SWANN AND HAMLET
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Swann is predestined to suffering by his temperament and by the
too neat transformation he undergoes from aesthete into lover.
There is an interesting resemblance between Swann and the
Provenr;al poets (and those of the
dolce stil nuovo)
in the distance
they feel exists between them and the object loved. But with the
poets of the south, this distance is suitable to the tone of worship
in their love. They worship the impeccable woman, the spiritual
mistress. Not only is Swann's world naturally remote from
Odette's, but he increases the separation by the morbidity of his
imaginings. Daily he invents evil designs to explain Odette's con–
duct. In this evolution of the hero-lover, the sick man should be
raised to health by love. This is Dante's testimonial, and Caval–
canti's. But in Proust's work the artist is overcome by a peculiar
suffering which is a malady. Swann frankly faces the nature of
this malady, when he realizes that to cease being suspicious of
Odette, would be to cease loving her. Swann accepts the impossi–
bility of any cure. His is the cherished malady. To be cured
would be to die.
Hamlet seeks knowledge which will permit him to act. But
Swann, refusing to act and thereby cause his spell to vanish, invents
false facts in order to maintain his fever. The modern hero in
literature seems to be characterized by his search and effort to
adjust the world to the facts of his imagination. Thus, the modern
hero represents, to an extraordinary degree, a case of infantilism.
He is a child, not because of his innocency, but by his reconstruc–
tion of a distorted world. Hamlet, the type of classical hero,
strives in the opposite direction. His action is not self-protective
and remote from reality. It is a piercing of all that has obscured
his mind from the understanding of reality. To live, for Hamlet,
becomes equivalent to leaving his books, his childhood, his tradi–
tions, and testing their maturing power on what the world inevit–
ably provides of deceit, lust, mercy. Hamlet goes into a world he
doesn't know, where he will have to readjust his vision and his
strength. Shakespeare's art is the art of the world to be conquered.
Proust's art is the art of the world to be remembered. Swann
is the hero when he remembers, thanks to the sound of music, the
figure of Odette flanked by the Verdurins and the Cottards. His
world is reenacted by a violent and subversive memory, the richest
perhaps in all literature. But the hero condenses the world into a
