Strange accident of fortune

"No, I don't know them," he said, but instead of vouchsafing so simple a piece of information, so very unremarkable a reply, in the natural conversational tone which would have been appropriate to it, he enunciated it with special emphasis on each word, leaning forward, nodding his head, with at once the vehemence which a man imparts, in order to be believed, to a highly improbable statement (as though the fact that he did not know the Guermantes could be due only to some strange accident of fortune) and the grandiloquence of a man who, finding himself unable to keep silence about what is to him a painful situation, chooses to proclaim it openly i order to convince his hearers that the confession he is making is one that causes him no embarrassment, is in fact easy, agreeable, spontaneous, that the situation itself--in this case the absence of relations with the Guermantes family--might very well have been not forced upon, but actually willed by him, might arise from some family tradition, some moral principle or mystical vow which expressly forbade his seeking their society.


I've been building up to this, but here we have an archetypal Proustian sentence-paragraph. This one--unlike many others--is actually understandable from beginning to end, and reasonably grammatical. But how thick with emotional and psychological information it is! These sentences of his exhaust me to unpack; and as I am--as already noted--no scholar, I fortunately don't have to. But what we have here is the kind of minute, multi-layered interior observation that surely must be called Proustian. A sentence like this at once assures the reader that this is in fact a novel and not a memoir, because my god how could one actual person understand this much about the internal reality of another actual person; and yet likewise strikes the mind as far more memoir-like than novel-like because, my god, what novelist would create a narrator with this idiosyncratically observant of the overlapping emotions of the characters around him?