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By Root 563 0

Swann’s Way filled him with a desire to ‘see more clearly into the sources of [his] rapture’ (SW, 186; 129), and in Within a Budding Grove there are further moments of fleeting exaltation which pique his sensibilities yet at this stage remain opaque: there is the ‘cool, fusty smell’ in the little pavilion in the Champs-Élysées (BG, 74; JF, 393); first hearing Vinteuil’s sonata (BG, 118–22; JF, 422–5); seeing the sunrise from the train approaching Balbec (BG, 268; JF, 520–1); and the sight of a stand of trees at Hudimesnil (BG, 345; JF, 568). These experiences provide happiness and confusion in roughly equal measure: the Narrator’s analysis of them is never satisfactorily completed since his roving attentions tend to stray elsewhere. This is characteristic of Within a Budding Grove, particularly Part Two, where his observational and analytic energies are frequently channelled towards the things and people of the world around him, rather than inwards to his own mind and memory, as at the start and end of Swann’s Way. By contrast to the first volume of the novel, Within a Budding Grove is a largely linear narrative of discovery, albeit with proleptic signposts here and there pointing towards later volumes.

The opening to Part One offers insight into the subjectivity of perception, the nature of identity and the effects of the passage of time. In ‘Combray’, Swann was described as discreet about his social connections and well informed about art; now, to the Narrator’s father’s mind, he is ‘a vulgar show-off’, while Cottard, the awkward, unassured doctor of ‘Swann in Love’, is deemed an ‘eminent’ guest (BG, 1; JF, 347), now a professor, revered by colleagues and patients alike. The changes in both men illustrate that identity is fluid and shifting, or, to put it differently, that each of us has several identities that are manifest at different times and under different circumstances.

Norpois’s role is double-edged: the old diplomat persuades the Narrator’s sceptical father that a literary career is not necessarily a bad thing for his son yet he also deflates the would-be writer, first by remaining silent upon reading the Martinville vignette, then, at the mention of Bergotte, tearing into him, identifying his writings’ ‘bad influence’ on the Narrator’s piece, describing them as (amongst other things) ‘flaccid’ and ‘altogether lacking in virility’ (BG, 51–2; JF, 379). Norpois’s remarks persuade the Narrator of his ‘intellectual nullity’ (BG, 53; JF, 380) and his father’s capitulation makes him suddenly ‘conscious of [himself] in Time’ (BG, 63; JF, 386): he realizes that he is subject to the laws of Time and therefore already on the road towards old age and death which, with all hope of an artistic vocation now crushed, looks barren and unforgiving. For all that, he still delights in playing with Gilberte in the Champs-Élysées. This leads to a brief, erotic encounter, in which his physical pleasure culminates so suddenly that he laments, characteristically, that it took ‘a form which I could not even pause for a moment to analyse’ (BG, 76; JF, 395). Soon choking fits, much to his distress, prevent him from seeing Gilberte for an extended period, then one day an unexpected letter arrives from her, inviting him to tea. His love is redoubled and he starts to frequent the Swann residence, something previously possible only in the realm of his imagination.

As well as recounting his interactions with Gilberte, the Narrator also casts light on her mother’s rapidly developing salon, so different from the ‘ “official world” ’ to which her husband used to belong: ‘like a kaleidoscope’, the Narrator remarks, ‘which is every now and then given a turn, society arranges successively in different orders elements which one would have supposed immutable, and composes a new pattern.’ ‘These new arrangements’, he continues,

are produced by what a philosopher would call a ‘change of criterion.’ The Dreyfus case brought about another, at a period rather later than that in which I began to go to Mme Swann’s, and the kaleidoscope once more reversed