Swann's Way: In Search of Lost Time, Volume One

“So much did I love that good night that I reached the stage of hoping that it would come as late as possible, so as to prolong the time of respite during which Mamma would not yet have appeared.”

For Marcel, time is not objective. Emotion influences time to such an extent that the wait for his mother’s goodnight kiss can feel like infinity. He infuses the moment with such an emotional significance that he seeks to delay her arrival, hoping to unburden himself of the anxiety that the kiss will not come again. The anxiety in anticipation of the kiss and the fear that it might arrive too soon illustrate the elastic way in which Marcel perceives time, depending on his emotional state.

“I was conscious that it was not connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savors, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs.”

Marcel dips a small cake in tea and feels overwhelmed by a rush of emotion. The moment is a shock to Marcel, but it clarifies his existence. He has always been a sentimental person and now he is attuned to the relationship between his senses and his sentimentality. He explores the sensation, plunging deeper into the relationship between his emotional past and his physical present.

“The leaves, which had lost or altered their own appearance, assumed those instead of the most incongruous things imaginable.”

The tea leaves in the cup unfurl in the same way that the memories of Marcel’s past unfold depending on his physical conditions. The leaves are placed into boiling water, which opens them, revealing their inner truth to the world. They become “the most incongruous things imaginable”, just as Marcel’s memories unfurl and overwhelm him when they are subjected to a change in his physical condition, his environment, or something else that might trigger his thoughts.

“At this date I was a lover of the theater: a Platonic lover, of necessity, since my parents had not yet allowed me to enter one.”

At a young age, Marcel declares that he is a lover of the theater. He says this even though he has never stepped inside such a building, let alone seen a play. As a youngster, Marcel lacks access to the world of adults. He is restricted to the role of the observer, attempting to understand himself, his world, and the arts from an exterior position. His attachment to the theatre is sincere and intense, but it is built on imagination.

“Did, each of them, once in his life, compose a line which is not only fairly rhythmical, but has also what is in my eyes the supreme merit of meaning absolutely nothing.”

Bloch makes Marcel speculate on the nature of art, wondering whether a poem that means “absolutely nothing” could ever be beautiful. Marcel is still young when he hears this opinion, and it stays with him for many years. Though he does not explicitly answer, the nature of his narration suggests that he disagrees with Bloch. Marcel searches relentlessly for meaning. He reflects on his memories, trying to find meaning in every gesture, action, word, and experience. As the narrator, Marcel provides a novel-length rebuke of his childhood friend.

“But with his intense prudishness he had given up coming, so as not to be obliged to meet Swann.”

Manners and etiquette are highly valued during this era. Swann is in a strange position in that he is of a higher social class than many characters, and he fraternizes with aristocrats, yet he is judged for the rumors and gossip that follow his wife. Characters do not know whether to believe these scandalous rumors and judge Swann accordingly. Rather than think too hard, Vinteuil resolves the issue by simply avoiding Swann.

“I began gradually to realize that Françoise’s kindness, her compunction, the sum total of her virtues concealed many of these back-kitchen tragedies, just as history reveals to us that the reigns of the kings and queens who are portrayed as kneeling with clasped hands in the windows of churches, were stand by oppression and bloodshed.”

Marcel is the product of a middle-class household. He is so invested in his stories about heroic aristocrats and the experiences of the adults around him that the revelation that working-class people also lead fulfilling and worthwhile lives is shocking to him. Marcel presents this as a wry, childish revelation but the dismissal of the authentic lives of working-class people is evident in the behavior of middle-class people like Aunt Léonie. Not every middle-class person undergoes Marcel’s revelation.

“I had invested each of them, by conceiving them in this way as two distinct entities, with that cohesion, that unity which belongs only to the figments of the mind; the smallest detail of either of them appeared to me as a precious thing, which exhibited the special excellence of the whole.”

In reviewing his memories, Marcel comprehends the way he must use small details to inform him about larger truths. Marcel believes that the universe is too vast and complex for him to understand. Instead, he does his best to extrapolate meaning from small details. These fragments of understanding can teach him about the “special excellence of the whole.”

“So it came to me, uttered across the heads of the stocks and jasmines, pungent and cool as the drops which fell from the green watering pipe.”

Marcel’s first meeting with Gilberte is a pivotal moment in his life. Given the importance of their relationship, Marcel makes a special effort to document every sensation and feeling he experienced. The sights and smells, the sensation of the “pungent and cool” atmosphere help Marcel to fix this memory in his mind. The most pivotal moments in Marcel’s life are those in which he has the most sensory memories, both because the overwhelming sensations make them important and because Marcel wants to fix them in his memory by forcibly documenting every sensation.

“There is probably no one, however rigid his virtue, who is not liable to find himself, by the complicity of his circumstances, living at close quarters with the very vice which he himself has been most outspoken in condemning.”

Marcel accepts that humanity is flawed. His stories and memories depict no one without fault, including himself. Hypocrisy, Marcel states, is a natural part of life. Everyone he meets is a hypocrite in some fashion, so Marcel is unwilling to denigrate anyone for not matching their behaviors to their stated beliefs. Marcel at least acknowledges his hypocrisy.

“I could see that she had a real existence independent of myself, acquired a fresh increase of power over my imagination, which, paralyzed for a moment by contact with a reality so different from anything that it had expected, began to react.”

Marcel’s dedication to Sensation and Sentimentality is so complete that, during a highly emotional moment, he feels almost frozen with sensory overload. The blend of an important emotional interaction and the sensory input of the world leaves him feeling “paralyzed.” Marcel’s gift for remembering the sensations of his past is also a curse, leaving him immobile in some of the most important moments of his life.

“You are afraid of falling in love?”

Odette’s comment to Swann is heavy with foreboding. She almost goads him into falling in love with her. Swann should be afraid of falling in love because his relationship with Odette will scandalize society and depress him. At the same time, Odette should be afraid of Swann falling in love with her because his love will become an obsession from which she will be unable to escape.

“So in his conversation he took care never to express with any warmth a personal opinion about a thing, but instead would supply facts and details which had a value of a sort in themselves, and excused him from showing how much he really knew.”

Swann possesses a form of arrogant modesty. When speaking with others, he hides his true feelings as he fears that his intelligence and knowledge will expose their lack of understanding. This patronizing approach to social interaction suggests that Swann wants to appear modest while believing himself smarter than those around him. He arrogantly assumes that his opinions are too powerful for the insipid people who surround him.

“And yet possibly this particular manner of saying ‘to make love’ had not the precise significance of its synonyms.”

Marcel, an aspiring writer and the narrator of the novel, understands the intersection between language and love. To him, the term “to make love” is an inadequate way to express the act of sex and the emotional significance contained in it. Synonyms for this term exist, each of them revealing a slightly different dimension of the act, but each one is inadequate. Even though he is a writer, Marcel accepts that there are no words that can convey the total emotional meaning of sex and love.

“What depressing lie was she now concocting for Swann’s benefit”

Swann does not know whether Odette is lying, but reality has become irrelevant. His jealousy and his paranoia have become a substitute for the truth. He becomes convinced that Odette must be lying, even if he cannot describe exactly how she is lying. The situation is parallel to the time when Swann fell in love with an idea of Odette, rather than Odette herself. He obsesses over the idea of a lie, rather than a specific lie.

“I’m paying for other men’s pleasures with my money.”

Swann’s way of managing his rising suspicion is to recast his jealousy as generosity. He wants to find a positive perspective on his relationship with Odette, so he wryly assures himself that he is performing an act of kindness and generosity to the slew of lovers that he believes her to be entertaining. This perspective ignores Odette’s agency or desires. Instead, her life becomes an extension of Swann’s thoughts and feelings.

“His love extended a long way beyond the province of physical desire.”

To Swann, sex is almost inconsequential. He is convinced that his relationship with Odette has moved beyond physical pleasures. He perceives this emotional desire as a world beyond the physical, a world that captivates him. For Swann, this region of emotional pleasure is a physical place to be explored, conquered, and built upon. In this sense, the province of physical desire and the province of emotional desire are essentially the same.

“It was only by directly contrasting what she was to-day with what she had been at first that he could have measured the extent of the change that had taken place.”

Like Marcel, Swann is a sentimental man who understands the power of memory. He uses his memory of Odette to soothe his troubled soul. By remembering her as she was before, he can create a nostalgic pleasure that alleviates the pain of his present. Swann, like Marcel, uses the juxtaposition of memories and emotions to comfort himself.

“But suddenly it was as though she had entered, and this apparition tore him with such anguish that his hand rose impulsively to his heart.”

Swann’s sonata is the antithesis of Marcel’s madeleine. When Marcel tastes the madeleine, he is transported back to a warm moment in his past. This memory provides him with joy and comfort. When Swann hears the sonata, he is shaken with a different jolt of emotion and memory. The memory is not comforting. The sonata that once brought him so much joy now reminds him of how much he has lost. The sonata is equally powerful, but it functions negatively.

“He imagined what was kept secret from him in the light of what was revealed.”

Swann comes to understand his situation with Odette through contrasts. He can only guess the secrets by examining what he knows to be true, seeing the dark secrets in the light of what he understands. This process of creating deliberate juxtapositions shows how much the calm, meticulous Swann has been changed by his relationship with Odette.

“To think that I have wasted years of my life, that I have longed for death, that the greatest love that I have ever known has been for a woman who did not please me, who was not in my style!”

Swann suddenly realizes that he has spent a long time pursuing a woman who has no interest in him. This revelation is ironic, as Swann still marries Odette. Marcel describes a future in which Swann and Odette are locked in an unhappy marriage for the sake of a child. For all the insight and the suddenness of Swann’s revelation, he still married Odette.

“And besides, even from the point of view of mere quantity, in our life the days are not equal.”

Days are a unit of measurement. They are composed of a number of hours, minutes, and seconds. Marcel believes in the subjective nature of time, however, so he suggests that the “days are not equal.” The emotional experiences that take place during each day drastically alter the way people perceive the days. Days can seem longer or shorter, depending on a person’s experiences. The changing, nuanced complexity of emotional experience is so powerful that it changes something as simple and as universal as the length of a day.

“They were just women, in whose elegance I had no belief, and whose clothes seemed to me unimportant.”

Marcel reflects on the people he once knew and considers them now to be distant and unknowable, as well as irrelevant. They are consigned to his past, figments of his memory that are locked away and distant. The people who pass before him now are not the same people that he remembers. They, like Marcel himself, have been changed by their lives and their experiences, so much so that comparing their present to their past selves would only reveal how little he truly understands them.