On page 245, of Swann’s Way, we are introduced to the Duchesse/Mme de Guermantes, a member of French royalty and future love interest of Marcel. Immediately preceding her entrance into the novel, the narrator has been constructing elaborate romantic fantasies of Mme de Guermantes based upon her royal pedigree, which can be traced back to the semi-mythical Genevieve de Brabant, various works of art (including the ‘magic lantern’ of his childhood), and the natural beauty of the Guermantes way. The intensity of these fantasies quickly overwhelm the young narrator and he must turn to his father’s perceived ability to “transgress laws… more ineluctable than the laws of life and death” for comfort. Failing at that, he falls into a morbid depression stemming from his inability to accept his own mortality which we can assume is narcissistic at its core because of the narrators ability to take impersonal encounters with death in stride, most recently, Aunt Leonie’s, which he dealt with by teasing the grieving Francoise and enjoying long walks in the country.
The first enocunter with Mme de Guermantes:
Suddenly, during the nuptial mass, the verger, by moving to one side, enabled me to see in one of the chapels a fair-haired lady with a large nose, piercing blue eyes, a billowy scarf of mauve silk, glossy and new and bright, and a little pimple at the corner of her nose. And because on the surface of her face, which was red, as though she had been very hot, I could discern, diluted and barely perceptible, fragments of resemblance with the portrait that had been shown to me; because, more especially, the particular features which I remarked in this lady, if I attempted to catalogue them formulated themselves in precisely the same terms–a large nose, blue eyes–as Dr. Percepied had used when describing in my presence the Duchesse de Guermantes,
This is a strictly physical description in which the reader is given no sense of the grandeur and romance that has already been invested into this character. The pimple on her nose is an unattractive detail that strips Mme de Guermantes of her superidealized perfection. Then the narrator says to himself, “This lady is like the Duchesse de Guermante.” He is, at this first instant, incapable of accepting a reality that disagrees with his fantasy.
Now the chapel from which she was following the service was that of Gilbert the Bad; beneath the flat tombstones of which, yellowed and bulging like cells of honey in a comb, rested the bones of the old Counts of Brabant; and I remembered having heard it said that this chapel was reserved for the Guermantes family, whenever any of its members came to attend a ceremony at Combray; there was, indeed, but one woman resembling the portrait of Mme. de Guermantes who on that day, the very day on which she was expected to come there, could be sitting in that chapel: it was she! My disappointment was immense.
Mme de Guermantes is literally couched in the physical representation of her royal heritage in a spot reserved for her personage and the narrator still has to take a beat and go through this deductive process in order to accept the fact of her identity. Now struggling to reconcile this reality with his idealizations, the narrator realizes that he had, in his minds eye, stripped Mme de Guermantes of her humanity and elevated (it may be argued reduced) her into a work of art. The idolatry of art, otherwise the valuation of art and aesthetics as ‘greater than’ reality, is a central theme in Swann’s Way. Often we will find a character will be unsympathetic towards another character until such time as they can read into the other’s plight an artistic/historic allusion. From these recurrences, we infer a key motif in the work: Reality is valued in aesthetic terms.
To the previous point, we have now met Mme de Guermantes unmediated by the powerful associations of her name and for an instant we see her as an ordinary character. The narrator must now resolve the discrepancy between Mme de Guermnates as a fluid and compliant emblem for eternal romance and beauty and Mme de Guermantes as just another mortal under “subjection to the laws of life.” He fails utterly and is completely unrepentant about this fundamental flaw in his perception of reality. Instead, we are treated to a lengthy passage in which the narrator indulgently details an entirely new elaborate romantic fantasy in which Mme de Guermantes falls in love with him for no discernable reason. We follow the thread of this fantasy to a reflection on his ambition to become a great writer, which predictably leads him to another morbid depression.
But even if the narrator is blinded by his delusion, the text reveals the hypocrisy inherent in the narrator’s paradoxical understanding of the world around him. The narrator treasures his obsessive fantasies, these romantic artifices, consciously constructed delusions, above all else, refusing to relinquish them even when squarely confronted with contrary evidence. Yet, if one follows the trajectory of these fantasies, they always lead to some melancholy pit and the remedies always come about absent of any self-conscious impetus. Proust ties spontaneous or unwilled memories or experiences with his deepest feelings of joy or enchantment. The things that give him true joy come unbidden and are usually banal or natural (the madeleine, the Hawthorne).
These themes prefigure the novel’s central investigation: the search for/creation of one’s true identity. Who am I? How can one even begin to recognize ‘I’? etc. Proust attempts to answer these questions by exploring the nature of memory, which he (we can confidently assume) believes crucial to the nature of identity. But in this exploration, we see that memory is very rarely honest. Furthermore, it is not even benign. Memory is outright seditious, undermining our attempts to know other people, places, and ourselves by superimposing the colors of our own secret (even to us) desires upon every image that we see. This brings the validity of the entire Combray section of the novel into question as it composed largely of personal recollections of Marcel, as opposed to ‘Swann in Love’ in which the narrator seems to switch into an omniscient third-person. Marcel’s memories are simply not reliable. He plays with temporal relationships the same way that the Impressionists would play with relationships of light and color in order to achieve an image more accurate to his feelings than to objective reality. The final question we arrive at from this is: Does that matter? That is to say, does it matter as to the construction of an individual’s identity whether or not that individual has knowledge outside of the sphere in which his identity colors and alters all information? Proust has demonstrated that perception is suspect to a myriad of foibles and follies and that everything we know must first be mediated by that flawed perceptive organ and therefore is suspect of all the same foibles and follies.
Even the simple act which we describe as “seeing someone we know” is to some extent an intellectual process… (Pg. 23)
…like every attitude or action which reveals a man’s underlying character; they bear no relation to what he has previously said, and we cannot confirm our suspicions by the culprit’s own testimony, for he will admit nothing; we are reduced to the evidence of our own senses, and we ask ourselves, in the face of this detached and incoherent fragment of recollection, whether indeed our senses have not been the victims of hallucination… (Pg. 177)
