Reading Swann's Way

The first volume of Proust's epic novel has been on my "to read" list for quite a while. Sara's boyfriend Zach is a Proust aficionado, going so far as to have a quote from the author tattooed on his arm (note to self: ask what the quote actually says), and while I was visiting their apartment last weekend I looked at his bookshelf-worth of Proust and decided it was finally time to give it a try. He assured me that if I read the first one I'd want to read all of them. He also opined that it's the greatest work of fiction ever written.

I'm halfway through Swann's Way now, and while I can't say that I agree with either assessment, I don't have a terribly strong opinion about it yet; or rather, I should say that I have a bunch of small opinions, but not a generalized opinion of the whole book. I was certainly surprised to find it fairly readable, though; when a thing reaches 1.5 million words and seven volumes and yet still insists on being called a single novel, you expect that there are going to be all manner of strange, impenetrable digressions. Well, digressions there certainly are, but they're musing, melancholy, and philosophical rather than indigestible. I was expecting stream-of-consciousness writing in the manner of Joyce, I suppose, and have been pleasantly surprised on that score.

There's an incredible amount of feeling in this book, and by that I mean that the young narrator, who is a semi-autobiographical reflection of Proust himself, is incredibly sensitive to beauty in the world around him. Sometimes it made me feel like I must be a little bit of a dull block not to be able to share this absolute, over-powering sense of presence within nature, to be able to lose myself for hours, as he claims to be able to do, in contemplating the play of sunlight over the slates of a distant church steeple, or a carpet of buttercups in a meadow. I admire things like that, too, but clearly not to this depth. At other times, however, the extended, rambling passages in which the narrator goes into ecstasies over some kind of flower or another were frankly a little much, and I skipped forward.

I had a vague idea that this was a work of fiction without a real plot, a novel turned inward, on the memories and feelings of its narrator. In that sense it reminds me of Montaigne, who wrote "I myself am the subject of my essays." Proust has an incredible facility with language (and I'm reading the old translation, not the Modern Library one that Zach recommended, which wasn't available in the local library), and so even though there's nothing much happening, I'm interested to see where he's going to go next, what scene or character he's going to sketch vividly in just a few paragraphs. I dog-eared the page with the following passage, which deals with the book's prominent theme of memory--in this case, a memory of the steeple of the church in Combray, the town he knew from his childhood:

"And so even to-day if, in a large provincial town, or in a quarter of Paris which I do not know very well, a passer-by who is "putting me on the right road" shows me in the distance, as a point to aim at, some hospital belfry or convent steeple lifting the peak of its ecclesiastical cap at the corner of the street which I am to take, my memory need only find in it some dim resemblance to that dear and vanished outline, and the passer-by, should he turn round to make sure that I have not gone astray, may be amazed to see me still standing there, oblivious of the walk I had planned or take or the place where I was obliged to call, gazing at the steeple for hours on end, motionless, trying to remember, feeling deep within myself a tract of soil reclaimed from the waters of the Lethe slowly drying until the buildings rise on it again; and then no doubt, and then more anxiously than when, just now, I asked him to direct me, I seek my way again, I turn a corner...but...the goal is in my heart..."

I do have certain negative feelings toward the novel, though. I'm not sure I really like this narrator,this sort-of-Proust-child. Sensitive he may be, but he's also neurotic and self-obsessed. The first section of the novel (the individual volumes themselves even have queer internal structures) focuses around his recollections of his inability to sleep alone as a child, and his obsession with his mother coming in to give him a goodnight kiss before he faced the darkness--to the extent that he was willing to undertake an elaborate plot to lure his mother upstairs on one of the occasions she remained at the dinner table rather than come up to see him. It's difficult to describe here the level of pathological obsession that this kid seems to have with his mother kissing him goodnight; on nights when he knows she won't come up, because they have guests or for another reason, he's plunged into utter despair for hours preceding his bedtime. As in, he says that he wishes he were dead rather than go to sleep without her kissing him. What? It's not clear exactly how old the narrator is supposed to be at this point, and this is terribly gendered, but I can't help it: man the fuck up.

His twisted attitude toward women is expressed obliquely elsewhere; he notes offhand, for example, that you can never trust your mistress, even when you are inflamed with passion, the way you can trust your mother:

"...one has doubts of them even at the moment when one believes in them, and never can possess their hearts as I used to receive, in a kiss, my mother's heart, whole and entire, without qualm or reservation, without the smallest residue of an intention that was not for me alone."

Now, I know that children are selfish, but this to me smacks of a self-involvement verging on solipsism; perhaps because it echoed an earlier passage I took issue with. The narrator, wandering in a wood near Combray, is so overcome with his love of the place that he desires nothing so much as to meet a local peasant girl in order to understand, through her (and implicitly, through having sex with her) its beauty more completely:

"...to wander thus among the woods of Roussainville without a peasant-girl to embrace was to see those woods and yet know nothing of their secret treasure, their deep-hidden beauty. That girl...was to me herself a plant of local growth, and one whose structure would enable me to get closer...to the intimate savor of the country."

This really irritated me, because he sees this girl not as an actual individual with feelings but as a fantasy-object onto which he could project his own desires. She's a tool and not a person--no matter how poetically it's all phrased. Of course, it doesn't help that he goes immediately on to talk about being at:

"that period of life when one has not yet separated the fact of this sensual pleasure from the various women in whose company one has tasted it, when one has not yet reduced it to a general idea which makes one regard them thenceforward as the interchangeable instruments of a pleasure that is always the same." So women are structures and instruments, not people? Nice.

These reservations notwithstanding, I'm glad to be reading it, if only for its importance in the general literary canon. I still refuse to read Joyce, though. On principle! I'm still scarred from my high school attempts to read Portrait of the Author, also known as the only time I BSed my way through an English exam.