MARCEL PROUST : Du côté
de chez Swann (À la recherche du temps perdu I). Second part.
Proust belongs
to the “late encounters” in my literary biography, although I was aware of him,
and glanced rather hastily at some pages of À la recherche...,
decades ago. That was the epoch of being more obsessed with trying to decode
the “economic” and “political” bottlenecks, real or apparent blind alleys, as
well as revolutionary proposals, inebriated by moody voluntarism, of our
societies, particularly in developing countries. To engage too much time and
energy (which is what Proust demands from his readers) in deciphering the divertimenti,
imbrogli, amoretti, and
Cover of the Gallimard edition „folio classique“, 2017, detail of Portrait de Madame Charles Max, by Giovanni Boldini, Musée d‘Orsay, Paris.
The decisive encounter took place
mid-2011. Living in Spain, I was on my way to South America, making what I
thought was going to be a short stop in Paris. Yet black clouds arising over
the political horizon in one of those countries, “down there”, forced me to
extend my Parisian sojourn, in an hotel in the 14th arrondissement.
Not far from the Rue Daguerre (where I lived for a whole year in 1998),
I found a copy of Du côté
de chez Swann
in a second-hand bookshop, and said to myself, “well, now or never…” The owner,
a tall man with a large white beard, looked at me with very much perplexed
eyes, saying “are you really going to read this? No one does it nowadays...” He
was, of course, exaggerating—though perhaps
not that much.
It is thus how I began my long,
cyclical, off-and-on expedition trough À la recherche..., which has
landed me, up to now, at the end of the 3rd volume, Le côté de Guermantes, after having read, and re-read, À
l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur, second volume.
A first confession has to be
admitted. As I start reading Proust, almost always, a poisonous irritation sets
upon myself, parallel to a feeling of being forced to do something I should
not. It takes about ten, fifteen minutes for that indisposition to fade away,
at a slow pace. I believe it has to do with the frustration of not finding
“solid ground”, of looking (unsuccessfully) for a kind of Ariadne’s thread
which will guide me through the labyrinth. The latter is indeed there, the
former also, yet invisible. This irritating prelude is akin to someone
stumbling across thick fog, looking for the house which should shelter him, becoming increasingly uneasy at not bumping onto the right path.
Then one just seems to float in a
bathtub full of perfumed cotton, letting oneself be transported by the text,
which steadily acquires the form a very long dream, a Bruckner symphony, where each
moment is in itself a separate symphony.
This volume is divided into three
parts. The first one is “Combray”, signifying today
“Illiers-Combray (re-baptised as such by President Pompidou in 1971, to
commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Marcel Proust),
where his father, Adrien Proust, was born.
It encapsulates mostly the numerous voyages undertaken from Paris to the
town where his parents still kept a house, the sojourns thither, the efforts by
a child and then a teenager to reconstruct dreams and reality (and the mixture
of both), postponing sleep until the weight of souvenirs imposed its law. The teenager
constructs his own paradise through books and reproductions of painting and
architecture. Both Monsieur
Swann and the Guermantes are introduced.
“Un homme qui dort, tient en cercle
autour de lui le fil des heures, l’ordre des années et des mondes. »[1]
It is there, in bed, when the great battle of
the memories begins, the struggle to recall the souvenirs, to fix the real
experience with persons and art in the unconscious, for ever. So that they
might resurface, at their own will, whenever they are needed to console and
illuminate the path towards the extinction of life. Proust was, from his
earlier hours, a hyper-sensitive human-being. He needs only, either the
soundless flaring of the wings of a butterfly, or the reflections of sunshine
onto the painted glasses of the church in Combray, or anywhere, for that
“other-world” to be reborn.
The second part, “Deuxième partie. Un amour de Swann”, often sold separate as an independent novel,
begins with one of the most delicious paragraphs of the whole volume:
“Pour faire partie du « petit noyau «,
du « petit groupe «, du « petit clan « des Verdurin, une condition était
suffisante mais elle été nécessaire: il fallait adhérer tacitement à un Credo
dont un des articles était que le jeune pianiste, protégé par Mme. Verdurin
cette année-là et dont elle disait:»Ça ne devrait pas être permis de savoir jouer Wagner comme
ça!», enfonçait à la fois Planté et Rubinstein...»[2]
Cover of the Gallimard Edition, „Un amour de Swann“, prefaced by Volker Schlöndorff, portraying Monsieur Swann (Jeremy Irons) and Odette (Ornella Mutti).
Yes, Proust was a “Wagnerian”, as were Thomas Mann, T.S. Eliot, J.R. Tolkien and many others, hence one might wish to capitalize on that cognisance, to be able to navigate more at ease through the Proustian ocean. And not altogether directionless.
The axe of this part of the novel is
the relationship between Monsieur Swann and the odalisque Odette, an odd and
unstable liaison (socially a faux-pas which would render Monsieur Swann
a pariah in the salons of the haute-bourgeoisie), plagued by jealousies,
betrayals and obsessions. When Monsieur Swann could not see her, as she has
travelled elsewhere, he
“… il se plongeait dans les plus
enivrant des romans d’amour: l’indicateur des chemins de fer, qui lui apprenait
les moyens de la rejoindre, l’après-midi, le soir, ce matin même!”[3]
The most exhilarating romance-novel:
the timetable of the trains which could make a
tête-à-tête possible, at the urge of a whim, as
soon as possible… Many will find one’s own echo in this concrete example of one
of the techniques in the outillage of Proust’s narrative: that of
injecting magic into the most unsuspected, even trivial objects of daily life.
The third part, „Troisème partie. Noms de pays: le nom”, is centred on the fictitiously-named Balbec. (largely inspired by Cabourg, on the French Atlantic coast), with the Gran Hôtel de la Plage occupying the centre of the stage. Balbec seems to have been an old family-name in France, though there is the phonetic coincidence with Baalbek, Lebanon, known in antiquity as the Greek Heliopolis, “the city of the sun”. It has already been suggested that the coincidence was not such, rather a chosen signal by the author.
It is the shortest of the three
parts of the volume (44 pages out of more than 400), yet perhaps the densest,
and the richest in terms of metaphors with regard to the literary
reconstruction of the places where the young man seemed to have achieved
happiness (or expect to achieve it). What does he dream of, while in Balbec?
Of Florence, Venice, Pisa…:
“Sans doute si alors j’avais fait moi-même plus attention à ce qu’il avait
dans ma pensée quand je prononçais les mots « aller à Florence, à Parme, à
Pise, à Venise « je me serais rendu compte que ce que je voyais n’était
nullement une ville, mais quelque chose d’aussi différent de tout ce que je
connaissais, d’aussi délicieux ; que pourrait être pour une humanité dont
la vie se serais toujours écoulée dans des fins d’après-midi d’hiver, cette
merveille inconnue : une matinée de printemps. « [4]
What is paradise? Quite simple, it
is the arrival of a spring morning in a civilization which has only known
hitherto wintery afternoons.
And he also dreams about Gilberte, the young
lady he used to wait for at the Champs-Elysées. His descriptions of the
emotions and the hide-and-seek
imbroglios with the young lady do not fail to turn the reader into a becalmed
yet also enthusiastic admirer of the writer.
Leaving aside the usual small minority of
aesthetes and writers who would not be put off by the apparent boredom of a
lengthy text, or the tedious descriptions of social gatherings, and beyond the
requirements of syllabi at the Licée in France, and at some
universities, at home and abroad, is it worth reading Proust nowadays?
The answer is affirmative, at least in the sense of a paleontology approach, which seeks to fix for ever the rites, moers and tastes of the
French aristocracy between the end of the 19th at the beginning of
the 20th century, and of the “haute” – perhaps also not too “haute” - bourgeoisie, seeking to be accepted, or at least respected,
by the descendants of the elite which used to run France until 1789.
Marcel Proust may belong to that
special category of most mentioned, but less read novelists, which can also apply
to James Joyce. Between 2004 and 2012, 790.000 copies were sold of Proust’s
books, occupying the 38th position in a ranking of the first 50
“classical” authors (including foreigners) sold in France, Agatha Christie in
the 6th position with 2.650.000 copies and the Austrian Stefan Zweig in the 7th, with 2.510.000 copies [5]
Yet there is more, a “Proustian” Weltanschauung,
a vision-of-the-world which has not been constructed as an aleatory, perhaps
even arbitrary combination (“Enfin je trouve un lecteur qui devine que mon livre est un ouvrage
dogmatique et une construction! »[6], rather on a systematic attempt to discover “une
realité plus profonde”[7] underneath the images we
perceive from the material world, and the surface of the dreams, the mementos,
imposed upon us.
To navigate through
the Proustian ocean may equal swimming in opaque waters, looking for tiny
diamonds, three-four feet below. Many will wonder whether the effort justifies
itself, others will point out to more contemporary, easier-to-access novelists.
But the diamonds, down on the seabed, ils y sont.
One should perhaps
imitate the Marilyn Monroe’s method, while reading Ulysses of
James Joyce. Just jump at any page, from time to time, and then at another. One
may go forwards, and then backwards. One could begin by the end, and end by the
beginning. What the text has to offer us remains unaltered. There is, then, “substance”
...
[1]P. 5
[2]P. 185
[3]P. 288
[4]P. 383
[5]Le top 50 des auteurs classiques les plus
vendus, https://www.lefigaro.fr/livres/2012/03/14/03005-20120314ARTFIG00604-le-top-50-des-auteurs-classiques-les-plus-vendus.php, 27.7.2020.
[6]Lettre de Proust à Jacques Rivière ;
février 1914, p. 461.
[7]„Esquisse pour les deux côtés »,
p. 436.
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