Now what would MP be up to, calling Swann’s lover Odette? Ode – some kind of poem-ish form. But diminished. a diminutive ode. An Odette. So basically a phrase. But a little one. A little ode.
I’m not saying there isn’t a little phrase in a piece of music written by M. Vinteuil and played…throughout the novel. Of course there is! The sonata, the septet and the unassuming composer who lives in Combray are the subject of countless studies and inquiries as to what particular pieces of music might have served as models for Proust. All this is fascinating.
Which doesn’t preclude the possibility that the author hints at another maestro conducting here- MP himself – as he writes, weaving his little phrase in and out of the pages, laying down his foundations, setting up his grand motifs.
Perhaps it was owing to his ignorance of music that [Swann] had received so confused an impression, one of those that are none the less the only purely musical impressions, limited in their extent, entirely original, and irreducible to any other kind. An impression of this order, vanishing in an instant, is, so to speak, sine materia . . . And this impression would continue to envelop in its liquidity, its ceaseless overlapping, the motifs which from time to time emerge, barely discernible, to plunge again and disappear and drown, recognized only by the particular kind of pleasure which they instill, impossible to describe, to recollect, to name, ineffable—did not our memory, like a laborer who toils at the laying down of firm foundations beneath the tumult of the waves, by fashioning for us facsimiles of those fugitive phrases, enable us to compare and to contrast them with those that follow.
Odette in this light can be viewed as a name that plays into the gestalt. Together- Swann the sign and Odette the name fall in love with the little phrase from Vinteuil’s sonata. It represents them, and they represent it.
First there’s a sonata, and a pair of lovers claiming the little phrase as their own – the two characters we meet at the beginning of the novel. And as the novel progresses the characters multiply and the narrative grows more complex, transforming into the septet we read about much later on. A composition created and assembled by MP, writing about a septet in the end pages of his seven volumes of words.
