Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

popsicles & Dr. J

“A little tap on the window-pane, as though something had struck it, followed by a plentiful light falling sound, as of grains of sand being sprinkled from a window overhead, gradually spreading, intensifying, acquiring a regular rhythm, becoming fluid, sonorous, musical, immeasurable, universal: it was the rain.”

The word that always pops into my mind when I read Proust — despite his reputation for sickliness, for preciousness, for being the sort of person who would collapse repeatedly onto the fainting couch if he weren’t already in bed — is: swagger.

Think of the hilarious audacity of spending fifty pages describing yourself falling asleep. And think what it feels like to know (or anyway to hope) that you are brilliant and charming and talented enough to make such a description not just tolerable but delightful. 

This is the constant underlying drama of Proust — this is what accounts for the tension in one of the least narratively tense books ever written. Can I get away with THIS?, Proust is constantly asking us, before launching into a five-page discourse on the way the afternoon sun strikes a small-town steeple or a three-page meditation on the texture of a piece of music we’ve never heard. And the answer, again and again, is: Yes, goddamn it, you can. 

Proust is like a child who, at the end of a day on which he has been whining non-stop for a popsicle and bursting into tears at regular intervals, says something so beautiful — so profound, so funny, so unexpectedly lovely — that it doesn’t make you forget about the preceding hours of agitation: it redeems them, transforms them, reveals them to have been precious and somehow necessary all along.

Not far into volume one (I should here confess that I’ve only read the first three volumes), Marcel is in his Aunt Leonie’s garden reading a book. This reading-experience has, we feel, been pretty well covered over the preceding pages — Marcel’s fantasies of friendship with the author; the occasional interruptions from the gardener; the fragrance of the air. We’ve now been reading Proust for long enough that the thrill of being involved in so gargantuan an undertaking (I’m reading Proust!) has faded; the ending is not even a rumor in the distance. A languorous Sunday afternoon feeling has settled over the proceedings. 

So Proust, in a rare concession to readerly head-nodding, lets the narrative drift up into Aunt Leonie’s bedroom. Leonie is a gossipy, self-obsessed hypochondriac and therefore a potent narrative stimulant. And Leonie and her servant Françoise are, it turns out, batting around their usual subjects: Leonie’s digestion, the possibility of a visitor, the weather. Proust has, in the garden, given us all the introspection we can take, so now he’s going to treat us to some dialogue and petulance.

“‘Françoise, just look at that black cloud behind the steeple, and how poor the light is on the slates. You may be certain it will rain before the day is out. It couldn’t possibly go on like that, it’s been too hot.’”

They go on — Leonie wonders hopefully if a certain Mme. Goupil might get caught without an umbrella in her new silk dress; Françoise demurs; Leonie remembers that she’s forgotten to take her all-important pepsin — and we are happily, if aimlessly, eavesdropping. When suddenly: 

“A little tap on the window-pane, as though something had struck it, followed by a plentiful light falling sound, as of grains of sand being sprinkled from a window overhead, gradually spreading, intensifying, acquiring a regular rhythm, becoming fluid, sonorous, musical, immeasurable, universal: it was the rain.”

If there’s a better start to a rainstorm in all of literature, I haven’t read it. The sentence works like a rainstorm — it breaks the torpor, it awakens the heat-dulled senses. I swear I can feel the room temperature dropping by a couple of delicious degrees when I read it. 

And just look at the drama with which it unfolds. That first little tap, as from an unexpected visitor, and then that miraculously apt plentiful light falling sound, as of grains of sand being sprinkled from a window overhead. Proust is known, justly, for his elaborate and endless similes, but look how simple he can be, how sensorily attuned. This isn’t Proust arriving at the perfect image by closing his eyes and introspecting through a sleepless night — this is Proust listening to the rain against a window, just as you and I and every writer who has ever lived have done a thousand times, and being better than anyone else at saying what it sounds like. This is the literary equivalent of those showcases for elite athletes where prospects sprint across a gym or leap to touch a twelve-foot rim — just show us what you can do. This moment with the sand is when the agents start ducking into the hall to make urgent phone calls.

And Proust isn’t done. Because now the sound is intensifying, acquiring a regular rhythm, and look at this string of adjectives: fluid, sonorous, musical, immeasurable, universal. I don’t want to make too much of the word choices (isn’t fluid a bit on-the-nose?), knowing that I’m working with a translation, but look at the shape of the line, how it descends like a hand running over a piano from the high, barely audible tinkle of those sand-grains down to the deep, booming breadth of immeasurable and universal. The rain has gone, in a matter of seconds, from a local phenomenon (this window, this room) to a blanket over an entire region. Proust makes rain seem as strange, and as astounding, as it must seem to a baby.

And then, like Dr. J after a windmill dunk jogging calmly up the court, Proust shrugs — it was the rain. Why are you all staring at me?, he seems to say. Leonie thought it was going to rain and then it rained. 

Only by the slight smile he struggles to suppress, in the nonchalance of those final words, can we tell that he is in fact aware of what’s just happened here. He’s gotten away with it again

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