Secular Transcendence in Marcel Proust, #marcelproust, #swannsway

Reading Swann's Way: Video: A portion of lecture given at Pace University in New York City, October 2018. #savagesight/constructednoise, #frenchsymbolism, #marcelproust

Portion of class lecture at Pace U, October 2018

Essay version of lecture: 

Transcendence and the everyday

In his essay “The Image of Proust” Walter Benjamin describes how Marcel Proust employed two competing approaches to the problem of Time in his magnum opus A la recherche du temps perdu or, in translation, In Search of Lost Time.  Benjamin, quoting Ramon Fernandez, calls these two approaches the theme of eternity and the theme of time (or a more “everyday” version of time).  He associates the first of these approaches with “remembering” (i.e., combining different and multiple time frames and episodes into a timeless aesthetic structure) and the second with mere “aging”—moving on through life from day to day, according to habitual behaviors and mundane pursuits.[1]  So, while Benjamin acknowledges a certain idealism in Proust’s representation of time, this idealism is a “convoluted” kind, a fusing of the eternal and the everyday, the transcendent and the ordinary, in an act of what he calls “rejuvenation.”  This act of rejuvenation is also the effect, for Proust, of an alternation of images or episodes as they mutually shed light on each other.  The transcendence of eternal time is secularized, that is, it is linked up with the everyday passage of time.  Hence it is not ideal in a Platonic sense, as something absolute or unchanging.  Proust’s idealism is made worldly, a matter of lived phenomena, not abstractions.  In this way he is an idealist and empiricist at once, a romantic and a realist both, but in a way that we associate, historically, with the Symbolist Movement, a late nineteenth-century movement that set the foundation for Twentieth-Century Modernism in the arts—literature, painting, and music.  (Symbolism is a movement associated with the French poets Baudelaire and Mallarme, but also such American High Modernists as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and, in painting, with Impressionism, Postimpressionism, Cubism, and Futurism.  

Proust as a modernist 

        Though Proust is working in many ways in a realist tradition, he is subjecting it to a critique that is not merely idealistic or romantic, but truly modernist, insofar as his Symbolist preoccupations represent an early manifestation of Modernism, if with fewer empirical fractures and the simultaneous contrasts they generate through narratological multiplicities and shifting streams of consciousness.  That said, Proust’s discontent with conventional realist assumptions about the ordinariness or plausibility of everyday experience is a product of his modernist sensibility.  This attitude is one in which a sense of crisis disrupts the regular passage of time and the ordinary disposition of things.  It requires a more subjective re-ordering of temporal events, of everyday reality, since Modernists see the idea of everyday reality as suspect or misleading, much as the Cubists see illusionistic space as misleading and thus undertake a perspectival reordering of it. 

       For the Modernists, Reality is something too complex or discontinuous to be represented according to the usual empirical or illusionistic methods. It is a purely subjective phenomenon or at least an accumulation of such phenomena, fragments that are largely irreconcilable with each other and thus not conducive of empirical evaluation. This is why Proust’s novels never present a complete, unified action—a fully plausible imitation of the human story—with its beginning, middle, and end, as Aristotle recommended. Instead, Swann’s Way,[2] for instance, begins with the story of the narrator Marcel and his childhood, shifting to another stage, perhaps adolescence, in Combray, but then shifting back in time to the story of an older, well-heeled (but Jewish, and therefore somewhat marginalized) neighbor named Charles Swann. Finally the story fast-forwards again to the narrator’s childhood, albeit to when he was living in Paris and not in Combray, where he develops an infatuation with Swann's and Odette’s young daughter, Gilberte.[3] It’s a kaleidoscope of temporal shifts sometimes compounded within each narrative chapter, portions of which are so temporally suspended (as in the Combray chapter) that one almost can’t determine the age of the narrator Marcel as his own protagonist. 

Twentieth-century modernist works were conspicuous for presenting these discontinuities in their different manifestations across the arts and in the proliferating hybrids between them.  Modernism thus constituted a crisis, both of representation and of consciousness, about the real, the ordinary, and the everyday.  Everyday experience couldn’t be taken at all for granted and had to be subjected to what deconstructionist critic Paul De Man identified as a “hermeneutics of suspicion,”[4] a critical and imaginative reinvestigation (or reorganization) in a way that was truer to personal, internal experience, if not to the mundane, middle-class assumptions about experience:  i.e., that reality is simply a problem of cause and effect, expenditure and consumption, that can be quantified and objectified like dollars and cents—that is, in ways that even the most ill-prepared reader or spectator will grasp if adequately coaxed and cajoled with the various reversals and surprises of popular entertainment. 

Such is the modernist critique—its sense of crisis about the social, psychological, economic, and political ordering of the world.  A feeling of crisis that belies the old nineteenth-century assumptions about representation:  that it had to be orderly, plausible, entertaining, and morally coherent.  The modernists had decided these attributes were simply rationalist illusions, undermined by new physical laws (Einstein’s theory of relativity), by new psychological assumptions (Freud’s unconscious), and by new sociological motivations (Marx and Engels’ alienation, Nietzsche’s will to power).  The artist or writer now felt isolated from that older world, cut off from conventional reality and having to find new modes of expression that seemed compositionally imperfect or chaotic, but which at least seemed more subjectively true, more responsive to new kinds of knowledge, and that seemed to convey a more personal kind of honesty about the contradictoriness of the world, and new ways to cope in a crisis.  (The Dreyfus Affair had clearly demonstrated the need for a new kind of public honesty, for instance, in French politics.)

Fusing perception and memory—creative evolution 

Thus, while still writing from a realist perspective in many ways, Proust subjects realist representation to modernist scrutiny.  He insists that the realist novel be founded on a phenomenology of mind, of an alternation between sensory perception and remembrance, between the slow process of living and aging and that of suddenly remembering what life was, what it was becoming, and what it might signify (Benjamin).  It could no longer be formulated as a conventional plot with a unified action made up of recognizably working parts (this is classic naturalism—think Balzac’s Père Goriot or even Flaubert’s Madame Bovary), nor could it be treated as a scientific experiment at the center of which we find a protagonist whose instinctual responses to a situation can be rhetorically quantified by the author (this is modern naturalism—think Zola’s Germinal).  NO.  Proust’s “real” has to do with the ways in which experience and memory, everyday perception, and echoes of the past are always swelling, fusing, and transforming each other in a creative process or evolution (as philosopher Henri Bergson called it[5]) and how the everyday, as a result of memory, can be shot through with luminous moments of insight.  One form of this is Proust’s “involuntary memory,” a chance sensory experience (such as dunking a piece of cake into some tea and tasting it) that unexpectedly awakens one to a new fullness or simultaneity of experience not known before.  This opening up of consciousness famously happens toward the end of the Overture to Swann’s Way with the episode of the madeleine, resulting in Marcel the narrator’s reawakened memories of Combray in his childhood.  It is the real made rapturous or beautiful through moments of startling recollection, but supported, in the end, by sustained critical investigation.

I carried to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had let soften a bit of madeleine.  But at the very instant when the mouthful of tea mixed with cake crumbs touched my palate, I quivered, attentive to the extraordinary thing that was happening inside me.  A delicious pleasure had invaded me, isolated me, without my having any notion as to its cause.  It had immediately rendered the vicissitudes of life unimportant to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory, acting in the same way that love acts, by filling me with a precious essence: or rather this essence was not merely inside me, it was me.  I had ceased to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. (45)

[J]e portai à mes lèvres une cuillerée du thé où j’avais laissé s’amollir un morceau de madeleine.  Mais à l’instant même où la gorgée mêlée de miettes de gâteau toucha mon palais, je tressaillis, attentif à ce qui se passait d’extraordinaire en moi.  Un plaisir délicieux m’avait envahi, isolé, sans la notion de sa cause.  Il m’avait aussitôt rendu les vicissitudes de la vie indifférentes, ses désastres inoffensifs, sa brièveté illusoire, de la meme façon qu’opère l’amour, en me remplissant d’une essence précieuse:  ou plutôt, cette essence n’était pas en moi, elle était mois.  J’avais cessé de me sentir médiocre, contingent, mortel.  (58-59)

Through involuntary memory, the narrator experiences a kind of modern sense of immortality.  But this involuntary memory is aided by voluntary memory; correspondences between the transcendent and the everyday are found, and thus a creative but also critical re-examination of social relationships is undertaken.[6]  Thus, the tendency of our habitual or everyday social behaviors to stifle or dissipate one’s creative potential is counteracted by this kind of rejuvenating, enlivening experience.  The feeling of transcendence contributes to the creative impulse.

Proust’s disillusion with society 

In his own life Proust sensed just how deadly social convention could be to one’s creative potential as a writer.  If during his youth in the late Nineteenth Century he partied and chattered, in the Twentieth he mostly wrote, and wrote, and wrote—mostly to subvert the former value he had placed on “moving in society” (if not necessarily “moving up in it,” something his family’s status had mostly made unnecessary. Despite writing and publishing a collection of short stories called Les Plaisirs et les jours (translated as Pleasures and Regrets in 1948) and many parodies and reviews of other writers’ works, the younger Proust had devoted most of his time to cultivating his social connections.  Though subject to depressing bouts of asthma that worsened with age and ultimately shortened his life,[7] Proust’s youth was characterized by extraordinary wealth and a glamorous social life.   Much like the character Swann, Proust was a dandy of sorts, a connoisseur of art and culture who moved in the upper echelons of Parisian society.  His friends included princesses, dukes, and viscounts (including Le Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac, a well-known personage and minor poet, famously painted by James McNeill Whistler and the model for Proust’s Baron de Charlus--not to mention for Des Esseintes in Huysman's A rebours) as well as cultivated bourgeois like himself.  But in the end Proust succumbed not only to his nervous asthma—turning him into a nearly permanent invalid—but to his disillusion with the social world he had once valued so highly.[8]  As his novel suggests, he had realized—or simply decided—that human relationships (particularly amorous ones) must inevitably lead to disappointment and that relationships with the upper crust of society would be the most disappointing of all.  This insight is dramatized in In Search of Lost Time in his narrator’s increasing discontents with the Guermantes family who initially represent for him the pinnacle of aristocratic culture.  Proust could not find happiness either in society or in love (he was gay) or even in personal friendships, though that was all he professed to be seeking.[9]  That said, it’s well known that he was, in his youth, quite spoiled and subject to tantrums, and, in his adult life, often sadistic in the expression of his sexuality.[10]  The sort of happiness he desired could be found only in art (i.e., in writing a work of fiction), and only in an art made for his time.  In the final analysis, no one understood more acutely or represented with more accuracy the disappointments of amorous attachments.   For Proust, desire is fundamentally about dissatisfaction and love an illusion one creates about people one can never genuinely know or understand—something generated by false cues and artificially enhanced through personal vanity, that is, through the pleasure of being “in love” or even, as they say, being in love with love.  The fulfillment of desire can reveal only the sensible failings of those persons we once believed would satisfy us.  

The crisis of subjectivity—the Overture

It all begins in childhood, the first, fundamental, subjective crisis that anticipates the larger crisis of modernity.  In the Overture of Swann’s Way, the narrator describes his childhood preoccupation with his mother, his habitual need for her reassuring goodnight kiss, a ritual that must be performed every night to help prepare him for the nightmare of having to go to sleep in his darkened room—alone and, in a sense, orphaned or motherless.  But one evening while the neighbor Swann is visiting the crisis comes:  on being sent to bed, the ritual kiss is denied the boy thanks to the peremptory commands of his father, and so he must find an alternative way of satisfying his need, come what may.  He sends a note to his mother through a servant.  He gets no answer.  He takes the plunge and decides to wait on the staircase landing for his mother who will mount it in preparation for bed once Swann has left.  He fears punishment, even expulsion from the home.  Discovering him on the stairway, his mother tries to shoo him away, but the father—who is presumed to be the ultimate enforcer of discipline—discovers them together.  Instead of being outraged, however, the father reveals the arbitrariness of his rule.  He takes pity on the child and orders the mother to stay the night with him.  It’s an unanticipated bliss for the child.  A night in the bedroom with maman!  Every child’s Oedipal fantasy come true!  The narrator, Marcel, even gets to open his birthday presents a week ahead of time—all of them books and prints (a clue to the supreme value Proust placed on fictional and artistic solutions to the problem of experience).  But the old regime of the mother—enforced with strictness and formality—is now in tatters.   Marcel knows that he has disappointed her and that she has had to make a concession to him at the behest of the father; the result for Marcel isn’t the bliss he anticipates but a sense of guilt.  He is now unalterably alienated from his own desire.  It’s fulfillment leads to more discontent as he assumes the privileges and responsibilities of joining the Symbolic Order of the Father. 

Swann in love

This infantine drama of disappointment will be replicated in multiple relationships throughout the novel, starting off with Swann and Odette de Crécy, a woman of questionable morals for the time (a demimondaine—not exactly a prostitute, but a woman who uses sex to secure the financial generosity of men in order to sustain her lifestyle and to move up in society).  She finds her mark and successfully draws him in; it’s a game she’s very familiar with.   While Proust acknowledges that love can be spontaneous, an uncontrollable welling of passionate adoration—like that, even, of a child for its mother—as adults, love becomes more artificial, something pursued out of vanity and inspired by a need for pleasure or novelty. 

And so, at an age when it would seem, since what one seeks most of all in love is subjective pleasure, that the enjoyment of a woman’s beauty should play the largest part in it, love may come into being—love of the most physical kind—without there having been, underlying it, any previous desire.  At this time of life, one has already been wounded many times by love; it no longer evolves solely in accordance with its own unknown and inevitable laws, before our astonished and passive heart.  We come to its aid; we distort it with memory, with suggestion. (204)

Ainsi, à l’age où il semblerait, comme on cherche surtout dans l’amour un plaisir subjectif, que la part du goût pour la beauté d’une femme devait y être la plus grande, l’amour peut naître—l’amour le plus physique—sans qu’il y ait eu, à sa base, un désir préalable.  A cette époque de la vie, on a déjà été atteint plusieurs fois par l’amour; il n’évolue plus seul suivant ses propres lois inconnues et fatales, devant notre coeur étonné et passif.  Nous venons à son aide, nous le faussons par la mémoire, par la suggestion. (233) 

What are these aids that move Swann to love someone, someone who turns out not even to be his type?  As I’m sure the reader recognizes, it has a lot to do with the things Swann values in society and the things that allow him to value himself, things not unlike the self-objectifying image the infantine subject discovers at the mirror stage.  Swann takes pleasure in society and in the arts.  But it is the arts especially that provide the self-affirming indices of his social and intellectual standing albeit one that conspicuously draws on the acclaim of others.  Hence, like the relation between eternity and time, it is a case of circularity and convolution, if also what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu might call “Distinction.”  Early on in the text one learns that Swann instinctually prefers plump and lively working girls.  But while Odette is working, she’s working primarily on him, if not only on him.  She is recommended by his friend the Baron de Charlus and this helps capture Swann’s interest.  At first, she represents a kind of amorous convenience, the ease and pleasure of having a woman attracted to him without having to do much and allowing him to live large in a lower social sphere—thanks to her patience as she awaits him every night at the salon of the rich but cheesy Verdurins. 

The “little phrase” of Vinteuil

At the Verdurins’, Swann hears a musical piece played by the pianist, a piece that intrigues him aesthetically but that will become the anthem of his and Odette’s “love” even before he’s actually decided to love her.   

… at a certain moment, […] suddenly charmed, he had tried to gather up and hold on to the phrase or harmony […] that was passing by him and that had opened his soul so much wider, the way the smells of certain roses circulating in the damp evening air have the property of dilating our nostrils.  Maybe it was because of his ignorance of music that he had been capable of receiving so confused an impression, the kind of impression that is, however, perhaps the only one which is purely musical, immaterial, entirely original, irreducible to any other order of impression.  An impression of this kind is, for an instant, so to speak, sine materia. (216)[11] 

… à un moment donnée […] charmé tout d’un coup, il avait cherché à recueillir la phrase ou l’harmonie […] qui passait et qui lui avait ouvert plus largement l’âme, comme certaines odeurs de roses circulant dans l’air humide du soir ont la propriété de dilater nos narines.  Peut-êtres est-ce parce qu’il  ne savait pas la musique qu’il avait pu éprouver une impression aussi confuse, une de ces impressions qui sont petu-être pourtant les seules purement musicales, inétendues, entièrement originales, irréductibles à tout autre ordre d’impressions.  Une impression de ce genre, pendant un instant, est pour ainsi dire sine materia. (247) 

And later … 

… Swann found within himself, in the recollection of the phrase he had heard, in certain sonatas he asked people to play for him, to see if he would not discover it in them, 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.  (218-219) 

… Swann trouvait en lui, dans le souvenir de la phrase qu’il avait entendue, dans certaines sonates qu’il s’était fait jouer, pour voir s’il ne l’y découvrirait pas, la présence d’une de ces réalités invisibles auxquelles il avait cessé de croire et auxquelles, comme si la musique avait eu sur la sécheresse morale dont il souffrait une sort d’influence élective, il se sentait de nouveau le désir et presque la force de consacrer sa vie. (249) 

It’s an aesthetic experience (not unlike an involuntary memory) that he comes to associate with Odette.  This is reinforced by other arts, such as when he compares the “musical phrase” of Vinteuil to certain bright spaces (rapidly recessed in depth) in the paintings of Pieter de Hooch or in Jan Vermeer’s famous View of Delft (though he discusses the latter only later in the final volume of In Search of Lost Time).  More importantly, Swann discovers a resemblance between Odette and certain figures in the paintings of Botticelli.  As the text reads:  

She reminded him even more than usual, when she looked this way, of the faces of the women portrayed by the painter of the Primavera.  She had at this moment their downcast and heartbroken expression which seems to be succumbing beneath the weight of a grief too heavy for them…. (290-291) 

Elle rappelait ainsi plus encore qu’il ne le trouvait d’habitude, les figures de femmes du peintre de la Primavera.  Elle avait en ce moment leur visage abattu et navré qui semble succomber sous le poids d’une douleur trop lourde pour elles .... (327) 

Or again he remarks her resemblance to Botticelli’s Zipporah in his Sistine Chapel fresco The Daughters of Jethro.  But as his attraction to Odette increases, she herself seems to reinforce the value he puts on certain artworks.  It’s a kind of circular reinforcement of desire, a hermeneutic circle:

He looked at her; a fragment of the fresco appeared in her face and in her body, and from then on he would always try to find it in her again, whether he was with Odette or was only thinking of her, and even though he probably valued the Florentine masterpiece only because he found it again in her, nevertheless that resemblance conferred a certain beauty on her too, made her more precious.  Swann reproached himself for having misunderstood the value of a creature who would have appeared captivating to the great Sandro, and he felt happy that his pleasure in seeing Odette could be justified by his own aesthetic culture.  He told himself that, in associating the thought of Odette with his dreams of happiness, he had not been resigning himself to a second best as imperfect as he had believed until now, since she satisfied his most refined artistic tastes. (232) 

Il la regardait; un fragment de la fresque apparaissait dans son visage et dans son corps, que dès lors il chercha toujours à y retrouver, soit qu’il fût auprès d’Odette, soit qu’il pensât seulement à elle; et, bien qu’il ne tînt sans doute au chef-d’oeuvre florentin que parce qu’il le retrouvait en elle, pourtant cette ressemblance lui conférait à elle aussi un beauté, la rendait plus précieuse.  Swann se reprocha d’avoir méconnu le prix d’un être qui eût paru adorable  au grand Sandro, et il se félicita que le plaisir qu’il avait à voir Odette trouvât une justification dans sa proper culture esthétique.  Il se dit qu’en associant la pensée d’Odette à ses rêves de bonheur, il ne s’était pas résigné à un pis-aller aussi imparfait qu’il l’avait cru jusqu’ici, puisque’elle contenait en lui ses goûts d’art les plus raffineés. (264) 

But the fact is that he’s given up all these finer, aesthetic aspirations—his will to be an artist, his scholarly essay on Vermeer, even his social cultivation.  Odette has replaced all that and made it easier, and thus more apparently fulfilling.  Life becomes a kind of artwork or project for him, but it’s all self-delusion.   After the cattleya scene, their love is affirmed—if still convenient.  It takes Odette’s “absence,” her breaking with the routine of Swann’s pleasure, to crystallize his desire, a new insatiability.  “Chrystalization” is a term used by the novelist Stendhal in his interminable essay “De l’amour” to explain the moment when love becomes fully impressed upon one’s psyche, even at the price of one’s self-possession.  It is, of course, a moment of crisis—the moment when Swann arrives at the Verdurins’ to find Odette has not waited for him.  Indeed, she’s found someone else, but she’s not prepared to throw Swann over either.  She “relies” upon him.  Only later will Swann fully recognize that HE has become the person that a “kept woman” is relying on to maintain herself, to contribute to her own economy of pleasures, pleasures that no longer include him.  On realizing this, he naturally compares her to another artwork, this time by Gustave Moreau, describing Odette as “an apparition […] among venomous flowers” (277).

Even the Verdurins conspire to enforce this new regime of exclusion, a conspiracy provoked in part by their sense of Swann’s snobbery, his connections to people better or higher up than they.  He has become a kind of Saniette, but of a different order.  (The Verdurins seem to hate Saniette’s genuine scholarship, just as they hate Swann’s genuine social cultivation.)  Swann’s love makes him so abject that Odette even introduces her rival lovers to him without fear of losing him, so long as she occasionally does him the favors he requires and submits to his own investigation of her past, his own hermeneutics of suspicion, another kind of research into lost time, prompted by mounting jealousy but sustained also by an abject need to win Odette’s favor, approval.   We discover not only that Forcheville has been one of her lovers for quite some time, but that one of her older lovers was Marcel’s Uncle Adolphe, whom we learn about in the Combray section that precedes “Swann in Love.”  This episode tells the story of how Marcel unexpectedly pays a visit to his uncle and discovers a charming and delightful lady at his home.  (It is the source of a family rift between this uncle and Marcel’s immediate family.)  The woman was indeed Odette.  In fact, Odette also turns out to have enjoyed female lovers in the Bois de Boulogne, a detail perhaps intended to shock Proust’s original readers, but also to introduce the theme of homosexuality, as it will be dramatized later in the story of the Baron de Charlus who—like Saniette and Swann—is humiliated by the Verdurins, but unlike them, is reduced to frequenting homosexual brothels as shown in Time Regained, the final volume of In Search of Lost Time.  This last volume also reveals the ascendancy of Mme Verdurin, who, despite all her vulgarity as a parvenu—the rising middle classes—becomes the Duchesse de Guermantes, an aristocrat at the top of the social pyramid.[12]

            As for Swann, his recovery from romantic obsession is once again linked to the “little phrase” when he hears it later upon unexpectedly re-entering society and attending a function at the home of the elegant, if not especially important, society lady, Madame de Saint-Euverte.  Proust re-evaluates the phrase for several pages of text, as if to alert us to its importance in the resuscitation of the original Swann who was so much more lively, socially and artistically, than Swann in love.  Steeped in his love for Odette, he is nevertheless becoming more detached from her and already senses that their love will end.  He even starts to appreciate the music of Vinteuil as an intellectual pleasure again and not solely as the “anthem of [his and Odette’s] love.”  Though critics have conjectured that Proust was thinking of a sonata by Camille Saint-Saëns, my guess is that he had more modern piece in mind—something by Debussy or Ravel Proust may have been familiar with while writing his novel.  Though such a piece would be entirely incompatible with the 1880s period he was trying to evoke in the story of Swann, it would be consistent with the period and the aesthetic of the novel’s composition in the early Twentieth Century.

            Swann has more trials to suffer, of course, afflicted as he is by uncertainty regarding the true nature of Odette.  Since his love is a purely subjective reality, it oscillates between his vision of the good, compliant Odette and the bad, lying Odette.  The full effect of all the anguish he feels as a result of his jealousy and abjection (for instance, paying for Odette’s many pleasures and even contemplating sending her to Bayreuth in the company of Forcheville), the full effect comes when Swann discovers a lump on his abdomen that he fantasizes to be a fatal tumor.  (This will turn out to be true, as Swann dies of cancer in a later volume.)  What is most significant for Proust is that this joy in possibly dying is preceded by a moment of absolute ANGUISH when he wishes only to occupy Odette’s empty apartments “to wait for her there until the hour of her return, into whose stillness […] would have flowed and melted the hours which some magical illusion, some evil spell, had made him believe were different from the rest” (329).  But she won’t allow him to do this, and so he goes alone to bed, distracting himself with the thought of seeing “some great painting the next day.”

[But] no sooner, as he prepared to go to sleep, did he cease to exert upon himself a constraint of which he was not even aware because it was by now so habitual, than at that very instant an icy shiver would run through him and he would begin to sob. (329)

[M]ais, dès que, pour se preparer à dormer, il cesser d’exercer sur lui-même une contrainte dont il n’avait meme pas conscience tant elle était devenu habituelle, au meme instant un frisson glacé refluait en lui et il se mettait à sangloter. (368)

This sobbing, I think, has to be linked with the sobs of the child Marcel upon waiting up for his mother and being granted the reprieve of a night with her.  His exceptional weakness and sensitivity have been officially recognized by the family, but it has happened at great cost, hence the narrator’s own sense of devastation and anguish.  One can only imagine that Swann, on fully obtaining the beloved person he “wasted years of his life” for and even wanted to die for, would induce the same sense of alienation.  Proust illustrates this alienation, this detachment from one’s own intimacies, at the end of Swann’s ordeal when he has a dream about a man in a fez.  In this dream, the man in the fez begins weeping on learning that Odette has left for a prearranged rendez-vous.  Swann himself is in the dream and he consoles the man in the fez whom Odette seems to have betrayed with Napoleon III, a figure representing Forcheville.  (Just as Forcheville represents a kind of phony aristocrat, Napoleon III is a historically farcical version of Napoleon I.)   Swann consoles the sobbing man.  “Thus did Swann talk to himself, for the young man [in the fez] was also himself; like certain novelists, he had divided his personality between two characters, the one having the dream, and [the other that] he saw before him wearing the fez” (393).  This happens frequently in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and we recognize that Proust has divided himself between several characters, if mostly, 1., as Marcel the narrator and, 2., as Swann the lover and failed aesthete.

Memory and history, life and art

Swann, then, represents the memory—the backstory—of something Marcel never specifically experienced.  He represents a kind of bridge between a remembered past and a past that comes to us only by hearsay or documentation:  the past that history, culture, and celebrated works of art encapsulate for us.  Love, too, is a kind of yearning for a special transcendent realm, but the human objects of our attraction seem, more than anything else, to fail to live up to expectations even as we contort ourselves to make believe they do, to make ourselves accept the illusion that they can bring us to a better, almost resplendent place.  It’s an endlessly circular pattern of suspicion and self-deception.  For Proust, the only way out was to produce a work of art based on a strategy of inspired remembrance and meticulous recapitulation through language.  Creativity replaces personal relationships, just as history and culture replace personal memories.  Proust’s narrator, Marcel, will commence writing such a work in the last volume of this monumental book that we are reading (the book itself being, perhaps, the evidence of Marcel’s future book).  This happens in Time Regained when Marcel has another episode of involuntary memory while stepping up on a curb and realizing that time has passed more quickly than he anticipated.  He must now get to work and write his book.[13]  He no longer cares about “society” or his day-to-day life except insofar as he hopes to live long enough to complete his novel.  As an author, Proust himself barely managed it; indeed he virtually killed himself through the exhausting effort of completing the work of seven volumes. 

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[1] Referring to Fernandez, Benjamin claims he “rightly distinguishes between a thême de l’éternité and a thême du temps in Proust.  But his eternity is by no means a platonic or utopian one; it is rapturous.  Therefore, if ‘time reveals a new and hitherto unknown kind of eternity to anyone who becomes engrossed in its passing,’ this certainly does not enable an individual to approach ‘the higher regions which a Plato or Spinoza reached with one beat of the wings.’  It is true that in Proust we find rudiments of an enduring idealism, but it would be a mistake to make these the basis of an interpretation […].  The eternity which Proust opens to view is convoluted time, not boundless time.  His true intent is in the passage of time in its most real—that is, space-bound—form, and this passage nowhere holds sway more openly than in remembrance within and aging without.   To observe the interaction of aging and remembering means to penetrate to the heart of Proust’s world, to the universe of convolution.  It is the world in a state of resemblances, the domain of the correspondences; the romanticists were the first to comprehend them and Baudelaire embraced them most fervently, but Proust was the only one who managed to reveal them in our lived life.  This is the work of the mémoire involontaire, the rejuvenating force which is a match for the inexorable process of aging.  When the past is reflected in the dewy fresh ‘instant,’ a painful shock of rejuvenation pulls it together once more as irresistibly as the Guermantes way and Swann’s way become intertwined for Proust… “ from Walter Benjamin’s “The Image of Proust” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections.  Harry Zohn, trans; Hannah Arendt, ed.  Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968: 201-215.

[2] For this paper I will be referring to the Gallimard Folio Collection edition of Du côté de chez Swann (1954) and the Penguin Classics Deluxe edition, translated by Lydia Davis (2003).  

[3] One assumes Gilberte is the biological product of the events described in “Swann in Love,” but the circumstances of her mother’s pregnancy are not revealed in that episode and clearly occurs only after, or perhaps unconsciously simultaneous to, Swann’s growing realization that he has “wasted years of [his] life, even wanted to die, over a woman who wasn’t even [his] type …” (Swann’s Way, 396).

[4] On asking whether a passage in “Combray” makes “paradigmatic claims for itself,” De Man argues in Allegories of Reading how the “uncertainty as to whether this is indeed the case creates a mood of distrust which, as the later story of Marcel’s relationship with Albertine makes clear, produces rather than paralyzes interpretative discourse.  Reading has to begin in this unstable commixture of literalism and suspicion” (58).  Paul De Man, “Reading (Proust)” in Allegories of Reading.  Yale University Press, 1979: 57-78. 

[5] See Bergson’s Creative Evolution.  Arthur Mitchell, trans.  New York: Random House, 1944.

[6] Paul Ricoeur concurs, and expands on, the notion that a reconciliation between voluntary and involuntary memory defines the “tale of time” at the heart of Proust’s Recherche:  “[S]i la Recherche est une fable sur le temps, c’est dans la mesure où elle ne s’identifie ni avec la mémoire involontaire ni même avec l’apprentissage des signes—lequel, en effet, prends du temps—, mais pose du problème du rapport entre ces deux niveaux d’expérience et l’expérience hors pair dont le narrateur retarde le dévoilement pendant près de trois milles pages.  See Ricoeur’s “A la Recherche du temps perdu: le temps traversé“ in Temps et récit, tome 2, La configuration du temps dans le récit de fiction. Éditions de Seuil, 1984: 194-225.

[7] These attacks were psychogenic in origin, hence a somatic reaction to an essentially nervous disorder.  See Douglas W. Alden’s biographical essay “Marcel Proust:  10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922” in The Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 65.  French Novelists, 1900-1930.  Catharine Savage Brosman, Gen. Ed.  Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1988: 218- 255.  

[8] As Benjamin writes, “It is obvious that the problem of Proust’s characters are those of a satiated society.  But there is not one which would be identical with those of the author, which are subversive.  To reduce this to a formula, it was to be Proust’s aim to design the entire inner structure of society as a physiology of chatter.  In the treasury of its prejudices and maxims there is not one that is not annihilated by a dangerous comic element. […] [Comparisons to other long, humorous literary works] … do not do full justice to the explosive power of Proust’s critique of society.   His style is comedy, not humor; his laughter does not toss the world up but flings it down—at the risk that it will be smashed to pieces […].  The pretensions of the bourgeoisie are shattered by laughter. Their return and reassimilation by the aristocracy is the sociological theme of the book” (206-207).  And later, “The upper ten thousand were to [Proust] a clan of criminals, a band of conspirators beyond compare:  a Camorra of consumers.  It excludes from its world everything that has a part in production, or at least demands that this part be gracefully and bashfully concealed behind the kind of manner that is sported by the polished professionals of consumption.  Proust’s analysis of snobbery, which is far more important than his apotheosis of art, constitutes the apogee of his criticism of society.  For the attitude of the snob is nothing but the consistent, organized, steely view of life from the chemically pure standpoint of the consumer. […] [T]he pure consumer is the pure exploiter—logically and theoretically—and in Proust he is that in the full concreteness of his actual historical existence. […] Proust describes a class which is everywhere pledged to camouflage its material basis and for this very reason is attached to a feudalism which has no intrinsic economic significance but is all the more serviceable as a mask of the upper middle class.  This disillusioned, merciless deglamorizer of the ego, of love, of morals—for this is how Proust liked to view himself—turns his whole limitless art into a veil for this one most vital mystery of his class: the economic aspect.  He did not mean to do it a service” (“The Image of Proust” 209-210).

[9] Benjamin attributes this insight to Jean Cocteau (203).

[10] See Henri Bonnet’s Les Amours et la sexualité de Marcel Proust.  Paris: Nizet, 1985.

[11] Note how the language of impressionism is used here to evoke not only the musical “impressionism” of, say, Debussy and Ravel but also the confusion of the senses found in Symbolist poetry.  Furthermore, the statement seems to affirm, somewhat circuitously, Walter Pater’s foundational idea that all the arts strive toward the condition of music….

[12] See Edmund Wilson’s chapter “Marcel Proust” in Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1970-1930.  Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1931 (reprinted, 1984): 132-190.

[13] This is the moment Paul Ricoeur has in mind when he notes, “Ce qui fait la singularité de la Recherche, c’est que l’apprentissage des signes, aussi bien que l’irruption des souvenirs involontaires, offer le profil d’une interminable errance, interrompue, plutôt que couronnée, par la soudaine illumination qui transforme rétrospectivement tout le récit en l’histoire ivisible d’une vocation.  Le temps redevient un enjeu, dès lors qu’il s’agit d’accorder la longueur démesurée de l’apprentissage des signes avec la soudaineté d’une visitation tardivement racontée, qui qualifie rétrospectivement toute la quête comme temps perdu” (195).