Davis: 300-316; Moncrieff: 411-433
by Dennis Abrams
Swann attempts to keep Odette to himself, “to capture her through her self-love.” Odette’s lies are “an expedient of a particular order; and the only thing that could decide whether she ought to make use of it or confess the truth was a reason of a particular order too, the greater or lesser likelihood that Swann might discover the truth.” (Isn’t this the same logic behind a child’s lies as well?) Odette’s looks begin to fade. “But knowing that under the new chrysalis, what lived on was still Odette, still the same will, evanescent, elusive, and guileful, was enough to make Swann continue to put the same passion into trying to capture her.” Odette goes with the Verdurins to Pierrefonds. Swann arranges to go visit his friend, the Marquis de Forestelle, who lives in the vicinity, in the hope of seeing her without her thinking that he’s following her. Odette’s feelings for Swann are changing. “The fact was that she had not even thought of him. And occasions such as this when she forgot Swann’s very existence were more useful to Odette, did more to attach Swann to her, than all her coquetry. Because in this way Swann was kept in that state of painful agitation which had already been powerful enough to make his love blossom on the night when he had not found Odette at the Verdurins’ and had searched for her all evening.” Odette pointedly chooses Swann over Forcheville, at least for one evening. Odette asks for money to rent a house at Beyeruth in which to entertain the Verdurins for the season. Swann refuses in an angry letter, thinking that she’ll use it for a rendezvous with Forcheville, then thinks better of it, worried that it must have “brought him down from the high, the unique rank which by his goodness, his honesty, he had won in her esteem,” then goes further, thinking about how grateful and happy she would be if he gave her the money…”she would come running to him, happy, grateful, and he would have the joy of seeing her, a joy which he had not experienced for almost a week and which nothing could replace.”
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A few thoughts:
1. It is interesting and I think important that on pages 306-307 in the Davis translation, the Narrator, for the first time, intrudes into the story of Swann and Odette. “And he did not have, as I had at Combray in my childhood, happy days during which to forget the sufferings that will return at night.” Why does the Narrator suddenly make his presence known here?
2. I love this analysis of Swann’s “condition,” which strikes me as remarkably true, and one of those moments when the reader slaps himself (or herself) in the forehead and asks “How does he know that?”
“Because as soon as Swann could picture her without horror, as soon as he once again saw kindness in her smile, and as soon as the desire to take her out of reach of all other men was not added by jealousy to his love, that love again became above all a predilection for the sensations that Odette’s person gave him, for the pleasure he took in admiring like a spectacle or questioning like a phenomenon the dawn of one of her glances, the evolution of one of her smiles, the emission of an intonation of her voice. And the pleasure, different from all the others, had ended by creating in him a need for that she alone could satisfy by her presence or her letters, a need almost as disinterested, almost as artistic, as perverse, as another need that characterized this new period in Swann’s life, in which the dryness, the depression of earlier years had been succeeded by a sort of spiritual superabundance, without his knowing to what he owed this unhoped-for enrichment of his inner life anymore than a person in delicate health who from a certain moment grows stronger, stouter, and seems for a time to be on the road to a complete recovery: that other need which was also developing apart from the real world was the need to hear, and to understand, music.
3. Love. Is Swann actually in love with Odette? In love with the idea of Odette? If she didn’t pull away, would he still be as interested? Is he in love with being in love and the feelings it gives him, like those of Vinteiuil’s “little phrase”? Does the real Odette even count in the equation?
Discuss.
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Today’s Reading:
Davis: Page 316 “Sometimes this was after several days…” through Page 328 “…nevertheless pained him like a betrayal.”
Moncrieff: Page 433 “Sometimes it would be after several days…” through Page 450 “…pained him as if her enjoyment of them had been an act of treachery.”
Enjoy.
Seems like Odette now has Swann completely in her power. And he will have to marry her, even though the marriage will not bring him happiness. He is a complete weak-willed masochist — willing to put up with any behavior on her part. Swann is a doormat.
On this reading I am finding Swann much less believable a character — because on the one hand he is able to hold his own in the most brilliant society, and on the other he is almost a complete simpleton. Proust has created two characters in one person, and they don’t quite fit together.
Mike:
I think you’re underestimating Swann here. Freud once described being in love as “the over-estimation of the object.”
In one of my favorite quotes, Jorge Luis Borges said that “To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible God.”
It is by making Swann such a completely rational character 99% of the time, except when it comes to Odette, that both the comedy and the tragedy arise.
Dennis
Swann reminds me of an addict: always obesessed with scoring his next shot when not with Odette – not because he thinks she is so wonderful but because he has to satisfy his craving.
It’s like a nicotine addiction: no one who starts to smoke will claim that cigarettes are delicious, but once you are addicted to nicotine and you need them on a regular basis they will appear delicious.
It seems the same with Swann’s need of Odette and that’s why to me there’s something unhealthy about their relationship. Oddly enough at the same time maybe this makes Swann all the more human.
The passage that I particularly liked from this reading (from the Kilmartin, not Enright, revision of Moncrieff):
Examining his complaint with as much scientific detachment as if he had innoculated himself with it in order to study its effects, he told himself that, when he was cured of it, what Odette might or might not do would be a matter of indifference to him. But the truth was that in the depths of his morbid condition he feared death itself no more than such a recovery, which would in fact amount to the death of all that he now was.
It seems to me that this, among other passages, shows how comprehensive Swann’s understanding is. He is able to diagnose his condition–he “knows” that Odette’s every move is not fundamentally interesting. But to reach a state where he lives that reality, he would have to lose his obsessive love. And such a loss, in its way, would be the death of him; would negate everything he has become and is now. To be cured, he would have to wish himself to be other than he is; he would have to change, not Odette. And that he simply cannot do.
Dennis, I agree with your comment in your reply to Mike. I think Proust’s entire point is that the key to Swann’s character is that he is a man of the most crushing contradictions. Himself the most intelligent and cultured of men, who is accepted in the highest strata of society, he falls completely for a woman who, putting aside that she was only a step up from a streetwalker, unintelligent and uncultured… on top all that, she wasn’t even his “type.”
This has been great fun, Dennis, and you’re doing a great job.
Thanks Ray. And I think one of the major ideas in Proust is that people are never easily definable, or, for that matter, knowable.
I know it’s all about Swann, but do we ever stop to think what it is like to be Odette in this picture? To be so scrutinized, desired to the point of idiocy, pursued against all reason…I think she is entitled to be a little uncomfortable with all this.
A little action on the side and some time on her is the least she should be allowed. I won’t even mention the double-standard reflected in Swann’s behaviors with other women. Oh, I just did. Not that I really like Odette, but she has to make a living!