Swann Song

Proust is wearing me down. It's a real seat-squirmer to watch poor old Swann disintegrate, but then his love, if that's the word, is so mixed up with vanity and status, being seen, etc. Still, he suffers, and I do want to see how he comes out of it. Odette? We may never learn much about her. She seems to be a kind of social parasite of the sort that women in the nineteenth century might well have had to be in order to keep head above water. An entrepeneur of flirtation. But, I must wait and see. Swann is no better, of course. He merely has money. Odette has some, we are told, but nothing to match Swann.

The big difference between the first two chapters and "Swann in Love" (no.3) is that the latter seems to be entirely given over to the third person. Certainly the narrator is not Swann, and certainly he knows Swann's inmost thought. That's omniscience. But about 100 pages into the chapter comes an aside using the word "I." Suddenly, we have what I've been calling Marcel speaking, not a figure of true omniscience. So, having moved from the mode of memoir in chs. 1 and 2, he seemed to have moved into fictional narrative. That illusion shatters when "I" speaks up.

SWANN SONG

I can't watch Swann too long,
except out of the side of my eye.
Even now I want not to be
cantilevering down this line
to see the scales come off a fish.
I'm sure I have some email
I'd much rather complain about
having to read than watching
this rickety construction bleed
through the pores of his abject
but deeply manipulative need--
to what? Screw some equally
infantile member of the tribe
in hopes that love might emerge,
full-formed, out of the froth
of his fevered member? He would
shudder to hear such talk. I do myself,
watching him fumble, not only
with Odette's diaphanous bodice,
but with the language of stammer
and sweated confusion (how can
it be so terrifying unclear which
emotion is real or comes first,
ardor or the narcotic of needing
to dine at a fashionable address?).
I don't yet know how it will turn out,
but I know from the movies the yowl
of hounds that have caught the scent,
the scrambling for cover under a bush,
and from a moment or two in the past,
the smell of there being nothing
inside my shirt, not even me,
just that stuttering muskrat, the heart.