Swann’s Way, Part 1 Trans CK Scott Moncrieff, Chatto & Windus, London 1922
Overture
Context:
The Narrator, we'll call him Marcel, shall we? now a middle-age man, is reminiscing about his boyhood memories about the time he and the family stayed at their country home in Combray, Normandy. He meditates on the imperfections of memory and recollection in that shadowy half-way house between waking and sleeping at different stages and places of this early time in his life. Marcel used to dread going to bed and being parted from his mother for the whole night. On one occasion when the family are being visited in Combrray by a family friend, Swann, he misses out on his goodnight kiss, his “sole consolation” when he went upstairs to bed at night. Its deprivation was a singular source of anguish. However, on this occasion, his father unexpectedly agrees to his mother remaining the night with him and she reads to him from the novel François le Champi. It is his only extant memory of Combray, until many years later, something happens.
The Narrator, we'll call him Marcel, shall we? now a middle-age man, is reminiscing about his boyhood memories about the time he and the family stayed at their country home in Combray, Normandy. He meditates on the imperfections of memory and recollection in that shadowy half-way house between waking and sleeping at different stages and places of this early time in his life. Marcel used to dread going to bed and being parted from his mother for the whole night. On one occasion when the family are being visited in Combrray by a family friend, Swann, he misses out on his goodnight kiss, his “sole consolation” when he went upstairs to bed at night. Its deprivation was a singular source of anguish. However, on this occasion, his father unexpectedly agrees to his mother remaining the night with him and she reads to him from the novel François le Champi. It is his only extant memory of Combray, until many years later, something happens.
The first sentence, pregnant with meaning, of Proust’s epic saga: in this instance, a prelude for the drame de coucher (the theatre and the drama of his going to bed):
1 Longtemps, je me suis couché de bon heure. (For a long time, I used to go to bed early) Seeing someone we know
22 Even the simple act which we describe as "seeing some one we know" is, to some extent, an intellectual process. We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent envelope, so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our own ideas of him that we recognise and to which we listen. And so, no doubt, from the Swann they had built up for their own purposes my family had left out in their ignorance a whole crowd of the details of his daily life in the world of fashion, details by means of which other people, when they met him, saw all the Graces enthroned in his face and stopping at the line of his arched nose as a natural frontier; but they contrived also to put into a face from which its distinction had been evicted, a face vacant and roomy as an untenanted house, to plant in the depths of its unvalued eyes a lingering sense, uncertain but not pleasing, half-memory and half-oblivion, of idle hours spent together after our weekly dinners, round the card-table or in the garden, during our companiable country life. |
Ignoring suffering and injustice
13 In my cowardice I became at once a man, and did what all we grown men do when face to face with suffering and injustice; I preferred not to see them. Castes and ‘one’s proper station’
25-6 My great-aunt, however, interpreted this piece of news (Swann attending a luncheon given by a personage whose father and uncle had been among our most prominent statesmen during the reign of Louis-Philippe) in a sense discreditable to Swann; for anyone who chose his associates outside the caste in which he had been born and bred, outside his ‘proper station’, was condemned to utter degradation in her eyes. It seemed to her that such a one abdicated all claim to enjoy the fruits of those friendly relations with people of good position which prudent parents cultivate and store up for their children’s benefit, for my great-aunt had actually ceased to ‘see’ the son of a lawyer we had known because he had married a ‘Highness’ and had thereby stepped down – in her eyes- from the respectable position of a lawyer’s son to that of those adventurers, upstart footmen or stable-boys mostly, to whom we read that queens have sometimes shewn their favours. Nostalgia and antiquity 53 My grandmother had bought them (the pastoral novels of George Sand eg Francois le Champi) in preference to other books, just as she would have preferred to take a house that had a gothic dovecot, or some other such piece of antiquity as would have a pleasant effect on the mind, filling it with a nostalgic longing for impossible journeys through the realm of time”. |
Trying to revive old memories of Combray:
(as through a sort of luminous panel)
57-8 I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and so effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognised their voice the spell is broken. We have delivered them: they have overcome death and return to share our life.
And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die.
The madeleine
Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, save what was comprised in the theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had any existence for me, when one day in winter, on my return home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent for one of those squat, plump little cakes called "petites madeleines," which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell. 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. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory - this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could, no, indeed, be of the same nature. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it?
And then, after a gigantic struggle of recall ..
And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom , my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it; perhaps because I had so often seen such things in the meantime, without tasting them, on the trays in pastry-cooks' windows, that their image had dissociated itself from those Combray days to take its place among others more recent; perhaps because of those memories, so long abandoned and put out of mind, nothing now survived, everything was scattered; the shapes of things, including that of the little scallop-shell of pastry, so richly sensual under its severe, religious folds, were either obliterated or had been so long dormant as to have lost the power of expansion which would have allowed them to resume their place in my consciousness. But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
And as soon as I had recognized the taste of the piece of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-blossom which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set to attach itself to the little pavilion opening on to the garden which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated segment which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I used to be sent before lunch, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. And as in the game wherein the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little pieces of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch and twist and take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, solid and recognizable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.