Proust's Novel in a Novel: "Un Amour de Swann"

Author(s): Elonore M. Zimmermann

Source: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 68, No. 3 (Jul., 1973), pp. 551-558
Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3724992
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 PROUST'S NOVEL IN A NOVEL:

'UN AMOUR DE SWANN'

Un Amour de Swann is so independent from the rest of Proust's A la rech

perdu that it could be said to form a novel within that novel. It has ofte
separately, and indeed its plot is self-contained. Its characters, with th
Swann and Odette, play a very marginal role in the later books, an
do reappear, they are much older and so completely changed as t
unrecognizable. The previous volume has introduced us to the narr
hood seen from the perspective of an aging man. Now he steps asid
utmost detail an episode in someone else's life, disrupting even the tim
since these events happened several years before the beginning of
volume. In the traditional novel within a novel, an 'editor' claims t
the lost diary or the letters of the hero. Here the narrator simply
found out about these incidents many years later, which, considering
and detailed character, is of course highly improbable. He himself
improbability,1 and we can assume that he does not care whether
any more than the fictitious editor of previous centuries.
The technique of the novel within a novel was frequently used,
the strongly autobiographical novels of the nineteenth century, t
first-person narration. In Un Amour de Swann, on the contrary
autobiographical 'I' of Combray is replaced by a third-person nar
reversal in a set technique provides us with a first hint that Swann mi
much a third person as he would appear to be.2
While Proust rather brutally throws us from the world of Combray
Swann he does not at first explain why he does so. It is not until th
the novel that, meditating upon his life, he remarks that Swann p
role in it (III, 915, I029). But even that seems somewhat contrived: he n
was thanks to Swann that he left the narrow confines of his famil
people who were to shape his life, and that it was through Swann he r
we never see others, but only create and recreate them (I, 19-20). The h
in Un Amour de Swann itself are more revealing: at one point the narr
explicitly that Swann's character resembles his own in many ways
repeatedly compares his way of looking at the world and especially
when in love, to those of Swann (I, 295, 297, 529), as he will do aga
the later books.
Yet if Swann's love for Odette seems a model of Marcel's future loves, it does not
mean that the recounting of it is representative either of the novel as a whole or
even, in fact, of the narrator's love. For Marcel is not Swann: the young man whose

1 '[J'avais appris] avec cette precision dans les details plus faciles a obtenir quelquefois pour la vie
de personnes mortes il y a des siecles que pour celle de nos meilleurs amis, et qui semble impossible,
comme semblait impossible de causer d'une ville a une autre - tant qu'on ignore le biais par lequel
cette impossibilite a ete tournee'. (Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, edited by P. Clarac
and A. Ferre, 3 vols (Paris, I954), i, 86. References in the text are to this edition.)
2 The relationship between Swann and the narrator has been examined repeatedly by critics since
Ramon Fernandez, Proust (Paris, 1943), pp. 128 et seqq. See in particular: J. Rousset, Forme et signifi-
cation (Paris, I962), pp. 145 et seqq. I have myself tried to deal with some of its complexities in 'Le
Role de Swann et de la societe dans l'acte de creation proustien', Studi Francesi, 45 (I971), 433-42.

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552 Proust's 'Un Amour de Swann'

life and development form the subject of A la recherche will escape the danger of
becoming Swann; the narrator of his past has already escaped it;1 and one of
Proust's major purposes in the novel is to illuminate the path which has led the
hero to his final escape. That secret path starts in Combray, and while the child
does not know this, Proust prepares us to understand it by painting the life at
Combray through the complex point of view which we may assume to have been
that of the child's unconscious, and through the style which will illuminate the
narration of every phase of the protagonist's life. When we are caught in the
universe of Swann, there is a complete change in both.
The universe of the narrator has been firmly established in the first volume. If
it is then set aside, if Un Amour de Swann follows immediately after Combray, it is
because Proust wants to state clearly at the beginning of A la recherche two main
themes of the narrator's life: Du cote de chez Swann, the first part of the novel, is to
contain the pre-conscious elements on which the remainder is built, those elements
which can later be resurrected and transformed through the mysterious workings
of involuntary memory. The first theme, Combray, is, unconventionally treated,
the narrator's past in a conventional sense, namely the story of his childhood.
Un Amour de Swann introduces the second theme, a certain type of love which fore-
shadows Marcel's own way of loving, and which gives the growing narrator an
emotional past and also, as we shall see, an essentially pre-reflective one. In later
books, the narrator will point to similarities of pattern between his loves and those
of Swann. Swann's love will then be treated like a personal memory, in the same
way as are the childhood scenes from Combray.
The main difference between Swann and Marcel, as many critics have seen and
as Proust makes clear himself, is that Swann never strove to use his natural gifts
creatively but dissipated them in a meaningless and unprofitable social life
(I, 19I, 223). When we meet him he has lost faith in an ideal beyond the reality of
everyday life (as the narrator will later say of himself), and thus he has found
excuses to abandon all effort to transcend mundane existence (again as the nar-
rator is repeatedly tempted to do and often does). He has proclaimed social life
to be on a level with art, both equally worthy of his attention (I, 193, 2 I).
In the last book of the novel, Le Temps retrouve, we see the narrator go off to
write his book after overcoming precisely the discouragement and laziness which
have kept Swann from becoming a creator otherwise than in his dreams. The
discouragement in which the narrator had wallowed for some time has been
dispelled by flashes of involuntary memory which have uncovered unsuspected
links, have created unexpected juxtapositions, and thus have made it clear to the
narrator that objects are not just a surface: they have a depth, they are composed
of all the angles from which they are seen, of all that surrounds them, of all that
the person who perceives them feels as he looks at them or hears them; and they
continue to live in him in their richness, as he continues to live in them, latently,
until he resurrects them and himself with them (III, 885, 912). Only a sudden
intuition can trigger this resurrection, but intelligence, the faculty to combine, by
recognizing that these flashes uncover universal laws, has to intervene if the

1 Marcel Muller, in Les Voix narratives dans la 'Recherche du temps perdu' (Geneva, 1965) has formulated
an elaborate vocabulary to deal with the various levels of meaning of the narrative 'I'. Since long
definitions would be necessary before adopting it, I have had to content myself with more elementary
designations.

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 ELEONORE M. ZIMMERMANN
553

revelation is to become permanent. Intelligence, set to work

plumb the depth of fleeting sensations, recognize their composit
The search of A la recherche not only seeks to suspend time, but t
it captive on the page without divesting it of its main quality, th
life, that is, many-faceted, fleeting. The complex net whic
capture life is his long, metaphor-laden sentence which, wi
allusions, recreates the object described.
Un Amour de Swann is the story of a love experienced in the p
which is Swann's, but which the narrator will transcend. The
was a world remembered, presented in the double perspecti
writing of the novel possible, that of time relived as a present, an
as a past. In contrast, the greater part of Un Amour de Swann pre
the most ordinary time in everybody's life, the time we let pass
One of the great stylistic achievements of the book is to plunge
stream of time which moves so subtly that only when he st
realize that time has passed, that the situation has changed. To g
of Proust's work, the reader must be aware of the difference
and its style, and that of the rest of the novel. Un Amour de Sw
reflect the mind of Swann who is lost in his obsessive love and h
moment, so much so that he sees nothing outside of it, that he i
passing, of the changes around him, and even, except in one
of the changes in himself.
For Swann is not analytically minded, he does not look at h
outside, and the effort needed to pursue an idea is beyond his
these failings which, according to the narrator, keep him from
basis for creation, we see how important are will and a certai
intelligence in Proust's conception of what determines creativ
not suffice. Swann does have rare moments of lucidity: he realiz
one night when he desperately pursues Odette from one caf6
she had left the salon where he expected but did not much care t
in spite of his love, he knows at times that she is nobody very s
There are even moments when he is dimly aware that his lov
present interests will not survive it (I, 279). But he shies away fr
suffering (I, 32I, 300, 353). Again and again, when a revelat
refuses to analyse it, to draw the consequences (I, 377). Why w
have Swann mention her name in society? (I, 242). When she a
wasn't she in fact acting like a 'kept woman', an expression h
use about her, but which conveyed such a different vision of her
deal with it? In this as in other instances: 'I1 ne put approfondir
acces d'une paresse d'esprit qui etait chez lui congenitale, intermi
tielle, vint a ce moment eteindre toute lumiere dans son in
Thus he will not find out what a kept woman is, nor be able
the undefined nature of Odette although it has become his main
The same lack of application will keep him later from discoveri
Proustian law: that the birth of love depends not on meeting a p
but purely on the emotional state of the subject at the time of th
he was to love Mme de Cambremer not because his lucky sta
Mme de Saint-Euverte's concert, but because he no longer lov

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554 Proust's 'Un Amour de Swann'

Qui salt meme, dans le cas ou, ce soir-la, il se fut trouve ailleurs, si d'autres bonheurs,
d'autres chagrins ne lui seraient pas arrives, et qui ensuite lui eussent paru avoir 6t6 inevi-
tables? Mais ce qui lui semblait l'avoir 6te, c'6tait ce qui avait eu lieu, et il n'6tait pas loin
de voir quelque chose de providentiel dans ce fait qu'il se fut decide a aller a la soiree de
Mme de Saint-Euverte, parce que son esprit, d6sireux d'admirer la richesse d'invention de la
vie et incapable de se poser longtemps une question difficile, comme de savoir ce qui eut
dte le plus a souhaiter, consid6rait dans les souffrances qu'il avait eprouvees ce soir-la et les
plaisirs encore insoupconnds qui germaient d6ja - et entre lesquels la balance dtait trop
difficile a etablir- une sorte d'enchainement necessaire. (I, 381)

This passage, in which it is the narrator who has to suggest the insight which
Swann misses, should be contrasted with another one in Le Cote de Guermantes, where
the narrator, while relating an episode in his own life, announces how he would
later think back on the beginning of his greatest love and realize that it could have
been directed towards another woman, that no necessity predetermines our loves:
Combien y en a-t-il dans nos souvenirs, combien plus dans notre oubli, de ces visages de
jeunes filles et de jeunes femmes, tous diff6rents, et auxquels nous n'avons ajoute du charme et
un furieux ddsir de les revoir que parce qu'ils s'dtaient au dernier moment ddrobds!...
Ce ne fut pas [Mme de Stermaria] que j'aimai, mais c'aurait pu etre elle. Et une des choses
qui me rendirent peut-etre le plus cruel le grand amour que j'allais bient6t avoir, ce fut, en
me rappelant cette soir6e, de me dire qu'il aurait pu, si de tres simples circonstances avaient
6et modifi6es, se porter ailleurs, sur Mme de Stermaria; applique a celle qui me l'inspira si
peu apres, il n'dtait donc pas - comme j'aurais pourtant eu si envie, si besoin de le croire -
absolument ndcessaire et predestine. (II, 393)

In this second passage, Proust juxtaposes three states of consciousness in the

narrator: the writer, the man who loves and thinks back, the man who does not
yet love. Moreover, he draws the reader in, to become the fourth presence, by his
formulation of the general law which is being deduced: how often do 'we' fall in
love only because 'we' have been refused.
Thus, the narrator has to intervene repeatedly from the outside and formulate
what Swann only feels obscurely. When he himself is in love, when he is jealous,
however, he searches for the generality behind the specific events, even as he lives
them. The 'past' which Swann's love puts at his disposal will serve him as a model
to which he will assimilate his own experience. As time passes, he will integrate the
observations about the loves of all those he knows. If the discovery of laws at times
modifies his behaviour (I, 925), it does not bring him happiness, as is apparent in
the passage which we have just discussed, where the illusion that love is predestined
might have made his unhappy love easier to bear. But because he looks consciously
at the moment he is living, he will later be able to relive it with less pain (III, 904-5).
Most importantly, the multiple juxtapositions lend truth and an added dimension
to what in Swann's case must remain the experience of only one man at a single
moment.

Proust has given Swann all the gifts he would need and several oppo
to transcend the immediate, but he never takes advantage of them. Hi
gift is, of course, his sensitivity to art. It is from Swann that the narrato
see in the people he meets incarnations of paintings or sculptures. But Swa
to stop at the perception of resemblances. After Swann has noticed th
quality of Odette's features it is again the narrator who has to intervene:
Peut-etre, ayant toujours garde un remords d'avoir borne sa vie aux relations mo
la conversation, croyait-il trouver une sorte d'indulgent pardon a lui accorde par
artistes, dans ce fait qu'ils avaient eux aussi considere avec plaisir, fait entre

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 ELEONORE M. ZIMMERMANN 555

aeuvre, de tels visages qui donnent a celle-ci un singulier certificat de

saveur moderne; peut-etre aussi s'6tait-il tellement laisse gagner par la
monde qu'il dprouvait le besoin de trouver dans une ceuvre ancienne c
et rajeunissantes a des noms propres d'aujourd'hui. Peut-etre, au con
suffisamment une nature d'artiste pour que ces caract6ristiques indivi
du plaisir en prenant une signification plus gdn6rale, des qu'il les ap
ddlivrdes, dans la ressemblance d'un portrait plus ancien avec un origi
tait pas. Quoi qu'il en soit, et peut-etre parce que la plenitude d'im
depuis quelque temps, et bien qu'elle lui ffit venue plut6t avec l'amour
enrichi meme son gout pour la peinture, le plaisir fut profond - et
Swann une influence durable, - qu'il trouva a ce moment-la dans la
avec la Z6phora [. . .] de Botticelli. (I, 223)

'Le plaisir fut profond', we are told. When talking about his
unexpected relationships, the narrator uses the word 'joie'.
involuntary memory, in the discovery of the essence of thin
hawthorns - becomes in several instances of the narrator's lif
for an investigation. It is that joy which will eventually lead him
of the nature of his vocation as a writer. But Swann will not
immediate impression of pleasure, which is 'perhaps' only due to
'more general significances' by 'the artist' in him. Instead of rais
of art, as did the painters he knows and loves so well, he degr
it into life: 'I la regardait; un fragment de la fresque apparais
et dans son corps, que des lors il chercha toujours a y retrou
aupres d'Odette, soit qu'il pensat seulement a elle' (i, 224). A r
Botticelli figure he sees in her serves as a photo of Odette on his
narrator knows the same temptations; to kiss Albertine is to tou
has fathered of maritime life. But before his lips touch her chee
them all, and finally very consciously kisses a multiplied, and
Albertine (II, 367).
Swann, then, cannot transcend life for art. It seems symbolic t
knows he will never regain Odette's love, he cannot leave her
Vermeer's paintings as he needs to do before proceeding with
him (I, 353). Yet Swann has not only the gift of seeing art; th
that he could have the gift of finding mysterious and revealing
metaphorical thinking. When he meets his old friend from pre-O
princesse de Laumes - and future duchess of Guermantes - he gre
following stream of concetti which leave all other listeners baffl
'Ah! ... voici la charmante princesse! Voyez, elle est venue tout ex
pour entendre le Saint Franfois d'Assise de Liszt et elle n'a eu le tem
m6sange, que d'aller piquer pour les mettre sur sa tete quelques petits
oiseaux et d'aub6pines; il y a meme encore de petites gouttes de r
ma chere princesse. (I, 340)
But to Swann metaphor is obviously a social game, not, as it
narrator, a means of discovering hidden truths (III, 889). Sinc
mood for games during most of the book, Proust, to keep the st
the protagonist's thinking, avoids using a language foreign
mind. As a result, Un Amour de Swann is almost completely
famous characteristic of Proust's style, the metaphor. It occur
is for some reason a spectator momentarily detached from th
when Odette prepares an orangeade for him and Forcheville

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 556 Proust's 'Un Amour de Swann'

he thinks that maybe she behaves in the same way in his absence. But usually he
lives immersed in the stream of time, incapable of watching its flow. Descriptions
of people, of landscapes, of social scenes, so common and so vivid in the rest of the
work, are also rare in this volume. Again Proust, following Swann's mood, allows
us to see onlywhen Swann is not too preoccupied to look around: the 'petit clan',
the habitues of Mme Verdurin's salon are described at great length before Swann
falls in love with Odette. The greatest scene, in fact, comes at the time when Swann
is first introduced to them. We do not see them again, although Swann and Odette
meet there every day, until the evening when Forcheville, whom Odette has
invited, is introduced, and Swann can be thought to watch everyone with a jealous
eye. Finally, the Verdurins reappear most vividly in Swann's imagination as he
thinks about a dinner from which he has been excluded. The only other major
descriptive passage occurs when Swann goes to the concert given by Mme de Saint-
Euverte where he pays such a pretty compliment to the future duchess of Guer-
mantes. Although he is in a world he has always known, he feels like an exile
because Odette is absent from it, and the distance this feeling creates between him
and his environment makes him aware of aspects of it he has never noticed before.
A wonderful series of sketches follows his entrance into the house (I, 322, et seqq.).
Thus the descriptions as well as the metaphors retrace the curve of Swann's
emotional development: at first, free from personal involvement, he can see
and observe the world which surrounds him. Then he becomes increasingly
preoccupied with his feelings, only darting a quick glance around in rare circum-
stances, as in a fit of jealousy. His world is limited to Odette. Only when she
rejects him, is he again led to look beyond her.
The world of the narrator is presented very differently. First of all, he does not
live his life before us, but relives and comments upon it. But we also see that he has
shown since childhood a disposition to reflect upon his feelings, to search for the
essences and laws behind the appearances (IIn, 878; in, Iooo). As a result, he does
not shy away from all thought and all images as Swann does, and the greater part
of the novel in which he is the protagonist differs profoundly in style from the
obsessive painting of Swann's anguish.'
And yet Un Amour de Swann is remembered for some of the most sustained
and the most breathtaking metaphorical descriptions Proust has ever written.
They are all linked to the recurrence of the 'petite phrase de Vinteuil'. This phrase
which Swann hears towards the beginning of his love for Odette at his first visit to
the salon of Mme Verdurin becomes the 'national anthem', to use Proust's phrase,
of their love because the hostess, 'la Patronne', has it played for him every evening.
That it should be this phrase which provides almost the only moment of meta-
phorical escape in so many pages is extremely significant. Indeed, the work of
Vinteuil represents the possibilities of art, in turn intuited, overlooked, refused and
unrealized, then triumphant.

1 Not that the narrator is less selfish than Swann. On the contrary, he probably is more so. Swann's
'gentillesse', his thoughtfulness is stressed repeatedly. He tries to put himself in Odette's place, to
think her thoughts, even when they do not relate directly to him. The narrator, on the other hand,
is resentful of every distraction which would keep him from looking into himself. The world with
which he presents us is his own inner world, and all things exterior are there only in so far as he has
made them his own.

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 ELEONORE M. ZIMMERMANN 557

Swann has heard the whole sonata of which the 'petite phrase' is a part before
meeting Odette and, contrarily to what will happen later to the less perceptive
narrator (I, 529), he has sensed from the first its newness and its beauty. But cir-
cumstances kept him from learning the name of the composer. When he comes to
the Verdurins, one movement of its adaptation for the piano is being performed,
after the 'Patronne' has seated him next to Odette and, significantly, he now learns
the name of the music which has moved him so deeply. The emotions which he felt
when he first heard the sonata invade him again: the vision it now evokes in him is
juxtaposed to this memory. He will hear the same andante again every night and
there are several beautiful descriptions of his feelings as he listens to it. But the
sonata will forever remain truncated in Odette's presence. Swann only hears the
piano version, and Odette insists he only needs to hear the one movement which she
even sometimes clumsily performs herself. It is not until he goes by himself to the
soiree of Mme de Saint-Euverte that he hears the full sonata played by a piano and a
violin.
The 'petite phrase' contains the seed of a work of art similar to A la recherche du
temps perdu, but which Swann was incapable of cultivating. It does contain the
possibility of memory: as the madeleine recalls in the narrator the sick-room of Tante
Leonie and therewith the whole magic of his childhood days in Combray, the
phrase could contain Swann's whole love for Odette and all its circumstances.
In fact he will, many years later, recall episodes of this love when he hears it again
in the presence of the narrator (I, 345-53), but this does not lead to further revela-
tions, no more than the irrepressible surge of involuntary memory which leaves him
panting when he hears the sonata unexpectedly at Mme de Saint-Euverte's, and
finds himself confronted with the happier self he once was.
The episode at Mme de Saint-Euverte's soiree foreshadows the matinee at the
princesse de Guermantes's which occurs at the close of the novel. The narrator,
like Swann, returns to society after an absence and disaffection which in his case
has lasted several years. He will experience the shock of the unfamiliarity of the
familiar even more strongly than Swann. As Swann hears the sonata and finds
himself faced with his past, the narrator experiences the well-known series of
involuntary memories. But there the resemblances end. Swann only learns from
his experience what he had refused to acknowledge (I, 32I), that Odette's love
for him is dead (I, 353). The narrator discovers the laws of art. While Swann in
his passivity does not go beyond the memory, and therefore only learns of the
death of the past, the narrator, searching for the hidden meaning of his experience,
comes to the conclusion that the past is alive, that he can make it live again in art,
and indeed can make the past give life to the present.
What Swann has been incapable of doing the narrator will do. And again the
'petite phrase' will serve as a symbol. While it has only been given to Swann to
hear the sonata in which it appears, the narrator will hear it in a septuor, many
years later. There can be little doubt that this work, with its recurring, persistent
themes and many variations, is a symbol of A la recherche. One of the main themes
of the novel, the theme of love, is born with Swann and appropriated, as is the
'petite phrase', by the creative narrator of the book. To carry a multiplicity of
meanings linking love and creation Proust has ordained for the 'petite phrase' a
complex fate. It was written by Vinteuil, the symbol of fatherly love, of total
devotion, literally unto death, to his seemingly unworthy but basically uncorrupted

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558 Proust's 'Un Amour de Swann'

daughter. It then becomes enriched by its association with the love of Sw

Odette which, Swann feels, it must somehow know and contain (I, 348)
narrator hears it at the height of his great love for Albertine, in its full bea
development, after it was touched by a third type of love: it is played
violinist Morel, the beloved of the baron de Charlus, after the pianist Dec
who had played its truncated version for Swann and Odette, has died (
Finally, it is the lesbian lover of Vinteuil's daughter who - partly as a w
atonement - resurrected the septuor, in which the 'petite phrase' is simultane
hidden and revealed, from the scattered manuscript notations of the com
Un Amour de Swann is, like the piano rendition of the 'petite phrase'
clumsy hands of Odette, only a fragment. Its world may seem rather du
dreary next to the richness and variety of the work as a whole where lif
often obsession, are both lived and seen and, most importantly, recreated
NEW YORK ELEONORE M. ZIMMERMANN

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