Swann's Way: Combray Chapter 1 (2nd post)

During the summers of his childhood, Marcel's mother and father would take him to stay at his great-aunt's house in Combray with other members of the family.

His remembrance of Combray starts with the bedtime anxiety he suffered there over whether his mother would come to kiss him goodnight or whether his father would dissuade her from this pampering (p.9 Scott Moncrieff, p.9 T Kilmartin). It is perhaps noteworthy that he usually refers to her as "Mamma" ("maman") whereas he always refers to "my father" ("mon père" never "papa"). When he does refer to "my mother" ("ma mère") it is often because he has just mentioned "my father". 

Marcel is either a highly sensitive child or his suffering is disproportionate to its cause: indeed, his fear of possibly having to forgo his mother's kiss draws a dark cloud not just over bedtime but over the end of each afternoon, in the same way as Mondays cast a pall over Sundays or the new school year ruins the last days of the summer vacation; and long before his bedtime, "my bedroom became the fixed point on which my melancholy and anxious thoughts were centred".

Combray

The story of his bedtime (and pre-bedtime) torment is interspersed with vignettes involving his great-aunt, his parents, his grandparents and their Combray neighbour Charles Swann, who was practically the only person who ever visited them on an evening (p.12ff SM, p.11ff TK). Despite that, whenever the visitors' bell rang, everyone would exclaim: "A visitor! Who in the world can it be?" even though they knew full well it could only be him. The grandmother would be sent off to investigate and the remaining family members would excitedly await her report back.

In the view of Marcel's family, Swann was a member of the upper middle class ("la belle bourgeoisie") (p.20 SM, p.18 TK). But as they had a "Hindu view of society", they never dreamed that he might also be part of the aristocratic world of the Faubourg Saint-Germain (p.18 SM, p.16 TK). We can compare Proust's description of a fluid class structure with Wharton's more rigid New York society (cf The Age of Innocence).

This is the beginning of Proust's first use in the novel of his 3D device of showing us a character from more than one angle: Swann as seen from a middle class and an upper class perspective. We will learn much later in the novel that one of those angles - the aristocratic view of Swann - eventually changes, thus adding a fourth dimension of Time to his character. If we take a photo of an object or person, it is two-dimensional. We take two photos of the same object or person but from different angles, then view them together through a stereoscope and the image becomes three-dimensional. If we then take another photo after the passage of an interval of time, we have added a fourth dimension (cf the inexplicably moving exhibition by a character in Sorrentino's The Great Beauty of photos which have been taken of him on every day of his life arranged in chronological order). Proust applies his technique to other personae in the novel and he also comes up with an ingenious way to apply it to the first-person narrator himself, as we shall see after reading the later sections Swann in Love and The Captive.

Meanwhile, Proust is also painting subtle pen portraits of Marcel's great-aunt and other members of the family. He draws you into the family circle by revealing their little rituals, such as the forementioned performance when the visitors' bell rings, his grandmother's walks around the garden, his grand-aunt giving his grandfather brandy despite his being forbidden liquor, or her habitual questioning of Swann: "Well M. Swann, and do you still live next door to the Bonded Vaults, so as to be sure of not missing your train when you go to Lyons?" (p.20 SM, p.18TK). The gentle humour continues with his depiction of Marcel's grandmother's sisters, Flora and Céline. The two elderly spinsters are so fearful of being indiscreet that their remarks become too cryptic to be understood by anyone other than the sisters themselves: "They, in their horror of vulgarity, had brought to such a fine art the concealment of a personal allusion in a wealth of ingenious circumlocution, that it would often pass unnoticed even by the person to whom it was addressed." Thus, when Swann visits the family after having given the sisters a case of Asti and they have also discovered he has been mentioned in the Figaro, Flora contributes to the general conversation by saying that she has discovered that M. Vinteuil's neighbour is nice, to which Céline allusively replies: "M. Vinteuil is not the only one who has nice neighbours." Proust writes: "And my aunt Flora, who realised this veiled utterance was Céline's way of thanking Swann intelligibly for the Asti, looked at him with a blend of congratulation and irony." (p.31 SM, p.27 TK). A little later when Marcel's grandfather complains about the poor standards of contemporary journalism, Flora breaks in: "I do not agree with you: there are some days when I find reading the papers very pleasant indeed!" "Yes," aunt Céline went one better. "When they write about things or people in whom we are interested" (p.32 SM, p.27 TK). Shortly, Swann quotes Saint-Simon to the grandfather. The political philosopher had said of a contemporary: "Never did I find in that coarse bottle anything but ill-humour, boorishness, and folly." At which point, Flora interjects: ""Coarse or not, I know bottles in which there is something very different!" (p.33 SM, p.28 TK).

Eleven pages later (following the narrative's return to Marcel's bedtime anguish), and 17 pages after it started, Proust returns to and rounds off the humorous episode when Swann leaves and the sisters congratulate each other on how "neatly" and "prettily" they had thanked him, especially the expression about "nice neighbours". This is too much for the grandfather, who shouts: "What! Do you call that thanking him? I heard that all right, but devil take me if I guessed it was meant for Swann. You may be quite sure he never noticed it." (p.44 SM, p.37 TK).

In this section, Proust deploys other techniques in his character sketches. He has Marcel's great-aunt teasing his grandmother by giving his grandfather brandy, which he was forbidden, while his wife was walking in the garden after dinner, then calling to her to come in and stop him drinking. He builds up his portrait directly and indirectly: he directly says the great-aunt was the only member of the family who could be described as a trifle common; he indirectly says she was of limited education by implying she could not have understood Swann's dual existence by reference to a Greek myth but only to the tale of Ali Baba because she had seen it painted on some plates they had (p.21 SM, p.19 TK). By this variety of bushstrokes he creates a living character. 

Likewise, we begin to get an inkling of the character of Marcel's grandmother from little details interspersed here and there: her love of fresh air and walking in the garden in all weathers (p.12 SM, p.11 TK); her views on what would make suitable reading for a child - "she could never make up her mind to purchase anything from which no intellectual profit was to be derived" (p.51 SM, p.42 TK); her indifference to the collapse of antique chairs which she had presented to married couples - it would be "sordid to concern herself with the solidity of any piece of furniture in which could still be discerned a flourish, a smile, a brave conceit of the past" (p.53 SM, p.44 TK). With these flicks of colour, Proust makes us see her as a serious-minded and unconventional individual.

One last point: I have used the word "interspersed" twice - Proust is a master of interspersion. He does not relate a series of incidents discretely; he breaks off here and commences a related episode, before returning briefly to the original account, which might then be abandoned for another episode, and so on and so forth. The little stories intertwine naturally and organically, sometimes even in a single - albeit lengthy - sentence; sometimes over dozens of pages. Not only does this prevent the reader from tiring, it replicates the non-linearity of our everyday lives. How often do we set off on one task or pursue one idea, before another demands our more immediate attention and takes us down numerous paths before we manage to complete our original aim?

What we have been discussing was interspersed with the well-known tribulations of Marcel's bedtimes at Combray. We shall turn to that in our next post.