Swann's Way: Combray Chapter 1 (Overture)

The first time I read the opening page, I was hooked because Proust described a phenomenon that I thought only I experienced. The narrator (not yet named as Marcel) falls asleep while reading in bed and would sometimes, in that brief period of hypnagogic confusion, thinking he was still awake and it was time to go to sleep, try to put away his book and extinguish the candle. Also during this transitional state, he would feel he had become the subject of his book, be it something concrete such as a building, something less solid such as a piece of music, or even an abstract relationship between two historical figures.

Artist: Yehuda Pen

What I didn't know then, and still don't, is whether it is an occurrence with which all, or many, bedtime readers are familiar. At that time, my experience was very slightly different, but later became identical with Proust's depiction, and is now slightly different again. It now seems as though, having not noticed I have turned off the light and gone to sleep, I have continued reading in my sleep under my own steam without the book or the light, like a cartoon character who has continued several paces after running off a cliff. And just as when the suspended animation looks down and falls, as a result of becoming acquainted with his predicament, my amazement that I have managed to read for so long in pitch darkness startles me into waking fully to reality.

Marcel, now once more awake, lies in bed listening to nocturnal noises outside such as the whistling of trains. And just as our thoughts before sleep wander, the narrative itself takes a detour: the sound of the trains leads Marcel to imagine the mental state of a passenger on such a train travelling through the silent night and deserted countryside. The passenger's sensibilities have been heightened by his uncommon experiences during the journey and his anticipation of being once more safely at home. This is enough to fix the journey "for ever in his memory". I assume we all have memories of uneventful bus or train rides which are stuck in our memories merely because we can remember the feeling we had at the time and not because of any external event.

The whistling of the trains Proust describes as "punctuating the distance like the note of a bird in a forest". A remarkable image.

As we move on to p.2 (Scott Moncrieff - p.4 T Kilmartin), it is nearly midnight and the narrator's thoughts take another detour which finds him sympathising with the pain and false hopes of an invalid who is unable to sleep. This leads him to some more general reflections on the confusion which befuddles us when we first awaken. Proust says that when we awaken from a sleep which finally descended on us towards morning after a night of insomnia, we have no idea of time and will conclude that we have just gone to bed. He then takes the idea a step further: when we awaken from a postprandial snooze in an armchair, we will imagine we had gone to sleep months earlier and in some foreign country. I have to admit never having experienced this level of disorientation. And Proust, now in Marcel's voice, goes even further beyond recognition when he claims that if his sleep is sufficiently heavy, he not only does not know where he is on awakening, but does not know who he is: "I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal's consciousness." Is this normal? Or perhaps the description of a pathological condition?

The whole passage is brilliant, but surely fantastic? A particular piece of brilliance is here: he is rescued from this oblivion by memory which "would come down like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being" (p.4 SM, p.6 TK). But in the next passage, we return to the nagging doubt that the narrator is once again wildly exaggerating: "When I awoke like this, and my mind struggled in an unsuccessful attempt to discover where I was, everything would be moving round me through the darkness: things, places, years."

Marcel recalls waking up in various locations, including his great-aunt's house in Combray and Mme de Saint-Loup's at Tansonville. Each house puts him in mind of seeing his bedrooms there from outside when returning from evening walks: the reflection of the sunset which he could see "glowing on the panes" of his window in the former house and the lamp shining in his window in the latter, "like a solitary beacon in the night" (p.6 SM, p.7 TK).

(How delightful to see our own house from outside, illuminated in the dark, and wonder like a passing stranger about the lives of its unseen inhabitants, taking clues from our furniture and decorations, no longer familiar when seen from our novel viewpoint.)

By p.8 (p.9 TK), Marcel's thoughts have rendered him "well awake" and Proust moves from the prefatory mixture of general and personal reflections to the particular narrative starting with his great-aunt's house at Combray (p.9 SM &TK).

And so we come properly to Combray, where we meet Marcel's family and Charles Swann, whose Way it is.