SWANN AND HAMLET
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being a malady' by having his hero say that his love cannot be
operated on ("son mal n'est plus operable"), Swann realizes that
Odette's real sentiment of love for him .is over. He continues, how–
ever, to listen to Vinteuil's music which is endowed for him more
and more with a supernatural prestige. He enters the final phase
of his love, when absolute immobility of his being is required for
the recapture of his love-that is, for the perfect hearing of musi–
cal themes which have assumed the sentiment of his love.
Swann becomes finally, then, the lover of beauty who is un–
able to possess it. As Aschenbach is the creator of beauty who is
unable to possess it. Both, through this incapacity to possess what
they love, stand for a new type of hero. Swann is the modern hero
whose action has become contemplation. Odette is in reality no
woman at all for Swann; she is a painting of Botticelli. Likewise,
Tadzio, in the rich and poignant imagination of Aschenbach, is
the smile of Narcissus.
One of the great moments in Hamlet's struggle is when he
makes this extraordinary request of his mother: "Forgive me this
my virtue." Hamlet is the innocent who wills the action of virtue
and whose tragedy occurs when the power upposed to virtue pre–
vails. Today, in Swann and Aschenbach for example, the hero has
reversed this extraordinary request of a son to his mother, and
utters its equally extraordinary opposite: "Grant me this my vice."
This request the modern hero doesn't make to his mother (who in
Hamlet's case represented the hero's world), but he makes it to
himself!
The old adage of Socrates, "Know thyself," is certainly at the
core of every heroic deed and of every effort toward the achieve–
ment of heroism. But today, the heroism of knowing oneself has
become the heroism of not knowing oneself, or rather the heroism
of flight from all that is central in oneself. The modern hero's
heart is the heart fluctuating. Proust's phrase, "les intermittences
du coeur," which he at one time destined for the general title of
his work, is the key phrase for modern psychology. And psychol–
ogism, I fully believe, will characterize our age (if anything
remains after the wars of our age) as humanism characterizes the
Renaissance and as scholasticism characterizes the Middle Ages.
The "intermittences of the heart" is the phrase in which con–
verge the profoundest meanings of romanticism and scepticism.
