The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust - Adam A. Watt [34]
The lesson of reality not measuring up to the Narrator’s anticipations, learnt on his first encounter with Mme de Guermantes, is repeatedly replayed with variations throughout the Search (in Within a Budding Grove, for example, with the Narrator’s first, long-awaited trip to the theatre and when he first meets Bergotte after long admiring his books). ‘Combray’ yields much more than disappointment, however: many happy, instructive hours are spent reading; the joy of contemplating the flowering hawthorns is not something the Narrator fully understands, but it sharpens his alertness to the interaction of the senses and the remarkable complexity of the simplest of natural phenomena. His inability to articulate the pleasure he draws from his engagement with nature when out walking illuminates for him the ‘discordance between our impressions and their habitual expression’ (SW, 185–6; 129). The consequent realization that he must therefore ‘endeavour to see more clearly into the sources of [his] rapture’ (SW, 186; 129) effectively formulates the Narrator’s central goal in the novel. We witness his earliest attempt at fulfilling it in the prose fragment composed after travelling in Doctor Percepied’s carriage and experiencing the shifting perspectives on the bell towers of the Martinville and Vieuxvicq churches afforded him by the winding road and his elevated position next to the coachman. Through the use of metaphor and analogy he seeks to account for the mysterious pleasure of his experience but his natural indolence and lack of self-belief mean that after this isolated moment his career as a writer stalls.
‘Swann in Love’ tells of Swann’s affair with Odette de Crécy. We meet the ‘little clan’ of regulars at the house of M. and Mme Verdurin, whose climb up the social ladder is an important strand of the novel’s subsequent development. Odette does not move in the same exalted circles as Swann, nor is she his intellectual equal. Chez Verdurin, however, when they are together, Vinteuil’s sonata for piano and violin is played, a piece of music which had enraptured Swann a year before, at the heart of which is a little phrase of five notes that, heard again, quite bewitches him, offering ‘the possibility of a sort of rejuvenation’ (SW, 252; 174). Swann’s relation with Odette is coloured by the aesthetic promise of the rediscovered sonata and the little phrase becomes a metaphor for their love. Despite the vulgarity of the company chez Verdurin, Swann’s attachment to Odette grows. He sees in her a likeness to Botticelli’s portrait of Zipporah and keeps a reproduction of the work on his desk. Focused on these substitute figures, the sonata and the portrait, Swann’s feelings for Odette develop to the point of obsession. He arrives one night at the Verdurins’ after she has left and, desperate to see her, departs on a manic chase around Paris. The Narrator explains that such a rush of ‘feverish agitation’ is all it takes to convert an infatuation into something much longer lasting: love.
It is not even necessary for that person [who provoked the agitation] to have attracted us, up till then, more than or even as much as others. All that was needed was that our predilection should become exclusive. And that condition is fulfilled when … the quest for the pleasures we enjoyed in his or her company is suddenly replaced by an anxious, torturing need, whose object is the person alone, an absurd, irrational need which the laws of this world make it impossible to satisfy and difficult to assuage – the insensate, agonising need to possess