The End of the Guermantes Way

It has taken me over two years to finish the first volume of Moncrieff's translation. Of course I have read any number of books in between; not every minute was spent on Proust. But who reads a book for over two years?

The Guermantes Way was slow getting through. A great deal of it centered on the Dreyfuss case. The closing scene had a few great moments of humor, including one featuring a giant envelope. And along the way, Marcel continued to have his illusions shattered. Still, if I had to choose, I would take Swann's Way every time.

In order not to be content with completing the first volume, I picked up the second immediately. Titled, for whatever reason, Cities on the Plain, the first few pages contain a revelation about M. de Charlus, who makes a rather distasteful impression, not because of his practices, but because of his attitude. That should be enough to jump-start me for another two years.

Is anyone else still reading this monumental work?

On finishing In Search of Lost Time

I want to write just a few words about finishing Proust’s In Search of Lost Time; I don’t feel up to writing a big long summing-up post that tries to say smart things about what it all means, but I do want to say something. I am happy to have finished, but I do miss reading Proust a bit; I’ve been used to a near-daily dose of the narrator’s slow-moving, contemplative voice, and now I don’t have that.

It’s hard to see how a 3,000-page book without all that much plot, relatively speaking, could cohere, but I think it does. I found the ending, say, that last couple hundred pages, really did wrap things up; it provides an answer to the question that has haunted the whole book — will Marcel ever write his masterpiece? This is a question that has lingered from the very first volume when it becomes clear that Marcel has an interest in, and perhaps a talent for, writing. The answer the book provides is satisfying, and realistic, given everything that has happened up until that point.

My favorite volumes were the first two and the last one; the third and fourth, The Guermantes Way and Sodom and Gomorrah, got a little long, but then the fifth volume, which contains The Prisoner and The Fugitive begins to pick up a bit in preparation for the grand ending. It’s the long party scenes in some of the middle volumes that got tiresome. What I loved about the book are the insights into the mind, art, time, and love, but the novel is also obsessed with society and rank and how people behave at parties, topics that didn’t thrill me quite as much. But even here there are things to interest; Proust captures snobbery and hypocrisy and the deadness that can lie behind the glittering masks of high society beautifully well.

But mostly this novel is worth reading because of what it can teach about observing the world around you and in you. Proust has a meticulous eye for how the mind perceives input from the world around it and for how we make sense of our experiences, and, of course, he has a beautiful way with a sentence to capture all that insight. I love how there can be so much wisdom and experience in one of those long sentences — how they can take in so much.

Proust on Art

I just came across some wonderful passages in Proust; I’m about 150 pages from end, determined to finish it and Don Quixote by the end of the summer. The narrator has just had a series of experiences of involuntary memory, where something in his present — a sound or taste or sight — will trigger a memory that recreates in his mind whole sections of his past that he had previously forgotten. The madeleine scene from Swann’s Way is the most famous of these, although there are many. Immediately before these memories come to the narrator, he despairs of ever becoming a writer; he has spent years and years of his life wasting time, avoiding doing the writing he has always wanted to do. The memories start the process of bringing him back to his vocation, and they set him off on a long meditation on literature, writing, and the relationship of art and life. I thought I’d share some short sections:

Real life, life finally uncovered and clarified, the only life in consequence lived to the full, is literature. Life in this sense dwells within all ordinary people as much as in the artist. But they do not see it because they are not trying to shed light on it. And so their past is cluttered with countless photographic negatives, which continue to be useless because their intellect has never “developed” them … it is only through art that we can escape from ourselves and know how another person sees a universe which is not the same as our own and whose landscapes would otherwise have remained as unknown as any there may be on the moon.

I love the idea that we all have the materials of art within us; the difference between artists and everyone else is that artists learn how to make use of those materials. Proust calls art “translation” — taking our experiences, whatever they are, and plumbing the depths of them to find meaning and to transform that meaning into something beautiful. And he says it requires courage. We like to live with certain illusions about ourselves; we whitewash our darker characteristics and cover over our failings, but the artist will look for the truth, no matter how difficult it is to face.

Here’s another passage on art and life, this time about imagination and sensitivity:

It may well be that, for the creation of a work of literature, imagination and sensitivity are interchangeable qualities, and that the second may without any great disadvantage be substituted for the first, in the same way as people whose stomach is incapable of digesting pass that function over to the intestine. A man born sensitive but with no imagination might none the less write admirable novels. The suffering that other people cause him, his efforts to prevent it, the conflicts that it and the cruel other person created, all of this, interpreted by the intelligence, might make the raw material of a book … as beautiful as it would have been if it had been imagined …

So making art isn’t the same thing as making things up. I’ve never liked the idea that imagination is as simple as making things up; to me, it has more to do with putting ideas together, making connections, seeing what’s in front of you in a new way. So in my way of thinking, the sensitivity Proust is talking about, combined with intelligence, is actually a certain kind of imagination.

And finally, here’s a passage on criticism:

[Criticism] hails a writer as a prophet, on account of his peremptory tone and his very public scorn for the school that preceded him, when in fact he has absolutely nothing new to say. These aberrations on the part of criticism are so constant that a writer might almost prefer to be judged by the general public …. For there is a closer analogy between the instinctive life of the public and the talent of a great writer, which is no more than an instinct religiously listened to while imposing silence on everything else, an instinct perfected and understood, than between it and the superficial verbiage and shifting criteria of the recognized arbiters of judgment.

Apparently Proust isn’t so fond of critics. (Although he’s not so fond of the general public either — to shorten the quotation I took out a parenthesis on how the general public generally doesn’t understand what an artist is doing.) He gives an interesting definition of art here, doesn’t he, that it’s “instinct religiously listened to”? And I do buy his argument that critics often get it wrong, that they take loud voices for true ones and newness for greatness.

Back to Proust

Cross posted at So Many Books


After a Proust hiatus I have finally jumped back in and it's like I never left. I'm on The Guermantes Way now, that's book three, and reading the new translation by Mark Treharne. Treharne's introduction was one of the worst I've ever read, but thankfully, his translating is very good. When I first decided to read the new translations I was a bit worried that there wouldn't be a consistency between books, that each book would "sound" different somehow. But much to my relief and pleasure, this has not been the case. Maybe it's the power of Proust.

One of the things I am enjoying most about In Search of Lost Time is how Proust takes his time. The narrative arc definitely moves forward but we are constantly going from the present to the past to the future and back to the present. Then there are the ideas and themes. They start as a passing mention you hardly notice. Then a little while later an idea returns and Proust dwells on it a little longer before moving on. But then sometime later it returns again and Proust adds more layers.

One of his ideas that I have had flitting around in my brain regards names. In Swann's Way we have an entire section devoted to names. In it, Marcel, the young narrator, becomes enamored of lots of names--Venice, the seaside town of Balbec, Swann, Odette, Bergot, Guermantes. But other than some brief experiences with Swann, he doesn't know anything about anything. He is free to let his imagination create people and places to go with the names.

In the second book, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, there is also a section about names. Marcel spends quite a lot of time with Swann and Odette and the writer Bergot. He spends so much time with them that his imagination has to, at times, be painfully adjusted to the reality. The narrator also gets to finally go to Balbec. Of course Balbec is not what he imagined, but it ends up being an enjoyable place nonetheless where he gets to meet some of the members of the Guermantes family. Still, Marcel is not intimate enough with the family for the name to lose its mythical status.

Now, at the very beginning of Guermantes Way we are brought back to names again. Whereas in the previous two books most of the name theme was implied or episodic, Proust comes right out and says what he is about at the very beginning:

At the age when Names, offering us the image of the unknowable that we have invested in them and simultaneously designating a real place for us, force us accordingly to identify the one with the other, to a point where we go off to a city to seek out a soul that it cannot contain but which we no longer have the power to expel from its nature, it is not only to cities and ruins that they give an individuality, as do allegorical paintings, nor is it only the physical world that they spangle with differences and people with marvels, it is the social world as well: so every historic house, every famous residence or palace, has its lady or its fairy, as forests have their spirits and rivers their deities.

Marcel's family have moved from their former house in Combray to an apartment in the Hôtel de Guermantes. In one of the apartments also lives Mme de Guermantes. Our narrator is about to slowly be disabused of his ideas about the family. Proust even warns us:

But after these earliest years, I can find a succession of seven or eight different figures spanning the time this name inhabited me; the first ones were the finest: gradually my dream, forced by reality to abandon a position that was no longer tenable, took up its position afresh, a little further back, until it was obliged to retreat further. And as Mme de Guermantes changed, so did her dwelling place, itself born from a that name fertilized from year to year by hearing some word or other that modified my dreams of it [...].

Isn't this whole name thing interesting, and true? And I love the way Proust says the name "inhabited" him. Who hasn't had a similar experience, imagining what a favorite author must be like or that a certain place--Paris maybe--must be filled with romance and intellectuals arguing in cafes and art everywhere not to mention the food and wine. Then we get to actually meet the author and we are startled by how different s/he is from what we imagined. Or we get to go to Paris and we find it to be a bit grungy, the coffee is terrible and no one but the tourists hang out in the cafes, not to mention the wine gives us headaches and the food is so rich we suffer from indigestion the whole time.

And the name thing is only a small piece of the whole, because it contributes to a bigger idea, the interplay between imagination and reality, examples of which are on nearly every page. It's nice to be back into Proust.

Generalized Impressions

I have so many thoughts swirling around about In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower that I'm not sure where to start. I'm sure there will be more than one post, so perhaps I will just begin with general impressions.

I loved the first part of the book, "At Madame Swann's." The luscious detail of dress, the dinner and tea parties, I could picture it all in my mind. I felt bad for our young narrator when his love for Gilberte didn't work out, but I also understood Gilberte and why she was annoyed with him. Marcel showing up all the time unannounced and her mother making her give up plans in order to stay with him. That would make me mad too. Marcel's first love is one of a rather clinging sort that sometimes eerily paralleled Swann's for Odette.

Part two has so many layers, so many beautiful moments. Themes that stand out for me are love, habit, art, and beauty. The descriptions I liked best in this section were when Proust is describing the dining room at the Hotel and at Rivebelle. He twice describes the room as an aquarium and the diners as fish, fist at Balbec (pg 260) with the working classes pressed against the windows looking in at the "strange fish and mollusks." Then later at Rivebelle he describes the ladies taking tea in the narrow, glassed gallery (pg 394), "the place looked like a tank of a creel that a fisherman has filled with his shiny catch, some of the fish being half out of the water, their sheen glistening and changing under glossy lights."

I also loved the description of his first dinner at Rivebelle with Saint Loup when the dining room becomes a solar system, the tables heavenly bodies exerting a sort of gravitational pull on other tables as they all kept looking at each other, and "the incessant revolutions" of the wait staff who moved "in a higher realm." And I laughed at this:

Like a pair of witches, sitting behind a great floral decoration, two ghastly cashiers, endlessly busy with their arithmetic, seemed engage in astrological calculations of the upheavals that might on occasion disrupt life in this planetary system, designed in accordance with the science of the Middle Ages.

Again in part two the narrator falls in love. This time it is with the gang of girls and more specifically with Albertine. The whole bedroom scene when Marcel thinks Albertine has invited him to her room because she wants to have sex with him because that's what all girls really want is both funny and dismaying. But Albertine has a good head on her shoulders and a strong bell rope so Marcel didn't even get a kiss. As baffled as Marcel is about why Albertine won't even let him kiss her, Albertine is almost as equally astonished about how he could not understand why she wouldn't. Maybe they could use a copy of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.

I had a hard time following how old Marcel is supposed to be through the whole book. Sometimes he seems like he could be twelve, playing with Gilberte, following the directions of his Grandmother. At other times he is walking out with a cane, dapper as any gentleman, or attending Odette's visiting time and he seems he must be at least 20. I tried not to think about it too much, but sometimes it was disconcerting.

There's my first impression. More specifics in a day or two.

More Place-Names

I've made it into the Balbec section now, after a bit of a slow-down. The good thing is I don't seem ready to give up--in fact, the more I read, the more I want to finish the entire book. The bad thing, at this point, is the beginning of this section is a bit dull. Coming off Marcel's love/hate for Gilberte, it's easy to feel disappointed. Proust has shown himself, with Swann/Odette and Marcel/Gilberte, to possess a profound and compelling talent. A volume that was originally intended to be mere filler has been, so far, as good as the best of the first volume. It's exciting to know that Marcel and Albertine are yet to come, and the focus on them will become tighter as the novel progresses.

Marcel seemed to have a bit of an unconscious crush on Odette. And the disillusions for him continue. I wonder what Swann ingredients and what Odette ingredients have gone in to make Gilberte. Though each male has gone from love to hate for their corresponding female, how do the females compare? Odette seemed to be more active in her beguiling of Swann, more knowing, but she also seemed to have more compassion than Gilberte had for Marcel. Who is the more cruel: Odette, for allowing Swann to marry her; or Gilberte, for shutting Marcel out completely? And what exactly is Odette's interest in Marcel?

The Intermittancies of the Heart

I'm drinking some Ceylon tea, it's mid afternoon and I've been lying on my couch slowly reading the opening strains of Swann In Love. It's refreshing how Proust is able to switch from countless descriptions of the rustic life in Combray to the more incisive, dynamic examination of the intermittencies of the heart. No longer is he dwelling on hawthorn trees and churches, sunsets and the complex odors of Aunt Leonie's room; he has turned his eye to the intricacies of relationships, the many shadings and gradations that exist and fluctuate between people, their passions and preoccupations.

Proust speaks with an absolutely authoritative voice. I paused after reading the section in which Swann first begins to become beguiled by Odette's relatively artless praising of his home and himself, her naive construction of a romantic bond out of half hearted gestures and disinterested invitations. He speaks with such authority that the reader is easily convinced without pausing for reflection on whether he actually agrees with Proust.

"And so, at an age when it would appear - since one seeks in love before everything else a subjective pleasure - that the taste for a woman's beauty must play the largest part in it, love may come into being, love of the most physical kind, without any foundation in desire."

Swann is entranced, beguiled by Odette's singing of the song of love, and begins to move alongside her despite his not having been attracted to her at the outset. Her siren's call is exactly that which so alarmed Marcel's uncle when she sought to construct and establish ties between herself and Marcel's parents in the Combray section, that natural, charming, illusion building habit of taking small scraps and creating works of art around them. Swann, jaded, content with enjoying the sensation of being in love over the actual ardor of love itself, is so gently and sweetly trapped that he never realizes at which point the power shifts from his own indifferent hands to hers.

Is this possible? Can one, having lived a rich life full of passion, love the pleasure of loving, and not the direct object of the passion itself? I am reminded of the cuckoo bird, who insinuates an egg into the nest of others, who's instincts cause them to rear the large, ugly chick as if it were a precious child of their own. Odette takes advantage of the lingering memories of love that still hang in the air from the passage of Swann's former lovers, and clothes herself in those sensations by evoking them artlessly. So camouflaged, she becomes the cuckoo in Swann's nest, not attractive in and of herself, but entwined in the strings of his heart through the use of her siren song.

This raises the question: how does one ever know if they're falling in love with the person, or with an eidolon that that person has managed through coincidence or fortune to evoke? If asked, Swann would no doubt aver that he loved Odette; he might be puzzled at the source of his passion if pressed, but would hold firm that it was she he adored. I suppose it is only through time that the illusion may founder on the rocks of reality, but then again, Swann never does awaken from his dream. He persists, contorting himself and his love for Odette to fit the facts as they come, refusing to release his madness. How can we ever truly know the object of our love?

How can we ever assure ourselves that we love the reality of them, and that they love the reality of whom we are in turn? Can love ever be more than an exercise in self delusion and wishful thinking? Is our love for another ever really more than a manifestation of our own preoccupations and desires, projected onto another who serves only to provoke them in us in the first place?

(I was going to finish this post on that note, but was suddenly struck by an earlier passage in the Combray section where Proust explains the ingenuity of the first writers in creating their characters on paper:

“It is true that the people concerned in them were not what Francoise would have called 'real people.' But none of the feelings which the joys or misfortunes of a real person arouse in us can be awakened except through a mental picture of those joys or misfortunes; and the ingenuity of the first novelist lay in his understanding that, as the image was the one essential element in the complicated structure of our emotions, so that simplification of it which consisted in the suppression, pure and simple, of real people would be a decided improvement. A real person, profoundly as we may sympathize with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, opaque, presents a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift...

The novelist’s happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable to the human soul, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is, which one's soul can assimilate. After that it matters not that the actions, the feelings of this new order of creatures appear to us in the guise of truth, since we have made them our own, since it is in
ourselves that they are happening, that they are holding in thrall, as we feverishly turn over the pages of the book, our quickened breath and staring eyes.”

The true Odette holds no attraction for Swann, but her words and actions draw him into making of her a character in the tale of his own heart; he creates an Odette, and is held in thrall by this marvelous creature. I believe that Proust is saying we all do this to some degree; take a real person, and then color them in with our own hues and desires, create them anew in our minds and hearts, and then suffer accordingly when the reality falls short of our dreams and desires. This is not a weakness on our part, as it seems to be in Swann when taken to an extreme, but rather a basic human limitation that we all must deal with, that forces us all to become novelists of our own lives.)