Swann's Way: Swann in Love (8th post)

 

At this point the novel moves away from Marcel's memories of his childhood and Combray as he narrates an event that occurred before his birth: Charles Swann's love affair with Odette de Crécy. This section is anomalous in that it is the only one out of chronological sequence (which is not to say that Proust never relates some shorter episodes out of order) and it is the only one relying on third-person narration (Dickens made the same switch from first- to third-person in The Old Curiosity Shop – but for very different reasons). All of this creates a technical problem: how does Marcel have access to all the details and, in particular, to Swann's emotions and even one of his dreams? The answer is to be found at the very end of the novel and allows us to reach a conclusion about the relationship between the author and the narrator that most critics are unwilling to draw. For now, however, that will have to wait.

We have already met Swann as he was a neighbour at Combray, and for the young Marcel he was "the unconscious author of my sufferings" because on the evenings Swann called on the family, Marcel's bedtime ritual would be broken by his mother staying downstairs with their guest and not coming up to bestow her bedtime kiss on her fretting son.

And we have already met Odette, although we and Marcel do not realise until much later that she and the Lady in Pink whom he encounters while she is visiting his Uncle Adolphe in Combray are one and the same.

Furthermore, we already know that their affair resulted in their marriage and that this marriage has proven socially disastrous for Swann, a theme which will be expanded upon in Within a Budding Grove (A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs).

But we have to go back half-a-dozen years (the novel's chronology and characters' ages are notoriously vague) from Swann at Combray to his meeting Odette for the first time, when he is introduced to her at the theatre by a friend, who had described her as “ravishing”. There is, of course, the usual ambivalence which Proust's characters exhibit when initially encountering someone who will become important in their lives: “She had struck Swann not, certainly, as being devoid of beauty, but as endowed with a style of beauty which left him indifferent, which aroused in him no desire, which gave him, indeed, a sort of physical repulsion; as one of those women of whom every man can name some, and each will name different examples, who are the converse of the type which our senses demand. To give him any pleasure, her profile was too sharp, her skin too delicate, her cheek-bones too prominent, her features too tightly drawn. Her eyes were fine, but so large they seemed to be bending beneath their own weight, strained the rest of her face and always made her appear unwell or in an ill humour.” (p.270 Scott Moncrieff, p.213 Kilmartin).

Odette soon sets her cap at Swann: she asks to visit him at his home as she would like to view his collections and better get to know him, and she also takes him to the salon of the Verdurins, of which she is a regular attendee.

Of Swann's indifference, the narrator observes: “In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough to make him fall in love with her. And so, at an age when it would appear—since one seeks in love before everything else a subjective pleasure—that the taste for feminine beauty must play the largest part in its procreation, love may come into being, love of the most physical kind, without any foundation in desire.”

They continue to see each other, but with little enthusiasm on Swann's part: when he is to meet her he always becomes depressed because he knows that in order to find her beautiful he will have to focus on her cheekbones and shut out the rest of cheeks.
But on one such occasion, he makes an important discovery: arriving at her house, he notices a resemblance to Zipporah (the daughter of Jethro and future wife of Moses) in a Sistine frescoe by Botticelli (p.6 vol II SM, p.243 TK). As a result of this link to Swann's aesthetic world, she now assumes a new and nobler form in his mind and he realises that, contrary to what he had previously felt, she does after all accord with his aesthetic tastes. “And whereas the mere sight of her in the flesh, by perpetually reviving his misgivings as to the quality of her face, her figure, the whole of her beauty, used to cool the ardour of his love, those misgivings were swept away and that love confirmed now that he could re-erect his estimate of her on the sure foundations of his aesthetic principles” (p.8 II SM, p.245 TK).

Whilst indifference as a prelude to romance is not unusual in novels (Mr Darcy's initial lack of interest in Miss Bennet being the most obvious example), this must be the oddest literary blossoming of love (although the reason for Mr Casaubon's marriage to Miss Brooke might be as improbable).

However, the full genesis of Swann's love is still to come: he has yet to undergo the misery and torture, necessary in the Proustian world and thought of therein as “intermittences of the heart”, for its completion.

This process commences when Swann almost immediately begins to worry that Odette has now become indifferent to him! He therefore feigns indifference to her in order to draw out of her a reaction. Accordingly, when he is to meet her at the Verdurins', he purposely arrives late. But the stratagem backfires on him: finding she has already left, he suddenly “felt his heart wrung with anguish”. He dashes off to search for her in various cafés and restaurants. As his desperation mounts, it becomes “an anxious torturing desire”, “the agonising desire to possess her”. This is all that is required in the first phase of the pathological condition that characters such as Swann (and the equally flawed Marcel) call love: “Among all the methods by which love is brought into being, among all the agents which disseminate that blessed bane, there are few so efficacious as the great gust of agitation which, now and then, sweeps over the human spirit.” (pp.17-18 II SM, p.252 TK). Eventually he finds her in the street looking for her carriage, which they enter together, and, as he straightens the cattleyas in her bodice, they embrace, his love for her being "brought into being” by this agony and anxiety.

That happy state of affairs does not last. The trouble starts with the introduction, at Odette's insistence, into the Verdurins' circle of a “swell” called the Comte de Forcheville (p.45 II SM, p.273 TK). He becomes the new favourite at the salon and Swann correspondingly falls from grace. Doubts begin to creep in: he only sees her on evenings because “he was afraid of her growing tired of him if he visited her during the day as well” and he was “constantly looking out for an opportunity of claiming her attention, in any way that would not be displeasing to her”. So he pays her debts because “he enjoyed everything which could impress Odette with his love for herself” (pp.67-68 II SM, pp.290-291 TK). However, he realises that “he had for some time been feeling neither well nor happy, especially since Odette had brought Forcheville to the Verdurins', and he would have liked to go away for a while to rest in the country. But he could never summon up the courage to leave Paris, even for a day, while Odette was there.” (p.72 II SM, p.294 TK). It is not clear at this stage whether this disinclination to leave Odette behind is because he is obsessed with her or afraid of her seeing someone else, or a combination of the two.

He gains some momentary relief when Odette tells him in front of everyone at the Verdurins', including Forcheville, not to be too late when he visits her the following evening after a banquet he is to attend (p.74 II SM, p.295 TK). It is now clear to Swann that she prefers him. Despite this, he notices the first stirrings of jealousy, which have another effect: “Since he had observed that, to several other men than himself, Odette seemed a fascinating and desirable woman, the attraction which her body held for him had aroused a painful longing to secure the absolute mastery of even the tiniest particles of her heart” (p.75 II SM, p.296 TK). Nevertheless, he wishes for her to ease his jealousy: he wants her “to guarantee him immunity, for as long as his love should last and he remain vulnerable, from the assaults of jealousy.” Vulnerability, it would seem, is a characteristic of this pathological variety of love.

It is not long before Swann's jealousy makes him suspicious. One night, after leaving her house because she wanted to go to sleep, he imagines that the real reason she has got rid of him is that she is awaiting the arrival of another lover (p.77 II SM, p.297 TK). He goes round the back of her house and waits below her bedroom window. He is “tortured”, is in “agony” and suffers “torment” (now he is really in love!). But his new certainty that she is not faithful reduces that torment: in much the same way as for the chess master Nimzowitsch the threat is often stronger than the execution of the move, for Swann the suspicion was worse than the knowledge. When he hears voices from within the bedroom and knocks on the shutters, which are then opened from within, he finds himself face-to-face with two old gentlemen standing in a room that he has never seen before (p.80 II SM, p.297 TK). As in The Rays' doo-wop hit Silhouettes, he had got the wrong house. He is now “overjoyed”, not from relief that Odette had not been unfaithful, but because she had not observed this demonstration of his jealousy, and hence discovered his passion, which would have revealed that his apparent indifference to her had been feigned.

I had hoped to deal with the entirety of Swann and Odette's courtship in one go, but the “intermittences” are so many we must divide them in two, and then deal with the other matters of Swann in Love in a third post.