Moncrieff: 20-71; Grieve: 17-53
by Dennis Abrams
Francoise flexes her culinary muscles preparing dinner for M. de Norpois. Marcel enjoys the theater experience until the moment the curtain rises. “So long as I had not yet heard Berma speak, I still felt some pleasure.” Marcel’s disappointment in La Berma. “I could not even, as I could with her companions, distinguish in her diction and in her playing intelligent modulations or beautiful gestures. I listened to her as though I were reading Phedre, or as though Phaedra herself had at that moment uttered the words that I was hearing, without its appearing that Berma’s talent had added anything to all at them.” The Narrator interjects “One discovers the touch of genius in Berma’s acting either a week after one has heard her, from a review, or else on the spot, from the thundering acclamation of the stalls.” Marcel meets M. de Norpois. M. de Norpois, in his own way, approves of Marcel’s interest in literature, “but the very terms that he employed showed me Literature as something entirely different from the image that I had formed of it at Combray, and I realised that I had been doubly right in renouncing it…now M. de Norpois took away from me even the desire to write.” M. de Norpois condescends to Marcel’s father regarding Marcel’s investments. Marcel tells M. de Norpois of his disappointment in La Berma, and is convinced by him that he is wrong. “‘It’s true!’ I told myself, ‘what a beautiful voice, what an absence of shrillness, what simple costumes, what intelligence to have chosen Phedre! No, I have not been disappointed!'” Cold spiced beef with carrots. M. de Norpois approves of King Theodosius’ use of the word “affinities.” M. de Norpois disapproves of the Emperor of Germany. M. de Norpois finds Balbec “charming,” speaks slightingly of its church. M. de Norpois tells of his dinner at the Swann’s, speaks approvingly of the state of their marriage. We learn that Odette had threatened to not allow Swann to see their daughter unless he married her. Swann’s dream of marrying Odette and presenting her to the Duchesse de Guermantes, who befriends both her and Gilberte. We learn that this won’t happen until after Swann’s death. “The laborious process of causation which sooner or later will bring about every possible effect, including, consequently, those which one had believed to be least possible, naturally slow at times, is rendered slower still by our desire (which in seeking to accelerate only obstructs it), by our very existence, and comes to fruition only when we have ceased to desire, and sometimes ceased to live.” M. de Norpois does not approve of Bergotte, either as a writer or as a person. M. de Norpois does approve of Gilberte. M. de Norpois makes clear that he will not serve to introduce Marcel to Mme. Swann.
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This was a long section. I hope it wasn’t too much to read over Christmas, but I couldn’t find any other way to break it up.
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1. A few words on La Berma and Phedre. La Berma, obviously, is based at least in part on Sarah Bernhardt, “the Divine Sarah,” France’s greatest actress of the age. It was Victor Hugo who used the phrase “golden voice,” to describe her — “silvery” and “flute-like” were other terms used to describe her voice. My hunch is that while based on her silent film performances, her acting style, at least to our eyes, seems staggeringly melodramtic and overdone; at her peak, and in comparison to what had come before her, she brought what can only be called a dramatic purity to her acting.
Racine’s tragic play Phedre, which was written in alexandrine verse, tells the story (taken from Greek mythology) of Phedre, who, in the absence of her husband Thesee, declares her love for his son from a previous marriage, Hippolyte. The role was one of Bernhardt’s greatest, and when in 1905 she appeared in NYC in the play, the New York Times had this to say about her performance.
“In respect to plastic grace, power of emotion, and classic grandeur, Mme. Bernhardt’s Phedre, revealed yesterday afternoon at the Lyric, occupies a position which is unique…it is an acting achievement of the very highest order, and as such fully merits the enthusiastic praise which has been lavished on it for years…In attempting to do justice to such an achievement one is confronted by almost insurmountable difficulties, for pliant as the language of description may be, it cannot compare in expressiveness with the varying means employed by so great an artiste to illuminate such a role…There is perhaps no more difficult scene in poetic drama than the one in which Phedre confesses to Hippolyte the existance of her secret passion. Mme. Bernhardt gives the incident all possible value, but so discretely is her manifestation accomplished that the lines of dramatic propriety are never transcended. The passage following the discovery of Hippolyte’s revulsion at her disclosure is terrific in its intensity.”
So one of today’s questions. Why was Marcel, at least initially, disappointed?
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2. One of my favorite paragraphs, describing Swann’s marriage to Odette.
“Almost everyone was surprised at the marriage, and that in itself was surprising. No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we cal love, or how it creates, so to speak, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a persom most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourselves.”
It is lines like those which, as marchhare said in response to my last post, have changed my life, by making me look at things through different eyes. Is the person I love not the person the rest of the world sees, but is he someone I in effect “created” for myself? And, if that’s the case, can we trust our feelings of love, if they’re not based in “reality?” Any thoughts on that?
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3. And finally. given the sacrifices that Swann has made, and his touching yet almost at the same time comic dream of being able to present Odette to the Duchesse de Guermantes, how do you feel about M. Swann now?
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Monday’s Reading:
Moncrieff: Page 71 “After M. de Norpois had gone my father…” through Page 85 “…and no longer loved her.”
Grieve: Page 53 “After M. de Norpois’s departure…” through Page 63…”and had stopped loving her.” (My apology to Grieve readers — the paragraph breaks for Moncrieff and Grieve do not always align.)
Enjoy.
Dennis,
I didn’t find the reading to be too much over the Christmas holiday, but I was surprised to find myself somewhat hesitant to start the new volume at all (did others feel this way?). There’s something a bit daunting about starting a 500+ page volume, even if I’ve already read the previous volume. I suspect I’ll face a bit of this hesitance every time we get to a new volume. Now that I’m well into this one, however, there’s no fear I’ll stop reading.
As to why Proust was disappointed in La Berma, I suspect we’re seeing some more of that famous Proustian disappointment where the anticipated thing never lives up to what is anticipated. Also, I wonder if Marcel was too young at the time to appreciate the nuances of La Berma’s performance. Maybe this is one area in qhich we we see the protagonist grow over time.
Gwen- I am coming to this project about a year later, but I too felt that way about starting the second volume. I finished Swann’s Way and then was going out of town for a week, so I didn’t want to pack the heavy book (I have the three-volume boxed set). When I got back, I read a bit of Budding Grove, but didn’t immediately get into it, so a couple more weeks went by … Now I am also well and truly into it!
Swann is just as mercurial as Odette. I can understand his view most of all the characters since we have spent so much time with him. After all he is the only character so far that has his own book named after him including a detailed story of his being in love. The reading is the most interesting for me when Swann is on stage. I liked the way he defied tradition in marrying Odette although perhaps for the wrong reason. I don’t see this story as about love but about sexual attraction, delusion and obsession. The paragraph you like so much, Dennis, about projection says it all.
Why did Marcel not like La Berma’s performance? It seemed to me probably because it was “melodramatic and overdone.” Marcel was looking for Truth; others were evaluating her performance in the context of a conventional standard (“staggeringly melodramatic and overdone”) of which Marcel was ignorant/innocent.
I don’t understand the Swann marriage–and we aren’t given much data. At the end of Swann in love he feels he is no longer in love, and Odette seems to be largely ignoring him. All of a sudden they have married after producing a daughter, but we have heard nothing directly from Swann and we see and hear very little of either Swann or Odette. So they and their marriage become a kind of Rorshach blot into which we may read our ideas/views/thoughts/wishes/whatevers, or they may remain enigmas.
That said, my guess about Odette is that she, being more skilled and experienced than Swann in the ways of passion, had, as we say, set her cap for him and, with a combination of powerful forces (mixture of avoidance-approach plus producing his child) successfully reeled him in. And he seems (from what little we can see) to be quite pleased with the result, as does she.
A lot of seems to have happened between the end of the first book and the beginning of the second. It is indeed a leap from Swann and Odette seeming to go their separate ways to their having a child, and ending up more of less happily married (after some blackmail on Odette’s part regarding seeing Gilberte). Almost seems as if there is about half a missing book.
The dinner with Norpois is one of my favorite passages in the books. I think Proust is at his best when the action is revealed through conversation. Conversely, he is at his most tedious when he is describing neurotic states of mind via interior monologues.
Norpois has a wicked tongue, for this supposedly discreet diplomat, in talking about Swann and Odette. I hope Marcel’s dad did not follow Norpois advice to put Marcel in 4% Russian bonds, which would likely have become worthless in 1917. Norpois is a sort of fossil, in that his expertise centers on a world of European royalty which would have become more or less irrelevant during his lifetime.
I’m finding the index of characters on tempsperdu.com quite helpful, it is http://www.tempsperdu.com/achar.html
As per the marriage of Swann and Odette, keep in mind that “Almost everybody was surprised at the marriage, and that in itself was surprising.”
I also enjoyed the dinner with de Norpois. Proust does a masterful job of making M. de Norpois seem like a charming, attentive, engaging dinner guest, while at the same time revealing that his aesthetic instincts (re: La Berma, Balbec, Bergotte) are the opposite of Marcel’s, whose aesthetic instincts I, somehow, want to trust.
I look forward to discovering whether the mature judgments of the Narrator are more similar to young Marcel’s or to M. de Norpois.
I thought there was something like youthful insecurity in Marcel’s disappointment in Berma and subsequent conversion to her greatness. He is so sure that he will love her that he seems to neglect how little he knows about theater–and so after judging the other actresses highly (based on what he thinks actresses ought to do) he is left somehow bereft by Berma’s (perhaps more understated?) performance. The passage about being convinced by reviews or thundering applause seemed to me a rather brilliant rationalization of being unsure about your own opinion until you hear it validated by others . . . in short, of being young.