Swann's Way

When, in a text analysis course, I had to read Swann in Love.one of the stories inIn Search of Lost Time, I was deeply charmed. I read it as if in a dream, emotions running high, breathing hard, far from the boredom that almost everyone else had prepared me for.

So this summer I decided to start and hopefully finish the "cathedral work". But I promise nothing: when I learned that it was composed of seven volumes (not 2 as I had the impression), I felt uneasy, because it is a work that does not look like any other.

Combray

This section focuses on the narrator's childhood in his country home in Combray, where he spent long afternoons reading in the garden. This is where we meet many members of his family, as well as Swann. It is also where the famous passage about the madeleines is (a passage that alone, out of context, made my grandmother cry).

On several occasions, I recognized myself in Proust's words; when he explains what reading is and why it can affect us so much, in particular, but also when he writes about his admiration for his favorite author, Bergotte:

Every time he spoke of something whose beauty had remained hidden from me until then, of pine forests, of hail, of Notre-Dame-de-Paris, of Athalie or Phaedra, he would make this beauty explode in an image to me. Also feeling how many parts of the universe there were that my crippled perception would not distinguish if he did not bring them closer to me, I would have liked to possess an opinion of him, a metaphor of him [...]. Unfortunately on almost everything I did not know his opinion. I did not doubt that it was entirely different from mine, since it came down from an unknown world towards which I was trying to rise; convinced that my thoughts would have seemed pure nonsense to this perfect mind, I had made such a clean sweep of them all, that when by chance I came across, in one of his books, one that I had already had myself, my heart swelled up as if a God in his kindness had given it back to me, had declared it legitimate and beautiful.

Wonderful explanation of what I felt towards several authors, but also towards the very one who stated this explanation. I felt, as he did, my heart swelling.

From this part on, I fell in love with Proust's talent for putting into words his observations about people and his own emotions, which are often those of everyone else, and which are incredibly accurate. I didn't even believe that such an acuity of observation on human nature was possible. Yes, the sentences are long, but they are not unnecessarily so: each word weighs heavily and must be there.

Swann in Love.

Swann in Love. is a story in about 200 pages of the unexpected love that Swann, an aristocrat highly regarded in society, develops for Odette, a "cocotte", i.e. a woman who has the reputation of being "maintained" by many men. We follow the beginning of an unlikely love, motivated mainly by jealousy, its sickly continuation for many years, and then its disillusioned end.

200 pages of the meanderings of a mind completely bewildered by a love that he tries to understand, without success, and in which he only gets stuck. All this is punctuated by a musical "little phrase" from a sonata by Vinteuil (a fictitious sonata, don't look it up on Spotify) which brings him a kind of comfort. Proust describes this little fictional phrase so often and in such detail, but manages to remain vague, which is still remarkable. In addition to his sensitivity to humans, he is also sensitive to music. When a normal person would say: "Music gives a lot of emotions", this is what Proust writes:

[...] the field opened to the musician is not a petty keyboard of seven notes, but an immeasurable keyboard, still almost entirely unknown, where only here and there, separated by thick unexplored darkness, some of the millions of keys of tenderness, passion, courage, serenity, which compose it, each one as different from the others as a universe, have been discovered by some great artists who render us the service, by awakening in us the correspondent of the theme that they have found, to show us what richness, what variety, hides without our knowledge this great impenetrated and discouraging night of our soul that we take for emptiness and for nothingness.

I recognized myself less in Swann in Love.It's a good thing for me, because it tells of a sickly, reductive, painful love that disconnects its victim from reality for as long as it is affected. We are fascinated by the tricks our own brains can play on us when we try to justify our emotional dependence on someone who isn't worth it.

Country names : the country

This part, much shorter, tells the story of the narrator's love for a little girl when he was a child. This little girl was Swann's. And by analogy with Swann, the narrator experiences an unrequited love, which he tries to hide from his conscience for a very long time. He met this little girl almost every day in the Champs-Élysées; his love is thus closely linked to place, which leads to a final reflection on the link between physical places and memories that, we understand from a note, is not completed.

I was able to build a theory in this section: Proust's sentences are long because they follow the author's reflection; but I also believe that their length serves to induce a meditative state in the reader. We can't hurry with 15 line long sentences, we have to take our time, otherwise whole parts of the sentence escape us. We can come across a pronoun and find its antecedent only three lines up; sometimes we have to reread faster, detaching ourselves from our school notions of syntax to understand the meaning. It is only in such a state that we can appreciate the text (it is in this state that the author himself must have been), and its construction means that we have no choice but to appreciate it, because if we get through it, we have understood the essential.

So I had a real crush on Proust. His writing moves me to the bottom of my stomach. Some sentences manage to speed up my breathing, as always in front of a great masterpiece, while I wait to see if they will run out of steam, but I am only more and more overwhelmed when I see that, on the contrary, they are approaching their climax. Then when they finish, I have to read them again, and I savor their accuracy. I feel as if the author is talking about me, or about some person I knew, and I am overwhelmed that someone long dead can describe me better than I can. He manages to express in the most beautiful words what I can barely notice.

So far, I'm excited. That said, I've only finished one volume. Only six more to go...