In WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE, the narrator makes his first tentative attempts at love. His plan to ingratiate himself with Gilberte by becoming friends with her parents backfires badly when Gilberte begins to distance himself from him. He agrees then to spend a season with his grandmother in a Norman oceanside resort named Balbec. There, in the most memorable scene in the novel, he makes the acquaintance of a "little band" of eight girls whose poise and sang-froid disarranges his senses. He falls in love, with first, then another. As the novel ends, we see him select one of them, Albertine, for future conquest.
This is my second time through the budding grove of Proust's great multi-part novel with its crescendo of (unfulfilled) sensuality. Such was the impact of the Balbec scenes that I thought that the narrator's pursuit of the band of girls took up most of the novel. In fact, it does not appear until well into the last part and takes up less than 200 pages. It is simply that Proust imprinted that scene so strongly in my mind that, over the years, I mistook a part for the whole.
WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE introduces some memorable characters that will come back in future volumes: In addition to Albertine, there are Robert de Saint-Loup, the painter Elstir, the Marquise de Villeparisis, and the Baron de Charlus. In the later volumes, we will see how Marcel (for that is the narrator's name) will fare with Albertine, and how the world that he saw as a shimmering fairy castle will shatter with the working out of his destiny, that of his friends, and that of the French in the years before the Great War.
One of the great chess grandmasters commented on the opening setup position -- before any moves had been made -- by saying "All the mistakes are there, waiting to be made."
Proust's extraordinary genius is evident on every page of this amazing book. One could point to any of a few dozen moments to illustrate this. What is amazing to me about Proust is how he can take an amazingly everyday event, and build it to proportions as great as any battle scene in WAR AND PEACE. For instance, at the end of "Madame Swann at Home," the narrator recounts the times he would wait at the Arc de Triomphe to take a walk with Madame Swann and her entourage. The ensuing eight or nine pages, which merely recount the group walking through Paris, become as majestic and epic as any scene in Homer or Virgil or Tolstoy. No scene would seem to contain less potential for greatness, yet Proust is able to make it something truly unique and beautiful. Or, to take another incident, have there been many incidents in literature as filled with passion and emotion and suspense as the Narrator's first attempt to kiss Albertine? In a mere two pages, Proust is about to pack a surreal amount of dramatic (and comic) action.
Although famous for containing at least part of both of the narrator's great love affairs, I find this novel even more fascinating for the extraordinary detailing of the myriad of social and class distinctions to be found in the seemingly infinitely varied French society. The great theme throughout the book, even when not specifically mentioned, is snobbism, and Proust owns the subject of snobbery as Homer owns that of war. Proust reveals snobbery primarily proceeding from those slightly lower on the social ladder. Ironically, he reveals those at the top guilty not of snobbery but of insolence and disdain, while not even his servant Françoise is innocent of being a snob. The tensions in the novel become particularly acute given the changes that were taking place in French society at the time. This theme is not restricted to this novel alone. It featured in SWANN'S WAY, especially in the attitudes of the Verdurin "faithful" and will be a major theme of ensuing volumes, especially THE GUERMANTES WAY.
The section of the novel recounting his getting to know Elstir contains perhaps my favorite passage in all of Proust, where Elstir, upon the narrator's learning something unflattering of Elstir's past, tells him that no one has not done things that they would not love to expunge, but that no one ought to despise this, because this is the only way one can truly become wise. "We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one can else can make for us, which no one can spare, us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world." This is not merely the opinion of Proust's character: it could stand as the central meaning of the novel as a whole.
Consider one passage which Theodor Adorno admired very much, where Marcel encounters Madame Swann wearing a lovely dress: "And I learned that these canons according to which she dressed, it was for her own satisfaction that she obeyed them, as though yielding to a Superior Wisdom of which she herself was High Priestess: for if it should happen that, feeling too warm, she threw open or even took off altogether and gave me to carry the jacket which she had intended to keep button up, I would discover in the blouse beneath it a thousand details of execution which had had every chance of remaining unperceived, like those parts of an orchestral score to which the composer had devoted infinte labor albeit they may never reach the ears of the public: or in the sleeves of the jacket that lay folded across my arm I would see, I would drink in slowly, for my own pleasure of from affection for its wearer, some exquisite detail, a deliciously tinted strip, a lining of mauve satinette which, ordinarily concealed from every eye, was yet just as deliciously fashioned as the outer parts, like those gothic carvings on a cathedral, hidden on the inside of a balustrade eighty feet from the ground, as perfect as are the bas-reliefs over the main porch, yet never seen by any living man until, happening to pass that way upon his travels, an artist obtains leave to climb up there among them, to stoll in the open air, sweeping the whole town with a comprehensive gaze, between the soaring towers."
Adorno's comments on this passage are far more profound than anything I could say. (They are availabe in the second volume of Notes to Literature) What is so striking, says Adorno, about this passage is not its enraptured precision but the way Proust preserves the unmediated experience of childhood that is so easily destroyed by our conformist society. In showing that this experience can be retrieved Proust's writing is profoundly liberating, not filled with "the false maturity of resignation." Though Proust was physically weak, the iron discipline of Proust's art reveals the deepest and most heroic discipline. Proust, in the end, is a martyr to happiness.
