Lectures on Literature

by Nabokov, Vladimir

  "But it was in vain that I lingered before the hawthorns, to breathe in, to marshal before my mind (which knew not what to make of it), to lose in order to rediscover their invisible and unchanging odour, to absorb myself in the rhythm which disposed their flowers here and there with the lightheartedness of youth, and at intervals as unexpected as certain intervals of music; they offered me an indefinite continuation of the same charm, in an inexhaustible profusion, but without letting me delve into it any more deeply, like those melodies which one can play over a hundred times in succession without coming any nearer their secret. I turned away from them for a moment so as to be able to return to them with renewed strength."

  But on his return to viewing them the hawthorns still offer no enlightenment (for Marcel is not to know the full significance of these experiences until the illumination that comes to him in the last volume) but his rapture is increased when his grandfather points out to him one particular blossom. "And it was indeed a hawthorn, but one whose flowers were pink, and lovelier even than the white. It, too, was in holiday attire... but it was attired even more richly than the rest, for the flowers which clung to its branches, one above another, so thickly as to leave no part of the tree undecorated, [first comparison:] like the tassels on the crook of a rococo shepherdess, were every one of them in colour, and consequently of a superior quality, by the aesthetic standards of Combray, to the 'plain,' [second comparison:] if one was to judge by the scale of prices at the main 'store' in the Square, or at Camus's, where the most expensive biscuits were those whose sugar was pink. And for my own part [third comparison.] I set a higher value on cream cheese when it was pink, when I had been allowed to tinge it with crushed strawberries. And these flowers [now the combination of all the senses:] had chosen precisely the colour of some edible and delicious thing, or of some exquisite addition to one's costume for a great festival, which colours, inasmuch as they make plain the reason for their superiority, are those whose beauty is most evident to the eyes of children.... High up on the branches, like so many of those tiny rose-trees, their pots concealed in jackets of paper lace, whose slender stems rise in a forest from the altar on the greater festivals, a thousand buds were swelling and opening, paler in colour, but each disclosing as it burst, as at the bottom of a cup of pink marble, its blood-red stain, and suggesting even more strongly than the full-blown flowers the special, irresistible quality of the hawthorn-tree, which, wherever it budded, wherever it was about to blossom, could bud and blossom in pink flowers alone."

  We then come to Gilberte, who in Marcel's mind is forever after associated with this glory of hawthorn blossoms. "A little girl, with fair, reddish hair, who appeared to be returning from a walk, and held a trowel in her hand, was looking at us, raising towards us a face sprinkled with pinkish freckles....

  "I gazed at her, at first with that gaze which is not merely a messenger from the eyes, but in whose window all the senses assemble and lean out, petrified and anxious, that gaze which would fain reach, touch, capture, bear off in triumph the body at which it is aimed, and the soul with the body ... an unconsciously appealing look, whose object was to force her to pay attention to me, to see, to know me. She cast a glance forwards and sideways, so as to take stock of my grandfather and father, and doubtless the impression she formed of them was that we were all absurd people, for she turned away with an indifferent and contemptuous air, withdrew herself so as to spare her face the indignity of remaining within their field of vision; and while they, continuing to walk on without noticing her, had overtaken and passed me, she allowed her eyes to wander, over the space that lay between us, in my direction, without any particular expression, without appearing to have seen me, but with an intensity, a half-hidden smile which I was unable to interpret, according to the instruction I had received in the ways of good breeding, save as a mark of infinite disgust; and her hand, at the same time, sketched in the air an indelicate gesture, for which, when it was addressed in public to a person whom one did not know, the little dictionary of manners which I carried in my mind supplied only one meaning, namely, a deliberate insult.

  " 'Gilberte, come along; what are you doing?' called out in a piercing tone of authority a lady in white, whom I had not seen until that moment, while, a little way beyond her, a gentleman in a suit of linen 'ducks,' whom I did not know either, stared at me with eyes which seemed to be starting from his head; the little girl's smile abruptly faded, and, seizing her trowel, she made off without turning to look again in my direction, with an air of obedience, inscrutable and sly.

  "And so was wafted to my ears the name of Gilberte, bestowed on me like a talisman ... with the mystery of the life of her whom its syllables designated to the happy creatures that lived and walked and travelled in her company; unfolding through the arch of the pink hawthorn, which opened at the height of my shoulder, the quintessence of their familiarity—so exquisitely painful to myself—with her, and with all that unknown world of her existence, into which I should never penetrate." Of course, Marcel does penetrate this world, not only the world of Odette but also that of the gentleman Charlus, who will develop later into the greatest portrait in literature of a homosexual. In their innocence, however, Marcel's family believe that he is Madame Swann's lover and are disgusted that the child is living in such an atmosphere. It is much later that Gilberte confesses to Marcel that she had been offended at his immobility as he looked at her without a gesture towards a friendship to which she would have responded.

  The walk along the Guermantes way follows in part a lovely river, the Vivonne, flowing through its clusters of water lilies. The Guermantes theme gains body when Marcel sees the duchess attending a ceremony in the very church where her prototypical image had appeared in the tapestry. He finds that the name is more than its bearer. "Suddenly, during the nuptial mass, the beadle, by moving to one side, enabled me to see, sitting in a chapel, a lady with fair hair and a large nose, piercing blue eyes, a billowy neckerchief of mauve silk, glossy and new and brilliant, and a little pimple at the corner of her nose.... My disappointment was immense. It arose from my not having borne in mind, when I thought of Mme. de Guermantes, that I was picturing her to myself in the colours of a tapestry or a painted window, as living in another century, as being of another substance than the rest of the human race I was gazing upon this image, which, naturally enough, bore no resemblance to those that had so often, under the same title of 'Mme. de Guermantes,' appeared to me in dreams, since this one had not been, like the others, formed by myself, but had sprung into sight for the first time, only a moment ago, here in church; an image which was not of the same nature, was not colourable at will, like those others that allowed themselves to be suffused by the orange tint of a sonorous syllable [Marcel saw sounds in color], but which was so real that everything, even to the fiery little pimple at the corner of her nose, gave an assurance of her subjection to the laws of life, as in a transformation scene on the stage a crease in the dress of a fairy, a quivering of her tiny finger, indicate the material presence of a living actress before our eyes, whereas we were uncertain, till then, whether we were not looking merely at a projection of limelight from a lantern.... But this Mme. de Guermantes of whom I had so often dreamed, now that I could see that she had a real existence independent of myself, acquired a fresh increase of power over my imagination, which, paralysed for a moment by contact with a reality so different from anything that it had expected, began to react and to say within me: Great and glorious before the days of Charlemagne, the Guermantes had the right of life and death over their vassals; the Duchesse de Guermantes descends from Genevieve de Brabant.' ... And my gaze resting upon her fair hair, her blue eyes, the lines of her neck, and overlooking the features which might have reminded me of the faces of other women, I cried out within myself, as I admired this deliberately unfinished sketch: 'How lovely she is! What true nobility! it is indeed a proud Guermantes, the descendant of Genevieve de Brabant, that I have before me!' "

  After the cer
emony when the duchess was standing outside the church, her glance passed over Marcel: "And at once I fell in love with her—Her eyes waxed blue as a periwinkle flower, wholly beyond my reach, yet dedicated by her to me; and the sun, bursting out again from behind a threatening cloud and darting the full force of its rays on to the Square and into the sacristy, shed a geranium glow over the red carpet laid down for the wedding, along which Mme. de Guermantes smilingly advanced, and covered its woollen texture with a nap of rosy velvet, a bloom of light, giving it that sort of tenderness, of solemn sweetness in the pomp of a joyful celebration, which characterise certain pages of Lohengrin, certain paintings by Carpaccio, and make us understand how Baudelaire was able to apply to the sound of the trumpet the epithet 'delicious. "

  It is in the course of his walks in the Guermantes direction that Marcel reflects on his future as a writer and is discouraged at his lack of qualification, at the "sense of my own impotence which I had felt whenever I had sought a philosophic theme for some great literary work." The most vivid sensations come to him but he does not understand that they have a literary significance. "Then, quite apart from all those literary preoccupations, and without definite attachment to anything, suddenly a roof, a gleam of sunlight reflected from a stone, the smell of a road would make me stop still, to enjoy the special pleasure that each of them gave me, and also because they appeared to be concealing, beneath what my eyes could see, something which they invited me to approach and seize from them, but which, despite all my efforts, I never managed to get at, to possess. As I felt that the mysterious object was to be found in them, I would stand there in front of them, motionless, gazing, breathing, endeavouring to penetrate with my mind beyond the thing seen or heard or smelt. And if I had then to hasten after my grandfather, to proceed on my way, I would still seek to recover my sense of them by closing my eyes; I would concentrate upon recalling exactly the line of the roof, the colour of the stone, which, without my being able to understand why, had seemed to me to be teeming, ready to open, to yield up to me the secret treasure of which they were themselves no more than the outer coverings. It was certainly not any impression of this kind that could or would restore the hope I had lost of succeeding one day in becoming a writer, for each of them was associated with some material object devoid of any intellectual value, and suggesting no abstract truth." Contrasted here are the literature of the senses, true art, and the literature of ideas, which does not produce true art unless it stems from the senses. To this profound connection Marcel is blind. He wrongly thinks he had to write about things of intellectual value when in reality it was that system of sensations he was experiencing that without his knowledge was slowly making an authentic writer of him.

  Some intimations come to him, as when the steeples theme turns up again in triple form during a drive: "At a bend in the road I experienced, suddenly, that special pleasure, which bore no resemblance to any other, when I caught sight of the twin steeples of Martinville, on which the setting sun was playing, while the movement of the carriage and the windings of the road seemed to keep them continually changing their position; and then of a third steeple, that of Vieuxvicq, which although separated from them by a hill and a valley, and rising from rather higher ground in the distance, appeared none the less to be standing by their side.

  "In ascertaining and noting the shape of their spires, the changes of aspect, the sunny warmth of their surfaces, I felt that I was not penetrating to the full depth of my impression, that something more lay behind that mobility, that luminosity, something which they seemed at once to contain and to conceal."

  Proust now does a most interesting thing: he confronts the style of his present with the style of his past. Marcel borrows a piece of paper and composes a description of these three steeples which the narrator then proceeds to reproduce. It is Marcel's first attempt at writing and it is charming although some of the comparisons, such as those of the flowers and of the maidens, are made deliberately juvenile. The comparison comes, however, between the steeples which the narrator has just described from his later vantage point and Marcel's literary attempt, which is surface description without the significance for which he was groping when he first experienced the sensation of these steeples. It is doubly significant that writing this piece "relieved my mind of the obsession of the steeples."

  The Combray part of the volume, which is about his childhood impressions, ends with a theme that started in the beginning—the reconstruction of his room in Combray, in which he would lie awake at night. In later life, when lying awake he would feel himself back in this room: "All these memories, following one after another, were condensed into a single substance, but it had not coalesced completed, and I could discern between the three layers (my oldest, my instinctive memories, those others, inspired more recently by a taste or 'perfume,' and those which were actually the memories of another, from whom I had acquired them at second hand) not fissures, not geological faults, but at least those veins, those streaks of colour which in certain rocks, in certain marbles, point to differences of origin, age, and formation." Proust is here describing three layers of impressions: (1) simple memory as a deliberate act; (2) an old memory stirred by a sensation in the present repeating a sensation in the past; and (3) memorized knowledge of another man's life, though acquired at second hand. The point is again that simple memory cannot be relied upon to reconstruct the past.

  The Combray section has been devoted to Proust's first two categories; it is the third that is the subject of the second main section of the volume, entitled "Swann in Love," in which Swann's passion for Odette leads to an understanding of Marcel's for Albertine.

  Several important themes occupy this latter section of the volume. One of these is "the little musical phrase." The year before, Swann had heard a piece of music for violin and piano played at an evening party. "And it had been a source of keen pleasure when, below the narrow line of the violin-part, delicate, unyielding, substantial and governing the whole, he had suddenly perceived, where it was trying to surge upwards in splashing tide of sound, the mass of the piano-part, multiform, coherent, level, and interclashing like the mauve tumult of the sea, charmed into a minor key by the moonlight." And "hardly- had the delicious sensation, which Swann had experienced, died away, before his memory had furnished him with an immediate transcript, summary, it is true, and provisional, but one on which he had kept his eyes fixed while the playing continued, so effectively that,' when the same impression suddenly returned, it was no longer uncapturable.... This time he had distinguished, quite clearly, a phrase which emerged for a few moments from the waves of sound. It had at once held out to him an invitation to partake of intimate pleasures, of whose existence, before hearing it, he had never dreamed, into which he felt that nothing but this phrase could initiate him; and he had been filled with love for it, as with a new and strange desire.

  "With a slow and rhythmical movement it led him here, there, everywhere, towards a state of happiness noble, unintelligible, yet clearly indicated. And then, suddenly having reached a certain point from which he was prepared to follow it, after pausing for a moment, abruptly it changed its direction, and in a fresh movement, more rapid, multiform, melancholy, incessant, gentle, it bore him off with it towards a vista of joys unknown."

  This passion for a phrase of music brought on in Swann's life the possibility of a sort of rejuvenation, renovation, for he had grown dull, but not being able to discover the composer and secure the music, at last he ceased to think of it. But now, at Mme. Verdurin's party, where he had gone only to be with Odette, a pianist plays a work that he recognizes, and he learns that it is the andante movement of a sonata for piano and violin by Vinteuil. With this knowledge, Swann has the feeling of holding the phrase secure in his power, of possessing it, as the narrator dreamed of possessing the landscapes that he saw. The same musical phrase not only speaks to Swann again later in the work but also delights the narrator at a certain point in his life. It should be borne in mind that Sw
ann is a kind of fancy mirror of the narrator himself. Swann sets the pattern, and the narrator follows it.

  Another important episode, and an example of the way in which Proust unfolds an incident, is that of Swann at Odette's window. He has come to see her after eleven at night, but she is tired and irresponsive and asks him to leave in half an hour. "She begged him to put out the light before he went; he drew the curtains close round her bed and left her." But in a fit of jealousy about an hour later it occurs to him that perhaps she rid herself of him because she was expecting someone else. He took a cab and came out almost opposite her house. Proust's metaphor is that of golden fruit.

  "Amid the blackness of all the row of windows, the lights in which had long since been put out, he saw one, and only one, from which overflowed, between the slats of its shutters, closed like a wine-press over its mysterious golden pulp, the light that filled the room within, a light which on so many evenings, as soon as he saw it, far off, as he turned into the street, had rejoiced his heart with its message: 'She is there—expecting you,' and now tortured him with: 'She is there with the man she was expecting.' He must know who; he tiptoed along by the wall until he reached the window, but between the slanting bars of the shutters he could see nothing; he could hear, only, in the silence of the night, the murmur of conversation."