The Proust Project, Day 20

Where this began
Day 19

Swann's Way (translated by Lydia Davis), pp. 276-287.

Swann has gone nuts. Even if we hadn't been alerted to the unfortunate outcome of his relationship with Odette earlier in the novel, it would be quite apparent by now that it can't end well. But there's no talking him out of it, even with warnings that she's more interested in his social status or his money. As he sees it, those things will only bind her to him the more: "self-interest ... would prevent the day ever coming when she would be tempted to stop seeing him." A "dilettante of immaterial sensations," he regards Odette as worth the price:

as we observe that people who are uncertain whether the sight of the sea and the sound of the waves are delightful convince themselves of it and also of the exceptional quality and disinterest of their own taste, by paying a hundred francs a day for a hotel room that allows them to experience that sight and that sound.

His "mental laziness" deters him from investigating her reputation as a "kept woman," and his behavior begins to attract comment like that of the Princesse des Launes, whose dinner party he leaves early so as to meet Odette: "Really, if Swann were thirty years older and had bladder trouble, one would excuse him for running off like that. But the fact is he doesn't care what people think." Indeed, he's pleased when Odette reveals to the Verdurins and the "little set" that Swann will be seeing her at home later.

Moreover, the depth of his obsession is revealed when, after Odette pleads a headache, meaning "no cattleyas tonight," he sneaks back to her house later and, seeing a light at what he thinks is her window, he fancies that she is entertaining a lover there. In fact, it fills him with a perverse, almost masochistic, joy.

And yet he was glad he had come: the torment that had forced him to leave his house had become less acute as it became less vague, now that Odette's other life, of which he had had, back then, a sudden helpless suspicion, was now in his grasp.... And perhaps, what he was feeling at this moment, which was almost pleasant, was also something different from the assuaging of a doubt and a distress; it was a pleasure in knowledge.

Characteristically, Swann intellectualizes his obsession:

[T]he curiosity he now felt awakening in him concerning the smallest occupations of this woman, was the same curiosity he had once had about History. And all these things that would have shamed him up to now, such as spying, tonight, outside a window, tomorrow perhaps, for all he knew, cleverly inducing neutral people to speak, bribing servants, listening at doors, now seemed to him to be, fully as much as were the deciphering of texts, the weighing of evidence, and the interpretation of old monuments, merely methods of scientific investigation with a real value and appropriate to a search for the truth.

Of course, this "scientific investigation" ends in farce, when he knocks on the window and discovers that what he thought was her room is actually in the house next door.

At this point, Swann's love has turned to neurosis, and however he might try to shut out the embarrassment of this misstep, "To wish not to think about it was still to think about it, still to suffer from it." And "every pleasure he enjoyed with her, ... he knew that a moment later, ... would supply new instruments for torturing him."

This section ends with a further unmasking of the "real" Odette, the woman who takes pleasure in Forcheville's cruelty to his brother-in-law, Saniette, and casts "him a glance of complicity in evil." It's an expression that tortures Swann.

The Proust Project, Day 19

Where this began
Day 18

Swann's Way (translated by Lydia Davis), pp. 250-276.

So much of the Swann-Odette affair has been seen from his point of view, that we're almost overdue seeing it from hers. When we do, we find that she regards Swann as "intellectually inferior to what she would have imagined" and that he's "reserved" -- partly because he's aware that she's incapable of understanding him. "She would marvel more at his indifference to money, his kindness to everyone, his refinement." Rather surprisingly, perhaps, though she's awed by his "position in society," she is not inclined to use him as a vehicle for social climbing, partly because she dreads the world's cruelty, and partly because, being ignorant of this more fashionable world, she fears it. And so she begins to imagine barriers between herself and Swann:

People who liked collecting curios, were fond of poetry, despised crass calculations, dreamed of honor and love, she saw as an elite superior to the rest of humanity. One did not really have to have these predilections, provided one proclaimed them.... But men who, like Swann, had these tastes, yet did not talk about them, left her cold.... [I]n fact, what spoke to her imagination was not the practice of disinterestedness, but its vocabulary.

And so it falls to Swann to try "to see that she enjoyed being with him, not to oppose the vulgar ideas, the bad taste, which she displayed in all things, and which he loved, moreover, like everything else that emanated from her." He "sought to enjoy the things she liked" rather than make the considerable effort to educate her tastes. The affair intoxicates him so that "he did not dare to say to himself, afraid that he would not believe it, that he would always love Odette." Because he thinks that he will always be able to see her at the Verdurins, he convinces himself that they possess virtues that they don't actually have: "How fundamentally real their life is! How much more intelligent, more artistic, they are there than high-society people!... More and more, that is where I will find my companionship and live my life."

The trouble is, the Verdurins don't reciprocate his enthusiasm. And their suspicions that Swann isn't really one of them come to a head at the dinner party at which Swann's honesty is judged inferior to the hypocrisy of the snobbish Comte de Forcheville, and his intellect to the pretentiousness of Brichot, a professor at the Sorbonne whose wit "would have been considered pure stupidity by the people among whom Swann had spent his youth." It's Forcheville in particular who puts Swann on the spot with the Verdurins by revealing some of his connections to the aristocracy whom the Verdurins regard as "bores."

Swann's unwillingness to renounce such connections unequivocally draws Mme. Verdurin's fire: "she was feeling the rage of a grand inquisitor who cannot manage to extirpate the heresy." She presses Swann to speak ill of his friends, but he persists in saying, "They're charming people." It outrages Mme. Verdurin "that because of this one infidel she would be prevented from creating a complete moral unanimity among the little clan."

The evening ends with Swann "still unaware of the disgrace that threatened him at the Verdurins'" and with M. Verdurin, because "Swann wants to play the society man with us, defender of duchesses," suggesting that "Odette really seems to prefer Forcheville" who is, after all, he notes, the "Comte de Forchevile."

What I'm Watching

Up

Like so many Pixar films, particularly WALL-E and Ratatouille, this one packs much of its charm and inventiveness in the beginning. The setup -- the life together of Carl and Ellie -- is enchantingly and touchingly done, and the initial scenes of the house escaping from the ground and soaring through the city are lovely. I particularly like the moment when the balloons cast their multicolored shadows on the walls of a room whose window it's passing. But when the story devolves into the usual hair's-breadth adventures, it feels a little routine. Still, I can't fault the imagination of writers Pete Docter, Bob Peterson and Thomas McCarthy, the voice work of Ed Asner, and the extraordinary animation.

The Proust Project, Day 18

Where this began
Day 17

Swann's Way (translated by Lydia Davis), pp. 239-250.

At last, Swann and Odette "make cattleya" -- a twee euphemism that I'm certain Proust invented to emphasize the unsuitability of the relationship between the sophisticated, intellectual Swann and the shallow, slightly vulgar Odette. The consummation of their relationship is characterized as "having ended by possessing her that night," although Proust shortly afterward observes that "the act of physical possession" is one "in which, in fact, one possesses nothing" -- hinting that in no real way does Swann possess Odette.

Swann's experience with Odette has not yet achieved the bitterness that Shakespeare ascribes to sated lust in Sonnet 129:

Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;

Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and prov'd, a very woe;

Before, a joy propos'd; behind, a dream.

All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

But at least Swann is beginning to have doubts. He "could not ask himself without anxiety what Odette would mean to him in years later." He continues to associate the phrase from Vinteuil's sonata with their love, even though Odette's tastes in music are trashy. Sometimes

he realized that Odette's qualities did not justify his attaching so much value to the time he spent with her. And often, when Swann's positive intelligence alone prevailed, he wanted to stop sacrificing so many intellectual and social interests to this imaginary pleasure. But as soon as he heard it, the little phrase had the power to open up within him the space it needed, the proportions of Swann's soul were changed by it.

And so Swann is being brought down to Odette's level. Except for the piece of Vinteuil, he "did not try to make her play things he liked or, any more in music than in literature, to correct her bad taste. He fully realized that she was not intelligent."

What great repose, what mysterious renewal for Swann -- for him whose eyes, though refined lovers of painting, whose mind, though a shrewd observer of manners, bore forever the indelible trace of the aridity of his life -- to feel himself transformed into a creature strange to humanity, blind, without logical faculties, almost a fantastic unicorn, a chimerical creature perceiving the world only through his hearing.

The awareness of Odette's past doesn't trouble him: "He merely smiled sometimes at the thought that a few years before, when he did not know her, someone had spoken to him of a woman who, if he remembered rightly, must certainly have been she, as a courtesan, a kept woman." Up to this point, Odette has scarcely existed to him except when they are together. But now a friend reports seeing her on the street, and "it suddenly made him see that Odette had a life which did not belong entirely to him."

The Proust Project, Day 17

Where this began
Day 16

Swann's Way (translated by Lydia Davis), pp. 220-239.

Swann's infatuation with Odette deepens, even though the conniving of the Verdurins to bring them together is sometimes clumsy. The theme from Vinteuil's sonata becomes "like the anthem of their love," which causes him some perturbation because "when Odette, capriciously, had begged him to, he had given up the idea of having some pianist play him the entire sonata.... 'Why would you need the rest?' she said to him. 'This is our piece.'" Proust, who has earlier given us an account of the complexity of musical composition, is obviously demonstrating Odette's shallowness here, as she reduces a sonata to background music.

But then Proust pulls out all stops to alert us to Odette's deficiencies. The neighborhood in which she lives is denoted by its "short streets," the "monotony" of the houses, the "sinister street stall, the historic sign and sordid vestige of a time when these districts were in bad repute." Even her handwriting gives her away:

an affectation of British stiffness imposed an appearance of discipline on ill-formed letters that would perhaps have signified, to less prejudiced eyes, an untidiness of mind, an insufficient education, a lack of frankness and resolution.

And Swann is forced to overlook the deficiencies in her beauty,

to limit what he imagined of her cheeks only to her fresh, pink cheekbones since the rest was so often yellow, languid, sometimes marked with little red specks, distressed him, as it seemed to prove that the ideal is inaccessible and happiness mediocre.

So he lets himself fall into the fantasy that she resembles the figure of Zipporah (above) in the fresco by Botticelli in the Sistine Chapel. It is a way of bringing grace to "those large eyes of hers, so tired and sullen when she was not animated." Once again, as with the theme from Vinteuil's sonata, he falls into the habit of reducing works of art to suit his personal circumstances: "The words 'Florentine painting' did Swann a great service. They allowed him, like a title, to bring the image of Odette into a world of dreams to which it had not had access until now and where it was steeped in nobility." And so he contemplates Odette "sometimes with the humility, spirituality, and disinterestedness of an artist, and sometimes with the pride, egotism, and sensuality of a collector."

We learn, perhaps with some surprise, that they have not yet slept together. Certainly the Verdurins are surprised: Mme. Verdurin tells her husband and others in the "little circle," "As she hasn't anyone just now, I told her she ought to sleep with him." M. Verdurin, to his credit, sees Odette clearly: "I don't know if you heard what he was declaiming to her the other evening about Vinteuil's sonata; I love Odette with all my heart, but to construct aesthetic theories for her benefit, you'd really have to be quite an imbecile."

Which is pretty much what Swann has become in his infatuation, as he pursues the trail of Odette through the clubs and restaurants of Paris:

Of all the modes by which love is brought into being, of all the agents which disseminate the holy evil, surely one of the most efficacious is this great gust of agitation which now and then sweeps over us. Then our fate is sealed, and the person whose company we enjoy at the time is the one we will love. It is not even necessary for us to have liked him better than anyone else up to then, or even as much. What is necessary is that our predilection for him should become exclusive.

Is it worth pointing out that although this passage is a comment on Swann's passion for Odette, the generalizing pronouns that Proust uses are "him" and not "her"?

The Proust Project, Day 16

Where this began
Day 15

Swann's Way (translated by Lydia Davis), pp. 206-220.

The social satire continues with a delicious analysis of the manners and mannerisms of the Verdurins and their circle, including Dr. Cottard, whose social insecurity is such that he tries to greet every statement or question with an "ironic smile that removed all impropriety from his attitude in advance, since he was proving that if the attitude was not a fashionable one he was well aware of it and that if he had adopted it, it was as a joke." Even when invited to a performance by Sarah Bernhardt, Cottard is so unwilling to express an unfashionable opinion that "he entered the box with a smile that was waiting to become more pronounced or to disappear as soon as some authoritative person informed him as to the quality of the entertainment."

Cottard is the perfect foil for Swann, who is at ease in any social situation, "so that toward people of a social circle inferior to his, like the Verdurins and their friends, he instinctively displayed a marked attention, permitted himself to make advances." He asks to be introduced to everyone, including those to whom the Verdurins condescend, sometimes unwarrantedly, such as "Saniette, whose shyness, simplicity, and good nature had lost him all the esteem he had won by his skill as an archivist, his substantial fortune, and the distinguished family he came from."

But Proust also allows us to see what Swann has in common with Cottard, namely a sense that he has been hollowed out by his attempts to adapt to society's expectations. In Swann's case,

He had for so long given up directing his life toward an ideal goal and limited it to the pursuit of everyday satisfactions that ... since his mind no longer entertained any lofty ideas, he had ceased to believe in their reality, though without being able to deny it altogether.

As a result, "in his conversation he endeavored never to express with any warmth a personal opinion about things." Or else, very much like Cottard, "give[s] his remarks an ironic tone, as if he did not entirely subscribe to what he was saying."

But there is one thing that opened "in Swann the possibility of a sort of rejuvenation": the "delicious sensation" provoked in him by a piece of music he hears at a soiree. It rouses in him "the presence of one of those invisible realities in which he had ceased to believe and to which, as if the music had had a sort of sympathetic influence on the moral dryness from which he suffered, he felt in himself once again the desire and almost the strength to devote his life."

He has been unable to find out what the piece of music is or who composed it until he hears it again at the Verdurins': "it was the andante from the Sonata for Piano and Violin by Vinteuil."

The Proust Project, Day 15

Where this began
Day 14

Swann's Way (translated by Lydia Davis), pp. 195-206.

At the end of the "Combray" section, the narrator says that his mind returned

by an association of memories, to what, many years after leaving that little town, I had learned, about a love affair Swann had had before I was born, with that precision of detail which is sometimes easier to obtain for the lives of people who died centuries ago than for the lives of our best friends.

And so Proust excuses the fictional device of recounting "memories belonging to another person from whom I had learned them." Yes, it's a cheat, but all fiction is a cheat.

"Swann in Love" begins as a comedy of manners, with the introduction of the Verdurins and their "little set" or "little circle" or "little clan," which consists largely of "a person almost of the demimonde, Mme. de Crécy, whom Mme. Verdurin called by her first name, Odette" and a "former concierge" who is the aunt of a pianist under the Verdurins's patronage. The Verdurins's "little set" is just that: a microcosmic society mimicking the larger social set from which they were excluded.

So Swann, who moves in the highest circles, is something of a catch for the Verdurins. He is a dilettante who "had wasted his intellectual gifts in frivolous pleasures and allowed his erudition in matters of art to be used to advise society ladies what pictures to buy and how to decorate their houses." His Achilles heel is his susceptibility to women. "And though Swann was unaffected and casual with a duchess, he trembled at being scorned by a chambermaid, and posed in front of her." So even though Odette de Crécy was not his type, he falls for her.

Her profile was too pronounced for his taste, her skin too delicate, her cheekbones too prominent, her features too pinched. Her eyes were lovely, but so large they bent under their own mass, exhausted the rest of her face, and always gave her a look of being in ill health or ill humor.

Moreover, she knows nothing about the art he so admires, including his "unfinished" (i.e., abandoned) work on Vermeer, that he keeps using as an excuse for not visiting her: "'You're going to make fun of me, but that painter who keeps you from seeing me--' (she meant Vermeer) 'I've never heard of him; is he still alive?'" The way Swann is drawn into the trap reminds me of Lydgate being snared by Rosamond Vincy in Middlemarch.

The Proust Project, Day 14

Where this began
Day 13

Swann's Way (translated by Lydia Davis), pp. 169-191.

I went a little farther than my allotted ten pages today because there was really no place to stop before the ending of the "Combray" section.

The descriptions of the walks along the Vivonne on "the Guermantes way" are some of the most gorgeous writing so far in the novel, and could be celebrated for that alone. But one senses that Proust writes nothing without intent. One intent is to establish the centrality of the Guermantes, who have only been alluded to so far, to the history of Combray. And another is to comment on the importance of the place the narrator loves so well in his development as an artist. The two fuse together in this passage:

I dreamed that Mme. de Guermantes had summoned me there, smitten with a sudden fancy for me; all day long she would fish for trout with me. And in the evening, holding me by the hand as we walked past the little gardens of her vassals, she would show me the flowers that leaned their violet and red stems along the low walls, and would teach me their names. She would make me tell her the subjects of the poems that I intended to compose. And these dreams warned me that since I wanted to be a writer someday, it was time to find out what I meant to write.

But immediately the narrator is stricken with a kind of artistic impotence, an inability to "find a subject in which I could anchor some infinite philosophical meaning."

And then Mme. de Guermantes herself attends church in Combray, and the narrator gets his first, somewhat disillusioning glimpse of her: "a blond lady with a large nose, piercing blue eyes, a full tie of smooth, shiny new mauve silk, and a little pimple at the corner of her nose." But he overcomes the ordinariness of her appearance and imbues her with the cultural and historical significance that had informed his earlier imaginings.

And immediately I loved her, because if it may sometimes be enough for us to fall in love with a woman if she looks at us with contempt, as I had thought Mlle. Swann had done, and if we think she will never belong to us, sometimes, too, it may be enough if she looks at us with kindness, as Mme. de Guermantes was doing, and if we think she may someday belong to us.

In the meantime, his frustration at his inability to convert his sensations into something of literary import continues, to the point that he is ready to give up his vocation as a writer.

But the moral duty imposed on me by the impressions I received from form, fragrance, or color was so arduous -- to try to perceive what was concealed behind them -- that I would soon look for excuses that would allow me to save myself from this effort and spare myself this fatigue.

Fortunately, he has an epiphany on a ride back from their walk along the Guermantes way. He sees three church steeples that change position as the carriage moves along and which change colors as the sun sets. And his pleasure in the sight of them manifests itself "in the form of words that gave me pleasure." So he asks the doctor in whose carriage he is riding for a piece of paper and a pencil and writes the words down. "I felt that it had ... perfectly relieved me of those steeples and what they had been hiding behind them."

And so it was from the Guermantes way that I learned to distinguish those states of mind that follow one another in me, during certain periods, and that even go so far as to share out each day among them, on returning to drive out the other, with the punctuality of a fever; contiguous, but so exterior to one another, so lacking means of communication among them, that I can no longer comprehend, no longer even picture to myself in one, what I desired, or feared, or accomplished in the other.

And so the Méségliese way and the Guermantes way remain for me linked to many of the little events of that life which, of all the various lives we lead concurrently, is the most abundant in sudden reversals of fortune, the richest in episodes, I mean our intellectual life.

That, in a nutshell, is why the narrator goes in search of lost time. (And, incidentally, why Scott Moncrieff's Shakespeare allusion, "Remembrance of Things Past," is so misleading a title, turning the narrator's quest into a passive and nostalgic exercise.)

When on summer evenings the melodious sky growls like a wild animal and everyone grumbles at the storm, it is because of the Méségliese way that I am the only one in ecsasy inhaling, through the noise of the falling rain, the smell of invisible, enduring lilacs.

This is the quest for the incidents in the "intellectual life" that are bound up in the particularities of sensory experience.

The Proust Project, Day 13

Where this began
Day 12

Swann's Way (translated by Lydia Davis), pp. 158-169.

This section sent me back to Wordsworth, to "The Prelude" and the "Intimations of Immortality" ode, those poems that trace the process from boyish exhilaration to the disillusionment of maturity in which

nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower.

On his solitary walks in the autumn of his aunt's death the narrator begins to discover the disjunction between himself and the world, to be "struck for the first time by this discord between our impressions and their habitual expression."

And seeing on the water and on the face of the wall a pale smile answering the smile of the sky, I cried out to myself in my enthusiasm, brandishing my furled umbrella: "Damn, damn, damn, damn." But at the same time I felt I was in duty bound not to stop at those opaque words, but to try to see more clearly into my rapture.

But from the grumpy way with which his enthusiasm is received by a passerby, he "learned that the same emotions do not arise simultaneously, in a preestablished order, in all men."

And mostly what he discovers in himself is the limits of his adolescent erotic longings, which merge with the landscape.

For at that time everything which was not I, the earth and other people, seemed to me more precious, more important, endowed with a more real existence than they would have appeared to a grown man. And I made no distinction between earth and people. I desired a peasant girl from Méségliese or Rossainville, a fisherwoman from Balbec, just as I desired Méségliese and Balbec.

The narrator assumes an availability of women from the "lower" classes, keeping his imagination distant from women of his own class. And he "has not yet abstracted [sexual] pleasure from the possession of the different women with whom one has tasted it, [or] reduced it to a general notion that makes one regard them from then on as the interchangeable instruments of a pleasure that is always the same." Even in the sly passage in which he masturbates "at the top of our house in Combray in the little room smelling of orris root," he's at one with nature "until the moment when a natural trail like that left by a snail added itself to the leaves of the wild black currant that leaned in toward me."

And then adolescent eroticism gives way to detachment, disillusionment, depression:

I no longer believed that the desires which I formed during my walks, and which were not fulfilled, were shared by other people, that they had any reality outside of me. They now seemed to me no more than the purely subjective, impotent, illusory creations of my temperament. They no longer had any attachment to nature, to reality, which from then on lost all its charm and significance and was no more than a conventional framework for my life, as is, for the fiction of a novel, the railway carriage on the seat of which a traveler reads it in order to kill time.

This is followed by the scene, which takes place a few years later, in which the narrator spies on Mlle. Vinteuil and her lover as they mock the portrait of the late M. Vinteuil. It is a moment "that remained obscure to me at the time" but will eventually form in him the idea of sadism. Throughout the scene, the narrator's sympathetic understanding remains with Mlle. Vinteuil, in whom he "recognized her father's obsequious and reticent gestures, his sudden qualms.... And time and again, deep inside her, a timid and supplicant virgin entreated and forced back a touch and swaggering brawler."

Proust is, I think, rather self-conscious in his somewhat overheated treatment of this incident: He tries to downplay its melodramatic theatricality by drawing attention to it.

It was true that in Mlle. Vinteuil's habits, the appearance of evil was so complete that it would have been hard to find it so perfectly represented in anyone other than a sadist; it is behind the footlights of a popular theater rather than in the lamplight of an actual country house that one expects to see a girl encouraging her friend to spit on the portrait of a father who lived only for her; and almost nothing else but sadism provides a basis in real life for the aesthetics of melodrama.

But the narrator discerns in Mlle. Vinteuil something of the prudishness of her father. "It was not evil which gave her the idea of pleasure, which seemed agreeable to her; it was pleasure that seemed to her malign." And he ends by (somewhat heavy-handedly, I think, drawing a moral from the incident:

Perhaps she would not have thought that evil was a state so rare, so extraordinary, so disorienting, and to which it was so restful to emigrate, if she had been able to discern in herself, as in everyone else, that indifference to the sufferings one causes which, whatever other names one gives it, is the terrible and lasting form assumed by cruelty.

A Different Perspective

I have mixed feelings about this, a three-dimensional exploration of Picasso's "Guernica." On the one hand, it draws attention to details in the painting I had never observed so closely before. But on the other, I think it oddly diminishes the work, reducing it to a collection of shapes. The impact of the painting is sufficiently strong without camera tricks and mood music. But as an "interpretation," I suppose it's as valid as any other form of criticism.