Swann's Way: Place-Names: The Name (11th post)

 

This section, Place-Names: The Name, performs a double balancing act.

On the one hand, as the final part of Swann's Way it is a counterpoise to the first part. The opening few pages of Combray start in the present with the narrator as an older man lying awake and thinking about places he has slept, before going on to recall his boyhood in Combray; whereas Place-Names: The Name starts in the past with the narrator's recollection of his youthful relationship with Gilberte Swann, before the last few pages end in the present with his reflections on the changes he has seen. Thus the older narrator in the present literally bookends the series of remembrances that constitute the majority of Swann's Way.

And on the other hand, it is the obverse of Place-Names: The Place (which forms part of Within A Budding Grove). The two similarly titled parts represent, respectively, the already familiar dichotomy of imagination and reality (we will later learn in Time Regained that reality is disappointing because apprehending it involves no act of the imagination). As the title of Place-Names: The Name suggests, the focus is on the names of places, such as Balbec, Venice and Florence, and what the narrator's imagination can conjure from those names, in contrast to the later part, which will deal with the reality of one of the places itself when the narrator finally gets to visit Balbec. “And yet nothing could have differed more utterly, either, from the real Balbec than that other Balbec of which I had often dreamed” (p.229 II Scott Moncrieff, p.416 Kilmartin). “I need only, to make [these dreams] reappear, pronounce the names: Balbec, Venice, Florence, within whose syllables had gradually accumulated all the longing inspired in me by the places for which they stood” (p.234 II SM, p.420 TK).

Artist: Albert Edelfelt

Unfortunately those destinations have to remain a dream when Marcel becomes ill and his doctor advises against all travel. The furthest he is allowed to go is to the Jardin des Champs-Elysées, accompanied by his late aunt Léonie's maid, Françoise, who is now in his parents' service. There he sees “a little girl with reddish hair”.¹ A friend calls her name “Gilberte” and in an episode reminiscent of that in Combray when Marcel hears her name being called for the first time (see my sixth post), he says: “The name Gilberte passed close by me, evoking all the more forcefully her whom it labelled in that it did not merely refer to her, as one speaks of a man in his absence, but was directly addressed to her; it passed thus close by me, in action, so to speak, with a force that increased with the curve of its trajectory and as it drew near to its target;—carrying in its wake, I could feel, the knowledge, the impression of her to whom it was addressed that belonged not to me but to the friend who called to her, everything that, while she uttered the words, she more or less vividly reviewed, possessed in her memory, of their daily intimacy, of the visits that they paid to each other, of that unknown existence which was all the more inaccessible, all the more painful to me from being, conversely, so familiar, so tractable to this happy girl who let her message brush past me without my being able to penetrate its surface” (p.244 II SM, p.428 TK). Having now seen her there, Marcel soon becomes obsessive about meeting her again in the park: would she come that afternoon? would the weather be too bad? And just as quickly his previously imaginary love for her becomes real. They do meet again and play together in the Jardin des Champs-Elysées, and then one day Marcel observes that the Gilberte before him looks different from the Gilberte who inspires his dreams (p.253 II SM, p.435 TK).

We have previously pointed out Proust's technique of rendering a character three-dimensional by presenting different people's views of that person. Here, when describing Gilberte, instead of multiplication he uses division: rather than describe her as one person seen from multiple perspectives of other characters, he divides her up into different personae as viewed by one person, Marcel. The first division appears here when, as we have just seen, the living, breathing Gilberte is separated from the girl who exists in Marcel's mind. A second division follows shortly when Marcel distinguishes between “the little girl whom I loved” and “her with whom I used to play” (p.256 II SM, p.438 TK). Then, in an echo of Swann's preoccupation with Odette's unknown life, the Gilberte that Marcel has come to know is differentiated from the still hidden Gilberte (p.259 II SM, p.440 TK). And finally, there is the Gilberte “so quick and informal with us” and “the other little girl that Gilberte must be when at home with her parents” (p.260 II SM, p.440 TK). Thus, Gilberte is presented in eight different parts: actual/remembered; playmate/loved one; known/unknown; and out/at home.

Marcel also starts to venerate her parents. “As for Swann, in my attempts to resemble him, I spent the whole time, when I was at table, in drawing my finger along my nose and in rubbing my eyes. My father would exclaim: 'The child's a perfect idiot, he's becoming quite impossible.'” (p.270 II SM, p.448 TK). While for Marcel, Mme Swann can do no wrong: he is impressed by both the “simplicity” of her clothes and, when she rides out in the Bois de Boulogne, the “ostentation” of her horses and carriage (p.276 II SM, p.453 TK); a couple of pages later, he is equally impressed by her “rich attire”, as well as her “majesty”, her “fame”, and her “reputation for beauty, for misconduct, and for elegance” (pp.277-279 II SM, pp.454-455 TK). Incidentally, it is at this point that Mme Swann is revealed to have formerly been Odette de Crécy.²

The section closes in the present with the narrator revisiting the Bois de Boulogne in an autumnal, ubi sunt frame of mind. He fails to find the beautiful women he had seen there in his youth, his neiges d'antan, and instead of the elegant carriages and horses, he only sees “motor-cars driven each by a moustached mechanic” (p.284 II SM, p.459 TK). The costumes too have changed for the worse: the ladies' lovely gowns have been replaced by tunics, and they wear immense hats covered with fruits, flowers and birds, while the men walk around bare-headed. The narrator's final reflection is: “The reality that I had known no longer existed. It sufficed that Mme Swann did not appear, in the same attire and at the same moment, for the whole avenue to be altered. The places that we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.” (p.288 II SM, p.462 TK).

¹ The chronology of the novel is notoriously vague and contains inconsistencies. This is surely one, for this “little girl” (“une fillette”) is described in Within A Budding Grove as “a young person of fourteen or fifteen” (p.67 III SM, p.513 TK).

² In my 9^th post, I stated that Swann would later marry Odette, although we would never find out why. One of the problems of writing a blog while rereading is that one already knows what happens. So from the very start, I knew that Mme Swann was Odette and had forgotten that Proust does not reveal this until this section. I cannot remember whether, on my first reading, that had been a surprise revelation or totally obvious. If the former, I apologise to any first-time Proust readers for my spoiler!