Lectures on Literature

by Nabokov, Vladimir

  It is important to recognize that the significance of these memories is at this time, even as they accumulate, lost on the narrator. "It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture [the past]: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die." It is only at the last party, in the final volume of the whole work, that the narrator, by then an old man of fifty, received in rapid succession three shocks, three revelations (what present-day critics would call an epiphany)—the combined sensations of the present and recollections of the past—the uneven cobbles, the tingle of a spoon, the stiffness of a napkin. And for the first time he realizes the artistic importance of this experience.

  In the course of his life the narrator had experienced several such shocks, however, without then recognizing their importance. The first of these is the madeleine. One day when he was a man of, say, thirty, long after the days spent in Combray as a child, "one day in winter, as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent out for one of those stubby, plump little cakes called 'petites madeleines,' which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim's shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through me, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place in me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity an illusion—this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling "me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this mighty joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?"

  Further mouthfuls begin to lose their magic. Marcel puts down the cup and compels his mind to examine the sensation until he is fatigued. After a rest he resumes the concentration of all his energies. "I place in position before my mind's eye the still recent taste of that first mouthful, and I feel something start within me, something that leaves its resting-place and attempts to rise, something that is loosened like an anchor that had been embedded at a great depth; I do not know yet what it is, but I can feel it mounting slowly; 1 can measure the resistance, I can hear the confused echo of great spaces traversed." There is a further struggle to clarify from the sensation of taste the visual memory of the occasion in the past that gave rise to the experience. "And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little bit of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before church-time), when 1 went to say good day to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or of lime-flower infusion....

  "And once I had recognised the taste of the bit of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden.... And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little bits of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and acquiring substance, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea."

  This is the end of the second theme and the magical introduction to the Combray section of the volume. For the larger purposes of the work as a whole, however, attention must be called to the confession, "although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy." Other recalls of the past will come from time to time in this work, also making him happy, but their significance is never apprehended until, extraordinarily, in the final volume the series of shocks to his senses and to his memories fuse into one great apprehension and, triumphantly—to repeat—he realizes the artistic importance of his experience and so can begin to write the great account of In Search of Lost Time.

  Nabokov's map of the streets of Combray in his teaching copy of Swann's Way

  The section titled "Combray" comes in a part of the book devoted to this Aunt Léonie—her room, her relationship with Françoise the cook, her interest in the life of the town in which she could not join physically, being an invalid. These are easy pages to read. Note Proust's system. For a hundred and fifty pages before her casual death, Aunt Léonie is the center in the web from which radiations go to the garden, to the street, to the church, to the walks around Combray, and every now and then back to Aunt Léonie's room.

  Leaving his aunt to gossip with Françoise, Marcel accompanies his parents to church and the famous description of the church of Saint-Hilaire at Combray follows, with all its iridescent reflections, its fantasies of glass and of stone. When the name of Guermantes is mentioned for the first time, that romantically noble family emerges from the inner colors of the church. "Two tapestries of high warp represented the coronation of Esther (in which tradition would have it that the weaver had given to Ahasuerus the features of one of the kings of France and to Esther those of a lady of Guermantes whose lover he had been); their colours had melted into one another, so as to add expression, relief, light to the pictures." One need not repeat that since Proust had invented the whole Guermantes family he could not specify the king. We inspect the inside of the church and then we are outside again; and here begins the lovely theme of the steeple—the steeple that is seen from everywhere, "inscribing its unforgettable form upon a horizon beneath which Combray had not yet appeared," as when one approached by train. "And on one of the longest walks we ever took from Combray there was a spot where the narrow road emerged suddenly on to an immense plain, closed at the horizon by strips of forest over which rose and stood alone the fine point of Saint-Hilaire's steeple, but so sharpened and so pink that it seemed to be no more than sketched on the sky by the finger-nail of a painter anxious to give such a landscape, to so pure a piece of 'nature,' this little sign of art, this single indication of human existence." The whole of the description merits careful study. There is an intense vibration of poetry about the whole passage, about the purple spire rising above the jumbled roofs, a kind of pointer to a series of recollections, the exclamation mark of tender memory.

  A simple transition leads us to a new character. We have been to church, - we are on our way home, and we often meet M. Legrandin, a civil engineer who would visit his Combray home on weekends. He is not only a civil engineer, he is also a man of letters and, as it gradually will appear through the book, the most perfect specimen of vulgar snob. On coming home we find Aunt Léonie again, who has a visitor, a certain energetic albeit deaf spinster, Eulalie. We are ready for a meal. The cooking abilities of Françoise are beautifully brought into juxtaposition with the artistic carving of the quatrefoils on the porches of thirteenth-century cathedrals. In other words,
the steeple is still with us, looming above the fancy food. The chocolate cream is to be marked. Taste buds play a very poetical part in Proust's system of reconstructing the past. This cream of chocolate was as "light and fleeting as an 'occasional piece' of music, into which [Françoise] had poured the whole of her talent.... To have left even the tiniest morsel in the dish would have shewn as much discourtesy as to rise and leave a concert hall while the 'piece' was still being played, and under the composer's very eyes."

  An important theme is taken up in the next pages, leading to one of the main ladies in the book, the lady whom we shall later know as Odette Swann, Swann's wife, but who in these pages appears as an anonymous earlier recollection of Marcel—the lady in pink. This is how her appearance is brought about. At one time an uncle lived in the same house in Combray, Uncle Adolphe, but he is no longer there. In his boyhood the author visited him in Paris and liked to discuss theatrical matters with him. Names of great actresses pop up with one invented character named Berma among them. Uncle Adolphe was apparently a gay dog, and on one rather embarrassing occasion Marcel meets there a young woman in a pink silk dress, a cocotte, a lady of light morals, whose love may be bought for a diamond or a pearl. It is this charming lady who is going to become Swann's wife; but her identity is a secret well kept from the reader.

  Back we go again to Combray and Aunt Léonie, who as a kind of household goddess dominates this whole part of the book. She is an invalid lady, somewhat grotesque, but also very pathetic, who is cut off from the world by sickness but is intensely curious about every piece of gossip in Combray. In a way she is a kind of parody, a grotesque shadow, of Marcel himself in his capacity of sick author spinning his web and catching up into that web the life buzzing around him. A pregnant servant maid is momentarily featured and compared to an allegorical figure in a Giotto picture, just as Mme. de Guermantes appeared in a church tapestry. It is noteworthy that throughout the whole work either the narrator or Swann often sees the physical appearance of this or that character in terms of paintings by famous old masters, many of them of the Florentine School. There is one main reason behind this method, and a secondary reason. The main reason is of course that for Proust art was the essential reality of life. The other reason is of a more private kind; in describing young men he disguised his keen appreciation of male beauty under the masks of recognizable paintings; and in describing young females he disguised under the same masks of paintings his sexual indifference to women and his inability to describe their charm. But by this time, the fact that reality is a mask should not disturb us in Proust.

  A hot summer afternoon follows, a very concentration of summer color and heat, with a garden and a book in the middle; one should note how the book merges with the surroundings of Marcel, the reader. Remember that after some thirty-five years have elapsed Marcel is all the time searching for new methods of reconstructing this little town of his early adolescence. In a kind of pageant, soldiers pass beyond the garden, and presently the theme of reading brings about the author of a book whom Proust calls Bergotte. This character has some affinities with Anatole France, a real writer mentioned separately, but on the whole Bergotte is a complete creation by Proust. (Bergotte's death is beautifully described in the pages of a later volume.) Once more we meet Swann, and there is a first allusion to Swann's daughter Gilberte with whom Marcel is later to fall in love. Gilberte is linked with Bergotte, her father's friend, who explains to her the beauties of a cathedral. Marcel is impressed by the fact that this favorite author of his is a guide to the little girl in her studies and her interests: here is one of those romantic projections and relationships in which so many characters of Proust appear.

  Nabokov's comments on the translation in his teaching copy of Swann's Way

  A friend of Marcel's, a young man called Bloch, a somewhat pompous and extravagant young fellow in whom culture, snobbism, and a high-strung temperament are combined, is introduced; and with him comes the theme of racial intolerance. Swann is Jewish, as is Bloch, and so was Proust on his mother's side. It follows that Proust was greatly concerned with the anti-Semitic trends in the bourgeois and noble circles of his day, trends that culminated historically in the Dreyfus affair, the main political event discussed in the later volumes.

  Back to Aunt Léonie who is visited by a learned priest. The theme of the church steeple looms again, and like the chimes of a clock, the theme of Eulalie, Françoise, and the pregnant maid reverberates as the various attitudes and relations between these women are established. We find Marcel actually eavesdropping on his aunt's dream—a very singular event in the annals of literature. Eavesdropping is, of course, one of the oldest literary devices, but here the author goes to the limits of the device. Luncheon is earlier on Saturday. Proust makes much of little family traditions, of those capricious patterns of domestic customs that cheerfully isolate one family from another. Then in the next few pages starts the beautiful theme of the hawthorn flowers which will be more fully developed later. We are again in the church where the flowers adorn the altar: "they were made more lovely still by the scalloped outline of the dark leaves, over which were scattered in profusion, as over a bridal train, little clusters of buds of a dazzling whiteness. Though I dared not look at them save through my fingers, I could feel that the formal scheme was composed of living things, and it was Nature herself who, by trimming the shape of the foliage, and by adding the crowning ornament of those snowy buds, had made the decorations worthy of what was at once a public rejoicing and a solemn mystery. Higher up on the altar, a flower had opened here and there with a careless grace, holding so unconcernedly, like a final, almost vapourous bedizening, its bunch of stamens, slender as gossamer, which clouded the flower itself in a white mist, that in following these with my eyes, in trying to imitate, somewhere inside myself, the action of their blossoming, I imagined it as a swift and thoughtless movement of the head with an enticing glance from her contracted pupils, by a young girl in white, careless and alive."

  At the church we meet a certain M. Vinteuil. Vinteuil is accepted by everybody in this provincial town of Combray as a vague crank dabbling in music, and neither Swann nor the boy Marcel realizes that in reality his music is tremendously famous in Paris. This is the beginning of the important music theme. As already remarked, Proust is intensely interested in the various masks under which the same person appears to various other persons. Thus Swann is merely a stockbroker's son to Marcel's family, but to the Guermantes he is a charming and romantic figure in Paris society. Throughout this shimmering book there are many other examples of these changing values in human relationship. Vinteuil not only brings in the theme of a recurrent musical note, the "little theme," as we shall see later, but also the theme of homosexual relationship which is developed throughout the novel, shedding new light on this or that character. In the present case it is Vinteuil's homosexual daughter who is involved in the theme.

  Marcel is a very fantastic Sherlock Holmes and is extremely lucky in the glimpses of gestures and snatches of tales that he sees and hears. (Incidentally, the first homosexuals in modern literature are described in Anna Karenin, namely in chapter 19, part two, where Vronski is breakfasting in the mess room of his regiment..Two officers are briefly but vividly described—and the description leaves no doubt about the relationship between those two.) Vinteuil's house stood in a hollow surrounded by the steep slopes of a hill, and on that escarpment, hidden among its shrubs, the narrator stood a few feet from the drawing-room window and saw old Vinteuil lay out a sheet of music—his own music—so as to catch the eye of his approaching visitors, Marcel's parents, but at the last moment he snatched it away so as not to have his guests suspect that he was glad to see them only because it would give him a chance to play to them his compositions. Some eighty pages later the narrator is again hidden among the shrubs and again watches the same window. Old Vinteuil by then has died. His daughter is in deep mourning. The narrator sees her place her father's photograph on a little table, with the sa
me gesture as when her father had prepared that sheet of music. Her purpose, as it proves, is a rather sinister, sadistic one: her lesbian friend insults the picture in preparation for their making love. The whole scene, incidentally, is a little lame from the point of view of actions to come, with the eavesdropping business enhancing its awkwardness. Its purpose, however, is to start the long series of homosexual revelations and revaluations of characters that occupy so many pages in the later volumes and produce such changes in the aspects of various characters. Also, later, the possible relations of Albertine with Vinteuil's daughter will become a form of jealous fixation for Marcel.

  But let us return to the walk home from the church and the return to Aunt Léonie, the spider in the web, and to Françoise's dinner preparations, where her vulgar cruelty both to chickens and to people is revealed. Legrandin reappears a little later. He is a philistine and a snob, toadying to a duchess and not wishing her to see his humble friends, the narrator's family. It is interesting to see how false and pompous Legrandin's speeches sound about the beauties of a landscape.

  The theme of the two walks the family would take in the neighborhood of Combray now enters its main stage of development. One walk led towards Méséglise, called the Swann way because it passed along the boundary of Swann's estate of Tansonville; the other was the Guermantes way leading towards the estate of the Duke and Duchess of Guermantes. It is on the Swann way walk that the theme of the hawthorns and the theme of love, of Swann's little daughter Gilberte, come together in a splendid flash of pictorial art. "I found the whole path throbbing with the fragrance of hawthorn-blossom. The hedge resembled a series of chapels, whose walls were no longer visible under the mountains of flowers that were heaped upon their altars [a reminiscence of the first introduction of the hawthorn theme in the church]; while underneath the sun cast a square of light upon the ground, as though it had shone in upon them through a stained window; the scent that swept out over me from them was as rich, and as circumscribed in its range, as though I had been standing before the Lady-altar....