Remembrance Of Things Past: Volume I - Swann's Way & Within A Budding Grove (1982) - Plot & Excerpts
(part one of three)Marcel Proust’s monumental novel, A la recherche du temps perdu, traditionally translated into English as Remembrance of Things Past, from a line in one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and probably better translated in more recent editions as In Search of Lost Time, consists of seven books. Having last read it a quarter of a century ago, I decided that I wanted to read it at least once more in this lifetime. In my previous reading I read ten pages each night before falling asleep, continuing for nearly a year. This time I clipped along at about seventy-five pages a day and found a unity to the work that had escaped me before, appreciating as I am now able to do, in part because of an additional quarter of a century of life experience, the subtleties and psychological perceptiveness that I had not previously noted. I suspect that any reader will be able to see much of himself or herself in Proust’s exquisite and monumental novel.Finishing Swann’s Way, the first book, I found that a number of impressions emerged. Proust’s syntax is wonderful, often consisting of dependent clauses piled upon and within each other in such as a way as to create a momentum that links ideas and experiences in a tapestry that is rich and multi-hued. His metaphors, many of which are extended at length, are fresh and creative, memorable in the way that they throw light upon experience. He is primarily writing about the inner life, about the way in which memories (not mainly voluntary memories, which are superficial and can be called up at will, but those deeper involuntary memories that we rarely are aware of or expect and that appeared capriciously and unexpectedly) create our present experience and condition our actions and our response to circumstances. One wonders to what extent those deep memories are immutable, and one suspects that they are always in flux, influenced by the passage of time and by ongoing experience. Therefore no part of experience, either past or present, is fixed or predictable. We live in a quicksilver milieu, both interior and exterior, that is ever changing and evolving, there being no fixed identity either past or present but rather a continually morphing kaleidoscope of impressions. To assume or expect otherwise is an illusion. Proust’s agenda is to tap into this substratum of memory and explore its influence upon our present – and the influence of our present perceptions on those memories. His understanding of psychology is deep and remarkable, his perceptions about the illusory nature of any fixed “self” being acute.Swann’s Way contains Proust’s famous petit madeleine episode that triggers his vivid memories of his summers at Combray, the introduction of his family, his reminiscences of M. Charles Swann and Swann’s courting of the famous courtesan, Odette de Crecy, a courting that occurred before Marcel was even born. The narrative is entirely in the first person and is comprised largely of Marcel’s memories and the exploration of his own mind. Physical descriptions of places and people are detailed and vivid. Psychological insights are even more profound.The second book in the novel, Within a Budding Grove (these titles vary with the specific translation), explores in more detail Marcel’s later acquaintance with Swann and Odette after their marriage, Marcel’s love as an adolescent for their daughter, Gilberte, and the subsequent end of that affair. Moving then to the seacoast town of Balbec, the narrative moves in a different direction. New characters are introduced, such as Robert de Saint-Loup, Baron du Charlus, and Albertine. Always the reader has the feeling less that he is being provided a glimpse into Marcel’s life than that Marcel is offering a mirror into which the reader looks and learns about himself. Always we find a Marcal who is endlessly anxious, rarely happy, ever tense and neurotically obsessive, self-absorbed and solipsistic, frail and often ill. He resists any changes in his life, clings to the familiar as the only way of anchoring his awareness in a Self, fearing any alteration, which he equates with death, the ultimate dislocation. This book also contains long and fascinating philosophical discussions on the craft of writing, providing insights into Proust’s own beliefs and experiences (one supposes). There is more focus here on anti-Semitism than was apparent in the first book, the crude and abrasive Bloch making another appearance and the Dreyfus Affair being alluded to. Marcel, the narrator, perpetually constructs in his mind elaborate imaginative scenarios of the future and then strains to force reality to meet those constructions. He does so with activities and events as well as with interpersonal relationships. Consequently, nothing ever quite meets his expectations and desires, leaving him in a constant state of dissatisfaction and thwarted desire.
Originally published on my blog here in August 1998 and here in November 1998.Swann's WaySwann's Way (Au cote de chez Swann) is the first in Proust's monumental Remembrance of Things Past. This Penguin edition, of the whole novel in three volumes, is an updating of the famous English translation of C.K. Scott Moncrieff, rewritten to fit in with a new, greatly improved French edition prepared after Moncrieff's death.The first part of Swann's Way, the introductory Overture, immediately immerses us in the intense, slightly strange (yet extremely French) world of the narrator. As the title of the sequence suggests, everything is couched as a reminiscence of the past, and is not presented in chronological order but as these memories occur to the narrator. We plunge into his adolescence, and then in the second part (Combray) his earlier childhood holidays are remembered (during the famous tea-soaked madeleine biscuit episode, where the taste prompts the memory). The title of the book comes from one of the two walks taken by the family, either towards the house of the Swanns, or toward Guermantes (The Guermantes Way being used for the title of a later volume).The third part of this novel, Swann in Love, moves back again, to the time when Swann was a bachelor; the narrator couldn't possibly have known all of the feelings Swann had. It describes in great detail the infatuation Swann had for a young woman Odette of distinctly dubious reputation.With Remembrance of Things Past, it's not the plot but the atmosphere which is important. The novel, in this translation, reads like a kind of gentle but sophisticated stream of consciousness; you are drawn into the world of the narrator and of Swann in the major section (though this is written in the third person). Proust uses a poetic desciptive method, where, in each small section of the text, words are used in a metaphical way all taken from a particular sensual art - music or painting for example. This is how the atmosphere is created; it's very clever, but also unobtrusive and effective.Within a Budding GroveThe second volume of the massive Remembrance of Things Past tells of the adolescence of Proust's narrator; hence the title. Each part of this novel tells the story of a love affair, both extremely typical of adolescence and particularly of the rather hot-house society of late nineteenth century France in which it is set. There are common features to both love affairs, the first with Gilberte, daughter of M. Swann and Odette who feature strongly in the first volume of the series, Swann's Way, and the second with Albertine, who will go on to feature prominently in the rest of the narrator's life. In both cases, the affair begins with worship from afar, continues as the narrator gets to know the object of his desire, receiving with what perhaps seems an exaggerated joy the slightest imagined sign of favour and being cast down by the slightest sign of indifference. It is the somewhat monomaniacal obsession with the beloved that gives the reader a feeling that there is something unhealthy about the narrator's internal psychology. He lives his entire life looking for a way to gain an extra glimpse of his beloved, and carries out extremely tortuous plots in order that this can be done in a way which seems "natural". The distractions provided by Albertine's group of friends makes that affair seem slightly less obsessive. Neither affair has a prominent physical aspect, though both have moments of physical contact beyond that permissible in society at the time.An argument over nothing leads to the break with Gilberte, giving rise to a period of feigned indifference which gradually turns into real indifference. Proust's analysis and portrayal of the process of forgetting here is one of the cleverest and best done parts of his long work about memory.
What do You think about Remembrance Of Things Past: Volume I - Swann's Way & Within A Budding Grove (1982)?
If there is anything that Proust taught me, it's patience. I'm a fast reader, but his books require a slow, contemplative reading. I enjoy tight, spare prose, yet he meanders and spends a page describing the quality of light at one specific moment. I'm not sentimental, and he wallows in nostalgia. The best advice I got when starting the series was to give myself over to the experience, turn off the left hemisphere of my brain and just try to imagine the cool French air, the buttery taste of the madelines and the swish of the skirts. It was great advice. I found myself enjoying the work on a level that I hadn't experienced before.
—Cheri
Well, two down. Remarkable, of course, with insights into everything from the art of the novel to love to time itself and the minutiae of life in the country- or sea-side. Not only is this a source for a great Tom Russell song ("The dogs bark but the caravan moves on"). But this: "...for existence is of little interest save on days when the dust of realities is mingled with magic sand, when some trivial incident becomes a springboard for romance. Then a whole promontory of the inaccessible world merges from the twilight of dream and enters our life, our life in which, like the sleeper awakened, we actually see the people of whom we had dreamed with such ardent longing that we had come to believe that we should never see them save in our dreams." Magic sand, indeed.
—Eric
I read this years ago in French--well, just the middle section--Swann in Love. Now I'm almost done with the entire novel and am somewhat embarrassed (because reading Proust in the 21st century is considered pretentious or stupid or just weird) to say I am truly loving this book. My only complaint is that it is hard to find suitable breaks in which to put it down between readings. Certainly Proust didn't intend for this monumental work (six more novels to go to complete all of Remembrance of Things Past) to be a critique of his time and place in France, at least I don't think so, but sometimes it presents a horrifying sense of the stultifying aspects of the world Swann moves in, that the narrator moves in. Anyway, one reads it for the liquid sentences, the sense of savoring the moment, of the senses. He celebrates the ordinary, the everyday beauty and routine of life--I admire this tremendously but it does create a conundrum for one trying to follow Buddhist practice--by trying to capture this sense of the moment, Proust is attempting to hold on to it, to grasp it, to preserve it. I admire that and the skill with which he pursues it, yet I also believe it is a vain practice. But he pursues it with brilliance.Completed this amazing book. Will pick up the next in a few weeks when I get a few other library books returned.
—Peggy
