In Search of Lost Time Vol.2: “like those apparently inanimate objects in a Persian fairy-tale”

I wonder if any reader never gets tired, frustrated, or annoyed reading Proust. There must be an ideal reader out there, savouring every page of Proust as I did with War and Peace or Moby Dick. Much as I enjoy and often blog about visual details, I sometimes can’t help getting impatient when Proust spends pages describing the furniture and flowers in the Swanns’ house and garden, or detailing Mme Swann’s clothes and change of fashion. One drowns in a sea of details, often trivial.

Proust, and thus his narrator, is highly sensitive. My temperament is different. 

“I was left alone there in the company of orchids, roses and violets, which, like people waiting beside you who do not know you, preserved a silence which their individuality as living things made all the more striking, and warmed themselves in the heat of a glowing coal fire, preciously ensconced behind a crystal screen, in a basin of white marble over which it spilled from time to time its dangerous rubies.” (Vol.2, P.1) 

Fortunately I don’t just read for the “reading experience”, so it’s interesting to see what Proust’s doing. The narrator compares the orchids, roses, and violets to “people waiting beside you who do not know you”, and many pages later, comes back to the same idea of the flowers as living, sentient beings. 

“There was always beside her chair an immense crystal bowl filled to the brim with Parma violets or with long white daisy-petals floating in the water, which seemed to testify, in the eyes of the arriving guest, to some favourite occupation now interrupted, as would also have been the cup of tea which Mme Swann might have been drinking there alone for her own pleasure; an occupation more intimate still and more mysterious, so much so that one wanted to apologise on seeing the flowers exposed there by her side, as one would have apologised for looking at the title of the still open book which would have revealed to one Odette’s recent reading and hence perhaps her present thoughts. And even more than the book, the flowers were living things; one was embarrassed, when one entered the room to pay Mme Swann a visit, to discover that she was not alone, or if one came home with her, not to find the room empty, so enigmatic a place, intimately associated with hours in the life of their mistress of which one knew nothing, did those flowers assume, those flowers which had not been arranged for Odette’s visitors but, as it were forgotten there by her, had held and would hold with her again intimate talks which one was afraid of disturbing, the secret of which one tried in vain to read by staring at the washed-out, liquid, mauve and dissolute colour of the Parma violets.” (ibid.) 

He has an interesting, unusual way of looking at things. This, for example, is how he writes about a stool:  

“When, after lunch, we went to drink our coffee in the sunshine of the great bay window of the drawing-room, as Mme Swann was asking me how many lumps of sugar I took, it was not only the silk-covered stool which she pushed towards me that exuded, together with the agonising charm that I had long ago discerned—first among the pink hawthorn and then beside the clump of laurels—in the name of Gilberte, the hostility that her parents had shown to me and which this little piece of furniture seemed to have so well understood and shared that I felt myself unworthy and found myself almost reluctant to set my feet on its defenceless cushion; a personality, a soul was latent there which linked it secretly to the afternoon light, so different from any other light in the gulf which spread beneath our feet its sparkling tide of gold out of which the bluish sofas and vaporous tapestries emerged like enchanted islands…” (ibid.) 

This passage about a stool doesn’t just show the narrator’s hypersensitivity, but also lets us see his obsession with Gilberte and his reverence for anyone and anything related to Gilberte. 

But my favourite part, at least so far, about furniture in Within a Budding Grove is about a few pieces of furniture, including a big sofa, that he inherited from his aunt Léonie and then gives to a brothel as presents: 

“I used never to see them, for want of space had prevented my parents from taking them in at home, and they were stored in a warehouse. But as soon as I saw them again in the house where these women were putting them to their own uses, all the virtues that pervaded my aunt’s room at Combray at once appeared to me, tortured by the cruel contact to which I had abandoned them in their defencelessness! Had I outraged the dead, I would not have suffered such remorse. I returned no more to visit their new mistress, for they seemed to me to be alive and to be appealing to me, like those apparently inanimate objects in a Persian fairy-tale, in which imprisoned human souls are undergoing martyrdom and pleading for deliverance.” (ibid.) 

In the book, we can see that the narrator is rather careless about the items he inherited from Aunt Léonie, selling “a magnificent set of old silver plate” just to send orchids to Mme Swann and later “a big vase of old Chinese porcelain” just so “every day, for a whole year, [he] could smother Gilberte in roses and lilac”, so here he gives away his late aunt’s furniture to a brothel. But the moment he sees the furniture “tortured by the cruel contact to which I had abandoned them in their defencelessness”, he sees them differently. 

The fascinating part, however, is that Proust doesn’t end there. Our memory, he says, doesn’t present things chronologically.

“… I remembered only long afterwards that it was upon that same sofa that, many years before, I had tasted for the first time the delights of love with one of my girl cousins, with whom I had not known where to go until she somewhat rashly suggested our taking advantage of a moment in which aunt Léonie had left her room.” (ibid.) 

Now we see the sofa differently. 

This is Proust’s technique: he depicts a thing, or a person, from different angles, gets us to perceive it/ him/ her in different ways, and transforms the object or person. 

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