![]() ![]() This one dinner-party, in that way Proust has, comes to be representative of all the dinners Swann attended in those years. Over half of the Overture is given over to one anxiety-riven evening at Combray, where the boy and his parents moved to every spring. The person he might be remembering – Swann, say, in those strange little evening visits he makes at this time – is not at all the person he came to know well in later life: ‘even now I have the feeling of leaving someone I know for another quite different person when, going back in memory, I pass from the Swann whom I knew later and more intimately to this early Swann….’ Whatever this narrator describes is always in the context of what a remarkable thing memory itself is. ![]() Proust’s thoughts about memory – and, specifically, memories of bedrooms at the point of falling asleep or waking – somehow mutate, so that the meditation becomes the description of a time in the narrator’s childhood whilst still being a meditation. We have a leisurely meditation on consciousness, identity and the subjectivity of memory which slowly becomes an ever more focused depiction of a particular time and place. ![]() I’m not sure how Proust manages to do any of this. ![]()
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