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Swann's Way / Du côté de chez Swann
834 Plays5 months ago
In their inaugural episode of Proust Curious, hosts Emma Claussen and Hannah Weaver begin their plunge into Proust with the first volume of the Recherche, Swann’s Way. Proust’s humor can often be lost in the haze of canonization, but that’s where our curiosity turns today. We talk about psychedelic lime blossoms, seeing people through paintings, and the original deeply feeling kid. We consider the unity of this frequently-excerpted volume. Finally, we engage with Proust’s careful misdirection about the nature of time at the end of the volume, which he wrote in a letter was “the opposite of [his] conclusion.” Plus, we’ll answer the question, If not yourself, who would you be? Join us as we search for lost time and remember things Proust.
Resources:
In Search of Lost Time (trans. Moncrieff, Kilmartin, and Mayor; rev. Enright)
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Transcript
Introduction to Proust Curious Podcast
00:00:04
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to Proust Curious, a podcast in partnership with Public Books. I'm Hannah Weaver, an assistant professor of medieval literature at Columbia University, and currently a fellow at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination. And I'm Emma Glossen. I'm an early modernist at Trinity College, Cambridge. Proust Curious is a podcast about the experience of reading alajas de tompperie All Seven Volumes, written between 1906 and 1922.
Overview of Proust's Work
00:00:31
Speaker
published between 1913 and 1927, Marcel Proust's cultural touchstone is an object of enduring fascination and, let's face it, intimidation. We're not Proust experts, but we do study literature for a living, so we feel both under and over-qualified to tackle this. Join us as we search for lost time.
Introduction to Swann's Way
00:00:51
Speaker
And remember things, Proust.
00:01:11
Speaker
Today, we're starting at the beginning with Ducote de Gessin, Swan's Way, or as the most recent translation would have it, The Swan Way. In this volume, we meet the narrator as a sensitive child in Cambrai dreaming of becoming a writer and hear about a love affair that his neighbor Swan had before he was born. We have cameos from hypochondriacs, courtesans, and aristocrats. We have set pieces in salons and sadistic voyeurism and bushes. Proust evokes an entire world.
00:01:41
Speaker
Or, put more simply, a weird kid lives in his imagination, fantasizing about flowers and hawthorn bushes, and a bored guy becomes completely obsessed with a woman he doesn't even like. So Emma, because this is our listener's first time meeting us, maybe, although you may have, I guess, heard either of our past podcasts, Emma's Excellent Podcast, Twice Told Tales, or my former podcast, That Book. Also Excellent. Wow, thank you.
00:02:09
Speaker
If it's your first time here, you might want to know a little bit about who we are. And so we thought a good way to do that might be to answer question each episode from the famous or perhaps infamous Proust questionnaire.
00:02:22
Speaker
This was a questionnaire of kind of intense questions about life answered by Proust twice, apparently at ages 13 and 20. And it's also used as an interview device and by Vanity
Proust Questionnaire: Alternate Identity
00:02:32
Speaker
Fair. So we'll put a link to that questionnaire in the show notes. The question this week is, if not yourself, who would you be?
00:02:39
Speaker
And before we answer, I think we need to say what Proust answered at age 13. He said, nowon but i'm a boy i guession japre and but ne butler is u josonon bi me etrainene legendgen What he means by that, right, is I don't need to ask myself this, so I would rather not answer. However, I would quite like to have been plenty the younger.
00:03:03
Speaker
Pliny the Younger, of course, as we all know, the nephew of Pliny the Elder, um who was a lawyer, author, and magistrate in the first century AD, was apparently well known for having survived a variety of emperors and remained on good terms with many of them. And he's best known now ah for his epistolae, his collection of letters. All of that we have to confess is rather obscure if you're not a classicist or like a great fan.
00:03:31
Speaker
of Rome. Yeah. I guess you could say that you would have liked to have been a Roman. A Roman who was in the thick of things and was also a writer? Yeah. Tell me, who did you choose? If not yourself, who would you be, Emma? Okay. So I'm envisaging this. Like, I don't know why, but I'm like a bit like a kind of like a superhero film where like one day I go to sleep with me and the next morning I wake up as the person that I would be if I weren't myself and that person is Serena Williams. Oh my god. I really didn't expect a sporting person. Nothing you're not sporting is just not what I expected. Wait, so tell me everything.
00:04:17
Speaker
So when I was thinking about this, I thought of a number of writers to give a kind of Proust-esque answer, you know people I admire from history. But then I think I actually would rather just be me reading them or reading about them. I don't really feel like I would like to be George Eliot, although I think that she is completely amazing, for example. And then I thought, what would I like? If I can't if i had to not be me, I'd like to be someone really different. sure yeah And then and I thought, I would absolutely love to be really physically strong.
00:04:48
Speaker
and excellent in a way that involves a totally different use of your mind. right yeah kind of like The mixture of training and expertise and intuition that comes with being absolutely brilliant at a sport like tennis where you know it's so spatial and basically all kinds of skills that I don't have. You already have brought up some of my issues with this question, which are that, what is it supposed to mean? like If not yourself, who would you be?
00:05:18
Speaker
right this second? Like someone who's contemporary? Or do you just take it as Proust took it and think of someone his historical? Like if you were born at a different moment, who would you be? And then is it from uncooled from the past? Who would you be? Like who do you wish to be? Or ah just like realistically, who would you be? um So I didn't go for realism in my answer. Well, I took it historically, I guess. And I think ah if it if it's the realistic one, I would probably be just like, I don't know, some I would probably be like a servant or a governess or something like probably in England, because that's where most of my family is from. But funnily enough, I was like, well, if I get to be someone exciting, I would choose to be George Eliot. You already brought up.
00:06:05
Speaker
yeah
00:06:07
Speaker
Amazing! So clearly we're all the same wavelength already. So I would be ah writing under a pen name and writing beautiful novels that are greeted with ambivalence by Henry James, I guess.
00:06:22
Speaker
Right, and you'd be in the 19th century in a similar period. I would be in the 19th century, I guess. It's very alluring to me for unclear reasons, because I think it was probably actually fairly terrible. But what is exactly about George Eliot that means that you would be her? It's a who do I want to be, right? So you wanted to be physically accomplished and unlike yourself. And I guess I just want to be a better and more compelling version of myself.
00:06:50
Speaker
So there's all the two options for this question. I think um she is a writer that I so sincerely admire and she made it happen against a lot of odds. So she's very courageous and and smart and talented and had a very interesting life. Like it doesn't seem like it was boring at all.
00:07:11
Speaker
And all of that is quite appealing, although I guess, you know, she was also very charming, I gather, ah despite
Plot of Swann's Way
00:07:17
Speaker
the fact that she was also reputed to be not very good looking. So um her charm overwhelmed any initial impression. I would like to be so charming that my initial impression fades away in the face of my relentless charm.
00:07:32
Speaker
I do find you relentlessly charming, Hannah. That's achieved. I think you're contractually obligated to say that. So I guess, yeah, so we have Serena Williams and George Eliot here. Who would also be great to both have at dinner? Yeah, I think they would be, right? I think they'd both be great conversationalists. Yeah.
00:07:57
Speaker
So let's get into the heart of the matter here. For this time, we've read the first volume of In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past, if we want to use the two English titles. Let's give a little bit of a plot summary of this first volume. Although let's say also before we start that i I'm going to go ahead and say that plot is not the point. No, no, definitely not. I mean, there's large sections that ah seem quite plotless.
00:08:25
Speaker
Nevertheless, ah there are definitely settings and plots that are important, and so it can be helpful maybe to to recall them. Yeah, like this narrative. Yeah, so what we're dealing with at the beginning of the book is we're in we spending time with a wealthy family in Combre in northern France, and this family is sort of like haute-bourgeois family, and their base this that's family is based on p Proust's family. although it is not identical to Proust's family, and the narrator, though his name is Marcel, is not, in fact, Proust. This is the section where, as a child, that and then it's sort of as an adolescent, it's hard to exactly place these events on a timeline, but as a much younger person, the narrator
00:09:13
Speaker
remembers childhood visits to Combre where his ah sick aunt lived and they had a country house. um He's desperate for his mother to come and say good night to him. The first 50 or so pages are devoted to this desperate wish. We hear about churches, neighbors, two walks that they like to take towards Germont and Miseries. And what's really important to him are how all of these scenes from the past are really fertile for his imagination and point him towards the desire to describe them and develop them as a writer. And then the next part of the volume is called Annemor the Swan, or um translated as Swan in Love, and it's about an aristocrat who is known to the Neritas family, who has invites to all the best homes, he's very wealthy, he has a
00:10:10
Speaker
broad choice of social engagements, but this is about him becoming totally enraptured with a woman called Odette de Cressy, despite thinking that she is both unattractive and unintelligent, and despite noting at various points that she's getting less attractive.
00:10:31
Speaker
So why does he fall in love with Odette? Arguably, it's because he's bored, maybe a bit depressed. He's not got much to do because he's so rich that he doesn't really need to work. And also because she becomes associated by him with two artworks. So one is a sonata that they hear together at the salon where they that they frequent. And the other is a Botticelli painting.
00:10:57
Speaker
and yeah So I really think the whole world in terms of figures from art. Yeah, ah he kind of talks himself into being obsessed with her because, you know, that's almost a kind of like displacement of his work as an art historian because that's sort of what he is. and He's endlessly working on an essay on Vermeer that never seems to get finished. So um given that we had a George but elot reference earlier. I can say that he's kind of like a sub-art historian, Casorban, figure. He's working on a project that he's never going to complete, um I think. I don't know, who famously was working on, quote, the key to all mythologies, quote. So yes, he's working on some kind of key to Vermeer.
00:11:41
Speaker
Yeah. And I would say, is from our notes, that I would say that he is a bit like a Casoban figure, but he's a lot more chic. Yeah, that's true. yeah yeah He's very sought after by all the chicest of them all. Yeah. So Swan and Odette have a passionate affair in which he is ultimately driven wild by jealousy. So her absences and her refusals and the kind of the mystery of the life that she leaves without him is ultimately also, as well as the painting and the music, what makes him fall for her so incredibly strongly without basis in real attraction, although it's a different kind of real attraction I guess. And ultimately she falls out of love with him and he realises in great despair, he's very unhappy how many other affairs she's been having at the same time with both men and women as she begins to treat him more and more coldly.
00:12:31
Speaker
But the volume ends with him coming to terms with this as his own passion cools. The third section is called Nond de peuil, Le Nant, so the name, it it place name's the name. And in this section we're back with the young narrator. It doesn't seem that much time has passed since we were in Cambrai with him.
00:12:54
Speaker
And he's really, really, really looking forward to going on vacation to Baalbek in Normandy. And he's had long standing fantasies about it as a place of pure nature. And then after Swan tells him about a church, also a pure art.
00:13:11
Speaker
But then there's the possibility that he'll visit Venice and Florence instead, and this dream overtakes the first dream. And in fact, he gets so excited and so worked up about the possibilities that he makes himself sick and is unable to leave Paris.
00:13:27
Speaker
So, instead of going to these places whose names incite fantasies and associations, he stays in Paris and meets Gilbert, who is Swann's daughter, or Swann Odette's daughter. So we learn that Swann and Odette, after all of that, after the cooling of the passion on both sides, nevertheless got married. And that marriage ties the three volumes together to some extent. So we'll return to the question of how the three volumes work together later in this episode.
00:14:09
Speaker
So Emma, what what did you notice in this read of this volume?
Proust's Observations and Style
00:14:14
Speaker
So I had remembered it as being really beautifully observed about people and their behavior. And I didn't disagree with that again reading it this time. I do find it very humane because essentially this is about people being very silly a lot of the time, you could say, indeed and and obsessive and making mistakes. But somehow those behaviours are so tenderly actually explained and described that they end up being both sympathetic and quite beautiful. So I think I um i still enjoyed that aspect of it. But this time, what I really noticed was the attention to setting, to the non-human details around the characters, especially the plants and flowers. I mean, one of the covers of an English translation is an orchid.
00:15:07
Speaker
And you can't really read Anna-Morda-Swan without focusing on flowers because the orchid is at the heart. It's like a symbol of their sexual relationship, right? yes um But I hadn't really and noticed all the rest. And compre, a lot of it is set on country paths and in gardens. And there's this amazing bit at the end about water lilies and how and on one of the paths in the river that where they're really like vibrant and almost like people themselves.
00:15:35
Speaker
So you have a lot of countryside scenes in Combre, and then said then you have flowers in Anémar de Soin, and then in Nantes du Pey, you have the character, the the narrator.
00:15:47
Speaker
I mean, I was thinking actually on the Champs-Élysées, it's not so much about the flora and fauna of it, but the descriptions of grass, I guess. But it ends in the Bois du Boulogne, so yeah there are some great descriptions of trees that I might talk about. So that's something that I really noticed and enjoyed um this time. Do you want to share any particular passages that stood out to you on this reading? In light of all these references to trees and plants and flowers.
00:16:10
Speaker
think actually a kind of originary moment in Combre that made me notice this more and more as we went through was this really intense description of tea leaves.
00:16:24
Speaker
yeah And the tea is really important. in compre. Everyone kind of knows about dipping a Madeleine in tea if they know something about fruit, but the actual setup of the tea being made I think by Francois who's first the sick aunt's servant and then becomes the narrator's family's servant.
00:16:46
Speaker
So I think in the original scene of the tea in the Madeline, it is the mother, right? So the narrator is visiting his mother later in life. She offers him this tea, and that is what makes his memories emerge involuntarily and triggers the whole writing project in some ways. And I think that tea is this tea.
00:17:10
Speaker
yes great yes So his aunt is being brought her tizan, her herbal tea, and the narrator helps to make it. It would be my duty to shake out of the chemist's little package onto a plate the amount of lime blossom required for infusion in boiling water.
00:17:26
Speaker
The drying of the stems had twisted them into a fantastic trellis, in whose intervals the pale flowers opened, as though a painter had arranged them there, grouping them in the most decorative poses. The leaves, which had lost or altered their own appearance, assumed those instead of the most incongruous things imaginable, as though the transparent wings of flies, or the blank slight sides of labels, or the petals of roses, had been collected and pounded, or interwoven as birds weaved the material for their nests.
00:17:51
Speaker
A thousand trifling little details, the charming prodigality of the chemist, details which would have been eliminated from an artificial preparation, gave me, like a book in which one is astonished to read the name of a person and who one knows, the pleasure of finding that these were indeed real aligned blossoms, like those I had seen when coming from the train in the Avenue de la Garre, altered but only because they were not imitations but the very same blossoms which had grown old.
00:18:17
Speaker
And as each new character is merely a metamorphosis from something older, in these little grey balls I recognised the green buds plucked before their time. But beyond all else the rosy, moony, tender glow which lit up the blossoms among the frail forest of stems from which they hung like little golden roses.
00:18:33
Speaker
Marking as the radiance upon an old wall still marks the place of a vanished fresco, the difference between those parts of the tree which had which had and those which had not been in bloom. These details showed me that these were petals which before their flowering time the chemist's package had embalmed on warm evenings of spring.
00:18:54
Speaker
that I mean, it is it is an incredible description, the ladder, the evocation of the train station. Yeah, like recognizing leaves like characters in a book, being able to see them at different stages of time, as in when they were budding, when they were dried, what the what the water is kind of reanimating.
00:19:19
Speaker
found that this was so so detailed you could almost imagine it happening in slow motion. It's kind of psychedelic where the you know you're looking into the cup or the narrator is looking into the cup and seeing these things come alive but also kind of seeing a whole like back story and film of the like ah ah one of those um nature films that that sped up. you know from yeah Oh gosh, yeah, where you see the grass come out of the ground. yeah No, absolutely. And I feel like you're right, this is the this is not the famous tea, but in a way it's ah almost more precise, perhaps.
00:19:57
Speaker
moments of what can come out of the tea cup that time can be stretched out and or it's simultaneously somehow paradoxically contained in one mouthful or in one dried up blossom. It's really a fascinating and very beautiful description. Yeah. Yeah. And seeing the real lime trees from the train. Right, coming from the Gach. So the application of the train is particularly interesting to me because in that first more famous cup of tea into which he dunks his Madeleine and out of which comes all of these really fully formed
00:20:35
Speaker
sensory memories of Conbray. He talks about it being a mechanical experience. He says, and soon mechanically, dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. And it is that taste that provokes the entire novel And so there's this ah this odd juxtaposition between the senses and the machine, and it's very lightly present in the passage that you chose for us too, Emma. Yeah, that's so true. I also would say one more thing about this passage, which is it just gives such a sense of the narrator's attention to detail. So this is especially comre, but I think arguably across the whole volume, there's such a loving attention to minutiae. yes yeah
00:21:28
Speaker
i yeah i agree The tiny variations in a person's feelings or the tiny details of the leaves, tiny leaves in a cup of tea and kind of feel like the narrator is It's kind of going around in a weird state of staring at things, and and it's kind of out of it all the time, but in the the almost like on drugs. Yeah, ah that's right. Yeah, it's like just like totally fixated on somehow everything at once. it's really The novel is really, as Proust says in Combre, and one of the experiences I think you were evoking when you talked about reading it for the first time, that books can present a kind of
00:22:11
Speaker
truth that's not actually accessible in daily life because we can't wander around staring at everything this intently or we would just maybe always be sort of oddly fixated in a corner. We can't both observe humans as finally as Proust does and observe tea leaves as finally as Proust does in the moments that we're going through them. We can in reflection perhaps do some of that or we can do it by reading Proust. Join us.
00:22:41
Speaker
yeah And I think just to summarise, also this is a strange book for that reason. And that was also something that maybe isn't a very highfalutin comment, but that is also something I hadn't really remembered until I reread at this time. that This is weird. This kid is weird. yeah The kind of psychedelic or uncanny aspects of the book really jumped out at me this time.
00:23:04
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's actually, that's that's kind of what I, it's similar to what I was going to say, is that I think this book is frequently just treated as a sort of mountain to climb. I love looking at one star reviews of ah great things, so whether it be a monument or a book. And this is something that I used to do on my former podcast. So I did it for this, ah for Swansway, just to see. And um a man named Steven,
00:23:33
Speaker
titled his review, Hard Work, and said, difficult read needs all your concentration to complete. Steven, true. You know, I'm not here to argue. At the same time, him what people don't, I think, think of is that it's so wacky and so deeply funny, like so funny. I have done so much laughing rereading it. And I think There's a lot of it that I think I was already catching when I reread it more recently. But when i when I read it as a college student, I don't think I caught how deeply funny the narrator as a kid is. He literally goes out and hugs Hawthorne Bushes at one point because he loves them so much. I mean, that is intense. And like I already mentioned, he gets so excited about traveling that he makes himself ill. So he's just this sort of hyperbolic
00:24:24
Speaker
figure who can and can't cope with how much um beauty he perceives or imagines that he will get to one day perceive around him and just has a sort of obsessive nature that is just profoundly funny. Like Emma said, it is described in a humane way with a lot of, I think, ah sympathy and love, but it's also um yeah meant, you're you're meant to sort of have a chuckle, I think, slightly at the narrator's expense. So I think that that I think I took him sort of seriously as a budding artist without seeing what can be funny about being a budding artist initially. And I also just this time, I felt like I was at the best comedy roast maybe of all time, particularly, although not exclusively,
00:25:13
Speaker
Oh, wait, I was going to say particularly in Anamoda Swan, but now I'm double and having second thoughts because there are also some deeply funny things that his grandfather does and some ways that like some of the figures in Compre are described that are just super funny. But yeah I thought I would. Yeah, I love the Saturday thing.
00:25:32
Speaker
where they all behave ridiculously because they have lunch an hour early on a Saturday and they all act like they've done this incredibly like radical thing, but also that if no one else knows that they have lunch an hour earlier on a Saturday, then they're just complete barbarians. It's also such a small town but yeah thing, that whole Saturday thing. it's also it's so It's so funny and it also really evokes how hermetic in a way this town is. Or is it an hour later?
00:26:00
Speaker
they haven't lunch either. They have it at 11, which I love eating lunch. And that even strikes me as early. And anyway, Emma brought this really beautiful passage and I thought I would bring actually just a really funny passage to our attention.
Proust's Humor in Characterization
00:26:14
Speaker
This is a description of the Dr. Kotor, who is a member of the little group that is basically a salon around this woman called Madame Verdeurant. And that is the salon where Swann and Odette court. Swann is ultimately exiled from the salon. But we open Swann in love with a description of le piinnoo the little clan around Madame Verdeurant and the people that she has gathered.
00:26:48
Speaker
all of them are funny. The whole, the, the, the Petit Nueyo is just so funny, but I think maybe the funniest one, uh, possibly, uh, he's got stiff competition, but is Le Dr. Kota, who is indeed a physician. He's, so he's sort of like, again, a, an, an open bourgeois type.
00:27:09
Speaker
and clearly is highly educated because he's a physician. But he has a lot of trouble knowing what people mean, and he tends to take things super literally. So here is a passage where we first are introduced to these tendencies of Kothar.
00:27:27
Speaker
Dr. Coteach was never quite certain of the tone in which he ought to reply to any observation, or whether the speaker was jesting or in earnest. And so, by way of precaution, he would embellish all his facial expressions with the offer of a conditional, a provisional smile whose expectant subtlety would exonerate him from the charge of being a simpleton if the remark addressed to him should turn out to have been facetious.
00:27:52
Speaker
But as he must also be prepared to face the alternative, he dared not allow this smile to assert itself positively on his features, and he would see there a perpetually flickering uncertainty, and which could be deciphered the question that he never dared to ask. Do you really mean that?
00:28:08
Speaker
He was no more confident of the manner in which he ought to conduct himself on this in the street, or indeed in life generally, than he was in a drawing-room. And he might be seen greeting passers-by, carriages, and anything that occurred with a knowing smile which absolved his subsequent behavior of all impropriety, since it proved, if it should turn out unsuited to the occasion, that he was well aware of that.
00:28:31
Speaker
and that if he had assumed a smile, the jest was a secret of his own. um I just want to talk about his um like need to figure out what cliches mean. So following the advice given him by a wise mother on his first coming up to the Capitol from his provincial home, he would never let pass either a figure of speech or a proper name that was new to him without an effort to secure the fullest information upon it.
00:28:56
Speaker
As regards figures of speech, he was insatiable in his thirst for knowledge for, often imagining them to have a more definite meaning that was actually the case. He would want to know what exactly was meant by those which he most frequently heard used. Devilish pretty, blue blood, living it up, the day of reckoning, the class of fashion, and so forth.
00:29:15
Speaker
in what particular circumstances he himself might make use of them in conversation. Failing these, he would adorn it with puns and other plays on words which he had learned by rote. Later on, there's a conversation where Blanche de Cassie comes up, or the word Blanche comes up, and he's like, what? You mean Blanche de Cassie, who is a medieval queen? He just like, you know he, this is the, speed up for his tendency to hook onto a single word, interrupt the conversation,
00:29:44
Speaker
and send it down a total dead-end byway with what seems to be both an utter lack of self-consciousness and an extreme self-consciousness of his ah provincialism. Yeah, so he's ultra-performative.
00:29:59
Speaker
the failing. Right. He's really, really trying to blend in and his attempts just make him stand out all the more. poorrkota you have to pity the i mean He's been adopted into this settlement and is treated with the utmost approbation by Madame Verdeurand, and his remarks are treated as though they are witticisms, but they are obviously, alas, buffoonery. Oh yeah, they're so funny. um I love this passage so much.
00:30:29
Speaker
but also I will say there is something slightly relatable. like Who hasn't been cut out at some point in life? Not being totally sure if they're supposed to disapprove or approve or that they totally get the jokes or doing that but weird malleable smile. I feel like that's a little bit like my experience when I was ah my year abroad, of which is a part of a modern languages degree in the UK, where you have to go and you know improve your language by you know like living in the country. yes And you know, humour is really hard to get when you're a language learner. So yes, so Katao is speaking his native language and it's quite funny that he just hasn't quite mastered it and he' is he's behaving like a like it's not his native language. Yes, that's so true. In a way, he's right. There's a very strong idiolect in this book. Yeah, so true. especially to aristocrats, but also to the haute bourgeoisie. um yeah So when we meet to the duchess de germont, who I think is the princess de l'homme when we meet her here, but she will become the duchess de germont for we aristocratic reasons that I don't understand and actually don't care to understand. But she has a lot of sort of verbal tics that are used to be chic.
00:31:40
Speaker
but are in fact just as silly as Kotaar's problems. I think just language and the way people use it comes in for a lot of scrutiny here. And Proust is such a fine observer that he finds the humor and yeah how people go awry with their language use. Just funny as as ah as a non-native speaker of French who's currently you know spending time in France.
00:32:08
Speaker
terrifying thought to be a thing of being evaluated by a Proustian observer. And there are some times when Qatar is just, so he he frustrates what narrative there is. Because I would say also, maybe I should have said this earlier, that an immortal swan does have much more of a plot and much more of a drive to it. And Qatar is just in there, bumbling misdirecting, yeah yeah taking up space that Nobody really wants him to have. Yeah. Yeah. But ah meanwhile, Madame Verdeurant is nevertheless burying her head in her hands and pretending to have paroxysms of laughter. And does her husband come up with a way to cough, to yeah to make it seem like he's laughed so hard that he's having a coughing fit? So they're forced to sort of imitating laughter at all times to make it seem like the people, they're they're they're faithful of the little clan are the funniest and wittiest possible.
00:33:00
Speaker
clan that they have developed for themselves. And they also all have they have to have perfect harmony, don't they? So they have to completely agree with each other about who is cool and what's interesting and what's funny. And that's also why Swan gets excommunicated in the end. Yes, because he's he is he's at someone erroneously and not even maliciously says that he frequents other houses, even though he hasn't been. And that's too much for Madame Verdera. She must exile him because it's ah her way or the highway.
00:33:29
Speaker
Proust Curious is brought to you in partnership with Public Books, an online magazine of ideas, arts and scholarship. You can find us at publicbooks dot.org. That's publicbooks.org. To donate to Public Books, visit publicbooks dot.org slash donate.
00:33:46
Speaker
So Emma, you noticed the finer details of plant life on this read, and I noticed how Proust is the master of the roast. But the thing about this book that is sort of odd more globally, and not just psychedelic plants or um deeply funny ah ah observations about people, is that it does have these three parts, as we mentioned before,
00:34:15
Speaker
And their relationship is not super obvious. Sometimes certain parts are published by themselves. So you can buy Combre separately, and you can buy Anna-Maudes-Swan separately. I don't think you can buy Nond de Paris Le Nome because it is a very short and odd.
00:34:35
Speaker
It's often described even by Proust as sort of like a something that's dangling on to the end of this volume. It's a bit like an epilogue. It's a bit like an epilogue and it's it's it is that way because of actually just the practical concerns of publishing. but He meant for the first two thirds of the next volume to also be part of volume one, but it would have been too expensive to print. And so it's really a lead in to the next volume and doesn't hugely go with this volume, but now it's sort of stuck here because of the publishing tradition at this point.
00:35:10
Speaker
but They're frequently excerpted. They're seen as maybe we don't need to read the whole thing, um which is, I guess, just sort of the ah the deal with Proust in general. We maybe don't need to read the whole thing is kind of, it's kind of I would say, the general. Yes, we do. To Proust. Yes, we do. A, but B, what can we make of this kind of hodgepodge of parts?
00:35:33
Speaker
Well, I think that you can read them separately and get great pleasure just from reading compre or just from reading annamada swan. If any listeners want to do that, no shame yeah in doing so. However, reading them all together and reading them as we have done quite close together relatively quickly. What's fun about doing that is you can actually notice all the subtle interweavings. So there's this section with the about the relationship between the narrator's grandfather and swan in Anamara swan, right? And that is
00:36:10
Speaker
referenced in the first part. who And I think that is quite compelling in a way to try and like see see a through line. Right. And then what is one that section is often taken as sort of a ah microcosm of the book or that swan is sort of an alter ego for the narrator an adult alter ego of the narrator and not a microcosm in terms of plot at least i don't think so although i will need to reread to verify so stay with us and we'll find out but just that a microcosm in terms of thematic concerns i think with obsession um longing
00:36:52
Speaker
the the difference between the fantasy you construct of something and the reality of it, but that still doesn't ah explain its placement sort of among these souvenir the souvenirs. oh my gosh These memories of youth, not to use one of my favorite words, but it's really an interpolation into the story of oh Dear listeners, I wrote a book on interpolation. And interpolation is the insertion of foreign material into a pre-existing text. And this actually was that ah in terms of whose writing process. So I'm not just um saying that it feels like that, but he wrote a draft of the book that did not include
00:37:36
Speaker
and i modiwa And later on came back and belatedly added it in, which is indeed exactly what an interpolation is. And so another thing that it really does is it gives a depth of time, right? Like it ground it grounds a lot, of like you were saying about the grandfather's relationship.
00:37:56
Speaker
it grounds things further back in time and even beyond the narrator's possible memories. So there's sort of a suggestion that we're going to be reading from the narrator's point of view for by far the book of the book as we've discussed he's sort of insanely perceptive there There's every reason to treat him as of as a faithful narrator, and yet there are limits to that perception, and those limits are time. And the and that's and the time that has not been lived is in some way, and perhaps,
00:38:36
Speaker
only recoverable through storytelling? Yeah, I was also just thinking that there is this moment when the narrator's voice appears in Anamora Swann and he says about Swann, I began to take an interest in his character because of the similarities which in holy difference but respect it offers it offered to my own.
00:38:58
Speaker
you But it's also it's it's almost like a typological relationship, right? yeah It's like Swann is the type and the narrator is the anti-type. So Swann is the the first instance that foreshadows and um in some ways already enacts certain behaviors and qualities and events, and then the narrator comes to fulfill the promise of the first one and to to do those things but more fully. I mean, yeah famously, this is John the Baptist and Jesus for those who aren't.
00:39:30
Speaker
hip with exegetical lingo, that's where that's where the word typology comes from. But it it does seem to have a sort of typological temporal logic also at work. Yeah, and so and the narrator gets frustrated with this one as well, doesn't he, when he meets him in Compre and doesn't understand why he's so insincere.
00:39:49
Speaker
yes right And wonders what exactly it would take to make him be sincere. And then, you know, he's a paradigm of sincerity yeah insane in some ways. So I think that there are a lot of satisfactions to be had from from reading all of all of this together.
Character Dynamics and Outcomes in Swann's Way
00:40:07
Speaker
And you also get a sense, I do you think, I mean, I'm repeating what you've already said, but it's a sense of the depth of that world and of all these kinds of behaviors and all these interlocking social groups like the Verdureau Salon and the yeah people in Compre and the ah parents and children in Paris. right Just seeing how they all kind of behave and treat one another and all the minute minute again might with the minutia all the minute reasons why they do and don't get along. yeah In conclusion, for this part of the discussion, I think we could say also that it's about it is about character, but it's is about this world that Proust is creating that we're seeing from so many different angles through these core figures. I think that's one of the great appeals of reading the book, right? You really do feel like you're in a world. Do you feel like you're
00:40:57
Speaker
swimming in a world. it's It's just so fully imagined. Yeah. It's one of just the really great pleasures of breathing proof. So if you're listening and you're like, I don't know, do give it a shot.
00:41:20
Speaker
Let's declare the winners and losers of this volume, Emma. This is going to be a recurring feature. ah We will choose a winner and choose a loser for each volume and justify ourselves briefly. Emma, who is your winner? Right, so my winner is somebody who, my winner that I'm awarding today, the badge of winning this volume, is somebody who doesn't appear in it very long and Actually, the narrator describes her in this incredibly ambivalent way, yeah almost as a kind of person who seems to be truly evil, but not quite. I'd say my winner is Van Tsai's daughter, Mamos el Van Tsai.
00:42:02
Speaker
Oh my God.
00:42:05
Speaker
Oh my God. No, please, please but um elaborate, but allow me to say, sorry, I have to go out of turn. Allow me to say that my loser was Van Thuy. And I think it's related to what you're about to say. We have the same loser? Okay, so tell us about Van Thuy's daughter as the winner, please.
00:42:28
Speaker
Who's Vante for our listeners that don't have this on the tip of their tongue? Who is Vante? So Vante is the local music music teacher, but he's also a composer who yes the narrator meets in compre, but at the end of his sad little life,
00:42:45
Speaker
ah So he dies during the narrative of compre due to despair at the behaviour, well partly he's it's attributed to despair at the behaviour of his daughter who has created a great scandal through having a relationship with a woman openly.
00:43:01
Speaker
He is also the composer of the Sonata that was the theme song for Odette and Swan, but without Swan ever knowing that the man that he in fact knew was indeed the composer of the Sonata. Yes, so we might come onto to that as to why Vante is the loser.
00:43:16
Speaker
um but But I have picked his daughter as the winner because, firstly, that when she's first introduced, it's as this incredibly robust and strong person. hu And part of the joke is that Vantoy is so, so solicitous of her her health and her her comfort, but actually, she she's, the narrator says something like, she she doesn't need any of that. She's fine in all weathers.
00:43:39
Speaker
yeah
00:43:43
Speaker
And then she has this relationship. She does not hide it. And she also, once her father has died, she is kind of, I mean, I'm over reading here and and maybe she comes back in later volumes and I've just forgotten. and But you know, she's mistress of her own fate. She's living with this woman that she loves and clearly desires very much because the narrator spies on them.
00:44:08
Speaker
yeah There's this an incredible scene of voyeurism, yes? Yeah. And I'd read that, or I think it's possible to read that as her kind of escaping the norms of this incredibly claustrophobic and panoptically surveillance world. And yeah maybe she yeah the narrator's kind of projecting that maybe she feels bad about her terrible scandalous behaviour, but she's still You know, I think that you could say that she's the winner because she's living the life that she wants to live and she's free of having her dad, even though that's obviously a shame. Just staring, just staring around her, yeah attempting, doing his best to shame her. The other winner that I considered was not was a non-human winner, and which was his phrase.
00:44:56
Speaker
yeah his I guess it does seem to you ah always pierce through whatever else is going on around it. yeah But I have to say that I don't think the phrase can be a winner, um ultimately, because It doesn't seem to have done anything for Van Thuy and I feel like a real winner. Or Swan, yeah. Or Swan. Yeah, it actually seems to be sort of like a Harbinger Harbinger? How do you say that word? I agree. Anyway, of doom in some way or of yeah unrealized dreams is more is more accurate. It seems to be strongly associated with fantasy and not reality for both the composer and Swan. Yeah, agreed. So that's why I went for his daughter instead.
00:45:40
Speaker
See, I wrote in my notes, there's only one winner, right? And it's Odette. So, I mean, it's super obvious, but I feel like at the same time, I feel like almost, you could make an argument for, ah you've convinced me on Ventai's daughter, I have to confess, but you could make an argument for almost anyone in this book being the loser. Yeah, I thought the same thing.
00:46:05
Speaker
But having Odette be the loser would be hard to sustain, because it seems like, actually, she just really, really comes out ahead, like in any by any measure. She's still incredibly chic by the end of the book. the narrator regrets The adult narrator regrets no longer being able to see her with her chic little hats in the Guadamudana. She's married to a very wealthy man. She has a daughter who seems to be thriving.
00:46:32
Speaker
ah she's just seemingly like has come out really on top. And in fact, there's this amazing parentheses that I just want to read. I think this is very... This parentheses really reminded me of To the Lighthouse, the Virginia Woolf novel and how everything important happens in parentheses. It's towards the end of Ana Moda Swan and it's talking about how Odette will never really let him drop because she needs his money. Swan could sometimes get her to see him basically because she knows that she needs his money.
00:47:04
Speaker
And recapitulating all his advantages, his social position, his wealth from which she stood too often in need of assistance not to shrink from the prospect of a definite rupture. Parentheses, having even so people said, an ulterior plan of getting him to marry her, end parentheses,
00:47:23
Speaker
his friendship with Sharus, which was true in everyone, etc. it It actually doesn't matter, the greater contents, just the fact that this marriage plot is sort of put in a parentheses and you're encouraged to overlook it because it's a parenthetical. And then it ends up coming true by the end of the book, which I recall being flabbergasted by at age 18. I was like, what? He fell out of love with her. How could it be that he married this terrible woman?
00:47:49
Speaker
um And yet, ah yeah, so she seems to me to be the winner. And and yeah another candidate, I guess, for winner would be Gilbert, who is just reenacting her mother's fascination on young a narrator without necessarily even knowing that she's doing that.
00:48:07
Speaker
Yeah, these women are the winners, like Mademoiselle Van Thuy, Odette, and Gédard in different ways. Yes. And I completely agree about Odette. I also think that the way that at first she in the narrative of Anna-Morda's swan, how she has to pander to the swan quite a lot and pretend and conceal, and in the end she ends up being able to be much more honest with him because he kind of forces that out of her. I think that's kind of a win as well for her. She ends up being
00:48:40
Speaker
able to be pretty free about who she sees and what she does, um and and to still get her desired outcome. Yes, exactly. yes she's she ultimately just All her cards are on the table and yet she still ends up with him. Yeah, and also it's a great victory narrative as well because she's so underestimated by Swan at the start as somebody who just doesn't even matter if she thinks anything or not.
00:49:04
Speaker
because she's just this object in some ways to him. Well, yeah, she's just the painting, the Botticelli painting. yeah indeed yeah And then she comes to life. It's almost creepy. Is this is is this actually a horror story? The painting comes to life and takes over his... When art comes to life, it's a problem.
00:49:24
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. It takes all your money. It takes all your money. When art comes to life, it takes all your money. and We both said that the loser was poor Van Thuy. Do we want to elaborate or should we just let? Have we said enough? so I think that the thing that clinched it for me is when they're talking about the the phrase or his sonata in Annemarda Swann. And Swann says, oh, I knew someone at called Van Thuy in compre. And then Madame Vergillant says,
00:49:54
Speaker
Oh, perhaps that's the man, perhaps that's the composer of this sonata. of whom And oh no, Swan burst out laughing. If you had ever seen him for a moment, you wouldn't put the question.
00:50:06
Speaker
I really do think that's perfect. That's a perfect reason. Everyone thinks he's a loser. Everyone thinks he's a loser. oh
00:50:21
Speaker
Emma, to wrap things up today, I think we should spend a little time with the last sentence of the book. And it will become clear why. First of all, I think this is an iconic sentence. It's very, very beautiful, and it's very evocative. And it's also very misleading. This is the last sentence in French. L'élieu que nous arrond-crenu n'appartièn par comme de les spats ou nous les cituons pour plus de facilité.
00:50:50
Speaker
et n'été que n'mance tranche omeleur dans préciant contigueux qui formé nos travie d'alors. Le le les les routes, les avenues, son fugitives, et l'ass, comme les annés.
00:51:06
Speaker
Oh, so good, right? um The places we have known, ah translates, Moncrief, do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. They were only a thin slice held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time. The memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment. And houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.
00:51:34
Speaker
So what's interesting about this last sentence is that I think especially that elas is really mournful and really um ah coupled with the word fugitive.
00:51:45
Speaker
makes it seem like these things are both fleeing and fleeting, that there's no chance of ever recapturing past time. So we're in search of it, right? And this is seems to be sort of a nihilist perspective that it's not actually discoverable. But Proust wrote in a letter to his friend Jacques Riviere in February 1914,
00:52:07
Speaker
that taking this last sentence as the final word of the project would be a grave error. He wrote, it's only at the end of the book, once the life lessons have been understood, that my philosophy will be revealed. The idea I express at the end of the first volume is the opposite of my conclusion. It is a step apparently subjective and amateurish towards the most objective and devout of conclusions.
00:52:35
Speaker
If one were to infer from it that my philosophy is one of disenchanted skepticism, that would be just as though an opera-goer, having seen that at the end of Act I, Parsifal understands nothing about the ceremony and is sent away by Guernamonts, concluded that Wagner wanted to say that simplicity of heart leads nowhere.
00:52:54
Speaker
so I love that. Obviously, no one would think that about Parseval. But regardless, I think the the crucial thing is the idea I express at the end of the first volume is the opposite of my conclusion. And I find that especially um fascinating, Emma, because so many people do just read the first volume.
00:53:17
Speaker
And it ends on this note, and it is such a beautifully crafted sentence, right? a last companies and It's just those words really resonate. that I think that certainly unwittingly, Prüss has left a lot of people with this false conclusion. I think he thought that people would have more stamina than they do.
00:53:42
Speaker
Sorry, what do you think Emma? It's just got a really tempting link with the title. shout she tompowers you right and So it seems to be we're in search of last time.
00:53:54
Speaker
Oh, but wait, we can never get it back, you know, um yes in they in this final sentence. it so It's a feudal quest, and actually the Advocation of Parsifal is interesting because that's a feudal quest also. m Right, so i can see I can see why it's been and it's been taken in that way.
00:54:14
Speaker
I also would say that in Nonsopé, which is the se that kind of epilogue section that this is taken from, there's so much mapping. He talks about how he has a little plan of Paris. he There's this great moment where he misses Gilbert on the Champs-Élysées, because there's so many different paths that she could walk down yeah to get there, and he missed the one that she came by.
00:54:34
Speaker
So he's doing this mental mapping of where she could be yeah he's obsessed with the road that she lives on. So I also wonder if this sentence should more be should be taken more as a kind of conclusion to that volume or that part of the volume it about um but remembering a place and the experiences that were had there.
00:54:55
Speaker
Yeah, in a sense, it is it is sort of just sort of fundamentally true, I guess, that you're not going to run into Odette de Crécy in the Bois de Boulogne anymore. So that that that that avenue will never be the same that it was ah again, I guess. Although, again, I think I might be being misled and into the wrong conclusion here.
00:55:16
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I guess it's also just the point that maybe you might be a nice point to end on, which is that this is not the end. Yes, right. This is not the end, right? So this is the end of one phase of trying to completely pin down this family and these people and this place at a particular moment.
00:55:39
Speaker
but thats There's already been kind of been being drained of its contemporaneity throughout the narrative because there's all these references to it not being there anymore. Right, right. And that'll be something that I think we need to grapple with. um If this is the opposite of its conclusion, and yet there are constant references to these things' disappearance, like how how to reconcile those two opposing impulses, the idea of disappearance and the idea of permanence, um which does seem to be, I think that reckoning is a big part of Proust's project. So we too will continue to reckon. Yeah.
00:56:14
Speaker
I think that's it. Right, Emma? Yeah. Thank you so much, Hannah. Oh, it's been a pleasure. ah jatare That is it for this episode of Pressed Curious, and we hope that we've piqued your curiosity. If you like the podcast, please tell a friend about it. Pressed Curious is hosted by Emma Clausen and Hannah Weaver and produced by Michael Goldsmith.
00:56:36
Speaker
You can reach us at prustcurious at gmail dot.com. We'd also like to thank our partner Public Books, an online magazine of ideas, arts, and scholarship. Check it out at publicbooks.org. Join us next time for volume two, a lombre de jeune fianfleur, or in the shadow of young girls in flower. Ooh, flowers, Emma. I think you'll have a good time. Can't wait. Okay, thanks for listening. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Au revoir.