Lectures on Literature

by Nabokov, Vladimir

  Despite the pain, he derives an intellectual pleasure, the pleasure of the truth: the same inner truth above emotion that Tolstoy was after. He feels "the same thirst for knowledge with which he had once studied history. And all manner of actions, from which, until now, he would have recoiled in shame, such as spying, tonight, outside a window, tomorrow, for all he knew, putting adroitly provocative questions to casual witnesses, bribing servants, listening at doors, seemed to him, now, to be precisely on a level with the deciphering of manuscripts, the weighing of evidence, the interpretation of old texts, that was to say, so many different methods of' scientific investigation, each one having a definite intellectual value and being legitimately employable in the search for truth." The next metaphor combines the idea of the golden light and the pure, scholarly search for knowledge: the secret of a lighted window and the interpretation of some old text. "But his desire to know the truth was stronger, and seemed to him nobler, than his desire for her. He knew that the true story of certain events, which he would have given his life to be able to reconstruct accurately and in full, was to be read within that window, streaked with bars of light, as within the illuminated, golden boards of one of those precious manuscripts, by whose wealth of artistic treasures the scholar who consults them cannot remain unmoved. He yearned for the satisfaction of knowing the truth which so impassioned him in that brief, fleeting, precious transcript, on that translucent page, so warm, so beautiful. And besides, the advantage which he felt—which he so desperately wanted to feel—that he had over them, lay perhaps not so much in knowing as in being able to shew them that he knew."

  He knocks and finds two old gentlemen facing him from the window. It was the wrong one. "Having fallen into the habit, when he came late to Odette, of identifying her window by the fact t,hat it was the only one still lighted in a row of windows otherwise all alike, he had been misled, this time, by the light, and had knocked at the window beyond hers, in the adjoining house." This mistake of Swann's may be compared to the narrator's mistake when relying solely upon memory, he tried to reconstruct his room from gleams in the dark, at the end of the Combray section, and found that he had misplaced everything when daylight came.

  In Paris, in the park of the Champs-Elysées, "a little girl with reddish hair was playing with a racquet and a shuttlecock; when, from the path, another little girl, who was putting on her cloak and covering up her battledore, called out sharply: 'Good-bye, Gilberte, I'm going home now; don't forget, we are coming to you this evening, after dinner.' The name Gilberte passed close by me, evoking all the more forcibly her whom it labelled in that it did not merely refer to her, as one speaks of a person in his absence, but was directly addressed to her"; and thus carried in the little girl's memory all of the unknown shared existence possessed by her, an existence from which Marcel was excluded. The metaphor of the name's trajectory, which begins the description, is followed by one of the name's perfume, Gilberte's friend "flung it on the air with a light-hearted cry: letting float in the atmosphere the delicious perfume which that message had distilled, by touching the two girls with precision, from certain invisible points in Mlle. Swann's life." In its passage the celestial quality of the name is compared to "Poussin's little cloud, exquisitely coloured, like the cloud that, curling over one of Poussin's gardens, reflects minutely, like a cloud in the opera, teeming with chariots and horses, some apparition of the life of the gods." To these images is now added that of space-time in parentheses, the content of which should be noted for its bit of lawn and bit of time in the girl's afternoon, with the shuttlecock beating time: the cloud casts a light "on that ragged grass, at the spot on which she stood (at once a scrap of withered lawn and a moment in the afternoon of the fair player, who continued to beat up and catch her shuttlecock until a governess, with a blue feather in her hat, had called her away)." The light that the name, like a cloud passing over, sheds for Marcel was "a marvellous little band of light, of the colour of heliotrope," and then with an inner simile it turns the lawn to a magic carpet.

  Nabokov's drawing of "a gorgeous, mauve-colored orchid"

  This band of light was of a mauve color, the violet tint that runs through the whole book, the very color of time. This rose-purple mauve, a pinkish lilac, a violet flush, is linked in European literature with certain sophistications of the artistic temperament. It is the color of an orchid, Cattleya labiata (the genus called thus after William Cattley, a solemn British botanist), an orchid, which today, in this country, regularly adorns the bosoms of matrons at club festivities. This orchid in the nineties of the last century in Paris was a very rare and expensive flower. It adorns Swann's lovemaking in a famous but not very convincing scene. From this mauve to the delicate pink of hawthorns in the Combray chapters there are all kinds of shadings within Proust's flushed prism. One should recall the pink dress worn many years before by the pretty lady (Odette de Crecy) in Uncle Adolphe's apartment, and now the association with Gilberte, her daughter. Notice, moreover, as a kind of exclamation mark punctuating the passage, the blue feather in the hat of the girl's governess—which the boy's old nurse lacked.

  More metaphors within metaphors may be observed in the passage after Marcel has become acquainted with Gilberte and plays with her in the park. If the weather threatens rain he worries that Gilberte will not be allowed to go to the Champs-Elysées. "And so, if the heavens were doubtful, from early morning I would not cease to interrogate them, observing all the omens." If he sees the lady in the apartment across the way putting on her hat, he hopes that Gilberte can do the same. But the day grew dark and remained so. Outside the window the balcony was gray. Then we have a series of inner comparisons: (1) "Suddenly,on [the balcony's] sullen stone, I did not indeed see a less negative colour, but I felt as it were an effort towards a less negative colour, [2] the pulsation of a hesitating ray that struggled to discharge its light. [3] A moment later the balcony was as pale and luminous as a standing water at dawn, and a thousand shadows from the iron-work of its balustrade had come to rest on it." Then the inner comparisons again: a breath of wind disperses the shadows and the stone turns dark again, (1) "but, like tamed creatures, [the shadows] returned; they began, imperceptibly, to grow lighter, [2] and by one of those continuous crescendos, such is, in musk, at the end of an overture, carry a single note to the extreme fortissimo, making it pass rapidly through all the intermediate stages, I saw it attain to that fixed, inalterable gold of fine days, [3] on which the sharply cut shadows of the wrought iron of the balustrade were outlined in black like a capricious vegetation...." The comparisons end with the pledge of happiness: "with a fineness in the delineation of [the shadows'] smallest details which seemed to indicate a deliberate application, an artist's satisfaction, and with so much relief, so velvety a bloom in the restfulness of their sombre and happy mass that in truth those large and leafy shadows which lay reflected on that lake of sunshine seemed aware that they were pledges of happiness and peace of mind." Finally, the shadows of the filigree ironwork, resembling ivy, become "like the very shadow of the presence of Gilberte, who was perhaps already in the Champs-Elysées, and as soon as I arrived there would greet me with: 'Let's begin at once. You are on my side.' "

  The romantic view of Gilberte is transferred to her parents. "Everything that concerned them was on my part the object of so constant a preoccupation that the days on which, as on this day, M. Swann (whom I had seen so often, long ago, without his having aroused my curiosity, when he was still on good terms with my parents) came for Gilberte to the Champs-Elysées, once the pulsations to which my heart had been excited by the appearance of his grey hat and hooded cape had subsided, the sight of him still impressed me as might that of an historic personage, upon whom one had just been studying a series of books, and the smallest details of whose life one learned with enthusiasm.... Swann had become to me pre-eminently [Gilberte's] father, and no longer the Combray Swann; as the ideas which, nowadays, I made his name connote were different from the ideas in the system of wh
ich it was formerly comprised, which I utilised not at all now when I had occasion to think of him, he had become a new, another person...." Marcel even attempts to imitate Swann: "in my attempts to resemble him, I spent the whole time, when I was at table, in drawing my finger along my nose and in rubbing my eyes. My father would exclaim: 'The child's a perfect idiot, he's becoming quite impossible.' "

  The dissertation on Swann's love that occupies the middle of the volume evinces the narrator's desire to find a resemblance between Swann and himself: the pangs of jealousy Swann experiences will be repeated in the middle volume of the whole work in relation to the narrator's love affair with Albertine.

  Swann's Way ends when the narrator, now a grown-up man of thirty-five, at least, revisits the Bois de Boulogne early on a November day, and we have an extraordinary record of his impressions and his memories. Against the. background of dark and distant woods, some trees still in foliage but others now bare, a double row of orange red chestnut trees "seemed, as in a picture just begun, to be the only thing painted, so far, by an artist who had not yet laid any colour on the rest...." The appearance is artificial: "And the Bois had the temporary, unfinished, artificial look of a nursery garden or a park in which, either for some botanic purpose or in preparation for a festival, there have been embedded among the trees of commoner growth, which have not yet been uprooted and transplanted elsewhere, a few rare specimens, with fantastic foliage, which seem to be clearing all round themselves an empty space, making room, giving air, diffusing light." The horizontal light of the sun at this early hour touches the tops of the trees as it would, later, at dusk, "flame up like a lamp, project afar over the leaves a warm and artificial glow, and set ablaze the few topmost boughs of a tree that would itself remain unchanged, a sombre incombustible candelabrum beneath its flaming crest. At one spot the light grew solid as a brick wall, and like a piece of yellow Persian masonry, patterned in blue, daubed coarsely upon the sky the leaves of the chestnuts; at another, it cut them off from the sky towards which they stretched out their curling, golden fingers."

  As on a colored map the different places in the Bois could be traced. For years the trees had shared the life of the beautiful ladies who in the past walked under them: "forced for so many years now, by a sort of grafting process, to share the life of feminine humanity, they called to my mind the figure of the dryad, the fair worldling, swiftly walking, brightly coloured, whom they sheltered with their branches as she passed beneath them, and obliged to acknowledge, as they themselves acknowledged, the power of the season; they recalled to me the happy days when I was young and had faith, when I would hasten eagerly to the spots where masterpieces of female elegance would be incarnate for a few moments beneath the unconscious, accomodating boughs." The inelegant people he now passes in the Bois recall what he had earlier known. "Could I ever have made them understand the emotion that I used to feel on winter mornings, when I met Mme. Swann on foot, in a seal-skin coat, with a woollen cap from which stuck out two blade-like partridge-feathers, but enveloped also in the deliberate, artificial warmth of her own house, which was suggested by nothing more than the bunch of violets crushed into her bosom, whose flowering, vivid and blue against the grey sky, the freezing air, the naked boughs, had the same charming effect of using the season and the weather merely as a setting, and of living actually in a human atmosphere, in the atmosphere of this woman, as had in the vases and beau-pots of her drawing-room, beside the blazing fire, in front of the silk-covered sofa, the flowers that looked out through closed windows at the falling snow?"

  The volume ends with the narrator's view of the past in time and space. "The sun's face was hidden. Nature began again to reign over the Bois, from which had vanished all trace of the idea that it was the Elysian Garden of Woman...." The return of a semblance of reality over this artificial wood "helped me to understand how paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory, which must inevitably lose the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being apprehended by the senses. The reality that I had known no longer existed. It sufficed that Mme. Swann did not appear, in the same attire and at the same moment, for the whole avenue to be altered. The places that we have known belong not only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin layer between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years."

  The point he makes is that simple memory, the act of visualizing something in retrospect, is not the correct method: it does not recreate the past. The ending of Swann's Way is only one of the different aspects of viewing the past that in the gradual building up of Marcel's understanding prepare for the final experience that reveals to him the reality for which, throughout the work, he has been searching. This event takes place in the great third chapter, "The Princesse de Guermantes Receives," in the final volume, The Past Recaptured, when he discovers why simple memory is insufficient and what, instead, is required. The process begins when Marcel, entering the court of the Prince de Guermantes's residence, on his way to the final party, hastily avoids an oncoming automobile "and, in stepping back, struck my foot against some unevenly cut flagstones leading to a carriage house. In recovering my balance, I put my foot on a stone that was a little lower than the one next to it; immediately all my discouragement vanished ' before a feeing of happiness which I had experienced at different moments of my life, at the sight of trees I thought I recognised when driving around Balbec, or the church spires of Martinville, or the savour of a madeleine, dipped in herb tea, or from many other sensations I have mentioned which had seemed to me to be synthesised in the last works of Vinteuil. Just as when I had tasted the madeleine, all anxiety as to the future, all intellectual doubt was dispelled. The misgivings that had been harassing me a moment before concerning the reality of my literary gifts, and even of literature itself, were suddenly banished as if by magic. But this time I made a firm resolve that I would not be satisfied to leave the question unanswered (as I did the day I tasted of a madeleine dipped in herb tea) as to why, without my having worked out any new line of reasoning or found any decisive argument, the difficulties that had seemed insoluble a short time before had now lost all their importance. The feeling of happiness which had just come Over me was, indeed, exactly the same as I had experienced while eating the madeleine, but at that time I put off seeking the deep-lying causes of it."

  The narrator is able to identify the sensation rising from the past as what he had once felt when he stood on two uneven stones in the baptistry of Saint Mark's in Venice, "and with that sensation came all the others connected with it that day, which had been waiting in their proper place in the series of forgotten days, until a sudden happening had imperiously commanded them to come forth. It was in the same way that the taste of the little madeleine had recalled Combray to my mind." This time he determines to get to the root of the matter, and while waiting to make his entrance to the drawing room, his sensations being actively aroused, the tinkle of a spoon against a plate, the feeling of a starched napkin, even the noise of a hot-water pipe bring back to him floods of memories of similar sensations in the past. "Even at this moment, in the mansion of the Prince de Guermantes, I heard the sound of my parents' footsteps as they accompanied M. Swann and the reverberating ferruginous, interminable, sharp, jangling tinkle of the little bell which announced to me that at last M. Swann had gone and Mamma was going to come upstairs—I heard these sounds again, the very identical sounds themselves, although situated so far back in the past."

  But the narrator knows that this is not enough. "It was not in the Piazza San Marco any more than it had been on my second visit to Balbec or on my return to Tansonville to see Gilberte, that I would recapture past Time, and the journey which was merely suggested to me once more by the illusion that these old impressions existed outside
myself, at the corner of a certain square, could not be the means I was seeking... Impressions such as those which I was endeavouring to analyse and define could not fail to vanish away at the contact of a material enjoyment that was unable to bring them into existence. The only way to get more joy out of them was to try to know them more completely at the spot where they were to be found, namely, within myself, and to clarify them to their lowest depths." The problem to be solved is how to keep these impressions from vanishing under the pressure of the present. One answer is found in his new recognition of the continuity of present with past. "I had to descend again into my own consciousness. It must be, then, that this tinkling [of the bell at Swann's departure] was still there and also, between it and the present moment, all the infinitely unrolling past which I had been unconsciously carrying within me. When the bell tinkled, I was already in existence and, since that night, for me to have been able to hear the sound again, there must have been no break of continuity, not a moment of rest for me, no cessation of existence, of thought, of consciousness of myself, since this distant moment still clung to me and I could recapture it, go back to it, merely by descending more deeply within myself. It was this conception of time as incarnate, of past years as still close held within us, which I was now determined to bring out in such bold relief in my book."