Waggish

David Auerbach on literature, tech, film, etc.

Tag: proust (page 8 of 11)

2.1.7 Mme Swann at Home: Vinteuil’s Sonata

24 December 2003 / / 0 Comments

Proust spends some time in Within a Budding Grove on Vinteuil’s sonata, the one which Swann came to associate with Odette, which contained a certain passage that sent him into a reverie. Marcel himself falls under its spell in “Mme Swann at Home” and describes how it offers itself up in pieces, with its most apparent aspects also being the least rewarding. It’s some sonata–Proust compares it to Beethoven.

In “Swann in Love,” Vinteuil’s sonata appeared to offer Swann glimpses of the noumenal; it came as close to Truth as anything he experienced. Now, with the sonata tied to an unhappy, finished past, its effects on him have changed. They are no less vivid, but less transcendent:

“It’s rather a charming thought, don’t you think,” Swann continued, “that sound can reflect, like water, like a mirror. And it’s curious, too, that Vinteuil’s phrase now shows me only the things to which I paid no attention then. Of my troubles, my loves of those days, it recalls nothing, it has swapped things around…What the music shows–to me, at least–is not ‘the triumph of the Will’ or ‘In Tune with the Infinite,’ but shall we say old Verdurin in his frock coat in the palmhouse in the Zoological Gardens. Hundreds of times, without my leaving this room, the little phrase has carried me off to dine with it at Armenonville. (575)

And so Swann’s glimpse of the absolute turns out to be bound in time to a very particular context. It holds the power to transport him, but not to another plane of reality, only to another place in his memory. Since this passage comes after pages praising the internal beauty and structure of the sonata, it’s not as though the sonata’s merit is completely relative. But its merit is something not quite beyond the reach of humanity, not as a gift from a genius to the peons, but as an object of depth and subtlety from which some people (those deep people of substance, Proust says) can draw a profound aesthetic experience, by lashing it to their own experiences, past and present. Thereafter, Swann can have differing associations with the sonata, but he maintains a relationship with it as he carries it with him.

But why stop at a sonata? We can invest great significance in the most trivial of things: a pop song, a knick-knack, a prized material possession signifying status or rarity. In this case too, it is our investment, our personal feelings, that have the significance, that make an amalgam that dwarfs the original object. And whatever connection to the heavens someone proclaims through their own or someone else’s work of art is filtered through that, so any declaration of universality should be treated as suspect. Proust seems to violates this constantly by making grand poetic generalizations, but he tends to catch himself by later contradicting whatever he said.

Coincidentally, the reason I decided to take a subjective, digression-laden approach when I was keeping this journal was to avoid the dictatorial tone of much criticism, that analysis which plies its trade with ostensibly factual analysis of the text, presented as scientific and descriptive. I don’t understand why that tone persists in light of all the relativistic theorizing that’s gone on over the last century. (Actually, I sure do, but that’s a sociological topic.) Fortunately, we have Proust to show us, at great length, that time will undo such authority, in people and in art.

2.1.6 Mme Swann at Home: Bergotte Himself

23 December 2003 / / 0 Comments

There is something very particular about Bergotte that I want to point out because I believe it illustrates how cagey Proust is about letting “authority” seep into his novel. I’ve already mentioned how the people who have most influenced young Marcel, like Bloch and Bergotte, but also Swann and Odette, are invariably undercut by being painted in a very different light, either in their interactions with others, or through being seen differently in the past or the future.
In the case of Bergotte, you have the first character who could be considered a genius. His effects on people are mixed. He can be so novel in his verbiage that people are disappointed, because they cannot attach it to anything in their experience. The impression he makes is decidedly not rational:

Doubtless again to distinguish himself from the previous generation, too fond as it had been of abstractions, of weighty commonplaces, when Bergotte wished to speak favourably of a book, what he would emphasise, what he would quote with approval would always be some scene that furnished the reader with an image, some picture that had no rational meaning. “Ah, yes!” he would exclaim, “it’s good! There’s a little girl in an orange shawl. It’s excellent!” or again, “Oh yes, there’s a passage in which there’s a regiment marching along the street; yes, it’s good!”…And it is true that there was in Bergotte’s style a kind of harmony similar to that for which the ancients used to praise certain of their orators in terms which we now find hard to understand, accustomed as we are to our own modern tongues in which effects of that kind are not sought. (598)

This “kind of harmony” is more insidious than the substance of what Bergotte is saying. We’ve already seen his impact on Marcel, which contained as much of Marcel as it did of Bergotte, and Bergotte’s attunement to a certain type of intellectual disposition at the expense of his interactions with those around him, but the emphasis on his mode of speaking further points away from the substance of what he says and more towards the style, one which fosters agreement even when the reader isn’t sure with what he is agreeing. The influence of the style seems unavoidable:

There were other characteristics of his elocution which he shared not with the members of his family, but with certain contemporary writers. Younger men who were beginning to repudiate him and disclaimed any intellectual affinity with him nevertheless displayed it willy-nilly by employing the same adverbs, the same prepositions that he incessantly repeated, by constructing their sentences in the same way, speaking in the same quiescent, lingering tone, in reaction against the eloquent and facile language of an earlier generation…His way of thinking, inoculated into them, had led them to those alterations of syntax and accentuation which bear a necessary relation to originality of mind. (598)

What the younger writers take from Bergotte is not his ideology, which they reject, but the power in his style. Yet it is through his style that he wields his influence, both over people who cannot quite comprehend what he is saying, and in the next generation of writers.
The notion of speech that is more about style and influence than ideological substance puts me in mind of Mynheer Peeperkorn, from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Let me start by saying that I find Mynheer one of the most irritating characters in literature, and he’s a good part of my low estimation of the book. But his flaws and Mann’s flaws are relevant to what Proust does with Bergotte. Let’s take a look at some of Mynheer’s speech:

“Gentleman–,” the Dutchman said, raising his lance-nailed captain’s hand in a gesture that both implored and commanded. “Fine, gentlemen, agreed, excellent! Asceticism–indulgence–sensual lust–let me say that–by all means! Eminently important! Eminently controversial! And yet, permit me to say–I fear that we are about to commit a–ladies and gentlemen, we are avoiding, we are irresponsibly avoiding the holiest of–” He took a deep breath. “This air, ladies and gentlemen, this day’s foehn air so rich in character, so tenderly enervating, suggestive and reminiscent of spring’s fragrance–we should not breathe it in merely so that in the form of–I implore you: we should not do it. That is an insult. For its own sweet, simple sake, we must totally and fully–oh, and with our highest and most perceptive–settled, ladies and gentlemen! And only as an act in purest praise of its properties should we then release it from our–but I must break off, ladies and gentlemen. I must break off in honor of this–” (582)

(This surely must be less annoying in German.) After thirty pages of this sort of thing, you can’t wait for the impotent old life force to off himself. Yet in the book, this sort of logorrhea gains him a little cult following who cheerfully follow him and his irrational ramblings off the cliff of reason. The protagonist Hans Castorp decides that the rational characters “simply shrank beside Peeperkorn” and discusses how Mynheer being drunk “only made him grander and more awe-inspiring,” and it’s all very uninspiring, no more so than when Mynheer opens his mouth. That he’s patently saying nothing is a fact; it’s his mystical life force or whatever ineffable thing Mann was thinking about on that day that is the attractive force. It’s unconvincing because there is nothing of that attraction communicated in the book.
Bergotte, on the other hand, does come across as a great spirit, less in what he says or what he does, more in the description of that effect. It’s made more convincing by the portrayal of it as only part of his nature, and the description of how his particular genius can sometimes estrange him from people as much as enamor people of him. With Mann, Mynheer is the nonnegotiable life force, while with Proust, Bergotte is presented in terms of his effects on particular types of people. There’s some, but not much, “there” there.
So while Mynheer Peeperkorn belongs to a line that eventually extends down to Jubal Harshaw and “Henry Miller” the character(not in their positions in the novel, but in their universal effects on those around them–see also Wyndham Lewis), Bergotte is Oz and the man behind the curtain simultaneously, as well as a heterogeneity of experience that does not permit him to be one thing to all people.
The contrast is deeper than the nature of the individual character; it’s a question of approach, and it reminded me of a passage from way back in “Combray” in the first volume:

These were the events taking place in the book I was reading. It is true that the people concerned in them were not what Francoise would have called “real people.” But none of the feelings which the joys or misfortunes of a “real” person arouse in us can be awakened except through a mental picture of those joys or misfortunes; and the ingenuity of the first novelist lay in his understanding that, as the image was the one essential element in the complicated structure of our emotions, so that simplification of it which consisted in the suppression, pure and simple, of “real” people would be a decided improvement. A “real” person, profoundly as we may sympathise with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, remains opaque, presents a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift. If some misfortune comes to him, it is only in one small section of the complete idea we have of him that we are capable of feeling any emotion; indeed it is only in one small section of the complete idea he has of himself that he is capable of feeling any emotion either. The novelist’s happy discovery was to think of substituting for these opaque sections, impenetrable to the human soul, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is, which one’s soul can assimilate…It is the same in life; the heart changes, and it is our worst sorrow; but we know it only through reading, through our imagination: in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change. (91)

What is Proust doing if not to portray, first, the repetitions and lack of change amongst characters, and second, the simultaneous coexistence of contradictory characteristics in a character depending on the situation?
I find this to be the best answer to the charges of myopia that I and plenty of others have leveled against the novel, of asking why the vagaries of these high-class French people have any significance. Well, to do the sort of examination here, I believe that Proust had to stick very close to his own past experience, mutating it but hardly abandoning it. I don’t see how he could have constructed such elaborate characters except by starting from known exemplars and then reconstructing/reshuffling them. I could be wrong, but that’s my best guess. Proust’s endless efforts to detach his writing from one particular view of his situations also goes a way to redeeming the choice of subject matter, since it becomes secondary to the approach.
This is probably the penultimate entry on “Mme Swann at Home,” which is by a wide margin the richest section in the first two books. (The remaining section of Within a Budding Grove is thankfully much more linear and breezy.) It’s hardly self-contained, so it’s bizarre that it begins the second volume, but there you have it. The message that I take from it, above all else, is that everything–past, present, and future–is subject to revision over time. Of course, a thousand pages of showing that principle in action over everything and everyone Proust can think of has a far more profound effect than just saying it.

2.1.5 Mme Swann at Home: Bergotte and Marcel

21 December 2003 / / 0 Comments

Bergotte is the author who cast a spell over young Marcel in the Combray section, and via Swann, he is now able to meet him. It comes at such a crucial point in the book, when Marcel is undergoing feverish revision of what had gone before, that Bergotte’s dialogue with him almost solely redeems the possibility of writing, after Marcel had become disgusted with it earlier.
It is not altogether a positive portrayal: Bergotte is an intellectual visionary possessed of a singular vision, even a genius, but he is myopic. He doesn’t quite have clay feet, but one of the overriding themes of Marcel’s interactions with him (roughly pages 592-618, maybe my favorite sequence so far) is how he moves from being Marcel’s idol of earlier years to a incisive, cranky man very different from the image that Marcel had as a youth. More specifically, the earlier image of Bergotte was not that of a person, but of an ideal, the author of words in which he had seen himself perfectly reflected, when in fact what he was seeing was himself in a mirror he had constructed partially out of Bergotte’s words, but which was mostly a projection of his own mind.
I think that for anyone who develops a particular affection for reading in their early teenage years, there is that set of authors which seem directly in tune with our thoughts. They appear to express inner truths that were previously thought unshared by anyone. These authors usually disappoint us later when it turns out that they were aiming at something else entirely, and somewhere in college, we figure out that we have to be a lot more careful before verbal intoxication leads to overly zealous identifying of kindred spirits. After that, those authors go into a very special category where we neither criticize them nor praise them, since we know we’ll be talking more about ourselves than about the authors. And there’s a little bit of resentment to the authors for tricking us so badly, when we were so vulnerable. I’m not yet ready to divulge who’s on my version of that special list.
Bergotte does not disappoint Marcel in such a severe way, though he is acutely aware of the gap between the man he meets and the author he read:

I had told him [Bergotte] everything that I felt with a freedom which had astonished me and which was due to the fact that, having acquired with him, years before (in the course of all those hours of solitary reading, in which he was to me merely the better part of myself), the habit of sincerity, of frankness, of confidence, I found him less intimidating than a person with whom I was very uneasy about the impression that I must have been making on him, the contempt that I had supposed he would feel for my ideas dating not from that afternoon but from the already distant time in which I had begun to read his books in our garden at Combray. (611)

And so he tells Bergotte, after Bergotte remarks on how precocious he is in appreciating the “pleasures of the mind”:

I felt how purely material was everything that I desired in life, and how easily I could dispense with the intellect. As I made no distinction among my pleasures between those that came to me from different sources, of varying depth and permanence, I thought, when the moment came to answer him, that I should have liked an existence in which I was on intimate terms with the Duchesse de Guermantes and often came across , as in the old toll-house in the Champs-Elysees, a fusty coolness that would remind me of Combray. And in this ideal existence which I dared not confide to him, the pleasures of the mind found no place. (613)

Bergotte finds this surprising, and though Marcel is disappointed, he is still encouraged that such discussions can take place, and that the dead image of literature pushed on him by the staid M. de Norpois (around page 488 or so) earlier is not the limits of writing as practiced. Bergotte, not the man (or spirit) that Marcel had imagined, is still able to bring about a meaningful dialogue. Of course, just to emphasize the gap, Bergotte then trashes Cottard and Swann, which hits Marcel like an earthquake:

“[Swann’s] typical of the man who has married a whore, and has to pocket a dozen insults a day from women who refuse to meet his wife or men who have slept with her. Just look, one day when you’re there, at the way he lifts his eyebrows when he comes in, to see who’s in the room.” (615)

But what about Bergotte himself? Though initially appearing aloof, like the locked container of infinite knowledge, he shortly comes off as judgmental, amoral (in how he treats those around him), and petty. (More so than Swann)
His singular, unique vision, as described, should be a tip-off that he’ll eventually be painted as limited by that singularity of his vision. In Proust, strength and depth of feeling in a single direction invariably reveals a corresponding deficit in other directions. The judgment comes down most harshly when Proust pulls back to describe Bergotte’s later years:

[Bergotte] would say also, with a shy smile, of pages of his own for which someone had expressed admiration: “I think it’s more or less true, more or less accurate; it may be of some value perhaps,” but he would say this simply from modesty, as a woman to whom one has said that her dress or his daughter is beautiful replies, “It’s comfortable,” or “She’s a good girl.” But the instinct of the maker, the builder, was too deeply implanted in Bergotte for him not to be aware that the sole proof that he had built both usefully and truthfully lay in the pleasure that his work had given, to himself first of all and afterwards to his readers. Only, many years later, when he no longer had any talent, whenever he wrote anything with which he was not satisfied, in order not to have to suppress it, as he ought to have done, in order to be able to publish it, he would repeat, but to himself this time: “After all, it’s more or less accurate, it must be of some value to my country.” So that the phrase murmured long ago among his admirers by the crafty voice of modesty came in the end to be whispered in the secrecy of his heart by the uneasy tongue of pride. And the same words which had served Bergotte as a superfluous excuse for the excellence of his early works became as it were an ineffective consolation to him for the mediocrity of the last. (599)

This is such a sneaky technique, and Proust loves it. (He did the same with Swann, and there are frequently other references to the futures of other characters.) To pull back drastically and look at Bergotte years later, a self-deluding shadow of his former genius, pulls the rug out from any authority Bergotte once had. Whatever follows from Bergotte–and what follows does have a profound effect on the young Marcel–has its authority weakened. It is only a variant of Proust’s techniques elsewhere, where he destabilizes authoritative words and thoughts by revising them, but this nearly seems cheap. What redeems it is the idea that the same words, and indeed the same thoughts, could be used by a single man at different points in his life and carry completely different implications: at one time false modesty over one’s genius, at a later time a sad excuse. It makes the later Bergotte, whom we haven’t met yet, explicable and sympathetic in the terms of his current self.
For comparison, Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities deals heavily in the irony that the great plans of his Austrian political figures in 1912 will come to nothing when the war breaks out, but he only refers to it sparingly. The only reference that comes to me offhand, in fact, is almost in passing. I’ll quote the passage, if only to illustrate how differently Musil deploys his judgments (and also because I like it so much):

Had Arnheim been able to see only a few years into the future, he would have seen that 1,920 years of Christian morality, millions of dead men in the wake of a shattering war, and a whole German forest of poetry rustling in homage to the modesty of Women could not hold back the day when women’s skirts and hair began to grow shorter and the young girls of Europe slipped off eons of taboos to emerge for a while naked, like peeled bananas. He would have seen other changes as well, which he would hardly have believed possible, nor does it matter which of those would last and which would disappear, if we consider what vast and probably wasted efforts would have been needed to effect such revolutions in the way people lived by the slow, responsible, evolutionary road traveled by philosophers, painters, and poets, instead of tailors, fashion, and chance; it enables us to judge just how much creative energy is generated by the surface of things, compared with the barren conceit of the brain. (443)

Is it just me, or is there actually a bit of overlap here in their concerns, if not their tones? It reads like a defense of Marcel’s lack of interest in Bergotte’s “pleasures of the mind.” Now, Musil truly isn’t interested in the surfaces he references, while Proust makes them the center of the novel. If Proust does have an affiliation with one of the German writers of that era, it’s Mann, who I’ll get to next time.

2.1.4 Mme Swann at Home: Odette Herself

20 December 2003 / / 0 Comments

As with Swann, Odette herself has changed. Proust alternates between “Madame Swann” and “Odette” without a clear pattern, but it’s still evident that they represent two aspects of her, one in her role as Swann’s wife, one as the ill-bred and coarse Odette of years past. “Madame Swann” is the woman that the teenage Marcel sees, the charming mother of Gilberte, to whom he is affectionate. Odette is the person that Swann still remembers as his erstwhile love, but who no longer exists.
The “Madame Swann” of this section is defined partly by her relationship to Swann himself, but moreso by her relationship with Marcel. The Swanns initially find him distasteful, but warm to him and eventually Marcel’s relationship with Madame Swann is more intimate than that between any of the others: there is reticence and a maternal aspect to her, traits never before glimpsed. Yet the interchanging of the two names implies that there is part of the past Odette that persists, not the Odette in Swann’s mind (which is well and truly dead) but something that she envisions in herself, and something that persists in her relations with other people.
As she walks down the Avenue du Bois at the end of the section with Swann, as “established” as she ever has been and still the target of ambivalent gazes from younger men, she says to Marcel:

“You aren’t ever coming to see Gilberte again? I’m glad you make an exception of me, and are not going to drop me completely. I like seeing you, but I also liked the influence you had over my daughter. I’m sure she’s very sorry about it, too. However, I mustn’t bully you, or you’ll make up your mind at once that you never want to set eyes on me again.”
And as the average span of life, the relative longevity of our memories of poetical sensations is much greater than that of our memories of what the heart has suffered, now that the sorrows that I once felt on Gilberte’s account have long since faded and vanished, there has survived them the pleasure that I still derive from seeing myself once again strolling and talking thus with Mme Swann. (689)

(Marcel has long given up on Gilberte at this point.) Mme Swann is a different person entirely here; the years and her change in position have permitted her to participate in this experience right here, for which Marcel claims an esteemed position. It is as though this has endured even while his love for Gilberte, and Swann’s love for and jealousy over Odette, have not.
Again, the issue of taste–more specifically, of discernment–is paramount, because it’s the attunement to this sort of aesthetic appreciation, to the affecion shown within a casual social context, that Proust paints as being more enduring than the transitory passions. Thus, lack of taste towards such experiences is one of the largest failings one can have, in Proust’s world. Consequently, this moment holds a bit of redemption for Mme Swann, who, while no great intellect or moral paragon, has carved out a brief moment of bliss that has remained more strongly in Marcel’s memory than any of Swann and Odette’s unfortunate experiences. And I infer that Odette has slightly more taste too, as she can participate in such things.
It is this sort of rewriting that changes the shape of Swann’s Way in my mind, because while there was the sorrow of Swann’s waste of his life on Odette and the contrast with Marcel’s own memories of Combray, they were presented as distinct elements. Now they are intermixed and even Odette, very unsympathetic in “Swann in Love,” has facets that Swann and readers like me could not fit into the earlier framework.
That theme, if only as a subtle undercurrent, runs through the section. Swann and his wife have a relationship which has an intimacy that, if not love, is beyond sheer convenience:

As for Swann himself, she knew intimately those traits of character of which the rest of the world is ignorant and which it scoffs at, and of which only a mistress or a sister possesses the true and cherished image; and so strongly are we attached to such idiosyncrasies, even to those of them which we are most anxious to correct, that it is because a woman comes in time to acquire an indulgent, an affectionately mocking familiarity with them, such as we ourselves or our relatives have, that love affairs of long standing have something of the sweetness and strength of family affection. (505)

Actually, I’m confused as to why Proust uses the term “love affairs,” since what the Swanns have sure isn’t that. But Proust emphasizes a mysterious relation, the private aspects of what has gone on between the Swanns which are mostly not detailed, as having provided for them. They haven’t provided love, but they have provided, for Swann, stability, and for Odette, standing. And while Odette does no love Swann, nor does he bother her; there is stability there.
As Swann no longer has the demon of jealousy affecting his relationship with Mme Swann (since it’s affecting his affair with his mistress), he is in a pleasant torpor himself around her:

But so far as Odette was concerned, Swann was quite blind, not merely to these deficiencies in her education but to the general mediocrity of her intelligence. More than that; whenever Odette told a silly story Swann would sit listening to his wife with a complacency, a merriment, almost an admiration in which some vestige of desire for her must have played a part; while in the same conversation, anything subtle or even profound that he himself might say would be listened to by Odette with an habitual lack of interest, rather curtly, with impatience, and would at times be sharply contradicted. (559)

I suppose this sounds negative, but next to “Swann in Love,” it’s almost comfortable. (The reference to residual desire for Odette, however, seem to contradict what’s gone before and after, where it’s made quite clear that Swann does not love Odette any more, and so all I can say is, I give up. Such things are unknowable, if not in real life, at least in this book.) Swann has grown patient with Odette; Odette still does not understand much of what he’s talking about. But these are the ground rules, and they have provided, even still, a measure of nominal success. Swann’s ambitions have changed to fit the shape of his life, and with Gilberte around, he doesn’t even seem like the disappointed man that he ought to be.
What continuity there is to Odette is established in one cryptic passage, which draws the distinction even as it isolates a similarity. It begins with Proust discussing the importance of Mme Swann’s Garden:

There was another reason for the flowers’ having more than a merely ornamental significance in Mme Swann’s drawing-room, and this reason pertained not to the period but, in some degree, to the life that Odette had formerly led. A great courtesan such as she had been, lives largely for her lovers, that is to say at home, which means that she comes in time to live for her home. The things that one sees in the house of a “respectable” woman, things which may of course appear to her also to be of importance, are those which are in any event of the utmost importance to the courtesan. (638)

This passage is presented specifically as Marcel’s experience of his visits to the Swanns’ home, and how he feels her extend over the house so that even the flowers become an intimate particular that make him feel awkward. (Pages 638-641 or so give the full story and are very beautiful and difficult to summarize.)
But what does it mean? Is Proust taking high society down a peg by equating a woman’s dominance of her salon or other parties as similar to the control expressed by a courtesan? Is it an explanation of a continuity in Odette, detailing how she has preserved some crucial aspect of her soul after marrying Swann by removing the unacceptable aspect but preserving her sphere of influence? Does it anticipate the later quote mentioned above (page 689) by implying that the real importance to Odette’s earlier actions was not in the affairs themselves but in the aesthetics with which she conducted herself, which have developed and mutated into something not only acceptable in higher society, but aesthetically memorable?
I don’t think there’s a definite answer at hand, but there’s probably something to all three explanations. There is more of Odette in “Mme Swann at Home” than there was in “Swann in Love,” which was mostly about Swann, and if she’s not as sympathetic as Swann, she’s at least explicable and complex now.

2.1.3 Mme Swann at Home: Swann and Odette

18 December 2003 / / 0 Comments

If Swann’s Way zigzagged between Marcel’s childhood and Swann’s earlier affair, with clearly defined angles, Within a Budding Grove is corkscrew-shaped: each gnarled observation doubles back on itself and intersects with everything else, with no clear resolution.
One of the most vivid juxtapositions comes in Marcel’s view of Gilberte (the Swanns’ daughter), who has come to embody both the present and the past of her parents:

On Gilberte’s face, at the corner of a perfect reproduction of Odette’s nose, the skin was raised so as to preserve intact M. Swann’s two moles. It was a new variety of Mme Swann that was thus obtained, growing there by her side like a white lilac-tree besides a purple…It was when she had been to her classes, when she must go home for some lesson that Gilberte’s pupils executed that movement which, in the past, in Odette’s eyes, had been caused by the fear of disclosing that she had opened the door that day to one of her lovers, or was at that moment in a hurry to get to some assignation. Thus did one see the two natures of M. and Mme Swann ripple and flow and overlap one upon the other in the body of this Melusine. (607)

The main point here is how Gilberte takes after and intermixes parts of both of her parents, good and bad, but beneath that, there is also the suggestion of natures past and present: Swann’s abandoned social climbing, Odette’s coquetry, Mme Swann’s more subdued role as a wife, the resigned intellectual that Swann has become.
What of the two parents? Odette and Swann have ended up married, more seemingly by default than for any other reason. He doesn’t love her; whatever appeal she once held has not returned. Everything is for convenience. That is the immediate implication. But, as elsewhere, their present relationship affects the past as much as the past affects it:

The laborious process of causation which sooner or later will bring about every possible effect, including, consequently, those which one had believed to be least possible, naturally slow at times, is rendered slower still by our desire (which in seeking to accelerate only obstructs it), by our very existence, and comes to fruition only when we have ceased to desire–have ceased, possibly, to live. Was not Swann conscious of this from his own experience, and was there not already in his lifetime–as it were a prefiguration of what was to happen after his death–a posthumous happiness in this marriage with Odette whom he had passionately loved–even if she had not attracted him at first sight–whom he had married when he no longer loved her, when the person who, in Swann, had so longed to live and so despaired of living all his life with Odette, when that person was dead? (508)

Here, Proust presents Swann as a changed man: in fact, it was only through his change (his renouncing of his love for Odette) that he was ever able to marry him. Yet the marriage, despite his lack of love for her, makes a sanguine postmortem for Swann’s dead self, the one who did love Odette, in that he (the current Swann) has made his dead self happy by ending up with Swann, even if his current self is, at best, resigned. The irony arises in the fact that Proust presents it as a prerequisite that Swann had given up all his passion before he could have married her. The arrangement between M. Swann and Mme. Swann requires that he not be the crazed obsessive of years past but a reticent, somewhat cynical man of good standing. And so he is:

There was no renunciation on Swann’s part, when he married Odette, of his social ambitions, for from those ambitions Odette had long ago, in the spiritual sense of the word, detached him…In so far as a mental picture which accompanies one of our resolutions may be said to motivate it, so it might be said that if Swann married Odette it was in order to introduce her, together with Gilberte, without anyone else being present, without, if need be, anyone else ever coming to know if it, to the Duchesse de Guermantes. (506-508)

And also:

For a long time now it had been a matter of indifference to him whether Odette had been, or was being, unfaithful to him. And yet he had continued for some years to seek out old servants of hers, to such an extent had the painful curiosity persisted in him, to know whether on that day, so long ago, at six o’clock, Odette had been in bed with Forcheville. Then the curiosity itself had disappeared, without, however, his abandoning his investigations. He went on trying to discover what no longer interested him, because his old self, though it had shrivelled to extreme decrepitude, still acted mechanically, in accordance with preoccupations so utterly abandoned that Swann could not now succeed even in picturing to himself that anguish–so compelling once that he had been unable to imagine that he would ever be delivered from it. (564)

Again, there is the zombie Swann, who still acts on his old desires. And again, I’m not sure how much to trust this, since there is so much confusion and suggestion that these passages are only the temporary rationalization of Swann’s current self. It’s enough to say that Swann does not love Odette, certainly not like he did in the past, but he is still moved by her, and by his former self.
Most notably, Swann has a new, unnamed lover, who dredges up the old anxieties:

For between Swann and the woman whom he loved this anguish piled up an unyielding mass of previous suspicions, having their cause in Odette, or in some other perhaps who had preceded Odette, which allowed the ageing lover to know his mistress of to-day only through the old, collective spectre of the “woman who aroused his jealousy” in which he had arbitrarily embodied his new love. Often, however, Swann woulud accuse his jealousy of making him believe in imaginary infidelities; but then he would remember that he had given Odette the benefit of the same argument, and wrongly. And so everything that the young woman whom he loved did in the hours that he was not with her ceased to appear innocent. But whereas at that other time he had made a vow that if ever he ceased to love the woman who, though he did not then know it, was to be his future wife, he would show her an implacable indifference that would at last be sincere, in order to avenge his pride that had so long been humiliated, now that he could enforce those reprisals without risk to himself, he no longer wihsed to do so; with his love had vanished the desire to show that he no longer loved. (565)

This is the most vehement passage of renunciation, where Swann has not only given up on Odette totally, but he has also given up on even wanting to avenge himself on her by cheating on her. (He does it anyway, but he won’t tell her.) Yet Odette is still present in his fears about his new love, and it is not the “Mme. Swann” of the present day but the Odette of years past. Having been filled with emotion again, the memory of the object (i.e., Odette) that captivated him when he was in love is cast on to the new object (the unnamed woman) even as Odette herself is the subject of none of his old emotions. It is this remembered object, no longer extant, that informs his relationship with the new woman, more than anything in his marriage.
(I use the word “object” because he is so insistent on the myopia of each character as they interact with their projected, changing views of other people. It is to his immense credit that the subject changes so rapidly, particularly in “Mme Swann at Home,” as to produce vertigo and uncertainty.)
The themes are even a little trite here: Swann never got over old Odette, the green-eyed demon still torments him, he’s grown tired of Odette even though he got her. What’s striking is the treatment. It’s the tactic of laying out the contradictions over time, contradictions that don’t get resolved because there is no true consistency: Swann’s images of Odette in years past are, ultimately, his own, and they make themselves felt again because Odette then still exists for him, in that zombie part of him that can still react without reason.
Compare it to the end (ch. 17) of Joyce’s Ulysses, where there is the realization that Bloom’s relationship with Stephen Dedalus will not recreate Bloom’s dead son Rudy, due to “the irreparability of the past [and] the imprevidibility of the future.” Joyce’s faux “scientific objective” tone in that chapter serves to pull Bloom from inside his own head to a point of (as I always read it) despair, but also to a point where his endeavors may be cast in a nobler light. Proust focuses exclusively on the former aspect, but he never admits a single emotion above others. He is persistent in destabilizing his frameworks, and there is a certain humility in that. I find Ulysses heartbreaking, but I’m also inclined to think that emotionally, it is more tradition-bound than Proust.
Later, when Marcel is mourning the death of his love for Gilberte, he might as well be talking about Swann:

The picture of the beloved in our minds which we believe to be old, original, authentic, has in reality been refashioned by us many times over. The cruel memory, on the other hand, is not contemporaneous with the restored picture, it is of another age, it is one of the rare witnesses to a monstrous past. But inasmuch as this past continues to exist, save in ourselves who have been pleased to substitute for it a miraculous golden age, a paradise in which all mankind shall be reconciled, those memories, those letters carry us back to reality, and cannot but make us feel, by the sudden pang they give us, what a long way we have been borne from that reality by the baseless hopes engendered by our daily expectation.
But after a time, absence may prove efficacious. The desire, the appetite for seeing us again may after all be reborn in the heart which at present contemns us. Only, we must allow time. But our demands as far as time is concerned are no less exorbitant than those which the heart requires in order to change. For one thing, time is the very thing that we are least willing to allow, for our suffering is acute and we are anxious to see it brought to an end. And then, too, the time which the other heart will need in order to change, our own heart will have spent in changing itself also, so that when the goal which we had set ourselves becomes attainable it will have ceased to be our goal. Besides, the very idea that it will be attainable, that there is no happiness that, when it has ceased to be a happiness for us, we cannot ultimately attain, contains an element, but only an element, of truth. It falls to us when we have grown indifferent to it. But the very fact of our indifference will have made us less exacting, and enables us in retrospect to feel convinced that it would have delighted us had it come at a time when perhaps it would have seemed to us miserably inadequate. One is not very particular, nor a very good judge, about things which no longer matter to one…So that we can never be certain that the happiness which comes to us too late, when we can no longer enjoy it, when we are no longer in love, is altogether the same as that same happiness the lack of which made us at one time so unhappy. There is only one person who could decide this–our then self; it is no longer with us, and were it to reappear, no doubt our happiness–identical or not–would vanish. (675-676)

In the second paragraph, the first third or so are things we’ve heard before. It’s the looping back (from “Besides…” onward), the delving into a hypothetical past space where an individual subjective mind cannot exist, that is novel.

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David Auerbach

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