“To admit you to the “little nucleus,” the “little group,” the “little clan” at the Verdurins’, one condition sufficed, but that one was indispensable: you must give tacit adherence to a Creed one of whose articles was that the young pianist whom Mme Verdurin had taken under her patronage that year and of whom she said “Really, it oughtn’t to be allowed, to play Wagner as well as that!” licked both Planté and Rubinstein hollow, and that Dr. Cottard was a more brilliant diagnostician than Potain.”
So begins part two of Swann’s way, the first one of the seven volumes of Marcel Proust’s masterpiece, In search of lost time. Swann’s way was handed to me by my friend Hagai as he was packing his things several months ago to leave Israel. “Take it,” he said. “It’s a marvelous novel. There are sections about nature, which are generally boring. But the sections about society, relationships, and memory are exquisite. I think you’ll find it worth your while.”
Well it certainly was a while: it took me over two months to read. But in sum, I also feel it was definitely worth it.
Proust is notorious for being difficult, for being pretentious, and also, with his great novel often touted as the definitive masterpiece of modernist literature, for being one of the greatest writers in history. In Search of Lost Time is the choice tome for many literati when asked the ‘what would you take to read if you were stuck on a desert island’ question. But let’s discard these prejudices, because indeed when I approached Proust I didn’t really know what I was getting into. All I had to go on was the recommendations of a close friend.
I finished Swann's way just this weekend, turning the last page with nostalgia almost as if I had relived a childhood. As is true of the events of actual life, the most prominent feature of the earlier parts of the novel was not a collection of sharp instances or details, but rather a haze which is best defined by the emotions it has the power to conjure. The book itself is, not surprisingly, Proustian (by this I refer to the principle of involuntary memory). I couldn’t even recall the individual events of the novel which had conspired to generate this nostalgia in me, for many of them had been submerged into the atmosphere of the thing and were certainly not in themselves relevant. Finishing it gave me the same longing and apprehension that one gets when approaching a life transition, or when saying adieu to a loved one.
But attaining this feeling came at a cost, for getting through the novel was, as it was promised to be… difficult.
There are three sections to Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Swann’s way: Combray, Swann in Love, and Place-Names: The Name.
Combray was the tough one. There were vignettes in it that kept me happily reading, but those were interspersed between long slogs. Comprising sometimes dozens of pages of florid description with no plot, the slogs were equally abstruse as they were slow. The whole book is, in fact, written in long, periodic, convoluted sentences that use a vocabulary of the very highest English, all of which requires rather a lot of attention to follow. (I’m strange in that I actually particularly liked this). Proust is not to be read by the impatient or the attention deficit. Despite all this, and because I glimpsed brilliance in certain segments of Combray, I never seriously considered putting the book down. But I wasn’t sure if I would ever really get into it, or rather if the book would remain as merely a time-consuming curiosity in my life-history of reading.
All of that changed with the sentence that I pasted at the top of this blog post. Within pages of starting part two (Swann in Love), I was mesmerized. A two month journey had gotten me through the 264 pages of Combray, but I swept through the 279 pages of Swann in Love in about 4 days. Consider that the sentence at the start of this blog is neither more nor less complex than the average sentence in the Swann’s Way, and you will understand that I must have been very engaged to have done this.
I thought then that Combray should simply be skipped, because it and Swann in Love don't really need each other. However, I’m not so sure now. The last, short section of the book, with the awful name Place-Names: The Name (which I’m guessing comes from a clunky translation of the French), evokes both Combray and Swann in Love and creates certain images which, without the context of Combray, would lack the lingering depth perhaps best characterized by feeling something just at the tip of your tongue, which you just can't quite put a name on. I was impressed by the crafting of this emotion, and I realized that without Combray, the effect would have been thinner.
Combray focused on the narrator’s childhood, and, like childhood itself, was richer in impressions than in happenings. The very fact that it was difficult, that it took a long time to get through, also played a role in its power. The focus, like childhood’s, wasn’t on plot, but rather on an experience that is often characterized by its very lack of occurrences. The book purposely slowed me down, and forced me into its own, drawn out pace. Only because of that was I able to relish the ending, for I felt as if I had been on some sort of a journey by the time that I got there, with its slow and its faster bits, which is ultimately more similar to life than is any pulp or, indeed, the majority of the media of modern consumption.
Proust is not an author who I feel will appeal all too easily to most modern readers, because, like the literature we have demanded and received, we order our emotions in digestible bites. Proust couldn’t have cared less about word counts or succinctness, which sets him at odds with nearly all modern authors. We live in a world now in which attention is one of the greatest currencies, and grabbing the attention of a consumer is so critical that most of the art about us is designed to first draw us in, and then, perhaps, to release its slower and subtler influences. Without the marketing feature at the outset, these works would simply be ignored. Who has the time to read something that doesn’t get right to the point?
But there is a value in not getting to the point, because life itself doesn’t get to the point, either. Proust certainly could have managed to tell the same story in less or in simpler words, but I don’t believe he even would have wanted to. If you are to appreciate this book’s merits, you are to surrender to Proust’s meanderings, and you are to trust him that these meanderings will be worthwhile. If you don’t trust him, don’t start. I believe that Proust wanted to capture the moments he described in his story as if they were emotional photographs, and to a large degree, difficult as it is, I believe he succeeded.
I have enough faith in Proust now that I'm ready to follow him through another 6 volumes. The end of Swann's way leaves me feeling satisfied but as if the ground has been set for something far bigger. Hopefully I can manage to get my hands on the rest of the set before I ever get stranded on some desert island…
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