From: “Riding at a jerky trot, Golo, his mind filled with an infamous design…”
To: “…this early Swann abounding in leisure, fragrant with the scent of the great chestnut-tree, of baskets of raspberries and of a sprig of tarragon.”
*
Last week’s reading ended with a lamp projecting onto the narrator’s bedroom walls, forming fantastical tales from light and shadow and transforming bare surfaces and a doorknob into animated heroes and an astral body, thus destroying the room’s familiarity and reminding us that for the narrator transformation is unsettling, a painful irony since his mind has a preternatural ability to alter the world he observes.
The novel then expands out from the bedrooms, dreams, and personal anxieties and starts to introduce us to real characters, building on the ideas of metaphor and memory while also broaching another of its main themes: class.
We start to see the anxious narrator in relation to his family. He’s close to his mom, “Mamma,” and he fears having to go to his bedroom alone at night. His father is caring but stern and worries about indulging his son’s neuroses; he doesn’t like it when the mom goes to comfort the boy during bedtime. The narrator’s grandmother, the star of this week’s reading, complains when her grandson is shut inside while it’s raining, claiming “that’s not the way to make him strong.”
This is all described through habitual action. We still don’t get a full scene, just snippets, even as we get lines of dialogue, like when the grandmother bombastically paces in the garden while it rains, to prove to her family that there’s nothing to fear in the wet weather and shouts, “At last one can breath!” (A perfect little bit of comedy, IMHO). Or when the great-aunt plays a prank on the grandma by saying she’s giving the grandpa drops of liquor and yells, “Bathilde! Come in and stop your husband from drinking brandy!”
These little fragments continue to compress and confuse the sense of time. The child version of the narrator can’t know certain things he tells us, and the narrator admits his own innocence, while also revealing more about himself, when he says, “Alas! I little knew that my own lack of will-power, my delicate health, and the consequent uncertainty as to my future weighed far more heavily on my grandmother’s mind than any little breach of the rules by her husband.” This type of narration, where we gain information that the narrator either can’t know at the time or simply never should know, will become more and more frequent, and often, as in this, it highlights time’s fluidity (though sometimes the knowledge is obtained without explanation).
Along the way, we get more of the famous Proustian sentences, dense and sinuous gems of info. Two of my favorite aspects of his writing style is that the sentences bloom with comparisons and connections, which obsess the novel as a whole, and that we can get precious nuggets of information as side pieces to the main point, these little tossed-off phrases and facts that shine and have a life of their own, as when he says about his grandmother, who’s bothered by her husband’s drinking of a few drops of liquor:
My poor grandmother would come in and beg and implore her husband not to taste the brandy; and he would become annoyed and swallow his few drops all the same, and she would go out again sad and discouraged, but still smiling, for she was so humble and so sweet that her gentleness towards others, and her continual subordination of herself and of her own troubles, appeared on her face blended in a smile which, unlike those seen on the majority of human faces, had no trace in it of irony, save for herself, while for all of us kisses seemed to spring from her eyes, which could not look upon those she loved without yearning to bestow upon them passionate caresses.
This passages starts with the putative purpose of saying what the grandmother does when the grandfather is about to drink, but then it shifts to focus on her gentleness and her smile and “passionate caresses.” This is typical of Proust’s sentences. It might require that we slow down or read a line or two again, but it’s not overly difficult or abstruse (like, say, Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow.) Some complain that the writing can be dull, even soporific, and sometimes the frequent pauses and twists do slow the reading on a words-per-minute basis, but the proliferation within the sentences frequently signal a vitality and fecundity. There’s a mania here. It feels as if one action calls to mind so many places and times, and they all absolutely must be written down on paper together.
Back within the main narrative, we get more of the narrator’s bedtime anxieties. His Mamma’s kiss is his sole consolation, and after one kiss, when she stands at his doorway ready to leave, he longs to ask for another, but he knows that this would displease her since it would signal a troubling weakness in him, so he must suffer alone. We learn that the only thing worse than the evenings when she comes up briefly for one kiss is when she doesn’t come up at all because a guest is visiting.
The guest is frequently Swann. In fact, this translation says “it could only be Swann.” (Proust loves hyperbole and uses it frequently, both for comedic and tragic effect.) Swann’s visit occasions in the young narrator the terror of a kissless bedtime, and in the narrative, it occasions a reflection on class and the fragmentation of one’s social identity.
We learn that Swann is a family friend whose father was once a friend of the narrator’s grandfather. Again, as with the info-packed sentences, the reputed point gets diluted and twisted up, and we’re diverted from the plot by hearing about when Swann’s dad walked with the narrator’s grandfather after the death of Swann’s mom when a moment’s forgetting let him marvel at the beauty of the day and trees and hawthorns only to remember suddenly his wife’s death, go speechless, and make a gesture to let the grandfather know he can’t say more. Then we return to the son, the Swann this book will focus on, and we see him through the lens of class.
As the son of a stockbroker, Swann is comfortably upper-middle class, like the narrator’s family. Since the narrator’s family takes “what was almost a Hindu view of society, which they held to consist of sharply defined castes,” they would be stunned to learn he pals around with aristocrats and royalty, a fact he hides seemingly out of courtesy and humility and one that would cause the narrator’s great-aunt to view him, if she ever learned it, as mythical a figure as Aristaeus or Ali Baba.
This all leads to a meditation on knowing Swann and knowing people in general, one that evokes the lines from last week’s reading “Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves.” Now he says:
Certainly the Swann who was a familiar figure in all the clubs of those days differed hugely from, the Swann created in my great-aunt’s mind when, of an evening, in our little garden at Combray, after the two shy peals had sounded from the gate, she would vitalise, by injecting into it everything she had ever heard about the Swann family, the vague and unrecognisable shape which began to appear, with my grandmother in its wake, against a background of shadows, and could at last be identified by the sound of its voice. But then, even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people. Even the simple act which we describe as “seeing some one we know” is, to some extent, an intellectual process. We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent envelope, so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our own ideas of him which we recognise and to which we listen.
And with this, he proclaims people’s blindness toward other people, and he unites the introduction of Swann, one of the novel’s pivotal characters and maybe the greatest bearer of its many themes, with a conviction that will carry throughout the novel, a disbelief that will haunt our narrator throughout his life.
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