An adult world

The opening of Un Amour de Swann transforms the pace and drift of the writing. The reader has the impression of embarking on a new novel, and the change is startling, perhaps even unwelcome. It is not only the virtual disappearance of the narrator that causes a sense of loss. Combray, for all its variety, has a smoothness of texture and an aesthetic harmony corresponding to the anchoring of the narrative self in the security of childhood, and this impression prevails over the melancholy or menacing notes of apprehension. In the final section of Swann's Way and in the middle volumes, a gentler transition is provided as Marcel's perception becomes once more the medium of the narrative, but the interruption constituted by Un Amour de Swann sounds a new note which is to recur in the last four volumes, when Marcel's own vision is that of an adult. Here the change is to a primarily social, sophisticated world in which a first phase of comic obser - vation introduces the central exploration of Swann's inner life. It is an intense, gradually darkening study of obsession.

We are not prepared for this change at first reading, but it is retrospectively ‘announced’ very late in La Recherche, at the centre of Time Regained, when the narrator is returning to Paris from his sanatorium during the War. While the train is halted, he sees a row of trees, their trunks shaded by their sunlit foliage, and recalls the meaning, or rather the messages, such sights once had for him: