Swann's Way Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  PART I - Combray

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  PART II - Swann in Love

  PART III - Place-Names: The Name

  Notes

  Synopsis

  SWANN’S WAY

  MARCEL PROUST was born in Auteuil in 1871. In his twenties, following a year in the army, he became a conspicuous society figure, frequenting the most fashionable Paris salons of the day. After 1899, however, his chronic asthma, the death of his parents, and his growing disillusionment with humanity caused him to lead an increasingly retired life. From 1907 on, he rarely emerged from a cork-lined room in his apartment on boulevard Haussmann. There he insulated himself against the distractions of city life and the effects of trees and flowers—though he loved them, they brought on his attacks of asthma. He slept by day and worked by night, writing letters and devoting himself to the completion of In Search of Lost Time. He died in 1922.

  LYDIA DAVIS, a 2003 MacArthur Fellow, is the author of a novel, The End of the Story, and three volumes of short fiction, the latest of which is Samuel Johnson Is Indignant. She is also the translator of numerous works by Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris, Pierre Jean Jouve, and many others and was recently named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government. Her essay on close translation of Proust appeared in the April 2004 issue of the Yale Review.

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  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2003 Published in Penguin Books 2000, 2004

  Translation, introduction, and notes copyright © Lydia Davis, 2002

  All rights reserved

  Proust, Marcel, 1871-1922

  [Du côté de chez Swann. English]

  Swann’s way / Marcel Proust ; translated with an introduction and notes by Lydia Davis ; general editor, Christopher Prendergast. p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-50126-9

  I. Davis, Lydia. II Prendergast, Christopher. III. Title.

  PQ2631.R63D813 2003

  843’.912-dc21 2003049743

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  Introduction

  Many passages from Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way are by now so well known that they have turned into clichés and reference points and occupy a permanent place in contemporary Western culture. Scenes and episodes are familiar even to many who have not actually read the book: say “Proust” and they will immediately think “madeleine” and “tea,” if not “cork-lined room.” Yet confronting the book itself is an entirely different, and individual, experience. One will have one’s own way of visualizing the narrator’s childhood bedtime scene with his mother, his visits to his hypochondriac aunt, his teasing of the servant Françoise, his embrace of the prickly hawthorns, his vision of the three steeples, and his first piece of serious writing. Swann’s agonizing love affair with Odette and the narrator’s youthful infatuation with Swann’s daughter Gilberte will be colored by the personal associations of each reader, who will likewise have unexpected memories, recalled by unexpected stimuli, that will enable him or her to identify with the narrator in the most famous scene of all, in which the taste of a tea-soaked madeleine suddenly incites his full recollection of his childhood in the village of Combray and, from this, leads to the unfolding of all the subsequent action in the three-thousand-page novel.

  One will find, too, that the better acquainted one becomes with this book, the more it yields. Given its richness and resilience, Proust’s work may be, and has been, enjoyed on every level and in every form—as quotation, as excerpt, as compendium, even as movie and comic book—but in the end it is best experienced, for most, in the way it was meant to be, in the full, slow reading and rereading of every word, in complete submission to Proust’s subtle psychological analyses, his precise portraits, his compassionate humor, his richly colored and lyrical landscapes, his extended digressions, his architectonic sentences, his symphonic structures, his perfect formal designs.

  Swann’s Way is divided into three parts: “Combray,” “Swann in Love,” and “Place-Names: The Name.” “Combray,” itself divided into two parts, opens with the bedtime of the narrator as a grown man: he describes how he used to spend the sleepless portions of his nights remembering events from earlier in his life and finally describes the episode of the madeleine. A second and much longer section of “Combray” follows, containing the memories of his childhood at Combray that were summoned by the taste of the “petite madeleine” and that came flooding back to him in unprecedentedly minute and sensuous detail. This first part of the book, having opened at bedtime, closes—itself like a long sleepless night—at dawn.

  “Swann in Love,” which jumps back in time to a period before the narrator was born, consists of the self-contained story of Swann’s miserable, jealousy-racked love for the shallow and fickle Odette, who will one day be his wife; the narrator with whom we began the book scarcely appears at all.

  The third and last part, “Place-Names: The Name,” much shorter than the rest of the volume, includes the story of the narrator’s infatuation, as a boy, with Swann’s daughter Gilberte during the weeks they play together on the chilly lawns of the Champs-Élysées and ends with a sort of coda which jumps forward in time: on a late November day, at the time of the writing, the narrator, walking through the Bois de Boulogne, muses on the contrast between the beauties of the days of his childhood and the banality of the present, and on the nature of time.

  The story is told in the first person. Proust scholars have identified a handful of slightly different I’s in the novel as a whole, but the two main I’s are those of the rather weary, middle-aged narrator as he tells the story and the narrator as a child and young man. The first person, however, is abandoned for shorter or longer intervals in favor of what is in effect an omniscient narrator, as when, in “Combray,” we witness conversations between his aunt Léonie and the servant Françoise which the boy could not have heard; and most remarkably during nearly the whole of “Swann in Love.”

  The story is told in the first person, the protagonist is referr
ed to several times in the course of In Search of Lost Time, though not in Swann’s Way, as “Marcel,” and the book is filled with events and characters closely resembling those of Proust’s own life, yet this novel is not autobiography wearing a thin disguise of fiction but, rather, something more complex—fiction created out of real life, based on the experiences and beliefs of its author, and presented in the guise of autobiography. For although Proust’s own life experience is the material from which he forms his novel, this material has been altered, recombined, shaped to create a coherent and meaningful fictional artifact, a crucial alchemy—art’s transformation of life—which is itself one of Proust’s preoccupations and a principal subject and theme of the book.

  The episode of the madeleine, for instance, was based on an experience of Proust’s own, but what Proust apparently dipped in his tea was a rusk of dry toast, and the memory that then returned to him was his morning visits to his grandfather. The scene of the goodnight kiss was set, not in a single actual home of Proust’s childhood, but in a melding of two—one in Auteuil, the suburb of Paris where he was born, and the other in Illiers, a town outside Paris where he spent many summers. Similarly, the characters in the novel are composites, often more perfectly realized ideals or extremes, of characters in his own life: the annoying Mme. Verdurin is based closely on a certain Mme. X of Proust’s acquaintance, but to avoid offending her by too blatantly describing her, Proust attributed her habit of incessantly painting pictures of roses to another character, Mme. de Villeparisis.

  What is introduced in this inaugural volume of In Search of Lost Time? As Samuel Beckett remarks in his slim study Proust, “The whole of Proust’s world comes out of a teacup, and not merely Combray and his childhood. For Combray brings us to the two ‘ways’ and to Swann, and to Swann may be related every element of the Proustian experience and consequently its climax in revelation. . . . Swann is the cornerstone of the entire structure, and the central figure of the narrator’s childhood, a childhood that involuntary memory, stimulated or charmed by the long-forgotten taste of a madeleine steeped in an infusion of tea, conjures in all the relief and colour of its essential significance from the shallow well of a cup’s inscrutable banality.”

  Through Charles Swann, the faithful friend and constant dinner guest of the narrator’s family, we are led, either directly or indirectly, to all the most important characters of In Search of Lost Time. As Proust himself says, describing the book in a letter to a friend: “There are a great many characters; they are ‘prepared’ in this first volume, in such a way that in the second they will do exactly the opposite of what one would have expected from the first.” Nearly all, in fact, are introduced in Swann’s Way: the young protagonist, his parents and his grandmother; Swann, his daughter Gilberte, and Odette, whose is both the mysterious “lady in pink” early in the book and later the lovely Mme. Swann; Françoise, the family servant; the narrator’s boyhood friend, the bookish Bloch; and the aristocrat Mme. de Villeparisis. Stories are told about them that will be echoed later by parallel stories, just as the story of the young protagonist’s longing for his mother is echoed within this volume by the story of Swann’s longing for Odette and the narrator’s, when he was a boy, for Gilberte. Stories are begun that will be continued, hints are dropped that will be picked up, and questions are asked that will be answered in later volumes; places are described that will reappear in greater detail. “Combray,” which contains some of the most beautiful writing in the novel, sets the stage for the rest, and in its first pages introduces the principal themes which will be elaborated in subsequent volumes: childhood, love, betrayal, memory, sleep, time, homosexuality, music, art, manners, taste, society, historic France. The later volumes, in turn, give “Combray” an ever richer meaning, and reveal more fully the logical interrelation of its parts. As Proust himself, again, in the same letter, says: “And from the point of view of composition, it is so complex that it only becomes clear much later when all the ‘themes’ have begun to coalesce.”

  In the narrator’s recovery of his early memories through the tasting of the tea-soaked madeleine, for instance, we first learn of Proust’s conception of the power of involuntary memory: the madeleine is only the first of a number of inanimate objects that will appear in the course of In Search of Lost Time, each of which provides a sensuous experience which will in turn provoke an involuntary memory (the uneven cobblestones in a courtyard, for instance, or the touch of a stiffly starched napkin on the lips). The incident of the madeleine will itself be taken up again and revealed in a new light in the final volume.

  In the narrator’s early passion for his mother and Swann’s for Odette, we are introduced to the power of love for an elusive object, the obstinate perversity with which one’s passion is intensified, if not in fact created, by the danger of losing one’s beloved. The narrator’s infatuation with Gilberte in the present volume will be echoed by his more fully developed passion, as an adult, for Albertine in a subsequent volume. In the very first pages of Swann’s Way, the notion of escape from time is alluded to, and the description of the magic lantern which follows soon after hints at how time will be transcended through art. The wistful closing passage in the Bois de Boulogne introduces the theme of the receding, in time, and the disappearance, of beloved places and people, and their resurrection in our imagination, our memory, and finally our art. For only in recollection does an experience become fully significant, as we arrange it in a meaningful pattern, and thus the crucial role of our intellect, our imagination, in our perception of the world and our re-creation of it to suit our desires; thus the importance of the role of the artist in transforming reality according to a particular inner vision: the artist escapes the tyranny of time through art.

  In one early scene, for example, the young protagonist sees the object of his devotion, the Duchesse de Guermantes, in the village church. He has never seen her before; what he has loved has been his own image of her, which he has created from her name and family history, her country estate, her position and reputation. In the flesh, she is disappointing: she has a rather ordinary face, and a pimple beside her nose. But immediately his imagination goes to work again, and soon he has managed to change what he sees before him into an object once again worthy of his love. Similarly, later in the novel Swann finds that his love of Odette is wonderfully strengthened, even transformed, the moment he realizes how closely she resembles a favorite painting of his: he now sees the painting, as well, when he looks at her. The power of the intellect, and the imagination, have come to transform the inadequacy or tediousness of the real.

  Proust began writing Du côté de chez Swann when he was in his late thirties, sometime between the summer of 1908 and the summer of 1909, as near as we can make out from references in his letters and conversations. His mother, with whom he had lived, had died in 1905, and following a stay of some months in a sanatorium, he had moved into an apartment at Versailles while friends searched for a suitable place for him to settle. This place turned out to be an apartment at 102, boulevard Haussmann, which was already familiar to him since the building had been in the possession of his family for some years; his uncle had died in the apartment and his mother had often visited it. The building is now owned by a bank, but one can still view Proust’s high-ceilinged bedroom with its two tall windows and marble fireplace. In this room, of modest dimensions, Proust spent most of the rest of his life—slept, rested, ate, received visitors, read, and wrote. It was here that most of À la recherche du temps perdu came into being.

  In a sense, the book had already been in preparation for several years before it began to take the form of a novel. It was never destined to be composed in a neatly chronological manner in any case, and elements of it had been emerging piecemeal in various guises: paragraphs, passages, scenes were written and even published in earlier versions, then later reworked and incorporated into the novel. The famous description in Swann’s Way of the steeples of Martinville, for example, had an earlier incarnation
as an article on road travel; and versions of many scenes had appeared in Proust’s first, unfinished, and unpublished novel, Jean Santeuil, which juxtaposed the two childhood homes that Proust would later combine to form the setting of the drama of the goodnight kiss.

  Proust had been projecting a number of shorter works, most of them essays. At a certain point he realized they could all be brought together in a single form, a novel. What became its start had, immediately before, begun as an essay contesting the ideas of the literary critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, a work which he conceived as having a fictional opening: the mother of the main character would come to his bedside in the morning and the two of them would begin a conversation about Sainte-Beuve. The first drafts of this essay evolved into the novel, and at last, by midsummer of 1909, Proust was actually referring to his work-in-progress as a novel. Thereafter the work continued to develop somewhat chaotically, as Proust wrote many different parts of the book at the same time, cutting, expanding, and revising endlessly. Even as he wrote the opening, however, he foresaw the conclusion, and in fact the end of the book was completed before the middle began to grow.

  A version of the present first volume, Du côté de chez Swann, was in existence by January 1912, and extracts including “A Ray of Sun on the Balcony” and “Village Church” were published that year in the newspaper Le Figaro.

  Although the publisher Eugène Fasquelle had announced that in his opinion “nothing must interfere with the action” in a work of fiction, Proust nevertheless submitted to him a manuscript of the book in October 1912. At this point, admitting that his novel was very long but pointing out that it was “very concise,” he proposed a book in two volumes, one called Le Temps perdu (Time Lost) and the other Le Temps retrouvé (Time Found Again), under the general title Les Intermittences du coeur (The Intermittences of the Heart). (He had not yet found the title Du côté de chez Swann.)