As promised, here is the inaugural post of my
In Search of Lost Time series. Where to begin?
With the cover, of course.
(Tangentially, I'm always intrigued as to how publishers decide what to place on the cover, whether it's well-known works of art or abstract expressionist paintings, but that's another story.)
My edition of Swann's Way (translation by C.K. Scott Moncrieff), the first volume of Marcel Proust's oeuvre, has this rumpled pillow and bed sheets as the cover art. The fabrics are all creamy white and the pillow, although bearing the indentations from a presumably just-awakened head, is full and inviting.
So what does this have to do with Proust? A lot, actually.
The first chapter is comprised of the narrator's recollections of his childhood visits to a small village in rural France, Combray. He begins by detailing his nightly ritual of going to bed and anticipating his mother's appearance to kiss him goodnight. Without this goodnight kiss, he cannot sleep, as one tortured episode attests; during one summer evening at Combray, the adult members of the family held a dinner party, and the presence of guests in the house prevented the narrator's mother from kissing him goodnight. Terribly upset, the narrator spends the hours past his bedtime in contriving how to get his mother to come up to his room so he can see her again and fall asleep. He first calls for the maid, Francoise, and hands her a desperate note claiming that he is ill and needs his mother's immediate attention. His mother, of course, sees through this manipulative note and sends the maid back with no answer-- a rather cold refusal of her son's request. This sends the narrator into despair, and he vows to stay awake until the guests leave, go out into the hallway and intercept his mother on her way to bed. He does this, and his mother is angry for a moment, until she realizes how upset her son is and decides to sleep in his room and comfort him. The boy cries himself sick, overcome with emotion as his mother recognizes and validates that he is of a very sensitive, nervous nature. Until then, his emotional variations had caused his family members to regard him as weak and in need of stricter discipline, but in this episode, he discovers that his sensitivity isn't shameful. Rather, he experiences things more intensely than many others and he is only now beginning to comprehend his own mind and emotional states.
Beyond the obvious connections with sleep in that scene of the goodnight kiss, the first chapter takes place at a pivotal moment in the narrator's life; he's about 11 or 12 years old in the first part of this volume, on the cusp of adolescence, at the dawning of a new consciousness of himself and the world around him. He is, in a sense, just now awakening, as his intellectual life becomes richer and more complex, as he loses some of his childish innocence and realizes that many of the people around him are not simply the image that they wish to project, but lead separate lives (both separate social lives outside of his family's circle and distinct inner lives), of which he is only tangentially aware.
For instance, the narrator's Aunt Leonie is supposedly an invalid, unable to leave the two rooms that she occupies in Combray. She is pious in her sufferings, which include never sleeping, hardly eating, and having such a weak constitution that she can only speak in hushed tones. Yet the narrator discovers her talking to herself, often quite animatedly, reminding herself of the image she has constructed of her own life (he recalls her saying, "I must remember, I never slept a wink" and occasionally catches her waking up in the grips of a nightmare). More intriguing is that Aunt Leonie often gives voice to her fantastic imaginings when she believes that no one else is around, delivering fervent, vituperative monologues in an imagined confrontation with a friend, whom she suspects is disloyal, or with the maid Francoise, whom she suspects is scheming for her money. She often fantasizes about some "domestic calamity" interrupting her life, destroying the house at Combray and killing her entire family, leaving her as the sole survivor. In these fantasies, she imagines herself venturing outside to the church at the town's center and delivering the eulogies for her family, shocking the entire population with her strength through such an ordeal. She rehearses such scenarios in her mind periodically when her routine existence becomes oppressive. Even the sedate, sickly Aunt Leonie lives a rather separate life in her own mind, one of passions and intense emotions that she would never admit, but which need to be expressed. Later on, a friend of the narrator suggests that Aunt Leonie had been a passionate younger woman, a claim so shocking that the boy was no longer allowed at the family's house at Combray. Yet there is evidence, in Aunt Leonie's turbulent fantasies, that her current state of repose is not the whole of her existence, and that her very illness is a complete fabrication (she does in deed sleep, quite often, she has many appetites, both physical and emotional, which she sates in her inner world). The narrator is often surprised by these findings, realizing that the adults understand that Aunt Leonie is not really as sick as she says she is, that her fragility is of a more psychological nature than physical, but they accept her fictions without contradiction. They understand that she needs these fantasies, or at least believes that she does, and clings to them with such fervor that they realize attempts to dissuade her would be futile. There is still a sense that the narrator is unaware of a great deal of his family's relations and past, but he is gradually becoming more aware of the blurry line between reality and fantasy.
The narrator is entering a new dream, after being disabused of some of his youthful assumptions about his family and worldly matters such as actresses and supposedly glamorous people, through his own capacity for vivid fantasy. Much to his active grandmother's chagrin, he often retreats into his own mind, burying himself in books and poetry, fantasy lives, an imagined and idealized woman whom he loves with such passion that her lack of physical existence hardly deters his romantic longings. This fantasy world may be inchoate, and heavily influenced by what he reads, but it is an expression, an outpouring of his soul as it awakens to new sensations, desires, and intensities. In this sense, his comparative anonymity and vagueness is fitting; I'm uncertain of his exact age, and he does not identify himself by name, perhaps because he is recounting a time in which he is just now contemplating how to construct his identity.
In Swann's Way, identity is something assumed to be fixed, simple and immutable, but the narrator soon comes to learn that it is part fiction, part fact, and always based on an incomplete perception. In short, he is encountering subjectivity, both his own and that of others. The narrator learns that the titular associate of the family, Swann, is not all that he seems. In his family's snobbish middle-class estimation, Swann is a social inferior, and they do him the favor of accepting him graciously (although they are generally condescending in how they expect him to behave around them). Swann complies and even appears to be happy to fill that role for the sake of this upper-middle class family's pleasure and companionship. But, the narrator discovers that Swann has a much more varied social circle than he keeps in Combray; he is friendly with famous authors and artists, and lives a very fashionable life in Paris, of which the narraotr's family does not approve and functions as the reason why they consider him inferior. They are scandalized by Swann's wife, whom they hint was a prostitute, and pointedly exclude her from their society, and frequently bemoan the fact that a man of such a respectable background as Swann would willingly associate himself with such fringe characters.
The narrator, however, is in awe of Swann's lifestyle, I believe for the same reason that Aunt Leonie constructs her doomsday fantasies; there is the hint of eschewing the banalities of his everyday existence, so bound by the rules of propriety and routine, expectations and narrow definitions that constrain his desires and invalidate his longings for intense and novel experiences. At this stage in his life, the narrator is very fond of the theater and is in love with several actresses, although he has never set foot inside a theater. He has a thirst for drama, and much of the allure of the theater and the glamorous women who seduce his imagination from the playbills is derived from the fact that this world is forbidden. His parents do not allow him to attend plays because it isn't respectable; he has an uncle who associates with actresses, but is careful to hide these acquaintances from the family. Like many of the characters, this Uncle Adolphe leads a rather different life from that he presents to the middle-class sensibilities of his family.
At this point in the novel, I get the feeling that the narrator very much desires to shock and offend those refined sensibilities.
