Imagining An Image Poem by gershon hepner

Doting, jealous, self-abasing, Swann,
infatuated by Odette, was chasing
an image Botticelli painted on
the Sistine Chapel walls. While disgracing
himself pursuing someone of low origin,
he clearly calculated her true worth
in pleasure units that she brought with sin,
making the anomaly of birth
more than irrelevant, since it enhanced
his primal purience, forever pristine,
whenever he at his beloved glanced,
imagining an image in the Sistine.
Do you think Swann was ridiculous,
and is infatuation like his tragic?
Not so, thought Proust, I think, meticulous
in depicting Odette’s art: black magic.


Erich Eichmann (“The Savage Lessons of Pretty Pictures, ” WSJ, October 25,2008) reviews “Paintings in Proust” by Eric Karpeles. He recalls how Lambert Strether, in Henry James’ “The Ambassadors” looks out at the French countryside in a sunny scene a few hours by train from Paris, and suddenly sees two figures managing a boat along the bend of a river. He thinks that they “had been wanted in the picture” all day. “What he saw was exactly the right thing.” Eric Karpeles sets color reproductions of paintings Proust mentions in “In Search of Lost Time, ” allowing the reader to immerse himself in Proustian sentences and to study the painting that serves as the pivot of the passage or its point of accent. Eichman describes how Proust says that Swann’s lover, Odette, “a woman of low origins and dubious virtue” who provoked his “infatuation, his doting foolishness, his jealousy, his self-abasement, ” resembled an image in Botticelli’s “The Trials of Moses” (1481-82) in the Sistine Chapel:

Edmund Wilson, in “Axel’s Castle, ” describes Swann as acting “ridiculously and tragically” when he finds an identity between a 15th-century masterpiece and a 19th-century courtesan. Swann’s attachment to Odette sends him down into a grasping bourgeois milieu whose inhabitants, by the end of “In Search of Lost Time, ” will rise to seize the commanding heights of French society.

10/30/08