When I told my husband I was writing about canals today, he said ‘quenelles?!’
No, not quenelles. And not the canals in Venice, or even in Delft. Let’s talk about canals in Combray, shall we? Here’s the curé, with Tante Leonie, pontificating.
“But what is unquestionably the most remarkable thing about our church is the view from the belfry,…like a fairy-tale, with what you might call vistas along the plain, which have quite a special charm of their own. On a clear day you can see as far as Verneuil. And then another thing; you can see at the same time places which you are in the habit of seeing one without the other, as, for instance, the course of the Vivonne and the ditches at Saint-Assise-lès-Combray, which are separated, really, by a screen of tall trees; or, to take another example, there are all the canals at Jouy-le-Vicomte, which is Gaudiacus vicecomitis,* as of course you know. Each time that I have been to Jouy I have seen a bit of a canal in one place, and then I have turned a corner and seen another, but when I saw the second I could no longer see the first.”
I’ll hazard a wild guess that there aren’t canals in or around the environs of Illiers. But in Combray, apparently yes. And if you look up Gaudiacus Vicecomitics you find Joué-lès-Tours. Translation- to play with the towers? Could these be the ‘Quatuor’ towers of my Moors? I’d like to think so. But we don’t know, even if ‘jouer des tours’ means to play tricks on someone.
So it appears we have MP’s curé to open up the channel, narratively speaking, between Combray and Venice.
I think this theme of canals runs through the novel in strange ways.
There are all manner of canals and conduits, and MP explores them all. They are the perfect metaphor, kind of a meta metaphor, if you will- for those of you who see canals as metaphors themselves, linking one thing to another. Canals channel the sea. They also serve as conduits for wastewater. In truth, a sewer is cousin to a canal, each a way of channeling and moving things, be it waste-water or the sea.
In the salon of the Verdurins in Paris, metaphors of wastewater abound.
Here’s Swann speaking of the Verdurins, and of Odette.
Swann says: “God knows that I have honestly attempted to pull Odette out of that sewer, and to teach her to breathe a nobler and a purer air. ”
“I dwell so many miles above the puddles in which these filthy little vermin sprawl and crawl and bawl their cheap obscenities, that I cannot possibly be spattered by the witticisms of a Verdurin!” he cried, tossing up his head and arrogantly straightening his body.”
Swann’s social standing and pedigree has been tainted by association with the Verdurin’s, Their salon is tinged with the ‘stink’ of their name, likened to a puddle or sewer, and containing within it the word ‘ordure.’
In contrast, the Vinteuil sonata that appears from within the bowels of the Verdurin salon flows with imagery of water
“a phrase…emerged for a few moments from the waves of sound.”
“Its molten liquidity the motifs which now and then emerge, barely discernible, to plunge again and disappear and drown”
“He had suddenly perceived, where it was trying to surge upwards in a flowing tide of sound, the mass of the piano-part, multiform, coherent, level, and breaking everywhere in melody like the deep blue tumult of the sea, silvered and charmed into a minor key by the moonlight.”
. . .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 (Swann’s Way, 294-295).**
Such an odd contrast between the flow of water in the sonata, and the sewer-like environment of the Verdurin salon. I’m not sure what to make of it. But I feel as though Swann gets bogged down in the muck and mire of his relationship with Odette. We leave him at the end of Swann’s Way with the strangest dream on a high path above the sea. Odette goes off with Forcheville. Could there be a more obvious forking of the road in the relationship, she choosing to go on the path with Forcheville? Swann is left with the man with the fez, who turns out to be himself.
That one detail of the fez is so interesting. I like to think that it’s part and parcel of all the Persian metaphors Swann brings to Marcel’s attention, along with talk of storms at sea. Suddenly we’re in the realm of Venice with its Byzantine influences, its seafarers and Moors and Sultans. Immediately after, the text moves on to a description of Marcel’s room at Balbec.
The sea literally enters the room and is reflected in the glass behind which are the books.
Among the rooms which used most commonly to take shape in my mind during my long nights of sleeplessness, there was none that differed more utterly from the rooms at Combray…than my room in the Grand Hôtel de la Plage, at Balbec, the walls of which, washed with ripolin, contained, like the polished sides of a basin in which the water glows with a blue, lurking fire, a finer air, pure, azure-tinted, saline. The Bavarian upholsterer who had been entrusted with the furnishing of this hotel had varied his scheme of decoration in different rooms, and in that which I found myself occupying had set against the walls, on three sides of it, a series of low book-cases with glass fronts, in which, according to where they stood, by a law of nature which he had, perhaps, forgotten to take into account, was reflected this or that section of the ever-changing view of the sea, so that the walls were lined with a frieze of seascapes, interrupted only by the polished mahogany of the actual shelves.” Intro, Place-Names: The Name.
And suddenly, we are no longer in Paris with Swann and Odette and Mme. Verdurin’s clan, her little group in Paris. Now we are with Marcel and his group of young girls by the sea. It’s as though the little phrase, if taken as a metaphor for the text itself, has migrated from Paris to Balbec, seaside, to pick up the trail of storms and Persia in Balbec.
Even the Verdurins are heading there, about to rent out Mme de Cambremer’s villa. My next topic to talk about. I love her.
** Note: I find this passage to be the most direct reference to the little phrase’s importance in the novel, not just as it weaves in and out and through all sections, but also as it points to the “firm foundations” underpinning all. MP has been the laborer doing so throughout, and only here naming what he is doing.
T