Wes Lanser
3 Apr, 2015
In Search of Lost Time
Examined Passage
At last the carriages were ordered. Mme Verdurin said to Swann: “Good-bye, then. We shall see you soon, I hope,” trying, by the friendliness of her manner and the constraint of her smile, to prevent him from noticing that she was not saying, as she would always have said hitherto: “Tomorrow, then, at Chatou, and at my house the day after.”
M. and Mme Verdurin invited Forcheville into their carriage. Swann’s was drawn up behind it, and he waited for theirs to start before helping Odette into his.
“Odette, we’ll take you,” said Mme Verdurin, “we’ve kept a little corner for you, beside M. de Forcheville.”
“Yes, Madame,” said Odette meekly.
“What! I thought I was to take you home,” cried Swann, flinging discretion to the wind, for the carriage door hung open, the seconds were running out, and he could not, in his present state, go home without her.
“But Mme Verdruin has asked me…”
“Come, you can quite well go home alone; we’ve left her with you quite often enough,” said Mme Verdurin.
“But I had something important to say to Mme de Crecy.”
“Very well, you can write it to her instead.”
“Good-bye,” said Odette, holding out her hand.
He tried hard to smile, but looked utterly dejected.
“Did you see the airs Swann is pleased to put on with us?” Mme Verdurin asked her husband when they had reached home. “I was afraid he was going to eat me, simply because we offered to take Odette back. It’s positively indecent! Why doesn’t he say straight out that we keep a bawdy-house? I can’t conceive how Odette can stand such manners. He literally seems to be saying ‘You belong to me!’ I shall tell Odette exactly what I think about it all, and I hope she’ll have the sense to understand me.
A moment later she added, inarticulate with rage: “No, but, don’t agree, the filthy creature…” unwittingly using, perhaps in obedience to the same obscure need to justify herself – like Francoise at Combray, when the chicken refused to die – the very words which the last convulsions of an inoffensive animal in its death throes wring from the peasant who is engaged in taking its life. (404-405)
The confrontations in Proust’s work are often physically subtle. The encounters, when reduced down to the events which actually transpire, are simple things. Yet Proust surrounds them with such labyrinthine twists of emotion that they cause tension and turmoil far in excess of what they might produce had they been penned in any other way. The multi-reflective nature of Proust, that it is the memoirs of a fictional narrative, and especially this section as it undoubtedly based off stories that the narrator had been told by another character, since they occurred either before the narrator was born or when he was quite young, serves this purpose. We are made privy to the emotional winding up of the characters, as if they were watches or clockwork, all their imaginings and fantasies are described with as much verisimilitude as anything else in the story. Indeed, questions on the nature of memory which Proust himself subtly poses make us wonder if these imaginings are not themselves just as reliable as the memories which the character has created.
In this passage, Mme Verdurin has Odette ride in their carriage to her home instead of going, as per usual, in the carriage of M. Swann. A rather placid matter, it seems by that description. Yet the text of the passage and the place it occupies within the deliberate flow of the story lend to it a grand importance and overburden it with emotional significance. Strong parallels with the kiss at Combray with which the novel opens echo back and forth within the text, creating a sort of self-referential feedback that is at once familiar to our own thought processes and strange to see so faithfully reconstructed upon the page. This is a point in Swann’s relationship with Odette that the strain becomes public, when attempts to ignore what can be described as nothing less that his obsession become pointless. It also marks a turning point in Swann’s relationships and place in society, where the company of Odette no longer welcomes him as one of the “faithful.”
The very opening lines, the “At last,” are preceded by Swann “anxiously counting the minutes” until he can be alone with Odette. This strongly harkens to the kiss and, indeed, many pages before, the narrator admits that perhaps Swann would be the only one to understand the importance he placed on that act. It is in this passage that we begin to see why. At the restaurant with Odette, which Swann once enjoyed immensely he now longs only for the event to end so that he may spend precious time alone with his beloved, time that he has grown accustomed to having, a habit that he relies upon for release he cannot find elsewhere.
More than that it has become his habit, and more than that he simply feels his relationship with Odette is stretching and straining like pulled taffy, Swann has real reason to want to speak with Odette. He wants, or perhaps needs, her to shed light upon why Verdurin had broken her own habit of explicitly inviting him to the next night’s events and perhaps to conspire with Odette so that they might spend the evening together anyways. Of course, he also aches to “lull to rest in her arms the anguish that tormented him.” The narrator chooses to describe Swann’s needs for Odette as nearly identical to his own for his mother’s affection when he was a child. We are left to wonder whether this is intentional on the part of the narrator, whether it is taken from something that Swann related to him directly or whether he imagined it based on his own limited, or perhaps comprehensive, understanding of the mechanics of helpless infatuation.
Here also is an excellent example of Proust’s use of the action of anticipation. There are no further details about the dinner after the point at which Swann realizes that he has not been invited to the next one. Instead, he plots and schemes until the carriages arrive and it is time to leave. It is little wonder that the Verdurin and Odette tire of such absent company yet his obsession with Odette and preoccupation with the future blinds him to this cause. Furthermore, Swann is frequently subject to ruminations on hidden meanings within the words of others. In the case of Odette, it is frequently how he catches her in lies. In this case, it is the implications of what is not said by Mme Verdurin. In other places in Proust, through his use of abrupt changes or interruptions amidst cerebral discourses, we get a sense that time may still be going on while these are the thoughts within the heads of characters at the time that the scene is taking place. It is not at all implausible to imagine a silently panicking Swann, sitting at dinner isolated by his imagined plots which he uses to desperately cling to the threads of a life which is slipping through his fingers.
Which makes his outburst when these plans are so unexpectedly unraveled all the more relatable. When Mme Verdurin offers to take Odette home and she “meekly” accepts, the rug is completely pulled out from under Swann. It is not that Swann is unprepared for her to prioritize others above him, indeed he nearly fetishizes it with his suspicions and his stalkings, but rather that he did not expect it to come in this way and it destabilizes that fantasy that he has built up for himself. Indeed, Swann’s coping mechanism seems to be based upon elaborate scenarios which he imagines before events which lend him, at least partially. That which he truly craves: control.
The unexpected loss of power which comes when he is undermined by Mme Verdurin’s offer is what causes him to “[fling] discretion to the wind.” In matters where he has time to prepare, even matters where he is motivated by uncontrollable jealous impulse, Swann has a history of displaying circumspection. Here it is destroy by the unexpected, and perhaps to the characters of Proust, un-expectable breach of the canon of habit upon which Swann constructs his scenarios. We see another example of his when Swann visits what he assumes to Odette’s window at night and selects which window to spy upon by the habit shared by he and Odette to be only window with lights still within at the late hour of their rendezvous. It is likely also this inflexibility that makes Swann unattractive to Odette, as she once exclaims how nice it is to see him some time other than the afternoon, which he had made a point to exclusively see her in. Interestingly, Swann immediately dismisses this as a falsehood.
As the present spirals away from the future that Swann constructed and the contingencies that he had prepared for, he becomes increasingly distressed. When Mme Verdurin rebukes his insistence that he be the one to accompany Odette home and continues to resist him, the best excuse he can come up with is “But I had something important to say to Mme de Crecy.” Which is perhaps the most transparent, overused excuse developed by mankind. In other scenarios, ones in which Swann has time to plan, his lies and excuses are elaborate and, he thinks, cunningly crafted. Even in scenarios of heightened emotion, such as when he believes he is about to catch Odette cheating on him, he takes comfort and even pleasure in having just the right thing to say. Indeed, nothing less should be expected from a man who spends so much of his time in consideration of the hidden meaning of words. That ‘I need to tell her something‘ is his response indicates that something terribly wrong with this situation for Swann.
Swann is crushed by this development. Not only is Odette prioritizing others over him but she is doing so in a way that he had not planned for. Furthermore, and this may not be at the forefront of Swann’s consciousness due to his obsession with Odette, the social circle that he chose over that of Prince and other high society figures is rejecting him. In fact, Verdurin is humiliating him in what, by the convoluted standards of Proust’s depiction of the quasi-aristocracy, is an exceptionally blunt, brutal manner. The next passage hammers upon that point. The conversation is, without doubt, one imagined, yet we are left in doubt as to the original author of the fantasy. It is most likely that Swann dreamt it up, as I believe he is want to do as he “returned home on foot through the Bois, talking to himself aloud, in a slightly artificial tone he used to adopt when enumerating the charms of the ‘little nucleus’ and extolling he magnanimity of the Verdurins” (406). Without doubt, the narrator has put a great deal of his own experience into this twice-fictitious exchange, as evidenced by his insertion of dialog from his own childhood. In my opinion, Swann was the author of the first section in which Mme Verdurin is coherent. It smacks of the mental tortures Swann is said to inflict upon himself. The second seems to me to be the narrator’s commentary on Swann’s relationship with Odette, added independently as it more closely resembles the allegories to which the narrator is more prone that Swann.
In this case, Swann, or perhaps his relationship with Odette is the chicken. It is a hapless creature unaware of its purpose in the scheme of things, just as Swann is unaware of Odette’s extensive and sordid romantic history. It flails against its inevitable fate, not comprehending that it really have expected his all along and, the informed hand forced to do the dirty work of destiny, curses it for its ignorance and stubborn resistance. The allegory is only dissimilar in that, in the end, this chicken acquits itself with a manner of victory.