[Note as of 4/14: I posted this to my blog on Weds 4/8 for seminar on 4/9, but it never seems to have posted to the main site, so I am reposting in hopes it will show up this time]

This passage of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way describes the habitual events of the evenings Swann and Odette spent together in the early part of their love affair. Particularly, it focuses on the “little phrase” of the Vinteuil sonata that Swann found so enchanting and evasive some time before meeting Odette, which became “the national anthem of their love” (308). The passage highlights the relationship between the individual, emotional pleasure of Swann’s love for Odette and the shared sensory pleasure of the musical phrase. It details his experience listening to Odette play the phrase over and over, and the changes it provokes in his mind, body, and soul. Over the page and a half from “The little phrase continued to be associated in Swann’s mind with his love for Odette” to “He would make Odette play it over to him again and again, ten, twenty times on end, insisting that, as she did so, she must never stop kissing him,” Proust takes up several major themes of the book and issues of contemporary French life and culture.

One of the major questions we have encountered in this novel and in lectures and historical texts so far is that of the role of reason in modern life. The concept of the ability of individual human beings to use reason was one of the most important results of the Enlightenment, and reason maintained its position as one of our most important capacities until the rise of Romanticism in the early nineteenth century. Romanticism prized emotion and our relation to the natural world over reason, and it questioned the universality of Enlightenment concepts. Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, proposed the idea of subjectivity of experience, the possibility that not everyone experiences the world in the same way. Though Proust was not born for a century after the Critique‘s publication, In Search of Lost Time continues to engage with questions of the role of reason, as opposed to the role of sensory perception or the role of emotion. It also engages with another major cultural concern of the Enlightenment still current in nineteenth century France: the relation of the individual to the collective, especially in the newly modernized Paris of Haussman and the Second Empire. In this passage, these questions are drawn to the forefront.

Near the beginning of the passage, the narrator notes that “when the cold government of reason stood unchallenged in his mind” (335) Swann can easily see himself abandoning his love for Odette and his evenings spent hearing the “little phrase” over and over. But the moment he hears the sonata, he abandons his reason instead. The sensory trigger bypasses his rational mind and goes straight into his emotional soul, overriding logic and even “those human considerations which affect all men alike,” ranging perhaps from the need for food and water to the need to protect his social standing and reputation. Indeed, Swann knows that loving Odette is not reasonable: “he realized that Odette’s qualities were not such as to justify his setting so high a value on the hours he spent in her company” (335). He is aware that Odette is not particularly intelligent (341), that she has vulgar taste (342), that her reputation is questionable and her status markedly lower than his (342-3). But when she plays the “little phrase,” he is “deprived of his logical faculty” and becomes a creature only of sensory perception and bare emotive soul (336). Interestingly, the narrator refers to reason as “the whole armour” of the “innermost soul” (336), implying that reason is less natural, inherent, and integral to humanity than is the soul, home of pleasure, sorrow, and love.

The idea that the soul is more essentially human than reason reverberates throughout the passage and its cultural context. The soul is where Swann holds his love for Odette, a love that he notes “[does] not correspond to anything outside itself, verifiable by others” (335) and is instead unique and individual to him. Swann is alienated by the individuality of his love for Odette, separated from the collective by the subjectivity of his experience. He recognizes, however, that the pleasure of listening to the sonata is not individual, that it is one of Kant’s moments of shared subjectivity in the face of a beautiful piece of art. Kant’s idea was that in sharing that experience of beauty, we can briefly understand other people as equally active subjects in this world, rather than the objects we regard them as the rest of the time. The connection to the collective produced by the sonata, however, is also inverted, when the music makes Swann into “a creature estranged from humanity” (336). Both the love he feels in his soul and the beauty he perceives with his senses can make Swann feel alienated. If the soul is the essential part of a person, and it is individual rather than universal in its experience, what does that say about the role of the individual in modern France?

This tension between sources of alienation is representative of the tension between reason and emotion, soul and body, Enlightenment ideals and Romantic ideals, historic and modern, that haunts the novel as a whole. This tension also exists in the relationship between the sonata and Swann’s love for Odette: in some ways it is pleasurable, pure, basic, natural; in others it is artificial, strained, isolating. There is no shared subjectivity in Swann’s love for Odette, which is reinforced by the frequent use of the word “possession” to describe their relationship, particularly its sexual elements. Swann regards her as an object to be possessed, a view of women the narrator also seems to hold, as evidenced by certain passages in “Combray” (the desire for a peasant-girl, 219-221). This pleasure in “possessing” Odette is closely related to the pleasure of the sonata, and the pleasure of love overall: the pleasures housed in the soul. The soul has an intimate connection with the body and its sensory capacities, as well as its sexual drives: the sonata deprives Swann of reason, of the ability to do anything but experience the sounds and the emotions they provoke, and kiss Odette. What implications does that special connection have about Romantic versus Enlightenment priorities of natural sensation and reason respectively, especially in relation to the changing role of the individual?

Though this passage raises these questions, it provides no answers. Its tone does not obviously praise or condemn Swann’s experience or choices. Though Proust frequently and generously uses adjectives and adverbs throughout the text, there are few descriptive turns from the narrator in this passage. Those that are present are brief and describe Swann’s experience of a situation, rather than the situation itself: “Odette’s affection might seem a little abrupt and disappointing,” the phrase’s “mysterious essence,” the “strange frenzy of intoxication” induced by the sonata (336). The only descriptive phrase that seems to originate from the narrator, rather than from Swann, describes what Swann becomes upon listening to the sonata: “a fantastic unicorn, a chimaera-like creature” (336). The word “fantastic” currently has a very positive connotation, but it can also mean simply “based on fantasy, not real” (Merriam-Webster). Thus it seems that the narrator takes no strong position on Swann’s actions or experiences with Odette and the sonata in this passage, or on the questions about individuality that these actions raise.

The question of whose perspective is embodied in the narration is omnipresent in “Swann in Love” and some sections of “Combray.” Though much of “Combray” is presented in first-person recollections, the narrator of those recollections is not present for all of the events discussed, and the events of “Swann in Love” occur before his birth or in his early childhood. This shift in ownership of the story is not easily resolved, and will probably be an ongoing issue over the course of the novel, like the tensions between historic and modern ideas and those among body, mind, and soul. This brief passage exemplifies the mastery and complexity of the novel as a whole: in just six hundred words, there is an incredible range of meaning expressed.