Swan's Way

by Raczymow, Henri; Bononno, Robert

• ISBN13: 9780810119253
• ISBN10: 0810119250
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-12-01
• Publisher: Northwestern Univ Pr

Summary

Rarely has anyone takenSwann's Waydown a stranger path, and never with such intriguing results. What begins as a meditation on the fictional identity of the elegant "swan" of Proust'sIn Search of Lost Timebecomes, through a series of turns and twists, an ingenious investigation of the character's real-life counterpart, Charles Haas. Part novel, part essay, part literary sleuthing,Swan's Wayis a critical tour de force. Through an inspired reading of Proust's text, Henri Raczymow gradually unravels the multiple contradictions of Charles Swann's personality, brought into focus by the fault lines in Proust's narrative method. The author traces Swann's evolution and the multiple ways in which his Jewish identity keeps peeping through the veneer of respectability of this sophisticated dandy. Through a parallel inquiry into the history of the Jockey Club--to which Haas, a Jew, was, like Swann, exceptionally admitted--and the transformation of the German-Jewish Haas into the fashionable British Swann,Swan's Wayevolves into an examination of the question of personal identity and posthumous survival. Haas's Jewish identity is the invisible thread that guides Raczymow through the maze of Proust's work, which serves as a backdrop against which fin de siegrave;cle French society enacts the ugly drama of anti-Semitism. Blurring the boundaries between life and fiction,Swan's Wayleads the reader ever deeper into the unresolved question of literary and personal character.

Author Biography

Henri Raczymow was born in France in 1948 and lives in Paris. He is the author of a biography of Maurice Sachs and several works of fiction and non-fiction including Writing the Book of Esther (Holmes & Meier, 1995), Pauvre Bouilhet (Gallimard, 1998) and Quartier libre (Gallimard, 1995).

Robert Bononno is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant to translate Isabelle Eberhardt, Seven Years in the Life of a Woman: Letters and Journals. His many translations include Cyberculture, Kubrick, French New Wave, and Ghost Image.

Table of Contents

First Impressions	3	(1)
Gestures	4	(3)
A Clubman	7	(5)
Rue Rabelais	12	(3)
Swann's Name	15	(5)
Sadism, Death	20	(5)
S/Z	25	(2)
Swan: To the Letter	27	(2)
Tissot, Painter	29	(4)
``Madame Proust''	33	(3)
Swan Song	36	(11)
The Frame and Its Canvas	47	(3)
The Hares of the Judengasse in Frankfurt am Main	50	(5)
A Very Rarefied Elite	55	(16)
Music	71	(7)
Revelry	78	(5)
The Affair	83	(12)
A Grand Story	95	(4)
An Exercise in Futility	99	(2)
Seated, for Days at a Time	101	(11)
Haas in Love	112	(23)
Death Has Overtaken...	135	(10)
Coda	145