Marcel Proust’s
lighted windows
in the novel
Swann’s Way
A
few lighted windows that Marcel Proust
(1871-1921) looks up at with his memories
and he announces, learns of, and writes about
sophisticated Charles Swann’s alluring love for
and jealousy of enigmatic Odette de Crécy.
It is sufficient to “draw near to the Verdurins'
door – one of the modest Salons in Paris –
and catch sight of the great lamp-lit spaces
of the drawing-room windows”, for Swann to
melt “at the thought of the charming creature
(Odette) whom he would see as he entered
the room, basking in that golden light.”
However, before Swann enters the Verdurins’
salon, Marcel Proust, with the mastery of
an impressionist, plays with “the figures of the
guests”, which “stood out, sharp and black,
between lamp and window” while Swann
“would try to make out Odette. And then, when
he was once inside (the room), without thinking,
his (Swann’s) eyes sparkled suddenly with such
radiant happiness that M. Verdurin said to the
painter: ‘H'm. Seems to be getting warm’.”
From a simple lighted window, the great French
writer is able to see the birth of love and, with a
pinch of irony, announces the antecedents of the
story to the “people who have been used for half
a lifetime to electric light”. He remembers out of
time, and with the help of his powerful memory
he puts the emotions he had experienced in the
window, making them stem from his conscience.
And once again, knocking on Odette’s bedroom
window, Marcel Proust reveals the depth
of Swann’s passionate and voluptuous love:
in the nights in which Swann pines, and “after
the hour at which Odette sent her servants
to bed,” he arrives “at the ground-level, among
the windows (all exactly alike, but darkened)
of the adjoining houses ” and taps on the pane
of the only lighted one, which in fact is Odette’s
window, where the action takes place, where
the amorous relationship degrades, or better,
as Giovanni Raboni – who translated the French
text into Italian in 1981 – indicates, where
the metamorphosis, as such, of its painful
essence takes place.
And again it is a lighted window that triggered
Swann’s fever of jealousy: Odette “begged him
to put out the light before he went,” and Swann
“drew the curtains close round her bed” before
he left her in the night. But when he was in his
own house again, jealous, like a shadow of his
love, the idea suddenly struck him “that, perhaps,
Odette was expecting some one else that evening.”
He wanted to know who it was, so “he went out,
took a cab, and stopped it close to her (Odette ‘s)
house. […] Amid the glimmering blackness of all
the row of windows, the lights in which had long
since been put out, he saw one, and only one,
from which overflowed […] the light.”
Marcel Proust plays upon the illuminated window
and ironizes about Swann’s sudden jealousy,
as he had “fallen into the habit, when he came
late to Odette, of identifying her window by the
fact that it was the only one still lighted in a row
of windows otherwise all alike, he had been
misled, this time, by the light, and had knocked
at the window beyond hers.”
The accidental mistake gives Proust the
opportunity to evoke the delicate aspects
of deceit, the relentless effect of the emotions of
a self-destructive love. In the novel Swann’s Way,
Proust enunciates his prodigious analysis of love
and jealousy, which he further developes in his
great literary work In Search of Lost Time, which
is considered a masterpiece of French narrative.
Copertina dell'edizione francese, edita da
Gallimard dal 1919 / Cover of the french edition,
published by Gallimard since 1919
8 – To be continued. For “Epiphanies of light”,
to date, the following short stories by Empio
Malara have been published in LUCE: “Alessandro
Manzoni, a creator of light” (n. 317, September
2016); “Herman Melville. Light that invites us on
a journey” (n. 321, September 2017); “Light and
dark in the portrait of James Joyce as a youngt
man” (n. 322, December 2017); “Flashes and
lights in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms” (n.
323, March 2018); “The artificial sun in the novel
The magic mountain by Thomas Mann” (n. 324,
June 2018); “The irreverent and irrational light
in some texts by Carlo Emilio Gadda” (n. 325,
September 2018); "Philip Roth's revealing lights
in American Pastoral" (n. 326, December 2018).
EPIPHANIES OF LIGHT / LUCE 327
17