Reading Proust - A Running Commentary

How to introduce characters in a novel? Here is some actual advice given to novice writers: “provide a brief description or summary of the character's physical appearance (age, height, hair colour and clothing style), personality (shy and reserved or outgoing and charismatic) and background (occupation, family and past experiences)”.  Yet this is not how the great writers go about it. There are two ways of introducing characters: by having them appear or by referring to them before they appear (Godot being the exception). At one extreme, where introduction and appearance coincide, we can think of literary characters who suddenly and dramatically appear on the scene. In Great Expectations, for example, the young narrator, Pip, has just introduced himself to the reader and is in the churchyard where his father, mother and five brothers are buried. Without any warning, Dickens then introduces the startling character of Abel Magwitch:  “‘Hold your noise!’ cried a terrible voice, a...

 It is now two years after the Gilberte episode and Marcel, aged about 16 or 17, finally gets finally to go to Balbec, accompanied by his grandmother. In Place-Names: The Name, at the end of Swann's Way, Marcel has only the names of desired destinations with which to conjure. But now in the much longer Place-Names: The Place, he experiences one of the destinations of which he has long dreamed. In particular, he has been looking forward to seeing the Persian-influenced church at Balbec and, as ever, he is disappointed by the reality. He has alighted from the train at Balbec-le-Vieux rather than Balbec-Plage and discovers that the church is not next to the sea, which he had romantically imagined lapping at the foot of its walls, but twelve miles away in the inland town's mundane surroundings of a café, an omnibus office, a bank and a pâtisserie. Furthermore, the church's statue of the Virgin appears as a little, wrinkled, old lady (which is discussed in a 357-word sentence – ...

 Having examined Marcel's relationship with Gilberte, I would now like to explore the Swanns' home and social life, which is the other main theme in this section. Before doing that, however, it is necessary to consider the beginning of the section, which opens with Marcel's parents having to dinner an old ambassador, the Marquis de Norpois, who is working with Marcel's father. Prior to the visit, his parents had been pondering the question of whom else to invite and had decided against Swann, who Marcel's father thought had, since his marriage to Odette, become a vulgarian who was forever name-dropping. Meanwhile, on M de Norpois' previous recommendation, Marcel had been earlier that day to see the great actress Berma but when faced with the reality, as we should expect by now, had been disappointed. He remains, however, a devotee of the great author Bergotte. It is an iconoclastic evening for Marcel, for M de Norpois speaks highly of Mme Swann, disparages Bergo...

This section serves essentially two purposes: to chronicle the development of Marcel's relationship with Gilberte and to depict the Swanns' home and social life. Artist: Renoir Marcel and Gilberte's growing intimacy echoes in some respects that of her parents in Swann in Love: Swann and Marcel fall for their would-be lovers by indirect means (via Botticelli and Bergotte, as we have already seen); their predominant emotion in pursuit of love is pain; each suffers as a result of not only his beloved's behaviour but also his own back-firing actions; and each uses the strategy of feigned indifference in the belief that the deception will make his inamorata less indifferent to him. One major difference, however, is that Swann is, initially at least, loved by Odette, whereas Marcel's love for Gilberte is unrequited. The story of his love for her is, therefore, one of deception, self-deception and eventual realisation, still mingled with self-deception, that their relation...

  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 real...

Interwoven in the telling of Swann and Odette's romantic entanglement are three important factors in its development: the Verdurins' group which starts by bringing them together and ends by coming between them; Swann's consequent exile from high society; and the importance of music, in particular Vinteuil's sonata, in their relationship. In relation to the first two of those themes, Proust's skills as a portraitist and as an observer of subtle class distinctions are illustrated in his sketches of the attendees of both the Verdurins' bourgeois and the Marquise de Saint-Euverte's upper-class salons; while, in relation to the third theme, his profound appreciation of music is demonstrated by his thoughts on the sonata which is heard in both salons. The Verdurins' circle Proust commences Swann in Love with a description of the “little clan” who attend the Verdurins' salon. Immediately, with just one quote, he renders the personality of the group...

  After the momentary respite resulting from having waited outside the wrong bedroom window, Swann's hard time immediately resumes: “his jealousy, as it had been the shadow of his love” returns, which renews his imaginings of Odette tendering her love to another ( p.81 II Scott Moncrieff, p.301 Kilmartin ). “A fresh turn was given to the screw” when he remembers a look of admiration in her eye while Forcheville had been making a scene at the Verdurins'. And soon his suspicions are revived after she fails to answer the door one afternoon despite the porter telling him he believed her to be at home. He repeats his earlier behaviour of going round the back of her house, standing beneath her bedroom window and knocking on it. On receiving no answer this time, he later returns to her front door and she lets him in, telling him she had been asleep when he had called earlier. He believes her to be lying and his suspicions are confirmed upon reading a letter which she has given him to...

  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 Cr é cy. 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 Combra...