Ah, holiday weekend, you sucked away the extra time I usually get when I'm not the only adult in the house. Thankfully beach time, fireworks, and good beer were worth it. But I'd wanted to read 100 pages over the weekend and I only squeezed in 10 before the work week returned.
Class issues
We meet the eponymous Swann. The narrator and his family appear to belong to the middle class, and while Swann used to belong to this set as well, he appears to have risen a half class or more in popularity. We are told that this elevation of his position escapes the family's knowledge because "middle class people in those days took what was almost a Hindu view of society, which they held to consist of sharply defined castes, so that everyone at his birth found himself called to that station in life which his parents already occupied..." (p.19) and we are also given distinct examples of how this was untrue in a reality where class was more fluid. Swann is the obvious example, but then the narrator's great aunt provides a second: she is described as being "the only member of our family who could be described as a trifle 'common,'" (p.21). And later, the grandmother is said to feel that "distinction was a thing wholly independent of social position," that a tailor was "the best and most distinguished man she had ever seen" while "a nephew of Mme. de Villeparisis whom she had met at the house [was] 'so common!'" (p.25)
A comment about titles: "[my great-aunt] had actually ceased to 'see' the son of a lawyer of our acquaintance because he had married a 'Highness' and had thereby stepped down—in her eyes—from the respectable position of a lawyer's son to that of those adventurers, upstart footmen or stable-boys mostly, to whom, we are told, queens have sometimes shown their favours." (p.26-27)
Some philosophy
Swann's place in society sets up a narration on class but also on the nature of self and perception. The narrator reflects on our being seen as different to each person of our acquaintance, that "even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people." (p.23)
And referring not only to this philosophy, but the concept of memory and fluid time, the existence not of a Swann who was different, but of a different Swann, and also a reference to art as life: "this early Swann in whom I can distinguish the charming mistakes of my youth, and who in fact is less like his successor than he is like the other people I knew at that time, as though one's life were a picture gallery in which all the portraits of any one period had a marked family likeness, the similar tonality—this early Swann abounding in leisure, fragrant with the scent of the great chestnut-tree, of baskets of raspberries and of a sprig of tarragon." (p.24)
A bit of humor
As the dinner party gets underway, the party that will separate the narrator from his mother earlier than he would like and will deny him that goodnight kiss in his bed, we are introduced to the grandmother's sisters, who are perfect caricatures of old biddies from earlier novels. Their attempts to thank Swann for a gift of wine and to mention his having been written up in a recent newspaper article suffer from such "a wealth of ingenious circumlocution, that it would often pass unnoticed even by the person to whom it was addressed" (pp.29). And their meaning may be subtle, but their method is not, so we are treated to a scene of satirical humor, while Swann is left "in some bewilderment." (p.33)
About Swann
Swann is purported to have been fashioned at least in part after Charles Ephrussi, a Jewish art historian and collector
I admit to being disappointed that he wears his hair in the Bressant style (p.17), better known today as a mullet. But I also wonder if this isn't part of his characterization (by which I mean as a patron of nineteenth century pop-culture—theater, art, politics—not as a hillbilly).
He frequents the Jockey Club and the Faubourge Saint-Germain, and hangs out with folks like the Comte de Paris and the Prince of Wales, so he is popular with the elite French society, the haute bourgeoisie and the upper class or nobility, such as it is.
He lives on the Quai d'Orléans, and I found a great article about that here which describes this as the "perfect place for Swann, connoisseur, collector, writer marqué who once imagined he would publish a study of Vermeer." (p.19)
He has made a disadvantageous marriage, at least in the minds of the narrator's family, possibly on the grounds of pregnancy, and he has a daughter.
Vocabulary:
Ferruginous (p.16, adj) 1. Containing iron oxides or rust. 2. Reddish brown; rust-colored.
Other passages/quotes worth noting:
p.20 "when challenged by them to give an opinion, or to express his admiration for some picture, he would remain almost disobligingly silent, and would then make amends by furnishing (if he could) some fact or other about the gallery in which the picture was hung, or the date at which it had been painted." (a character trait to which I think we return later)
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