Swann's Way: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 1 Paperback – November 14, 2013

Latest English translation from French, 2002. 444 pages. Book 1 of À la recherche du temps perdu [In Search of Lost Time, in seven volumes]UPDATED: 11/21/2018Summarizing Proust has a long history, most hilariously shown in the Monty Python sketch “Summarizing Proust Competition” in which contestants attempt to summarize all seven volumes of ‘In Search of Lost Time’ within 15 seconds:Having just finished SWANN’S WAY, my summary takes this condensed haiku form:Madeleine in teaBrings memories of lost timeMarcel is left sadNow for something completely different.SWANN'S WAY, the first of Proust's seven-volume novel, is a joy to read. For a novel about which many detractors have said 'Nothing happens' it was engaging, imaginative, full of philosophical ideas, and, as the saying goes, was hard to put down. Is it a series of Proust's philosophical musings disguised as a novel? Or the inverse? An autobiography disguised as a novel? All the above? Call it what you will, but boring and uninteresting? Quite the opposite.Summing up SWANN'S WAY properly, I would say: The unnamed narrator of undefined age (though clearly old enough to reflect back on his childhood) – call him Marcel – is facing a very real and common human affliction, particularly of those of us of later age, a world-weariness, a discontent, dissatisfaction for the way life has turned out. Why is the world the way it is? At the opening of the novel, Marcel is seeking solace from this melancholy in recollections of a time past, a better time in Combray with his parents, but the memories are mere shadows – “Dead forever? Possibly.” [44] Then, unbidden, come a flood of Combray memories, triggered by the taste of a piece of madeleine dipped in tea, connecting present and past experiences, transcending time and space:And suddenly the memory appeared. That taste was the taste of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because that day I did not go out before it was time for Mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Leonie would give me after dipping it in her infusion of tea or lime blossom.... immediately the old gray house on the street, where her bedroom was, came like a stage set to attach itself to the little wing opening onto the garden that had been built for my parents behind it....and the water lilies of the Vivonne, and the good people of the village and their little dwellings and the church and all of Combray and its surroundings, all of this which is acquiring form and solidity, emerged, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea. [p 47-48]And so begins Marcel's remembrances, or, more to Proust's intent, Marcel's 'search for lost time,' (or, playing on the translation of temps perdu, which adds yet another reading to the novel, 'wasted time'.)The novel weaves in and out of time, as memories do, forever timeless, stream-of-consciousness style, Marcel bringing to vivid mind people, places, and events from his past life, involuntary recalls sparked by the sensory stimulus of a phrase from a violin sonata, the fragrance of a lily, the taste of a madeleine.The themes of art, memory, time, identity, family, love, friendships, and beauty run throughout SWANN'S WAY. One concept that seems crucial to the narrator's metaphysics I found particularly interesting – that one can only really glimpse reality, the actual 'thing itself', through art – painting, music, literature. It is through art that we get a sense of the beauty of the world, a beauty which our meager fleeting senses cannot grasp. It posits that there is something more real hidden beneath the veneer of the physical world which we can only discover through artistic endeavor. It is art which captures that ineffable, transcendent something we sense but cannot grasp.One of my favorite passages in SWANN'S WAY which illustrates this is the narrator's description of seeing the twin steeples of Martinville church and the steeple of Vieuxvicq while riding the winding streets in an open carriage:As I observed, as I noted the shape of their spires, the shifting of their lines, the sunlight on their surfaces, I felt that I was not reaching the full depth of my impression, that something was behind that motion, that brightness, something which they seemed at once to contain and conceal. [184]A long paragraph follows in which Marcel cranes his neck this way and that to keep the steeples in view as the carriage makes its way through the narrow streets, until finally:Soon their lines and their sunlit surfaces split apart, as if they were a sort of bark, a little of what was hidden from me inside them appeared to me, I had a thought which had not existed a moment before, which took shape in words in my head, and the pleasure I had just recently experienced at the sight of them was so increased by this that, seized by a sort of drunkenness, I could no longer think of anything else.... Without sayint to myself that what was hidden behind the steeples of Martinville had to be something analogous to a pretty sentence, since it had appeared to me in the form of words that gave me pleasure... [185]Marcel goes on to commit his observations to paper, and only discovers the ineffable quality of those steeples once he has committed them to language, to words, to literature. But by the end of the book, Marcel laments that he is not suited for the time in which he now lives, this shabby, vulgar, inelegant time. Rather than buoy his spirits, his memories of a better, more elegant and sophisticated time merely depress. “The reality I had known no longer existed... The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience. They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions which formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years.” [444]There is so much more to this book, of which I have discussed just a sampling of the themes in this seven-volume, 4,200-page novel. I look forward to this great adventure in literature.

It is the common practice in contemporary fiction to strategically use words to propel a story forward, to move the plot along at an acceptable pace in order to hold readers’ attention. Yet the defining—and extraordinary—characteristic of Proust’s style is that he uses words to keep us IN THE MOMENT. One reviewer referred to his Swann’s Way experience as meditative, yet another expression of being entirely present. Events and details generally considered mundane are observed and depicted anew as the minutiae of each are wondrously beheld. Proust’s language burrows deep; rather than simply asking us to experience frustration, remorse, happiness, he asks us to sense the very life beneath those simplified emotions, the very reality of existence.Proust’s style of grounding us in the present speaks greatly to the idea of self-love—as do all forms of meditation. Yet he counter-intuitively writes the story of unrequited love and unfulfilled longing, a yearning for someone or some experience we cannot have that is more akin to self-loathing. We see this in both Swann and young Marcel’s repeated attempts to recreate prior moments of joy as well as in their hopes for future pleasures, looking backward to the past or beyond to the future rather than appreciating the wonders available to them NOW. This inevitably causes degrees of suffering.We see that Marcel begins to exhibit this tendency at a young age (before eventually falling prey to a relationship that somewhat mirrors Swann’s), while having tea, craving the exquisiteness of that already-gone first sip:"I return in my thoughts to the moment when I took the first spoonful of tea...and I feel something quiver in me, shift, try to rise, something that seems to have been unanchored at a great depth; I do not know what it is, but it comes up slowly; I feel the resistance and I hear the murmur of the distances traversed...Undoubtedly what is palpitating thus, deep inside me, must be the image, the visual memory which is attached to this taste and is trying to follow it to me. But it is struggling too far away, too confusedly...Will it reach the clear surface of my consciousness—this memory, this old moment...? I don’t know. Now I no longer feel anything, it has stopped, gone back down perhaps..."Swann wishes for long-ended love so perversely that he grows ever more weary and sick. Indeed, this perversity carries on so relentlessly that one begins to understand that Proust is actually providing a commentary on how NOT to love, a gentle lesson for us readers, bestowed affectionately. So as we turn the page, fully swathed in each sweetly painful moment, that sip of tea or bewitching feminine wile, we slightly cringe as we see ourselves reflected in those experiences, wince at the injustice we have done to ourselves.Art is prevalent throughout, in painting, in music, in the landscape of the countryside, in the fashionable attire of the day, in each and every meditative word. It is our saving grace, our link to the universe, to pure love. Representing our true, inner selves, art is then constantly juxtaposed with our desperate yet fruitless external search for self-worth. The answer, this art seems to say, is just at the tip of your consciousness, here for the taking."Of course, although human from this point of view, it [the musical art of a sonata] belonged to an order of supernatural creatures whom we have never seen, but whom despite this we recognize with delight when some explorer of the invisible manages to capture one, to bring it, from that divine world to which he has access to shine for a few moments above ours."It’s difficult to say more just yet; this is only a small part of a much larger work. Curious to see how Proust continues, I now begin Within a Budding Grove.