Le Monde 100: Swann's Way: Swann in Love

After finally polishing off the rest of Swann's Way, I found my outlook transforming from reading out of a sense of duty to Man is Men to sincere interest and delight once I got on board with Proust's style.

Proust takes the concept of the formation of experience, which he illustrates through the Narrator's bedtime experiences in Overture and Combray, and shows how love wreaks havoc on one's construction of reality in the largest part of the book, Swann in Love.

Swann goes on an emotional roller coaster as he navigates his relationship with a courtesan, who loves him one day and spurns him the next. Swann jumps through hoops trying to make sense of his obsession with her and comes face to face with the concept of cognitive dissonance much like the Fox and the Grapes, where the fox, after trying so hard and failing to reach the grapes that are high in a tree, deems them as sour anyway. He must alter his sense of reality in order to suit the actual reality.

But what this really goes into is how our memories are not made out of exact mirrors of stretches of time but are rather like a book or movie, where only the moments that fit our ideal of the memory are archived together in our mind to formulate the experience.

A friend of mine went on a long road trip with his wife across America for their 10 year anniversary. He told me that they fought the whole way and squabbled and squibbled non-stop, leading him to wonder if the trip was a good idea. But, after the trip, when they sat at home reflecting on the month long excursion, they felt it was the best trip of their life! They expunged all the bad moments and strung together all the good ones, making them the building blocks of that experience.

This is exactly what Swann did with his courtesan, Odette:

"Rare as they became, those moments did not occur in vain. By the process of memory, Swann joined the fragments together, abolished the intervals between them, cast, as in molten gold, the image of an Odette compact of kindness and tranquillity, for whom he was to make, later on (as we shall see in the second part of this story) sacrifices which the other Odette would never have won from him."

This book is worth the work. So, now, for all who are following along or wished to forgo Marcel Proust's long winded nattering, on to The Trial by Franz Kafka!

Le Monde 100: Swann's Way - Combray

Finishing the second part of Swann's Way leads me to, if not agree with, but, at least understand Evelyn Waugh's assessment of it as "raving" and Marcel Proust as a "mental defective," especially in the light of the pages and pages of prose that shoulder aside any real concern with plot. There is a desperation to Proust as he has a single minded obsession with triggering memories and experiencing the purest sensation of the initial recollection of a long forgotten moment.

Proust realizes that memories are subject to the Law of Diminishing Returns as each subsequent recollection of any long-lost moment will gradually wane in its ability to impart ecstasy. So the sheer size and depth of his description of detail is a method in itself to preserve those sentimental moments.

He literally lays out this cathartic need to preserve through writing due to the unpredictable instability of the human mind when dealing with the onset of an obsession over the future of the memory of three steeples against the backdrop of Combray. He writes down a long description of the scene after which he writes, "I had finished writing it, I found such a sense of happiness, felt that it had so entirely relieved my mind of the obsession of the steeples, and of the mystery which they concealed, that, as though I myself were a hen and had just laid an egg, I began to sing at the top of my voice."

So, basically all 1.5 million words of Remembrance of Things Past are simply a long series of laid eggs.

But, who doesn't love eggs? Proust pushes out some amazing orbs of writing such as

"but what fascinated me would be the asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and rosy pink which ran from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible changes to their white feet, still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed: a rainbow-loveliness that was not of this world. I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form, who, through the disguise which covered their firm and edible flesh, allowed me to discern in this radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades, that precious quality which I should recognise again when, all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting as the fairies in Shakespeare's Dream) at transforming my humble chamber into a bower of aromatic perfume."

And that's just asparagus!

Now, shall we push on through the rest of this book that suffers from the literary equivalent of gigantism? Let's!

Le Monde 100: Swann's Way: Overture.

I admit my sole connection to Proust before starting Swann's Way (the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past) was this:




Whatever sense of ambling I had with The Stranger must now be stripped away as Remembrance of Things Past is the the longest novel in history with about a million and a half words in its seven volumes. Furthermore, where The Stranger was such an easy read due to Camus' hardboiled writing style,which stemmed from his lack of sentiment, Proust is sentimentality incarnate, where every emotion and every feeling is walked up and down the boulevard as if there were no word for urgency in his world.

Reading Swann's Way feels like reading an auto manual where every part on a diagram is exploded and then frozen in place in order to get a full view of every piece.

Proust gives the same treatment to the formation of memories.

What is so interesting about Proust the fact that he can remain engaging even though nothing really happens in his story. He describes the brief moment of displacement that one feels upon waking that he uses as a blank canvas to inject an exploration of his entire life. In that moment, one has no context as to where one is or when one is living allowing for a brief period to be wherever or whenever a person wants to be. It's like a momentary Nirvana where only the Self exists.

The introduction of Swann has a similar effect on the Narrator's family as seen in this passage:

"And so, no doubt, from the Swann they had built up for their own purposes my family had left out, in their ignorance, a whole crowd of the details of his daily life in the world of fashion, details by means of which other people, when they met him, saw all the Graces enthroned in his face and stopping at the line of his arched nose as at a natural frontier; but they contrived also to put into a face from which its distinction had been evicted, a face vacant and roomy as an untenanted house, to plant in the depths of its unvalued eyes a lingering sense, uncertain but not unpleasing, half-memory and half-oblivion, of idle hours spent together after our weekly dinners, round the card-table or in the garden, during our companionable country life."

The man is blank enough to be whatever you want him to be.

Overture, which is the first part of Swann's Way ends on another moment where the Narrrator eats a tea-soaked Madeline - an experience that he had not had for decades, making it a pure memory (rather than a memory of another memory) and a gateway to other pure memories. Thus, setting the stage no doubt for the rest of the book.

Are you still with me? Congratulations! But, have no fear- Swann's Way, apparently, is quite self contained. So we shan't read all seven volumes.

(Unless, of course, a chorus of voices compels me.)