Reading Proust’s stories from Swann’s Way gave me a lot of feelings. I’m not sure that I understood either story completely – or that I ever could – but I certainly felt connected to them on a deeper level than I would have expected. Of the two stories, I would like to discuss aspects of “Overture” (the first part) in particular, as well as the video lecture on Modernism.

My first thoughts on “Overture” were essentially, “Does this long description of the narrator’s sleeping habits lead anywhere in terms of a plot? Why are his dreams so strange? Is this going into philosophical territory, and will it make any sense?” The first several pages made me feel disoriented and uneasy – perhaps similarly, I thought, to how the narrator himself is meant to be feeling. As well, the dreamlike quality of the narrator’s memories was so dizzying that I could have sworn, at certain points, that I came close to uncovering memories from my own childhood. I can only describe the sensation as something like trying not to drift off to sleep in the back seat of a car while flying along a highway in the dead of winter.

Somewhat deeper into the story, the remembered interactions between characters were what stood out to me most – especially when it came to the narrator and his mother. I did not initially see the child-narrator’s intense desire to be kissed by his mother before bed as anything particularly strange – at the least, it definitely didn’t strike me as having any kind of sexual or malicious undertones. However, as I read further, I started to get the sense that the narrator’s focus on this “ritual” stems from other needs that his parents are not meeting. Near the end, after the narrator’s mother is finally urged by his father to go into the boy’s room, the narrator becomes quite overwhelmed and seems caught between relief at the results of his efforts and grief at what such a moment signifies.

Several of the ideas from the lecture on Modernism came to mind as I was reading Proust’s works: the subversion of expectations for a story, the relationship between events and one’s memories of them, and the way in which our perceptions of situations can change with time. When I think back to the narrator’s dreams in relation the latter two concepts, I still wonder: is there some kind of narrative logic behind the return to these memories? Are they simply a way of creating the desired atmosphere? Although I am not entirely confident in my understanding of Proust’s work, I certainly find it striking.