Being-in-Love

by Christopher Ciaccio

“And since the qualities that he believed to be intrinsic to the Verdurins were merely the reflection of the pleasures he enjoyed in their house because of his love for Odette, those qualities became more serious, more profound, more vital, along with those pleasures.” -Marcel Proust

Swann’s Way: An Exploration of Being-in-Love

For the existentialist, there are fundamental aspects of the subject’s existence, such as being-in-the-world or being-towards-death that are universally valid for every human subject. As one investigates further, there are other modes of existence that only apply to certain identity groups, such as women, that influence the way one exists by defining the ways in which the subject can enter into relationships with things and others in the world. Being-in-love is a mode of existence that is different from those other ways of being because instead of being based on one’s own identity, it is based upon the romantic love that one has for their beloved. Being-in-love creates meaning for the subject insofar as objects are related to him through his beloved. Simone de Beauvoir dealt with issues that relate to this discussion of the way in which we create meaning in the world in her work The Ethics of Ambiguity. In this work, she describes her concept of disclosing being as a way that the existential subject imbues meaning into the world by entering into a relationship with things in the world. This concept is useful in our discussion of being-in-love because of how disclosure of being occurs in the novel Swann’s Way.

Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust is the first book of seven in his twentieth-century modernist masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time. The novel is a series of memories recounted by the narrator and centers around two main characters: the narrator Marcel and the estranged friend of his grandmother, Charles Swann, a man with many connections to the high society of France. The novel follows the narrator’s reflections on his childhood in Combray, a small town outside of Paris, and in Paris itself, and it recounts the story of Swann’s love affair with a woman named Odette in a section entitled “Swann in Love.” What makes Swann’s Way special, however, is the immense significance imbued into almost every event, object, or character in the novel through Proust’s masterful prose. Seemingly insignificant events, such as the narrator receiving a good night’s kiss from his mother, can have profoundly significant consequences on the narrator’s psyche, and this immense meaning that Proust captures in the narrator’s and Swann’s experiences is treated in a fundamentally different way when a character is in love. When Swann is in love, the way he relates to the world around him is fundamentally altered; things become meaningful not because they relate to him but because they relate to the object of his love, Odette. We can use Beauvoir’s concept of disclosure of being to describe how the narrator transforms the memories that he is retelling by imbuing them with immense significance and meaning.  

Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity presents the idea of disclosure of being as the way that the existential subject “gives itself reasons for being that it does not have” (Beauvoir 11). The existential subject is one that no longer has recourse to transcendent beings like God or Reason for the task of creating meaning and significance in the world, rendering it to be its own source of meaning. The way the subject is able to create meaning is via this act of disclosing being by relating ourselves to what is not us but necessarily keeping that distance between what is subject and what is object. One cannot fully possess what one is not. This concept is clearer if one considers the artist as the one that is disclosing being. The artist enters into a relationship with the landscape that he paints, and by painting, it imbues the natural world with meaning and significance that it could never have without him. A reader of Swann’s Way will notice this disclosure of being almost immediately by the way that the narrator injects every object, memory, feeling, or person with detailed and intense meaning via his sprawling, rich sentences and masterful word choice. The act of eating a Madeleine cookie dipped in tea floods the narrator’s mind with memories of his childhood because of the relationship that those memories had to the taste and texture of what he just ate. The narrator, when he writes of all of the memories brought to him by the eating of the Madeleine, is relaying the disclosing of being that his relationship with the cookie produces via the memories that it signifies for him, bestowing upon the Madeleine a wealth of significance and meaning via its relationship to these memories. In what follows, I will examine the ways that the narrator discloses being for Swann, both when he is in love and when he is not in love, in order to explore the way that being-in-love alters how we disclose being.

At the beginning of the “Swann in Love” section of the novel, we find descriptions of what Swann values and finds significant, especially in women, prior to his being-in-love with Odette. The Swann that we meet at the beginning of this section is certainly a womanizer. The narrator describes the nature of Swann’s desire for the opposite sex as “a feeling of vanity” that “made him want to shine, in the eyes of any unknown woman with whom he was infatuated” (Proust 198-99). Courtship for Swann seems to be a self-centered desire to see himself as valuable through the eyes of whoever he is pursuing at the time in that passage. Another one of Swann’s romantic tendencies before he meets Odette includes the habit of moving from woman to woman as he pleases: “He did not enclose himself in the edifice of his relationships, but had transformed that edifice, in order to be able to raise it again effortlessly on sight wherever he found a woman that pleased him” (200). Swann sees the idea of depriving himself of the aforementioned practice of moving from woman to woman and suppressing his desires as a “cowardly abdication before life” (200).  Lastly, “the physical qualities that [Swann] looked for [in women]… were the direct opposite of those he admired in the women sculpted or painted by his favorite masters” (199). This aspect of Swann’s desire for women will be important later in our discussion.

When Swann first meets Odette, while enjoying the attention that she gives to him, he does not seem to find her to be attractive. Upon their introduction to each other, the narrator describes Swann’s impression of her beauty as “a type of beauty that left [Swann] indifferent, that aroused no desire in him, even caused him a sort of physical repulsion” (Proust 203). Odette’s face is described as “that face whose details he had somewhat forgotten in the meantime” (204). What Swann seems to like about Odette is the gratification that her attraction to him bestows upon him, as evidenced in this passage: “But when Odette had left, Swann would smile, thinking of how she had told him the time would drag until he allowed her to come again” (205). However, despite the narrator’s discussion of Swann not finding Odette to be attractive, he foreshadows the love that Swann will have for her son in a reflection about how love changes as one grows older. The narrator states that later in life, “to feel that one possesses a woman’s heart may be enough to make one fall in love with her” and that “love may come into being— love of the most physical kind— without there having been, underlying it, any previous desire” (204).

The first shift in Swann’s existence towards being-in-love occurs when he hears a certain sonata in F-sharp at a party with Odette. Previously, Swann had heard the same tune on a different occasion, described as an experience that “opened his soul so much wider” (Proust 216). The experience of hearing the sonata was almost mystical for Swann, with the narrator describing his impression of it as “purely musical, immaterial, entirely original, irreducible to any other order of impression” and “impossible to describe, to recall, to name, ineffable” (216-7). During the memory in which Swann is experiencing the sonata for the first time, the narrator describes a sort of existential awakening in him. Swann reflected on the fact that “He had for so long given up directing his life towards an ideal goal and limited it to the pursuit of everyday satisfactions that he believed… that this would not change as long as he lived” (218). In retreating from his valuing of “lofty ideas,” he “acquired the habit of taking refuge in unimportant thoughts that allowed him to ignore the fundamental essence of things” (218). The experience of hearing the sonata caused him to feel “in himself once again the desire and almost the strength to devote his life” to “one of those invisible realities,” but the desire did not come to fruition because he was unable to find the composer of the work and forgot it (218-9). But, after hearing the sonata for the second time at this party, Swann is able to discover its name and to possess it, allowing for the sonata to enact the “rejuvenation” that it spawned in him the first time he heard the piece, albeit in a different way than it originally affected him (216, 219). The piece then becomes, for Swann, “a token, a memory of his love” for Odette (227). The shift in the way that being is disclosed for Swann begins with his experiencing of the sonata, opening him up to the possibility of falling in love with Odette, with the sonata taking its significance from the experience of sharing it with Odette rather than from the experience of the music itself.

As the story of Swann’s love affair for Odette continues, we can find more examples of the way that Swann changes as his love for Odette develops. It was mentioned earlier that Swann does not find Odette particularly attractive and also that he does not find women who resemble his favorite paintings to be attractive. However, one day, after forgetting his cigarette case at Odette’s house and returning to retrieve it, he shows Odette an engraving, and in the moment of Odette looking down upon the engraving, “she struck Swann by her resemblance to the figure of Zipporah… in a fresco in the Sistine Chapel” (Proust 231). Seeing this Botticelli painting in Odette is a shift in Swann’s perception of her, changing the foundation of his view of Odette from one built upon his view of her “in the flesh” to one based on “the principles of an unquestionable aesthetic” which he then was able to change “into physical attractions” (Proust 232-3). By seeing her in this new, aesthetic way, Swann’s taste in women shifts as he previously did not find Odette or women that resembled his favorite paintings to be attractive. Also, not only did Swann’s relationship to Odette’s appearance change due to this occurrence, but his relationship to the painting that he saw in her also shifted with the narrator relaying that “he probably valued the Florentine masterpiece only because he found it again in her” (232). As evidenced by the above paragraph, Swann’s being in love has changed the ways in which he relates to the object of his love along with other objects in the world that he relates to Odette.

Now that we have analyzed examples from the novel, let us discuss what they reveal about the nature of disclosure of being and being-in-love and how they interact in the novel. Firstly, how does disclosure of being change when one is in love? Falling in love both intensifies the meaning that Swann finds in the world and localizes it upon the object of his love. We can see this in the contrast between the way Swann engages in relationships with women before and after falling in love with Odette. Before falling in love, Swann was a complete womanizer, moving from relationship to relationship as he pleased; disclosure of being is centered upon himself and attached to whoever suits his fancy at the time. But after falling in love with Odette, it seems that everything that he finds significant is so because of its relation to her. The painting is valuable to him “only because he found it again in her”; the musical piece becomes “ a token” of his love for Odette, revealing that disclosure of being is now centered on the object of his love (Proust 227, 232). Another way that disclosure of being changes when Swann is in love is by amplifying the significance of things that relate to the object of his love. The sonata rejuvenates Swann’s desire to pursue “lofty ideas” after having heard it with Odette. Similarly, after seeing the painting in Odette, her beauty is thus associated with it, greatly amplifying the significance of her looks via association; but the painting also takes on a new, stronger meaning due to its relationship with Swann’s beloved. She is where meaning is sourced from and amplified for Swann when he is in love with her.

A misconception about being-in-love is that it allows the two lovers to possess one another, but due to the solipsistic nature of disclosure of being, such mutual possession is impossible. We do not get Odette’s point of view at all throughout “Swann in Love.” The descriptions of disclosure of being are centered on Swann and specifically on how the narrator relates to the story of Swann. Because we never receive Odette’s inner monologue, we cannot know if her experience of the relationship is the same as, or similar to Swann’s, or if she was even in love with Swann in the first place. Odette’s inner self is closed off to her lover as well. Simone de Beauvoir writes about the object of disclosure of being: “It remains foreign, forbidden, but I take delight in this very effort toward an impossible possession” (Beauvoir 11). This sentiment is echoed by the narrator when reflecting on the nature of love: “when we do not have him with us— the quest for the pleasures that his charm gave us is suddenly replaced in us by an anxious need whose object is this person himself, an absurd need which the laws of the world make it impossible to satisfy and difficult to cure— the senseless and painful need to possess him” (Proust 239). Swann, even though he desires to know Odette completely, cannot do so, but in trying to, he succedes in disclosing being in the world and in Odette. This distance, this impossible-to-fulfill desire, is necessary to disclose being in the first place, and it is what gives significance to things like the object of one’s love.

Being-in-love is a mode of existence that is different from universal modes of existence, such as being-in-the-world, and from ones based upon social identity, like being-woman. Being-in-love shapes the way that we create significance in the world around us via localizing disclosure of being around our beloved and amplifying the significance of things via relating them to our beloved. Proust demonstrates this in the “Swann in Love” section of his novel Swann’s Way via the narrator recounting the story of Swann’s love for Odette. Swann goes through a transformation after falling in love with Odette that changes the way that he discloses being in the world. Because Swann is in love with Odette, she is the center of significance for him, and through his insatiable desire to possess Odette fully, he begins to disclose being in a completely different way than he did previously.

Works Cited

Beauvoir, Simone de. The Ethics of Ambiguity. Translated by Bernard Frechtman, Open Road Integrated Media, 2018. 

Proust, Marcel. Swann's Way. Edited by Christopher Prendergast. Translated by Lydia Davis, Penguin Books, 2013.