The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust - Adam A. Watt [31]
After this unsettling swirl, we return to the Narrator’s early childhood at Combray when the dread of bedtime was his primary fixation. His family seek to distract him with a magic lantern, a projector perched atop a lamp whose light casts images from slides on to his bedroom walls. This is the Narrator’s first experience of the transformative and moral aspects of storytelling: the lantern brings lively colour and movement to his room’s normally unremarkable walls; the story that flows across them is that of Geneviève de Brabant (a distant relative, we later learn, of Mme de Guermantes), sought out and abducted by the wicked Golo, whose crimes drive the sensitive young Narrator ‘to a more than ordinarily scrupulous examination of [his] own conscience’ (SW, 10; 18).
On the evenings when Charles Swann came to visit, the Narrator’s mother’s kiss would be withheld, leaving him inconsolable in his room, tortured by the sounds of his parents’ conversation with Swann, ‘the unwitting author of [his] sufferings’ (SW, 50; 43). Thus Swann is introduced as a barrier to the Narrator’s happiness. He is, of course, far more (Samuel Beckett described Swann as ‘the corner-stone of the entire structure’1), but when we later learn quite how much Swann’s own existence was blighted by despair relating to his love affair with Odette, it seems apt that his first role should be as a harbinger of suffering.
Because Swann’s father during his lifetime was fond of the Narrator’s grandfather, Swann still visits the family at Combray. Swann père was a stockbroker; Swann fils, however, is ‘one of the most distinguished members of the Jockey Club, a particular friend of the Comte de Paris and of the Prince of Wales, and one of the men most sought after in the aristocratic world of the Faubourg Saint-Germain’ (SW, 16; 22). He is discreet about his sparkling social connections, far-removed from the horizons of the Narrator’s great aunts, but they suspect nothing since, as the Narrator puts it ‘middle-class people in those days took what was almost a Hindu view of society, which they held to consist of sharply defined castes … from which nothing … could extract you and translate you to a superior caste’ (SW, 16; 22–3). As the novel develops, individuals of almost every social station voice suspicion of arrivistes, and events show that marriage can elevate individuals to a new social circle but cannot guarantee their acceptance. At the same time, however, the Search tells of many movements up and down the social ladder that contradict any notion of rigidly governed social boundaries. Odette (whose marriage to Swann attracts disapproval from the Narrator’s bourgeois family and Swann’s aristocratic acquaintances alike), Bloch, the Verdurins and the Narrator, amongst others, ultimately far surpass their class origins. Their mobility reflects the shifting social morphology of the Third Republic.
A key episode of ‘Combray I’ is the account of the night the Narrator’s mother stays in his room. Desperate for one more kiss, he waits for Swann’s departure then throws himself at his mother when she comes upstairs. As he waits, his heart beats ‘with terror and joy’ (SW, 40; 37) and the tension between these emotions underpins the scene that follows. Everything he had hoped for – his mother’s