In Search of Lost Time Vol.2: facial expressions

It’s fascinating to see how Proust describes facial expressions:

“… M. de Norpois, while anything was being expounded to him, would preserve a facial immobility as absolute as if you had been addressing some ancient—and deaf—bust in a museum. Until suddenly, falling upon you like an auctioneer’s hammer or a Delphic oracle, the Ambassador’s voice, as he replied to you, would be all the more striking in that nothing in his face had allowed you to guess what sort of impression you had made on him, or what opinion he was about to express.” (Vol.2, P.1) 

Later: 

“… But the absolute control over his facial muscles to which M. de Norpois had attained allowed him to listen without seeming to hear a word. At length my father became uneasy: “I had thought,” he ventured, after an endless preamble, “of asking the advice of the Commission …” Then from the face of the noble virtuoso, who had maintained the passivity of an orchestral player whose moment has not yet come, there emerged with an even delivery, on a sharp note, and as though they were no more than the completion (but scored for a different voice) of the phrase that my father had begun, the words…” (ibid.)

Nothing escapes him. 

“… replied the Ambassador with a slyness veiled by good-humour, casting round the table a glance the gentleness and discretion of which appeared to be tempering while in reality intensifying its malice.” (ibid.)

That is still M. de Norpois. I also note his language, his choice of words when he talks about the Comte de Paris and Madame Swann: “a little episode which is not unintriguing”, “his impression of her had on the whole been far from unfavourable”, “are as often as not the last to let themselves be embarrassed by the decrees of popular opinion”, etc. (my emphasis)

All these double negatives show that M. de Norpois seems very careful and particular about every single word he utters, that he talks like a diplomat even in informal settings. One of the problems with reading Proust in translation is that I can’t tell how well he conveys the different voices—some of it must be lost. In this case, I can see something in the language. 

But then the narrator’s mother asks M. de Norpois about his own impression of Madame Swann: 

“All the vigour of an old connoisseur broke through the habitual moderation of his speech as he answered: “Quite excellent!”

And knowing that the admission that a strong impression has been made on one by a woman takes its place, provided that one makes it in a playful tone, in a certain form of the art of conversation that is highly appreciated, he broke into a little laugh that lasted for several moments, moistening the old diplomat’s blue eyes and making his nostrils, with their network of tiny scarlet veins, quiver. “She is altogether charming!”” (ibid.) 

I don’t know about you, but I don’t remember having encountered any writer describing the quivering of a character’s nostrils, “with their network of tiny scarlet veins”. The only nose I remember is Gogol’s “The Nose”, but that’s different. 

Later, the narrator asks M. de Norpois about the Swanns (as a way of asking about Gilberte):  

“… I had seen flitting across the face of the Ambassador an expression of hesitation and displeasure, and in his eyes that vertical, narrow, slanting look (like, in the drawing of a solid body in perspective, the receding line of one of its surfaces), that look which one addresses to the invisible interlocutor whom one has within oneself at the moment when one is telling him something that one’s other interlocutor, the person to whom one has been talking up till then—myself, in this instance—is not meant to hear.” (ibid.) 

I have always liked subtlety, but Proust is particularly perceptive and sensitive.

However, sometimes what I see in Proust is not the perception of a sharp-eyed novelist but rather the perception of an over-sensitive, insecure, and obsessive person, who overthinks, tries to decipher the meaning of every little detail, and obsesses over the most trivial of things. Perhaps I’m not explaining myself very well, but in most of the passages above (except the last), the narrator is depicting the facial expressions in a detached way, as an amused observer, but in the last passage, he’s no longer detached—he puts lots of hopes on M. de Norpois mentioning his name to the Swanns and perhaps helping him enter the house, but then he makes a blunder and messes up his chance. 

This is another description that is not detached: 

“It was when she had been to her classes, when she must go home for some lesson, that Gilberte’s pupils executed that movement which, in the past, in Odette’s eyes, had been caused by the fear of disclosing that she had opened the door that day to one of her lovers, or was at that moment in a hurry to get to some assignation.” (ibid.) 

It makes me think of Proust’s description of a shift in M. Legrandin’s pupils in Swann’s Way: 

“But, at the sound of the name Guermantes, I saw in the middle of each of our friend’s blue eyes a little brown nick appear, as though they had been stabbed by some invisible pin-point, while the rest of the pupil reacted by secreting the azure overflow. His fringed eyelids darkened and drooped. His mouth, set in a bitter grimace, was the first to recover, and smiled, while his eyes remained full of pain, like the eyes of a handsome martyr whose body bristles with arrows.” (Vol.1, P.1) 

This is however a detached description from an amused observer. The level of detail makes it feel like an exaggeration (or is it?). 

These passages come from the translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff & Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright. 

It’s a good thing that Proust switches between different modes and different tones. I feel weary whenever the narrator writes about obsession—Swann’s obsession with Odette in Swann’s Way and now the narrator’s anxiety about Gilberte—and when Proust starts generalising about love, I get even wearier and just think “no, not everyone’s like you”.

But I may get back to this subject.