A Swann Love: the Vinteuil’s sonate and the rise of the feelings

Abstract

A Swann love is generally the entrance door to the monumental work of the greatest writer of the XXth century. The story of Swann and Odette is apparently “simple”; but behind this love triangle a complex novel is built presenting relations with Painting and Music. We can verify an intertextuality among the arts, and as they connect to each other the significance of the work is established. Swann begins to idealize the woman who will be loved intensively. However one day he discovers that there was a sad reality under the veil of beauty. Based on Barthes’ (1982), on Julia Kristeva’s (1981) and on Gérard Genette’s (1994) conceptions, we will examine the relation between the Vinteuil’s sonata and Swann’s feelings. Thus, we will show that Proust offers an approximation between Literature and Music in this novel which is the first volume of In Search of Lost Time.