200
PARTISAN REVIEW
salon and the salon into his fever. This he will not leave, because
there is nothing outside of it. Neither will Aschenbach leave
Venice. Fever-infested Venice is the symbol in Mann's story for
the world of the modern hero who seeks his death, willfully, in all
that is unreal to himself. "Something is rotten in the state of
Denmark" is no modern ejaculation.
The mind of the hero has become the mind of the artist, who,
having learned the strange power that can be exerted over all that
he creates, has been confounded by the power which the real
world seeks to exert over him. To escape this dilemma, which is
simple and habitual, he has constructed a more complicated one in
his effort to
·c~nsider
the world, an art, and human struggle in the
world, the artistic creation.
As Swann listens to the brief recurring theme in Vinteuil's
sonata, with which he has come to associate his love for Odette, he
feels the proportions of his soul change. In himself the hero has
learned how to liberate a space necessary for the action and the
movement of his memory. In contradiction with the hero who is
forced to compose his action in the present-invading-future, Swann
is the hero of the present-invading-past. The world enters into him
as if it had no more consistency than the sounds of Vinteuil's
music have in the air. The world is malleable. It is subtilized
by
some lyric chemistry, even as the will of the hero has subtilized
evil.
Later in the work, there is another metaphor, another delicate
notation concerning the musical motifs in Vinteuil's sonata. The
motifs become for Swann ideas which fill the great unpenetrated
night of his soul ("qui remplissent la grande nuit impenetree de
son arne"). This is an extraordinary adjective,
impenetree,
which
bears in it the paradox of Proust's entire novel, and more particu·
larly, the paradox of Swann's love. Proust is saying that musical
motifs, like ideas, are
filling
the soul of his hero which is
unpene·
trated.
This seems to be equivalent to saying that the hero is filling
his memory with the unreal furnishings of memory. The active
hero usually heeds a contrary supplication: the great necessity for
the soul to empty itself and thereby to face the present and to
prepare the future.
This paradox of metaphor leads us back to the paradox of
morals. Soon after Proust completes the image of Swann's 'love
