“And in the same way, also, the thoughts of the dying are quite often turned toward the aspect of death that is real, painful, dark, visceral, toward the underside of death, which is in fact the side it presents to them and so harshly makes them feel, and which more closely resembles a crushing burden, a difficulty breathing, a need to drink, than what we call the idea of death” (84)

It is within the rouse of a dream that creates feelings of uncertainty. Your mind is foggy while your body is still adjusting to rest. In the first volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time comes Swann’s Way– a novel that encapsulates fleeting childhood memories in a reflective future. Readers are first introduced to the narrator through a hazy fit of reminiscence. This first section– “Combray”– feels like we are entering a dream. The time is non-linear and seems to jump around based on the memory proposed. The memories themselves feel as though they are locked up in his mind. He must swim through these scattered thoughts to recount his life or his own state of being. 

Structurally, the book seems complicated. There are passages of long sentences that are seemingly endless. But, it is within their continuous length that I found very profound. The wealth of these sentences was coupled with elaborate metaphors to dictate the fragmented memory of dreaming. Having an overarching series about searching for lost time is what introduces us to the narrator and his long-winded mind. The very essence of memories is entrapped by the curse of time; no one can live forever. It further seems that the narrator does not wish to live forever, or at least not in the sense we would think. The narrator wishes to reframe his life as it no longer follows a straight path in his mind.

The explorations of physical space, time, and subsequently of being, find themselves in “Combray.” The narrator endures this foggy moment of waking up that reflects his concerns about his identity. We can see this in a quote from the very beginning:

“A sleeping man holds in a circle around him the thread of the hours, the order of years and of worlds. He consults them instinctively upon awaking and in one second reads in them the point of the earth that he occupies, the time past until his arousal; but their ranks can be mingled or broken” (5)

In a sleepy daze, the narrator cannot fathom his identity and grasps his childhood. He cannot make sense of himself in his present life, but within the retellings of his childhood, he can at least fixate on those around him. In the fictional dreams in his head, he yearns to distinguish those ‘real’ in his past. In his childhood, his family was on a strict clock; for example, his mother came in to kiss him goodnight. But the shuffling of such routines had caused the boy to be filled with anxiety–he no longer could predict the predictable. It is with this final quote that I believe sums up the narrator’s mixed feelings:

“And once the novelist has put us in this state, in which his book will disturb us as might a dream but a dream more lucid than those we have while sleeping and whose memory will last longer, then see how he provokes in us within one hour all possible happinesses and all possible unhappinesses just a few of which we would spend years of our lives coming to know and the most intense of which would never be revealed to us because the slowness with which they occur prevents us from perceiving them (thus our heart changes, in life, and it is the worst pain; but we know it only through reading, through our imagination: in reality it changes, as certain phenomena of nature occur, slowly enough so that, even if we are able to observe successively each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change)” (87)

A Question for Discussion:

In “Combray” by Proust the linear structure of time is removed and replaced with an intricate premise of the narrator’s childhood. While it may be confusing, it does provide an interesting perspective on memories. Why do you think Proust decided to begin this novel with a hazy start to a dream? Is there a narrative point on the role of dreams in fleeting memories?

For fun, I attached a French painting “The Rocky Path in the Morvan” painted by Henri-Joesph Harpignies.