Davis: 216-230; Moncrieff: 294-314
by Dennis Abrams
A year before his first visit to the Verdurins’, Swann heard the Sonata for Piano and Violin, and responds to one particular phrase that “led him first this way, and then that, towards a state of happiness that was noble, unintelligible, and yet precise.” Music and memory. “It even seemed, for a moment, that this love for a phrase of music would have to open in Swann the possibility of a sort of rejuvenation.” Swann hears the phrase again at the Verdurins’ “And it was so particular, it had a charm so individual, which no other charm could have replaced, that Swann felt as though he had encountered in a friend’s drawing room a person whom he had admired in the street and despaired of ever finding again.” Swann learns that the piece is by a composer named Vinteuil, and dismisses the possibility that it is the same Vinteuil who teaches piano at Combray. Swann reveals that he knows people in high places. Dr. Cottard’s reaction. Swann, Odette and the music. “…the little phrase by Vinteuil that was like the anthem of their love.” Swann and the young working girl in his carriage. Swann has tea at Odette’s home. Oriental furnishings and chrysanthemums.
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In his book The Western Canon, Harold Bloom discusses Proust in a chapter entitled “Proust: The True Persuasion of Sexual Jealousy.” I thought this might be a good time to begin sharing with you some of Bloom’s thoughts on the subject, to consider and keep in mind as we read deeper into “Swann in Love.”
“In Search of Lost Time (herein called Search for short), which, unfortunately may always be known in English by the beautiful but misleading Shakespearean title, Rememberance of Things Past, actually challenges Shakespeare in its powers of representing personalities. Germaine Bree observed that Proust’s personages, like Shakespeare’s, resist all psychological reductions. Again like Shakespeare, Proust is a master of tragicomedy: I wince as I laugh, but I have to agree with Roger Shattuck that the comic mode is central to Proust because it allows him representational distance in exploring the then partly forbidden matter of homosexuality. Because of Proust’s preternatural comic genius, he also rivals Shakespeare at portraying sexual jealousy; one of the most canonical of human affects for literary purposes, handled by Shakespeare as catastrophic tragedy in Othello and near-catastrophic romance in The Winter’s Tale. Proust gives us three magnificent sagas of jealousy: the ordeals, in sequence, of Swann, Saint-Loup, and Marcel (I will call him Marcel, even though the Narrator gives him that name only once or twice in the enormous novel). These three tragicomic, obsessive anguishes are only one strand in an encyclopedic work, yet Proust, like Freud, can be said to join both Shakespeare and the Hawthorne of The Scarlet Letter in confirming the canonicity of sexual jealousy. It is hell in human life but purgatorial splendor as materia poetica. Shelly affirmed that incest was the most poetical of circumstances; Proust teaches us that sexual jealousy may be the most novelistic.
In 1922, the year of Proust’s death (he was just fifty-one), Freud published a powerful, brief essay on sexual jealousy, “Certain Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia, and Homosexuality.” There is an opening association between jealousy and grief, and Freud assures us that persons who seem not to manifest these two universal affects have undergone severe repression, so that jealousy and grief become even more active in the unconscious. With grim irony, Freud divides jealousy into three parts: competitive, projected, delusional. The first is narcissistic and Oedipal, the second imputes to the loved one a guilt, whether real or imagined, that belongs to the self; the third, over the border into paranoia, takes as its usually repressed object someone of one’s own sex. As is cutomary with Freud, the analysis is highly Shakespearean, though more in the mode of The Winter’s Tale, which Freud did not mention, than in the tragic darkness of Othello, where Freud once specifically located projected jealousy. Leontes in The Winter’s Tale almost systematically works through Freud’s three varieties of jealousy, Proust’s three grand cases of jealousy leap over the normal or competitive variety, dally briefly with the projected sort, and center themselves ferociously in the delusional mode. But Freud is Proust’s rival, not his master, and the Proustian account of jealousy is very much Proust’s own. Applying Freud to Proust on jealousy is as reductive and misleading as analyzing Search‘s vision of homosexuality in a Freudian way.”
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The reading for the weekend:
Davis: Page 230 “A second visit he made to her…” through Page 248 “…but possessed by another.”
Moncrieff: Page 314 “More important, perhaps, was a second visit he paid her a little later.” through Page 339 “…but himself in thraldom to another.”
Yes, but what about the music? I love the music in Proust – and here, the attempt to describe the joy that a few notes of music can bring in itself made me happy.
An illuminating discussion of the sources of the ‘little phrase’:
http://blog.allmusic.com/2008/11/07/who-wrote-the-vinteuil-sonata-a-musical-mystery/
I can’t help but thinking, during this passage, that Swann is kind of a rat, having the rosy little working girl in his arms in the carriage until the moment he goes into the Verdurin’s house to meet Odette. Even making an allowance for the distance in time and culture between our era and that of Proust’s youth, he seems to be a man who has gone through life sexually exploiting women of the lower classes, but without forming the least emotional attachments to them.
Two things struck me during the course of this section:
1. The effect of the sonata on Swann. We learn that Swann had “given up directing his life toward an ideal goal and limited it to the pursuit of everyday satisfactions.” This state of mind “allowed him to ignore the fundamental essence of things.” Somehow the sonata alerts Swann to the “presence of one of those invisible realities” to which he desires “to devote his life” and alleviates “the moral dryness from which he suffered.” I’m certainly not one to underestimate the great power of music, but this transformation caused by this sonata seems to great to be credible. Also, after hearing the sonata, I don’t see much change in Swann’s behavior, so I’m inclined to believe the transformation isn’t as extreme as the description on pp. 218-19 suggests. Perhaps we’ll see a transformation in future pages.
2. The ridiculousness of Odette’s drawing room. It’s filled with “many mysterious alcoves,” “palm trees contained in china cachepots,” “screens festooned with photographs, bows of ribbon, and fans,” “cushions of Japanese silk,” and lots and lots of carefully arranged lamps. Like Odette herself, the room is highly affected. This is my first reading of Proust, and maybe my opinion will change over time, but I do not admire Odette, and I can’t imagine the narrator intends for us to admire her. Certainly, he (Marcel) is describing Odette as a very silly, vacuous sort of person, overly concerned with surfaces and lacking much consistency of character.
Gwen:
The sonata will remain an important theme throughout the book. But on the subject of Odette’s room, I’m not sure that “ridiculous” is the word I’d use to describe her drawing room. Orientalism was very much the rage, and I think the point that Proust was making in describing the Chinese porcelain, the screens, the Japanese silks, etc., was that Odette was attempting, as best she could given her circumstances, to be fashionable.
Dennis – I left an earlier, brief, enthusiastic comment on Proust’s writing about music, which is still ‘awaiting moderation’ presumably because I included a link. Is Word Press being overly conscientious?
Back to music. One of the reasons I loved this so much was the description of the joy that a few notes of music can bring. Gwen, I don’t think there’s a suggestion that this changes Swann. I think it’s that while he is so transported, he has both the immediate surge of happiness, and the pleasure of knowing he has the sensibility to appreciate it. As a retired person doing nothing much, I find this very easy to understand.
Cyrille:
I think you’ve got that exactly right with regards to Swann and music. I’m not sure what happened to your comment, but I’ll try to find out.
Cyrille:
I agree. I’m not retired, but certainly nothing in my professional life stimulates me the way that art does, and I think you are on to something when you say that the pleasure of art is both the immediate sensations, plus some kind of reflective realization that this thing that elates you is not recognized by everyone but only those with, as you say, “the sensibility.” Certainly it is not lost on Swann that no one in the Verdurins’ salon has the same strong reaction to the little phrase that he does. And I would add that there is some special kind of ecstasy that comes with knowing that the art was created by a person, not by nature, and that the work creates a wordless but profound bond between the artist and the appreciator.
In the 1982 film “Celeste” the music performed for Proust in his home is credited as the String quartet in D major by Cesar Franck, composed from 1889-90. It’s too new to be the source of the “little phrase” in 1877 but just right for Proust to have enjoyed it at home in later years.
allmusic.com discusses the mystery of who wrote the Vinteuil sonata. Debussy, Faure, Cesar Francke, Saint-Saens? It’s a lovely discussion of Proust’s personal life and interests in music. Suggests Proust together with his lover and friend Reynaldo Hahn l”heard a performance of Saint-Saen’s Violin Sonata No. 1 in D minor, Op. 75. After this event, Proust asked Hahn to play it for him on several occasions, saying that he wanted to hear, “That bit I like…the little phrase.” Is this anecdotal evidence sufficient to say that this is the sonata that played in Proust’s imagination and preyed on Swann’s emotions as the Vinteuil Sonata?”
http://blog.allmusic.com/2008/11/7/who-wrote-the-vinteuil-sonata-a-musical-mystery/