Lectures on Literature

by Nabokov, Vladimir

  The body's memory would then take over, and "would make an effort to deduce first from the form which its tiredness took the orientation of its various members, and then to deduce from that where the wall lay and the furniture stood, to piece together and to give a name to the house in which it must be living. The body's memory, the composite memory of its ribs, knees, and shoulder-blades, offered it a whole series of rooms in which it had at one time or another slept; while the unseen walls kept changing, adapting themselves to the shape of each successive room that it remembered, whirling through the darkness. And even before my brain, hesitating on the threshold of time and forms, had collected sufficient impressions to enable it to identify the room, it, my body would recall from each room in succession what the bed was like, where the doors were, how daylight came in the windows, whether there was a passage outside, what I had had in my mind when I went to sleep, and had found there when I awoke." We go through a succession of rooms and their metaphors. For a moment he is a child again in a big bed with a canopy, "and at once I would say to myself, 'Why, I must have gone to sleep after all, and Mamma never came to say good night!' " At such a moment he was back in the country with his grandfather, who had died years ago. Then he is at Gilberte's house (she is now Mme. de Saint-Loup) in Swann's old house in Tansonville, and in a succession of rooms in winter and in summer. Finally he actually wakes up in present time (as a man) in his own house in Paris, but his memory having been set in motion: "usually I did not attempt to go to sleep again at once, but used to spend the greater part of the night recalling our life in the old days at Combray with my great-aunt, at Balbec, Paris, Donciéres, Venice, and the rest; recalling all the places and people that I had known, what I had actually seen of them, and what others had told me."

  Then with this mention of Combray, he is once more in his childhood and back in the time of the narrative: "At Combray, as every afternoon ended, long before the time when I should have to go up to bed, and to lie there, unsleeping, far from my mother and grandmother, my bedroom became the fixed point on which my melancholy and anxious thoughts were centered." When he was especially wretched, the time before dinner was occupied by a magic lantern telling a medieval tale of the evil Golo and the good Genevieve de Brabant (a forerunner of the Duchess de Guermantes). This magic lantern "movement," or "event," becomes connected by the dining-room lamp to the little parlor where the family would adjourn after dinner on wet evenings, and the rain then serves to introduce his grandmother—the most noble and pathetic character in the book—who would insist on walking in the wet garden. Swann is introduced: "we heard, from the far end of the garden, not the profuse and shrill bell which drenched and stunned with its icy, rusty, interminable sound any passing member of the household who set it going by pushing through 'without ringing,' but the double peal—timid, oval, golden—of the visitor's bell.... and then, soon after, my grandfather would say: 'I can hear Swann's voice.' ... Although a far younger man, M. Swann was very much attached to my grandfather, who had been an intimate friend, in his time, of Swann's father, an excellent but an eccentric man in whom the least little thing would, it seemed, often check the flow of his spirits and divert the current of his thoughts." Swann is a man of fashion, an art expert, an exquisite Parisian greatly in vogue in the highest society; but his Combray friends, the narrator's family, have no idea of his position and think of him only as the son of their old friend, the stockbroker. One of the elements of the book is the various ways in which a person is seen by various eyes, as for instance Swann through the prism of Marcel's great aunt's notions: "One day when he had come to see us after dinner in Paris, and had apologized for being in evening clothes, Françoise [the cook], when he had gone, told us that she had got it from his coachman that he had been dining 'with a princess.' 'Some princess of the demi-monde, a courtesan,' drawled my aunt;' and she shrugged her shoulders without raising her eyes from her knitting, serenely ironical."

  One essential difference exists between the Proustian and the Joycean methods of approaching their characters. Joyce takes a complete and absolute character, God-known, Joyce-known, then breaks it up into fragments and scatters these fragments over the space-time of his book. The good rereader gathers these puzzle pieces and gradually puts them together. On the other hand, Proust contends that a character, a personality, is never known as an absolute but always as a comparative one. He does not chop it up but shows it as it exists through the notions about it of other characters. And he hopes, after having given a series of these prisms and shadows, to combine them into an artistic reality.

  The introduction ends with Marcel's description of his despair when visitors forced him to say goodnight downstairs and his mother would not come up to his bedroom for a goodnight kiss; and the story proper begins with a particular arrival of Swann: "We were all in the garden when the double peal of the gate-bell sounded shyly. Everyone knew that it must be Swann, and yet they looked at one another inquiringly and sent my grandmother scouting." The metaphor of the kiss is complex and will run through the whole work. "1 never took my eyes off my mother. I knew that when they were at table I should not be permitted to stay there for the whole of dinner-time, and that Mamma, for fear of annoying my father, would not allow me to give her in public the series of kisses that she would have had in my room. And so I promised myself that in the dining-room as they began to eat and drink and as I felt the hour approach, I would put beforehand into this kiss, which was bound to be so brief and stealthy in execution, everything that my own efforts could put into it: would look out very carefully first the exact spot on her cheek where I would imprint it, and would so prepare my thoughts that I might be able, thanks to these mental preliminaries, to consecrate the whole of the minute Mamma would allow me to the sensation of her cheek against my lips, as a painter who can have his subject for short sittings only prepares his palette beforehand, and from what he remembers and from rough notes does in advance everything which he can possibly do in the sitter's absence. But that night, before the dinner-bell had sounded, my grandfather said with unconscious ferocity: 'The little man looks tired; he'ld better go up to bed. Besides, we are dining late tonight.' ...

  "I was about to kiss Mamma, but at that moment the dinner-bell rang.

  " 'No, no, leave your mother alone. You've said good night quite enough. These exhibitions are absurd. Go on upstairs.' "

  The agony the young Marcel undergoes, the note he writes to his mother, his anticipation, and his tears when she does not appear foreshadow the theme of despairing jealousy he will endure, so that a direct connection is established between his emotions and Swann's emotions. He imagines that Swann would have laughed heartily could he have seen the contents of the letter to his mother, "whereas, on the contrary, as I was to learn in due course, a similar anguish had been the bane of his life for many years, and no one perhaps could have understood my feelings at that moment so well as himself; to him, that anguish which lies in knowing that the creature one adores is in some place of enjoyment where oneself is not and cannot follow—to him that anguish came through Love, to which it is in a sense predestined, by which it must be taken over and specialized.... And the joy with which I first bound myself apprentice when Françoise returned to tell me that my letter would be delivered, Swann, too, had known well that false joy which a friend can give us, or some relative of the woman we love, when on his arrival at the private house or theatre where she is to be found, for some ball or party or 'first night' at which he is to see her, he finds us wandering outside, desperately awaiting some opportunity of communicating with her. He recognises us, greets us familiarly, and asks what we are doing there. And when we invent a story of having some urgent message to give to her (his relative or friend), he assures us that nothing could be more simple, takes us in at the door, and promises to send her down to us in five minutes.... Alas! Swann had learned by experience that the good intentions of a third party are powerless to control a woman who is annoyed to find herself pursued even in
to a ball-room by a man whom she does not love. Too often, the kind friend comes down again alone.

  "My mother did not appear, but with no attempt to safeguard my self-respect (which depended upon her keeping up the fiction that she had asked me to let her know the result of my search for something or other) made Françoise tell me, in so many words 'There is no answer'—words I have so often, since then, heard the janitors of public dancing-halls and the flunkeys in gambling-clubs and the like, repeat to some poor girl, who replies in bewilderment: 'What! he's said nothing? It's not possible. You did give him my letter, didn't you? Very well, I shall wait a little longer.' And just as she invariably protects that she does not need the extra gas which the janitor offers to light for her, and sits on there ... so, having declined Françoises offer to make me some tisane or to stay beside me, I let her go off again to the servants' hall, and lay down and shut my eyes, and tried not to hear the voices of my family who were drinking their after-dinner coffee in the garden."

  This episode is followed by a description of the moonlight and silence which perfectly illustrates Proust's working of metaphors within metaphors.

  The boy opens his window and sits on the foot of his bed, hardly daring to move lest he be heard by those below. (1) "Things outside seemed also fixed in mute expectation." (2) They seemed not to wish "to disturb the moonlight." (3) Now what was the moonlight doing? The moonlight duplicated every object and seemed to push it back owing to the forward extension of a shadow. What kind of a shadow? A shadow that seemed "denser and more concrete than the object" itself. (4) By doing all this the moonlight "made the whole landscape at once leaner and larger like [additional simile] a map which is unfolded and spread out" flat. (5) There was some movement: "What had to move—the leafage of some chestnut-tree, for instance—moved. But its punctilious shiver [what kind of shiver?] complete, finished to the least shade, to the least delicate detail [this fastidious shiver] did not encroach upon the rest of the scene, did not grade into it, remaining clearly limited"—since it happened to be illumined by the moon and all the rest was in shadow. (6) The silence and the distant sounds. Distant sounds behaved in relation to the surface of silence in the same way as the patch of moonlit moving leafage in relation to the velvet of the shade. The most distant sound, coming from "gardens at the far end of the town, could be distinguished with such exact 'finish,' that the impression they gave of remoteness [an additional simile follows] seemed due only to their 'pianissimo' execution [again a simile follows] like those movements on muted strings" at the Conservatory. Now those muted strings are described: "although one does not lose one single note," they come from "outside, a long way from the concert hall so that [and now we are in that concert hall] all the old subscribers, and my grandmother's sisters too, when Swann gave them his seats, used to strain their ears as if [final simile] they had caught the distant approach of an army on the march, which had not yet rounded the corner" of the street.

  The pictorial effects of moonlight change with era and author. There is a resemblance between Gogol, writing Dead Souls in 1840, and Proust composing this description about 1910. But Proust's description makes the metaphoric system still more complicated, and it is poetic, not grotesque. In describing a moonlit garden Gogol would also have used rich imagery, but his rambling comparisons would have turned the way of grotesque exaggeration and some beautiful bit of irrational nonsense. For instance, he might have compared the moonlit effect to linen fallen from a wash line, as he does somewhere in Dead Souls; but then he might ramble away and say the moonlight on the ground was like sheets and shirts that the wind had scattered while the washerwoman peacefully slept, dreaming of suds and starch and the pretty new frock her sister-in-law had bought. In Proust's case the peculiar point is that he drifts from the idea of pale light to that of remote music—the sense of vision grades into the sense of hearing.

  But Proust had a precursor. In part six, chapter 2, of Tolstoy's War and Peace (1864-1869) Prince Andrey stays at the country manor of an acquaintance, Count Rostov. He cannot sleep. I have slightly revised Garnett: "Prince Andrey left his bed and went up to the window to open it. As soon as he had unfolded its shutters, the moonlight broke into the room as if it had been waiting a long time outside on the watch for such a chance. He opened the window. The night was cool and motionlessly luminous. The trimmed trees that stood in a row just in front of the window were black on one side and silvery bright on the other.... Beyond them was [some kind of] a roof all shining with dew. On the right stood a great thick-leaved tree, its bole and branches a brilliant white, and overhead an almost full moon was riding the starless spring sky.

  "Presently at the window of the floor above him he hears two young feminine voices—one of them belongs to Natasha Rostov—singing and repeating a musical phrase.... A little later Natasha leans out of that window above and he hears the rustle of her dress and the sound of her breathing," and "The sounds became still like the moon and the shadows."

  Three things are to be noted in Tolstoy as foreglimpses of Proust:

  1. The expectancy of the moonlight lying in wait (a pathetic fallacy). Beauty ready to rush in, a fawning and dear creature at the moment it is perceived by the human mind.

  2. The clearcut quality of the description, a landscape firmly etched in silver and black, with no conventional phrases and with no borrowed moons. It is all real, authentic, sensuously seen.

  3. The close association of the visible and the heard, of shadow light and shadow sound, of ear and eye.

  Compare these to the evolution of the image in Proust. Notice the elaboration of the moonlight in Proust, the shadows that come out of the light like the drawers of a chest, and the remoteness and the music.

  The various layers and levels of sense in Proust's own metaphors are interestingly illustrated by the description of his grandmother's method of selecting gifts. First layer: "She would have liked me to have in my room photographs of ancient buildings or of the most beautiful landscapes. But at the moment of buying them, and for all that the subject of the picture had an aesthetic value of its own, she would find that vulgarity and utility had too prominent a part in them, through the mechanical nature of their reproduction by photography. [Second layer.] She attempted by a subterfuge, if not to eliminate altogether their commercial banality, at least to minimise it, to substitute for the bulk of it what was art still, to introduce, as it might be, several 'layers' of art; instead of photographs of Chartres Cathedral, of the Fountains of Saint-Cloud, or of Vesuvius she would inquire of Swann if some great painter had not made pictures of them, and preferred to give me photographs of 'Chartres Cathedral' after Corot, of the 'Fountains of Saint-Cloud' after Hubert Robert, and of 'Vesuvius' after Turner, and this brought her present up to an additional stage in the scale of art. [Third layer:] But although the photographer had been prevented from reproducing directly the masterpieces or the beauties of nature, and had there been replaced by a great artist, he was there again, in possession of his rights, when it came to reproducing the artist's interpretation. Accordingly, having to reckon again with vulgarity, my grandmother would endeavour to make it recede still farther. She would ask Swann if the picture had not been engraved, [fourth layer:] preferring, when possible, old engravings with some interest of association apart from themselves, such, for example, as shew us a masterpiece in a state in which we can no longer see it today, as Morghen's print of the 'Last Supper' of Leonardo before it was spoiled by restoration." The same method was followed when she made presents of antique furniture or when she gave Marcel the old-fashioned novels of George Sand (1804-1876) written fifty years before.

  With his mother reading to him—from these George Sand novels—the first bedtime theme ends. These first sixty pages of the English translation are complete in themselves and contain most of the stylistic elements found throughout the novel. As Derrick Leon remarks: "Enriched by his remarkable and comprehensive culture, by his deep love and understanding of classical literature, of music and of
painting, the whole work displays a wealth of similes derived with an equal aptness and facility from biology, from physics, from botany, from medicine, or from mathematics, that never ceases to astonish and delight."

  Nabokov's annotations on Marcel's recollection of the madeleine

  The next six pages also form a complete episode, or theme, which in fact serves as a foreword to the Combray part of the novel's narrative. This episode, which can be titled "The Miracle of the Linden Blossom Tea," is the famous recollection of the madeleine. These pages start with a metaphorical summary of the first, or bedtime theme. "And so it was that, for a long time afterwards, when I lay awake at night and revived old memories of Combray, I saw no more of it than this sort of luminous wedge, sharply defined against a vague and shadowy background, like the triangles of light which a Bengal fire or some electric sign will bring out and dissect on the front of a building the other parts of which remain plunged in darkness: at the broadest base of this wedge there was the little parlour, the dining-room, the thrill of the dark path along which would come M. Swann, the unconscious author of my sufferings, the hall through which I would journey to the first step of that staircase; so hard to climb, which constituted, all by itself, the tapering part of that irregular pyramid; and, at the summit, my bedroom, with the little passage through whose glazed door Mamma would enter...."