In Search of Lost Time Vol.1: as comedy of manners

One thing I didn’t expect was how funny Proust would be. Some parts of Swann’s Way feel like a comedy of manners.

For example, the narrator writes about Swann from his great-aunt’s perspective:

“… she did not, in fact, endow him with any critical faculty, and had no great opinion of the intelligence of a man who, in conversation, would avoid serious topics and showed a very dull preciseness, not only when he gave us kitchen recipes, going into the most minute details, but even when my grandmother’s sisters were talking to him about art. When challenged by them to give an opinion, or to express his admiration for some picture, he would remain almost disobligingly silent, and would then make amends by furnishing (if he could) some fact or other about the gallery in which the picture was hung, or the date at which it had been painted.” (Vol.1, P.1)

That is amusing because I see it in other people, and at the same time embarrassing because I see it in myself. 

Here is the narrator writing about his great-aunt: 

“Whenever she saw in others an advantage, however trivial, which she herself lacked, she would persuade herself that it was no advantage at all, but a drawback, and would pity so as not to have to envy them.” (ibid.) 

I recognise that in some of my relatives. Swann is coming, and the great-aunt is dissuading the narrator’s grandmother’s sisters from mentioning that his name appears in the Figaro. 

“She did not, however, put any very great pressure upon my grandmother’s sisters, for they, in their horror of vulgarity, had brought to such a fine art the concealment of a personal allusion in a wealth of ingenious circumlocution, that it would often pass unnoticed even by the person to whom it was addressed.” (ibid.)

A few pages later, in the middle of a conversation about something else:

“… “I don’t agree with you: there are some days when I find reading the papers very pleasant indeed,” my aunt Flora broke in, to show Swann that she had read the note about his Corot in the Figaro.

“Yes,” aunt Céline went one better, “when they write about things or people in whom we are interested.”

“I don’t deny it,” answered Swann in some bewilderment.” (ibid.)

Apart from his name in the Figaro, they also want to thank Swann for the wine he sent. 

“… “Coarse or not, I know bottles in which there is something very different,” said Flora briskly, feeling bound to thank Swann as well as her sister, since the present of Asti had been addressed to them both. Céline laughed.

Swann was puzzled, but went on…” (ibid.)

Hahahahaha. 

The grandmother too has a horror of vulgarity. 

“The truth was that she could never permit herself to buy anything from which no intellectual profit was to be derived, above all the profit which fine things afford us by teaching us to seek our pleasures elsewhere than in the barren satisfaction of worldly wealth. Even when she had to make someone a present of the kind called “useful,” when she had to give an armchair or some table-silver or a walking-stick, she would choose antiques, as though their long desuetude had effaced from them any semblance of utility and fitted them rather to instruct us in the lives of the men of other days than to serve the common requirements of our own.” (ibid.) 

For example, rather than give him photographs of famous buildings, she avoids the “commercial banality” by buying paintings of those buildings. 

“We could no longer keep count in the family (when my great-aunt wanted to draw up an indictment of my grandmother) of all the armchairs she had presented to married couples, young and old, which on a first attempt to sit down upon them had at once collapsed beneath the weight of their recipient.” (ibid.)

Nabokov would call them genteel.

Aunt Léonie, like the narrator’s other relatives, has her pretensions. 

“Unfortunately, having formed the habit of thinking aloud, she did not always take care to see that there was no one in the adjoining room, and I would often hear her saying to herself: “I must not forget that I never slept a wink”—for “never sleeping a wink” was her great claim to distinction, and one admitted and respected in our household vocabulary: in the morning Françoise would not “wake” her, but would simply “go in” to her; during the day, when my aunt wished to take a nap, we used to say just that she wished to “ponder” or to “rest”; and when in conversation she so far forgot herself as to say “what woke me up,” or “I dreamed that,” she would blush and at once correct herself.” (ibid.)

It gets funnier. She is an invalid whose hobby is listening to gossip and discovering the identity of anyone she doesn’t recognise, so the narrator uses over and over again the phrase “didn’t know from Adam”: “at Combray a person whom one “didn’t know from Adam” was as incredible a being as any mythological deity” (ibid.). Someone she doesn’t know from Adam may turn out to be someone’s daughter who has been going to school somewhere else, or a gardener’s brother, and so on, but Proust doesn’t stop there. He goes further: 

“Everyone was so well known in Combray, animals as well as people, that if my aunt had happened to see a dog go by which she “didn’t know from Adam” she never stopped thinking about it, devoting all her inductive talents and her leisure hours to this incomprehensible phenomenon.” (ibid.) 

Then: 

““That will be Mme Sazerat’s dog,” Françoise would suggest, without any real conviction, but in the hope of appeasement, and so that my aunt should not “split her head.”

“As if I didn’t know Mme Sazerat’s dog!” My aunt’s critical mind would not be fobbed off so easily.

“Well then, it must be the new dog M. Galopin brought back from Lisieux.”

“Oh, if that’s what it is!”” (ibid.) 

Hahahaha I thought “a dog” was exaggeration or some figure of speech.

Now look at the narrator’s friend Bloch, who upsets the entire household once because he turns up an hour and a half late for dinner and covered with mud from head to foot:  

““I never allow myself to be influenced in the smallest degree either by atmospheric disturbances or by the arbitrary divisions of what is known as time. I would willingly reintroduce the use of the opium pipe or the Malay kris, but I know nothing about that of those infinitely more pernicious and moreover flatly bourgeois implements, the umbrella and the watch.”” (ibid.) 

Proust picks interesting details. 

My headline is of course clickbait—not the entire of Swann’s Way is like this—but I do think that In Search of Lost Time doesn’t present a complete break with the literature that came before, as some people say, and that many parts of the novel do feel like comedy of manners.