Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

PART I

Spoilers

For reasons that will become apparent, my review focuses not on the plot of the novel, but on its style and themes.

If you want to develop your own relationship with these aspects of the novel, then it might be better to turn away now.

This is partly why I paid little attention to the excellent discussion group at Proust 2013, before writing my review.

“Swann’s Way” is one of the most personal books ever written, and I want to define my personal relationship with it, without viewing it through the prism of other people’s insights, words and interpretation, no matter how right they might be and how wrong I might be.

I wanted my reading experience to be intimate and personal, not shared and social. Until now.

To the extent that I might reveal any plot points, I think it’s like telling you that Christ died in the New Testament. (Sorry that I had to spoil the surprise.)

Anyway, this is my warning to the spoiler-sensitive.

Apprehended by the Suspect

I have to confess that, before I actually bought the book and opened it, I regarded Proust with greater apprehension than any other novelist.

18 months before, I overcame the perceived intimidation of “Ulysses” and discovered the joys that had awaited me there.

I felt that my apprehension had cheated me of pleasure. It was like starting a relationship with someone, and discovering that it could have happened six months earlier, if you’d only had the courage.

This time, I was determined not to be put off, so I just dived in when the reading schedule was announced. In retrospect, I think this is the only way to do it.

Jump in, the water’s not as cold as you anticipate. In fact, it’s like a warm bath. You won’t want to get out.

Sentenced to Life

The source of my apprehension was the length of sentences and paragraphs.

People who know me know that I write one sentence paragraphs. No matter what you think of my sentences or paragraphs, nobody has ever had to turn over a few pages to see when they ended.

I haven’t always written this way. When I was in secondary school, I acquired a large vocabulary and a love of etymology (which helps).

We were taught that good writing involved a display of our vocabulary, hopefully correctly used.

I turned my back on this practice, as soon as I was exposed to lecturers with different views at university. Later, newspaper editors drummed single sentence paragraphs into me. Voilà.

In the meantime, I read a lot of Dickens and Hardy, and towards the end of school I became obsessed with Henry James, which resulted in my (unfulfilled) ambition to become a diplomat and work in nineteenth century Europe.

This background is just to show that I am not averse to a long sentence, as long as it’s put to good use.

Ex Cathedra Sentences

Right now, I regard Proust as the greatest ever architect of sentences.

His sentences encapsulate a single, complete thought, like mine attempt, only my thoughts are parish churches and his are cathedrals.

I just want you to nod (or shake, disagree and argue) when you read one of my sentences.

Proust forces your eyes and your mind to follow a sentence as it aspires upwards to, yes, the spire of his vision.

His sentences are not just vehicles of communication, they are architectural constructs that inspire awe and wonder.

They take life and love and build a monument to them that will last through the ages, like architects before him built monuments to the belief in God.

His sentences don’t just perpetrate meaning, they perpetuate meaning and beauty into perpetuity.

Proust mounted the most concerted campaign to take the ephemeral and make it perpetual.

Previously, this task was attempted by painters. Only now, when you inspect the damage done to some of the artworks housed in the Louvre, do you you realise the foresight of his choice of creative vehicle.

People will read Proust until, at least, the temperature reaches Fahrenheit 451.

”From Marvel to Marvel”

If every sentence is a cathedral, and every cathedral is a marvel, then the novel as a whole is a gallery, a galaxy of marvels.

So much so that Genet could witness it and remark:

"Now, I'm tranquil, I know I'm going to go from marvel to marvel."

I cite Genet, not just to mention the marvel, but to highlight the tranquil.

Proust’s sentences calmed me, as in a warm bath or a gentle sea. He immersed me in a sea of tranquility, a “Mare Tranquillitatis”.

Proust lulled me. First, he rocked me, then he lulled me. Ultimately, he sang me a lullaby.

Proust engendered tranquility in me.

Observations of a Ladies’ Man

I was worried that I would react aggressively to Proust.

How would I, a male, of sorts, react to a novel that apparently lacked a hero, that lacked action, that lacked a battle and a victory, that lacked a seduction and a conquest?

How would I react to Proust’s effeminacy? His apparent insight into the feminine and oversight of the masculine?

Moreover, was Proust just a gossip, to quote another anecdote of Edmund White, a “Yenta” (the Yiddish word for a female gossip) ?

Proust was in a unique position to document the affairs of a bourgeoisie that didn’t have to work, that had inherited wealth and could survive by the management of its securities and investments.

In the words of Veblen, it was a leisure class, and Proust’s mission was to document its leisure activities.

In “Swann’s Way”, the chief leisure activity is love and sex.

Would it be fair to say that most men wouldn’t be able to write a 440 page novel about love and/or sex?

Or that the sex life of many men might not even have added up to 440 minutes during their entire lifetime?

To that extent, Proust understands love and sex like only a woman can.

Observations of a Man's Lady

If I am correct in this interpretation, then Proust deserves a large audience of women.

Yet, what puzzles me is that Proust, at least in this volume, only presents the male’s perspective, never the female’s.

I read the novel as a male, and during “Swann in Love” I inevitably identified with Charles Swann.

All the way through, I reacted, “That is so me! (I hope none of my friends guess.)”

However, how is a woman to react to “Swann in Love”?

Do they, like me, identify with Swann? Or do they identify with Odette?

Is there an antagonism between the genders? Does Proust call upon us to take sides? Or does he take the side of love?

Is the gender of each lover irrelevant, as long as there is love on the agenda?

Must our perspective on love have a gender? Isn’t it enough to engender love?

Anyway, I wanted to know what was going on in Odette’s mind.

As a first person narrator, “Marcel” knew far too much about Swann’s inner life and too little about Odette’s.

I wanted (want) to know what women think.

Is that so unreasonable? Or is it too reasonable?

PART II

Helmet Cam-bray

The first chapter, Part I of "Combray", is 49 pages long and deals with the narrator's childhood in a home that also houses his grandmother and two aunts.

Over the last couple of years, there have been a few books, the most obvious being Murakami's "1Q84", where I started to use the term "helmet cam" to describe the narrative.

Although it was presumably constructed and edited by an author, it still gave the impression that a helmet cam was seeing everything in front of it, without any editorial cutting or rearrangement.

It saw everything, it recorded everything, it passed on everything to us.

Normally, a helmet cam cannot see the face of the person wearing it. Thus, it sees everything that the person sees from their own perspective.

In "Swann's Way", the verbal description is so vivid and precise that we see the narrator himself.

The Subject is also the Object.

The Subject is its own Object. At least until he discovers M. Swann.

Up until then, the narrator is like a juvenile crustacean, slowly constructing a shell, but not quite there yet.

He is sensitive, even over-sensitive, soft, fleshy, pink, much to the masculine disgust of his father and the embarrassment of his mother.

Yet the helmet cam hones in on every element of sensitivity and emerging sensibility.

He is almost too sensitive for this world, yet he is imminently sensitive to its charms.

He does nothing but observe, imagine, remember, write.

Like a helmet cam, however, he gives the impression that neither he nor anybody else has edited him.

This is the narrator's mind recording time and place with nobody pressing the pause button.

Sentences and paragraphs are irrelevant to this narrative.

Each paragraph is as long as an attention span needs to be.

Only when his attention falters does the narrator need to pause and restart.

Each paragraph is almost like a can of film.

It captures life until there is no film left. Then you remove the film and put in a new reel. And we're off again on another flight of the mind.

The Awakening of the Author as a Young Man

The first section of the novel starts in bed and finishes in bed, a cocoon, a comfort zone.

The narrator is a child, still very much attached to his mother and the comfort of her love, and so is prone to separation anxiety.

His experience of life depends solely on her, and is therefore restricted by her, a woman.

Only if he overcomes his anxiety can he venture out into the world, in order to discover the love of others.

This is a period of intense sensations and associations.

It’s here that Proust develops his concept of involuntary memory, an association of memories with physical sensations common to the past and the present.

The act of soaking a petite madeleine in a cup of lime-blossom tea evokes powerful memories:

"I feel something quiver in me, shift, try to rise, something that seems to have been unanchored at a great depth...and suddenly the memory appeared...the immense edifice of memory."

The narrator describes the sensation as a "delicious pleasure".

It renders "the vicissitudes of life unimportant", the brevity of time 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..."

Much of the analysis of Proust focuses on the mechanism of involuntary memory.

However, it’s equally important, if not more so, to recognise the analogy with the workings of love.

Love is an intensity of sensation. We detect everything so much more sensitively. We preserve it and we recall it. We remember all of the detail of our relationship: where we met our lover, our first words, our first kiss, our first correspondence.

So when Proust describes madeleines and tea, he also adverts to the precious essence of love.

He is not just writing about the psychology of perception and memory, he is investigating, in a way nobody had done before him, the essence of the gaze, desire, lust and love.

Each moment that is recalled by involuntary memory is a moment in love.

The Semiotics of Desire

Over the course of the novel, both Proust and the narrator assemble a list of qualities that recognise or recall or "magnetise" desire.

The narrator refers not just to madeleines and tea, but to light, perfume (or fragrance) and colour.

To this list, Swann adds music. He is captivated by a piece of music by the (fictitious) composer, Vinteuil.

Every time he hears it, he is reminded of his love for Odette.

In the last section, the narrator summarises:

"From then on, only sunlight, perfumes, colours seemed to me of any value; for this alternation of images had brought about a change in direction in my desire, and – as abrupt as those that occur now and then in music – a complete change of tone in my sensibility...

"For often, in one season, we find a day that has strayed from another and that immediately evokes its particular pleasures, lets us experience them, makes us desire them, and interrupts the dreams we were having by placing, earlier or later than was its turn, this leaf detached from another chapter, in the interpolated chapter of Happiness."

Later, the narrator refers to "the highest sort of immediate happiness, the happiness of love".

To be in love is to be happy. To love is human, to be loved is divine.

These ideas are collected together in the discussion of place names:

"I needed only, to make them reappear, to pronounce those names – Balbec, Venice, Florence – in the interior of which had finally accumulated the desire inspired in me by the places they designated.

"Words present us with little pictures of things, clear and familiar, like those that are hung on the walls of schools to give children an example of what a workbench is, a bird, an anthill, things conceived of as similar to all others of the same sort.

"But names present a confused image of people – and of towns, which they accustom us to believe are individual, unique like people – an image which derives from them, from the brightness or darkness of their tone, the colour with which it is painted uniformly, like one of those posters, entirely blue or entirely red, in which, because of the limitations of the process used or by the whim of the designer, not only the sky and the sea are blue or red, but the boats, the church, the people in the streets."

PART III

Swann’s Way

In the first section of the novel, Proust offers the narrator two alternative methods of traversing the countryside: the Meseglise way and the Guermantes way.

These "ways" come to symbolize the alternative ways of approaching life and love:

"...so the Meseglise 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 vicissitudes, the richest in episodes, I mean our intellectual life."

Much has been said about the alternative translations of the novel and its title.

However, for me, “Swann’s Way” doesn’t just represent a viable linguistic option, it hints at the way that the tale of Swann’s love in the heart of the novel represents a way or method of loving that becomes an option or choice available to the narrator.

In short, the novel is concerned with Swann’s way of loving and what can be learned from it.

I don’t think this is communicated by a translation of the title as "The Way by Swann’s", which seems to focus on the geographical path, rather than the metaphysical one.

Swann in Love

The centerpiece of the novel is the second section, “Swann in Love”.

While narrated by the same character (Marcel?), it betrays a wealth of personal detail about Swann’s mental processes that only a third person omniscient narrator could be familiar with.

This quibble aside, the section is probably my favourite literary analysis of any particular character trait, in this case, the capacity for love and jealousy, which in Proust’s hands are flipsides of the same two-sided coin.

We witness the relationship between Swann and Odette transition between first meeting, flirtation, lust, consummation, self-doubt, suspension, reconciliation, suspicion, jealousy, oscillation, irritation, agitation, indifference, torment, unhappiness, despair, estrangement and cessation.

She has a reputation as a courtesan or kept woman, yet Swann, just as much a philanderer, falls madly in love with her. In the words of the narrator in a different context (that of Gilberte) , they are “sister souls”.

Witness what the equally flirtatious Odette says in her letters:

"My dearest, my hand is trembling so badly I can hardly write."(This letter, Swann keeps in a drawer with a dried chrysanthemum flower.)

"If you had forgotten your heart here too, I would not have let you take it back."

"At whatever hour of the day or night you need me, send word and my life will be yours to command."

”Making Cattleyas”

Proust is relatively coy about the physical consummation of the relationship.

It becomes sexual, although we are not told how soon or for how long.

Nor are we told why the two lovers fall out, only that Swann starts to feel jealous of other real or imagined companions.

Just as words and sensations have significance for the characters, Swann and Odette develop a code for their assignations.

They describe sex as “making cattleyas”, an expression which refers to the orchids that were present at the time of their first mutual seduction.

So, ultimately, it is clear that we are dealing with not just love, but love and sex intertwined.

Love and Jealousy

Proust displays a remarkable insight into the flip sides of love and jealousy:

"...what we believe to be our love, or our jealousy, is not one single passion, continuous and indivisible. They are composed of an infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, which are ephemeral but by their uninterrupted multitude give the impression of continuity, the illusion of unity.

"The life of Swann’s love, the faithfulness of his jealousy, were formed of the death, the faithlessness, of numberless desires, numberless doubts, all of which had Odette as their object…

"The presence of Odette continued to sow Swann’s heart with affection and suspicion by turns."

Love is Space and Time Measured by the Heart

Proust persists with the language of involuntary memory throughout the novel, only, he extends it to both time and space.

Time passes, and the reality we once had no longer exists.

Similarly, "the places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience."

It is the task of memory to revive time and space (and therefore love) that might otherwise be lost.

Our minds work like a filing cabinet of memories. Each memory is:

"...a thin slice among contiguous impressions which formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years."

Conversely, time and space are lost, to the extent that they are not preserved by memory.

Just as “Ulysses” is Joyce’s attempt to record and preserve an Odyssey through 20th century Dublin, “Swann’s Way” is Proust’s attempt to perpetuate moments in love, so that we who follow him may better understand love and, in turn, experience better love, as well as perpetuate and remember our love.



SOUNDTRACK:

Art of Noise – "(Moments in) Love"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=co-whU...

Erik Satie - "Trois Gymnopédies"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7DBoi...

Francis Poulenc - "Melancholie"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OG_pMH...

Claude Debussy - "Golliwogg's Cakewalk"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMrdhg...

Gabriel Fauré - "Pavane Op.50" (Du coté chez Proust)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTiOut...

Cesar Franck - "The Little Phrase"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKxXWP...

Jorge Arriagada - "Sonate de Vinteuil"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXD-37...



HAIKU AND VERSE:

On Reading Proust, Alone, Rising I

Fancy strays alone,
In ecstasy, inhaling
The scent of lilac.


On Reading Proust, Alone, Rising II

I read not alone,
But thrilled by a creature of
A different kingdom.


On Reading Proust, Alone, Rising III

Reading, reverie:
Occupations that demand
Constant solitude.


For more verse inspired by Proust, see here:

http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/3...


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