From "That New Year's Day was especially painful...." to "...the following afternoon, before dinnertime."
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There are times when Proust reminds me of Samuel Richardson's Pamela, that infamously interminable eighteenth-century epistolary novel that Henry Fielding parodied in Shamela and Joseph Andrews. Not, of course, that I've actually read Pamela, but I've read in it and about it -- including Fielding -- enough to know that it requires a certain patience and persistence to get through a thousand-plus pages about a woman defending her virtue. (Apologies and kudos to those who have read it.) Today is one of those times, with the narrator wallowing in self-inflicted misery about Gilberte's not making the next move to restore their relationship.
He begins by waiting for the New Year's Day letter he expects her to write. And waiting and waiting, having decided it must have been held up in the mail.
Whether it was really likely or not, our desire for such a letter, our need for it, is enough to make us believe it will probably come. The soldier is convinced that an indefinitely extendable period must elapse before he will be killed, the thief before he will be arrested, all of us before we must die. This is the amulet that protects individuals, and sometimes nations, not from danger, but from the fear of danger, or, rather, from belief in danger, which can lead to the braving of real dangers by those who are not brave.
There's enough wisdom and psychological insight in passages like that one to win us over, to keep us going through what might otherwise be sheer ennui -- the kind of insight that, again reportedly, Proust shares with Richardson (despite Fielding's mockery). Proust also makes us realize that what the narrator is going through is a kind of addiction: "I was as distressed as an invalid who has finished his vial of morphine without having another one available." And indeed, the narrator has his own physiological addiction: "My heart palpitations had become so violent that I was ordered to reduce my consumption of caffeine. This having put a stop to them, I began to wonder whether the caffeine might not be partly responsible for the anguish I had felt when I more or less chose to fall out with Gilberte."
Well, yes, but he might as well face it, he's addicted to love. (Catchy line, that.) "I detested the thought that one day I might have these same feelings for someone else, as this deprived me not only of Gilberte, but also of my love and my pain, the very love and pain through which, as I wept, I tried to grasp the real Gilberte, though I was obliged to admit they did not belong to her in particular, but would sooner or later devolve to another woman." He fancies going to Gilberte to tell her that one day he would love another, but decides that this would only show her how great his love for her is now, "and she would have been more irked than every by the sight of me." You're caught in a trap, you can't get out, because you love her too much, baby.
Sorry for the pop song references, but they make a point: What the narrator is going through here is familiarly adolescent posturing, of a different order from the fevered obsession of Swann for Odette. "So, with tears, courage, and consolation, I sacrificed the happiness of being with her to the possibility of one day seeming lovable in her eyes, though knowing it would be a day when the prospect of seeming lovable in her eyes would leave me cold."
We know that the narrator's infatuation is a shallow one because he's so easily distracted from self-pity by the goings-on at the Swanns', particularly by Odette herself, who is constantly upgrading her style:
She was in the habit of maintaining that she would go without bread sooner than be deprived of art and cleanliness, and that she would have be more upset by the burning of the Mona Lisa than by the annihilation of "swarms" of her acquaintance. These conceptions appeared paradoxical to her lady friends, giving her among them the renown of a high-minded woman, and brought the Belgian ambassador to visit her once a week; and in the little world that revolved about her sun, everybody would have been astounded that elsewhere -- at the Verdurins', for example -- she was seen as stupid.
The narrator's observations of the way Odette has changed, even in the eyes of Swann, are another of Proust's violations of point of view -- it's unlikely that the still-naive narrator would have seen so clearly that Swann "could still see her as a Botticelli" while Odette "had no time for Botticelli."
In the evenings, Swann would sometimes murmur to me to look at her pensive hands as she gave to them unawares the graceful, rather agitated movement of the Virgin dipping her quill in the angel's inkwell, before writing in the holy book where the word Magnificat is already inscribed. Then he would add, "Be sure not to mention it to her! One word -- and she'd make sure it wouldn't happen again!"
Similarly, the nuanced analysis of of Odette's clothing -- "One could sense that, for her, dressing was not just a matter of comfort or adornment of the body: whatever she wore encompassed her like the delicate and etherealized epitome of a civilization" -- is a bit beyond the young narrator's sensibility. But why quibble, when it gets us away, if only temporarily, from his musings about Gilberte?
From "One day when Swann ..." to "... Swann was never mentioned again."
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Can this relationship be saved?
Swann arrives at Odette's in the middle of the day, rings the bell, thinks he hears footsteps inside, but no one comes to the door. When he comes back an hour later, Odette tells him she was asleep and by the time she got to the door he was gone. He knows she's lying, but he doesn't accuse her of doing so, "because he thought that, left to herself, Odette would perhaps produce some lie that would be a faint indication of the truth." Her expression as she lies reminds him once again of Botticelli's women, of "their downcast and heartbroken expression which seems to be succumbing beneath the weight of a grief too heavy for them."
When he leaves, she gives him some letters to post for her, one of which is for Forcheville. He mails the others, but takes the one for Forcheville with him and reads it by holding it up to a candle, ingeniously rationalizing "that by not looking, I'm behaving with a lack of delicacy toward Odette, because this is the only way to free myself of a suspicion which is perhaps calumnious for her, which is in any case bound to hurt her, and which nothing would be able to destroy, once the letter was gone." The letter betrays nothing conclusive.
His jealousy, like an octopus that casts a first, then a second, then a third mooring, attached itself solidly first to that time, five o'clock in the afternoon, then to another, then to yet another.
It changes him radically:
And so he who ... had sought out new people, large groups, now appeared unsociable, appeared to be fleeing the company of men as if it had cruelly wounded him. And how could he not be misanthropic, when he saw every man as a possible lover of Odette's.
And he finds himself shut out from the one social group he had relied on, the Verdurins and their "little set." When he discovers that he has not been invited on one of their outings, he is mortified, so visibly that "his coachman looked at him and asked if he was not ill or if there had not been an accident." He sends the coachman away and walks home, railing against the "sublimely bourgeois" Verdurins, and even against Odette: "He could see Odette in clothes far to formal for this country outing, 'because she's so vulgar and worst of all, poor little thing, such a fool!!!'" He professes to be through with the Verdurins for good: "Thank God -- it was high time I stopped condescending to mix in utter promiscuousness with such infamy, such excrement."
The irony, of course, is that the Verdurins are equally glad to rid themselves of Swann, whom Mme. Verdurin calls "deadly dull, stupid, and ill-mannered."
From "And while Mme. Verdurin was saying ..." to "... and painful need to possess him."
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Swann's infatuation with Odette deepens, even though the conniving of the Verdurins to bring them together is sometimes clumsy. The theme from Vinteuil's sonata becomes "like the anthem of their love," which causes him some perturbation because "when Odette, capriciously, had begged him to, he had given up the idea of having some pianist play him the entire sonata.... 'Why would you need the rest?' she said to him. 'This is our piece.'" Proust, who has earlier given us an account of the complexity of musical composition, is obviously demonstrating Odette's shallowness here, as she reduces a sonata to background music.
But then Proust pulls out all stops to alert us to Odette's deficiencies. The neighborhood in which she lives is denoted by its "short streets," the "monotony" of the houses, the "sinister street stall, the historic sign and sordid vestige of a time when these districts were in bad repute." Even her handwriting gives her away:
an affectation of British stiffness imposed an appearance of discipline on ill-formed letters that would perhaps have signified, to less prejudiced eyes, an untidiness of mind, an insufficient education, a lack of frankness and resolution.
And Swann is forced to overlook the deficiencies in her beauty,
to limit what he imagined of her cheeks only to her fresh, pink cheekbones since the rest was so often yellow, languid, sometimes marked with little red specks, distressed him, as it seemed to prove that the ideal is inaccessible and happiness mediocre.
We learn, perhaps with some surprise, that they have not yet slept together. Certainly the Verdurins are surprised: Mme. Verdurin tells her husband and others in the "little circle," "As she hasn't anyone just now, I told her she ought to sleep with him." M. Verdurin, to his credit, sees Odette clearly: "I don't know if you heard what he was declaiming to her the other evening about Vinteuil's sonata; I love Odette with all my heart, but to construct aesthetic theories for her benefit, you'd really have to be quite an imbecile."
Which is pretty much what Swann has become in his infatuation, as he pursues the trail of Odette through the clubs and restaurants of Paris:
Of all the modes by which love is brought into being, of all the agents which disseminate the holy evil, surely one of the most efficacious is this great gust of agitation which now and then sweeps over us. Then our fate is sealed, and the person whose company we enjoy at the time is the one we will love. It is not even necessary for us to have liked him better than anyone else up to then, or even as much. What is necessary is that our predilection for him should become exclusive.
Is it worth pointing out that although this passage is a comment on Swann's passion for Odette, the generalizing pronouns that Proust uses are "him" and not "her"?
Similarly, the nuanced analysis of of Odette's clothing -- "One could sense that, for her, dressing was not just a matter of comfort or adornment of the body: whatever she wore encompassed her like the delicate and etherealized epitome of a civilization" -- is a bit beyond the young narrator's sensibility. But why quibble, when it gets us away, if only temporarily, from his musings about Gilberte?
