Swann and Haml·et: Anote on the
Contemporary Hero
Wallace Fowlie
THE
TRAGIC HERO
has deserted tragedy and crept into the novel.
His destiny has discovered here more space for his action and for
his suffering. (Always, tragedy has been prepared by the world
making itself felt in the virtue and vice of a solitary man.) More
elaborately than any other literary artist, Marcel Proust prepared
the setting for tragedy and the actors who seemed destined to por–
tray tragedy. But this longest preparation in art never ceased being
just that. Proust contemplated tragedy throughout the composition
of his thousands of pages; he never lived it.
The heroes of Proust, because of their unreciprocated love,
are, more than other heroes in literature, the great solitary ones.
Like a violently lighted room, each hero-Swann, Charlus, Marcel
-absorbs in himself a world of cruel light, and the rest of the
house, the other beings (and the other decors) disappear in
darkness.
The jealousy of Swann for Odette is a shadow which follows
his love everywhere. Odette is the ·mistress under suspicion when
she is absent, when she is present, even when perhaps she is no
longer loved. Swann caresses and cradles all the insignificant
words of Odette and also all those which she never uttered. The
joy of Swann of which he is surest is his cohabitation with the
absent Odette. There he is all-powerful and his very jealousy can
change into voluptuousness. Surrounded by friends or alone, he
thinks of her and this thought leaps on to his knees and cuddles
down "comme une bete aimee qu'on emmene partout et qu'il gar–
erait avec lui,
a
table,
a
l'insu des convives."
Swann is the hero who loves. But the classical hero usually
the one who is loved. Hamlet, for example. Hamlet represents
e type of hero who is jealous of his fate as a man and not of his
ate
as a lover. Rodrigue also. Even Othello, blindest of them all,
ows constantly that he is loved by Desdemona. But Swann,
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