Volume 31, Number 13 · August 16, 1984
Not Swann's Way
By Roger Shattuck
Swann in Love
directed by Volker Schlöndorff, screenplay by Peter Brook, by Jean-Claude Carrière, by Marie-Hélène Estienne, based on "Un Amour de Swann" by Marcel Proust
Orion Films, 110 minutes
We know now how inadequately we have been served by the traditional metaphor for the novel: that it 'holds a mirror up to nature.' The metaphor does not fail because there is no nature, no reality out there to mirror. It fails because the novel offers us words, not the direct visual images that a mirror reflects. The reality those words reveal is both there and not there. On the basis of widely shared cues and conventions each reader's mind must to a large extent project and create that imaginary reality. Thus literature may be both the most abstract and the most personal of the arts.
Review, 4788 words
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