In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

This second section of In Search of Lost Time is in two parts: “At Mme Swann’s” and “Place-Names: The Place.” In Proust’s original conception, the book was not split after Swann’s Way. Grasset, his first publisher, required him to make more than one volume of it. Proust transposed some pages from a later passage, to round off what thus became the first major section of the novel as we know it. This is why, at the end of both Swann’s Way and “At Mme Swann’s,” we find Mme Swann with sunshade in an avenue in or near the Bois de Boulogne. The consecutiveness of the original text remains visible, despite the division of the book: at the beginning of this section of Proust’s work, the narrator is still moving into the vicinity of the Swanns, as he was at the end of Swann’s Way. In “At Mme Swann’s” the narrator continues to be infatuated with Odette and besotted with her daughter, Gilberte. She is the first of the adolescents with whom he dallies here. The others he will meet at the seaside, at Balbec, in “Place-Names: The Place.” The cast of Proust’s great and memorable characters is now enriched, especially by the advent of Albertine and (briefly) of Charlus, who will both figure largely in the later volumes, and by Bergotte and Elstir, who complete the trio of artists begun in Swann’s Way with Vinteuil. Proust’s characters are, be it noted, the work of a caricaturist: he gives to each a distinctive voice and mode of speech, most noticeably here Norpois and Charlus.

As for place-names, many are those of real places, some of them relocated on the map of Brittany or Normandy. Others, invented, borrow evocative syllables from real ones, like Balbec itself: it looks like Bolbec, near Le Havre; and, as the town with an “almost Persian” church, it appropriately sounds rather like Baalbek in Lebanon.

Largely devoted to the narrator’s attempts to love and be loved by a series of girls, and to his serious acquaintance with love as a source of pain, this section also expands three other worlds he will explore further in later volumes: art, society, and friendship. In the world of art, he goes to see La Berma act; he meets both Bergotte, the writer he read in the garden at Combray, and Elstir, a painter (whom the reader has met before, in a different guise). In a lowly level of society, he makes personal acquaintance with not only the Swanns, but also Mme Verdurin. He next meets members of the exalted Guermantes family: Mme de Villeparisis, Robert de Saint-Loup (who is to be the main vehicle of the theme of friendship), and the Baron de Charlus.

Love, art, society, friendship: these are the major realms of experience to be explored by the young protagonist. From the narrator’s encounters with these great enigmas and temptations, Proust distills his lengthy meditations, variations on some of the most structural themes of his novel: the disparities between cognition and thing, theory and practice, desire and discovery, appearance and truth, imagination and reality. For the narrator is now coming to an awareness of life as mystery, full of passions that baffle, appearances that conceal, illusions that seem to promise, impressions that tantalize. He has inklings of the sheer unpredictability of beauty, the inability of words and names to capture the essences of things, the contradictions with which life replaces expectations, the discrepancy between impression and memory, his own sentimental fatalism. In “Place-Names: The Name,” the last section of Swann’s Way, the narrator longed to see Balbec, its Persian church, its perilous tempest-thrashed shore; and here, in “Place-Names: The Place,” he sets eyes at last on all three, to his dismay. None of them resembles the fancied version of itself. Wishes never come true. The expected revelation of a transcendent truth becomes the disappointing “tyranny of the particular.” But this in turn will be redeemed by an understanding of truths about beauty and reality: that impressions, our only access to these, are inadequate to their conscious capture, that they are individual, irreplaceable by any generality, untranslatable in any word, accessible only by a freak of memory or through art. In his variations on this theme, Proust transmutes epistemology into poetry. And all the time, as the narrator, persuaded by Norpois of his lack of talent, strays apparently further and further away from his lost “vocation” to become a writer, frittering his life into pastimes as futile as Swann’s before him, the irony of existence will slowly secrete in these very pastimes the only subject he can write about: perception, and the states of consciousness that translate the world into an individual’s experience, those shallow and transitory states in which, without being fully conscious of them, we mostly live. Proust is never more original as a novelist, never more Proustian, than when examining a momentary awareness of which we are barely aware: a glimpse of something possibly glimpsed long ago, the sight of a building we have heard of, a close-up of a face first loved at a distance, appearances as affected by sleep, erotic arousal, or drunkenness, the nature of things imagined from the sound of a name, subliminality as unexamined memory or impressions barely remembered. For vivid impression fossilizes into habit, a trance from which only chance memory can release it. Once released, only simile can capture it. Awareness of the world is an optical illusion, in other words metaphor: the figures which describe things as other things are as organic in the style of Proust as in the paintings of Elstir.

Lack of forethought in devising some of the book’s major divisions, imposed on Proust by his ignorance of the technicalities of publishing, can also be seen in smaller aspects of his text, inconsistencies, improvisations, and discrepancies, which reflect as much his mode of composition as French publishing practice of that time. Among the great novelists, as a bungler of basics Proust has no equal, save perhaps Henry James—think of chapter I of The Portrait of a Lady, where James has tedious difficulty in getting his story under way, in defining the point of view of his narrator. Is the latter a know-all or a Flaubertian deducer from appearances? The man seems unskilled in introducing his characters to his reader, and in enabling characters to converse. In similar things, Proust too seems incompetent, or perhaps an improviser. Both James and Proust were of at least two minds. James was unsure whether he was American or English, whether he was writing for American or English readers, whether he was to yield to the temptation to be French. Proust was intermittently unsure whether he was writing an essay or a novel. Here is a novel written by a critic and literary theorist, both a novel in the form of an essay and an essay on the novel. Proust must not only show but tell, tell rather than show, tell at the expense of showing; he must make the reader, who may wish only to revel in the fiction, admit the truthfulness of its fictionality. Proust’s reflections, his enunciation of philosophical and psychological truths, his aesthetic theories, his opinions and system of thoughts are often more important to him than his verisimilitudes. His composition was often not linear; he wrote in bits and pieces; transitions from one scene to another are sometimes awkward, clumsy even. He can make heavy weather of simple movements: characters get stood roughly into position so that the next demonstration may take place; action must be performed perfunctorily, so that protracted analysis of it may ensue; the narrator seems to say farewell to Elstir at his front door, yet two pages later is walking him home. Proust shows, it has been said, “utter nonchalance” about “loss of fictional verisimilitude.”³

Some of this shows Proust’s disdain for Realism and its tenet of observation of the physical world. But other features of this work, quite analogous, cannot be so explained. The narrator’s presumed age is at variance with the events in which he occasionally participates (Norpois’s table talk, for instance, with its naughty allusions to cuckoldry, emotional blackmail, the indelicacies and delightful improprieties of Mme Swann). This may be one reason why Proust never divulges how old the narrator is: it enables him to fudge, to have it both ways, in disquisitions on the appreciation of art and music, on human behavior and experience of life and love, well beyond the narrator’s assumed years. It may be to assuage this impression that many characters remark on the narrator’s precocious intelligence and sensitivity.

Another main uncertainty for the reader is Proust’s conflation within the one text of two narrative viewpoints, first person and third. Whereas in Swann’s Way the two are largely kept apart, first person in “Combray” and “Place-Names: The Name” and third person in “Swann in Love,” in this second section Proust never resolves his indeterminate narratorial point of view. On one and the same page the narrator’s subjectivity, aptly blinkered in the face of a character’s hidden qualities, becomes a disconcerting omniscience. We learn of the motives and emotions of characters frequenting Mme Swann’s at-homes, of Dr. Cottard or of the Swanns themselves, from a narrator who, as outsider and (presumably) callow youth, should know them as little as we do.

The translator can have a similar uneasiness from an indeterminacy in Proust’s use of the imperfect tense: though it is normally reserved for repeated or continuing happenings, he will use it for events that appear to be single and preterite. This feature of the writing can be bothersome; the translator may be (justifiably) tempted to clarify what Proust has left ambiguous and unsatisfactory: did this act take place once or more than once? Such ubiquitous symptoms of the text, inseparable from major structural features of it, suggest that the latter were improvised rather than planned, then persevered with rather than revised. Jean-François Revel, though admiring Proust, says the writing is not improvised, only slipshod: “he makes endless additions, rewrites without rethinking, overwrites, forgets, repeats himself, muddles the design.”⁴ Originally vanity-published, Proust’s manuscripts never received the attention that Maxwell Perkins gave to Scott Fitzgerald’s or the devoted Bouilhet to Flaubert’s. It has been said that Proust’s contract with Grasset “rid him of all editorial constraints.”⁵ His novel is one of the few masterpieces never properly edited before publication and containing to this day infelicities which some may be surprised to find in a masterpiece. The translator wishing to make a seamless text for his reader is often thwarted by Proust’s seams, which tend to be rough. His paragraphing often seems idiosyncratic.

Smaller discrepancies abound. In “At Mme Swann’s,” Bloch tells the narrator all women are “always on the lookout for opportunities to make love” (p. 150), a revelation he had already made in “Combray.” In “Place-Names: The Place,” with every air of reminding us of something we know, the narrator says Mme de Villeparisis once gave him a duck holding a box of chocolate (p. 335); yet, though he has been telling us much about her for many pages, not only have we heard nothing of this surprising event, but in the accounts of his grandmother’s first meetings with Mme de Villeparisis at Balbec, much tends to contradict it. Near the end of “Place-Names: The Place,” the narrator seeks to contrive an introduction to Mme Bontemps (p. 506). But hundreds of pages earlier, in “At Mme Swann’s,” her fellow guest, he seems to know her well enough (pp. 173, 180). In the Miss Sacripant episode, the flowers are first roses, then twice (or is it thrice?) carnations (pp. 428, 429). Mme Swann’s white furs, Proust says, are of zibeline (= sable), which I translate as “ermine,” since white furs made from a black animal seem to indicate that here (p. 210), as occasionally elsewhere, he used the wrong word. Having decided (belatedly) that Saint-Loup’s garrison town shall be called Doncières, Proust later wrongfoots us by seeming to have left it unnamed (p. 365). The sudden and disconcerting appearance of Nissim Bernard (p. 354), then his disappearance, are symptoms of this same makeshift mode of composition: again the translator is tempted to make things easier for his reader by smoothing over an afterthought which breaks up the Blochs’ conversation about Bergotte and makes some pronouns problematical. The narrator is twice introduced to Andrée (pp. 461, 464). The mention of “doubts” on p. 510 is odd, there having been no doubt in the narrator’s mind up to this point. These examples and others, some of which I mention in footnotes, show the unedited and unrevised nature of some of Proust’s text.

In translating, it is sometimes necessary to edit. For example, the French has a strange parenthesis in “la reine de (Naples)”: had I faithfully translated this, it would have given “the Queen of (Naples)” (p. 353); rather than perplex my reader, I edit. Similarly, in a scene where Andrée is absent, she appears to speak. Or, rather, which character speaks the words “I’ve put up with her awful dishonesty for ages” (p. 466) is in French unclear; in English it must, I believe, be clarified. The unclarity is here compounded by the fact that Proust, having just introduced another of the girls into the scene, has neglected to name her. Or take what looks like a tiny example of defective revision or lack of editing: the words “overhanging the threshold” (p. 500). These words surprise the reader: the narrator is walking with Andrée through woodlands, in a country lane, and there is no building to which this “threshold” might belong. It is interesting to note that, to this little translator’s dilemma, C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s solution, quite defensible, was to quietly omit the words. Here and there, with other small perplexities, I do something similar.

The Dreyfus Affair is made much of by some commentators on In Search of Lost Time. In fact, Proust deals with it hardly at all (in the whole novel, the name of Dreyfus occurs less often than the headwaiter’s, a very minor character), and then only in its most trivial repercussions in fashionable society, such as those reflected on p. 91. More important to the novel than Dreyfus is the virulence of the anti-Semitic prejudice generally shared by the fashionable characters, of the sort satirized on p. 345 in a speech by Charlus (and perceptible, if less virulent, in Proust’s own ambivalence toward the Blochs). Still, such as it is, it is here that we see the first allusions to the Affair. Early in “At Mme Swann’s,” there is a comparison (p. 19) that may be a reminiscence of Colonel Picquart, a hero of the Dreyfusards. And the only other mention of Dreyfus (p. 388) may suggest that the summer which the narrator and his grandmother spend at Balbec is that of 1898, one of the Affair’s acutest phases. (Despite which, the volume contains passing references to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5 and to the King of England.)

I think it is also misleading to speak of Proust’s sharp “powers of observation,” of “the immensity of his social canvas,” to say he has “a grasp of how society works” and gives “a vast panorama of society.”⁶ Proust’s book is much more about the power of covert sexual transgressiveness to undermine a social order founded on class, snobbery, and money. True, his characters include duchesses and scullery maids, ambassadors and busboys. But there is little in between. And they are all seen from a perspective that likens them to one another. Proust needed little evidence in support of his generalizations. He certainly professes a sort of Balzacian expertise in diagnosing the ills of the social body; but his sociology is hampered by the shallowness of his sample and by his prizing of introspection over observation of externals. This should surprise no one: he was a cosseted Parisian whose Right Bank world was narrow, who preferred to live in the past, in bed, in a cork-lined room, who rarely traveled and never did a day’s work.

Proust’s real strengths lie in his analysis of the ordinary, his close acquaintance with feelings, the pessimism of his examination of consciousness, his diagnosis of the unreliability of relationships and the incoherence of personality, his attentiveness to the bleak truths he has to tell of time, of its unrelenting wear and tear, its indifferent outlasting of all human endeavor, its gradual annulment of our dearest joys and even our cruelest sorrows, voiding them of all that once made them ours. Life, as Proust tells it, is disappointment and loss—loss of time, as his title says, and loss of youth of course; loss of freshness of vision, of belief, and of the semblance it once gave to the world; and loss of self, a loss against which we have only one safeguard, and that unsure: memory.