Classics and the Western Canon discussion
Proust - Swann's Way
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Discussion: Place Names and book as a whole
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Everyman
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Dec 06, 2011 05:04PM
For discussion of the final section of Swann's Way.
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Well, I have just finished the book. I am looking forward for your comments on this section. I have really enjoyed this book. But, I felt that Swan In love dragged. I am interested to see if you thought that the work tied together as a whole?
Patrice wrote: "It's dragging so much for me that I still 250 pages to go!"Not certain I could ever have read it. But am enjoying the second listening far more than the first.
Proust's sentences and ideas are so convoluted and feed back on themselves so much that I find his writing very difficult to grasp in a single reading. Given that I like to almost skim read, a least parts of anything of such length, ISOLT becomes a particular challenge.
Patrice wrote: "...don't like missing a thing...."I've never found that possible.
Well, we finally find out for sure that Odette became Mme Swann, but we don't find out how. I guess something has to be left for Vols. II-VII. We also don't know how the narrator will eventually win Gilberte, though that surely has to happen, if after many vicissitudes.This book is like a symphony. The long chapters are different in setting and tone, but somehow they go together like the movements in a symphony. It even has an Overture. It is an Impressionist symphony--long washes of gently varying color and timbre you can get lost in, not the brisk theme and variations of a Classical symphony.
Roger wrote: "This book is like a symphony. The long chapters are different in setting and tone, but somehow they go together like the movements in a symphony. It even has an Overture. It is an Impressionist symphony--long washes of gently varying color and timbre you can get lost in, not the brisk theme and variations of a Classical symphony. ..."Roger, thanks for the analogy. Although I'm not sophisticated at being able to make musical comparisons, your words seem right to me.
Speaking of music, I think one of my favourite quotes from Swann in Love is this:[...] love once again became, more than anything, a taste for the sensations which Odette’s person gave him, for the pleasure which he found admiring, as one might a spectacle, or in questioning, as one might a phenomenon, the birth of one of her glances, the formation of one of her smiles, the utterance of an intonation of her voice. And this pleasure, different from every other, had in the end created in him a need of her, which she alone, by her presence or by her letters, could assuage, almost as disinterested, almost as artistic, as perverse as another need which characterised this new period in Swann’s life, when the sereness, the depression of the preceding years had been followed by a sort of spiritual superabundance, without his knowing to what he owed this unlooked-for enrichment of his life, any more than a person in delicate health who from a certain moment grows stronger, puts on flesh, and seems for a time to be on the road to a complete recover: - this other need, which, too, developed in him independently of the visible, material world, was the need to listen to music and to learn to know it.
Sometimes, though, I'll admit that I feel like there's just too much ridiculous tediousness that you have to push through to get to really nice passages, especially when the action slows downs. I don't think Proust's sentences are necessarily hard to understand, they just go on and on and on without saying that much. I had to read Troilus and Cressida a couple of weeks ago and the language just leaves you mystified. There are so many obscure words the Shakespeare made up in that play that although I read it three times in a short period of time it was still very hard to understand. Proust is different from that, I dunno, he sometimes lulls you to sleep and you feel yourself reading words that your brain just doesn't process.
Andreea wrote: "...you feel yourself reading words that your brain just doesn't process. "So true! It has only been hearing and seeing clusters of thought processes on a second listening that has really helped significantly for me, and even then there are spots where my mind just seems to enter a river and sense only the flow without the meaning.
(What Alexander suggests, making multiple readings until all those phrases sort of coalesce, sometimes works, too. It is the striking twist, though, that I particularly enjoy encountering -- one anticipates the thought process is going one direction and suddenly it turns upon itself.)
A passage evocative of place and nature that I like from this section:"I longed for nothing more than to behold a storm at sea, less as a mighty spectacle than as a momentary revelation of the true life of nature; or rather there were for me no mighty spectacles save those which I knew to be not artificially composed for my entertainment, but necessary and unalterable,—the beauty of landscapes or of great works of art. I was not curious, I did not thirst to know anything save what I believed to be more genuine than myself, what had for me the supreme merit of shewing me a fragment of the mind of a great genius, or of the force or the grace of nature as she appeared when left entirely to herself, without human interference. Just as the lovely sound of her voice, reproduced, all by itself, upon the phonograph, could never console a man for the loss of his mother, so a mechanical imitation of a storm would have left me as cold as did the illuminated fountains at the Exhibition. I required also, if the storm was to be absolutely genuine, that the shore from which I watched it should be a natural shore, not an embankment recently constructed by a municipality. Besides, nature, by all the feelings that she aroused in me, seemed to me the most opposite thing in the world to the mechanical inventions of mankind The less she bore their imprint, the more room she offered for the expansion of my heart. And, as it happened, I had preserved the name of Balbec, which Legrandin had cited to us, as that of a sea-side place in the very midst of "that funereal coast, famed for the number of its wrecks, swathed, for six months in the year, in a shroud of fog and flying foam from the waves.
"You feel, there, below your feet still," he had told me, "far more even than at Finistère (and even though hotels are now being superimposed upon it, without power, however, to modify that oldest bone in the earth's skeleton) you feel there that you are actually at the land's end of France, of Europe, of the Old World. And it is the ultimate encampment of the fishermen, precisely like the fishermen who have lived since the world's beginning, facing the everlasting kingdom of the sea-fogs and shadows of the night." (Bold added.)
It seems at the end of the novel that the reader is being called to contrast and compare the narrator's infatuation for Gilberte with Swann's infatuation for Odette. (The fact that Gilberte is the daughter of Swann & Odette is also, well, interesting.)Are there similarities between the two? Is the narrator meant to be seen as a younger Swann? (Or Swann as an older narrator?) Is Gilberte a young Odette? Or is this parallel structure merely coincidental? (Or a red herring, perhaps?) What is the point?
And now I've run out of question marks.
But good questions before you did!Mine -- where is the sentence that says Mrs. Swann is Odette?
Lily wrote: "But good questions before you did!Mine -- where is the sentence that says Mrs. Swann is Odette?"
"Do you know who that is? Mme. Swann! That means nothing to you? Odette de Crecy?"
"Odette de Crecy? Why in fact I was just wondering...Those sad eyes... But you know she can't be as young as she once was! I remember I slept with her the day MacMahon resigned."
"You'd better not remind her of it. She's now Mme. Swann..."
p.437, Davis translation.
Thank you!(That's apparently on that last CD I still need to repeat! Missed it or didn't remember from the first time through. Something had led me to believe that verification didn't actually appear until the next volume, even though the implication had been obvious since dinner at Combray.)
I don't remember the implication -- I guess I missed that. Otherwise I wouldn't have been so surprised at the way it is revealed. "I slept with her the day that MacMahon resigned." Really now!! It's a bit over the top, don't you think? But it certainly makes me interested in how the marriage came about, given the way that Swann in Love ends. Marriage doesn't seem to be the natural conclusion of that relationship.
Thomas wrote: "It seems at the end of the novel that the reader is being called to contrast and compare the narrator's infatuation for Gilberte with Swann's infatuation for Odette. (The fact that Gilberte is the ..."I think there's definitely the suggestion that Swann and the Narrator are sides of the same person. In Swann's dream at the end of Swann in Love we're told that:
Swann reasoned with himself, for the young man whom he had failed, at first, to identify, was himself also; like certain novelists, he had distributed his own personality between two characters, him who was the 'first person' in the dream, and another whom he saw before him, capped with a fez.
But, at the same time, I'm starting to read the whole volume as a bundle of variations on the theme of love (and I mean that in the musical sense of the word 'variations' too) - love of one's mother, one's childhood, adult/sexualized love, young/romantic love, love of art and places and love of the past.
The implication -- well, we were told at the very beginning that Swann's wife wasn't welcome in the home where Proust stayed in Combray. But I, too, was fascinated by how the story is unfolded. At the end of "Swann in Love", Swann seems to be moving away from that love. Then we have the outrageous twist of this chapter! Almost like a modern marketing hook to read the next book in the series.
Are we sure that Gilberte is Swann's daughter? Certainly she is the daughter of his wife Odette, but could her father be someone else?
Roger wrote: "Are we sure that Gilberte is Swann's daughter? Certainly she is the daughter of his wife Odette, but could her father be someone else?"Gilberte believes that he is her father, as does the narrator. But I suppose she could have been conceived the day that MacMahon resigned. That doesn't seem likely, given Swann's character, but I suppose all shall be revealed in the fullness of time.
