Day Seventy-Nine: The Guermantes Way, pp. 137-148

From "The weather had become milder...." to "...joined the banks of the Vivonne." 

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The narrator begins to go out for his daily walks again, inevitably crossing paths with Mme. de Guermantes, whose faint smile of greeting he sometimes perversely ignores. When Saint-Loup comes to Paris for a brief visit of a few hours, he surprises the narrator, "'Oriane's not at all nice,' he told me, without realizing he was going back on his previous words. 'She's not the Oriane she was, they've gone and changed her. It's not worth your bothering with her, I promise you.'" Aside from the fact that the narrator has previously tried to conceal from Saint-Loup his romantic interest in the Duchesse, this is a little odd because there's no mention of the promise to write to her about letting him see her paintings by Elstir. Instead, Saint-Loup offers to introduce him to his cousin who is married to the Duc de Poictiers, saying that she's younger and more intelligent than the Duchesse. There's some indication that Saint-Loup and Mme. de Guermantes may have had a falling-out over the Dreyfus case, because he indicates to the narrator that Mme. de Poictiers, though not a Dreyfusard, has shown signs of open-mindedness about the case.

Then we learn from the narrator's father that M. de Norpois is a friend of Mme. de Villeparisis and has suggested that the narrator "would be able to meet interesting people at her gatherings." Norpois also told him that Mme. de Villeparisis "keeps a Bureau of Wit," without elaborating on what that might mean. "As for myself," the narrator says, "lacking any very clear picture of this Bureau of Wit, it would not have come as any great surprise to find the old lady from Balbec installed behind a bureau, as in fact I eventually did." 

That the Dreyfus case has divided society is demonstrated to the narrator's father when Mme. Sazerat, a Dreyfusard, meets his greeting with "the sort of acknowledgment that is dictated by politeness toward someone who has done something disgraceful" and when she smiles at the narrator's mother "with vague melancholy, as one smiles at a playmate from one's childhood with whom all connection has been severed because she has lived a debauched life, married a jailbird or, worse still, a divorced man." 

Meanwhile, Saint-Loup returns to Paris to see his mistress and invites the narrator to join him. On his way to Saint-Loup's for the trip to the mistress's home on the outskirts of the city, the narrator runs into Legrandin, whom he has not seen since the days when the family used to visit Combray regularly. Legrandin remarks with his usual candor on the narrator's fashionable dress, and says, "Your ability to stay for a single moment in the nauseating atmosphere of the salons -- it would suffocate me -- is its own condemnation, its own damnation of your future in the eyes of the Prophet.... Ah, those aristocrats! The Terror has a lot to answer for; it should have guillotined every one of them." He offers to send him his latest novel: "You will not care for it; it is not deliquescent enough, not fin-de-siècle enough for you; it is too frank, too honest. What you need is Bergotte -- you've admitted it -- gamy fare for the jaded palates of refined voluptuaries." 

Nevertheless, the narrator parts from Legrandin "without any particular ill-feeling for him."

Day Seventy-Three: The Guermantes Way, pp. 61-75

From "I really was in love with..." to "...on the corner of an unpacked trunk." 

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"I really was in love with Mme de Guermantes." Oh dear, that means the narrator is about to get whiny and weepy and self-indulgent, and to start going on at length about minutiae. And so he does, with four-page meditation on sound occasioned by the noise of burning logs shifting in a fireplace and the ticking of a watch (pp. 67-71). True, these observations are related to the novel's constant observations on the relationship of sensory experience to memory, but the impatient reader (that would be me) is tempted to skim. 

He knows, of course, that his love for Mme. de Guermantes is impossible: 

I had, alas, in the real world, chosen to love the very woman whose person possibly combined the greatest number of different advantages there are, in whose eyes I therefore could not hope to cut any sort of figure; for she was richer than the richest people outside the nobility, not to mention the personal charm that placed her in the eye of fashion and made her into a sort of queen among all others.

And so he considers ways of getting himself under control, including taking a trip. So he orders Françoise to pack, and then decides to tell her to unpack. "Françoise, borrowing the expression from her daughter's vocabulary, remarked that I was 'crazy.'" Finally, he decides to visit Saint-Loup at his garrison, not least because Saint-Loup is related to the Duchesse. 

But when he gets there, there's a problem about where to stay. Saint-Loup has just returned from a leave, so he can't go off with the narrator somewhere. He recommends a hotel, but he knows how sensitive the narrator is about strange rooms. Finally, he arranges with his captain to allow the narrator to stay in his room for one night. 

"And he has given his permission?" I cried. 
"He has no objection at all." 
"Oh! I adore him!" 
"No, that would be going too far."

Indeed. Actually, the reason for Saint-Loup's quashing of the narrator's enthusiasm is that the captain is "the biggest fool who's ever walked the earth." Saint-Loup prefers his major, whom all his fellow soldiers dislike "because he's a Freemason and doesn't go to confession." Saint-Loup, the narrator notes, had "the social theories of his teachers and the worldly prejudices of his relatives, unwittingly [combining] a democratic love of humanity with a contempt for the nobility created by the Empire." 


But this glimpse of garrison life and its social hierarchies is unfortunately brief. The narrator's attention is turned to Saint-Loup's portrait of the Duchesse and to the view from his window. And after the night with Saint-Loup, he is forced to stay with the hotel, where he sinks into his usual mope: "I had to face the world with a 'self' that I encountered only after years of absence, but which was always the same, the self that had never grown up since Combray, since my first arrival at Balbec, weeping inconsolably on the corner of an unpacked trunk."

 

Day Thirty-Two: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 30-44

From "The cold beef with carrots..." to "...foreshadow what was to happen after his death?"

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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 Odette 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.

Day Thirty-One: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 3-30

From "When it was first suggested..."to "'...Of course I'm not disappointed!'"

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The narrator's comment in Swann's Way about "the mystery of personality" seems to apply particularly well here at the opening of the second volume, in which we learn that the foolish Dr. Cottard we met at the Verdurins in the first volume has now become "a scientific man of some renown," and that Swann is now regarded as "nothing but a vulgar swank," at least by the narrator's father. "This statement of my father's may require a few words of explanation," the narrator interjects, "as there may be some who remember Cottard as a mediocrity and Swann as the soul of discretion."

Both men have reinvented themselves -- in Swann's case an adaptation to "a new position for himself, ... far below the one he had formerly occupied, but suited to the wife with whom he must now share it." The narrator notes that there is some anti-Semitism in the current view of the sudden vulgarity of "this man (who in former days, and even now, could show exquisite tact in not advertising an invitation to Twickenham or Buckingham Palace) braying out the fact that the wife of an undersecretary's undersecretary had returned Mme. Swann's visit."

In his gushing ways with these new friends and his boastful citing of their exploits, Swann was like the great artist who takes up cooking or gardening late in life and who, though modest enough to be untroubled by criticism of his masterpieces, cannot bear to hear faint praise of his recipes or flower beds.

As for Cottard, now "Professor Cottard," "it is possible to be unread, and to like making silly puns, while having a special gift that outweighs any general culture, such as the gift of the great strategist or the great clinician." And Cottard has apparently emerged as a gifted diagnostician. The narrator observes that "the nature we display in the second part of our life may not always be, though it often is, a growth from or a stunting of our first nature, an exaggeration or attenuation of it. It is at times an inversion of it, a turning inside out." So Cottard has shaved his beard and mustache and cultivated a cold and taciturn manner -- except when he's with the "little circle" at the Verdurins "where he instinctively became himself again."

These transformations of personality are, I think, central to the novel, which is not only a search for lost time but often also a search for the lost self that time has carried away. In his introduction, Grieve notes how often Proust switches point of view from the narrator as a young man to the narrator in his later years, sometimes to the confusion of the reader. And that Proust doesn't specify the narrator's age, so that we're never quite sure how old he is at any given time in his remembrances of things past. I think this is key to Proust's examination of memory. We assume that the narrator is a mature man, telling us about what it was like to be a child anxiously awaiting his mother's goodnight kiss, but in telling us the story he becomes that child again, giving us more than any mere scouring of our memories could really supply. We are what we create ourselves to be.

But we are not the sole creators of ourselves. One theme apparent in the opening pages of this volume is the influence of others, not only family and friends, but of society as a whole in shaping the person. Both Swann and Cottard are who are they have become because they are responding to the expectations of others. And the pompous Marquis de Norpois, the narrator's father's new friend, holds sway over the narrator's parents.

By strengthening in my father's mind the high opinion he had of M. de Norpois, and thereby also fostering in him a higher opinion of himself, she felt she was fulfilling the wifely duty of making life sweet for her husband, just as she did when she saw to the excellence of the cooking and the quietness of the servants.

M. de Norpois also plays a key role in fulfilling the narrator's desire to see the actress La Berma. Although the doctor has forbidden him from going to the theater, fearing that the overexcitement would be hazardous to his health, the narrator, under the influence of the praise of the writer Bergotte (in the little book given him by Gilberte), continues to plead for the opportunity: "By day and night my mind was haunted by the knowledge of the divine Beauty which her acting would be bound to reveal." And it is de Norpois who sanctions his going to see La Berma perform in two acts from Phèdre.

But the experience is disillusioning, not at all the transport that the narrator has been expecting: "I sat there and listened to her as I might have read Phèdre, or as though at that moment Phèdre herself was saying the things I was hearing, without La Berma's talent seeming to add anything at all to them.... [S]he blurred the whole speech into a toneless recitative, blunting the keen edges of contrasts which any semi-competent performer, even a girl in a school production, could hardly have failed to bring out." When the applause breaks out, he is momentarily lifted out of his disappointment:

I let the cheap wine of this popular enthusiasm go to my head. Even so, once the curtain had fallen, I was aware of being disappointed that the enjoyment I had longed for had not been greater, but also of wishing that, such as it was, it would continue, and that I was not obliged to leave behind me forever, as I walked out of the auditorium, this life of the theater in which I had just shared for a few hours.

We've seen the narrator disappointed before: in his first sight of the Duchesse de Guermantes. But he conquered that disappointment quickly, overcoming the ordinariness of her appearance by dwelling on the cultural and historical significance of the family she represents. Now he hopes that de Norpois will illuminate him on the excellence of La Berma. But he receives only platitudes and received opinions from the Marquis:

"I have never seen Mme. Berma in Phèdre, but I have been told she is outstanding. It must, of course, have been quite a thrill for you.

M. de Norpois, being incomparably cleverer than I was, must be in possession of the truth that I had been unable to derive from La Berma's acting.... Concentrating my whole attention on my impressions, which were hopelessly confused, with no thought of shining or finding favor, but in the hope of gaining from him the truth I sought, I made no effort to substitute set phrases for the words that failed me, I made no sense, and eventually, so as to have him say straight out what was so admirable about La Berma, I owned up to my disappointment.

"What's that?" exclaimed my father, appalled at the poor impression my ineptness might make on M. de Norpois. "How can you say you didn't enjoy it? Your grandmother told us you didn'[t miss a word, that you just stared and stared at her, that nobody else in the whole auditorium lapped it up the way you did!"

"Well, yes, I was listening as hard as I could, to see what was so great about her. I mean, she's very good..."

"Well, then, if she's very good, what more do you want?"

And after de Norpois delivers himself of some more inanities about the reputation of La Berma, the narrator finally concludes, "He's right, you know! ... What a lovely voice, what simple costumes! How clever of her to think of doing Phèdre! Of course I'm not disappointed!"

On the one hand we have here an amusing but fairly commonplace bit of satire on bourgeois received opinions and their potentially deleterious effect on the bright and inquisitive mind of an original and aspiring artist. But what makes this more than just a comic moment is the way the experience of disillusionment works on the narrator. Just a few pages earlier, his father has touted de Norpois as an authority on becoming a published writer. We have learned that the narrator inherited Aunt Léonie's estate, so he has the wherewithal to make his way in whatever career he chooses. So his father urges him to show de Norpois something he has written. What he produces is the piece about the three steeples that he wrote on their ride back from a walk on the Guermantes way. "I had written it in a state of exhilaration which I felt it must convey to anyone who read it. But my exhilaration must have failed to touch M. de Norpois; and he handed it back to me without a word."

What we have here is failure to communicate.
 

Day Fourteen: Swann's Way, pp. 169-191

From "If it was fairly simple ..." to "... the raised finger of the dawn."

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The descriptions of the walks along the Vivonne on "the Guermantes way" are some of the most gorgeous writing so far in the novel, and could be celebrated for that alone. But one senses that Proust writes nothing without intent. One intent is to establish the centrality of the Guermantes, who have only been alluded to so far, to the history of Combray. And another is to comment on the importance of the place the narrator loves so well in his development as an artist. The two fuse together in this passage:

I dreamed that Mme. de Guermantes had summoned me there, smitten with a sudden fancy for me; all day long she would fish for trout with me. And in the evening, holding me by the hand as we walked past the little gardens of her vassals, she would show me the flowers that leaned their violet and red stems along the low walls, and would teach me their names. She would make me tell her the subjects of the poems that I intended to compose. And these dreams warned me that since I wanted to be a writer someday, it was time to find out what I meant to write.

But immediately the narrator is stricken with a kind of artistic impotence, an inability to "find a subject in which I could anchor some infinite philosophical meaning."

And then Mme. de Guermantes herself attends church in Combray, and the narrator gets his first, somewhat disillusioning glimpse of her: "a blond lady with a large nose, piercing blue eyes, a full tie of smooth, shiny new mauve silk, and a little pimple at the corner of her nose." But he overcomes the ordinariness of her appearance and imbues her with the cultural and historical significance that had informed his earlier imaginings.

And immediately I loved her, because if it may sometimes be enough for us to fall in love with a woman if she looks at us with contempt, as I had thought Mlle. Swann had done, and if we think she will never belong to us, sometimes, too, it may be enough if she looks at us with kindness, as Mme. de Guermantes was doing, and if we think she may someday belong to us.

In the meantime, his frustration at his inability to convert his sensations into something of literary import continues, to the point that he is ready to give up his vocation as a writer.

But the moral duty imposed on me by the impressions I received from form, fragrance, or color was so arduous -- to try to perceive what was concealed behind them -- that I would soon look for excuses that would allow me to save myself from this effort and spare myself this fatigue.

Fortunately, he has an epiphany on a ride back from their walk along the Guermantes way. He sees three church steeples that change position as the carriage moves along and which change colors as the sun sets. And his pleasure in the sight of them manifests itself "in the form of words that gave me pleasure." So he asks the doctor in whose carriage he is riding for a piece of paper and a pencil and writes the words down. "I felt that it had ... perfectly relieved me of those steeples and what they had been hiding behind them."

And so it was from the Guermantes way that I learned to distinguish those states of mind that follow one another in me, during certain periods, and that even go so far as to share out each day among them, on returning to drive out the other, with the punctuality of a fever; contiguous, but so exterior to one another, so lacking means of communication among them, that I can no longer comprehend, no longer even picture to myself in one, what I desired, or feared, or accomplished in the other.

And so the Méségliese 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 sudden reversals of fortune, the richest in episodes, I mean our intellectual life.

That, in a nutshell, is why the narrator goes in search of lost time. (And, incidentally, why Scott Moncrieff's Shakespeare allusion, "Remembrance of Things Past," is so misleading a title, turning the narrator's quest into a passive and nostalgic exercise.)

When on summer evenings the melodious sky growls like a wild animal and everyone grumbles at the storm, it is because of the Méségliese way that I am the only one in ecstasy inhaling, through the noise of the falling rain, the smell of invisible, enduring lilacs.

This is the quest for the incidents in the "intellectual life" that are bound up in the particularities of sensory experience.