Writing the immaterial...
At a party, Charles Swann hears music that changes his life. In this innovative passage from Marcel Proust's novel, the author describes the complex sensation of getting music stuck in your head.
The year before, at an evening party, Swann had heard a piece of music played on the piano and violin. At first he had appreciated only the material quality of the sounds which those instruments secreted. And it had been a source of keen pleasure when, below the narrow ribbon of the violin-part, delicate, unyielding, substantial and governing the whole, 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. But at a given moment, without being able to distinguish any clear outline, or to give a name to what was pleasing him, suddenly enraptured, he had tried to collect, to treasure in his memory the phrase or harmony—he knew not which—that had just been played, and had opened and expanded his soul, just as the fragrance of certain roses, wafted upon the moist air of evening, has the power of dilating our nostrils.
Perhaps it was owing to his own ignorance of music that he had been able to receive so confused an impression, one of those that are, notwithstanding, our only purely musical impressions, limited in their extent, entirely original, and irreducible into any other kind. An impression of this order, vanishing in an instant, is, so to speak, immaterial. Presumably the notes which we hear at such moments tend to spread out before our eyes, over surfaces greater or smaller according to their pitch and volume; to trace arabesque designs, to give us the sensation of breadth or tenuity, stability or caprice. But the notes themselves have vanished before these sensations have developed sufficiently to escape submersion under those which the following, or even simultaneous notes have already begun to awaken in us. And this indefinite perception would continue to smother in its molten liquidity the motifs which now and then emerge, barely discernible, to plunge again and disappear and drown; recognised only by the particular kind of pleasure which they instill, impossible to describe, to recollect, to name; ineffable;—if our memory, like a labourer who toils at the laying down of firm foundations beneath the tumult of the waves, did not, by fashioning for us facsimiles of those fugitive phrases, enable us to compare and to contrast them with those that follow. And so, hardly had the delicious sensation, which Swann had experienced, died away, before his memory had furnished him with an immediate transcript, summary, it is true, and provisional, but one on which he had kept his eyes fixed while the playing continued, so effectively that, when the same impression suddenly returned, it was no longer uncapturable. He was able to picture to himself its extent, its symmetrical arrangement, its notation, the strength of its expression; he had before him that definite object which was no longer pure music, but rather design, architecture, thought, and which allowed the actual music to be recalled. This time he had distinguished, quite clearly, a phrase which emerged for a few moments from the waves of sound. It had at once held out to him an invitation to partake of intimate pleasures, of whose existence, before hearing it, he had never dreamed, into which he felt that nothing but this phrase could initiate him; and he had been filled with love for it, as with a new and strange desire.
With a slow and rhythmical movement it led him here, there, everywhere, towards a state of happiness noble, unintelligible, yet clearly indicated. And then, suddenly having reached a certain point from which he was prepared to follow it, after pausing for a moment, abruptly it changed its direction, and in a fresh movement, more rapid, multiform, melancholy, incessant, sweet, it bore him off with it towards a vista of joys unknown.
What we love about this passage…
Proust is notorious for long, showy writing. His well-loved novel from the early twentieth century, À la recherche du temps perdu (published in English as Remembrance of Things Past and eventually as In Search of Lost Time), from which this passage is taken, runs over thousands of pages and describes France at the turn of the last century in great detail. Yet, his language often has a surprising directness to it in its treatment of philosophical issues. In this case, he takes on the question of how we might accurately describe the memory of music, which seems at times to escape language altogether.
Some of the solutions he comes up with for describing music include comparing the experience to other sensory ones—hearing this piece of music was like seeing the moonlight upon the sea or smelling “certain” roses. But, these comparisons seem to cheapen the wondrous original experience of actually hearing music in the first place. In short, something is lost in the translation between experiencing something and remembering or describing it.
But fret not, this loss is not wholly negative: holding onto memories, Proust concludes, is like building structures in the ever-changing sea of life. Even if they are secondary to the experience itself, one begins to admire a memory’s own patterns of construction and unique design.
To read alongside…
Throughout her works, Virginia Woolf—who was an eventual admirer of Proust—also tried to write about this problem of describing a thought. See one of her solutions in our recent newsletter featuring her essay “A Room of One’s Own.” Similarly, Emily Dickinson often used her poems to explore the furthest reaches of her thoughts: see our newsletter on her poem “This World is not Conclusion,” which includes her own musing on music: “This World is not Conclusion / A Species stands beyond / Invisible, as Music / But positive, as Sound.”
About the author…
Marcel Proust (1871-1922) is best remembered for his massive novel À la recherche du temps perdu, which captured the epochal changes shaping French society from the end of the nineteenth century through the First World War and burst the boundaries of what a novel could be. It is a masterpiece meditation on love, friendship, illness, art, sexuality, prejudice, and above all, Proust’s favorite topic: memory.
The version which appears above is based on the first translation into English by C. K. Scott Moncrieff.
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