Dombey and Son: the good, the bad, the ugly

Yesterday, coincidentally on the anniversary of Dickens’s death (9/6), I was finishing Dombey and Son. That took a while! But now I have finished.

This is in many ways a very good novel. The centre of Dombey and Son is the Dombey family: the coldness of Mr Dombey, the relationship between him and his daughter Florence, the character of little Paul, the pride of Edith. That’s where the interest lies. 

At this point, Dickens is trying a new kind of novel (so I have been told), perhaps unsure of himself, and his supporting characters—his supposedly comic characters—generally lack vitality: Sol Gills and Captain Cuttle are not particularly funny; Walter Gay is bland, especially since his return from seas; Dr Blimber and his pupils don’t leave a strong impression, except Mr Toots; Mrs Pipchin is interesting in the first half of the novel, when little Paul stays at her boarding house, but loses vividness when she becomes Mr Dombey’s housekeeper; James Carker has some excellent scenes and the potential to be a great villain, but pales in comparison with Uriah Heep; Mrs Brown and Alice mirror the relationship between Mrs Skewton and Edith and move the plot forward, but they aren’t interesting characters on their own; even Major Jo Bagstock, who has a distinct manner of speaking, becomes tiresome after a while; etc. Parts of the novel drag because the supporting characters are not very funny or memorable, because Dickens seems bored with them, because he seems to focus his interest on the Dombey family. 

When Dickens returns to the Dombeys however, it is magnificent. Who says Dickens can’t do psychology? Who says Dickens can’t write women? Edith is a great character, full of pride, full of resentment and self-loathing, but also full of affection for Florence. When I wrote about In Search of Lost Time before, I pointed out that Proust’s method of characterisation—his way of conveying the depth and complexity of his characters—was depicting the different facets of a character, at different periods, in different environments, before different characters. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, or Dostoyevsky does something else to convey and explore complexity, but that is what Proust does, and that is also what Dickens does with Edith in Dombey and Son. 

“Florence had a dread of him, which made his presence in the room a nightmare to her. She could not avoid the recollection of it, for her eyes were drawn towards him every now and then, by an attraction of dislike and distrust that she could not resist. Yet her thoughts were busy with other things; for as she sat apart—not unadmired or unsought, but in the gentleness of her quiet spirit—she felt how little part her father had in what was going on, and saw, with pain, how ill at ease he seemed to be, and how little regarded he was as he lingered about near the door, for those visitors whom he wished to distinguish with particular attention, and took them up to introduce them to his wife, who received them with proud coldness, but showed no interest or wish to please, and never, after the bare ceremony of reception, in consultation of his wishes, or in welcome of his friends, opened her lips. It was not the less perplexing or painful to Florence, that she who acted thus, treated her so kindly and with such loving consideration, that it almost seemed an ungrateful return on her part even to know of what was passing before her eyes.” (Ch.36) 

Edith is full of life because she’s different towards her mother Mrs Skewton, towards Mr Dombey, towards Florence, and others; she’s different towards Mrs Skewton in public and in private; she’s different towards Mr Dombey before and after the wedding; she’s different towards Florence alone and in the presence of Mr Dombey. She’s alive. She’s flesh and blood. 

The confrontations between Edith and her mother, and between Edith and her husband, are some of the greatest scenes I have read in fiction. 

“If his handsome wife had reproached him, or even changed countenance, or broken the silence in which she remained, by one word, now that they were alone (for Cleopatra made off with all speed), Mr Dombey would have been equal to some assertion of his case against her. But the intense, unutterable, withering scorn, with which, after looking upon him, she dropped her eyes, as if he were too worthless and indifferent to her to be challenged with a syllable—the ineffable disdain and haughtiness in which she sat before him—the cold inflexible resolve with which her every feature seemed to bear him down, and put him by—these, he had no resource against; and he left her, with her whole overbearing beauty concentrated on despising him.” (ibid.) 

The battle of the minds here is one of the best aspects of the novel. Mr Dombey is also a great character—a fascinating study of a cold, proud man. 

“Towards his first wife, Mr Dombey, in his cold and lofty arrogance, had borne himself like the removed Being he almost conceived himself to be. He had been “Mr Dombey” with her when she first saw him, and he was “Mr Dombey” when she died. He had asserted his greatness during their whole married life, and she had meekly recognised it. He had kept his distant seat of state on the top of his throne, and she her humble station on its lowest step; and much good it had done him, so to live in solitary bondage to his one idea. He had imagined that the proud character of his second wife would have been added to his own—would have merged into it, and exalted his greatness. He had pictured himself haughtier than ever, with Edith’s haughtiness subservient to his. He had never entertained the possibility of its arraying itself against him. And now, when he found it rising in his path at every step and turn of his daily life, fixing its cold, defiant, and contemptuous face upon him, this pride of his, instead of withering, or hanging down its head beneath the shock, put forth new shoots, became more concentrated and intense, more gloomy, sullen, irksome, and unyielding, than it had ever been before.” (ch.40)

A cold, proud man, inflexible, unmovable. And yet with Edith, he is baffled, he is conflicted, he feels stuck. Mr Dombey is a great counter-example to the popular claim that Dickens only writes caricatures: he’s complex, he develops, he changes. 

The best part of the first half is little Paul. The best part of the second half is Edith. I have complained about Florence—a spotless heroine is dull—but I think she does improve towards the end, when she leaves, and when she marries Walter Gay, knowing her father would disapprove. It’s fascinating to read Dickens and watch him improve over time: here he was having trouble with the gentle and forgiving Florence, but he figured it out by the time he got to Amy Dorrit and Esther Summerson.

A very good book. 

PS: 11/6 is my birthday. If you’d like to send a gift or support the blog, I’m on Ko-fi. Thanks to Harmon and Shruti for your support. 

Spring Snow: Mishima and Proust

I can’t be the only person thinking of Proust whilst reading Spring Snow. 

““I can’t tell you why,” she answered, deftly dropping ink into the clear waters of Kiyoaki’s heart. She gave him no time to erect his defenses.

He glared at her. It had always been like this. Which was why he hated her. Without the slightest warning she could plunge him into nameless anxieties. And the drop of ink spread, dull and gray, clouding everything in his heart that had been pellucid only a moment ago.” (Ch.4) 

Does Kiyoaki not make you think of Proust’s narrator? 

“Kiyoaki was so capricious that he tended to exacerbate the very worries that gnawed at him. […] Perhaps this was why Satoko deliberately sowed the seeds of dark and thorny flowers, rather than brightly colored ones, knowing what an unhealthy fascination they held for Kiyoaki. Indeed he had always been fertile ground for such seeds. He indulged himself, to the exclusion of all else, in the cultivation of his anxiety.” (ibid.) 

Kiyoaki is especially reminiscent of Proust’s narrator when he writes an angry letter to Satoko. I mean: 

““… I have no doubt that your emotional whims have driven you to do this to me. There has been no gentleness in your method, obviously no affection whatever, not a trace of friendship. There are deep-seated motivations in your despicable behavior to which you are blind, but which are driving you toward a goal that is only too obvious. But decency forbids me to say anything further…”” (Ch.6) 

Then he tells her to burn the letter unread, and invites her to the theatre. 

“… she was nevertheless like fine silk disguising a sharp needle, or rich brocade that hid an abrasive underside.” (Ch.8) 

But it’s not just the obsession, the anxiety, the little games…—Kiyoaki, like Proust’s narrator, is introverted, sensitive, elegant, dreamy, and an aesthete.

Spring Snow is full of interesting images. 

“Their white faces, powdered even more meticulously than usual for the occasion, were dappled in violet, as though some exquisite shadow of death had fallen across their cheeks.” (Ch.1) 

Interesting metaphors and similes. 

“… this fleeting angle of the Princess’s face—too slight to be called a profile—made Kiyoaki feel as if he had seen a rainbow flicker for a bare instant through a prism of pure crystal.” (ibid.) 

There are more striking metaphors in Mishima than in Kawabata or Tanizaki, that’s my impression. 

“The hot sun struck the backs of their close-shaven necks. It was a peaceful, uneventful, glorious Sunday afternoon. Yet Kiyoaki remained convinced that at the bottom of this world, which was like a leather bag filled with water, there was a little hole, and it seemed to him that he could hear time leaking from it, drop by drop.” (Ch.2) 

This is the scene of the ritual on the 17/8 when Kiyoaki’s 15—a water basin is placed in the garden to catch the reflection of the moon, and the belief is that if the moon isn’t seen in it, the boy has misfortunes for the rest of his life: 

“He could not bring himself to look up into the sky at the moon itself, the origin of the image in the water. Rather he kept looking down into the basin and into the water contained by its curved sides, the reflection of his innermost self, into which the moon, like a golden shell, had sunk so deep. For at that moment he had captured the celestial. It sparkled like a golden butterfly trapped in the meshes of his soul.” (Ch.5) 

Both the sensitivity, the overthinking of the character and the simile make me think of Proust.

More than other Japanese writers I have ever read, except perhaps Abe Kobo, Mishima uses lots of unusual metaphors. For example, when he says that Kiyoaki’s parents, the Marquis and Marquise, never have crises or storms of passion, he says: 

“Their expressions blank, innocent of foreknowledge, they glided downstream like twigs hand in hand on clear waters mirroring blue sky and clouds, to take the inevitable plunge over the crest of the falls.” (ibid.) 

He compares a voice to an object:

“And her voice on this cold winter night was as warm and ripe as an apricot in June.” (Ch.6) 

He compares arrogance to a tumour: 

“This time, Satoko’s forceful methods did not wound his pride. On the contrary, he felt a sense of relief, as though her scalpel had skillfully cut out a malignant tumor of arrogance.” (Ch.11) 

This description, when Kiyoaki hangs out with Satoko, also makes me think of Proust: 

“Kiyoaki had brought a green tartan blanket that now covered their legs. Since those forgotten days of childhood, this was the first time that they had ever been so close together, but Kiyoaki was distracted by the pale light flooding through the cracks in the bonnet of the rickshaw that narrowed and widened as a stream of snow filtered through them, by the snow itself turning to water on the green blanket, by the loud rustle of the snow pelting down on the hood as if onto dry banana leaves.” (Ch.12) 

Proust would perhaps write more clauses, more complex sentences, but the sensitivity and the notice of the light wouldn’t be out of place in Proust. 

The translation is by Michael Gallagher. 

In Search of Lost Time: something missing in Proust?

Yesterday I was talking to a friend, and he told me that his brother had been rereading Proust. 

“He said there's something missing in Proust. Throughout all serious literature, characters who are deeply drawn have some conflict between desire and duty - what they want to do, and what they ought to do. And yet, despite being stuck in the narrator's head for thousands of pages, there is no sense there of duty, of "ought": he perceives the whole world purely in terms of his desires.

And since we aren't allowed to see anything beyond his perceptions, we get a very lop-sided view.

We get merely a sequence of desires, and of frustration of his desires.

He says it's all very witty and charming; the evocation of sensual effects are breathtaking; and so on. But there's always a sense of something missing.” 

I find that an interesting observation. 

When I think about it, the conflict between what one wants to do and what one ought to do is depicted in Flaubert, in Dickens and Thackeray, in Jane Austen and George Eliot, in Henry James and Edith Wharton, in Tolstoy and Chekhov, in Nabokov, in Muriel Spark, in Natsume Soseki, and so on, but not really in Proust—at least not in the 2 volumes I have read.

What do you think about this observation?

And if you agree, which other major novelist also doesn’t explore the conflict between duty and desire?

In Search of Lost Time Vol.2: the girls at Balbec; the narrator being repellent

In Part 2 of Within a Budding Grove, the narrator goes to Balbec. Here he forms a friendship with Robert de Saint-Loup, comes across his Jewish friend Bloch, meets Baron de Charlus, befriends the painter Elstir, and meets a group of girls at the seaside, one of whom turns out to be Albertine.

The final section, about the girls at Balbec, is particularly good. For example, this is the moment the narrator approaches and gets to know Albertine, after looking at her and the group from afar for a while: 

“… I realised what a conjuring trick had been performed, and with what consummate sleight of hand, and how I had talked for a moment or two with a person who, thanks to the skill of the conjurer, without actually embodying anything of that other person whom I had for so long been following as she paced beside the sea, had been substituted for her. I might, for that matter, have guessed as much in advance, since the girl on the beach was a fabrication of my own.” (Vol.2, P.2)

The other girls are called Andrée, Gisèle, and Rosamonde.

I have written more than once about Proust’s techniques for characterisation so I won’t repeat myself, but the depiction of Andrée is fascinating.

When he first sees the band of girls, Andrée creates on him a strong impression when she gleefully jumps over a terrified old man lying in the sun. Then he gets to know her: 

“This Andrée, who had struck me when I first saw her as the coldest of them all, was infinitely more refined, more affectionate, more sensitive than Albertine, to whom she displayed the caressing, gentle tenderness of an elder sister.” (ibid.) 

She now seems like a different person. Then he gets to know her some more: 

“But when one knew her a little better one would have said it was with her as with those heroic poltroons who wish not to be afraid and whose bravery is especially meritorious; one would have said that deep down in her nature there was none of that kindness which she constantly displayed out of moral distinction, or sensibility, or a noble desire to show herself a true friend.” (ibid.) 

Again, the perception changes. This fits what Tom wrote below my last blog post “People are not what they seem, or, more often, they are just what they seem but are also something else.” 

“She was charmingly gentle and sympathetic, and spoke in sweet and sorrowful terms, when one expressed pity for Albertine’s poverty, and took infinitely more trouble on her behalf than she would have taken for a rich friend. But if anyone were to hint that Albertine was perhaps not quite so poor as people made out, a just discernible cloud would overshadow Andrée’s eyes and brow; she seemed out of temper. And if one went on to say that after all Albertine might perhaps be less difficult to marry off than people supposed, she would vehemently contradict one, repeating almost angrily: “Oh dear, no, she’ll be quite unmarriageable! I’m certain of it, and I feel so sorry for her.”” (ibid.) 

This echoes a passage the narrator earlier wrote about Françoise: 

“… particular regard was due to the little sewing-maid, who was an orphan and had been brought up by strangers to whom she still went occasionally for a few days’ holiday. Her situation aroused Françoise’s pity, and also her benevolent contempt. […] And since this girl hoped, on Assumption Day, to be allowed to pay her benefactors a visit, Françoise kept on repeating: “She does make me laugh! She says, ‘I hope to be going home for the Assumption.’ Home, says she! It isn’t just that it’s not her own place, it’s people as took her in from nowhere, and the creature says ‘home’ just as if it really was her home…”” (ibid.) 

That’s the phrase: “benevolent contempt”. 

Andrée is a more interesting character than Albertine perhaps because I can see her better. Albertine, like Gilberte, is more opaque. Proust has foreseen my criticism—this is how he justifies himself: 

“And perhaps [the novelist] would be expressing yet another truth if, while investing all the other dramatis personae with distinct characters, he refrained from giving any to the beloved. We understand the characters of people to whom we are indifferent, but how can we ever grasp that of a person who is an intimate part of our existence, whom after a while we no longer distinguish from ourselves, whose motives provide us with an inexhaustible source of anxious hypotheses, continually revised?” (ibid.) 

Frankly, I think that’s horseshit. 

Albertine is opaque—when the narrator writes about her, it’s him that we see, not her—and he is repellent.

For example, when Andrée lies to him that they cannot meet the next day because her mother’s unwell:

“Although this falsehood was of no real significance since Andrée knew me so slightly, I ought not to have continued to seek the company of a person who was capable of it.” (ibid.) 

But when he himself doesn’t want to see Saint-Loup, preferring to spend time with the girls: 

“Each time I wrote back to say that he was on no account to come, offering the excuse that I should be obliged to be away myself that very day, having some duty call to pay with my grandmother on family friends in the neighbourhood. No doubt he thought ill of me when he learned from his aunt in what the “duty call” consisted, and who the persons were who combined to play the part of my grandmother.” (ibid.) 

But that’s trivial, compared to this: 

“In the week that followed I scarcely attempted to see Albertine. I made a show of preferring Andrée.” (ibid.) 

He plays games with Albertine and Andrée. 

“When I spoke of Albertine to Andrée I affected a coldness…” (ibid.) 

When he wants to meet Albertine’s aunt Mme Bontemps: 

“In order to remove from Andrée’s mind the idea that I was interested in Mme Bontemps, I spoke of her thenceforth not only absent-mindedly but with downright malice, saying that I had once met that idiot of a woman, and trusted I should never have that experience again. Whereas I was seeking by every means in my power to meet her.” (ibid.) 

As someone who doesn’t play games and doesn’t like men who play games, I find that abhorrent. His behaviour is even worse when he tries to kiss Albertine and she doesn’t let him. Obviously the likability of a narrator or a main character is not a criterion of literary merit—I myself don’t read novels in order to get imaginary friends—but I can still judge them and Proust’s narrator is repellent. 

Here I have another complaint—perhaps the fault is mine—I have very vague ideas about how old the characters are and it slightly gets in the way of me understanding the characters. I know that when the narrator asks M. de Norpois about Gilberte, she is said to be about 14-15 though we’re not told how old the narrator is. I assume they’re around the same age. This is around the time they wrestle at the park, and before he enters the Swanns’ house. 

Then he penetrates Gilberte’s circle and frequents the house, but I’m not sure for how long this goes on till he discovers that Gilberte has a boyfriend. A year? 2 years? Then 2 years after he stops seeing Gilberte, he goes on holiday at Balbec and meets Albertine. 

How old is he at Balbec? What about her?  

When he wants her to introduce him to her friends, she says “What on earth can a lot of kids like them mean to a man like you?”. Is he 19-20? She talks about taking exams, so she could be 16, but she could also be 15 or 14. Perhaps Proust’s contemporaries would have known her age by the exam questions she gets, but the only thing I know with certainty is that Albertine is a couple of years younger than Gilberte, because Gilberte has said so in Part 1. 

Does it make a difference? It does, in the scene where the narrator tries to kiss Albertine in her hotel room. 

I’d like to hear your thoughts. 

_____________________________________________________________

The translation I’ve read is by C. K. Scott Moncrieff & Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright. 

After more than 5 weeks, I have now finished reading Within a Budding Grove. It is, even if trying at times, a great book. 

In Search of Lost Time Vol.2: Proust’s method of characterisation

Before I picked up Proust, one of my preconceptions or expectations was that he would enter his characters’ heads and inhabit their minds. 

Turns out, he doesn’t. Proust’s characters are mostly seen from the outside, making him more like Jane Austen, Dickens, Cao Xueqin… than Tolstoy, Henry James, George Eliot, Flaubert, Murasaki Shikibu… I’m about 4/5 of my way through Within a Budding Grove and so far, apart from the narrator’s, we only know Swann’s thoughts, and he is similar to the narrator’s—Swann’s obsession with Odette is later mirrored by his obsession with Gilberte and Albertine.

Proust however adds life, adds depth to his characters in different ways. His characters appear real and multifaceted because Proust depicts them from different angles, in different environments, in different roles. 

For example, when we first see Swann, he’s a friend of the narrator’s family, a guest who interrupts the goodnight kiss ritual, a man who never seems to speak his real opinions, and so on. Then we see Swann in society, with other people, and see Swann in love, obsessive, jealous, pathetic. Then we see Swann as the father of Gilberte, when the narrator becomes infatuated with her. At that point in Volume 1 and at the beginning of Volume 2, Swann appears as a barrier between the narrator and his object of desire, no longer a friend of the family, but he appears different again when the narrator starts frequenting their house and having tea with Gilberte. 

It’s the same with Odette Swann, née de Crécy: we see her differently as a courtesan, as the lady in pink, as the woman who holds Swann captivated and torments him, as Mme Swann, and as the mother of Gilberte. The narrator sees her differently in these different roles, and thus gets us to see her differently. 

He also says: 

“… A consultant more discerning than M. de Norpois would doubtless have been able to diagnose that it was this feeling of shame and humiliation that had embittered Odette, that the infernal temper she displayed was not an essential part of her nature, was not an incurable disease, and so would easily have foretold what had indeed come to pass, namely that a new regimen, that of matrimony, would put an end with almost magic swiftness to those painful incidents, of daily occurrence but in no sense organic.” (Vol.2, P.1) 

That is interesting. 

Proust lets his characters unfold over time, through different roles, and sometimes drops a surprising detail, such as Elstir’s portrait. Placed next to Proust, many writers would appear quite crude—for instance, Cao Xueqin’s characters, except Wang Xifeng, are generally quite consistent, in different circles and towards different people (though the interesting question that arises is: how does Cao Xueqin still make his characters feel so believable, so real?). 

Proust doesn’t always have to portray the characters in different roles, he can remove the layers and let his characters unfold over time: in an earlier blog post about Swann’s Way, I have written about Françoise and aunt Léonie. Françoise continues to unfold in Volume 2, when they’re at Balbec:  

“… Françoise—who on the day of her arrival, when she still did not know anyone, would set all the bells jangling for the slightest thing, at hours when my grandmother and I would never have dared to ring, and if we offered some gentle admonition would answer: “Well, we’re paying enough for it, aren’t we?” as though it were she herself that would have to pay—now that she had made friends with a personage in the kitchen, which had appeared to us to augur well for our future comfort, were my grandmother or I to complain of cold feet, Françoise, even at an hour that was quite normal, dared not ring, assuring us that it would give offence because they would have to relight the boilers, or because it would interrupt the servants’ dinner and they would be annoyed. And she ended with a formula that, in spite of the dubious way in which she pronounced it, was none the less clear and put us plainly in the wrong: “The fact is …” We did not insist, for fear of bringing upon ourselves another, far more serious: “It’s a bit much …!” So that what it amounted to was that we could no longer have any hot water because Françoise had become a friend of the person who heated it.” (Vol.2, P.2) 

Françoise is probably the most delightful character in In Search of Lost Time (is it too early to say?). 

“She had presently, with respect to Saint-Loup, whom she worshipped, a disillusionment of a different kind and of shorter duration: she discovered that he was a Republican. For although, when speaking for instance of the Queen of Portugal, she would say with that disrespect which is, among the people, the supreme form of respect: “Amélie, Philippe’s sister,” Françoise was a Royalist. But above all a marquis, a marquis who had dazzled her at first sight, and who was for the Republic, seemed no longer real. And it aroused in her the same ill-humour as if I had given her a box which she had believed to be made of gold, and had thanked me for it effusively, and then a jeweller had revealed to her that it was only plated. She at once withdrew her esteem from Saint-Loup, but soon afterwards restored it to him, having reflected that he could not, being the Marquis de Saint-Loup, be a Republican, that he was just pretending, out of self-interest, for with the Government we had it might be a great advantage to him. From that moment her coldness towards him and her resentment towards me ceased. And when she spoke of Saint-Loup she said: “He’s a hypocrite,” with a broad and kindly smile which made it dear that she “considered” him again just as much as when she first knew him, and that she had forgiven him.” (ibid.) 

(This is, I can’t help saying, my favourite Proust: funny Proust, comedy of manners Proust). 

Proust’s characters also appear multifaceted because he depicts them through the eyes of different characters. 

For example, this is the Princesse de Luxembourg: 

“… I saw, in the distance, coming in our direction, the Princesse de Luxembourg, half leaning upon a parasol in such a way as to impart to her tall and wonderful form that slight inclination, to make it trace that arabesque, so dear to the women who had been beautiful under the Empire and knew how, with drooping shoulders, arched backs, concave hips and taut legs, to make their bodies float as softly as a silken scarf about the rigid armature of an invisible shaft which might be supposed to have transfixed it.” (ibid.) 

This is how the judge’s wife sees her at Balbec:

““Just listen to this. A woman with yellow hair and six inches of paint on her face and a carriage which reeked of harlot a mile away—which only a creature like that would dare to have—came here today to call on the so-called Marquise!”” (ibid.) 

Especially interesting is the way he introduces Charlus. I wonder if Proust has calculated that In Search of Lost Time would get to the point of being so well-known that most people picking it up would have heard of the name Charlus and had some preconceptions about him, that he introduces him under a different name and surprises us later: 

“Saint-Loup told me that even in the most exclusive aristocratic society his uncle Palamède stood out as being particularly unapproachable, scornful, obsessed with his nobility, forming with his brother’s wife and a few other chosen spirits what was known as the Phoenix Club.” (ibid.) 

Robert de Saint-Loup also says: 

““One day, a man who is now one of the brightest luminaries of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, as Balzac would have said, but who at a rather unfortunate stage of his early life displayed bizarre tastes, asked my uncle to let him come to this place. But no sooner had he arrived than it was not to the ladies but to my uncle Palamède that he began to make overtures. My uncle pretended not to understand, and took his two friends aside on some pretext or other. They reappeared on the scene, seized the offender, stripped him, thrashed him till he bled, and then in ten degrees of frost kicked him outside where he was found more dead than alive; so much so that the police started an inquiry which the poor devil had the greatest difficulty in getting them to abandon…”” (ibid.) 

One can’t help thinking back of that passage when one later realises that uncle Palamède and Baron de Charlus are the same person. 

This is the first time (or is it?) the narrator meets Saint-Loup’s uncle: 

“… I turned my head and saw a man of about forty, very tall and rather stout, with a very black moustache, who, nervously slapping the leg of his trousers with a switch, was staring at me, his eyes dilated with extreme attentiveness. From time to time these eyes were shot through by a look of restless activity such as the sight of a person they do not know excites only in men in whom, for whatever reason, it inspires thoughts that would not occur to anyone else—madmen, for instance, or spies. He darted a final glance at me that was at once bold, prudent, rapid and profound, like a last shot which one fires at an enemy as one turns to flee, and, after first looking all round him, suddenly adopting an absent and lofty air, with an abrupt revolution of his whole person he turned towards a playbill in the reading of which he became absorbed, while he hummed a tune and fingered the moss-rose in his button-hole.” (ibid.) 

And: 

“He gave me the impression of a hotel crook who, having been watching my grandmother and myself for some days, and planning to rob us, had just discovered that I had caught him in the act of spying on me. Perhaps he was only seeking by his new attitude to express abstractedness and detachment in order to put me off the scent, but it was with an exaggeration so aggressive that his object appeared to be—at least as much as the dissipating of the suspicions he might have aroused in me—to avenge a humiliation which I must unwillingly have inflicted on him, to give me the idea not so much that he had not seen me as that I was an object of too little importance to attract his attention. He threw back his shoulders with an air of bravado, pursed his lips, twisted his moustache, and adjusted his face into an expression that was at once indifferent, harsh, and almost insulting. So much so that I took him at one moment for a thief and at another for a lunatic.” (ibid.) 

That whole passage sounds very much like something out of Dostoyevsky.

Charlus is fascinating, I expect him to become more fascinating as we follow him throughout the 7 volumes. 

In In Search of Lost Time, Proust continually makes the point that we can never truly know another person: the narrator doesn’t know Gilberte, Swann doesn’t know Odette, nobody truly knows anybody. So he doesn’t convey anyone’s thoughts (he enters Swann’s mind in Volume 1, only when Swann is in love, but doesn’t in Volume 2), and all the characters are seen from the outside—through the eyes of the narrator or other characters.

But they’re all complex, multifaceted, and forever capable of surprising us. They feel utterly real. 

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. 

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.

In Search of Lost Time Vol.2: Bergotte and genius

The narrator’s first meeting with his childhood hero and favourite writer Bergotte must be one of the most interesting sequences in Within a Budding Grove, perhaps in all of In Search of Lost Time. 

“… there, in front of me, like one of those conjurers whom we see standing whole and unharmed, in their frock-coats, in the smoke of a pistol shot out of which a pigeon had just fluttered, my greeting was returned by a youngish, uncouth, thickset and myopic little man, with a red nose curled like a snail-shell and a goatee beard.” (Vol.2, P.1) 

We have heard of the name Bergotte in Swann’s Way, and heard M. de Norpois’s impression of him at the beginning of Within a Budding Grove, but don’t see him till the narrator finally meets him at the Swanns’. 

“… Starting from them, I should never have arrived at that snail-shell nose; but starting from the nose, which did not appear to be in the slightest degree ashamed of itself, but stood out alone there like a grotesque ornament fastened on his face, I found myself proceeding in a totally different direction from the work of Bergotte, and must arrive, it would seem, at the mentality of a busy and preoccupied engineer, of the sort who when you accost them in the street think it correct to say: “Thanks, and you?” before you have actually inquired of them how they are…” (ibid.) 

Proust is hilarious! 

Then Proust—or the narrator—spends pages writing about the differences between Bergotte the writer and Bergotte the person in real life, and analysing the nature of literary genius. 

“… genius, and even great talent, springs less from seeds of intellect and social refinement superior to those of other people than from the faculty of transforming and transposing them.” (ibid.)

George Eliot is undeniably more intellectual, but I think Jane Austen and Emily Bronte are both better writers.

“Similarly, the men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or their culture the most extensive, but those who have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live only for themselves, to transform their personality into a sort of mirror, in such a way that their life, however mediocre it may be socially and even, in a sense, intellectually, is reflected by it, genius consisting in reflecting power and not in the intrinsic quality of the scene reflected. The day on which the young Bergotte succeeded in showing to the world of his readers the tasteless household in which he had spent his childhood, and the not very amusing conversations between himself and his brothers, was the day on which he rose above the friends of his family, more intellectual and more distinguished than himself…” (ibid.) 

Part of me thinks Proust has a point, but part of me feels uneasy. 

This is how M. de Norpois describes Bergotte: 

““… Ah! there’s a man who justifies the wit who insisted that one ought never to know an author except through his books. It would be impossible to imagine an individual who corresponded less to his—more pretentious, more pompous, more ill-bred. Vulgar at times, at others talking like a book, and not even like one of his own, but like a boring book, which his, to do them justice, are not—such is your Bergotte. He has the most confused and convoluted mind…”” (ibid.) 

We later see how ill-bred he is: 

“The malice with which Bergotte spoke thus to a stranger of the friends in whose house he had for so long been received as a welcome guest was as new to me as the almost tender tone he invariably adopted towards them in their presence.” (ibid.) 

Can a pretentious, pompous, ill-bred, vulgar, and boring person be a literary genius? The great writers I love, as far as I know (I mean, hear from other people), were not vulgar or boring. I can more readily accept a great writer being cruel and selfish in real life, than them being pompous, vulgar, or boring.

It also makes me wonder: people have often said that Bergotte is based on Anatole France, or at least the meeting is based on young Proust’s disappointing meeting with Anatole France. Are these lines about him? Was Anatole France like this? I can’t say. But if they are, Anatole France’s reputation has greatly fallen—nobody talks about him now, I doubt he’s even big in his home country—so the writer Proust calls a literary genius, in spite of dullness and lack of intellect, is not really a genius after all. 

The next part is also interesting: 

“As for those other vices to which M. de Norpois had alluded, that almost incestuous love affair, which was made still worse, people said, by a want of delicacy in the matter of money, if they contradicted in a shocking manner the trend of his latest novels […] those vices did not necessarily prove, supposing that they were fairly imputed to Bergotte, that his literature was a lie and all his sensitiveness mere play-acting.” (ibid.)

Here Proust discusses the questions that have bothered people for years: why were some writers who showed such humanity, such sensitivity and compassion and understanding in their novels such assholes in real life? 

“It is the vices (or merely the weaknesses and follies) of the circle in which they live, the meaningless conversation, the frivolous or shocking lives of their daughters, the infidelity of their wives, or their own misdeeds that writers have most often castigated in their books, without, however, thinking to alter their way of life or improve the tone of their household.” (ibid.) 

He goes further: 

“Perhaps the more the great writer developed in Bergotte at the expense of the little man with the beard, the more his own personal life was drowned in the flood of all the lives that he imagined, until he no longer felt himself obliged to perform certain practical duties, for which he had substituted the duty of imagining those other lives. But at the same time, because he imagined the feelings of others as completely as if they had been his own, whenever the occasion arose for him to have to deal with an unfortunate person, at least in a transitory way, he would do so not from his own personal standpoint but from that of the sufferer himself, a standpoint from which he would have been horrified by the language of those who continue to think of their own petty concerns in the presence of another’s grief. With the result that he gave rise everywhere to justifiable rancour and to undying gratitude.” (ibid.) 

I think he’s right.

I see this post as a starting point, so tell me your thoughts! Discuss! Argue!

In Search of Lost Time Vol.2: society and Proust’s extended metaphors

I love the metaphors in Proust.

Look at this passage in Within a Budding Grove, when the narrator writes about Professor Cottard: 

“… we must bear in mind that the character which a man exhibits in the latter half of his life is not always, though it often is, his original character developed or withered, attenuated or enlarged; it is sometimes the exact reverse, like a garment that has been turned.” (Vol.2, P.1) 

At some point I will discuss the way Proust writes characters, maybe, but I like that garment simile.

This is the narrator going to the Swanns’ to visit Gilberte: 

“Meanwhile, on those tea-party days, pulling myself up the staircase step by step, reason and memory already cast off like outer garments, and myself no more now than the sport of the basest reflexes, I would arrive in the zone in which the scent of Mme Swann greeted my nostrils.” (ibid.) 

I like that.

This is another garment simile, when he buys a photograph of the famous opera singer Berma, whom he finds neither beautiful nor a magnificent singer as he’s been told:  

“The wholesale admiration which that artist excited gave an air of slight impoverishment to this one face that she had to respond with, immutable and precarious like the garments of people who have none “spare,” this face on which she must continually expose to view only the tiny dimple upon her upper lip, the arch of her eyebrows, and a few other physical characteristics, always the same, which, after all, were at the mercy of a burn or a blow. This face, moreover, would not in itself have seemed to me beautiful, but it gave me the idea and consequently the desire to kiss it, by reason of all the kisses that it must have sustained and for which, from its page in the album, it seemed still to be appealing with that coquettishly tender gaze, that artfully ingenuous smile.” (ibid.)

Now that is a rather strange simile, no? I find it strange. 

Sometimes Proust has extended metaphors: 

“And as though she found a similarity between the somewhat summary, rapid, and violent manner in which Mme Swann conquered her new connections and a colonial expedition, Mamma went on to observe: “Now that the Tromberts have been subdued, the neighbouring tribes will soon surrender.” If she had passed Mme Swann in the street, she would tell us when she came home: “I saw Mme Swann in all her war-paint; she must have been embarking on some triumphant offensive against the Massachutoes, or the Singhalese, or the Tromberts.” And so with all the new people whom I told her that I had seen in that somewhat composite and artificial society, to which they had often been brought with some difficulty and from widely different worlds, Mamma would at once divine their origin, and, speaking of them as of trophies dearly bought, would say: “Brought back from the expedition against the so-and-so!”” (ibid.) 

“Colonial expedition”, “tribes”, “war-paint”, “offensive”, “trophies”: throughout the entire passage, Proust expands on the expedition metaphor.

The Swanns, the narrator tells us, “shared this failing of people who are not much sought after”: a visit or invitation from anyone prominent is loudly publicised. 

“The Swanns were incapable even of keeping to themselves the complimentary letters and telegrams received by Odette. […] Thus the Swanns’ drawing-room was reminiscent of a seaside hotel where telegrams are posted up on a board.” (ibid.) 

It is rather pathetic, and Proust makes it appear more ridiculous as the narrator’s mother compares the “conquests” to war and expedition. Then he switches to another extended metaphor: 

“… a great deal of the pleasure which a woman finds in entering a class of society different from that in which she has previously lived would be lacking if she had no means of keeping her old associates informed of those others, relatively more brilliant, with whom she has replaced them. For this, she requires an eye-witness who may be allowed to penetrate this new, delicious world (as a buzzing, browsing insect bores its way into a flower) and will then, so it is hoped, as the course of her visits may carry her, spread abroad the tidings, the latent germ of envy and of wonder.” (ibid.)

That is why Madame Swann invites the boring Madame Cottard. Proust expands some more on the pollination metaphor:  

“She knew what a vast number of bourgeois calyxes that busy worker, armed with her plume and card-case, could visit in a single afternoon. She knew her power of pollination…” (ibid.) 

Like Tolstoy, Proust notices everything and sees through everything. But Proust goes further than Tolstoy in dissecting and analysing the rules, the little games in high society. Perhaps French society in Proust’s time is more subtle, more snobbish and complicated? Or perhaps Proust is more interested in all the social games, the mores, the different circles, the hypocrisies and pretensions—Tolstoy after all doesn’t like high society. 

For example, the narrator writes that in his early childhood, no respectable salon would have opened its doors to a Republican. But the rules about whom to exclude change over time. 

“... like a kaleidoscope which is every now and then given a turn, society arranges successively in different orders elements which one would have supposed immutable, and composes a new pattern. […] These new arrangements of the kaleidoscope are produced by what a philosopher would call a “change of criterion.” The Dreyfus case brought about another, at a period rather later than that in which I began to go to Mme Swann’s, and the kaleidoscope once more reversed its coloured lozenges.” (ibid.)

This is another extended metaphor. Proust starts with the kaleidoscope image then talks about changes in society, the different circles, the perceptions of Odette/ Madame Swann in society, and so on for pages, then returns to the metaphor: 

“To return to the reasons which prevented Odette, at this period, from gaining admittance to the Faubourg Saint-Germain, it must be observed that the latest turn of the social kaleidoscope had been actuated by a series of scandals.” (ibid.) 

It is a rather unusual metaphor—I tend to associate kaleidoscopes with light and colours—but it works. 

My copy is the translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff & Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright. 

Proust on reading

Whilst rereading War and Peace, I thought of a passage in Proust’s Swann’s Way about reading, so I want to share it: 

“... Next to this central belief which, while I was reading, would be constantly reaching out from my inner self to the outer world, towards the discovery of truth, came the emotions aroused in me by the action in which I was taking part, for these afternoons were crammed with more dramatic events than occur, often, in a whole lifetime. These were the events taking place in the book I was reading. It is true that the people concerned in them were not what Françoise would have called “real people.” But none of the feelings which the joys or misfortunes of a real person arouse in us can be awakened except through a mental picture of those joys or misfortunes; and the ingenuity of the first novelist lay in his understanding that, as the image was the one essential element in the complicated structure of our emotions, so that simplification of it which consisted in the suppression, pure and simple, of real people would be a decided improvement. A real person, profoundly as we may sympathise with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, remains opaque, presents a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift. If some misfortune comes to him, it is only in one small section of the complete idea we have of him that we are capable of feeling any emotion; indeed it is only in one small section of the complete idea he has of himself that he is capable of feeling any emotion either. The novelist’s happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable to the human soul, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is, which one’s soul can assimilate. After which it matters not that the actions, the feelings of this new order of creatures appear to us in the guise of truth, since we have made them our own, since it is in ourselves that they are happening, that they are holding in thrall, as we feverishly turn over the pages of the book, our quickened breath and staring eyes. And once the novelist has brought us to this state, in which, as in all purely mental states, every emotion is multiplied ten-fold, into which his book comes to disturb us as might a dream, but a dream more lucid and more abiding than those which come to us in sleep, why then, for the space of an hour he sets free within us all the joys and sorrows in the world, a few of which only we should have to spend years of our actual life in getting to know, and the most intense of which would never be revealed to us because the slow course of their development prevents us from perceiving them. It is the same in life; the heart changes, and it is our worst sorrow; but we know it only through reading, through our imagination: in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change.”

(translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright) 

Reading Light in August

I’ve been reading Light in August. Faulkner is very, very different from Proust.

People (or rather Proust fans) often say that after Proust, it’s hard to read anything else for a while, because nothing could compare. I myself thought that perhaps characterisation in most novels would appear crude after the intricacy and subtlety of Proust. But after Swann’s Way, I was enjoying the fresh air in Faulkner, and thought that next to Faulkner, Proust appeared so narrow, almost even trivial, in his navel-gazing, his focus on minutiae, his long passages about the look of asparagus or the changing colour of a steeple or the light on a tiled roof. I thought, there’s much more to life than being desperately obsessed with someone and wondering how different the real person is from the one in your head.

But about 80 pages in (the book is about 350 pages on my kobo), I started getting a bit weary of Light in August. Again, it’s personal—I think it seems to be a great novel and Faulkner is a great writer—but at the moment, I’m rather fed up with race issues, especially in America. Light in August is more than that, but race is one of the main themes (it’s set in the South in the 1930s), and it’s a cruel, violent world that the novel is depicting.

I can see what Faulkner is doing (or so I think). I like the way he jumps back and forth in time, and switches between perspectives. I like the way he depicts characters. I also like his metaphors and images—interesting without drawing much attention to themselves. 

For example, look at the wagon moving very slowly that Lena is watching: 

“Though the mules plod in a steady and unflagging hypnosis, the vehicle does not seem to progress. It seems to hang suspended in the middle distance forever and forever, so infinitesimal is its progress, like a shabby bead upon the mild red string of road. So much so is this that in the watching of it the eye loses it as sight and sense drowsily merge and blend, like the road itself, with all the peaceful and monotonous changes between darkness and day, like already measured thread being rewound onto a spool. So that at last, as though out of some trivial and unimportant region beyond even distance, the sound of it seems to come slow and terrific and without meaning, as though it were a ghost travelling a half mile ahead of its own shape.” (Ch.1) 

The novel is bleak from the beginning. Lena is unwed and pregnant, hitchhiking without much money from Alabama to Jefferson, Mississippi to look for her baby daddy, Lucas Burch.

In chapter 2, Faulkner switches to Byron Bunch, a guy working at a mill. See the metaphor when he watches Joe Christmas and Joe Brown, two other men working at the mill: 

“And then Christmas would turn and with that still, sullen face of his walk out of whatever small gathering the sheer empty sound of Brown’s voice had surrounded them with, with Brown following, still laughing and talking.” (Ch.2) 

That’s very good. I like that. 

This is Hightower, the disgraced minister, friend of Byron Bunch: 

“His skin is the color of flour sacking and his upper body in shape is like a loosely filled sack falling from his gaunt shoulders of its own weight, upon his lap.” (Ch.4) 

Gross.

See Joe Christmas: 

“It seemed to him that he could see the yellow day opening peacefully on before him, like a corridor, an arras, into a still chiaroscuro without urgency. It seemed to him that as he sat there the yellow day contemplated him drowsily, like a prone and somnolent yellow cat.” (Ch.5) 

Christmas turns out to be the central character of Light in August. 

“Nothing can look quite as lonely as a big man going along an empty street. Yet though he was not large, not tall, he contrived somehow to look more lonely than a lone telephone pole in the middle of a desert. In the wide, empty, shadowbrooded street he looked like a phantom, a spirit, strayed out of its own world, and lost.” (ibid.) 

He grows up in an orphanage: 

“… the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like black tears.” (Ch.6) 

Note: “black tears”. 

Christmas is later adopted by Mr McEachern, a devout Presbyterian and a hard man who believes in corporal punishment as the way to bring up children. I like the metaphors when Faulkner writes about Mrs McEachern: 

“She was waiting on the porch—a patient, beaten creature without sex demarcation at all save the neat screw of graying hair and the skirt—when the buggy drove up. It was as though instead of having been subtly slain and corrupted by the ruthless and bigoted man into something beyond his intending and her knowing, she had been hammered stubbornly thinner and thinner like some passive and dully malleable metal, into an attenuation of dumb hopes and frustrated desires now faint and pale as dead ashes.” (Ch.7) 

Being an orphan with no knowledge of his family background, Christmas is nevertheless convinced from a young age that he’s part black. The novel revolves around the conflicting emotions, the loathing of a man believing himself to be part black in the time of Jim Crow laws. Cheery stuff. 

Light in August seems to be a great novel. I loved The South and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. But I can’t help thinking that literary works sometimes must come at the right time, and this is perhaps not the right time for me and Light in August.  

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.   

In Search of Lost Time Vol.1: Comedy of Manners Proust vs Psychological Proust

There are, you probably noticed, different modes in Proust. According to the New Yorker: 

“There are at least six Marcel Prousts to study, and, though we’d like to say that each feeds the others, the truth is that they exist in separate, sometimes baffling strata. There’s the Period Proust, the Toulouse-Lautrec-like painter of the high life of the Belle Époque, who offers an unmatched picture both of riding in the Bois and of visiting the brothels near the Opéra; and the Philosophical Proust, whose thoughts on the nature of time supposedly derived from the ideas of Henri Bergson and are argued to have paralleled those of Einstein. There’s the Psychological Proust, whose analysis of human motives—above all, of love and jealousy—is the real living core of his book; and the “Perverse” Proust (as the eminent scholar Antoine Compagnon refers to him), who was among the first French authors to write quite openly about homosexuality. Then there is the Political Proust, the Jewish writer who diagrammed the fault line that the Dreyfus Affair first cracked in French society, and that the war pulled apart. Finally, there’s the Poetic Proust, the pathétique Proust who writes the sentences and finds the phrases, and whose twilight intensity and violet-tinted charm make his Big Book one of the few that readers urge on friends rather than merely force on students.” 

I may (or may not) come back to this point. But in terms of writing characters, I would say that there are two different modes: Comedy of Manners Proust, and Psychological Proust.

Proust begins Part 2 of Swann’s Way telling us about the Verdurin set. That is Comedy of Manners Proust—he satirises various types of people and pierces through all of their pretensions; he is comic, sometimes even grotesque; and he makes me think of Jane Austen.

Mme Verdurin, for example, once laughs so hard that she dislocates her jaw.  

“From this lofty perch she would take a spirited part in the conversation of the “faithful,” and would revel in all their “drollery”; but, since the accident to her jaw, she had abandoned the effort involved in wholehearted laughter, and had substituted a kind of symbolical dumb-show which signified, without endangering or fatiguing her in any way, that she was “splitting her sides.” […] So, stupefied with the gaiety of the “faithful,” drunk with good-fellowship, scandal and asseveration, Mme Verdurin, perched on her high seat like a cage-bird whose biscuit has been steeped in mulled wine, would sit aloft and sob with affability.” (Vol.1, P.2) 

That’s what I mean about Proust being grotesque. Her husband is also ridiculous. 

“As for M. Verdurin, he was unsparing of his merriment, having recently discovered a way of expressing it by a convention that was different from his wife’s but equally simple and obvious. Scarcely had he begun the movement of head and shoulders of a man shaking with laughter than he would begin at once to cough, as though, in laughing too violently, he had swallowed a mouthful of pipe-smoke. And by keeping the pipe firmly in his mouth he could prolong indefinitely the dumb-show of suffocation and hilarity. Thus he and Mme Verdurin (who, at the other side of the room, where the painter was telling her a story, was shutting her eyes preparatory to flinging her face into her hands) resembled two masks in a theatre each representing Comedy in a different way.” (ibid.) 

This is the sort of thing you expect to find in Dickens. 

This is Dr Cottard, one of the people who frequent the Verdurin salon: 

“Dr Cottard was never quite certain of the tone in which he ought to reply to any observation, or whether the speaker was jesting or in earnest. And so by way of precaution he would embellish all his facial expressions with the offer of a conditional, a provisional smile whose expectant subtlety would exonerate him from the charge of being a simpleton, if the remark addressed to him should turn out to have been facetious. But as he must also be prepared to face the alternative, he dared not allow this smile to assert itself positively on his features, and you would see there a perpetually flickering uncertainty, in which could be deciphered the question that he never dared to ask: “Do you really mean that?”” (ibid.) 

He doesn’t dare to have an opinion of his own. But Swann is not different. The narrator has told us from the beginning: 

“When challenged by [my family] 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)

He says: 

“… whenever he spoke of serious matters, whenever he used an expression which seemed to imply a definite opinion upon some important subject, he would take care to isolate, to sterilise it by using a special intonation, mechanical and ironic, as though he had put the phrase or word between inverted commas, and was anxious to disclaim any personal responsibility for it…” (ibid.) 

The narrator says this again when he writes about Swann and the Verdurin set. Swann can see the ridiculousness of the other members, but he is the same.

Here is Mme Saniette, another person in the set: 

“As she was entirely uneducated, and was afraid of making mistakes in grammar and pronunciation, she used purposely to speak in an indistinct and garbling manner, thinking that if she should make a slip it would be so buried in the surrounding confusion that no one could be certain whether she had actually made it or not; with the result that her talk was a sort of continuous, blurred expectoration, out of which would emerge, at rare intervals, the few sounds and syllables of which she felt sure.” (Vol.1, P.2) 

Hahahahaha. 

This is Brichot, a professor from Sorbonne:  

“For he had the sort of curiosity and superstitious worship of life which, combined with a certain scepticism with regard to the object of their studies, earns for some intelligent men of whatever profession, doctors who do not believe in medicine, schoolmasters who do not believe in Latin exercises, the reputation of having broad, brilliant and indeed superior minds.” (ibid.) 

Not different from the numerous English teachers I saw on twitter who hated classic literature. 

I must note that the first-person narrator is not present in any of these scenes. Proust isn’t strict about point of view. 

Most ridiculous so far is probably Dr Cottard—he has no critical thinking, no opinions of his own; he takes everything in the literal sense and is easily fooled (“instead of sending Dr Cottard a ruby that cost three thousand francs and pretending it was a mere trifle, M. Verdurin bought an artificial stone for three hundred, and let it be understood that it was something almost impossible to match”); and he keeps making lame jokes, fancying himself so witty.

His wife is the same. She too has no opinions of her own. She too laughs at her own “witticism”. 

“And then, in her joy and confusion at the aptness and daring of making so discreet and yet so unmistakable an allusion to the new and brilliantly successful play by Dumas, she broke into a charming, girlish laugh, not very loud, but so irresistible that it was some time before she could control it.” (ibid.) 

These people all seem so insufferable. Like Jane Austen and Edith Wharton, Proust is ruthless. This is the Proust I like: sharp, precise, ruthless, and hilarious.

But there is another Proust—Psychological Proust—the Proust who goes on and on, for pages and for ages, about Swann’s love for Odette, or Swann’s jealousy. If you think of other psychological novelists such as Tolstoy or Flaubert, they depict characters in one mode, and move fluidly between scenes or conversations and characters’ thoughts, whereas in Proust, there is a clear division, a clear shift. Psychological Proust is analytical and not comic (though once in a while he may be funny). 

“Truth to tell, as often as not, when he had stayed late at a party, he would have preferred to return home at once, without going so far out of his way, and to postpone their meeting until the morrow; but the very fact of his putting himself to such inconvenience at an abnormal hour in order to visit her, while he guessed that his friends, as he left them, were saying to one another: “He’s tied hand and foot; there must certainly be a woman somewhere who insists on his going to her at all hours,” made him feel that he was leading the life of the class of men whose existence is coloured by a love-affair, and in whom the perpetual sacrifice they make of their comfort and of their practical interests engenders a sort of inner charm. Then, though he may not consciously have taken this into consideration, the certainty that she was waiting for him, that she was not elsewhere with others, that he would see her before he went home, drew the sting from that anguish, forgotten but latent and ever ready to be reawakened, which he had felt on the evening when Odette had left the Verdurins’ before his arrival, an anguish the present assuagement of which was so agreeable that it might almost be called happiness. Perhaps it was to that hour of anguish that he owed the importance which Odette had since assumed in his life. Other people as a rule mean so little to us that, when we have invested one of them with the power to cause us so much suffering or happiness, that person seems at once to belong to a different universe, is surrounded with poetry, makes of one’s life a sort of stirring arena in which he or she will be more or less close to one.” (ibid.)

I keep a long passage so you see what I mean about the difference, the shift. 

“… he would ask her, instead, to give him the little phrase from Vinteuil’s sonata. It was true that Odette played vilely, but often the most memorable impression of a piece of music is one that has arisen out of a jumble of wrong notes struck by unskilful fingers upon a tuneless piano. The little phrase continued to be associated in Swann’s mind with his love for Odette. He was well aware that his love was something that did not correspond to anything outside itself, verifiable by others besides him; he realised that Odette’s qualities were not such as to justify his setting so high a value on the hours he spent in her company. And often, when the cold government of reason stood unchallenged in his mind, he would readily have ceased to sacrifice so many of his intellectual and social interests to this imaginary pleasure. But the little phrase, as soon as it struck his ear, had the power to liberate in him the space that was needed to contain it; the proportions of Swann’s soul were altered; a margin was left for an enjoyment that corresponded no more than his love for Odette to any external object and yet was not, like his enjoyment of that love, purely individual, but assumed for him a sort of reality superior to that of concrete things.” (ibid.) 

My problem with Proust at the moment is not that he takes his time and writes about it for so long, but that the more he explicates the relationship between Swann and Odette, the more puzzled I am about Swann’s feeling for Odette. I simply don’t get it. 

From the beginning, we are told that Swann is not sexually attracted to Odette: 

“… she had struck Swann not, certainly, as being devoid of beauty, but as endowed with a kind of beauty which left him indifferent, which aroused in him no desire, which gave him, indeed, a sort of physical repulsion, as one of those women of whom all of us can cite examples, different for each of us, who are the converse of the type which our senses demand. Her profile was too sharp, her skin too delicate, her cheekbones were too prominent, her features too tightly drawn, to be attractive to him.” (ibid.) 

She’s not his type, so what is his type? 

“… as often as not they were women whose beauty was of a distinctly vulgar type, for the physical qualities which he instinctively sought were the direct opposite of those he admired in the women painted or sculpted by his favourite masters. Depth of character, or a melancholy expression, would freeze his senses, which were, however, instantly aroused at the sight of healthy, abundant, rosy flesh.” (ibid.) 

We are told that for some time, Swann doesn’t spend the early part of his day with Odette, nor go with her to the Verdurins, because he spends that time with a young seamstress—a woman of his type. 

I know that sometimes married couples who don’t love each other at the beginning may come to respect and love each other (which Chekhov depicts in “Three Years”, for instance), but it isn’t the case here. 

Physically, Swann isn’t attracted to Odette, and has to associate her looks with a painting by Botticelli to find some satisfaction. Mentally, he knows she isn’t intelligent, they don’t have the same tastes, and probably don’t have much in common. Socially (this is a classist world, a world of snobs), Odette is beneath him—she is part of the demi-monde, and said to be a kept woman, a courtesan, or what we nowadays call a sugar baby. He’s also aware that their relationship may be based on self-interest on her side, for he gives her presents and sometimes helps her with her money troubles. 

And yet, Swann is besotted with her, obsessed with her. Why?  

Proust says: 

“In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses a woman’s heart may be enough to make him fall in love with her.” (ibid.) 

I’m not quite convinced. He spends pages and pages analysing it, explicating it, but I still don’t quite understand Swann’s feeling for Odette. Love? I don’t think it is. But what is it? It seems irrational. 

“And the pleasure of being a lover, of living by love alone, the reality of which he was sometimes inclined to doubt, was enhanced in his eyes, as a dilettante of intangible sensations, by the price he was paying for it—as one sees people who are doubtful whether the sight of the sea and the sound of its waves are really enjoyable become convinced that they are—and convinced also of the rare quality and absolute detachment of their own taste—when they have agreed to pay several pounds a day for a room in an hotel from which that sight and that sound may be enjoyed.” (ibid.)

I would understand perfectly Swann heaping money on Odette and loving her despite not seeing love from her, if he were sexually attracted to her, but he’s not. As the narrator says over and over again, her kind of beauty leaves him cold and indifferent. Perhaps I’m missing the point and it’s meant to be irrational, but if that’s the intention, why does Proust spend so long analysing it?

After introducing Forcheville, a newcomer to the Verdurin set, and satirising the set, Comedy of Manners Proust again leaves for Psychological Proust to write about Swann’s love and jealousy.

“… It was true that Swann had often reflected that Odette was in no way a remarkable woman, and there was nothing especially flattering in seeing the supremacy he wielded over someone so inferior to himself proclaimed to all the “faithful”; but since he had observed that to many other men besides himself Odette seemed a fascinating and desirable woman, the attraction which her body held for them had aroused in him a painful longing to secure the absolute mastery of even the tiniest particles of her heart.” (ibid.) 

The writing about jealousy is very good, especially Swann’s mishap and Proust’s use of metaphors, but it remains puzzling to me that Swann becomes so obsessed and jealous when he thinks Odette is “no way a remarkable woman” and “so inferior to himself”. 

I don’t get it.