198
PARTISAN REVIEW
Odette one night,-he continues a futile search because it would
be cruel to renounce the search.
Odette incarnates Swann's love for beauty and his pride is
wounded because he knows that Odette's particular beauty will
not last. "L'amour a tellement besoin de se trouver une garantie
de
dun~e."
The element of pride in Swann's love grows to such
proportions that it ends by taking on a kind of responsibility. It
ends by remaining alone. Proust recaptures time by effecting three
transformations or three replacements: the hero yields to his pride;
the lover yields to his love; the artist yields to his work.
Aschenbach, in Thomas Mann's
Death in Venice,
is a purer
type of artist than Swann, but he too is characterized by pride in
his reputation and accomplishments. Aschenbach never becomes
the prisoner of his pride, as Swann does; he is prisoner of his work.
Neither man ever knew the facile liberty of normal living. They
are voluptuaries of art. "Art is a heightened mode of existence,"
we read in the Mann story. Natural voluptuousness for most men
is intermittent and passing. For Swann and Aschenbach, volup–
tuousness is an everlasting jailer. The pride of the connoisseur is
the love of the most faithful lover imaginable. He is the lover who
will forever see himself and his particular apprehension of beauty
in his past love or i; any new depiction of it: Aschenbach watching
Tadzio on the beach, and Swann looking at Odette in the salon of
Mme. Verdurin.
For Swann, then, love is the product of his taste in art,
behind which and before which stretches indomitably the connois–
seur's pride. His love is never pure because of this rich ingredient
of pride and because of his particular form of suffering. This suf–
fering, born from jealousy, seems to emerge from Swann's lack of
knowledge about Odette. He would cease suffering if he could
know all.
It
is true that Proust is no metaphysician. He is an artist.
But his hero's problem is epistemological in nature. The studious
life of Swann had taught him that the search of the connoisseur is
the search for facts. This habit he maintains in his role of lover.
The search of the lover is the search for facts. And now the derisive
tragedy becomes clearer. Whereas the facts about a painting are
stable, those which concern human beings and human life are
changing facts often shrouded in incomprehensible mystery.
