In Search of Lost...

Thyme.

My first Proust entry was ridiculously huge, which isn't exactly the best way to write in the blog medium. Anyway, I'll try to be a bit more concise; I'm still getting the hang of this thing.

I've been reading some articles about Swann's Way today, and one, titled "Stylistic, Structural, and Thematic Transformations in Proust's Du cote de chez Swann" by Harold F. Mosher, Jr., highlighted the metafictional elements of the novel as aspects of the theme of "life as art." As I wrote in my previous post, the narrator and several other characters escape into fantasy worlds, and that the line between fantasy and reality is not always clear. Mosher expounds on this theme further, in relation to the romances between Swann and Odette, and the young narrator and Swann's daughter Gilberte. Both Swann and the narrator transform life into art through elevating their beloveds, and thereby largely fictionalizing them. Swann exhibits "willed blindness" to Odette's infidelity, and he transforms her from a demimondaine into his wife, a member of the aristocracy. Although Swann, and the narrator in relation to Gilberte, elevates his beloved to the level of a goddess, he occupies the role of creator, of a godlike figure with the power to shape this woman through his own imagination.

Swann's Way, in placing the narrator at that age where romantic longings are quite intense, has some elements of the fairy tale in it. Mosher identifies the three subdivisions within Swann's Way as examples of different types of romance; Part One is a pastoral romance, in which the narrator finds mystery and divinity in nature (and his desires are rather undifferentiated); Part Three is a heroic romance, with a specific object (Gilberte) and the narrator's religious reverence for her and his quest to obtain her love. Mosher claims that Part Two is a romantic comedy of manners, in which Swann confronts the reality of Odette compared with his idealized fantasies of her.

With Valentine's Day approaching, this is an apposite topic of discussion, one that I raised in my post on Tolstoy's story "The Kreutzer Sonata"; does love necessarily entail an element of fictionalization?

I think that, to a certain extent, we all fictionalize ourselves. We form abstractions, images, and narratives in order to organize our experiences and make sense of them. The transformation of life into art is a mode of comprehending our experiences; the very act of reflecting on an experience requires it to be translated into narrative form, which is of course, a creation of art.

And so we do this with our individual love stories. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, and it doesn't mean that love is based on a falsehood. As Heidegger wrote, art and poetry function to reveal truth, they "unconceal" a person or an object's true being. That is, of course, how art should ideally function; there is art that is more divorced from truth (as I'm sure all of us can agree upon recalling some embarrassing and nonsensical middle school crushes and imagined romances such as Proust's narrator). But, I think that in our artistic renditions of our own love stories, the images that we must create of a loved person in order to comprehend them, do function to reveal the truth of what is best in that individual. Whether art reveals truth in the romances in Swann's Way, however, remains to be seen.