Psychological Landscapes

Setting in Proust’s Swann’s Way

Marcel Proust, in “Combray,” the beginning section of his epic novel, In Search of Lost Time, weaves together strands of memories and places to create a psychological landscape or geography in which he, through the narrator, guides the reader on a slow, discursive journey through the inner workings of his mind. Indeed, setting is paramount for Proust: it is the primary means through which he recreates an internal world, a world of memory and desire.

The narrator in Proust’s first volume, called Swann’s Way,¹ is spurred into the world of memory by a little madeleine, a small, molded cake shaped like a scallop shell, that had been dipped in tea. After having tasted it, he says that a “delicious pleasure...invaded me, isolated me, without my having any notion as to its cause. It...rendered the vicissitudes of life unimportant to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory...”(45). The memory of his Aunt Léonie returns to him, along with the gray house they lived in, the church, and all the rest of Combray (48). With that, Proust sends his narrator on a journey, a profoundly psychological journey, in which setting is essential because its products are tangible and of a specific nature. Proust’s narrator, while reading a book, realizes that “[a]lready less interior to my body than these lives of the characters, next came, half projected in front of me, the landscape in which the action unfolded and which exerted on my thoughts a much greater influence than the other...”(87). Proust’s narrator has a keen and passionate eye, interpreting everything around him in a private, psychological way.

There are many narrative settings in Proust’s book, but I have chosen to focus on five items, some of them grand, some of lesser import; but all showing the significance of setting for Proust’s narrator: the kitchen, the church, walking in the moonlight, walking along the way to Swann’s, and the Guermantes way.

The narrator has fond memories of being in the kitchen where Françoise, the bad-tempered head maid, would be “commanding the forces of nature” (123). He had a particular love for asparagus “steeped in ultramarine and pink.” He goes on:

It seemed to me that these celestial hues revealed the delicious creatures who had

merrily metamorphosed themselves into vegetables and who, through the

disguise of their firm, edible flesh, disclosed in these early tints of dawn,

in these beginnings of rainbows, in this extinction of blue evenings, the pre-

cious essence that I recognized again when, all night long following a dinner

at which I head eaten them, they played, in farces as crude and poetic as a

fairy play by Shakespeare, at changing my chamber pot into a jar of perfume (123-4).

The narrator’s voice is at once earthy, yet transcendent, tempered by the setting of the kitchen, a place that is, for the narrator, unrefined and mystical; a common place² that brings life through the preparation and eating of food. The setting of the kitchen creates a holy place in the narrator’s mind as the following scene shows:

When I arrived downstairs [Françoise] was busy in the scullery...killing a

chicken which, by its desperate and quite natural resistance, but accompanied

by Françoise, beside herself as she tried to split its neck under the ear, with

cries of “Vile creature! Vile creature!,” put the saintly gentleness and

unction of our servant a little less in evidence than it would, at dinner the

next day, by its skin embroidered with gold like a chasuble and its precious

juice drained from a ciborium (124).

Notice Proust’s use of religious imagery juxtaposed with the plainness of the chicken and its butchering.

The holiness of the kitchen is not to be outdone by the holiness of the church and, in particular, of the hawthorns displayed prominently on the alter that were “inseparable from the mysteries in whose celebration they took part, their branches running out among the candles and holy vessels...” (114). Indeed, the narrator is in such awe of the hawthorns that he feared staring at them. Proust uses the setting of the church and the hawthorns to intertwine the narrator’s observations of them with those of a girl, M. Vinteuil’s freckled, “boyish” daughter:

Higher up, [the hawthorn’s] corollas opened here and there with a careless

grace, still holding so casually...the bouquets of stamens...which clouded

them entirely, that in following, in trying to mime deep inside myself the motion

of their flowering, I imagined it as the quick and thoughtless movement of the

head, with coquettish glance and contracted eyes, of a young girl in white,

dreamy and alive (114-5).

Later, upon leaving the church, the narrator smelled the aroma of almonds emanating from the hawthorns, and he imagined that the scent must be hidden under little yellow places on the flowers,

“as the taste of a frangipani must be hidden under the burned parts, or that of Mlle. Vinteuil’s cheeks under their freckles”(116). The specifics of this setting influences the narrator’s thinking: it is precisely because he is in the church that he thinks these thoughts.

Another setting that Proust uses in developing the narrator’s interior landscape is the narrator’s remembrance of walks in the moonlight, walks which he took with his parents after evening mass if the air was warm. Often they would walk to the viaduct, “whose giant strides of stone began at the railway station and represented to me the exile and distress that lay outside the civilized world”(116-7). On these evening walks when the narrator and his family approached the viaduct and the train station at Combray, which marked for him the farthest limit of the Christian countries, his family would turn and head back into the safety of Combray and its gardens, back into the Christian fold where the narrator observed the haunting, destructive nature of the moonlight:

We would return by way of the station boulevard, which was lined by the most

pleasant houses in the parish. In each garden the moonlight...scattered its

broken staircases of white marble, it fountains, its half-open gates. Its light

had destroyed the Telegraph Office. All that remained was one column, half

shattered but still retaining the beauty of an immortal ruin (117).

The irony, of course, is that though the narrator feels safer within the confines of the village and its houses’ gardens than the land beyond the viaduct and train station, the moon’s light and subsequent shadowing of the buildings causes the narrator to use destructive terms in describing what he remembers seeing, which in turn affects his biases and shapes his memory.

The narrator’s description of both Swann’s way (or Méséglise way) and Guermantes way form a substantial portion of Proust’s “Combray.” The narrator tells the reader that he made mental walls between the two ways because his father always talked about the landscape of Swann’s way as “the most beautiful view of the plain that he knew and about the Guermantes way as a typical river landscape.” The narrator says that he

set between them, much more than their distance in miles, the distance that lay

between the two parts of my brain where I thought about them, one of those

distances of the mind which not only moves things away from each other,

but separates them and puts them on different planes. And that demarcation

was made even more absolute because of our habit of never going both ways

on the same day (137-8).

To walk along the way to M. Swann’s place, one left through the front door, the narrator says. M. Swann’s estate, Tansonville, which was situated just outside of the village, was surrounded by elegant gardens. The narrator notices the hawthorns in these gardens, loses himself among them, “bringing into the presence of my thoughts, which did not know what to do with it, then losing and finding again their invisible and unchanging smell, absorbing myself in the rhythm that tossed their flowers here and there with youthful high spirits...”(141). It was among the hawthorns and their “opulent finery” that the narrator realized his fear and desire to meet M. Swann’s daughter, the young Mlle. Swann. He does see her later, along her mother and mother’s lover, out in the gardens. Her mother calls her name, and the narrator thinks

[s]o it was that this name, Gilberte, passed by close to me, given like a talisman

that might one day enable me to find this girl again whom it had just turned into

a person and who, a moment before, had been merely an uncertain image (145).

Thus, Gilberte becomes a living being for the narrator, attached in his memory with the pink hawthorns in the Tansonville gardens.

Sometimes, while walking through the fields along the way to Swann’s toward Méséglise, the narrator would notice the wind flowing across the fields like a wave, which, for him, was the “presiding spirit of Combray.” For the narrator, the wind across the fields had the affect of joining Mlle. Swann with himself. He says that

this plain which was shared by us both seemed to bring us together, join us,

and I would imagine that this breath of wind had passed close beside her,

that what it whispered to me was some message from her though I could not

understand it, and I would kiss it as it went by (149).

For the narrator, the wind was an interior, tangible way of being with Mlle. Swann.

Later, the narrator reflects on his having spent so much time along Swann’s way and realizes that “the same emotions do not arise simultaneously, in a preestablished order, in all men”(159). He says that

[i]f I had just been thinking tenderly about my parents and making the wisest

decisions, those most likely to please them, they would have been employing

the same time in discovering some peccadillo I had forgotten, and they would

reproach me severely for it just at the moment I bounded toward them to give

them a hug (159).

The narrator’s interior landscape was surely influenced by his time spent along the way to Swann’s. The physical landscape colored the way he saw his life and experienced his life, and it affected the way he viewed others. At one point on one of his walks, when he suddenly desired to meet a “peasant” girl, he realizes that

this desire that a woman should appear added something more exhilarating

to the charms of nature, the charms of nature, in return, broadened what

would have been too narrow in the woman’s charm.... And, too,...the passing

woman summoned by my desire deemed to be, not an ordinary exemplar

of that general type—woman—but a necessary and natural product of this

particular soil.... And I did not separate the earth and the people (159-60).

Setting, for Proust, is essential: it creates the interior landscape through which the narrator passes.

To walk the Guermantes way one had to walk out the little gate in the garden. The Guermantes way followed the river Vivonne, the “greatest charm of the Guermantes way.” Proust uses rich imagery in describing the way to Guermantes. These walks were taken by the narrator and his family on days when the weather was nice and when they had plenty of time to be away. The walks were long, and they often went by some ruins from the Middle Ages. These ruins were on the opposite shore of the towpath on which they walked. The narrator muses about

a post that had descended into the earth, lying by the edge of the water like some

hiker enjoying the cool air, but giving me a great deal to think about, making

me add to the little town of today, under the name of Combray, a very dif-

ferent town, captivating my thoughts with its incomprehensible face of long

ago, which it half concealed under the buttercups (171).

Later, watching a water lily in the Vivonne, the narrator is reminded of people like his sickly Aunt Léonie who live life tied to their afflictions. The lily was tethered to the bank and

its peduncle would unfold, lengthen, flow out, reach the extreme limit of its

tension at the edge where the current would pick it up again, then the green

cord would fold up on itself and bring the poor plant back to...its point of

departure (172).

The narrator has pity on the plant because it repeats this action over and over again, and, from watching it, he sympathizes with those “who present year after year the unchanging spectacle of the bizarre habits they believe, each time, they are about to shake off and which they retain forever”(173). Here, the narrator is influenced by the setting along the Guermantes way and the stuck water lily.

The landscape along the Guermantes way bestows on the narrator a poetic sensibility, one which is irrevocably linked to setting. Once, along Guermantes way, the narrator muses about the possibility of becoming a writer:

Then, quite apart from all these literary preoccupations and not connected

to them in any way, suddenly a roof, a glimmer of sun on a stone, the smell

of the road would stop me because they seemed to be concealing, beyond

what I could see, something which they were inviting me to come take

and which despite my efforts I could not manage to discover....I would

stand there, motionless, looking, breathing, trying to go with my thoughts

beyond the image or the smell (182).

This is experienced by the narrator as he is observing steeples while riding in a carriage, so intrigued is he at the sight of them. “Soon,” he says “their sunlit surfaces split apart, as if they were a sort of bark, a little of what was hidden from me inside them appeared to me, I had a thought which had not existed a moment before, which took shape in words in my head”(184). Here the narrator is once again dissecting the landscape, his setting, and transforming it into a psychological terrain. He goes on to compose, while riding in the carriage, a work of prose in praise of the steeples of Martinville, a piece the writer found again later and boasts that he didn’t have to “submit to more than a few changes”(185).

Setting, for Proust, unfurled by the memory of eating the madeleine dipped in tea, is important. It is the cornerstone on which he builds the narrative of his story, and it shapes his memories and gives them a footing.