Time alone changes our memories. It changes our perceptions of events. The particular objects or moments we pay attention to when an event is occurring, change focus. Long after the experience, memories develop new meanings. New information further distorts our memories and transforms them into new stories that we tell ourselves. Swann, in Proust’s Swann in Love, discovers that memories of his affair with Odette take on new meaning when he reexamines his time with her, after their affair comes to an end.He exclaims to himself as he completes his reflection: “To think that I’ve wasted years of my life, that I’ve longed to die, that I’ve experienced my greatest love, for a women who didn’t appeal to me, who wasn’t even my type!” ⁽⁵⁴³⁾

What defined Swann’s “type”, his desired woman and how did it differ from Odette’s “type”? Before falling in love with Odette, Swann would look for women who were beautiful and charming, women whose beauty was “common”, with physical qualities described as “healthy, abundant, rosy, human flesh”, women of a “distinctly vulgar type”. He did not desire a women with any depth of character or one who often had a gloomy expression ⁽²⁷¹⁾ yet, he did look for interesting conversation. He didn’t seek those who were of his own status, but enjoyed the women of the servant class, the cook, an unknown women on a train he took ⁽²⁷²⁾. Odette was described as quite opposite of this “type” of woman Swann desired. She had a sharp profile, features tightly drawn, and prominent cheekbones, in a face that made her appear unwell or in an “ill humor” most of the time. She is initially described as “an ignorant woman with a taste for beautiful things”. She was a woman who left Swann at the best indifferent if not physically repulsed ⁽²⁷⁶⁾.

Through his obsession with Odette, Swann slowly forgets his initial feeling of repulsion and indifference to her and began to construct, outside of reality, a woman he could love, who became the only “type” of woman he could desire ^(280-281).

The narrator of the story describes why Swann might adjust his memory and desires when he explains that “the feeling that he possesses a woman’s heart may be enough to make him fall in love with her…without any foundation in desire” ⁽²⁷⁷⁾. The narrator begins the adjustment to Swann’s memories of Odette when he describes falling in love: “We come to its aid, we falsify it by memory and by suggestion. Recognizing one of its symptoms, we remember and re-create the rest” ⁽²⁷⁷⁾.

An important influence in Swann’s changing perception of Odette is when he associates the sonata or “little phrase” with his intensifying love for her. Swann describes the sonata as a “source of keen pleasure… slender but robust, compact and commanding…entirely original and irreducible to any other kind” ⁽²⁹⁵⁾. He was enraptured, his soul expanded, it opened to him “ a world of inexpressible delights, of whose existence, before hearing it, he had never dreamed, into existence… and he had been filled with love for it, as with a new and strange desire” ⁽²⁹⁶⁾. As the association between this “little phrase” with Odette develops in Swanns mind, his feelings for her follow the same trajectory. She becomes enrapturing and a source of exquisite pleasure as he dreams her into existence. And just as Swann become obsessed with this piece of music, he becomes obsessed with his Odette.

Swann still struggled with his physical perceptions of Odette, which distressed him and “proved that the ideal is unattainable” ⁽³¹⁴⁾. This changes for a time with another significant moment in the revision of Swann’s perception that occurs when he discovers her resemblance to Zipporah in Botticelli’s painting ⁽³¹⁴⁾. “He no longer based his estimate of the merit of Odette’s face on the doubtful quality of her cheeks and the purely fleshy softness… but regarded it rather as a skein of beautiful, delicate lines which his eyes unraveled, following their curves and convolutions…The similarity enhanced her beauty also, and made her more precious” ⁽³¹⁶⁾. Swann associates Odette with a fine work of art, with a fine piece of music and his construction of her as a desirable “type” of woman is complete ⁽³¹⁷⁾ and his memories of her adjust to this new reality.

Swann’s love deepens, developing into obsessive jealously as he tries to maintain the constructed Odette. She is objectified, and he attempts to own her, an understandable response to something he had produced. Odette’s actions are either suspect or ignored when they do not quite fit in Swann’s construct.

When the true nature of Odette’s personality and life style became undeniable, Swann began to reflect on his memories of their time together, re-living his old anguish and jealousies, comparing them against the new knowledge he had gained, identifying himself as ignorant, and trustful.

“For all that he now knew- for all that, as time went on, he might even have partly forgotten and forgiven- whenever he repeated her words his old anguish refashioned him as he had been before Odette had spoken: ignorant, trustful; his merciless jealousy placed him once again, so that he might be pierced by Odette’s admission, in the position of a man who does not yet know;⁽⁵²³⁾

This process of reflection goes on for months and with each memory absorbed and adjusted, another one appears, bringing with it a new observation, a new torment, where he must alter his memory of Odette and his time with her. Swann finally understands that it is not just one point of time that torments him, but the whole affair:

“After several months this old story would still shatter him like a sudden revelation. He marveled at the terrible re-creative power of his memory. It was only by the weakening of that generative force, whose fecundity diminishes with age that he could hope for a realization of his torments. But, as soon as the power of any one of Odette’s remarks to make Swann suffer seemed to be nearly exhausted, lo and behold another one of those to which he had hitherto paid little attention, almost a new observation, came to reinforce the others and to strike at him with undiminished force… And on whatever point in it his memory sought to linger, it was the whole of that season, during which the Verdurins had so often gone to dine on the Island in the Bois that racked him”. ⁽⁵²³⁾

As Swann reviews his memories of Odette he becomes aware that he did know many things about her; details that he didn’t want to know, and so he had overlooked the comments she made that revealed her true nature and the activities of her life. Swann had purposely deluded himself that Odette let an innocent life, predominantly devoid of immoralities.

“But often enough the things that he did know, that he dreaded, now, to learn, were revealed to him by Odette herself, spontaneously and unwittingly; for the gap which her vices made between her actual life and the comparatively innocent life which Swann had believed, and often still believed his mistress to lead, was far wider then she knew.”⁽⁵²⁴⁾

             Swann’s concept of Odette as a beautiful, innocent, sweet yet unintelligent woman was necessary if he was to justify the obsession for her that he developed during their relationship. If he had fully acknowledged that Odette had a life other than the one he assembled, he would have had to acknowledge that she was not his “type” and that he being used for his money and ability to finance her lifestyle, and he would lose the love of the perfect woman he had created.

Thus, through Swann’s reflection of his time with Odette, memory assumes a terrible power to re-create his relationship with her into something other than what Swann believed it to be, he regrets the moments spent in seeing only his version of Odette and recognizes the terrible re-creative power of memory.

“How paradoxical it is to seek in the reality for the pictures that are stored in one’s memory, which must inevitably, lose the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being apprehended by the senses. The reality that I had known no longer existed…They were only a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment.” ⁽⁶⁰⁶⁾