The sign of the swan in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu
Christ Church, Oxford
This article takes as its starting point Proust and Mallarmé's shared conception of the associative ‘music’ which connects words when considered as signs in literature. It examines the inscription of this in A la recherche du temps perdu, concentrating on the homophonic signifiers ‘cygne’, ‘signe’, ‘Swann’ and the English ‘swan’. By demonstrating the complexity of swan references in the novel, following the work of Gilles Deleuze, this article shows how Proust exploits his readers' desire to find satisfying knots at the end of narrative threads. The swan is a motif whose insistent return suggests a unifying pattern, the existence or validity of which is neither confirmed nor denied by the text. Albertine's depiction as a swan represents a figuring which juggles identity and sexuality with blankness, whiteness and the accessibility of the semiotic ‘si(cy)gne’. Proust's swans lead us to Tchaikovsky, to Mallarmé and to Wagner. Ultimately the focus is on the texture of Proust's prose, the subtle ‘rhythms’ to which one is alerted by the smallest of details, by words and their sound echoes, and the associations that sound throughout the novel like an ‘air ou chant sous le texte’.
1 ‘Contre l'obscurité’, in Contre Sainte-Beuve, ed. by Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre (Paris, Gallimard, 1971), pp. 390–95 (392–93). All further references are to this edition, which is abbreviated to CSB.
2 References will be to the four-volume Pléiade edition of A la recherche du temps perdu, ed. by Jean-Yves Tadié (Paris, Gallimard, 1987–89).
3 Mallarmé concludes: ‘L'air ou chant sous le texte, conduisant la divination d'ici là, y applique son motif en fleuron et cul-de-lampe invisibles’: ‘Le mystère dans les lettres’, in 
uvres complètes ed. by Bertrand Marchal, 2 vols (Paris, Gallimard, 1998–2003), ii, 229–234 (234); hereafter O.c.
4 Victor Graham, for example, states ‘Proust belongs to the Symbolist tradition in French literature’ in his The Imagery of Proust (Oxford, Blackwell, 1966), p. 120. See also Valéry Larbaud's preface to Emeric Fiser's L'Esthétique de Proust (Paris, Alexis Rodier, 1933), as well as Fiser's own studies La Théorie du symbole littéraire et Marcel Proust (Paris, Corti, 1941) and Le Symbole littéraire: Essai sur la signification du symbole chez Wagner, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Bergson et Marcel Proust (Paris, Corti, 1941), especially pp. 153–211.
5 Christine Crow, ‘"Le silence au vol de cygne": Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Valéry and the Flight of the Swan’, in Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Valéry: New essays in Honour of Lloyd James Austin, ed. by Malcolm Bowie, Alison Fairlie and Alison Finch (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 1–23. See also Henri Raczymow's promisingly titled but ultimately disappointing Le Cygne de Proust (Paris, Gallimard, 1989), which focuses not on swan symbolism, but on the relation between Charles Haas and Charles Swann; Richard E. Goodkin's ‘T(r)yptext: Proust, Mallarmé, Racine’, Yale French Studies, 76 (1989), 284–314 (especially pp. 292–96); and Nicholas Kostis's article of 1969 to which I refer below (see note 17).
6 Proust et les signes (Paris, PUF, 1964), second revised ‘Quadrige’ edition, 1998, p. 149.
7 For the most extended consideration of Wagner's work in the novel, see III, 664–68. Wagner's symbolism is considered in relation to Proust and other artists including Mallarmé by Fiser (see note 4 above). Probably the best general study of Proust and Wagner is Emile Bedriomo's Proust, Wagner et la coïncidence des arts (Paris, Editions Place, 1984), particularly Chapter 2, ‘Wagner dans l'
uvre de Proust’, pp. 12–28; see also pp. 109–124, on the ‘leitmotif’.
8 For a survey of the transformational and associative imagery involving birds in the novel, see Graham, pp. 65, 71–72, 94, 115–16. In examining the figure of the swan I shall bring into relief the considerable body of bird imagery in the novel which has received little critical attention (apart from Graham's work) since Vera Lindholm Vance began the task in her ‘Proust's Guermantes as Birds’ in French Review, 35 (1961–62), 3–10.
9 ‘Les aventures de Hassan al-Bassri’: Le Livre des Mille nuits et une nuit, tr. by J.C. Mardrus, 15 vols (Paris, Editions de la Revue Blanche, 1899–1904), x, 7–160 (49). Madrus dedicates his translation ‘A la mémoire du penseur Stéphane Mallarmé’.
10 Whilst Graham states that this sketch is based on ‘Leonardo da Vinci's painting of Leda’ (p. 181), in a letter of 1916 published after Graham's study, Proust suggests that the model for this sketch is Boldini's ‘Léda’ (Correspondance de Marcel Proust, ed. by Philip Kolb, 21 vols (Paris, Plon, 1970–1993), XV, 56–60). The Pléiade editors also suggest the influence of Gustave Moreau (IV, 1078).
11 In the imagined sketch, Albertine's sexual significance becomes inseparable from artistic meaning; cf. David Ellison's consideration of ‘Albertine's function in the system of homosexual signs’ in his The Reading of Proust (Oxford, Blackwell, 1984), pp. 169–70.
12 Whilst etymologically the name Albertine, from ‘Albert’, has a Germanic origin, ‘adal’, noble and ‘berht’, bright, famous, there is a (false) suggestion of whiteness in the name, to which readers are alerted in a different context: M. de Breauté refers to a native of La Réunion called ‘Albius, ce qui, entre parenthèses, est assez comique pour un Noir puisque ça veut dire blanc’ (II, 806). Associatively, Albertine's exclamation ‘Tu me mets aux anges!’ subtly evokes the whiteness of angels' robes and wings.
13 ‘La double séance’, in La Dissémination (Paris, Seuil, 1972), pp. 199–317 (290).
14 Swan Lake was performed in London by Diaghilev's ‘Ballets russes’ in 1911. Although Proust did not see this performance, we know from his correspondence, and from references in A la recherche, that he was well informed about contemporary ballet and would have been familiar with the story of Swan Lake: ‘Proust, qui fréquenta Nijinski et Bakst à partir de 1911, s'enthousiasma pour les Ballets russes’ (III, 1416). Proust opted for the name Odette in 1910, after trying and rejecting Françoise, Anna, Carmen and Mme X (I, 1195).
15 Albertine's double marking reaches the final stage of its evolution here: her etymological whiteness now connotes the icy coldness and inertia of death already embodied in the ‘stérile hiver’ and ‘blanche agonie’ of Mallarmé's sonnet: see my immediately following discussion.
16 Mallarmé, O.c., i, 36–37. For an incisive and illuminating analysis of this poem, see Roger Pearson's Unfolding Mallarmé: The Development of a Poetic Art (Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 176–82. The interpretation of this poem which I apply here is influenced by Pearson's ‘negative tale’ of the second stanza; one might compare the ‘poet-sign’'s surrender to that of the narrator: the former cannot transcend language and make the page his own, whilst the latter cannot overcome the psychosexual barriers that prevent him from possessing Albertine.
17 On this detail I must take issue with Nicholas Kostis's interpretation of this passage. In his ‘Albertine: Characterization through image and symbol’ (PMLA, 84 (1969), 125–35), he writes: ‘by giving Albertine a swan yacht, Marcel is telling her that she may cruise the sea of Lesbos, and he will not interfere’ (p. 134). I would emphasize that the narrator does not actually give Albertine the yacht. It is a token in a psychological bartering game. Moreover, the nature of the inscription on the yacht suggests that the narrator sees Albertine's split from him as final: the yacht will never sail, so what Kostis sees as a promise of non-interference is at best an empty gesture.
18 For a consideration of exile and the figure of the swan in Baudelaire, see Crow, pp. 3–4.
19 His desire is not to know the visible duchesse before him, since, as Deleuze puts it, ‘L'essence selon Proust [...] n'est pas quelque chose de vu, mais une sorte de point de vue supérieur’ (p. 133). Indeed, if the beauty of the Duchesse is in her name, then this passage corroborates the narrator's identification of his imagination in Le Temps retrouvé as ‘mon seul organe pour jouir de la beauté’ (IV, 450).
20 Proust Among the Stars (London, HarperCollins, 1998), p. 105.
21 ‘Proust et les noms’, in Le Degré zéro de l'écriture suivi de Nouveaux essais critiques (Paris, Seuil, 1972), pp. 121–34.