In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

Bergotte in the flesh is the volume's first lesson in disappointment: the narrator has worshipped the novelist's sentences for years, and the actual man, met at last in the Swanns' Paris apartment, turns out snub-nosed, oddly bearded, talking in a nasal drone that seems to belong to nobody who could have written those books. Proust doesn't resolve the gap; he insists on it, then shows the narrator's idea of Bergotte quietly repairing itself the moment the writer opens his mouth on a subject he actually cares about, his voice thickening and slowing until the sentences start to sound like the ones on the page. The disappointment is real and the worship survives it anyway, because they were never describing the same object, and the volume treats that as ordinary rather than tragic.

At Balbec the narrator first sees Albertine as one indistinguishable figure inside a moving cluster of girls, walking the seafront in a block so tight he can't yet tell Albertine from Andrée from Rosemonde, all of them registering as a single silhouette against the water that gives the volume its title. Individuation happens slowly and almost by accident, a bicycle, a polo cap, a particular laugh, until one girl detaches herself from the swarm and becomes a name he can be jealous of; even then Proust keeps blurring the edges, letting the narrator briefly mistake Albertine for Andrée again in a moment that undercuts how securely he thinks he now knows her. Proust is arguing that desire doesn't start with a person; it starts with an undifferentiated shape, and the person gets built afterward out of accumulated small evidence.

Elstir's studio, where the narrator watches the painter work and listens to him describe a garden as though it were a seascape, teaches a method the whole cycle will keep using: to see a thing freshly you have to strip off the name that habit has already glued to it, treating a church as a boat, a field as a body of water, until the borrowed word forces a genuinely new perception. Elstir also turns out to have been the disreputable pianist "Biche" Odette once painted with, a past he's spent years living down, which folds the lesson about seeing back onto the people doing the looking. Nobody in this volume is only what their current position says they are, and the narrator's growing intimacy with the painter is itself training for the vocation he hasn't yet admitted he wants.

The Prix Goncourt went to this volume in December 1919 over Roland Dorgelès's Les Croix de bois, a novel of the trenches published the same year, and the choice was loudly resented: a war just over, a jury of older men rewarding a long, mannered book about hotels and salons instead of a veteran's account of the front. Léon Daudet's advocacy carried the vote, and critics accused Proust of having bought or maneuvered his way to the prize through social connections rather than earned it on the page. The backlash didn't slow Proust's rise; it made him famous well past the small circle who had read Swann's Way, and gave the still-unfinished cycle a public reputation, and a readership, it hadn't had before.