The collector’s response to the beauty of art, Proust remarks, is to want to possess it, whereas the artist loves beauty with disinterest it is the glamour of art, rather than its essence, that pulls Swann into his affair, and eventually into a disastrous marriage (SW, 227). As this line suggests, Swann’s dilettantism loads the gun of his aestheticism. Proust’s congenitally cynical view of love, which much of his writing treats not as recognition but as illusion, allows him to relate the plot of the romance with the minute attention and inverted dramatic scale of a clinician following symptoms, even using terms like “disease” and “convalesce.” A collector of art, a connoisseur, something of a dilettante, Swann lets aesthetic sentimentality overwhelm his judgment of Odette, who he decides resembles one of the sylphs from Botticelli or Watteau, with the inaccessible glories of those painters at last “united in a creature whom he could possess” (SW, 238). “Swann in Love” chronicles the misplaced infatuation of Charles Swann, a friend of Marcel’s family, over a coquette named Odette de Crécy. (Although Proust sketched this character partly as a sly libel on himself, as a church artist, relishing the chance to play the sinner, renders himself as one of the devils in his portrayal of hell, he was not above taking advantage of his illness, telling friends, for instance, that his eyes were too weak to read their books.) But all this is merely preparation for the novel’s main action investigating a malady of a different kind, which comes into view in the final third of the novel, a self-contained novelette titled “Swann in Love.”

Green says, enjoys all the advantages of ill health with few of the unpleasant symptoms. The awakening self that the narrator chooses to begin his larger narrative is the one in his childhood home in Combray, which he sketches in wicked detail and crowns with an entertaining portrait of one Aunt Léonie, an ancient and eccentric invalid who, as F.C.

The famous opening passage of Swann’s Way, in which the narrator describes his periodic experience of emerging from sleep without a clear sense of where he is or his present age, requiring a moment of struggle to situate himself and reclaim his identity, hints at the sense in which what follows will concern itself with coming into oneself, finding one’s identity, awakening, on many different levels. Swann’s Way, the first installment of Marcel Proust‘s seven-volume In Search of Lost Time, was published in 1913. By Elyse Graham, Steven Hobbs, and Laura B.

Marcel proust swann