The Proust Project, Day 39

Where this began
Day 38

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 119-138.

The narrator's intimacy with the Swanns continues, to the point that Odette sometimes in restaurants confides things to him in English that she doesn't want others to hear. The problem, he notes, is that "everybody could speak English -- except me," so that remarks about other people, including the waiters, that even he "could tell were insulting" were "lost on me, if not on the people insulted."

His adulation of the Swanns even causes friction with Gilberte, who quarrels with her father because she wants to go to theater. Swann opposes her doing so because it is the anniversary of his father's death, but lets her have her way. When the narrator suggests to her that it might look odd to others if they went to the theater on a day of mourning, she retorts, "Look, what do I care about what other people think! I think it's preposterous to worry about other people when feelings are involved. You feel things for yourself, not for an audience." And when he sugests that it would please her father if she stayed home, "'Don't you start!' she snapped, snatching her arm away."

And then comes a big surprise: Odette invites him to a luncheon at which his idol Bergotte, so recently criticized by the Marquis de Norpois, is present. And characteristically, the narrator is initially disillusioned:

I saw a stocky, coarse, thickset, shortsighted man, quite young, with a red bottle-nose and a black goatee. I was heartbroken: it was not only that my gentle old man had just crumbled to dust and disappeared, it was also that for those things of beauty, his wonderful works, which I had once contrived to fit into that infirm and sacred frame, that dwelling I had lovingly constructed like a temple expressly designed to hold them, there was no room in this thick-bodied little man standing in front of me, with all his blood vessels, his bones, his glands, his snub nose, and his little beard.

But as usual, his disillusionment is temporary, and pages of analysis of the voice and style of the "real" Bergotte follow. Bergotte, he observes, can be distinguished from the many

insipid imitators who kept touching up their prose, in newspapers and books, with pseudo-Bergottisms in imagery and ideas. This difference in style came from the fact that the real thing was first and foremost some precious, genuine element lying concealed within each object, waiting to be drawn out by the great writer with his genius; and it was this drawing out that was the aim of the soft-voiced Bard, not to toss off a page or two in the manner of Bergotte. ... [E]ach new touch of beauty in his work was the particle of Bergotte hidden inside a thing, which he had drawn out of it. ... All the great writers are like that: the beauty of their sentences, like the beauty of a woman one has not yet met, is unforeseeable; it is a creation, since its object is an external thing rather than themselves, something in their minds but not yet put into words.

So the artist not only searches for the essence of the thing, he also finds some "particle" of himself within it. Even Bergotte's conversation betrays this search: "the reason why there was something too matter-of-fact and overrich in his speech was that he applied his mind with precision to any aspect of reality that pleased him." Avoiding clichés and stereotypes can be fatiguing to the listener who wishes "for the firmer footing of something more concrete, by which one meant something one was more used to."

But Bergotte's style has its limitations:

In his urge never to write anything of which he could not say, "It's smooth," there was a kind of strictness of taste which, though it had caused him to be seen for so many years as an artist of sterile preciosity, a finicking minimalist, was actually the secret of his strength.

All of the long disquisition on Bergotte is in the voice of the mature narrator, and the reader is probably glad when the point of view of the young and naive narrator returns to talk with Bergotte about his recent experience of watching La Berma in Phèdre. When Bergotte issues some exquisite praise of a gesture made the actress, the narrator comments, "The trouble was, I thought, that these assurances could have convinced me of the beauty of La Berma's gesture only if Bergotte had primed me with them before the performance." He still retains his sense of inadequacy in judging the artistry himself.

And yet he's not abashed when he mentions a stage effect he particularly admired and discovers that Bergotte disagrees: "When Bergotte's view on something differed in this way from my own, it never reduced me to silence, or deprived me of a possible rejoinder as M. de Norpois's opinion would have done. ... The arguments advanced by M. de Norpois (on questions of art) were indisputable because they were devoid of reality." So the narrator mentions de Norpois, whom Bergotte dismisses as "an old parrot." Odette interjects that he's "a dreadful old bore," but Swann, "whose job at home was to be the man of sound common sense" says that Bergotte and Odette "are being rather hard on M. de Norpois."

In defending de Norpois, however, Swann confides in the narrator about the ambassador's mistresses, leading to a moment of embarrassment:

"High-strung people should always choose objects of their affections who are 'beneath them,' as the saying goes, so that the self-interest of the woman one loves ensures that she will always be available." At that moment, Swann realized the connection I might make between this verity and his own love for Odette.

Then, recovering from his irritation at having said too much to the narrator,

Swann ... rounded off his idea in words that I later come to remember as a prophecy, a warning I would be unable to heed: "But the danger of such liaisons is that, though the subjection of the woman may briefly allay the jealousy of the man, it eventually makes it even more demanding. He reaches the point of treating his mistress like one of those prisoners who are so closely guarded that the light in their cell is never turned off. The sort of thing that usually ends in alarums and excursions."

The Proust Project, Day 38

Where this began
Day 37

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 107-119.

Swann, we learn, will apparently always associate Vinteuil's sonata with the Bois de Boulogne, and "the charm of certain nights" there, "about which it would have been pointless to ask Odette." Indeed, we have already seen Odette in her element in the Bois. She proposes that the narrator join them on an outing to the Zoo in the Bois, which also reminds her of Mme. Blatin, giving her occasion to make fun of the narrator's misapprehension that that the Swanns were friends of hers. "Even nice Dr. Cottard, who wouldn't speak evil of a soul, says the woman's a pest." And she tells the story of Mme. Blatin calling a "Singhalese" man a "blackie," to which the man retorted, "'Me blackie,' he bellowed at Mme Blatin, 'you camel!'" For the reader, however, Mme. Blatin remains an odd enigma.

While Gilberte is readying herself for their outing, the Swanns enjoyed "telling me about the rare virtues of their daughter," whose "thoughtful kindness" and "desire to please" he had already observed. He also notes that, "Young as she was, she seemed much more sensible than her parents," and that when he mentioned Mlle. Vinteuil to her, Gilberte replies, "She's a person I'll never have anything to do with. Because she wasn't nice to her father -- I've heard she made him unhappy."

His infatuation with the Swanns and their household continues, and he observes,

For years I had been convinced that to go to the house of Mme Swann was a vague pipe-dream that would never come to pass; a quarter-hour after I first stepped into her drawing room, it was all the former amount of time I had spent not knowing her that had become the pipe-dream, as insubstantial as a mere possibility which has been abolished by the fulfillment of a different possibility.

In the Bois, the Swanns encounter the Princesse Mathilde, whom Swann identifies to the narrator as "the friend of Flaubert, Sainte-Beuve, and Dumas. Just think, a niece of Napoleon I! Both Napoleon III and the Tsar of Russia wanted to marry her." While they are chatting with the Princesse, listening to her say that Hippolyte Taine "behaved like a pig" and that Alfred de Musset once arrived an hour late and "dead drunk" when she invited him to dinner, the narrator's friend Bloch makes an appearance. But Mme. Swann is under the impression that Bloch, who has "been introduced to her by Mme. Bontemps" is "on the minister's staff, which was news to me ... and that his name was M. Moreul."

The Proust Project

Who reads Proust on Christmas Day? See you tomorrow.

The Proust Project, Day 37

Where this began
Day 36

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 93-107.

Swann's marriage to Odette is built on denial -- on both sides. He "was blind not only to the gaps in Odette's education, but also to her poverty of mind." For her part, her "inveterate way was to lend a perfunctory ear, bored or impatient, to anything subtle or even profound that he might say." It's a marriage of "subservience of the outstanding to the vulgar."

Except that Swann has indulged his own vulgar streak, setting up "experiments in the sociology of entertainment" in which he brings together "people from very different backgrounds." When he announces that he's going to have the Cottards come to dinner with the Duchesse de Vendôme, he looked "like a gourmet whose mouth waters at the novel undertaking of adding cayenne pepper to a particular sauce instead of the usual cloves." But by doing so he annoys Mme. Bontemps, who has recently been introduced to the Duchesse and is upset that someone else of her acquaintance also has that privilege.

(Here there seems to be a typographical error: "Would she even have the heart to tell her husband that Professor Cottard and his wife were not to partake of the very pleasure that she had assured him was unique to themselves?" The not [my italics] in that sentence contracts its apparent meaning -- that the Cottards were going to partake of the same pleasure. I think the intended word must be now. Unfortunately, I don't have another text handy to cross-check.)

We also learn that Swann is no longer jealous of Odette, that he was "now almost indifferent to whether she had someone with her or whether she had gone out somewhere." He realizes that when he was jealous in the past, he fell into another kind of denial, determined to believe "that Odette's daily doings were quite innocent." Now he realizes that "she had ... been much more often unfaithful to him than he had liked to believe." And now he is carrying on an affair of his own, with

a woman who, though she gave him no grounds for jealousy, made him jealous all the same, since in his inability to find new ways of loving he put to use again with the other woman the way that had once served him with Odette.... And the Swann who, when he suffered because of Odette, had wished for the day when he might let her see him in love with someone else, took ingenious precautions, now that this was possible, to keep his wife in ignorance of his new affair.

Proust also slips one of his foreshadowings in here, telling us that "the pain of jealousy, as a cruel counterdemonstration will show in a later part of this book, is proof even against death."

At the Swanns' the narrator gets -- though he's unaware of it at this time -- another link to the couple's past, when he hears Odette play the theme from the Vinteuil sonata that used to be their theme song. The music allows the narrator to reflect on the interlocked nature of time, memory, and music:

Listening for the first time to music that is even a little complicated, one can often hear nothing in it. And yet, later in life, when I had heard the whole piece two or three times, I found I was thoroughly familiar with it. ... What is missing the first time is probably not understanding but memory.... This length of time that it takes someone to penetrate a work of some depth, as it took me with the Vinteuil sonata, is only a foreshortening, and as it were a symbol, of all the years, or even centuries perhaps, which must pass before the public can come to love a masterpiece that is really new.... Which is why the artist who wishes his work to find its own way must do what Vinteuil had done, and launch it as far as possible toward the unknown depths of the distant future.

This is the shrewd comment of the mature narrator, of course, and not of the young narrator who is willing to capitulate to received opinion rather than to trust his own disappointment at the performance of La Berma. Of course, he also adds, "It is possible that even a genius may have disbelieved that railways or airplanes had a future, and it is possible to be an acute psychologist yet disbelieve in the infidelity of a mistress or the deceit of a friend, whose betrayals can be foreseen by someone much less gifted."

Is the narrator, who has already demonstrated himself to be "an acute psychologist," talking about himself here?

The Proust Project, Day 36

Where this began
Day 35

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 82-93.

Proust's detailed account of the way late 19th-century French society functioned is probably one of the reasons contemporary readers give up on him, and today's section is particularly slow-going. (Though it may just be pre-holiday exhaustion setting in here; someone remind me next year that I'm not 40 -- or even 50 -- anymore and can't leave everything to the last minute.)

We switch from the young narrator to the mature one in mid-stream here, as the former admits that his "state of emotional turmoil" at being in the presence of the Swanns prevented him from understanding much that Swann said to him. So it must be the mature narrator who outlines for us the social nuances that inform their behavior, particularly Mme. Swann's. But Swann himself remains quite taken with people with whom he would not have associated before his marriage to Odette. For example, there are the Bontemps. Swann regards M. Bontemps as "a really distinguished person," although the narrator describes him as having "a silky fair beard, a pretty face, an adenoidal pronunciation, bad breath, and a glass eye."

But what should draw our attention to Bontemps is that Gilberte tells us,

"He's the uncle of a girl that used to go to my school. She was in one of the classes well below mine -- 'that Albertine,' everybody used to call her. I'm sure she'll be very 'fast' one of these days, but at the moment she's the funniest-looking thing."

Proust regards society as kaleidoscopic, constantly changing its standards of who's acceptable. The narrator tells us, "By the time I had taken my first communion, prim and proper ladies were being confronted, to their astonishment, with elegant Jewesses in some of the houses they frequented." But with the Dreyfus Affair ("slightly later than my first entry into the world of Mme Swann," the narrator tells us, suggesting that his "entry" took place before 1894), "All things Jewish were displaced, even the elegant lady, and hitherto nondescript nationalists came to the fore. ... If instead of the Dreyfus Affair there had been a war with Germany, the kaleidoscope would have turned in a different direction." But at this time, the influential Jews in French society included Sir Rufus Israels, whose wife was Swann's aunt. And "Lady Israels, who was hugely wealthy and very influential, had contrived to make sure that no one of her acquaintance would ever be at home to Odette."

The Proust Project, Day 35

Where this began
Day 34

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 71-82.

Concerned by his "attacks of breathlessness," the narrator's parents call in Dr. Cottard, who prescribes "Drastic, violent purgatives. Milk and nothing but milk for several days. No meat. No alcohol." Quite sensibly, they reject this seemingly absurd treatment, but when the narrator keeps getting worse, they give in and follow Cottard's advice. And it works. "So it was that we realized that Cottard the buffoon was a great doctor."

When he gets better, however, they are convinced that the air of the Champs-Élysées is "unhealthy," endangering his meetings with Gilberte. But to his surprise, even disbelief, Gilberte invites him to tea at her house.

In love, it is not only the causes of catastrophe that may lie forever beyond our grasp: just as often we remain in ignorance of the whys and wherefores of sudden outcomes that are happier -- such as the one that Gilberte's letter brought to me -- or, rather, outcomes which appear to be happy, as there are few truly happy outcomes in the life of a feeling, which can generally look for no better reard than a shift in the side of the pain it entails.

The invitation is an accident: The narrator's friend Bloch is present one time when Cottard is making a call and comments that Mme. Swann is very fond of the narrator -- which is, as far as either of them knows -- untrue. But Cottard, always on the lookout to ingratiate himself, apparently speaks favorably of him to Odette, and the narrator becomes a regular visitor, welcomed cordially by the Swanns -- who have apparently forgotten their previous animus toward him (if it ever existed).

Such is the narrator's adulation of the Swanns that, when he reports to his parents that the staircase in the Swanns' home is a Renaissance antique and his father replies that it's a copy in a commonplace building where he once considered renting an apartment, the narrator clings to his faith: "I exercised the authority of my inner self and, despite what I had just heard, put behind me once and for all, as a true Catholic might shun Renan's Life of Jesus, the corrosive notion that the Swanns' apartment was a perfectly ordinary apartment, an apartment that we ourselves might have lived in."

And so the narrator is swept up in his adulation of the Swanns and his passion for Gilberte.

The Proust Project, Day 34

Where this began
Day 33

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 59-70.

This was one of those hectic pre-holiday days (maybe because it's the shortest day of the year), so this post may be a little perfunctory.

Having vowed that January 1 would be the start of "a new friendship" with Gilberte, the narrator nevertheless realizes that there's no intrinsic reason why it should become one. "I was aware that this day did not know it was called New Year's Day, and that it was coming to an end in the twilight in a way that was not unknown to me." He recognizes instead "the reappearance of former times, with the never-ending unchangingness of their substance, their familiar dampness, their ignorant fluidity." In short, he's in the same mood as yesterday, when his father's remark -- "he's probably not going to change" -- cast him in such a funk. "Our desires interweave with each other; and in the confusion of existence, it is seldom that a joy is promptly paired with the desire that longed for it."

Moreover, in Gilberte's absence, he is tormented by the realization that he "could not even remember her face." But then Gilberte returns to the park, and "Each time she came, she left me with new things to desire for the following day." And then Gilberte taunts him with the information that her parents "don't fancy you very much, you know!" He writes Swann a sixteen-page letter assuring him of his sincerity and trustworthiness and asks Gilberte to take it to him. But the result is devastating: Gilberte informs him that her father didn't believe what he had written.

The obvious question here is, since the narrator has given up superimposing his mature voice on that of the young narrator, whether Gilberte is telling the truth. Did she even give her father the letter? Is she tormenting the narrator out of some perverse impulse to power? But Proust has stopped tipping his hand, at least for now.

He and Gilberte are interrupted by Françoise, who wants him to accompany her to the "green-trellised pavilion" that houses the restrooms. While he's there, he recognizes, or perhaps imagines, the attentions of the woman who tends the restroom as having a sexual overtone. When he returns, Gilberte offers to return the letter to him, but, "attracted by her body," he improvises a game in which she will try to keep the letter from him:

I had her pinned between my legs as though she were the bole of a little tree I was trying to climb. In the middle of all my exertions, without my breathing being quickened much more than it already was by a muscular exercise and the heat of the playful moment, like few drops of sweat produced by the effort, I shed my pleasure, before I even had time to be aware of it.

This bit of "pleasure-shedding" turns into a somewhat unsavory version of the madeleine scene: the experience links itself with "the cool, almost sooty air of the little trellised booth," which reminds him of the "dampish redolence" of his uncle Adolphe's room at Combray, the one in which he masturbated, leaving "a natural trail like that left by a snail." He is overcome with a sense of shame because "I had experienced a moment of genuine rapture, not from some idea of importance, but from a musty smell."

As this section ends, he has fallen ill. "Neurotics ... are so used to detecting disorders in themselves, which they later come to realize were quite harmless, that they reach the stage of paying no attention to any of them." And even when he is not really ill, he masters the art of faking it because one of the medicines the doctor prescribes for him is "a drink of beer, champagne, or brandy" whenever he feels an attack coming on.

The Proust Project, Day 33

Where this began
Day 32

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 44-59.

M. de Norpois continues to hold sway over the narrator and his parents. When the narrator asks about Swann and the Comte de Paris, de Norpois recalls an occasion when the Comte saw Odette:

Now, of course, no one in his entourage saw fit to ask His Highness what he thought of her. ... But when the vagaries of conversation happened subsequently to bring up her name, His Highness appeared not averse to bring up her name, by means of certain signs, you understand, which, though they may verge on the imperceptible, are withal quite unambiguous, that his impression of the lady had been far from, in a word, unfavorable.

The "in a word" is a nice touch. No word in de Norpois' discourse ever goes it alone, always being accompanied by qualifiers and litotic undercuttings. No word, that is, until we get to the question of the narrator's cherished writer Bergotte. De Norpois dismisses the narrator's favorite as "a flute-player," a writer without substance whose "works are so flaccid that one can never locate in them anything one could call a framework." Worse still, he uses the narrator's enthusiasm for Bergotte to issue a harsh critique of the narrator's own writing -- "that little thing you showed me before dinner, about which, by the way, the less said the better." He dismisses it as, using the narrator's own words (which the narrator intended as a show of modesty), "mere childish scribbling." Returning to Bergotte, de Norpois comments,

"Nowadays, a chap sets off a few verbal fireworks and everyone acclaims him as a genius.... Believe you me, he's the perfect illustration of the idea of that clever fellow who once said that he only acquaintance one should have with writers is through their books."

Here the general reader can be grateful for Grieve's note that the "clever fellow" is Proust himself, in his essay "Contre Sainte-Beuve." (Grieve is not as thorough in annotating this volume, I think, as Davis was in hers, but here he gives us some essential information.)

The narrator is, of course, "devastated": "I became once more acutely aware of my own intellectual poverty and of the fact that I had no gift for writing." Feeling "deflated and dumbfounded," he changes the subject by asking if Gilberte was at the dinner where de Norpois met Odette. De Norpois recalls "A young lady of fourteen or fifteen" -- the first more or less precise indication we've had of the age of Gilberte (and the narrator) at this point in the novel. And so the narrator presses de Norpois to speak about him to Gilberte and Odette, and when de Norpois agrees, "I was suddenly so overcome by tender feelings for this important man, who was going to exercise on my behalf the great prestige he must enjoy in the eyes of Mme Swann, that I had to retrain myself from kissing his soft hands." But his enthusiasm "was so chilling in its effect that ... I caught a glimpse of hesitancy and annoyance flitting across the ambassador's face." He has gone too far with this overinflated egotist.

Still, despite the harshness of de Norpois' criticism of his work, and of his idol Bergotte, the narrator is so awed by the man's reputation that he assumes that his own opinions are worthless. His sense of his own inadequacy is reinforced when his father shows him a newspaper review of La Berma's performance, which accords with de Norpois' conventional opinion of the actress. The narrator learns that the newspaper critic regards the performance he has seen, and been disappointed by, as "a triumph than which, in the whole course of her illustrious career, she has rarely had a greater," that it was "a veritable milestone in the theater," and that "the best-qualified judges are as one" in acclaiming it "as the finest, highest achievement in the realm of art that any of us have been privileged to witness in this day and age." Too naive to recognize the critique for what it is -- vapid and banal -- the narrator is all too ready to convince himself that he agrees with it.

Moreover, he now begins to have serious doubts about his vocation as a writer, which his father has endorsed for the wrong reasons. His father's statement -- "He's not a child anymore, he knows that he likes, he's probably not going to change, he's old enough to know what'll make him happy in life" -- depresses him. It implies that "the years to come would not be very different from the years already elapsed." And more important for the theme of the novel is the implication "that I did not live outside Time but was subject to its laws." His father's statement "suddenly showed me myself living inside Time; and he filled me with sadness."

The Proust Project, Day 32

Where this began
Day 31

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 30-44.

Proust pulls several narrative tricks in this section.

First, he wears us down with several pages of the ineffably boring M. de Norpois, about whom the narrator comments, "The only deduction I could draw was that, in politics, it was a mark of superiority rather than inferiority to repeat what everybody else thought." And then, just as we are tempted to begin to skim, he allows M. de Norpois to deliver a small bombshell at the dinner table:

"I dined [last night] at the house of a lady of whom you may have heard -- the beautiful Mme Swann."

My mother all but trembled. ... However, she was curious to know what sort of people went to the Swanns', and inquired of M. de Norpois about his fellow guests.

"Well, now .... to tell you the truth ... I must say it's a house at which most of the guests appear to be ... gentlemen. There were certainly several married men present -- but their wives were all indisposed yesterday evening, and had been unable to go," the ambassador replied, with a crafty glance masked by joviality, his eyes full of a demure discretion that pretended to moderate their mischievousness while making it more obvious.

And he goes on in this vein, remarking on Swann's fallen state in society, until he finally delivers the second narrative coup, answering the question that has lurked in the reader's mind about why Swann has married Odette when the last time we saw him, he was convinced he no longer loved or was obsessed by her:

"And yet, you know, I don't think the man's unhappy. It's true that the woman stooped to some pretty nasty things in the years before the marriage, some quite unsavory blackmail -- if he ever declined to satisfy her something or other, she just forbade him access to the child."

And having let us know that Odette had conceived a child -- Gilberte, the reader assumes at this point -- who was used to bind Swann to her permanently, Proust does something that would be considered a flaw in most contemporary fiction writing: He superimposes the mature narrator on the point of view of the young narrator. It's as if this section of the novel is being narrated by two voices. It's the mature narrator who takes over to tell us how Odette manipulated Swann into a marriage which "came as a surprise to almost everybody, which is a surprise." It is the mature narrator, after all who is privy to the information that "when it occurred to [Swann] that he might one day marry Odette, there was only one person in society whose opinion he would have cared for, the Duchesse de Guermantes." And that the Duchesse, whom we saw through the young narrator's eyes earlier in the novel , is someone we have also seen in the "Swann in Love" section, when she was the Princesse des Laumes.

And here we get another narrative trick: imparting information to us about what is to come in the novel, a kind of "spoiler" that might even be considered a narrative flaw in the hands of a lesser writer.

[I]t can be said that the purpose of Swann's marrying Gilberte was to introduce her and Gilberte, even though no one else might be present, even though no one else might ever know of it, to the Duchesse de Guermantes. As will be seen, the fulfillment of this social ambition, the only one he had ever harbored for his wife and child, was the very one that was to be denied him; and the veto preventing it was to be so absolute that Swann was to die without imagining that the Duchesse would ever meet them. It will be seen too that the Duchesse de Guermantes did come, after Swann's death, to be acquainted with Odette and Gilberte.

So why does Proust drop these as-will-be-seens on us, including the death of a major character, thereby eliminating at least one element of narrative suspense from his novel? We can only assume that Proust has bigger things in mind than mere plot.

Curriculum

First period: That's a Chair, This Is Your Scratching Post

Nap

Second period: Where Are My Socks? They Were Here on the Bed a Moment Ago

Nap

Third period: There's Nothing in That Closet/Cabinet/Drawer/Package for You

Nap

Fourth period: Get Down From There! Now!

Nap

Fifth period: No. No! NO! NOOOOO!

Nap

Sixth period: Awww, That's So Cute