About
Proust’s In Search of Lost Time
Swann’s
Way
by
Joel Rich
November 7, 2003 - Chicago Cultural Center
for
Dan Brown
I 1913,
was a pretty good year … for Western literature. It was the
year that Willa Cather established herself as a writer with the publication of As did D.H.
Lawrence, with Sons and Lovers. Thomas
Mann’s Death in Venice was published
in 1913. And George
Bernard Shaw‘s Pygmalion opened in
London.
Also, in And in 1913, there were novels published by Maxim
Gorky and Jack
London. Covering
the existential waterfront, so to speak, 1913 saw the publication of BOTH In 1913,
R. Tagore received the Nobel Prize for literature. And last,
but certainly not least, in November of 1913, after working on it in various
forms for over a dozen years, Marcel Proust’s first novel, Du Côté de
chez Swann – Swann’s Way – was
published. So,
ultimately, it was also a pretty good year for Marcel Proust. But
getting to the accomplishment of that year wasn’t easy.
Nor was
the route a direct one. The
manuscript for Swann’s Way was initially rejected by three of the major
French publishing houses of the time; it only saw the light of day because
Proust was willing to pay a good deal of the printing cost himself to have it
published by a small, relatively unknown firm. And Proust, it has been said, wasn’t a precocious writer, like Byron or Keats; it took him a number of years to reach maturity in his art. I’d like
now to take a few minutes to briefly trace Proust’s literary career,
especially as it led up to Swann’s Way,
as a preliminary to some observations about the text itself.
II Marcel (Valentin-Louis-George-Eugene) Proust was born in Auteuil, a suburb of Paris July 10, 1871 .
His
father, Adrien Proust, was an eminent doctor.
His
mother, Jeanne Weil, came from a wealthy Alsatian Jewish family.
In
May of 1873, Robert Proust, Marcel’s brother was born.
And
beginning in childhood and continuing throughout his life, Marcel suffered from
chronic, severe asthma.
Nevertheless,
from 1882 to 1889, he regularly attended secondary school at the academically
selective
Lycee
Condorcet; and
between 1877 and 1888 he collaborated with schoolmates to publish a series of
literary and artistic reviews. After graduating
from the
Lycee, in 1889 Proust
enlisted for military service, and served for one year, stationed in the city of
Following this
military service – which he indicated, later, he rather enjoyed and which is
reflected in his later writing – in 1890, he enrolled
at the Sorbonne’s Ecole des Science
Politique, where he studied law, but also continued to write, here through
contributions to a review of the preceding month's social and political events. In 1892, he
co-founded and contributed to a short-lived literary review, Le Banquet,
with former schoolmates from the Lycee. During this time,
he also began to regularly frequent the salons of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the wealthy, aristocratic area of This book,
titled, Les Plalsirs et les Jours
– Pleasures and Days – was published in 1896.
It was printed in an attractive
edition and included drawings by
a popular socialite, Madeleine
Lemaire. In the autumn of
1895, Proust began an autobiographical novel, which, after five years and a
thousand pages, he abandoned. It was
finally published in 1952 as Jean Santeuil.
In itself, this work was a dead-end for Proust, but it turned out to
be important to him for the developing of themes and approaches which he would
later employ more successfully. In any case, in
1897, Proust was introduced to the works of the English art historian and social
critic, John Ruskin, to which, after leaving off work on
Jean
Santeuil,
he
would devote
several years. There is apparently some question about the quality of
Proust’s translations – Proust actually didn't read or speak English and
depended a good deal on “trots” and a collaborator;
but still, the prefaces to these works anticipate Proust’s subsequent
development. In reading,
[Proust writes], friendship is
suddenly brought back to its first purity. With books, no amiability. These
friends, if we spend an evening with them, it is truly because we desire them.
In their case, at least, we leave only with regret. In September
1905, Marcel’s mother died of nephritis.
Overcome by the
loss, Proust set aside his literary pursuits for a number of months and
retreated to a sanitarium. During the period
1907-1908 he published various articles in Le
Figaro that can be seen as
preliminary to material that will eventually be incorporated into his novel.
In one of these,
“Fillial Sentiments of a Parricide,” – published in February, 1907 – Proust
analyzes the phenomenon of memory, which will later figure so prominently in his
work. Early in 1908,
Proust wrote, also for Le Figaro, a
series of pastiches in which he imitated the style of various nineteenth century
prose writers, including Balzac,
Flaubert, and Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve. Also, at this
time, he began what would turn out to be a hybrid work – part essay, part
fiction – which is directed against the critical approach of Saint- Beauve,
who he faults for failing to understand that a literary work is created by a
writer's inner consciousness and is not explainable by the author’s external
life. "A
book," Proust claims, "is the product of a different self
than the one we manifest in our habits, in our social life, or in our
vices" These
explorations, not published separately until long after Proust’s death, as Contre
Saint-Beauve, will serve Proust as a first version of the Combray
section of Swann’s Way; and also of
his final volume, Time Regained.
Most distinctive
in Contre-Saint Beauve is the focus on
the being of different kinds of time – inner time, which is experienced
through reminiscence and outer time, which can be experienced though awareness
of aging appearances, especially those of other people.
During
the years, 1910-1911, Proust further developed Swann’s
Way and revised the Time Regained material.
At this point, he envisioned the novel as having two parts: Time
Lost and Time Regained. The end
of In Search of Lost Time, thus, is
importantly implicit in its beginning, in Swann’s
Way – and vice versa.
In
any case, in 1912, extracts from Swann’s
Way were published in the Figaro
and the complete work was offered to the prestigious publishing house, Nouvelle
Revue Française (or NRF, as it was known), which at that time was headed
by the novelist, André Gide.
The
manuscript was rejected. In later years, Gide would
apologize to Proust and describe misjudging the significance of his work as
“the greatest regret of my life.”
Proust graciously accepted
Gide’s apology.
At the time of the
rejection, however, it was a stinging disappointment.
Nevertheless,
finally, as we have noted, Du Côté de chez Swann – Swann’s Way – after further rejection, was published, partly at
Proust’s own expense, on
Proust
completed the second novel of In Search of
Lost Time, A l’ombre des
jeunes filles en fleur, in 1917, but its publication was delayed by the
First World War. This is the novel that
has long been known in English as Within a Budding Grove,
although, personally, I prefer the recent and more accurate English title,
In
the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower.
Following the
end of the War, in 1918. the work was finally published - in a somewhat revised
version, as he had continued to work on it -and it was awarded – not
without some controversy, but nevertheless – the prestigious Prix Goncourt..
For
the last three years of his life Proust never stopped working;
during this period, the volumes which now appear in English as The Guermantes Way and Sodom
and Gomorrah were published Proust died of pneumonia on Only a few months earlier, he had written “Fin” –“End” – at
the foot of his manuscript.
Still, the remaining volumes of In
Search of Lost Time – the last three; there are seven in all – remained to be published at the time of Proust’s death and they would require
some revision. But Proust had sufficiently established his great work so that – as he
once observed
– whenever death might surprise him, his art would survive.
And the last volumes were published posthumously by Proust’s brother,
Robert, with editorial help from directors of NRF, which, of course, was the
publishing house that had originally rejected Swann’s Way. These volumes are La Prisonnière –
or The Captive
– which appeared in
1923;
Albertine disparue – or The
Fugitive – in 1925; and Le Temps retrouvé – Time
Regained – in 1927. In Proust’s own
lifetime, there was debate about In Search
of Lost Time, some seeing it as brilliant, others as unreadable. Alfred Humboldt, from the Ollendorf publishing house, rejected Swann’s
Way in a note to Proust in which he said: My
dear friend, I may be dense, but I fail to see why a chap needs thirty pages to
describe how he tosses and turns in bed before sleep. Even more puzzled
was the reader for the Fasquelle publishing house,
which also rejected the manuscript. Apparently, he got further into Swann’s
Way than Humbolt had, and he reported as follows: At
the end of seven hundred and twelve pages of this manuscript, after innumerable
griefs at being drowned in unfathomable developments and irritating impatience
at never being able to rise above the surface–one doesn't have a single, but
not a single clue of what this is about. What is the point of all this?
What does it all mean? Where is it all leading? Impossible to know anything
about it! Impossible to say anything about it! This afternoon, only a week short of 90 years to the day
after Swann’s Way first appeared in
print, how might one respond to its befuddled first readers? What is
Swann’s Way
about? What does it all
mean? Where is
it all leading? And what
is the point of all that talk about sleeping? To think about these questions, while at leisure, is part of
the joy of Swann’s Way and its
something that I encourage you to experience for yourself. But in the time that remains, I want to offer a few
observations that might be helpful. Before I do this, however, I need to say a few words about
different approaches to this text.
III First,
in moving from the life of the author of Swann’s
Way to the work itself, it can
be useful to explicitly underline the transition, for there is some tendency to
conflate the two, the life and the work But as Vladimir
Nabokov notes in his
Lectures
on Literature: One thing should be firmly impressed upon your minds: the
work is not an autobiography; the narrator is not Proust the person, and the
characters never existed except in the author’s mind. And similarly, the critic Howard Nemerov, observes in his lectures on
Proust:
… [T]oo much biography, ingested while reading the book,
will produce only a blurring of the focus among three persons: Marcel the boy
and young man whom we see growing, Marcel the middle-aged man who is speaking to
us about him, and Marcel Proust the author, who …project[s] the two former
[personages] … There are identifiable likenesses both in detail and in theme
… but I warn you against the historical habit of explaining either the man by
the book or the book by the man; like so many things easy to do it is tempting
to overdo. So, at this point, in considering the text itself, we are explicitly
moving to “a different neck of the woods.” But
secondly, I would observe that there are two significantly different ways to
look at Swann’s Way, namely, how it
appears to a careful first time reader, on the one hand; and on the other hand,
how it appears to a careful second (or third, or fourth – but for the present,
we’ll stick with a second) time reader – or, to speak more generally, how it
appears in retrospect, after one has completed the overall work,
i.e., the seven novels that comprise In
Search of Lost Time. And this
isn’t simply a trivial – or a typical – distinction, because – in effect
– at the end of Time Regained, the
last novel in In Search of Lost Time,
the narrator essentially invites one to begin again at the beginning … indeed,
so to speak, to meet him back at the beginning as the narrator who starts off in
Swann’s Way by making observations about falling asleep. Moreover
– and relatedly – it’s only in retrospect – when one has completed In
Search of Lost Time – that the significance of certain features of Swann’s
Way become recognizable. So, in what follows, I
need to try to navigate something of a middle course
between these two ways of reading, hoping that my remarks will be more or less
coherent to those who have various sorts of experience of the text – including
those who have no previous experience of it at all. And
finally, in what follows I am going to mainly direct my attention to the first
60 or so pages of the text. When Du
côté But when
the work was translated into English by C. K. Moncrieff, he designated the first
part of Combray as “Overture;” and while, strictly speaking, this wasn’t
part of Proust’s original intent, the demarcation seems an apt one and it's
this portion that I’ll mostly be considering. Also, in
what follows, for the most part be I’ll be using Moncrieff’s translations,
as revised by Kilmartin and Enright. However,
recently a completely new translation by
III What is Swann’s
Way about? The
first pages of Swann’s Way –
in the “Overture” – introduce
the reader to an insomniac narrator who begins by talking about falling asleep
and the sometimes vague border that we can experience between being asleep and
being awake. The work
opens with the following words:
For a long time, I went to bed early.
Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure. Now, at
first sight this opening might not appear to some people to be in the running
for the blue ribbon for great first lines – in competition, say, with: “Call
me Ishmael;” or “It
was the best of times; it was the worst of times;” or “All
happy families are the same. Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Nevertheless,
this first line does in fact succinctly do what those other first lines do,
which is to immediately place the reader in contact with the “universe”
which its author wants you inhabit. It is a
universe, among other things, in which TIME is important; as is often observed,
the overall work begins and ends with the word “time,” with “Longtemps,”
at the beginning of Swann’s Way and
with a capitalized “Temps” – Time – as the last word of Time Regained. And
different perspectives on time – as well, if you will, on its “kissing
cousin,” memory – appear throughout the work But
also, the first line can be understood to suggest that this is a universe in
which consciousness is important – the different ways in which we are conscious
of ourselves and of our world – which can sometimes be dramatically perceived
by focusing on what happens when we move to lose consciousness, as in the
activity of going to bed – or when we regain consciousness after dozing off. It is
here where the story of Swann’s Way begins,
with a first-person narrator describing his experience of losing consciousness
and gradually – in a state of semi-wakefulness – regaining it. Sometimes,
[the narrator says, I would start to doze and], … my eyes closed so
quickly that I did not have time to tell myself:
“I’m falling asleep.” [And] … half an hour later the thought that
it was time … for sleep would awaken me.
He goes on to describe an
odd mental experience: I
had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been reading,
but these thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I
myself was the immediate subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry
between François I and Charles V; [and] this did not offend my reason, but lay
like scales upon my eyes and prevented them from registering ... that the candle
was no longer burning. The peculiar impression that
he has experienced would persist for some moments after he awoke:
… [But] then,
[he says,] the subject of my book would separate itself from me, leaving me to
apply myself to it or not … At the
same time, my sight would return and I would be astonished to find myself in …
darkness, pleasant and restful enough for my eyes, but
… for my mind, to which it appeared incomprehensible, without a cause,
[it was] something dark indeed. The
narrator goes on to describe how, typically, he would then fall asleep again and
thereafter would reawaken only for brief periods: just long enough
[he says] to ... savor,
in a momentary glimmer of consciousness, the sleep which lay heavy on the
furniture … whose insensibility I should very soon return to share. But what is our condition when we are asleep? And
how does one recover oneself when he awakens? Ultimately, the answer to both questions. for the
narrator, involves
time. When a person is asleep, the narrator
observes,
he has in a circle around him the chain of the hours, the
sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly bodies. Instinctively, he
consults them when he awakes … but
this ordered procession is apt to grow confused …
[F]or me, it was enough if … my sleep was so heavy as completely to
relax my consciousness; for then, I lost all sense of … place … and when I
awoke in the middle of the night, not knowing where I was, I could not be sure
at first who I was; I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence
… an animal’s consciousness … So it’s possible for one to become confused about
time when he awakens unexpectedly – who hasn’t experienced this? But when
this happens, the narrator suggests, one might also lose the sense of his own
existence, since time – a sense of when we are – is also crucial to
realizing who we are. And if this happens, one first experiences whirling
disorientation:
…
[W[hen
I awoke, [he says,] … my mind struggled to discover
where I was, everything revolved around me through the darkness: things, places,
years. And in principle, at least, one might have existed
forever in a such a void, not knowing where, or when, or who one is. But, happily, the narrator tells us, there is a
savior. It is our memory.
… [M]emory
[he says]
– not yet of the
place in which I was, but of various other places where I had lived and might
now very possibly be – would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me
out of the abyss of not-being, from which I could never have escaped myself: in
a flash I would traverse centuries, and … [gradually]
... I would … piece together the original components of my ego. The
beginning of Swann’s Way, one might
suggest, is a kind of consciousness adventure story about the recovery of
one’s being in the face of oblivion by the providence of memory. And once
he has lived this adventure, the narrator says, often he would gradually
remember – since he is in his own bedroom – different bedrooms in which he has
slept over the years.
… [M]y memory had been set in motion, [he reports] and as a
rule I did not attempt to go to sleep again at once, but used to spend the
greater part of the night recalling ... life in the old days … remembering …
all the places and people I had known, what I had actually seen of them, and
what others had told me. At this point in the novel, the narrator reflects on
one bedroom in particular, the one in which he slept in his aunt’s house in the country, at
Combray, where his family spent their summers when he was a boy.
Combray
is the axis around which the “Overture” now revolves. And the narrator
recalls his bedroom there in which often he would have trouble falling asleep.
He observes: At
Combray, as every afternoon ended, long before I should have to go to bed … my
bedroom became the fixed point on which my melancholy and anxious thoughts were
centered … To
distract me, … when I seemed abnormally wretched, a magic lantern [was given
to me which] substituted for the opaqueness of my walls an impalpable
iridescence …
The
magic lantern, however, often only exacerbated the boy’s anxiety by destroying
the ordinary look of surroundings with which he had become habitually
comfortable. His
great aunt would project slides depicting a medieval story of attempted violence
against an innocent young woman, and the boy would experience the would-be
perpetrator, Golo, as a supernatural presence invading his bedroom [There
was] Golo, [he says]
riding at a jerky trot, …and advanc[ing] fitfully toward
the castle of poor Geneviève de Brabrant; …
nothing could arrest [Golo’s] progress [and] if the lantern were moved, I
could still distinguish Golo’s horse advancing across the window curtains,
swelling out with their curves and diving into their folds. The body of Golo
himself, being of the same supernatural substance … overcame every material
obstacle … absorbing it into himself: even
the doorknob … Golo’s presence in his
room is extremely upsetting to the boy because it disturbs the order –
cemented by habituation – which he has imposed on his environment. The absence
of an habitual order, one might suggest, is not unlike ones experience of time
without memory. As the narrator describes it:
I
cannot express, the discomfort I felt at this intrusion of mystery and beauty
into a room which I had succeeded in filling with my own personality; … the
anesthetic of habit being destroyed, I would begin to think – and feel –
such melancholy things … [So as] soon as the dinner bell rang, I would
hurry down to the dining room ... and would fall into the arms of my mother,
whom the misfortunes of Geneviève de Brabant had made all the dearer to me …
But after dinner, alas, I was soon obliged to leave Mamma And,
indeed it is after one dinner, the narrator recollects, that he experienced what
we today might call a “childhood trauma, one which often comes back to him
across the years. The
trauma has to do with the goodnight kiss which his mother used to give him each
night when she came up to switch out the light. This
kiss had both a spiritual and a soporific effect on the boy. He says: … [S]he bent her
loving face down over my bed, and held it out to me like a host for an act of
peace-giving communion in which my lips might imbibe her real presence and with
it the power of sleep When his
parents had grown-up visitors, it was customary for the boy to be sent to bed
early; and on these occasions, he says, … when … I must go
upstairs … that fragile and precious kiss which Mamma used to normally bestow
on me when I was in bed and just going to sleep had to be transported from the
dining room to my bedroom where I must keep it inviolate all the time that it
took me to undress, without letting its sweet charm be broken, without letting
its volatile essence diffuse itself and evaporate. Now pretty much the only visitor to his family when at Combray was Charles Swann, the son of a stock-broker from the nearby estate of Tansonville, whom the narrator's parents knew from Paris. He was a
great conversationalist, wealthy, and a connoisseur of art. But the
narrator’s family didn’t completely approve of Swann because he had made an “unsuitable” marriage with a former courtesan whom they – respectable
middle-class people – could not possibly invite to their home. Still,
they knew Swann as someone who was well-bred and felt pleased to do him the
favor of inviting him to their respectable household. They
would have been amazed, the narrator tells us, if they had known just how
wealthy and well-connected the modest and self-effacing M. Swann was. They
never suspected that socially he was actually quite superior to them, and mixed
with the aristocracy on a first name basis. Indeed,
he was even a friend of the Prince of Wales! But this would be inconceivable to his family,
because in those days, the narrator observes: Middle-class people … took what was almost a Hindu view of
society, which they held to consist of sharply defined castes ...;
everyone at his birth found himself called to that station in life which his
parents already occupied, and from which nothing, save ... an exceptional career
or ... a “good” marriage, could extract you … M. Swann the elder had been
a stockbroker; and so “young Swann” found himself immured for life in a
caste whose members’ fortunes … varied between such and such limits of
income. One knew the people with whom [Swann’s] father had associated, and so
one knew [Swann’s] associates … I might
note here that one of the ongoing themes in Swann’s
Way is how difficult it is to
really “know” another person. And, how often, the closer one is to another, the
more difficult it becomes. The
restricted vision of the narrator’s family is ultimately no better than will
be Swann’s own, later in the book, with respect to the “unknown life” of
the woman he loves. And in this case, the restriction will function as the
source of an immensely painful jealousy. In any
case, on summer evenings, Swann would often walk round from his place to the
back garden gate of the narrator’s aunt’s house. And
there was one night when he visited in which the boy received no kiss at all,
because his father – who tended to be imperious in his decisions – discouraged
his mother from leaving the table to be with the boy, believing that his son was
already being over-indulged. And so, [the narrator
relates,] I must set forth without viaticum; must climb the staircase … in
opposition to my heart … since [my mother] had not, by kissing me, given my
heart leave to accompany me …[A]nguish … invaded my consciousness … [and]
once in my bedroom … [I felt as if I was] dig[ging] my own grave as I turned
down the bed-clothes to wrap myself in the shroud of my nightshirt. Unable
to sleep and desperate, the boy decides to revolt. He tells the cook, Françoise,
that she is take his mother, who is still entertaining Swann downstairs, a note
begging her to come see him. He realizes that his note will no doubt greatly
annoy his mother, especially because he thinks it would make him appear as
ridiculous in Swann’s eyes; but it
would be worth the price, he feels, because, as he puts it: … [I]t would at least
admit me, invisible and enraptured, into the same room as herself, [and] would
whisper about me into her ear … [T]hat forbidden and unfriendly dining room
… [would have] opened its doors to me and, like a ripe fruit which bursts
through its skin, [would] pour out into my intoxicated heart the sweetness of
Mamma’s attention while she was reading what I had written. This
desire for communion with the person one loves is a major theme in the novel
and, as the middle aged narrator observes, it was one that Swann, more than most
people, would have recognized and appreciated. That the
narrator as a boy couldn’t perceive this is just a another instance of our
inability to know others, Nevertheless,
the action that boy was taking of interrupting the grown ups was socially an
extraordinary one, for he had been taught by his parents to be always
deferential and obedient. Even the
would-be messenger is taken aback, despite her complete belief that she is
obliged to follow the directions of the young master. As the narrator observes: [In the eyes of] Françoise … to
carry a message to my mother when there was a guest, … appear[ed]
as flatly inconceivable as for the door-keeper of a theater to hand a
letter to an actor upon the stage … Nevertheless,
against her better judgment, Francoise does deliver the note. And although his
mother doesn’t directly respond, once Swann has gone and she sees how
miserable the boy is,, she tries to console him. And
contrary to all expectation, his father doesn’t object and even urges his
mother to stay with the boy overnight. But
even though he at first feels victorious at this turn of events, the boy soon
realizes that "winning" his mother's presence was not an unmixed
blessing; for it required his parents to see him in a new and a reduced
light, to acknowledge that he possessed an inherent weakness, that, as
the narrator puts it, he “suffers from a nervous ailment.” So, the
events of that evening turn out, from the narrator’s perspective, to actually
constitute a defeat both for him and for his mother. As he
says:
… [M]y mother had … made … a first abdication … from
the ideal she had formed for me … [I]f I had … won a victory, it was over
her, … I had succeeded, as sickness or sorrow or age might have succeeded, in
relaxing her will, in undermining her judgment … I felt that I had with an
impious and secret finger traced a first wrinkle upon her … For a
long-time, this bedroom drama was the only part of his childhood that the
narrator remembered. And returning to the perspective of the middle aged
insomniac, he says: … [W]hen I lay awake at night and revived old memories of
Combray, I saw no more of it than [a] sort of luminous panel … defined against
a vague and shadowy background, like the panels which … a searchlight beam
will cut out and illuminate in a building the other parts of which remain
plunged in darkness, [It was] … as
though all Combray had consisted of but two floors joined by a slender
staircase, and as though there had been no time there but seven o’clock at
night … The reason that his recollection was limited, the narrator tell us, has
to do with the kind of memory that he was exercising: [F]acts which I … recalled … [were] prompted only by
voluntary memory, the memory of the intellect … [he says.] [T]he pictures
which that kind of memory shows us preserve nothing of the past itself … To me
it was … dead. Permanently dead? Very possibly. There is a large element of
chance in these matters, and a second chance occurrence, that of our own death,
often prevents us from awaiting for any length of time the favors of the first. Indeed, he
suggests, in a favorite passage of mine, that: [T]here is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the
souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, …
effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when … [d]elivered
by us, they have overcome death and return to share our life. And so it is with
our own past. It is a labor in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts
of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the
realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation
which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it
depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves
must die. So
it’s quite possible that the narrator might have had no further deep
recollections of his past – and had that happened, of course, his magnum opus would have been about 3,000 pages shorter! However,
one day, years later, as a middle-aged man, somewhat depressed and cold, he
visited his mother, who offered him some refreshment:
a cup of tea into which he dipped one of those fat little veined sponge
cakes called petites madeleines. And
suddenly he felt strangely, amazingly, happy. As he
describes it, [M]echanically, … I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea
in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed
with the crumbs touched my palate than a shiver ran through me … An exquisite
pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion
of its origin. … [A]t once, the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to
me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having
had the effect, which love has, of filling me with a precious essence;
… this essence was not in me, it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre,
contingent, mortal. He
struggled to understand why he felt as he did, what the connection could
possibly be between his feeling and the tea and madeliene: I sensed that [the all-powerful joy that I felt] was
connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but it infinitely transcended
those savors, could not … be of the same nature. Where did it come from? What
did it mean? How could I … apprehend it? Initially,
the narrator is overwhelmed by the task of comprehending his experience, with
the seeming impossibility, experienced once again, of being both the subject and
object of one’s consciousness: [T]he truth I am seeking, [he reflects] lies not in the cup
but in myself. The drink has called it into being, but does not know it … I
put down the cup and examine my own mind. … What an abyss of uncertainty,
whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same
time the dark region through which it must go seeking … Seek? More than that:
create. It is face to face with something which does not yet exist, which it
alone can make actual … Nevertheless,
he doesn’t give up and tries, purposefully,
to maneuver within his own
awareness: … I … ask
myself what it could have been, this unremembered state which brought with it no
logical proof, but the indisputable evidence, of its felicity … I want to try
to make it reappear. I clear an empty space in front of it; I place in position
before my mind’s eye the still recent taste of that first mouthful, and I feel
something start within me, something that leaves its resting-place and attempts
to rise, something that has been anchored at a great depth; I do not know yet
what it is, but I can feel it mounting slowly; I can measure the resistance, I
can hear the echo of great spaces traversed … But,
still, he can’t immediately succeed. Both his experience and his comprehension
of it are so fragile. [W]hat is … palpitating in the depths of my being, [the
narrator reflects], must be the
image, the visual memory which, being linked to that taste, is trying to follow
it into my conscious mind. But its struggles are too far off … I … cannot
invite it, as the one possible interpreter, to translate for me the evidence of
its contemporary, its inseparable paramour, the taste … Will it ultimately
reach the clear surface of my consciousness, this memory, this old, dead moment
which the magnetism of an identical moment has traveled so far to importune, to
disturb, to raise up out of the very depths of my being? I cannot tell. Now I
feel nothing; it has … perhaps sunk back into its darkness, from which who can
say whether it will ever rise again? Then,
suddenly, he understands. It will
not be until the last volume of In Search
of Lost Time that he FULLY understands the nature of his experience.
But, at this point he is at least able to comprehend its particular
essence: His
experience of the taste of the madeleine has brought back to him the taste of
the similar madeleine that his aunt used to give him, back in Combray, on
Sundays before mass. As he says: [S]uddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of
the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray … my aunt Lêonie
used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea …
The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my
mind before I tasted it; perhaps because I had so often seen such things in the
meantime, without tasting them, … their image had dissociated itself from
those Combray days to take its place among others more recent … [T]he shapes
of thing, including that of the little scallop shell of pastry … were either
obliterated or had so long remained dormant as to have lost the power … to
resume their place in my consciousness. But if images degrade, the narrator contends, smells and tastes survive
more deeply and much longer than other memories, although it is not until the last volume that he is
going to understand fully why such instances of
what he goes on to call “ involuntary memory” bring such great joy. Nevertheless,
the vividness of such sensuous memories will enable him to re-experience his
past – to regain lost time – in
ways not available from any other vehicle. And he
will conclude the “Overture” portion with the following observation:
[W]hen from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the
people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell
alone, more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more
faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping,
amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost
impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection. Because of his experience with the madeleine, this
“vast structure of recollection” is now accessible and he can begin to
explore it. The rest of Swann’s Way – and, for that
matter, the rest of In Search of Lost Time – follows …
IV So what is
Swann’s Way about? In the
time that I don’t really have left, I’d like to very briefly underline and
elaborate on a few of the themes which first appear in the “Overture” and
that are significant throughout In Search
of Lost Time. But let me
hasten to say that my observations here are very far from complete with respect
to either the richness or to the number included in the subject. Still, as we observed early on, Swann’s
Way is about time. Returning,
briefly to the opening sentence, we can notice that we have three kinds of time
presented there:
How one
experiences different kinds of time is of ongoing interest in the novel and the
artistic portrayal of temporal experience is one of its special pleasures. A
nice example of this is in the midst of the portions on sleeping and awakening
that we looked at earlier. At one
point, the narrator awakens and wonders what time it is. As it turns out, the
answer to this seemingly straightforward question can have both objective and
subjective elements. Here’s what he says: I … ask myself what
time it could be … I … strike a match to look at my watch. Nearly Different
ways in which we experience time – and their possible inter relations – what
it may mean, for example, to awaken at Under this
rubric, one also can notice that in Swann’s
Way we experience time and its
analysis in terms of
a number of different times of life
– including, the
narrator’s time of life as an older middle-aged man who reflects on the life
he has led; the time of life of the narrator’s boyhood; and the time of life
of a young middle-aged bachelor (Charles Swann of the Swann in Love section), as well as the time of life after such a
bachelor gets married. How
different times of life are experienced – and how they can inter-relate –
what is it like to re-experience one’s childhood when one is in middle age,
for example, is among the things that Swann’s
Way is about. Swann’s Way is also about passion and vulnerability:
We noticed
earlier one of the concerns of the narrator, on the traumatic night that he
describes, is that he might appear as ridiculous to Swann.
But as it turns out, his fear was quite unfounded, that actually, Swann
better than almost anyone, would have understood his feelings, since they were
similar to those he had experienced in his love for Odette. The
thwarting of the boy’s passion for his mother (a chaste passion, taking the
form of the desire for a kind of communion, but passion nevertheless) and the
vulnerability – sadness and the inability to sleep – are not unlike
Swann’s desire to share the life of his beloved despite its being so different
from that to which he was accustomed – and the vulnerability to even suicide
that his jealousy created when he was unable to share that life. And
finally, for the present, Swann’s Way is
about habit and novelty. We
observed the narrator’s description of how disconcerting to his boyhood self
was the introduction of a “foreign” element, like Golo, into the bedroom in
which habit had made him comfortable. And how
one experiences that which is new in relation to that to which one is habitually
accustomed is an ongoing theme, and one which finds application to various
elements – to other bedrooms, to be sure, but also to people and to works of
art. With
respect to the last, in Swann’s Way,
at one point the narrator observes: We are very slow in recognizing in the peculiar physiognomy of a new
writer the type which is labeled 'great talent' in our museum of general ideas.
Simply because that physiognomy is new and strange, we can find in it no
resemblance to what we are accustomed to call talent. Sometimes,
however, there is an immediate conjunction between what we have habitually
experienced and what we experience as new in a writer – a literary recognition
that we sense with a distinctive pleasure. In Swann’s
Way, the narrator describes his first experience of the writer, Bergotte: When
I had found, one day, in a book by Bergotte, some joke about an old family
servant ... which was in principle what I had often said to my grandmother about
Françoise ... then it was suddenly revealed to me that my own humble existence
and the Realms of Truth were less widely separated than I had supposed, that at
certain points they were actually in contact; and in my new-found confidence and
joy I wept upon his printed page, as in the arms of a long-lost father. For some,
the experience of reading Proust is not unlike what the narrator says his was in
reading Bergotte. And in
conclusion, I invite you to entertain the possibility that – despite all the
inaccessibility, that from the very beginning, has bedeviled readers of Proust,
he might – perhaps – provide you with similar joy. Thank you very much. |
copyright © 2003 Joel Rich. All rights reserved.