Jouissance: An Exploration of Love and Jealousy in Swann’s Way

Love is a complex and ambiguous phenomenon. Marcel Proust’s ‘Swann’s Way’ details the relationship between love and jealousy through the protagonist, Swann, and Swann’s love interest, Odette: their bond serves as a conduit through which we can examine Proust’s depiction of love. Exploring the interplay of love and jealousy will help in exhibiting how our perceptions can be our best friend or our worst enemy. Investigating Swann’s jealousy for Odette, I will argue that Proust paints an impermanent, solipsistic, and ultimately tragic picture of love.

Opening this essay is an account of Proust’s theory of memory, detailing how voluntary memory and involuntary memory affect how the world is understood. Section two presents Swann’s relationship with Odette, converging on how the right trigger— a phrase of music, a painting —can invoke memories that, in turn, radically alter his theretofore indifferent opinion of Odette. Finally, section three details how Swann’s growing feelings for Odette results in a fit of jealousy that is at once powered by and takes the place of his love.

Proust’s theory of memory is a critical factor in his portrayal of love. At the center of his theory is a tension between voluntary memory and involuntary memory: the former comprised of immediately accessible past experiences; the latter, of past experiences that are forgotten to us. While scholars’ agree that willing evocation of involuntary memories is unlikely (Tukey 1969, 395), Proust’s came to believe they could be elicited by the right trigger—particularly, interactions with works of art. Proust details one such experience through his character, Marcel.

Arriving home one dreary winter’s evening, cold and depressed, Marcel’s mother treats to some tea and a type of butter cake, known as a madeleine. On hitting his lips, the tea-cake concoction took on the form of an alchemical potion, leaving Marcel overflowing with mysterious yet pleasurable sensations. Marcel came to believe that the madeleine experience set off a process of remembering things past—fond memories of childhood in which his aunt Léonie would treat him to a tea-soaked madeleine (Proust 1992, 63). Informing his representation of Swann and Odette’s relationship, and therefore, his depiction of love, memory proves an important factor when considering Proust’s work.

Proust’s portrayal of love develops throughout Swann’s Way. Infatuated with Swann, Odette invites him to a salon at chez Verdurin, the home of a bourgeois couple who are desperate to climb the social ladder. Swann’s experiences in love left him disenchanted; despite her advances, Swann remained indifferent, even repulsed, at the sight of Odette (Proust 1992, 276). On hearing a phrase of a musical composition, Vinteuil’s sonata, an involuntary memory erupts within Swann. Much like Marcel’s tea-cake experience, the violin sonata elicited fond memories of Swann’s youth, filling him with a sense of possibility that had been theretofore forgotten. (Proust 1992, 295-296).

Later, Swann associates Odette with Botticelli’s portrait of Zipporah (Proust 1992, 312): her imperfections are disregarded, and the memory of what remains is lined in ‘molten gold’ (Proust 1992, 432). In focusing on substitute objects of love— Vinteuil’s sonata and Botticelli’s Zipporah —we see Swann’s feelings for Odette progress from indifference to obsession (Watt 2011, 50), while his conception of her paradoxically moves further away from reality. In observing that Swann’s love is deepened by combining past and present experience, serving to distort reality, we see Proust depicting love as is in part solipsistic: Proust seems to depict love as a relationship with an idealized image of the other, created out of our own selfish needs, rather than taking them for who they are.

Swann’s growing obsession with Odette elicits a compensatory decline in her love for him. It’s at this first peak in his landscape of feeling for Odette that Swann’s jealousy introduced. The Verdurins invite Comte de Forcheville, who they see as a better match for Odette, to their salon (Proust 1992, 348). Now consumed by jealousy, Swann alters his previously restrained character in an attempt to regain Odette’s affection, which he perceives as waning: he offers money to ease her financial trouble (Proust 1992, 379). Driven to spying on Odette after she sent him home one evening, Swann believes his suspicions of another lover confirmed when he sees a light left on in ‘her’ apartment, only to realize he was at the wrong address. Odette’s absence, coupled with suspicions that her absence may be shared with someone else, add to Swann’s jealousy: in a morbid fascination, he is at once in love with and repulsed by images of Odette that exist in his mind, detached from reality. Through Swann’s jealousy-driven behaviour, Proust seems to depict love as volatile, impermanent, and egocentric.

Vinteuil’s sonata acts as a conduit through which we can gain insight into Swann’s fluctuating feelings for Odette. On first hearing the sonata, Swann is bewitched by fond memories of his youth, filling him with feelings of possibility; feelings that are subsequently associated with Odette. Becoming their ‘national anthem’ (Proust 1992, 305), the sonata functions as a trigger for memories of and feelings associated with their budding love. As Swann suspects Odette’s love for him is abating, the sonata functions as a temporary analgesic, soothing the pain felt in the wake of love’s impermanence (Proust 1992, 375). Finally, as Swann wallows in self-pity while the sonata evokes memories of Odette, we see the sonata function as a harbinger of jouissance, the enjoyment of suffering. Swann’s wavering feelings are the result of a psychogenic conflict between two images of Odette: one of who she is; the other, who he wishes her to be. Proust uses Swann’s experience of Vinteuil’s sonata to highlight the plastic, narcissistic, and impermanent aspects of love.

Throughout Swann’s Way, the protagonist is suspended between imagination and reality. In what Kubala termed a ‘Proustian law’ (2016, 553), the birth of love— and its shadowy compatriot, jealousy —depends not on destiny, but on the emotional state of the subject at the time of contact. For Proust’s, love seems to exist primarily in the mind of the lover. Swann’s feelings for Odette, wavering between love and jealousy, paint love as solipsistic, impermanent, and ultimately tragic.

Marcel Proust had gift for perceiving deeper layers of reality that others regularly disregard. Proust’s theory of memory, introduced through Marcel’s madeleine experience, heavily influenced his depiction of love. Driven by fantasy, the erratic nature of Swann’s feelings for Odette sheds light reciprocal relationship between love and jealousy: the latter acting as a shadow of the former. Popular culture generally displays an idealistic image of love leading many to hold unrealistic expectations of others. In having us examine our assumptions, Proust’s keen eye for detail brings us closer to what might be considered more realistic expectations in love.

References

Kubala, Robbie. 2016. “Love and Transience in Proust.” Philosophy 91 (4): 541-557.

Proust, Marcel. 1992. In Search of Lost Time, Volume 1: Swann’s Way. Edited by D. J. Enright.Vol. 1. 7 vols. New York: The Modern Library.

Tukey, Ann. “Notes on involuntary memory in Proust.” The French Review 42, no. 3 (1969): 395-402.

Watt, Adam. 2011. The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust. New York: Cambridge University Press.