Adapting Marcel Proust’s Swann in Love, a section of his roman fleuve Remembrance of Things Past, presents some difficulties because Swann in Love is, after all, only a section of the larger work. Derrick Leon claims that, "A la recherche du temps perdu [the novel’s French title] is one long complex novel. It is not a sequence of novels, each complete in itself, which together form a cycle that need not necessarily be considered as an inseparable whole" (Leon, p. 170). Fair enough, but the attitude taken by director Volker Schlondorff in adapting the novel for the screen is that:

To make the film version of Swann in Love a more or less complete and independent story, he incorporates sections of Within a Budding Grove and tiny bits from later volumes, so his film is not technically limited to the portion of Swann’s Way entitled Swann in Love. Moreover, even though he wants to tell "a story," he admits that "Proust would have had a good laugh if someone had asked him for a ‘synopsis’ of his novel" (Schlondorff, p. vi). Schlondorff recognizes the importance of the narrative milieu from which Swann in Love is drawn, the importance of what he calls "Proust’s genius, which also resides in his way of telling the story, his way of intertwining themes and states of mind with no chronological obligation whatsoever" (Schlondorff, p. viii). And so his adaptation bears the burdens both of telling the "traces of the story" of Swann and his amour but also the "genius" of Proust for which he needs to accommodate at least something of the entirety of Remembrance of Things Past. So in preparation for the adaptation process and for making the film, Schlondorff immersed himself in the "author’s motivations, the force that made him write" (Schlondorff, p. vi), a useful exercise for a writer-director adapting any novel and certainly this complex novel that is dependent upon a well-defined place and time if not a well-defined adherence to the linear passage of time. But even if he finds the "force" that made Proust write, Schlondorff might find it so difficult to portray the large, amorphous, and complex motivations and goals embodied in Remembrance of Things Past that it would be impossible to fit them into a film of one hour and fifty minutes’ duration based primarily on only a small section of that novel. (For clarity, the terms "novel" and "whole novel" in this study refer to the entire novel Remembrance of Things Past; the phrase "section of the novel" is used interchangeably with the title of the part entitled Swann in Love unless specific reference is made to another section of the novel.)

Thus there is a tension in this adaptation as to how "true" it can be to both the whole novel and to Swann in Love. Even if Schlondorff is successful in finding Proust’s motivations and goals, he is left with the problem of portraying them in a film based only on a section of that novel. To be fair to the novel and to this analysis, it is necessary to point out the salient themes of the novel that are related to alienation, and then to be fair to Schlondorff, it is necessary to see how well he does in putting those complexities into the film based primarily on Swann in Love. Both Swann in Love and Remembrance of Things Past embody at least these themes:

Of these, all but the last are in some way manifestations of alienation. Involuntary memories are alienating because they can take us away from the present, from the places we are and from the people we are with at the moment that they intrude upon our consciousness. By evoking a strong memory over which we have no control, they destroy the illusion that we have a powerful human mind that is our servant rather than our master. Associations balancing somewhere on the imprecise and changing borders between the conscious, the unconscious, and the preconscious can be made to move from one to another by mechanisms independent of our wishes. When they come to our consciousness, they can control us in ways that we would prefer not to be controlled (Penfield, pp. 178-191).

Homosexuality alienates the homosexual from himself and from the rest of society because of the forbidden nature of homosexuality. Homosexuals, more because of their expression of their desires than those desires themselves, are banned and their behaviors criminalized in many societies, less so now, but certainly in the time and place represented in the novel, homosexuals and other sexual minorities are separated from humanity’s mainstream because they can obtain sexual satisfaction only in secret and then only in ways that much of the rest of the world demonizes. They receive messages from the dominant culture that tell them that they are sinful, immoral, deviant, criminal. The homosexual is thus torn between what he feels to be true in himself and what the world tells him is true. They are alienated from their authentic existence and forced to live an inauthentic existence, to use the terminology that Martin Heidegger, Karen Horney, and Erich Fromm use (Schacht, Alienation pp. 250-251). To exist between such forces, they must set barriers between them and their secret needs on the one hand and the world of society, which is in public, in the open, on the other to protect their secret and to allow them to continue to seek their secret desires. They must either be true to their inner selves and thus alienate themselves from society, or they must be true to what society demands and ignore their inner desires. In either case, they are subject to intense alienation.

Proust himself, of course, was a homosexual. As George Painter writes in his biography of Proust:

Proust’s well-known relationship with the young Venezuelan composer and singer Reynaldo Hahn dominated his personal life. In his edition of Proust’s correspondences, Phillipe Kolb circumspectly describes their relationship in a footnote to the first letter in the volume that refers to Hahn: "Reynaldo Hahn (1874-1947) He and Proust met in 1894 and their long and intimate friendship lasted until Proust’s death" (Kolb, Marcel Proust: Selected Letters, Letter 13, note 2, p. 16). In his letters to Hahn, Proust often signs himself as "votre poney," a childish term of endearment and playfulness that evokes a sense of sexual intimacy (Kolb, Marcel Proust: Lettres a Reynaldo Hahn p. 24). Proust even proposed that Reynaldo live with him: "In July [1912] after catching a cold ... he invited Reynaldo to move in ... [although] the offer was seriously intended ... the idea of living together, which might have been feasible eighteen years ago [when they had first met as young men in their twenties] if all four parents had been dead, [would not have worked and so Reynaldo declined]" (Hayman, p. 356).

Proust’s homosexuality runs throughout his works, especially Remembrance of Things Past. It shapes the works in ways of which he is both aware and unaware. In spite of his own sexual preference, Proust seems to have considered homosexuality an illness. In a letter to Louis de Robert, Proust writes:

It is sad that Proust considered homosexuality an illness because that would mean that he considered himself ill in at least this respect, but he nonetheless seems not to feel the need to apologize for the reality of his homosexuality although he considers it an illness. As Curtiss points out, "In a letter to Jacques Boulenger dated May 17, 1921, Proust comments on the possibility of offending homosexuals because of the portrait of the old Baron de Charlus, and seems not to worry about it" (Proust, Letters of Marcel Proust p. 368). Nonetheless, Proust does not seem to want his readers to know of his own homosexuality (Hayman, p. 317). But Proust does recognize the relationship between homosexuality and alienation: "In the long discussions of homosexuality [in his work], Proust emphasizes the loneliness and isolation in a small community from which homosexuals suffer" (Miller, p. 52). Membership in an intensely self-involved group is not necessarily alienating but it can be, and in Proust’s case, it is.

Inclusion and exclusion, by their very natures, are alienating. But the lines between homosexuals and the rest of society do not draw the only walls of inclusion and exclusion in Swann in Love. The entirety of Remembrance of Things Past is a series of inclusions and exclusions, a series of social events at which some people are included and from which others are excluded, something that we can see even if we focus only on Swann in Love, although the point is made far more often and thus with more weight in the entirety of Remembrance of Things Past. A person’s place in society, a definition of who that person is, comes in part as a result of which events include and which events exclude her or him. The society represented by the Verdurins comes of a hand-me-down perception of what pre-revolutionary royalty and empire nobility were like. The haute-bourgeoisie in Swann in Love, newly rich from urbanization, the Industrial Revolution, and the capitalist financial empires it created, are acting as they think "genuine" society has acted and continues to act, but theirs is a vulgar imitation with a short history and short-sighted goals more akin to the capitalist’s attention to the quarterly bottom line than to graciousness, politeness, and courtesy. And so this is a society of very odd manners, indeed, full of sniping, gossiping, character assassination, pettiness, thrumbling for position and friendships which, once gained, are left behind in the scramble for those more advantageous. Being a gentleman or a lady does not mean in the salons of the Faubourg-St. Germain what it means to middle class women and men of the middle and late 20th century generations in small-town midwestern America who were taught by their parents to be polite of speech, considerate of others, and well-mannered. Good manners in Swann in Love means kowtowing to monstrously rude behavior, elitism, backstabbing, and gossiping as well as often refusing to acknowledge "friends" because of their faith, heritage, status, or occupation.

The context of alienation, then, in Swann in Love is of a man so caught up in the world of the high society that he keeps—a world of enormous capital, fine art, and great beauty, yet nonethless a world of manners that forces people to do things that they do not want to do and that denies them the ability to do the things that they do want to do—that he does not know how to manage the more mundane aspects of his life, does not know how to handle his sexual desires, does not know how to pursue a woman romantically, and thus ultimately becomes obsessed with an inappropriate object for his desires, much as Aschenbach does in Mann’s Death in Venice. Swann’s relationships with women in general and his relationship with Odette in particular do not resemble love at all but rather a continually iterating loop of:

indifference->repulsion->attraction->desire->obsession->possession->indifference-> ...

with perhaps separation and jealousy periodically thrown into the loop somewhere between desire and indifference to increase the intensity of the next iteration of desire and obsession. Nowhere does genuine love, tenderness, affection, and friendship enter into his passion. The passion that Swann feels for Odette shows that he wants what is forbidden or what he cannot have until the object of his passion becomes something that he possesses, at which time it becomes uninteresting to him and he pushes it away only to be come fascinated with it again.

Swann is an outsider even in the Parisian society that accepts him. Like Proust, he is a Jew, accepted but different, tolerated but not included. It is as if he is overcompensating for something that he fears he lacks. Perhaps it is a lack of a family history, a family name. Perhaps it is the lack of a genuinely aristocratic—and Christian—background instead of the pseudo-aristocratic background he has inherited with the wealth that he has inherited from his father’s brokerage business and with the conversion of his parents to Catholicism. Swann does not fit into the world which he has worked so hard to enter, but he has adopted its manners and style as if he can enter the society of the Faubourg-St. Germain by osmosis. He has to "improvise a status for himself" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 8), and he has "squandered his intellectual gifts on frivolous amusements" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 8). So inured to his own feelings and desires by his years of careful cultivation of the "right" manners, Swann can no longer find women attractive in a healthful way. He would "behave simply and casually with a duchess, [but] would instantly begin to pose, when in the presence of a housemaid" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 8).

Indeed, it is more often to housemaids and other women like them that he finds himself attracted, as he "did not make an effort to find attractive the women with whom he spent his time, but sought to spend his time with women whom he had already found attractive" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 9). Swann exhibits, then, a bimodal distribution of his desire. He finds social gratification and intellectual stimulation with the women in the "haute societe" he frequents, but he finds sexual stimulation and physical satisfaction only with the maids and cooks of such women of society. A modern opinion born of pluralistic democracy would find nothing wrong in his courting whatever person he pleases, no matter her or his background, but he does not court these women in any meaningful sense. Rather, he makes his use of them, and then he discards them. Although these proclivities are not uncommon in the society in which he has chosen to live, for some reason they mark him as different. His friends know about his activities because he uses his connections in society to help procure his women. Moreover, this is a society of hypocrites and gossips, so his misadventures become from time to time topics for discussion and judgment. His problems come, then, both from his inability to unify his desires in the company of an appropriate object for his attentions, that is, a whole woman with whom he can enjoy both sets of pleasures, and from the spectacle he makes of himself in the society of which he tries so hard to remain a part but in which he is allowed only peripherally to participate. His search for a certain kind of woman is an inveterate habit. He uses his prominent social connections as "panders" to obtain introductions to, for example, the steward of a friend "whose daughter he had noticed in the country," and for whom he bartered his connections "just as a starving man might barter a diamond for a crust of bread" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 10).

It is his habit to find such young women, to possess them, to copulate with them—he does not make love in a way that includes friendship, mutual respect, sharing, or communion—and then to move on to another in a long list of such assignations. There is no sense that Swann is ever in love with these women, only that he is attracted to them, or more precisely, attracted to a certain character of their physique and only when he finds that physique in women whom he regards as socially inferior to him. His acts of copulation occur without any spiritual involvement, a very sad and empty set of experiences. His external behavior is that of a man, yes, because he finds, charms, overwhelms, seduces, possesses, and copulates with these women, but he never takes the time to know them. Indeed, it is apparent that he would not especially care for them if he did get to know them as people, as equals, as partners in a relationship. He is uninterested in developing a long-term relationship. "A starving man bartering a diamond for a crust of bread," as Proust describes Swann, is someone whose hunger, whose desires are disproportionate to his ability to satisfy them in a reasonable manner, not a man pursuing an adult relationship with an appropriate object of his affection, and so his grasping is frequent and frenzied like that of a starving man reduced to an animal behavior. Swann is clearly alienated from himself, from a normal, healthy, adult sexuality. It is probably not true that he is different from those Parisian society people around him with whom he associates, because Proust draws them all as hollow and sexually amorphous, uninterested in permanence. In a very real sense, Swann is just like them, yet the sense of community deriving from such kinship is unrewarding. They are all alienated even though they associate together. This alienation seems to be a characteristic of the society he keeps, not a universal judgment against all people.

Yet he is not loathsome, not without some redeeming value. He is not evil, merely unprepared. His actions are most likely a result of the society in which he lives and in Proust’s expression of his own homosexuality and alienation in the character of Swann. That is, Proust, like Swann, can be attracted only to certain kinds of people, that is, men. Thus, Swann’s predilection is a cryptohomosexual coding for Proust’s homosexuality. As for his promiscuity, Swann is just acting like significant numbers of other people in the society he keeps, but because Proust spends the most time on his character in Swann in Love, we are more involved with him and are more able to take note of his problems. And because he is so sensitive and trying so hard to be accepted, trying so hard to compensate for the emptiness inside him, like Proust, he is more pitiable than evil. After all, the novel is "not only based on [Proust’s] own experience: it is intended to be the symbolic story of his life, and occupies a place unique among great novels in that it is not, properly speaking, a fiction, but a creative biography" (Painter, p. 120). That is, the novel’s characters are not solely one-to-one mappings of people that Proust knew or even amalgams of people that he knew, but rather pastiches of several people all filtered through Proust’s vision of himself and the world, always influenced by his feelings of inadequacy and his homosexuality. As Painter writes:

Thus, the characters in Swann in Love and especially Swann are not logically consistent because they are not real people, only characters perhaps born of real people but changed in Proust’s telling of their stories and re-telling of his story.

At the outset of Swann in Love, it is clear that there is a division in the Paris of the novel that separates people into groups of those who are "in" and those who are "out":

Even at this superficial level, there is an alienating effect produced by the demands of the artificial culture engendered by the Verdurins and their haute bourgeois ilk. Mme. Verdurin is the sort of shallow person who spoke by "skipp[ing] lightly from one steppingstone to another of her stock of ready-made phrases" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 35).

People wanting to join in the pleasures, such as they are, at the Verdurins must "lay aside all worldly curiosity and the desire to find out for themselves whether other salons might not be sometimes as entertaining" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 3). Here there is both exclusion and inclusion, inclusion of those who are willing, even eager to pay obeisance to the petty dictates of M. and Mme. Verdurin and the band of graceless sycophants whom they gather about them, exclusive of everyone else. They would not be so pathetic if they would act like the ordinary people they are. The gathering together of friends who share a common culture or interest is a reasonable pastime and the basis for nearly all friendships. But the social climbers represented by the Verdurins are dissatisfied with who they are and thus calculate their actions to behave in ways beyond their abilities and in ways that will serve to increase their social stature. They are not successful, they are comical to a modern reader in a pluralistic democracy, but Proust’s attitude towards them is not quite so judgmental because he is, in the opinion of Edmund Wilson, "the spoiled child of rich parents who has never had to meet the world on equal terms" and so finds in them something of a kindred soul (Wilson, p. 407). So Proust’s observations of the social climbers are less critical but no less humorous than observations we might make today. But the Verdurins are, nonetheless, shallow in spite of their wealth. Of course, to the Verdurins, those who are "in" their little nucleus are the privileged, those who are "out" are the disadvantaged, although Proust lets us know that this jaundiced perspective is quite suspect, that to be "in" at the Verdurins is likely the same as being "out" of more fashionable salons:

These are hardly the kinds of people with whom the more gracious and worldly Swann is accustomed to associating, yet because of them he alienates himself in yet another way. By devoting his evenings to the Verdurin’s salon because of his fascination with Odette de Crecy, a member of the "little nucleus," he no longer spends time with the more cultured friends with whom he was used to spending time. He has been introduced to Odette one evening at the theatre "by an old friend of his, who had spoken of her as a ravishing creature with whom he might come to an understanding" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 13), an understanding, that is, of the sort that a gentleman and a courtesan come to agree upon. But Swann’s feelings towards Odette develop into more than the feelings usually shared between a courtesan and her patron—Swann begins to become obsessed with Odette. One evening upon learning that Odette has left the Verdurins’ before he arrived, Swann:

So Swann and Odette share some happiness when they are together. Yet, even though "he would make Odette play [the Vinteuil sonata] over to him again and again, ten, twenty times on end, insisting that, as she did so, she must never stop kissing him" and even though "every kiss provokes another" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 71), the happiness he feels remains "external to himself" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 63).

Swann continually vacillates on the verge between attraction and repulsion as when "once ... in Odette’s company, [he] cast furtive glances at her changing countenance and instantly withdr[ew] his eyes lest she should read in them the first signs of desire and believe no more in his indifference" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 59). And "he saw himself in the future continuing to meet Odette every evening; that did not, perhaps come quite to the same thing as loving her forever, but for the moment, while he loved her, to feel that he would not eventually cease to see her was all that he asked" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 85). These are not the feelings of a man in love but those of a man struggling to accommodate both love and indifference in his soul. Disturbed in a dream by the prospect of losing her, "he ... remembered ... that he would see Odette that evening, and the next day and almost every day. And then, being still deeply affected by his dream, he thanked heaven for those special circumstances which made him independent, thanks to which he could remain close to Odette ..." (Proust, Swann in Love pp. 228-229). And yet she is not quite right for him, and he is aware of that mismatch. For

Again his feelings swing between his acknowledgment of his need to love her by possessing her, on the one hand, and his fearful perception, on the other, that possessing her will reward him only with constant reminders of their not belonging together.

Swann finds her both more and less than perfect, over and over again often in the same moment. At one point "she had become most precious to Swann as it were just at the moment when he found her distinctly less good-looking" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 144). And although she enthralls him from time to time, he feels that he is "in search of what he claimed to be most anxious to avoid, and would in fact avoid the moment he found it" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 148). And yet Odette "was, on the contrary, more precious, as if, in proportion as his sufferings increased, the price of the sedative of the antidote which this woman alone possessed, increased at the same time" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 242). At times Swann "detested her" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 157). Yet he always comes back to her:

Thus irretrievably addicted to his feelings for Odette if not Odette herself, his love for her becomes an obsession which works "through the chemical action of his malady" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 157), yet he nonetheless "would wallow voluptuously in the emotions of a man in love, oblivious of the poisoned fruit that such emotions must inevitably bear" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 243). This is a disturbingly unusual portrait of a man in love, a man moved both by desire and stayed by poison.

He questions himself about Odette, asking:

In this soliloquy, Swann reveals a great deal about his feelings and thoughts about Odette. He questions whether anyone could genuinely love her although he claims to love her himself, thus making him different from everyone else. This passage also clearly identifies the ambivalent nature of his love and hate, his attraction to Odette and his repulsion from her. He says that she is not even a person, that she is imperfect but something that could be perfected, emphasizing his need to control and form her like a modern Pygmalion. He objectifies her into a pet, something to be captured, tamed, displayed, and admired, but never released, only pitied and protected from its incompetence by continued incarceration. And he reiterates his low opinion of her intellect. Tortured by the pull of both his attraction to and repulsion from Odette, "[s]ometimes he hoped that she would die, painlessly, in some accident, since she was out of doors, in the streets, crossing busy thoroughfares, from morning to night" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 230). It is the odd man in love who wishes death on his beloved, or more precisely, a very odd man in the thrall of a very odd love. But, in spite of his protestations, in spite of the pull both of repulsion and attraction, it is attraction that wins.

For Swann, indeed, falls in love, or in that frenzied obsession that passes for love within him. Proust writes:

Swann, who has previously schemed and intrigued to arrange assignations with women whom he thinks are beneath him intellectually and socially, aids this growing infatuation with Odette by falsifying his memories to efface the reality of those past affairs and the lack of satisfaction in them so that his mind can more readily support his desire for Odette.

Odette, already a member of the little nucleus that massed itself in the salon of the Verdurins, asks Mme. Verdurin if she can invite her new friend Swann, and the request is granted. Swann makes a great impression on the Verdurins. Although he would probably be classified as a "bore" by the Verdurins if they were to see him in the society which he usually frequents because that society would consider the Verdurins to be vulgar social climbers, it is precisely because of his manners and his connections that he ingratiates himself to them. He is more graceful than they because of the manners that he has learned in the society he usually keeps; thus, to pull him into their circle is a coup for the Verdurins even though they do not particularly care for him and eventually start talking behind his back about his odd affair with Odette:

Arriving and introducing himself, he has a moment of fear when he thinks that perhaps Dr. Cottard, a regular member of the little nucleus prone to bad puns, recognizes him from having seen Swann at a brothel, but his fear passes when he realizes that his supposition is likely untrue. The most interesting fact that we learn from this short panic is that Swann frequents brothels.

Yet Odette is different from the other women whom Swann has had in the past. All of his previous affairs have been with women of a certain kind whose beauty in his estimation is due to a "healthy, abundant, rosy flesh." Because of their physical characteristics, Swann pursued them, had them, and dropped them. Proust points out that Swann does not feel the same way about Odette on first meeting, for "she ... struck Swann not, certainly as being devoid of beauty, but as endowed with a kind of beauty which left him indifferent, which aroused in him no desire, which gave him, indeed, a sort of physical repulsion ..." (Proust, Swann in Love p. 14). In fact, she is the opposite of what he had previously found attractive. Nonetheless, their relationship continues and intensifies as:

Yet a man in love is unlikely to forget the details of his beloved’s face when she is away from him. Nor is he likely to be disappointed by that face when he finally sees it again. But because he has reached an age "when a man can content himself with being in love for the pleasure of loving without expecting too much in return" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 14), Swann begins to convince himself that he has begun to fall in love with Odette even though she disappoints him, even though her skin is too delicate, her features too sharp, her eyes too large, and so on down the list of tests that she fails in Swann’s mind.

In fact, Odette is the only one of Swann’s amours to whom Proust devotes any extensive description. So complete is this description of Odette and so devastatingly does Swann become obsessed with her, for obsession is probably as close to love that Swann can come, that we begin to wonder if perhaps it is not only Odette but all of his mistresses whom Swann finds repulsive. Perhaps it is a pattern in his behavior. Perhaps he always seeks to find women whom he finds both attractive and repulsive. In any case, he exhibits this combination of attraction and repulsion in his relationship with Odette, and Proust emphasizes this in various places and manners. On viewing the picture of Zipporah by Botticelli, whom Swann believes that Odette resembles, Swann’s desire for Odette causes him to place

Odette, thus, is a work of art to be viewed and treasured like the picture of Zipporah.

Calling on the Verdurins that first time, Swann encounters a house replete with the cultural clutter of the many things possessed by the upper-middle class of the late nineteenth century, many of them gifts of present and former members of "the little nucleus." The Verdurins inhabit a house that "was gradually filled with a collection of footwarmers, cushions, clocks, screens, barometers and vases, a constant repetition and a boundless incongruity of useless but indestructible objects" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 26). Things are prevalent in the Verdurins’ house because they are a means by which the Verdurins express themselves and their wealth, and Swann, unavoidably, expresses himself as well as when he "[begins], out of politeness, to finger the bronzes, and did not like to stop" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 31). This seemingly innocent gesture of polite interest in the hosts and their possessions indicates an oddness about Swann’s tastes and his behavior, a tactile frankness and sensuality, a tendency to demonstrate affection and to pursue gratification in unusual ways even under the eyes of those around him, especially coming as it does just before a description of his reacting to the approach of a beloved phrase from the Vinteuil sonata, a work of music that he has heard a year before at another party. At that previous party, the music "had been a source of keen pleasure" for him in a rather expansive manner, when he became aware of "the mass of the piano-part beginning to surge upward in plashing waves of sound" and when "at a certain moment, without being able to distinguish any clear outline, or to give a name to what was pleasing him, suddenly enraptured, he had tried to grasp the phrase or harmony—he did not know which—that had just been played and that had opened and expanded his soul, as the fragrance of certain roses, wafted upon the moist air of evening, has the power of dilating one’s nostrils" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 31). The music is for him both sensual and spiritual, affecting both his body and his personality. His response to the music betrays his tendency to over-react to sensation and emotion. This almost sexual response reiterates his inability to respond appropriately to ordinary feelings. His response is exaggerated; not childish but not mature; not deranged but not healthy. Listening to this work again at the Verdurins’ salon:

This is an image of a man whose alienation has left him primed for being swept easily by beautiful but simple sensations into pleasures that seem to him more important than they truly are simply because he has not known them before. It is not unusual for someone to be moved by a piece of music. Such transports happen all the time. The concept of "our song" that serves as a stimulus to remember an early phase of devoted rapture between two people is a gimmick used in countless portrayals of romance. But Swann does not respond as an adult to this feeling. Rather, he responds as an impressionable teenager would respond, infatuated with an object of love with whom he associates a popular song: excessive emotion, irrational thought, and sometimes inappropriate behavior. The music momentarily redeems him from the trivialities that have occupied him, moving him from a position of alienated disinterest to a position of his awareness of "a new and strange desire." Yet, because this is Swann, because we know that his strange desire will in itself provide, because it is self-admittedly strange, a venue to a different form of alienation:

In this passage Proust tells us why Swann’s life is so empty that the music can have this kind of power for him. Heretofore, Swann’s life has been filled with aimlessness, a recognition of the inconsequentiality of his focusing serially on things for which he holds only a transitory fondness, and a resignation that this stasis will likely continue in his life. He is torn by a vertiginous attraction to life and a repulsion from it: "He began to realise how much that was painful, perhaps even how much secret and unappeased sorrow underlay the sweetness of the phrase; and yet to him it brought no suffering" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 71). His life lacks a central philosophy and a goal. But not, he deceives himself, from this moment onward.

The power of the Vinteuil sonata has for Swann great instinctive pleasures, pleasures overtly sexual in Proust’s description of them. His instincts dominate his intellect because he has not had to challenge and thus use his intellect in the past, much like Proust the "spoiled child." He responds; he does not reflect. The music enthralls him "like a man into whose life a woman he has seen for a moment passing by has brought the image of a new beauty which deepens his own sensibility, although he does not even know her name or whether he will ever see her again," enthralls him "in spite of himself." And hearing it again that evening at the Verdurins’, after hearing "a high note sustained through two whole bars, Swann sensed its approach, stealing forth from beneath that longdrawn sonority, stretched like a curtain of sound to veil the mystery of its incubation, and recognised, secret, murmuring, detached, the airy and perfumed phrase that he loved" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 35), hearing it in the company of Odette, whom he has begun to deceive himself or at least accommodate himself into believing that he loves, "Swann began to tell Odette how he ha[s] fallen in love with that little phrase" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 36). And so that little section from the Vinteuil sonata becomes a cue for Swann, a handle on an involuntary memory that unites instinctual joy, sensuality, sexuality, and Odette in Swann’s mind. Thus drawn, Swann becomes a more frequent and ultimately a regular guest at the Verdurins’ salon, such as it is, and a regular visitor at Odette’s house, accompanying her home after their evenings together at the Verdurins’. It is not his first affair, of course, but the attention that he gives Odette, the demonstrations that they make of their new romance at the Verdurins’ might make it seem so, especially the demonstration of their leaving together, "a privilege which she afforded him ... a privilege he valued all the more because it gave him the feeling that no one else would see her, no one would thrust himself between them, no one could prevent him from remaining with her in spirit, after he had left her for the night" (Proust, Swann in Love pp. 45-46).

Because of his tortured feelings both of love and hate for Odette, the vacillation between them increases the intensity of each swing of the pendulum such that, while he loves her, his love becomes an exaggerated devotion, an obsession that manifests itself much as it would in the heart and behavior of a teenager. Proust describes Swann’s discovery of this obsession:

Thus does Swann’s obsession grow, feed itself, and make him dysfunctional.

After Swann becomes devoted to Odette, he gives up his usual habits, no longer calls on friends asking them for assistance in arranging his assignations: "His friend[s] would be left wondering, and indeed Swann was no longer the same man. No one ever received a letter from him now demanding an introduction to a woman. He had ceased to pay any attention to women, and kept away from the places in which they were ordinarily to be met" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 67). So devoted to Odette does Swann become that he feels that he has invested her "with the power to cause [him] so much suffering or happiness, that [she] seems at once to belong to a different universe, is surrounded with poetry, makes of one’s life a sort of stirring arena in which he or she will be more or less close to one" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 69). Yet Swann’s passion for Odette becomes a "malady which ... was so utterly inseparable from him that it would have been impossible to eradicate it without almost entirely destroying him; as surgeons say, his love was no longer operable" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 168). On speaking with Charlus and "even to people who had never heard of her, [Swann’s conversation] always somehow related to Odette" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 184). Malady inoperable, inseparable from itself, and one-minded to the exclusion of thoughts of other people are phrases that could be used to describe almost anyone in love, yet their use here includes the shadows of something other than love in Swann; that is, he exists not in a warm glowing light of revelation that opens his eyes but a chiaroscuro of doubt that belies a combination of love and hate, obsession and distance, attraction and repulsion.

In this enhanced state of excitement, the Vinteuil sonata, which has become for him a handle on the feelings that he has for Odette, takes on even more significance. He begs Odette to play him "that little phrase from Vinteuil’s sonata. It was true that Odette played vilely, but often the most memorable impression of a piece of music is one that has arisen out of a jumble of wrong notes struck by unskillful fingers upon a tuneless piano" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 69). Here again we encounter the mixture of attraction and repulsion. Swann recognizes that she is unskillful, plays badly, but he nonetheless finds great feeling in listening to her play, for "as soon as [the little phrase] struck his ear, [it] had the power to liberate in him the room that was needed to contain it; the proportions of Swann’s mind were altered" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 70). Swann became "estranged from humanity, blinded, deprived of his logical faculty, almost a fantastic unicorn, a chimaera-like creature conscious of the world through his hearing alone" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 71). Swann experiences the Vinteuil sonata viscerally, not intellectually, much as he experiences his obsession for Odette. Each is something that happens without explanation but which is accepted as real without question.

But in spite of the protests of the romantic elan, we know that this affair is not based on love but on blind infatuation. For this is Swann, not the boy next door, and this is Odette, not Judy Garland. He is holding back, not as in love as their actions at the Verdurins might make the other guests think, not as in love as Odette might think, even though she is a courtesan and has different expectations of love than a woman wanting to marry out of romance. Again he is overcompensating for his alienation and feelings of inferiority. The love that he feels does not become real or important enough to him until he is sure that he exclusively loves Odette. He can neither enter a healthy relationship with an appropriate woman whom he could tenderly pursue, nor can he treat Odette with continual tenderness and affection, nor can he treat Odette quite as brusquely in reality as he from time to time thinks of her in his mind, although he is from time to time rude because of his paranoia and jealousy. Yet, though his actions might appear to be those of a man in love, he is not in love at all, but merely filled with desire, sexual desire for Odette and more important the desire to own her completely, to accede to his obsession, for he is not in love, merely obsessed. It is his regular pattern to desire what he does not have and to copulate with women that he does not desire. Although she pursues him and although he desires her, although he is jealous of any other relationships that she might have, he demurs without letting her know why he is unable to commit to an exclusive relationship with her. The lambency of her charms reflects only oddly and incompletely in his eyes.

This overwhelming omnipresent desire in Swann to seek things that he does not have, to desire women whom he has not yet possessed is indicative of a mechanism that compensates for his feelings of inferiority and alienation. By always seeking, he is always seeking in a sense a way to better himself, to show that he is powerful, that his wealth is meaningful, that his life does contain a central philosophy that directs his actions towards reasonable goals, but these are only the external assurances he creates to solidify the place that he has improvised for himself in society.

When Odette asks him if he would like to see her before their ritual dinner at the Verdurins, he

And so he chooses not to enter into the kind of relationship that Odette the professional courtesan seeks, or at least, the kind of relationship that he believes that Odette seeks. He is alternately attracted to and then repulsed by Odette. He can have her any way he wants and so when he indulges his passion for her, he momentarily possesses her. Upon realizing that possession, he loses interest in her. But the minute she seeks the company of someone else or even when he believes that she is seeking the company of someone else, that is, when he thinks that he is losing his control over her, he becomes jealous, paranoid, and so he then becomes obsessed with her again and begins another cycle of passionate obsession and dissolute indifference. Yet at the same time, he fails to tell her why he holds back, fails to tell her that she is not nearly so desirable as his overt actions might make her think. Moreover, he treats her very badly, deliberately delaying her satisfaction while pursuing his own. Perhaps he cannot help himself because he is a victim of his obsessions and of his opinions about social class and the like which were held by most people of his class, but that does not make his behavior any less cruel. And that cruelty is part of his obsession; he still cannot love what he can have and cannot have what he can love. He is alienated from his true self and as such finds himself still drawn to deception and back-stair sexual pursuits with women whom he feels are inferior to him even when those pursuits intrude upon the expectations of the formal relationship he has established with Odette and even when their satisfaction means treating Odette rudely:

Odette is for Swann a fetish, something with which to satisfy his secret sexual yearnings, not someone with whom to share a sexual relationship. Fetishism is "sexual behavior under control of an inappropriate discriminative stimulus" (Ullman and Krasner, p. 129). Proust emphasizes Swann’s fetishizing of women with his repeated commentary about their specific body type and social class, attributes which attract Swann more than their personality for he seeks:

There is nothing wrong with pursuing women of a different social class or with different intellectual gifts, but Swann is not pursuing women, for he does not see them as real women, merely as things or as pieces of people. He speaks of them as if they were works of art (not unlike Aschenbach speaks of Tadzio in Death in Venice). That is, he fetishizes them. They are not real people, they are things; his sexuality is not directed at women, it is directed at women as fetishes.

We have already seen how Swann likes women only of a certain physical type and only women whom he considers to be socially and intellectually inferior to him. In this case, he is attracted to Odette in spite of her not being of that type, yet he nonetheless objectifies her and treats her as a fetish. He decides that she resembles Boticelli’s painting of Zipporah and so enshrines a print of that painting in his apartment. He also believes that "she reminded him even more than usual of the faces of some of the women created by the painter of the ‘Primavera’" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 129), and indeed, he frequently compares her and other people to works of art. When she writes him a note in a hand trembling with emotion, he puts it "in the same drawer as the withered chrysanthemum" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 55) that she had given him earlier like a keepsake. However, his action exemplifies his valuing and falling in love with things, not people. It is his idealization of her that keeps his love alive as when "he would begin to melt at the thought of the charming creature he would see as he entered the room basking in that golden light" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 55). Odette becomes a "creature" rather than a woman, glorified in reverie, not reality.

Moreover, Swann is both attracted to and repulsed by these women including Odette. The vertiginous forces caused by both the pull of attraction and the push of repulsion leaves Swann irrational, but helps to explain why he feels both forces. Freud says of love and hate:

Swann’s feelings of both love and hate for Odette are related to his objectification of women and his fetishizing of Odette. Fetishism is a uniquely male phenomenon. In Freudian psychoanalytic terms, a fetish is an object that has replaced the female genitalia as the focus of the male fetishist’s sexual energy. Fetishism arises because of a split in the developing ego of the young male child. Freud considers the fetish a penis substitute even though the fetish is the object of male attention. It is not a general penis substitute, however. A fetish substitutes for a specific penis, that is, the one that the young boy thinks that his mother must surely have. When he discovers that she does not have a penis, he represses this information because the logical consequence of her not having a penis is that she had one and lost it so he, too, is subject to the same threats of castration. To preserve his sexual identity, he denies reality and substitutes a non-genital object for the penis his mother should have; he preserves the truth (his penis) and also preserves the fantasy (the fetish) in the same act. This action splits the ego into two components, one that loves women and one that hates them. This split further tends to reinforce itself, making his attraction to the fetish extremely powerful. His mother’s penis still exists, but only in the form of a fetish. And yet it does not exist, since it is only in his mind that he equates the non-genital object with the penis his mother should have. He feels safe from the threat of castration as long as he relies upon the reassurance of the safeguarding fetish. Moreover, he tends to become quite content with his fetish as the object of his sexual energy since he does not have to woo and win it as he would a woman before he can use it to experience arousal and climax. The fetish is often handy and it never complains. The fetishist can obtain sexual gratification almost at will, and because the fetish is a secret that only he understands, he may even be able to be gratified in public. Although Swann has to woo the women he beds, they are not equals in the relationship; they are objects and thus more like fetishes than like real women. Moreover, even though Swann does not masturbate in public upon encountering the women he fetishizes, he does objectify them by comparing them to objects of art and manipulates them in his rich fantasy life.

Most important in relating the phenomenon of attraction and repulsion to fetishism, the fetishist maintains a lifelong aversion to the female genitalia because they remind him of the threat of castration. And through the fetish, he yet ascribes the ownership of the penis to women, which protects him from being a homosexual. Hence, there is tension set up between the fetishist’s attraction to women, since they possess his fetish-penis, and his aversion to them, since they also possess female genitalia and the concomitant threat of castration. Fetishism becomes the fetishist’s way of dealing with his own feelings of attraction and repulsion, and with his sexuality.

Because the penis is the prototype for the fetish, most fetishes have some anatomical or topological association with the penis; that is, they either appear on the body near the location of the penis on a man or where the penis would be on a woman if she had one, or in association with the escutcheon, or they look or perform like the penis, or they look or perform like something associated with the penis. The most common object fetishized is a woman’s shoe. There are several explanations for this predominance of shoe fetishists. A woman’s shoe represents:

Of these explanations, the last is perhaps the most important because it allows and accounts for the wide variety of fetishes in the general population. In his catalogue of sexual problems, the nineteenth century psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing lists animals, clothing, flowers, gloves, jewelry, cloth, fur, shoes among the fetishes he has repeatedly encountered.

Dr. von Krafft-Ebing records many classical cases of fetishists which are particularly revealing of the fetish that Swann presents. Here is the case history of a clothing fetishist:

And here are two more:

Dr. von Krafft-Ebing also cites several cases wherein the fetish is a certain aspect or appearance of the female body or a part of the female body, such as the eyes, ears, mouth, nose, feet, hair, skin, odors, physical disabilities, podices, souls, and voices:

In all of these cases, we find the elements of attraction-aversion, fetishism, and sadism. These phenomena occur throughout Remembrance of Things Past. Dr. von Krafft-Ebing writes that "pathological fetishism is connected, through gradual transitions, with physiological fetishism .… Here the abnormality consists only in the fact that the whole sexual interest is concentrated on the impression made by a part of the person of the opposite sex, so that all other impressions fade and become more or less indifferent" (Krafft-Ebing, p. 219). Proust was aware of such studies of human sexuality. Miller notes that Proust wrote in his journal as having read Havelock Ellis and Krafft-Ebing (Miller, p. 148). As for current theories of fetishism "many psychologists today believe that Freudian theories have little scientific validity ... [and that fetishism] among males can be at least partially explained by genetic, hormonal, and evolutionary causes" (Steele, pp. 25-26). The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV lists several "sexual and gender identity disorders" of which fetishism is only one (Steele, p. 27). There could well be an evolutionary imperative at work in preserving fetishism in the human male. Certainly homonid males who are attracted by a number of different visual, olfactory, and auditory cues are more likely to be successful in passing on their genes than those attracted to fewer.

Fetishism and attraction-aversion are evident in Proust’s portrayal of Swann, as are homosexuality and diffident sexuality expressed in multiple affairs with women who are of no consequence to him. All of these maladaptive sexualities relate to alienation. The first of these, diffident sexuality, is easy to demonstrate. Swann the lover of multiple women is a man unsure of himself and thus seeks to find meaning in his life by possessing a series of women, proving each time, many times over that he is capable of acting like a man, much like the Verdurins and people like them try to establish a place for themselves in society by courting and winning over a succession of mildly interesting people, trading them off for more interesting people with more advantageous connections at the first chance. But the remaining characteristics—homosexuality, attraction-repulsion, and fetishism—are more subtly drawn.

First, keep in mind that Swann does not necessarily make logical sense as a human being. Although almost everyone exhibits internal contradictions, Swann is not a real person but a pastiche of real people that Proust knew from whom he draws different characteristics and so Swann’s internal contradictions are likely to be more pronounced. Moreover, Proust projects some of his own characteristics, particularly his intense sensitivity, his feelings of inadequacy, and his homosexuality into Swann. With that realization in mind, the remaining characteristics become more easily understood. The attraction-repulsion is evident in the cycle of indifference and mad passion that Swann exhibits towards Odette. The salient characteristics of such a mixture of love and hate are the self-propagating nature of such feelings, the love transforming into hate, which subsequently acquires an erotic nature and thus can precipitate another round of love, as explained by Freud. Moreover, there is a self-preservational element to Swann’s love-hate relationship because it allows him to distance himself from Odette and his mixture of love and hate for her. He fears and hates her because she is a woman and unconsciously reminds him of the potential threat of castration, perhaps another reason that he changes partners so frequently. By not getting too close to any of them, he does not confront the fear of castration by running away before it becomes too evident. But he is also attracted to Odette because her being a woman protects him from being a homosexual.

Moreover to Swann, women are reminders of his mother, someone with whom he is not entirely comfortable because she not only represents the threat of castration but she reminds him of his Jewishness, something that he tries to escape and deny. Thus, his ego is split, he experiences wild shifts between attraction and repulsion, and he becomes a fetishist. His fetishizing is apparent in his categorization of women, his treating them as objects rather than people, in his descriptions of them in terms of works of art, and most importantly his desire only for women of a certain physical type and social class.

But Odette is notably not of the physical type that Swann usually finds attractive. Proust explains at great length that she is less full figured, tighter of skin, narrower of cheek, and so on. She is, in short, less definitively female and more ambiguously androgynous. Swann, thus, becomes a vehicle for Proust’s homosexuality, for if Odette is as much man as woman, then that part of his own homosexuality with which Proust endows Swann can find her all the more attractive. But this homosexual love is in itself dangerous because it is after all homosexual, something that Proust wants to deny as much as he wants to describe and celebrate it. As Miller explains:

The same mechanism is at work in Proust’s projection of his homosexuality in Swann. Marcel the narrator after all does identify with Swann. By projecting his homosexuality onto Swann and by experiencing heightened devotion to Odette, Proust protects himself from being a homosexual. As Miller writes:

Swann’s obsession with Odette can in part be explained as an idealized and intensified attachment to the mother since Odette is a mother figure for Swann in some respects even though she is also androgynous. (This is exemplified in the film by having Swann overly concerned with Odette’s breasts, in part a fetishist response, in part an idealization and return to mother love.) By being androgynous, moreover, Odette allows Swann to pursue a homosexual relationship as well. This mechanism also helps to explain Swann’s intense jealousy regarding any competition he might have for Odette. As Miller writes:

This mechanism moreover helps explain the fits of jealousy that Swann periodically exhibits. Thus, Proust’s homosexuality shows up in Swann’s obsession with Odette as a mother figure and as the object of his fetishism as well as his obsession with Odette being a manifestation of his homosexuality. The equating of the relationship between Swann and Odette on the one hand and a homosexual relationship on the other is made in several ways in the film.

Odette plays the part of the courtesan well, always trying to make Swann more comfortable, always trying to impress him with her abilities and her riches, both of which are slight:

Here she is both seductive and insouciant, preparing a place for Swann and mimicking the society of the Verdurins that thinks little of material possessions, but whereas the Verdurins have an enormous ability to procure more material objects, Odette is dependent upon her ability to please a man or more likely many men. Her job is to be a courtesan, and here she performs her work. But her desire to rearrange the room reiterates Swann’s obsession. When she insists upon arranging the room just so, because "She felt that if he were to put even one of them where it ought not to be the general effect of her drawing-room would be destroyed, and her portrait, which rested upon a sloping easel draped with plush, inadequately lit" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 48), it is as if only when the things around them are perfectly arrayed do they feel like being intimate. The sexuality of the moment is as dependent on the people as on the fetishism they put into arranging the moment and the locale.

Proust reintroduces the power of selective and involuntary memory in this scene of seductions when Odette pours Swann’s tea. She asks him if he wants lemon or cream, "and on his answering, ‘Cream, please,’ said to him with a laugh: ‘A cloud!’ And as he pronounced it excellent, ‘You see, I know just how you like it’" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 49). The scene recalls Combray and the power of the madeleine dipped in tea, it recalls a primeval scene of oceanic fertilization with some ancient proto-fish spawning her roe and her mate releasing his milt, and it also recalls Odette’s occupation, for it is her job to know "just how he likes it."But Swann thinks so little of Odette that the scene to him means "How nice it would be to have a little woman like that in whose house one could always be certain of finding, what one never can be certain of finding, a really good cup of tea" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 49). It is tea and comfort and not Odette that animate him. She is for him not a person but another thing.

Proust emphasizes the oddness of their relationship, that Swann is a man obsessed and Odette is a thing rather than a person, something that he obsesses over rather than a woman with whom he interacts. Before he visits her a second time, he prepares himself. He has " ... formed a picture of her in his mind." But it is not the picture found by a man in love, it is the picture formed by a man seeking to efface the actuality of the woman with whom he spends his time, with whom he copulates, because he recognizes in himself "the necessity, if he was to find any beauty in her face, of concentrating on the fresh and rosy cheekbones to the exclusion of the rest of her cheeks which were so often drawn and sallow, and sometimes mottled with little red spots, distressed him as proving that the ideal is unattainable and happiness mediocre" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 50). Like Scottie Ferguson (Jimmy Stewart) in Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo, he falls in love, or at least he falls for what passes in his life for love, with only part of a woman, only the way she looks in a certain light, a certain dress, a certain place. His idealization of her replaces any possibility of his getting to know the real woman, of finding out if she holds any attraction for him. This is fetishistic objectification, not mutually respectful human love.

Proust emphasizes this fetishism in Swann’s tendency to classify people both as works of art in general—that is, as things, objects, products that can be bought and had in the capitalist system that has allowed Swann’s family to become enormously wealthy—and as looking like specific works of art—that is, as things that he already knows and understands, things that he can classify and arrange in his mind—rather than reaching out to them as real people. In Odette’s case, she resembles Zipporah [Zephorah], the daughter of Jethro of Midian, who was to become Moses’ wife: "... she struck Swann by her resemblance to the figure of Zipporah, Jethro’s daughter, which is to be seen in one of the Sistine frescoes [by Botticelli]" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 50). (In the film, Swann keeps a print of this painting from the walls of the Sistine Chapel mounted beneath a huge magnifying glass on his bureau and even invites Odette to look at it.) And in a sense, as his comment on the importance of finding a place where he could find a good cup of tea if not a life’s partner reveals, Swann is like Moses, a Jew among non-Jews, looking for a woman and looking for a place to live. Such revelations of Swann’s mind serve not only to show his erudition but to emphasize that he objectifies as well as classifies people:

The most fantastic (and visual) element of Swann’s fetishizing of Odette comes from their euphemism for lovemaking. The first time that he is intimate with her:

The excuse of brushing the pollen off her dress gives Swann the opportunity to initiate his sexual advances. Proust indicates that it is the metaphor that means as much to Swann as the woman with whom he copulates. (The metaphor is also visually exploited in the film.)

So Swann is both attracted to and repulsed from Odette. He oscillates between these two extremes, each swing of the pendulum gaining more force from his growing, inoperable obsession such that the pendulum ultimately swings beyond the range of exaggerated devotion, even obsession, and his obsession becomes jealousy. Thinking that Forcheville might be a rival for Odette’s attentions, "he suddenly realis[ed] for the first time that Forcheville, whom he had known for years, could actually attract a woman and was quite a good-looking man" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 91). When she denies him a "cattleya" one evening, he watches the light from her house, jealous, afraid of losing her (Proust, Swann in Love pp. 118-119): "He never spoke to her of this misadventure, and ceased even to think of it himself. But now and then his thoughts in their wandering course come upon this memory where it lay unobserved, would startle it into life, thrust it forward into his consciousness, and leave him aching with a sharp, deep-rooted pain" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 123). Thus, his obsession for Odette, which proceeds from great emotion, emotion heightened by his objectifying her and fetishizing her, heightened by the sensuous power of the little phrase from the Vinteuil sonata, also yields a heightened sense of jealousy, a fear of losing her:

That is, he is only in love with her when she is in danger of being lost, or at least, when he fears that he might lose her. It is at this time, too, that he is excluded by the Verdurins, who now try to interfere with his relationship with Odette because they think that she can find a better match, try to block rather than promote it. So he becomes more isolated, more lost in his jealousy, more likely, on the next swing of the pendulum, to exhibit even more exaggerated devotion to Odette.

His jealousy leads him on mad searches for Odette and for information about her. Early in their relationship, on his way to her house, " ... every few yards his carriage was held up by others, or by people crossing the street, loathsome obstacles that he would gladly have crushed beneath his wheels, were it not that a policeman fumbling for a note-book would delay him even longer than the actual passage of the pedestrian. He counted the minutes feverishly" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 58). Impatience is a reasonable characteristic of a man in love, but here impatience elicits frenzied phantom violence against others who stand between a man and his beloved. This is not a reasonable description of a man who thinks that he is in love and is temporarily prevented by circumstances from making his way to her side. One evening when he cannot find her after she has gone to the opera without him, he searches vainly for her. His coachman realizes the tiny probability of finding her and asks if they can give up and go home, but Swann exclaims, "Certainly not! ... We must find the lady. It’s most important. She would be extremely put out—it’s a business matter—and vexed with me if she didn’t see me" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 61), and this business matter remains ambiguously undescribed.

In these times of jealousy, the Vinteuil sonata, which had previously been such a joy to him, becomes a painful ordeal:

But as both his obsession and jealousy increase, his mad searches become more intense. When he receives a "letter telling him that Odette had been the mistress of countless men (several of whom it named, among them Forcheville, M. de Breaute, and the painter) and women, and that she frequented houses of ill-fame" (Proust, Swann in Love pp. 231-232), he goes on a mad search to find out the truth about her. He accuses her of having affairs and demands to know the name of at least one of her other lovers: "It doesn’t really matter, but it’s a pity that you can’t give me the name. If I were able to form an idea of the person, it would prevent me ever of thinking of her again" (Proust, Swann in Love pp. 243-244). As usual, Swann is more worried about the idea of a person than about real people, that is, his imagination incites him more than reality. He is more worried about Odette’s reputation besmirching his reputation than about Odette, more worried about an imaginary lover than a real one. Though he has reason to believe that Odette has had affairs with both women and men, it is the idea of those affairs and not the affairs themselves that bother him. He thinks that a name whispered in confession will absolve her in his heart when in reality, he will always be subject to such fits of jealousy:

But even these admissions do not dissuade Swann that he is still in love with her, and so he ultimately marries her.

But his life is not without regrets. Although by the end of Swann in Love he has ceased his wild swings between love and hate, attraction and repulsion, he remarks, "To think that I’ve wasted years of my life, that I’ve longed to die, that I’ve experienced my greatest love, for a woman who didn’t appeal to me, who wasn’t even my type!" (Proust, Swann in Love p. 267). If Swann had some good friends with whom he could discuss his feelings for Odette, he would likely have been talked out of marrying Odette. He would not have wound up with this ironic commentary on the tragedy that he mistook for a life. But he did not have good friends such as that. All he had were a series of fragile associations with members of the aristocracy and the upper class.

Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past was long considered unfilmable, and for a long time, it remained unfilmed. So far, only the section entitled Swann in Love from Swann’s Way has been adapted for the screen. Most potential adapters—producers, screenwriters, and directors—were deterred by the length of the novel and its reliance on long descriptive passages of thought and observation. In the study of the adaptation from novel to film, a comparison of the film and the novel at the level of plot (content) and style (form) may have some merit, as Phil Powrie suggests: "Discourses on film adaptation generally rely on the concept of fidelity to a pre-existent text (literal) fidelity and/or fidelity of the spirit" (Powrie, p. 33). But there is much more to the study of the adaptation of a novel into a film than mere lists of similarities and differences, which are all too likely to be considered successes and failures. As Stanley Kauffman writes: "Swann in Love falls with repellent neatness between two stools. Those who know the novel can only be irritated by the film; those who don’t know the novel will see only a tedious film" (Kauffman, p. 31). In Kauffman’s case, Swann in Love seems only to have failures and failures rather than successes and failures, but that is likely because the film seeks to be something different from the novel, and Kauffman is convinced either that the film cannot be something different or that the film may be different but that difference is unremarkable and unworthy of the source from which it came.

Cataloguing lists of successes and failures is even more unwise in studying an adapted film when the source novel in question is as non-traditional and monumental as Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past surely is. As George Bluestone comments in his seminal study Novels into Film:

Bluestone explains different vectors for analyzing what he calls the "mutation" from novel to film and posits several reasons for the differences, but even though he offers much guidance, he does not lend much insight into the filmed transformation of Swann in Love. However, his choice of the word "mutation" is interesting because its biological connotation shows that Bluestone understands that a film is organically different from the novel from which it has been adapted. A mutation results from a change in the DNA in the nucleus of a cell. A mutation is not a morphological change but a change in the code that tells a cell what it is and what it does that may result in a morphological change. After a mutation, both of these measures of identity have changed, and the cell is different. Because of its unique dependence upon and approach to time, to memory, and to human psychology, as well as how they can be represented and presented in literature, Swann in Love begs to have a unique, new, and different kind of transformation into a unique, new, and different kind of film. In Narrative Discourse, which is both a study of structuralism and narrative on the one hand and of Remembrance of Things Past on the other, Gerard Genette writes:

Genette tries to show how the relationships among story, narrative, and narrating which are analyzed along the vectors of Order, Duration, Frequency, Mood, and Voice in chapters with those titles create the complex, unique, organic whole of Remembrance of Things Past. Yet it is precisely because of these complexities that the novel presents great difficulties to a filmmaker seeking to adapt it to the screen.

Indeed, the novel’s difficulties have both interested and discouraged other film-makers who have tried to bring it to the screen:

Powrie also mentions the efforts of Greta Garbo, Luchino Visconti, and Joseph Losey to make films from Remembrance of Things Past. Ultimately the task fell to French producer Nicole Stephane, who had bought the rights to film the novel in the early 1960s. She approached several directors, including Louis Malle, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, and Francois Truffaut to make a film of the novel. All of these directors have traditions of being "literary," of being able to get around the limitations that Proust himself had complained about when he wrote that:

Of course, Proust’s statement was made in the early years of this century in the childhood of film technique. Although he may here merely be finding fault with any art—literature, photography, or film-making—that tries to capture the physical appearance, reality, solidness of things, this is a simplistic reduction of the possibilities of film-making. "The cinema" is not a static thing, and neither are the attitudes, theories, creativities, and techniques that film-makers bring to it. In the seventy-five or so years since Proust made this complaint, we have seen film-makers who do not emphasize merely the reality that cinema can mimic but also its poetry. However, all the interesting directors whom Stephane contacted, whose work is untraditional and unbound by Hollywood convention, declined.

Mme. Stephane then contracted with noted playwright and screenwriter Harold Pinter in 1972 to write an English language version of a screenplay for Remembrance of Things Past. This version was never filmed. It tries to do justice to the entire novel in a film of 455 shots (or about a two-hour film, on average), because Pinter writes, "It would be wrong to attempt to make a film centered on one or two volumes. ... If the whole thing was to be done at all, one would have to try to distill the whole work, to incorporate the major themes of the book into an integrated whole" (Pinter, p. ix). Even though it was never produced, this screenplay was published to some positive response. "[The Pinter screenplay] enlarges the language of film in order to encompass one of the most sustained products of the human imagination." (Roger Shattuck, quoted in Kauffman, p. 30). Kauffman proceeds to praise the Pinter screenplay, but since his praises are not based on a finished film, they are a bit disingenuous. But while the Pinter screenplay is a distillation of the kind that may work for films based upon more traditional novels, it is disastrous to Proust’s roman fleuve. The Pinter screenplay is disjointed and confusing, making some fourteen significant shifts of time or location in the first sixty-seven shots. This kind of adaptation merely tries to recreate the complexities of time and order that power Proust’s writing, the complexities that Genette deals with in his chapter on Order. The fluidity of time and the non-linearity of sequencing reflect important themes of the novel, that is, the ability of the written word to capture a slice of time and protect it from corruption, the ability of the mind to free itself from the limitations of time with its capacity for memory, and the ability of the writer to control time and mimic memory. While this screenplay is an admirable effort, and while such a scheme might work for the adaptation of other novels, Pinter’s work demonstrates more how not to adapt Proust than how to. I suspect, however, given the freedom he would have been granted if the producer had a much larger budget that Pinter would have written an admirable screenplay for a film of many hours that would have adapted the entire novel for the screen or for a television miniseries. Yet, because only a film of great length could do justice to the volume of words, thoughts, sensations, and desires that Proust describes, evokes, and interweaves in his novel, the Pinter screenplay is a failure. Although the existing screenplay demonstrates that Pinter is aware of these converging vectors in the original novel, and although Pinter certainly has the ability to write a complex screenplay for a complex and necessarily long film, the screenplay is a failure because it tries to find cinematic equivalents of Proust’s style, especially his shifts of time and place, without taking into account the fact that Proust’s style extends over a monumental work of over one million words. The Pinter approach would likely work for a much longer film, but it would be inappropriate for a "standard" two-hour film.

Stephane next approached Peter Brook both to write an adaptation and to direct the film. Brook is also known for "literate" film adaptations, e.g., Lord of the Flies, Marat/Sade, and King Lear. Brook’s approach was different from that of Pinter. Whereas Pinter tries to do justice to the entire novel in a two-hour film, Brook concentrates only on Swann in Love because he believes that "all Proust’s obsessions are in the Swann in Love section ... [and that he] wanted to prove that in a single day it’s possible to reflect eternity" (Kauffman, p. 30). Kauffman suggests at vitriolic length that this approach is both unwise and unfaithful to the original. (Indeed, Kauffman seems only to be interested in finding fault with the Schlondorff film, which was shot from a revised version of the Brook screenplay, and to lay blame on Peter Brook rather than on Schlondorff. To make his demonization of Brook more complete or believable, I suppose, he needs to find a hero upon whom to place a dubious laurel wreath, and so chooses Pinter.)

The project of getting the novel on film eventually came under the supervision of (then West) German director Volker Schlondorff. Schlondorff also had a reputation of being able to handle "literary" adaptations of serious novels. He had been educated in France, and he studied film-making with Louis Malle, Alain Resnais, and Jean-Pierre Melville. He had made film versions of Musil’s Young Torless (1966), Kleist’s Michal Kohlhass, (1969), Brecht’s Baal (1970), and Boll’s The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975) (Costanzo, p. 171). Most notably, he wrote the screenplay for and directed the film version of Gunther Grass’s novel The Tin Drum (1979), which metaphorically depicts the stunting of intellect and morality in Germany during the Nazi era. This film won the Academy Award for the Best Foreign Film and shared the Golden Palm at Cannes. Its wide release made Schlondorff known in the west, especially in America. This notoriety helped executive producer Stephane obtain the financial backing necessary for Swann in Love (Powrie, p. 37). And so Schlondorff, with the assistance of Jean-Claude Carriere and Marie-Helen Estienne, adapted the screenplay done by Brook. The fact that Pinter’s name does not appear in the credits means that the film takes nothing from the Pinter script, and it is easy to see that it does not simply by comparing the Pinter screenplay with the Brook-Schlondorff film.

Yet the film as it exists also does what Pinter’s script tries to do; that is, it tries to distill the entire book into a two-hour film. Although it does not pretend to be much more than an adaptation of Swann In Love from Swann’s Way, and although there are some flashbacks and flashforwards in the film that do not occur in Swann in Love, because of its fluid yet compact use of time and by "isolating a few characters and events, [the film] dwells on gestures and details with an unhurried care that surely would have pleased the novelist" (Sterritt, p. 27). Thus, the film can be seen as a microcosm of the larger work. Although most critics of both film and literature savaged the film, at least some tried to understand what Schlondorff was trying to do. As David Ansen writes, "What’s remarkable is how much this 110-minute film gets in—how adaptable Proust proves to be. There’s no way to approximate those serpentine, metaphor-laden sentences with which Proust anatomizes a society and a soul. But Proust was also a great dramatist, a scathingly funny observer of a dinner party, the supreme reporter of love’s voracious, cannibal appetite" (Ansen, p. 80).

Even if other parts of Remembrance of Things Past were filmed, Schlondorff’s film version of Swann in Love tries to stand as representative of the entire novel, tries to incorporate its major themes and successes. Rather than distilling as Pinter desires, the Brook-Schlondorff film of Swann In Love takes a step towards what Bluestone suggests; that is, it becomes something else, something other than the novel. Bluestone, however, can tell us only that the film will be different from the novel, not how the film will be different, nor how cinematic narrative can adequately address the demands of the novel’s radically different narrative capabilities.

The Schlondorff-Brook film of Swann in Love is essentially the story of an impossible relationship between the rich and well-connected Swann and the perhaps complicated, perhaps simple courtesan Odette de Crecy in the Paris of the 1880s. The film takes place largely within the span of a single day, going from morning on the first day to morning on the second. There is a coda attached that pushes into the future about ten or perhaps fifteen years. (Proust is never particularly careful about time, and so Schlondorff may likewise not feel the need to be.) At the beginning of the film, Swann and his friend the Baron de Charlus attend a reception at the home of Swann’s friends the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes; the Duc is also Charlus’s brother. Swann talks embarrassedly and not entirely truthfully to Charlus about his affair with Odette. He hides from Charlus his obsession for Odette. As they speak, the overtly homosexual Charlus eyes the beautiful young male attendants, and Charlus and Swann enter the elegant salon as musicians play Debussy.

Later, Swann meets Odette at "the Bagatelle," an exclusive restaurant in Paris. She flirts with him while Charlus tries to seduce a very handsome young Jew who is at first excluded from the restaurant because of his heritage but who is quickly admitted because of his implied relationship with Charlus. Odette asks Swann about his essay on Vermeer. He accompanies her home, where there is a strange woman waiting for Odette. Swann overhears the woman telling Odette that a woman who has seen Odette at a brothel would pay well to spend some time with her. Swann is jealous of this news. Although in this scene he seems not to be disturbed about the possibility that Odette has lesbian affairs, the fact that she has affairs of any kind makes him jealous because he is obsessed with her. He pesters her about her affairs, demanding that she at least give him the name of someone with whom she has had an affair. She evades his questioning, creating a ridiculous and patently false story to satisfy him, then tries to get rid of him so that she can go to the opera with the Verdurins and Forcheville. Swann finds a piece of paper that lists the address of the brothel mentioned by the strange lady and leaves.

Swann goes to the brothel to inquire about Odette, has intercourse with a very young prostitute, pays her handsomely, goes home and falls asleep. He dreams about Odette. Awaking with a start, he determines to rush to the opera to try to find Odette. Not finding her or the Verdurins, he and his coachman continue the mad dash in the search for Odette. Eventually, Swann finds her with the Verdurins at a nearby restaurant. Odette and Mme. Verdurin snub him, for it is clear that she is there with Forcheville. Yet she and Swann sit together while the young pianist plays the Vinteuil sonata. After dinner, when Swann tries to take Odette home, Mme. Verdurin insists that she ride with her, her husband, and Forcheville, again snubbing Swann.

Swann walks on the sidewalk as his coachman follows him in the street. He slashes at plants with his walking cane while he berates himself and argues with himself about his relationship with Odette. He works his passions into a furious jealousy which drives him ultimately to Odette’s house. Seeing a light on in her house, he climbs up to knock on the windowpane—but he is mistaken! It is not Odette’s house, but her neighbors’. He begs pardon of the two startled men in the window, climbs down, corrects his course, and knocks at Odette’s house. She admits him. He believes that she is hiding someone in her house, and she indeed gives all the indications of deliberately keeping him from finding out some hidden secret. After they make love, she tells him about a friend of hers, another courtesan, whose lover has proposed marriage to her, hinting that she would be interested in hearing the same thing from Swann, but he demurs and goes home.

The next day, Charlus visits Swann in his home as he is awaking and preparing for the day. Swann tells him that he has decided to marry Odette. Flashforward about ten years or so. Swann is at the home of the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes again with the intention of introducing his young daughter to them, something that he apparently has tried to do several times in the recent past. He fantasizes about seeing people from his past there, about having been there before. The Duc and Duchesse appear but cannot stay to talk with Swann because they are late for a dinner appointment. They rush out, rudely ignoring his news when he tells them that he is dying. They are not so late, though, that the Duchesse does not have time to change her shoes to match her gown. As they drive off, the Duc and Duchesse speak to themselves about the unfortunate nature of Swann’s marriage to Odette and to the fact that they cannot receive his daughter. Swann keeps an appointment with Charlus. They talk about their lives, their approaching deaths (Swann’s more imminently), their disappointments, their satisfactions. As they speak, Odette walks past them, older but still pretty and the film fades out on this final shot of Mme. Swann.

Given that Schlondorff is trying to find in Swann in Love a miscrocosm of the entirety of Remembrance of Things Past, and given that Schlondorff has decided to find that microcosm in a single twenty-four-hour period of Swann’s life, he must necessarily make use of the some standard techniques such as condensation and expansion available to the filmmaker adapting a novel into a film. The Schlondorff film, for example, condenses all the salons of the Verdurins as they are described in the novel into only one such example in the film. However, we get some of the flavor of nouveau-riche snobbery and hypocrisy even from this brief exposure. Since the single event with the Verdurins happens after the grand reception at the mansion of the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes, we moreover get the chance to compare a vision of high society in all its grandeur and opulence with that of the fictive, presumptuous, imperfect imitation. We know that the Verdurins are hypocrites, boorish social climbers. This realization is precisely what Proust wants us to know about the Verdurins, precisely the image of them that he paints in the novel. In this case, the film does a reasonably successful job of conveying the same information that the novel conveys. Yet, this success comes at a price. We do not have in the film the luxury of Proust’s repeated descriptions of events, people, and relationships. Lost, thus, is information about Swann’s Jewishness, his striving to become accepted in Parisian society despite his being an outsider, and his inveterate womanizing, all of which would contribute to a sense of alienation present in the novel and useful for understanding the obsession that follows.

There are other examples of condensation in the film. In the novel, as Swann searches for the truth about Odette’s past and her lesbian affairs, Proust briefly explains, "Sometimes he repaired to brothels in the hope of learning something about Odette, although he dared not mention her name. ‘I have a little thing you’re sure to like,’ the ‘manageress’ would greet him and he would stay for an hour or so chatting gloomily to some poor girl who sat there astonished that he went no further"(Proust, Swann in Love p. 254). In the film, however, these repeated visits become a single encounter between Swann and a prostitute. As she tells him the truth that he already suspects about Odette, we see Swann and the prostitute in the act of intercourse as she answers his questions about Odette. By linking visually the ideas of outre sexuality and a search for knowledge, we can appreciate another one of the ways in which Schlondorff is mutating the novel into the film. He emphasizes two of the themes of the novel in a uniquely cinematic way and casts an Oedipal pall over the event, for Swann is searching for knowledge about identity and sexuality, both his and Odette’s. He asks "Who am I? Who is she? With whom do we copulate? How and why?" Schlondorff here demonstrates his attempts to deal with the psychological and internal aspects of the novel, those that challenge the film-maker to push the limits of film’s and his ability to render the novel in cinematic ways. This kind of visual linking of two themes is not possible in the novel, at least not in the same way inasmuch as the novel relies upon description and the film can show the two themes at the same time in the same frame as it does here or it can link two shots with an edit that indicates the thematic link between those two shots. Proust succeeds in evoking the mechanism of involuntary memory causing shifts in time and space in the novel, and indeed, these shifts are one of the most expressive mechanisms that Proust uses in his novel. Despite their literary origin, these shifts are also realizable in film, which is more plastic in its representation and manipulation of both time and space. Moreover, the audience becomes complicit in the lovemaking because of natural human interest in scenes of sexuality and the audience’s voyeuristic relationship to the spectacle, again something more difficult to achieve in the written word. So Schlondorff, though making a film of limited scope, does try to portray the centrality of the theme of outre sexuality and Proust’s fascination with it. Yet, again, because of the relative brevity of the film, we miss the importance and weight that would come of seeing more and more details revealed over a longer period of time, of repeated descriptions.

The Scholndorff film is also an admirable though not entirely successful attempt at finding a visually narrative way to convey the psychological aspects of the narrative in the source novel. In her book Alice Doesn’t, Teresa de Lauretis refers to an article by Seymour Chatman which helps to explain the differences between literary and cinematic narrative techniques: "To exemplify the differences between filmic and literary narrative, Chatman chooses two scenes from Guy de Maupassant’s novella A Day in the Country and the film version of that novella by Jean Renoir for comparison" (De Lauretis, p. 146). In her examination of the Chatman article, de Lauretis claims that filmic representation of events, of locations, and especially of characters and characterizations is dependent upon a psychological interaction between the audience and the scene depicted on the screen, and on nuances of representation which may be suggested by words but which may have no direct visual equivalent. The reputation of Proust’s novel and its greatness come in part from the way in which Proust uses words to mimic and recreate selected mechanisms of human psychology as well as to describe the actions of the actors, the setting for events, and the like. In Swann in Love, the psychological mechanisms that Proust most tries to evoke are memory, sexual attraction, and obsession. For the film to be successful, it, too, must find a cinematic way in which to represent those psychological mechanisms. Unfortunately for Schlondorff, it is difficult at times to find visual equivalents for all of the elements of story, narrative, and narrating--to borrow Genette's terms--that Proust has put into Swann in Love, for sometimes there are no visual equivalents for "those serpentine, metaphor-laden sentences with which Proust anatomizes a society and a soul" (Ansen, p. 80). Moreover, it is apparently difficult to find cinematic equivalents of the manner in which Proust recreates memory, sexual attraction, and obsession. Schlondorff apparently feels the need to rely upon characterization rather than visual stylistics, symbolic framing, or metaphoric editing to portray Swann's alienation, his outre sexuality, and his obsession for Odette, and this reliance on standard cinematic technique is seldom enough to evoke Proust. In short, the story from the originating factor makes it into the receiving factor, but Proust's genius does not. Nonetheless, the film does have its successes.

Certainly, some of the successes of the novel are rendered in more or less standard cinematic terms in the film. For example, Remembrance of Things Past is a marvelously rich recreation or evocation of a past era. In a sense, it conquers time by preserving it. This kind of narrativity can easily be done visually, as it is in the Schlondorff film, which contains a proliferation of visually impressive location shooting. Swann’s apartment, for example, is filled with lush interiors, dark, ornate woodwork, the clutter of the possessions of a wealthy man of his era. The chateau of the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes is solid, rich, and expansive beyond the imagination of most Americans. The costuming is opulent and exact. We never have the sense of watching a "Hollywood set," however, because of the use of location shooting, for the most part. Even though this evocation of the past relies upon standard film making techniques to render the word or the context visually, this technique nonetheless emphasizes the Proustian preoccupation with time and with how past events shape present realities. Moreover, the non-linear representation of time in the film also represents a conquest of time and another successful transfer to the film one of the aspects of the novel.

On the other hand, this reliance on the pedestrian may be one of the limitations of the film: "Schlondorff’s films have a strikingly conventional look to them, stylistically unextravagant and narratively bound to a clear, novelistic development that employs traditional strategies of suspense and climax" (Corrigan, p. 37). Swann in Love is no exception. Schlondorff is certainly less stylistically and visually adventuresome than other directors of the German New Wave such as Fassbinder, Wenders, and Herzog. Perhaps with more time and more money, the film-maker would be able to find more visual equivalents of Proust’s narrative and narrating. However, being "bound to a clear novelistic" style is probably inappropriate for adapting a novel which is not itself clear. The strong story line which is usually apparent in Schlondorff’s other films is absent here, and the tension he brings to the film in that kind of straight, strong story line and in trying to realize a fractal representation of Proust that consists of the sample but recreates the whole is ultimately not entirely successful.

The novel is resplendent with nuances of character. The film attempts to finesse such nuances through casting, acting, and directing, and it is not entirely successful, yet it, too, relies upon the concept that the characters are more than just what they appear to be at any given moment in the present, but that they are compendia of what they have experienced, and that visual representation is not bound by the conventions applied to the novel. For example, the use of flashbacks and juxtapositions of time and space which apply to a character can be more easily created in a film where point of view can be attributed to the dominant character in a scene by means of close-ups or other identifiers which denote ownership of a shot. Yet this, too, is a limitation of the film. In the novel, we already know a great deal about Swann, Odette, Gilberte, and Marcel before we arrive at the story of Swann’s mad obsession for Odette as it is told in Swann in Love. We know about Proust’s manipulations of time, about his concern with his sexuality and outre sexuality, with his concern for literariness. This background information is lacking in the film. Without that background information, the weight that Proust gives these elements of the narrative is less significant in the film.

Another of the concerns of the novel is the relationship between art and life, that is, how they influence each other. In the film, this concept is developed in several ways: Swann’s reaction to the Vinteuil sonata (although it is never precisely identified as such in the film, we see him as he listens to it, and his response lets us know how significant it is to him) is perhaps the most obvious. Yet, at the level of cinematic technique, director Schlondorff chooses to depict the backgrounds of some scenes as if they were impressionist paintings. Although this is again largely a standard cinematic technique, and due to directorial choice and to the beautiful cinematography of Sven Nykvist, again we encounter a cinematic narrative technique which emphasizes another of the themes of the novel, but which is unavailable to the novelist: the overlapping of art and life, and the influences that they have on each other. By making some scenes overtly impressionistic, Schlondorff grounds the events of the film in a historically identifiable period and foregrounds the "unreal" nature of art by calling attention to his own and the period’s art.

In spite of critical complaints to the contrary, the film does a reasonable job of at least trying to depict the five major themes of the novel I have identified earlier in this chapter. In the opening sequence, the film introduces all of the significant themes that Proust will deal with: the desire to become a writer; the way time shapes lives and will shape the novel and the film; the efficacy of the written word in preserving moments in time; how outre sexuality and passion lead a man to obsessions that influence and control his life; and how involuntary memory not only recreates past events but how those involuntary memories, in surfacing, influence current events. The opening 1:45 shot of the film mixes several levels of cinematic meaning. We see an ambiguous set of household objects while we also see the names of the cast and the crew for the film projected over these objects. We hear the sounds of a pen scratching across a leaf of paper as we hear the little phrase from the sonata that incites so much passion in Swann. Here, in little cinematic epiphanies, we experience at least a momentary cinematic narrative equivalent of Proust, with the mixture of art and life, with the inscription of time and feelings in words, and with the revelation of obsession and involuntary memory. The next shot shows Swann in bed, writing what is apparently a diary, with his voice-over narration supplying us with the words that he writes: "The air is warm and fresh, full of shadows and dreams. My love for Odette goes beyond the bounds of physical desire. It is so bound up in my acts, my thoughts, my sleep, my life, that without it, I would cease to exist." At this point, there is an interpolated flashback that shows Swann caressing Odette’s breast while pretending only to be arranging the flowers in her corsage, that is, "doing a cattleya" in the private lovemaking vernacular that Swann has with Odette: "Would you let me arrange the orchids in your corsage?" At this point, the film returns to the (supposed) present, as Swann ruminates, "I sacrifice my work, my pleasure, my friends, finally my whole life when I anticipate the hour that I shall meet with Odette. This love is a sickness so entrenched now that to cut it out would destroy me completely. A surgeon would say it’s inoperable." That is, this is a recognition that Swann’s obsession affects him like a disease and he suffers from it beyond the help of medical science. He is resigned to his fate. (As exemplified here, nearly all of the dialogue in the film comes with only slight alterations from the novel.)

Here we clearly have Proust’s preoccupation with passion, with the past, with obsession, and with writing about them. They a