The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust - Adam A. Watt [35]
This passage merits quotation in full for in expressing the conundrum facing Swann it also encapsulates the Narrator’s dilemma in his later relation with Albertine and, in a nutshell, Proust’s painful conception of love.
The Verdurins soon tire of Swann, deemed a bore because of his connections to high society (to which they have no access); they seek to make a match between Odette and the Comte de Forcheville, the dim-witted brother-in-law of Saniette, one of their regulars. It becomes harder for Swann to see Odette; her evasiveness and his growing suspicions combine to fuel jealous investigations (knocking on windows in the dark, opening mail addressed to others) that only send him deeper into despair, damaging his mental and physical health. Gradually, through his manipulation of language and imagery, Proust makes ‘Swann in Love’ a study of desire as pathology; eventually, inevitably, like a cancer, Swann’s love becomes ‘inoperable’ (SW, 371–2; 249).
For a time, however, there seems to be hope: Swann admits to himself Odette’s stupidity and the vulgarity of the little clan. He attends a soirée held by Mme de Sainte-Euverte, a glorious set piece of metaphor-driven portraiture and social observation. The company of old acquaintances is salutary: Swann’s conversation with the Princesse des Laumes (Mme de Guermantes as she was then known; SW, 410–12; 273–5) brilliantly captures the confidences, witticisms and familiarity one finds in the repartee of long-acquainted equals; it shows us Swann back in his element and highlights a marked contrast with the Verdurin milieu. The remission from his ills is suddenly shattered, however, when Vinteuil’s sonata is played and his feelings for Odette flood back through the affective channels opened up by the little phrase. Ruinously he renews his attentions, his inquisitions: has she had lesbian affairs? Two or three times, is the devastating response, the only answer he had not anticipated. But the human capacity for suffering is great and, sponge-like, Swann absorbs yet more. What we consider to be our love or our jealousy, we are told, ‘is composed of an infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, each of which is ephemeral, although by their uninterrupted multiplicity they give us the impression of continuity, the illusion of unity’, (SW, 448; 297). This multiplicity, one of many Proust identifies at the heart of human affairs, is one with which the Narrator has to reconcile himself after Albertine’s death in The Fugitive.
While for Swann it is too late (‘Swann in Love’ concludes with his painful realization that he has wasted years of his life on a woman who ‘was not his type’), we might hope that the story’s many lessons – regarding truth and morality, fidelity, jealousy, possessiveness and the possibility of satisfaction – would stand the Narrator in good stead in his own amorous adventures. In the later volumes, however, we realize time and again that the Narrator’s anxieties, his suffering and distress have a flavour of familiarity: we have seen them in blueprint in the pages of ‘Swann in Love’.
‘Place-names: The Name’ closes Swann’s Way. The Narrator considers the distinctions between our experience of a place and the anticipations we have of it, which are often tied closely to the evocative power of place-names, words with enormous associative potential, particularly for a mind like the Narrator’s.2 Balbec is a place he longs to visit as a child, spurred by tales from Legrandin and Swann of its rugged beauty and Norman Gothic church. A promised vacation in Italy fills his mind with images relating to the names of Florence and Venice, Parma and Pisa, but ill health prohibits him from going and the journeys, and experiences of these places, remain confined to Stevenson’s ‘pleasant land of counterpane’. The narrowing of experiential possibilities imposed by the Narrator’s ill health serves to swell his fascination with language, the signs that stand for unknown worlds, and his capacity for detailed scrutiny of whatever scraps of