In Search of Lost Time Vol.1: love, obsession, jealousy

I have complaints.

Before we get to that, it must be said that I do think Proust is a great writer, which you can see in my previous 5 blog posts about Swann’s Way. I absolutely love “Part 1: Combray”, with which many readers seem to struggle, and I do think that “Part 2: Swann in Love” is a great study of obsession and jealousy.

My problem with Proust is personal, and seems to be a clash of sensibilities. 

First of all, Proust is exhausting. He goes on and on and on about Swann’s obsession with Odette, and his jealousy. Swann’s Way is not a big volume—on my kobo, it is 445 pages, and Part 2 is about 184 pages or so—and yet it feels very long. Why do I find Proust, though not Tolstoy, so long and exhausting when both writers are interested in details and subtleties? I asked myself.* A major difference between Tolstoy and Proust is that Tolstoy moves rather quickly between characters and between groups of characters, and he inhabits everyone’s mind, whereas Proust’s underlying tempo is slow, and mostly stays in one character’s mind for a long time, either the narrator (unnamed but generally called Marcel for convenience), or Swann. Everyone says Swann is like Marcel, or at least his obsession with Odette will be later paralleled by Marcel’s obsession with Gilberte and Albertine (Proust writes “like certain novelists, he had distributed his own personality between two characters”).  

Another difference is that many things happen in Tolstoy and he writes about the minute changes in consciousness, whereas Proust writes about different actions and different incidents that are essentially manifestations of the same thing—Swann’s obsession with Odette and his jealousy.

Proust fans don’t have to tell me that the two novelists have different aims and must be judged accordingly, I know. I understand that Swann projects his fantasies onto Odette, as the narrator does with Gilberte in Part 3. I understand that Proust deliberately stays in Swann’s mind so that we don’t quite see Odette, only the Odette in Swann’s head. I understand that Proust is making a point about the impossibility of truly knowing another person. The comparison with Tolstoy is to explain what about Proust I personally find exhausting.

Part 2 of Swann’s Way is a great study in obsession, but being stuck in Swann’s neurotic, jealous mind feels oppressive after a while. Proust and Cao Xueqin have opposite “problems”: if Cao Xueqin largely conveys characters through action and dialogue, and sometimes makes me want to know more about characters’ thoughts but doesn’t go any further, Proust holds me hostage in a character’s head and doesn’t let go. Proust explores the subject till exhaustion, I end up feeling exhausted. 

My second complaint, again personal, is that I don’t know how old the characters are and how much time passes between events. We know how much time passes in Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, in The Tale of Genji and Hong lou meng…; in In Search of Lost Time, memories are jumbled together and time is generally unclear (even though once in a while there are references to historical events). In novels, sometimes it doesn’t matter, but the omission of time references in Swann’s Way can be a barrier: my perception of the behaviour of the narrator and Gilberte in Part 3 would change depending on how old they are (their language about playing games sounds young, but they’re probably older); I want to know the time gap between him first falling in love with Gilberte in Combray and meeting her again in Paris; the time gap also changes the significance when the narrator makes a distinction between Combray Swann and Swann as father of Gilberte; even something as minor as Marcel lying to Françoise and writing a note to his mother to ask for a goodnight kiss would be viewed differently depending on his age, and so on. 

Perhaps this is premature and reading all 7 volumes may help me create some sort of timeline, but my complaint remains true for Swann’s Way. 

My third complaint is to do with Psychological Proust. In my previous blog post, I wrote that I didn’t understand Swann’s love for Odette. I have decided to go along with Proust and see that love as irrational, though there’s something very strange about the way Swann associates Odette’s face with a painting by Botticelli (for some sort of satisfaction, because he’s not attracted to her), and associates their love with Vinteuil’s music. But let’s say I accept that.

Proust writes: 

“For what we suppose to be our love or our jealousy is never a single, continuous and indivisible passion. It is composed of an infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, each of which is ephemeral, although by their uninterrupted multiplicity they give us the impression of continuity, the illusion of unity. The life of Swann’s love, the fidelity of his jealousy, were formed of the death, the infidelity, of innumerable desires, innumerable doubts, all of which had Odette for their object. If he had remained for any length of time without seeing her, those that died would not have been replaced by others. But the presence of Odette continued to sow in Swann’s heart alternate seeds of love and suspicion.” (Vol.1, P.2) 

Perhaps I misunderstand what Proust means, but I don’t think it’s true. It’s true for Swann, and I suppose, for some people, but Proust writes it as a universal thing and I don’t think it is. Swann’s love for Odette seems to die and gets replaced with jealousy (or insecurity) when they’re apart, and he loves her again when they’re together (and she doesn’t play games with him), then his love dies again, and so on and so forth, but that isn’t normal. This is the relationship of a neurotic and insecure man with a manipulative woman; loving couples aren’t like that. 

“… The important thing was that we should see each other, Gilberte and I, and should have an opportunity of making a mutual avowal of our love which, until then, would not officially (so to speak) have begun. Doubtless the various reasons which made me so impatient to see her would have appeared less urgent to a grown man. As life goes on, we acquire such adroitness in the cultivation of our pleasures, that we content ourselves with the pleasure we derive from thinking of a woman, as I thought of Gilberte, without troubling ourselves to ascertain whether the image corresponds to the reality, and also with the pleasure of loving her without needing to be sure that she loves us too…” (Vol.1, P.3) 

Again, I suppose it’s true for the narrator, and many people, perhaps also Proust, but Proust presents it as a general thing and I don’t think it’s true for everyone. It’s not true for me, for example—I know that I cannot truly know my boyfriend and can only know what I know (I’ve seen Solaris), but I do care that my love for him is grounded in (part of) reality rather than some sort of fantasy entirely in my head; and it’s not enough to love unrequitedly. I asked a few grown men, and they didn’t think it’s a universal thing either.  

Generally speaking, Proust does have great psychological insight, especially when he pierces through people’s pretensions and hypocrisies, and when he writes about cruelty (the scene of Mlle Vinteuil and her lesbian lover in Part 1 is shocking and unforgettable). His depiction of a sick mind (I mean Swann’s) is brilliant. But Proust seems to have no idea what a normal, healthy love is like, so when the narrator speaks of his own or Swann’s feelings as something universal, problems arise.

Having said all that, I still think Proust is a great writer, and the last 20 pages of Swann’s Way, when the narrator returns to the Bois much older, are wonderful. 

“They had long since fled, and still I stood vainly questioning the deserted paths. The sun had gone. Nature was resuming its reign over the Bois, from which had vanished all trace of the idea that it was the Elysian Garden of Woman; above the gimcrack windmill the real sky was grey; the wind wrinkled the surface of the Grand Lac in little wavelets, like a real lake; large birds flew swiftly over the Bois, as over a real wood, and with shrill cries perched, one after another, on the great oaks which, beneath their Druidical crown, and with Dodonian majesty, seemed to proclaim the inhuman emptiness of this deconsecrated forest, and helped me to understand how paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one’s memory, which must inevitably lose the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being apprehended by the senses. 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 we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. They were only a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.” (Vol.1, P.3) 

(The excerpts are from the edition translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff & Terence Kilmartin, and revised by D.J. Enright).

That is magnificent writing. 

Will I read Volume 2? Probably, but not yet. 

*: I once came across a tweet from a (self-proclaimed) Proust fan saying that Proust did everything Tolstoy could do, and better. This, now I know, is pure bollocks. This person clearly knows neither Tolstoy nor Proust.