Rien Faire Comme une Bête

Abstract

In Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, most importantly in the second part of its first volume entitled Swann’s Way, a piano and violin sonata written by the fictitious composer Vinteuil recurs several times. The sonata, which is played at the house of the Verdurin family, contains a melody that Charles Swann associates with his love for Odette and with the experience of happiness. Especially one recurring phrase in the sonata represents a promise of happiness for Swann, a feeling of love that he links to the experience of escaping the immanence of his subjectivity and of opening himself up towards the world. The sonata’s effect on Swann is described as follows:

With a slow and rhythmical movement it led him first this way, then that, towards a state of happiness that was noble, unintelligible, and yet precise. And then suddenly, having reached a certain point from which he was preparing to follow it, after a momentary pause, abruptly it changed direction, and in a fresh movement, more rapid, fragile, melancholy, incessant, sweet, it bore him off with it towards new vistas. Then it vanished. He hoped, with a passionate longing, that he might find it again, a third time. And reappear it did, though without speaking to him more clearly, bringing him, indeed, a pleasure less profound. But when he returned home he felt the need of it: he was like a man into whose life a woman he has seen for a moment passing by has brought the image of a new beauty which deepens his own sensibility, although he does not even know her name or whether he will ever see her again. Indeed this passion for a phrase of music seemed, for a time, to open up before Swann the possibility of a sort of rejuvenation.¹