own separate seat, there is on the other hand but a single stage.” (page 195)
Shortly afterwards, Bloch “overthrew my conception of the world and opened for me fresh possibilities of happiness…by assuring me that…women never asked for anything better than to make love.” (page 205) He takes the boy to a “house of assignation.” The boy meets some of the women there but does nothing because, well, he’s a boy. But, here again, the problem of his age crops up. While in the house, the boy notices a sofa that once belonged to his aunt, which was randomly sold after her death. He has a peculiar memory of this sofa, in this place, at this time.
“…I remembered only long afterwards that it was upon the same sofa that, many years before, I had tasted for the first time the delights of love with one of my girl cousins…” (page 208) The phrase “many years before” strikes me as rather odd. He’s a boy, recently just a child, it would seem. Yet he is thinking about something that happened to him years ago.
Obviously, the narrator as a boy already has an advanced, if vaguely understood, sense of sexuality. Once again, In Search of Lost Time is about many things, with the evolution and expression of the narrator’s sexual nature being a strong thread tying the novel together. I find this passage striking. He must have been 10 or so when he played around with his cousin. Of course, it is also possibly that, as a boy, his sense of time is somewhat skewed and “many years” for him means a couple of years ago. Still, it is an extraordinary admission made in a passing, matter-of-fact manner.
Most of the remainder of “Madam Swann at Home” is about the boy visiting Gilberte and Odette at their Parisian home, the endless social gatherings for adults and for children, the stylish manner in which the Swanns live, and, particularly, about his growing attraction for Odette’s mature, mysterious style and beauty. Meanwhile, much as with the Swann-Odette saga of book one, the boy sees Gilberte one day with another boy and, with possessiveness and jealousy, eventually sublimates his love for the girl into indifference.
This is certainly the most difficult thing the narrator has yet experienced in the novel. He copes by going out in the evenings “to drown my sorrows in the arms of women whom I did not love.” (page 275) Again, this is puzzling to me. Did the boy seek comfort from his sufferings in the house of assignation? Who were these “women” that he did not love and what does it say that this young boy “drowns his sorrows” with them? I can’t see how the narrator can be older than 12-13 at this point; still fairly young for that sort of “comfort.”
Setting that aside, this section of the novel also affords Proust the opportunity to further develop his rather dark and twisted theory of love. The reader has seen examples of Proustian love in the Swann-Odette relationship and somewhat mirrored in the Gilberte relationship as well. In brief, it is not so much that the object of our desire possesses qualities that are lovable, rather, love is more about the attraction and projection of love upon the object of our desires. This ultimately leads to an unsatisfying cycle of magnetism, sparking physical pleasure that becomes habitual behavior. Gradually, this gives way to jealousy and obsession when the object of our love focuses their attention to other possible partners. Obsession gives way to neurotic resentment and, finally, indifference.
Proust had a pleasurable yet frustrating sex life. Part of this was brought on by his homosexuality at a time when that was certainly unacceptable, it was the turn of the 20th century after all. But most of it had to do with his passionately possessive personality in the relation to others, sexual or otherwise. A couple of quotes will suffice to sample this perspective as Proust explores it in this part of Within a Budding Grove.
“We are, when we love, in an abnormal state, capable of giving at once to the most apparently simple accident, an accident which may at any moment occur, a seriousness which in itself it would not entail. What makes us so happy is the presence in our hearts of an unstable element which we contrive perpetually to maintain and of which we cease almost to be aware so long as it is not displaced. In reality, there is in love a permanent strain of suffering which happiness neutralizes, makes potential only, postpones, but which may at any moment become, what it would long since have been had we not obtained what we wanted, excruciating.” (pp. 213-214)
“When we are in love, our love is too big a thing for us to be able altogether to contain it within ourselves. It radiates towards the loved one, finds there a surface which arrests it, forcing it to return to its starting-point, and it is this repercussion of our own feeling which we call the other’s feelings and which charms us more then than on its outward journey because we do not recognize it as having originated in ourselves.” (pp. 252-253)
Even after he becomes indifferent to Gilberte, the boy continues to visit the Swann home. Now, however, it is largely to interact with Madam Swann, who enjoys the boy’s maturity for his age and treats him kindly. Poetically enough, the end of Part One is a sort of replay of the conclusion of Swann’s Way. Madam Swann is gloriously attired and out for an early May afternoon stroll through Paris so that she might be seen and become to object of multiple male gazes. This time, however, the boy is at her side.
“And as the average span of life, the relative longevity of our memories of poetical sensations is much greater than that of our memories of what the heart has suffered, now that the sorrows that I once felt on Gilberte’s account have long since faded and vanished, there has survived them the pleasure that I still derive – whenever I close my eyes and read, as it were upon the face of a sundial, the minutes that are recorded between a quarter past twelve and one o-clock in the month of May – from seeing myself once again strolling and talking thus with Mme Swann, beneath her parasol, as though in the colored shade of a wisteria bower.” (pp. 297-298)
Here the (much older) overarching narrator has taken over again, putting the memory into a grander context that will continue to unfold as the novel progresses. As with so many little things throughout the novel, Proust allows the reader to experience the present moment as it happens but also reflects back upon this moment as a memory of his future self. At the heart of this is the very search for “lost time” itself, which will be elaborated upon far more in the five books to come.
Comments