Place Names-The Place

I feel that “Place Names-The Place,” the sprawling second chapter of Within a Budding Grove, is more thematically poignant than any of the other selections of Proust that I have read so far (I am almost finished with the Guermantes Way). As I mentioned in my previous post, one of the attractions that Within a Budding Grove has for me is the volume’s genuine feel for adolescent love. “Place Names-The Place” begins (p. 300-302) by addressing the relative nature of love, for such relativity is a major theme for the chapter in which Marcel develops feelings for a number of girls, making a shift from Gilberte to Albertine. On beginning the Search, I knew that Albertine was a major figure, and I knew that she appears in the second volume; I was surprised, therefore, that she did not appear until so late in the book, and that she has had such a limited role in The Guermantes Way. However, after examining why, I understand this; even the most important non-family figure in someone’s life is not going to appear until relatively late in the hero’s life. Albertine seems to be such an example.
The major physical movement of the chapter is Marcel’s trip to Balbec, one of the principal settings of the novel. I find it fitting that the narrator should mention Balbec and Marcel’s desire to visit Balbec so often before he actually goes; these references build the anticipation of the trip in the reader just as Marcel anticipated the trip. I know that when I read that Marcel was going to Balbec, I felt a relief that helped me identify with Marcel; I, like Marcel, was feeling cooped up and confined at the same old places in Paris. This relief reminded me of a major advantage that Proust has in writing such a lengthy novel: he can come closer than other novelists in simulating real life through his literature. In spending so much time on certain periods of Marcel’s life, Proust can give a better sense of what they were like, make the reader feel as though he were living like Marcel. This effect works particularly well to deal with the restless adolescent Marcel; the reader feels restless while reading so much about the restlessness of Marcel. Many people call Proust boring; I do not feel that this criticism should keep one from reading Proust, but neither do I feel that it shouldn’t be addressed. Sure, some sections of the Search are less interesting than others, and not much happens; sometimes this can be boring. But I think that the boredom that is created can be useful; it helps the atmosphere of the book and helps the reader identify with the characters’ frustrations. I think that many parts of the Search criticize the boring Parisian society life; this can come out in the prose, which helps show the anxiety of adolescence in Within a Budding Grove.
Although “Place Names-The Place” revolves around Marcel as the adolescent male, it also contains quite a bit about female adolescence, or, to be more specific, Marcel’s forming obsession of girls his age. Marcel’s dealings with Andree and Albertine shows that at this stage in his life he seems more interested in being interested in girls than in the actual girls themselves. Marcel does seem confused as whom he loves; at the end of the volume, during his confrontation with Albertine she confronts him on the matter, and he admits to the reader his fickleness. Overall, the females in the chapter seem much more aware and constant than Marcel himself; the revelations of the chapter come to us by way of older narrator Marcel, not confused adolescent Marcel. I think that this gender difference is the reason for the title of the volume, although it may not be so much a gender gap as a difference between Marcel and everyone else; the basis for Albertine, after all, was a man.
Overall, I feel that “Place Names-The Place” was a well-earned reprieve from the slowly building tedium of the preceding scenes in Paris, a vacation relatively filled with action. In Balbec, Marcel meets several of the most important characters for the rest of the book: Saint-Loup, Charlus, Elstir, Mme de Villeparisis, and Albertine. As for Saint-Loup and Charlus, I apologize for neglecting them here, but they will return in The Guermantes Way. And Mme de Villeparisis, she has quite bit of time to herself at her party; until next time, then.

Place Names-The Name and Madame Swann at Home

“Madame Swann at Home” and “Place Names-The Name” seem like they belong in the same volume of the Search. For one, the two narrative sections fit together; the themes also seem to match well. In “Place Names-The Name,” Marcel first gets to know Gilberte, the “Mlle Swann” that he meets in “Combray” along Swann’s Way. This, to me, seems to be a proper introduction to the “budding grove” of Marcel’s adolescence than the introduction of M. de Norpois. Nevertheless, “Place Names-The Name” makes a nice transition to Within a Budding Grove and nicely returns to Marcel for the end of Swann’s Way. “Madame Swann at Home” introduces a book focused completely around Marcel, which I prefer to Swann’s Way, actually. I think that in this second volume Proust captures the emotions of adolescence as well as anyone else I have ever read, from dealings with adults to those of the opposite sex.

Speaking of relations with girls his age, a fascination with Gilberte dominates the second half of “Place Names-The Name” and most of “Madame Swann at Home.” What I really enjoy about Gilberte’s portrayal in The Search (and Albertine’s, later in the novel) is the depth of commentary on Marcel’s relations with the girls, the multiple layers of description. The relationship between Gilberte and Marcel is described on three levels. On one level is Marcel’s perspective; he is completely infatuated with Gilberte, an obsession that only an adolescent romantic can have. This level seems genuine, if a little silly (doesn’t adolescence always seem silly?). On another level is the older Marcel who is telling the story; this Marcel makes the comments that it was not Gilberte herself that young Marcel loved as much as his perception of her; this older Marcel doesn’t claim that this nullifies the love; he just acknowledges that his young love (and all love in general) is relative to the viewpoint of the lover, and sometime is more dependent on this perspective than on the beloved. The third Marcel is much more subtle; this is Marcel the author, who seamlessly weaves between the two other Marcels. Roger Shattuck explains this phenomenon much more eloquently in his book Proust’s Way; I just found it particularly apparent with the Gilberte sections.
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I haven’t read about this passage anywhere, but a couple pages of “Madame Swann at Home” seem to me particularly profound. The section is on pages 73-75, when Marcel’s father talks to Marcel about his future profession. His father’s thoughts disturb Marcel; he notes: “The second suspicion, which was really no more than a variant of the first, was that I was not situated somewhere outside Time, but was subject to its laws, just like characters in those novels who, for that reason, used to plunge me into such gloom when I read of their lives… At the top of one page we have left a lover full of hope; at the foot of the next we meet him again, a bowled old man of eighty…” (74). The meta-fiction commentary of this passage is not in particular what strikes me, although it does fit nicely with Marcel’s character, and does not detract from the narrative; what I like about this passage is that it sums up so well the protagonist’s problem within the novel. In the Search, the older Marcel is trying to regain time and transcend it; this is why he became an artist, for through art he feels he has his best shot at being above Time. Yet even within the novel the artist ages, with the inevitable death looming after the book ends. Similarly, although over the course of the novel Marcel transcends age, and is on one level all ages at once, on any given page Marcel is confined within the limits of time. In acknowledging his earthly boundaries as akin to those of fiction, Marcel also acknowledges the fictional boundaries as earthly. In other words, I really like these few pages of the book.

Overall, Within a Budding Grove is my favorite section of the book (right now I’m almost halfway through The Guermantes Way, and is it slow). I really liked “Madame Swann in Love,” but I think that I enjoyed “Place Names-The Place” even more; I’m looking forward to writing about it and the introduction of Albertine. Until next time.

Swann in Love

"Swann in Love" struck me as odd from the beginning since it did not directly deal with Marcel. Nevertheless, Marcel seems to narrate the chapter; how can he know all of the things that he writes? This puzzled me, as did the attention that is paid to Swann and Odette; after all, Swann is only a neighbor of Marcel’s in Swann’s Way. After reading most of Within a Budding Grove, I now understand better why Swann is significant to the plot, but it must have been frustrating for Proust’s readers not to be able to read all of the work at once, and also frustrating for Proust to have so many critics not yet know what he is doing with the novel.
Even though such a characterization of Swann works with both the plot and the themes of the book as a whole, “Swann in Love” also functions well on its own, as a mini-novel within a novel (Swann’s Way) within a novel. Perhaps this is why someone adapted a movie of just “Swann in Love.” To me, the chapter has distinct similarities to Henry James’s The American. Both stories are concerned with Parisian social circles, both male protagonists fall prey to the wiles of society women, and each protagonist loses lots of money to the woman whom he unconditionally loves. However, there are a few notable differences between the stories that I feel say a lot about their respective themes. Firstly, while Swann is well-acquainted with French society and is actually stooping to fall in love with Odette, Christopher Newman is an American who tries to make his way into the upper-class Parisian society; this shows that the contrast in “Swann in Love” is not the contrast of nationalities and their cultural norms, but the contrast of different types of people within one social strata, with the socialite Swann sacrificing quite a bit for Odette, who is quite below his class. However, Proust does not romanticize such sacrifices but instead shows how, when love is concerned, little matters apart from the lover’s romantic perception: Odette is not deserving of Swann’s love, but that is not important to Swann. Therefore, in desiring Odette, Swann is consumed by Odette and in many ways becomes more like her, sinking to her level in some ways. Somewhere near the beginning of Within a Budding Grove, Marcel notes that in romantic relationships, the higher member often stoops to the other, whether in culture, intelligence or any other quality. “Swann in Love” is the story of making up for such differences, and while it may seem unfortunate for M. Swann, it also seems very realistic.
A second difference between “Swann in Love” and The American again pertains to Proust’s unsympathetic romantic ideas. In The American, the differences between American and French society are insurmountable and Christopher Newman is separated form his beloved just as he learns an important lesson about However, in “Swann in Love,” Swann and Odette marry. This plot point would seem more romantic than the separation of the lovers, but not the way that Proust weaves the story. By the end of “Swann in Love,” it seems that Swann has been beguiled, taken for a ride. Also, he doesn’t even decide to marry Odette for love, but doesn’t marry her until he has fallen out of love with her. This shows that marriage and love are not necessarily related, and in some cases have a negative relationship. At the end of The American, Newman is stung by unrequited love, but he becomes a better person for it; by the end of “Swann in Love,” Swann has fallen in and out of love, and has become a worse person. Swann’s fall obviously doesn’t say the greatest things about love, and “Swann in Love” is an emotional chapter.
One selection of “Swann in Love” that attracted my attention in an altogether different way was when the narrator briefly discusses Swann’s aesthetic beliefs: “Besides, having allowed the intellectual beliefs of his youth to languish, and his man-of-the-world skepticism having permeated them without his being aware of it, he felt (or at least he had felt for so long that he had fallen into the habit of saying) that the objects we admire have no absolute value in themselves, that the whole thing is a matter of period and class, is no more than a series of fashions, the most vulgar of which are worth just as much as those which are regarded as the most refined” (350). The context of this quote shows that Proust (or at least the narrator) probably disagrees with this type of aesthetic philosophy in the extreme. Nevertheless, the case is interesting for Swann, who is a collector and lover of art. How can he love art and claim that none is better than any other? I think that in this seeming contradiction Proust is trying to point out the absurdity of such an aesthetic philosophy, one that gained popularity as the Western world went through the twentieth century. Within the reality of In Search of Lost Time, Swann either doesn’t have such a relativistic attitude or he is wrong in appreciating Botticelli more than Gilberte’s paintings; such emphasis is lain on art throughout the book that Proust makes it difficult for anyone to agree with Swann’s philosophy. This persuasion, of course, allows us all to prefer the Search to any grocery-store romance we’re likely to encounter.
In closing, I would just like to note that something else that impressed me with “Swann in Love” is the comedy throughout. Dr. Cottard’s goofiness often brought a smile to my face, and some of the earlier dialogues between Swann and Odette were very funny indeed. Some of the charm of Proust so far is how he can make very serious themes light, and very light themes serious. This is certainly true throughout Within a Budding Grove, which I am about to finish. My entry on “Madame Swann at Home” should appear within the next couple days. Until then, I’ll start plodding along The Guermantes Way.