Reading Proust: Swann’s Way

After the first 200 pages or so of Swann's Way the reader is acquainted with Proust’s style and what to expect in terms of elaboration going forward.  The first part of the book continues on in Combray.  That we are seeing things from the perspective of a young narrator is indicated by such passages as: “The walls of the houses, the Tansonville hedge, the trees of Roussainville wood, the bushes adjoining Montjouvian, all must bear the blows of my walking stick or umbrella, must hear my shouts of happiness, these being no more than expressions of the confused ideas which exhilarated me, and which had now achieved the repose of enlightenment, preferring the pleasures of a lazy drift towards an immediate outlet rather than submit to a slow and difficult course of elucidation.” (page 218)

Much of Proust’s novel is sensual in its expression.  An early significant erotic moment comes when the boy is out late on a walk, his parents giving him permission to do so (it was a different, rural world then), and he happens upon two young women making-out in a naughty fashion.  He is a voyeur, seeing them from outside into the living room through a crack in the draperies as darkness falls.  It is pretty racy stuff for 1913 and reads fairly sexy today, though there is only a simple surface description of things, the narrator being a curious boy.  Considering his mysterious (for him) encounter with “the lady in pink” earlier, and his attraction for the little girl, Gilberte, who he saw near the fragrant hawthorns, there is a sensual awakening in the young narrator, splendidly expressed, yet never overtly proclaimed, by Proust.

The boy has an epiphany later when, while riding atop a carriage in the late afternoon, he is awestruck: “At a bend in the road I experienced, suddenly, that special pleasure which was unlike any other, on catching the sight of the twin steeples of Martinsville, bathed in the setting sun and constantly changing their position with the movement of the carriage and the windings of the road, and then a third steeple, that of Vieuxvicq, which, although separated from them by a hill and a valley, and rising from rather higher ground in the distance, appeared none the less to be standing by their side.” (pp. 253-254)

The boy is so overawed with this moment in time that he immediately writes about the event while still on the carriage, borrowing paper and pencil.  He decides to dedicate his life and future career to writing.  The passage where Proust “quotes” the boy’s writing is well done, he is largely imitating himself.  And it is at this point that the novel shifts entirely.

“Swann In Love” follows “Combray” and is the only portion of the novel written in traditional third-person perspective.  Instead of being narrated to, the reader is now in direct contact with the characters innermost feelings and motivations.  My belief is Proust chose this mode because it reflects events that happened before the boy was born and, therefore, could not possibly be narrated in the sense of the rest of the novel.

This section lasts for about 280 pages.   In a nutshell, it is the story of how the wealthy gentleman Charles Swann fell in love with and had intimate relations with Odette de Crecy.  They meet at one of Paris’ high-class salons late in the 19th century.  Proust gives us a wonderful examination of the salon life by introducing us to many characters of elite society.  Swann was not initially attracted to Odette though he enjoyed her company.  She was obviously not as educated as him, nor as graceful as others.  Rumors that she was somewhat of a lose cheat surrounded her. 

Then, just as when the boy experienced the hawthorns before seeing and falling in love with Gilberte, Swann experiences a piece of music that stirs something deep within him, affecting his feelings for Odette.  This is a fantastic, charming  passage of the novel.  Just as Proust celebrates the art of writing with the fictitious character of Bergotte, now he gives us the fictitious composer Vinteuil whose Sonata for Violin and Piano contains a “little phrase” that impacts Swann.

“With a slow and rhythmical movement it led him first this way, then that, towards a state of happiness that was noble, unintelligible, and yet precise….And reappear it did, though without speaking to him more clearly, bringing him, indeed, a pleasure less profound.  But when he returned home he felt the need of it: he was like a man into whose life a woman he has seen for a moment passing by has brought the image of a new beauty which deepens his own sensibility, although he does not even know her name or whether he will ever see her again.” (page 296)

This echoes the Madeline section earlier in the novel, where the narrator feels less and less enchanted with his memory of Combray with each additional bite of cake dipped in tea.  Each return of “the little phrase” impacts Swann less, yet the initial impression is profound.  Soon, this phrase of music becomes associated with Swann’s loving relationship with Odette.  The phrase is sometimes played in honor of the couple.
  
Yet Odette does not stay exclusive with Swann, though she does continue to associate with him at her preference.  The stresses brought about by their differences ultimately make Odette give up on her passion for Swann and offer it to other men.  For a long while, Proust plays with the reader (as with Swann) by making this side of Odette seem unclear, possibly just bad rumor.  But, as Swann’s possessiveness and jealousy grows, he discovers that Odette has been with others.  Before she came to Paris Odette was apparently a highly sought after courtesan and enjoyed lesbian sex as well.  All of this leads Swann to great suffering.  

Their relationship was once so passionate, involving a very sexy make-out scene while the couple was in a carriage, for example.  It drives Swann crazy to think of her, apparently ample, passion be directed toward others. He goes to great lengths to catch her with someone else.  He basically stalks her, so blind and ridiculous is his jealousy.  

“It was true that Swann had often reflected that Odette was in no way a remarkable woman, and there was nothing especially flattering in seeing the supremacy he welded over someone so inferior to himself proclaimed to all the ‘faithful’; but since he had observed that to many other men besides himself Odette seemed a fascinating and desirable woman, the attraction which her body held for them had aroused in him a painful longing to secure the absolute mastery of even the tiniest particles of her heart.” (page 385)

Swann’s possessive jealousy is ironic because other men always found Odette far more attractive than did Swann – yet that only made him want her all the more.  “’Looking at things quite honestly, I can’t say I got much pleasure last night from being in bed with her.  It’s an odd thing, but I actually thought her ugly.’  And certainly he was sincere, but his love extended a long way beyond the province of physical desire.  Odette’s person, indeed, no longer held any great place in it.  When his eyes fell upon the photograph of Odette on his table, or when she came to see him, he had difficulty in identifying her face, either in flesh or on pasteboard, with painful and continuous anxiety which dwelt in his mind.  He would say to himself, almost with astonishment, ‘It’s she!’ as though suddenly we were to be shown in a detached, externalized form one of our own maladies, and we found it bore no resemblance to what we are suffering.” (page 436)

It is true that “Swann In Love” is told in third-person.  But I discovered upon this third time through that the narrator does, in fact, pop his head up in the story momentarily.  When we come to the part where the boy’s Uncle Adolphe, who we met earlier secretly entertaining “the lady in pink”, becomes possessive of Odette himself and “tried to take her by force”, we discover more about why this uncle is shunned by the boy’s family.  And yet, when discussing this, out of nowhere, the narrative suddenly shifts to “my great-uncle Adolphe” and “my uncle” repeatedly for only one page.  

It is difficult to believe this is a mistake by Proust.  But why would he choose to write the word “my” in this briefly inconsistent fashion?  I spent some time after finishing Swann’s Way contemplating this, among many other things.  This savoring of Proust and considering the text more deeply is appealing to me; part of why I was looking forward to tackling this great novel again.  My guess, and it is an amateurish guess, of course, is that Adolphe is the connection between the boy and “the lady in pink”, a sort of nebulous innocent sexual awakening.  His short-lived reemergence as the narrator has to do with his great-uncle’s relations with Odette before he was born.  

Odette becomes indifferent toward Swann as she enters into various liaisons.  Swann’s suffering finally subsides to where he is almost able to keep the thought of his former lover out of his mind.  But then Vinteuil’s sonata and its “little phrase” reappears at a party he attends.  When he hears this, the flood of memory of his days in love with Odette comes back to him “without pity for his present desolation, the forgotten strains of happiness.”

“Swann dared not move, and would have liked to compel all the other people in the room to remain still also, as if the slightest movement might imperil the magic presence, supernatural, delicious, frail, that was so soon to vanish.  But no one, as it happened, dreamed of speaking.  The ineffable utterance of one solitary man, absent, perhaps dead (Swann did not know whether Vinteuil was still alive), breathed out above the rites of those two hierophants, sufficed to arrest the attention of three hundred minds, and made of that platform on which a soul was thus called into being one of the noblest altars on which supernatural ceremony could be performed.” (page 501)

Swann’s renewed persistence with Odette pays off in a few additional passionate moments with her but, generally, it only serves to strengthen his jealousy and possessiveness.  In his unceasing drive to discover Odette’s past, Swann gets her to offer him a partial confession that she has been with many men and women.  Circumstantial evidence indicates that it is still the case, despite their partial reconciliation, which is short-lived.  The deep, secure, exclusive love is gone. 

In the end, Swann becomes a rather pathetic creature; yearning of a lost love and an utter failure to influence is former lover.  He exclaims, rather comically, “’To think that I’ve wasted years of my life, that I’ve longed to die, that I’ve experienced my greatest love, for a woman who didn’t appeal to me, who wasn’t even my type!’” (page 543)  This is sad but silly at the same time.  Not appealing and not his type?  That’s putting things rather mildly.  He has a relationship with a woman whose primary attraction for him was that she was in high demand by others.  It is laughably twisted, as is much of Proust’s novel.

“Place Names – The Name” is the final section of the first book – about 60 pages in length.  We find ourselves in a different summer, this time at a beach resort called Balbec.  The overarching narrator returns to mention that the room he now occupies in the story is one of the bedrooms racing through his mind at the beginning of the novel.  Specifically, he is in his room at the Grand Hotel de la Plage.  Proust is almost neurotically obsessed the details of whatever environment he established in the narrative.

“The Bavarian upholsterer who had been entrusted with furnishing this hotel had varied his scheme of decoration in different rooms, and in that which I found myself occupying  had set against the walls, on three sides of it, a series of low book-cases with glass fronts, in which, according to where they stood, by a law of nature which he had not perhaps foreseen, was reflected this or that section of the ever-changing view of the sea, so that walls were lined with a frieze of seascapes, interrupted only by the polished mahogany of the actual shelves.” (page 545)

These exquisite details belie the fact that we don’t stay here long.  This served as a brief introduction to Balbec, a place that plays a larger role in the second book of the novel.  The narrator’s mind is moving through time again.  We are back in Paris.  The boy is sickly and his doctor advises limiting physical exertion to walks with Francoise, the family cook.  At a park along the walk, the boy encounters Gilberte while playing.  This time the two strike up a friendship.  The boy immediately falls in love with the red-headed girl, matching the red hair of her father, Swann.  But to Gilberte the boy is just another potential playmate, sort of symbolic of the way Odette was with Swann.

And yet it is revealed that, somehow beyond the reader’s understanding, Swann has married Odette, Gilberte’s mother.  Proust does this on several occasions throughout the novel.  He takes characters and completely changes how things turn out involving them, often in opposition to what he has previously told us.  In this case, Swann’s suffering and Odette’s indifference mysteriously transform into a marriage.  Now the lengthy third-person background story makes more sense.  Proust offers us insight into the beginning of the relationship of Gilberte’s parents.  

The book’s finale begins with a shift to Odette, now Mademoiselle Swann.  After she became a mother she took to traveling by carriage through a park, then exiting and, dressed grandiosely, strolled back to her home, putting herself on display. “…when she reached the pigeon-shooting ground she would tell her coachman to ‘break away’ and to stop the carriage, so that she might go back on foot.  And on days when I felt that I had the courage  to pass close by her I would drag Francoise off in that direction;  until the moment came when I saw Mme Swann, trailing behind her the long train of her lilac skirt, dressed, as the populace imagined queens to be dressed, in rich finery such as no other woman wore, occasionally looking down at the handle of her parasol, and paying scant attention to the passers-by, as though her sole object was to take exercise, without thinking that she was observed and every head turned toward her.” (page 596)

Proust immediately takes this moment, grand in the boy’s eyes, and makes it funny.  Two gentleman observing Odette speak of sleeping with her and how “she still looks superb.”  Proust often takes the elevated nature of things and juxtaposes against baseness.  The frequent extreme contrasts and disorienting character shifts are a source of the novel’s humor.

On page 598 there is a break; an extra line on the page indicating another shift.  This time the overarching narrator returns of discuss the Bois de Boulogne, the avenue where Mme Swann took her walks.  He recalls the place through the span of his Parisian life.  He does this with a vivid description of a quiet place, with trees and natural beauty and the rumble of carriages.  But now things have changed.  In place of the carriages there are automobiles.

The narrator laments all this.  “Alas! There is nothing now but motor-cars driven by a moustached mechanic, with a tall footman towering by his side. “  The way hat styles have changed distresses the nostalgic narrator to the point he proclaims “there is no elegance left.”  But, he realizes that this is as it should be when any place collides with the passage of time.

“The places we have known do not belong to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience.  They were only a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.” (page 606)

The “fugitive” nature of places and events to a human life is basically what In Search of Lost Time is all about.  To that extent, Swann’s Way is an excellent setup for the rest of the novel.  We have seen the world of the boy and of that world just before he was born.  In the next book he will grow older and the narration will become a bit more sophisticated, less vague past the surface of things.  We will return to the seascape views of Balbec, which Proust seemingly randomly introduces to the reader at the start of this section.

The difficulty of the first few pages of Swann’s Way make most people give up when attempting to read Proust.  Of those who manage to stick with it, most only finish the first book and never go any further.  Swann’s Way is the most popular section of the novel, perhaps due to the fact that it is the most common part of the novel to be academically taught.  But, Swann’s Way is like sticking your toe in the vast ocean of Proust to test the water, a short hike on a much longer and ever-broadening path.  Anyone gathering the stamina to continue the hike is rewarded time and again by the most amazing writing, a fascinating cast of characters, and a philosophical examination of life, love, the senses, the darkness of our nature, and things to consider when we long for our own past.     

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Lady Chatterley's Lover: An Intensely Sexy Read

A Summary of Money, Power, and Wall Street

A Summary of United States of Secrets