Involuntary Memory

The End of the Guermantes Way

2009-01-02T04:58:00.003-06:00

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

2007-08-20T16:54:00.001-05:00

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

2007-08-07T17:07:00.000-05:00

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

2007-02-27T19:13:00.000-06:00

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

2007-01-01T12:34:00.000-06:00

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

2006-12-13T20:06:00.000-06:00

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

2006-12-02T15:19:00.000-06:00

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.)

I am a laggard!

2006-12-01T10:51:00.000-06:00

I am late, I know, running far behind the pack in the high cone of dust kicked up by all y'all's sandalled feet, but here I come, charging across the plains as I begin to flicker through the pages of Swann's Way in earnest. I just finished the Combray section, and was stunned, staggered, stupefied and electrified all at once by the following passage near the end:

When, on a summer evening, the melodious sky growls like a tawny lion, and everybody is complaining of the storm, it is the memory of the Meseglise way that makes me stand alone in ecstasy, inhaling, through the noise of the falling rain, the lingering scent of invisible lilacs.

How incredibly gorgeous and evocative and melancholy and delightful is that? Inhaling the lingering scent of invisible lilacs through the noise of the falling rain? How perfect! I am, as you can tell, enraptured.

And what a delightfully beautiful and sumptuous section the Combray part turned out to be! I was never an overt fan of the beginning, where Marcel seems to spend his whole time wracked with woe and weeping and trembling over not receiving a good night kiss from maman (yes, yes, I know there's much more to it than that, including numerous passages and descriptions and the like that take the breath away), but the following expansion of the village life was wonderful. Literally. I've ranted and raved on my own blog already about all this, so shall refrain from degenerating into the same trumpeting notes of delirious ecstasy, but man oh man, can this guy write!

Actually, there was a part in the book where he talks about how, when walking home, he'd oft see a rock or a cloud or a wreath of flowers and feel a delight, an upsurge of energy and enthusiasm that spurred him on to divine the secret behind the thing, but which he allowed to dissipate with mere promises that he'd work on it properly later on.:

I would stand there motionless, looking, breathing, endeavoring to penetrate with my mind beyond the thing seen or smelt... It was certainly not impressions of this kind that could restore the hope I had lost of succeeding one day in becoming an author and poet, for each of them was associated with some material object devoid of intellectual value and suggesting not abstract truth. But at least they gave me an unreasoning pleasure, the illusion of a sort of fecundity, and thereby distracted me from the tedium, from the sense of my own impotence which I felt whenever I had sought a philosophic theme for some great literary work.

This, in short, cuts to the bone and lays bare my slap dash blogging style. To sit down and truly put my brain to work, to essay serious criticism requires more focus and effort than I am like to give; rather, I ejaculate my enthusiasm in happy burbles, and then turn to the next page, my desire to communicate satiated through a brief and momentary effusion. Proust is a weed whacker, splicing and dicing left and right and shearing our illusions from the reality beneath. Ah!

Unrequited Love

2006-11-07T18:47:00.000-06:00

Now that the RIP Challenge is done and I don't have to worry about finishing The Fourth Bear before it's due back at the library, I've picked up Proust again. The problem with Proust, if one could call it a problem, is that he makes it hard to pay attention to the words on the page. Time and time again I start reading and within five minutes or so he's got me thinking about my own past and experiences. Then I realize my eyes have traveled over two pages but my brain didn't follow, it's still back on page 200. So back I go where I manage to read one paragraph before it happens all over again. I don't mind, I enjoy it even, but I wonder how anyone can read Proust in anything less than a few years. At least at the rate I'm going that's how long it's looking to take.

Last night he got me on fulfillment, or rather the impossibility of. First he warmed up by lightly mentioning how we can never be happy because once the thing we had previously determined would make us happy finally arrives on the doorstep, we've changed and it is no longer what we want. He mentions this in a few almost throw away sentences then we're back to the story and the narrator musing, in a very Swann-like manner, about his love for Gilberte, Swann's daughter, and how he is working to cure himself of it.

Then three pages later we return to the impossibility of fulfillment:

As well, in the time it takes for the other's heart to change, our own heart will be changing too; and when the fulfillment desired comes within our reach, we will desire it no longer.

He goes on for long sentences then explaining and elaborating, drawing it out in a beautifully sad way. And it took me reading it over and over several times to be able to see all he was saying because with each sentence I'd stop and think, "Is that true?" And I can't stop thinking about it.

The happiness and fulfillment Proust is talking about is all centered around love. Gilberte likes the narrator and he likes her but she doesn't like him enough. His love for her grows as her pleasure in him wanes and he dreams of finding ways to make her come to her senses and love him back. But he knows that if she ever did decide to love him he would have spent so much time trying to get over loving her that he would not ever be able to be happily fulfilled by Gilberte's love. It's all very sad and cruel. Proust captures the heartbreak and unfairness of it so perfectly. What an exquisite experience this is turning out to be.

Cross-posted at So Many Books

The Sportswriter

2006-11-06T03:31:00.000-06:00

Proust and sports?? Can there be a connection? Let me explain.

I completed the first section of "In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower" some weeks ago and planned to write a piece about the humour and character found there...but I got sidetracked by a visit to London of Richard Ford. I collect signed copies of books and managed to get a copy of the third part of his Frank Bascombe books. As you may all appreciate this encourasged me to re-read the first two volumes again...and what did I discover at the beginning of Chapter 2 of "The Sportswriter"?

All we really want is to get to the point where the past can explain nothing about us and we can get on with our life............. Most pasts, let's face it, aren't very dramatic subjects, and should be just uninteresting enough to release you the instant you're ready (though it's true that when we get to that moment we are often scared to death, feel naked as snakes and have nothing to say ).

My own history I think of as a postcard with changing scenes on one side but no particular or memorable messages on the back........ The stamp of our parents on us and of the past in general is, to my mind, overworked, since at some point we are whole and by ourselves upon the earth, and there is nothing that can change that for better or worse, and so we might as well think about something more promising.

What then happens is that Frank Boscombe spends the rest of the book revisiting his recent past!!! Ford also, to my mind, uses some of the rambling techniques of Proust to get into the mind of his main character and to explore his past.

It is interesdting to note that while Proust was never a sportsman he did enjoy fast cars, he did complete a number of route marches during his military service and his father wrote one of the first physical exercise books.

Proust on Writers

2006-10-10T19:06:00.000-05:00

Cross-posted at So Many Books

I am moving along through In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. I am not moving along as fast as I would like, but even slow is good considering after finishing Swann's Way I had a day or two of resistance to continuing the endeavor. But I am glad I am doing so because this volume is really good. There is a section I very much enjoyed recently that every reader can relate to.

The young narrator (early teens? We never really know his age) loves the author Bergotte and has read everything of the author's that he's written. In Swann's Way there are scenes with the narrator gushing about the author and talking with Swann about him. Turns out Bergotte dines with the Swanns quite frequently and the narrator imagines what it would be like to meet him.

In this volume, he gets his wish. The narrator is invited to lunch at Swann's as is Bergotte. And you know, you've experienced it yourself, you meet the author you've idolized for years, there is always disappointment:

There, in front of me, bowing back at me, like the magician in his tails emerging unscathed while a dove flies from the smoke and dust of a detonation, I saw a stocky, coarse, thickset, shortsighted man, quite young, with a red bottle-nose and a black goatee. I was heartbroken: it was not only that my gentle old man had just crumbled to dust and disappeared, it was also that for those things of beauty, his wonderful works, which I had once contrived to fit into that infirm and sacred frame, that dwelling I had lovingly constructed like a temple expressly designed to hold them, there was now no room in this thick-bodied little man standing in front of me, with all his blood vessels, his bones, his glands, his snub nose, and his little black beard.

Perhaps we are not so surprised about an author's appearance in these days of glossy dust jacket photos, but we still construct, based upon the books, our idea of what the author is like. Proust's narrator did the same thing and has a difficult time reconciling not only the appearance of Bergotte, but his odd voice and way of speaking: "To my ear, Bergotte's way of speaking was completely different from his writing; and even the things he said differed from the things that fill his books." Nonetheless, the narrator feels comfortable talking with Bergotte because he feels like the author is a friend whom he has known a long time.

Throughout this whole section Proust also manages to make some interesting observations about writers and writing. He talks of the accent of the the writer. I can only read this as that certain something about particular authors that allows you to always recognize them. It is more than style, it has to do with voice in a way, but it also more than that. It is that thing that would help you recognize Proust or Woolf or Joyce or Austen in an unattributed passage from their work.

Proust also makes a comment on genius:

Likewise, those who produce works of genius are not those who spend their days in the most refined company, whose conversation is the most brilliant, or whose culture is the broadest; they are those who have the ability to stop living for themselves and make a mirror of their personality, so that their lives, however nondescript they may be socially, or even in a way intellectually, are reflected in it. For genius lies in reflective power, and not in the intrinsic quality of the scene reflected.

A few pages later Proust says that the individual life of the writer is taken over by all the other lives he imagines. This all sounds terrifyingly true. I say terrifying because in a way, the great writer sacrifices his or her life to the life of the work. Maybe this is the difference between great writers and good writers. The merely good live too much for themselves and have life and personality outside their books. But the great, their lives are in their books. Does that make sense the way I said that? There seems to be a rather religious feeling to that--losing the self to something greater and as a result becoming larger than one could ever be otherwise.

Art and Life and Proust

2006-09-30T07:23:00.000-05:00

Cross-posted at Of Books and Bicycles

I have recently come across a beautiful passage from Proust on the relationship of art and life. It is a passage on Vinteuil's sonata, the famous sonata from which comes the "little phrase" that was so important to Swann as he fell in love with Odette. Now it's the narrator who is thinking about its significance.

This is what he thinks: upon encountering a new work of art -- "new" meaning something recent that departs from established methods and schools -- we can't understand it immediately. We don't have the background to make sense of it; it seems foreign and chaotic, and maybe ugly. We can't analyze it -- break it into parts -- because we can't get a grasp of the entire thing in order to understand its structure. When we do begin to appreciate the new work of art, we don't appreciate the right things:

Not only does one not immediately discern a work of rare quality; but even within such a work, as happened to me with the Vinteuil sonata, it is always the least precious parts that one notices first.

When we finally understand the work more fully, those things we valued at the beginning of the process, we have now forgotten. And here is his conclusion:

Because it was only in successive stages that I could love what the sonata brought to me, I was never able to possess it in its entirely -- it was an image of life.

If we were to possess life entirely, it would have to be from the perspective of death, wouldn't it? Otherwise, we are always changing and so can't possess a thing in flux. But because we are changing constantly, our understanding of art is constantly changing, so we can't possess the work of art either. Art isn't so much a way of getting life to stand still as it is a way of charting its movement.

Proust elaborates:

But the great works of art are also less of a disappointment than life, in that their best parts do not come first. In the Vinteuil sonata, the beauties one discovers soonest are also those which pall soonest, a double effect with a single cause: they are the parts that most resemble other works, with which one is already familiar. But when those parts have receded, we can still be captivated by another phrase, which, because its shape was too novel to let our mind see anything there but confusion, had been made undetectable and kept intact; and the phrase we passed by every day unawares, the phrase which had withheld itself, which by the sheet power of its own beauty had become invisible and remained unknown to us, is the one that comes to us last of all. But it will also be the last one we leave. We shall love it longer than the others, because we took longer to love it.

I like what this says about art; I'm not sure I like what it says about life. About art, this tells me that some of the greatest pleasures to be had are those I have to wait and work for. It tells me, as I think about my post from a couple days ago, that pleasure and effort and patience are not opposed. If I stick with a difficult and bewildering work of art, it will begin to reveal beauties to me.

About life, Proust implies that the best parts come first, that we have the greatest access to beauty when we are young. I'm not sure I like this because I find it depressing, and also because I'm not sure it's true. Perhaps we have more intense experiences of life when we are young -- perhaps -- but surely the nature of one's experiences become deeper and more complex. Surely there is beauty in life that witholds itself until we have been patient long enough to see it revealed.

Happy Birthday Scott Moncrieff!

2006-09-25T08:00:00.000-05:00

My Writer's Amanac email for today informs me that it is Scott Moncrieff's birthday. He was born in Scotland in 1889. His translation of Swann's Way was first published in 1922, not long before Proust died. Moncreiff spent the rest of his life translating the remaining volumes of Proust's novel and died before he could finish the last one. His translation was the only one in English for most of the 20th century.

High praise for Proust

2006-09-24T18:51:00.000-05:00

The praise is from Colette: According to her, Swann's Way was:

everything one would have wished to write, everything one neither dared nor knew how to write.

I agree.

Desire

2006-09-21T18:56:00.000-05:00

Cross-posted at So Many Books

My mind feels rather dull today. I don't know if it is due to the weather--cold and rainy--or the stressful week at work I've been having (I'm beginning to think it might be time to look for a new job), or maybe my brain really is dull and I'm just now coming to the realization. Whatever the case, I have been meaning to write about Proust all week but have been putting it off hoping that tomorrow I will figure out what to say. Since I finished Swann's Way and am into In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, I am inclined to sum up my reading experience thus far.

But how does one sum up Proust? Maybe the Pythons can do it, or maybe not since I have not had the pleasure of seeing that particular episode, but I cannot seem to grab onto any words that are adequate.

This was my second time through Swann's Way. I first read it a couple of years ago. I was determined to get through the entirety of In Search for Lost Time but, alas, after four months of struggling with Swann, I couldn't do it. This time it only took me two months. I enjoyed the book much more too. It certainly helps having others reading Proust at the same time.

Maybe instead of trying to sum up, I will just mention a theme that moved through Swann's Way and is now appearing in In the Shadow of Young Girls. Desire. It's everywhere from the young narrator desiring his mother's kiss before bed, to Swann desiring Odette, to the narrator desiring to see the great actress La Berma. What I have noticed is that for Proust, desire is often at its height when the thing desired is unavailable. The more obstacles there are to possession, the more intense the desire grows. Swann is frantic when he can't find Odette; the narrator is unconsoled when he is unable to see Gilberte in the park; and again, the narrator is whipped into a frenzy over the actress La Berma who he has never seen her except in a photo on a playbill. When the obstacles are taken away and the desire is finally fulfilled, there seems always to be a disappointment.

At this point in the game I don't know what Proust is getting at. Is he saying that desire is always better than the fulfillment? That fulfillment is never completely satisfying? Are our desires for a person, event or thing always unrealistic in some way? Is what we desire most to possess simply unpossessable? Did I just make up a word? And if our desires can never truly be met, should we stop? Or at least desire lesser things so we won't be disappointed? Or is disappointment an inherent part of desire?

Perhaps Proust answers some of these questions later. Or maybe my desire for answers will be only be partially fulfilled and I will be able to share some disappointment with the characters in the book.

Proust and inconsistency of emotion

2006-09-21T06:39:00.000-05:00

Cross-posted at Of Books and Bicycles

One of the things I'm enjoying in my Proust reading is the way he captures the waywardness of the mind and emotions, the manner in which a person can feel one thing in one moment and then the opposite in the next. He describes the contrariness of emotion and desire so excruciatingly well; I recognize my own shifts and variations and inconsistencies in Proust's characters.

Towards the beginning of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, the narrator talks a lot about his desire to be a writer and his confidence, or lack of confidence, in his ability to write. And his feelings change constantly. When the narrator's father says about the narrator's desire to write that "The main thing is to enjoy what one does in life. He's not a child anymore, he knows what he likes, he's probably not going to change, he's old enough to know what'll make him happy in life," he has a strange response. He knows he should be happy because his father had wanted him to be a diplomat, and now, instead, he's getting permission from his father to do what he's dreamed of -- be a writer. But instead:

On this occasion, much as an author, to whom his own conceptions seem to have little value because he cannot think of them as separate from himself, may be alarmed at seeing his publishers putting themselves to the trouble of selecting an appropriate paper for them and setting them in a typeface that he may think too fine, I began to doubt whether my desire to write was a thing of sufficient importance for my father to lavish such kindness upon it.

Now that his father is taking his desire to be a writer seriously, he's not so sure that he's worthy of it. And this proclamation from his father makes him nervous for other reasons; his father's statement that he's old enough to know what he likes and that he won't change has made him realize that his life has truly begun. He is no longer on the threshold of life, full of possibility, but instead is already living, and, what's worse, his life may not change all that much. Isn't it often true that when we finally get the thing we've been longing for, we realize it's a disappointment, or that we didn't really want it, or that getting what we want just creates a whole new set of problems?

Near the above passage, Proust offers another example of the inconsistency of our minds and emotions:

Think of the travelers who are uplifted by the general beauty of a journey they have just completed, although during it their main impression, day after day, was that it was a chore.

He talks about the "promiscuity of the ideas that lurk within us." Isn't that a great way to describe what living in one's mind is like? It's true for me, certainly. That example of the traveler works particularly well for me, because I'm reminded of my backpacking trips, which I have fond memories of, many great memories, and yet when I try hard to remember what each moment actually felt like when I was backpacking, I have to admit that it was a lot of pain, misery, boredom, and unhappiness.

So which is it? Are my backpacking trips wonderful or terrible? Does the narrator want to be a writer or not? The answer depends on the moment you are asking the question.

a quick note on Time Regained

2006-09-20T09:39:00.000-05:00

This is another film version of Proust. I picked it up and set it aside after about thirty minutes. It also is in French, and unfortunately the subtitles are in white and often do not stand out against the scene. Still, I enjoy French spoken, and that didn't make me put it aside. What did, is it seems to be a film treating more the final volume of Proust's novel, and I didn't want to be exposed to it until after reading it. And the first thirty minutes were not linear, so at least it seemed to be attempting to capture the feeling of involuntary memory. The actor playing Marcel captured my impression of the author almost too well, and scenes depicting the writing of the novel made it difficult to view it purely as fiction, which is much easier done while reading. And Emanuelle Beart is luminous as usual. We will definitely watch it when all this reading is complete.

Introductions and Uncertainties

2006-09-16T12:22:00.000-05:00

In a previous posting the issue of negative Introductions to Proust was addressed and I toyed with the idea of inaugurating a competition to find the "worst" or most hilarious such introductions- I would lead off with this from Joshua Landy:

If someone were to suggest that the texture of Proust's novel resembles nothing quite so much as molasses, it would be difficult to dissent with any great conviction. The over-long book, with its over-long sentences, over-long paragraphs, over-long sections and over-long volumes, is as thick and viscous as treacle, and little more transparent.

Landy goes on to quote a 1912 review by Jacques Normand:

Reading cannot be sustained for more than five or six pages, one can set down as a positive fact that there will never be a reader hardy enough to follow along for as much as a quarter of an hour, the nature of the author's sentences doing nothing to improve matters.

Landy is of course a Proust supporter, and he notes that it is the author's style which, though idiosyncratic, and labyrinthine, given to logical confusion and an overwhelming sense of uncertainty, is the reflection of a particular vision of existence. The style maps or models:

the structure of the self as Proust sees it, namely as an entity divided not only from the outside world but also from within, into discrete temporal segments, which each contain, in turn, a plurality of faculties and drives.

So, reflecting on the previous posting unless we slavishly record every occurrence and thought in the novel, we should not be surprised that here and there we miss or forget something.

I feel I too should comment on how not just my sentences are becoming longer and longer but it also seems to affect writers on Proust such as Landy!!

A Few Questions

2006-09-15T07:01:00.000-05:00

As I contemplate Swann's Way and try to grasp it in its entirety, I have a couple of detail questions.

In the "Combray" section Swann is married to Odette, right? But at the end of the "Swann in Love" section Swann is no longer in love with Odette and it appears that they are through. So how and why did they get married? Do we know this and I missed it?

In the final sections, "Place Names," the narrator has been playing with Gilberte for weeks before Swann comes on the scene. The narrator mentions that Swann doesn't visit his family anymore since they quarreled. Is there ever mention of this quarrel and what it was about? This was a surprising detail to me especially since Swann pretended he didn't recognize the narrator and it isn't that long between "Combray" and "Place Names." I wonder what could have been so bad to keep Swann from visiting the narrator's family?

And here's another question, what was the point of Swann's dream about Odette? I've been trying to figure out if there is some significance to it. Swann dismisses it when he wakes up, but he thinks about it again later that day so it obviously had an effect on him. Is Proust using Freudian dream symbolism to say something that I'm not getting because I'm not up on Freud?

Did Swann exasperate anyone else? I wanted to do him bodily harm to make him come to his senses.

Introductions

2006-09-11T06:44:00.000-05:00

Cross-posted at Of Books and Bicycles

Yesterday I wrote about the odd introduction to my edition of Dracula; today I read the introduction to Proust's In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, written by James Grieve, the volume's translator and editor. This introduction was a little more traditional and less amusing than the Dracula introduction, but it had some odd moments too. Grieve tells us in the first paragraph that "Inclined to see this volume as a 'listless interlude,' Proust was surprised that 'everyone's reading it.'" Well, that's going to get readers excited about the book, isn't it? I'm guessing that the book won't feel like a "listless interlude" -- the first ten pages certainly don't feel that way, which is what I've read so far -- but I do wonder what made Proust see it that way.

But much odder is Grieve's rather-too-intense focus on Proust's shortcomings as a storyteller. In a short introduction, about 8 pages, he spends 3 or 4 describing Proust's inconsistencies and carelessness with detail. Part of the point, I think, is to discuss the troubles a translator faces when trying to figure out whether to correct an obvious and glaring error or to leave it there. Here is a passage on Proust's weaknesses:

Among the great novelists, as a bungler of basics Proust has no equal, save perhaps Henry James ... [James] seems unskilled in introducing his characters to his reader, and in enabling characters to converse. In similar things, Proust too seems incompetent, or perhaps an improviser ... His composition was not linear; he wrote in bits and pieces; transitions from one scene to another are sometimes awkward, clumsy even. He can make heavy weather of simple movements: characters get stood roughly into position so that the next demonstration may take place; action must be performed perfunctorily, so that protracted analysis of it may ensue; the narrator seems to say farewell to Elstir at his front door, yet two pages later is walking him home. Proust shows, it has been said, "utter nonchalance" about "loss of fictional verisimilitude."

Now it makes perfect sense to me than an introduction-writer might point out some of the author's flaws, but Grieve emphasizes them too much I think. After the above passage, he proceeds to offer pages of Proust's errors and lapses and inconsistencies, things that could have been left to the footnotes. So maybe Grieve doesn't need to work to convince us that Proust is great -- we already know he is -- but on the other hand he doesn't need to work so hard to convince us that Proust is sloppy!

But when Grieve writes about Proust's strengths, he does so very well. I like this explanatory passage:

Proust was intermittently unsure whether he was writing an essay or a novel. Here is a novel written by a critic and literary theorist, both a novel in the form of an essay and an essay on the novel. Proust must not only show but tell, tell rather than show, tell at the expense of showing; he must make the reader, who may wish only to revel in the fiction, admit the truthfulness of its fictionality.

This sounds exactly like the kind of book I like (although I like more traditional sorts of novels too -- very much so), with its mix of essayistic and storytelling modes, and it helps me understand what Proust is up to -- telling a story and meditating on stories both. And this passage might make you want to read the novel, although then again it might just depress you. I liked it anyway:

Proust's real strengths lie in his analysis of the ordinary, his close acquaintance with feelings, the pessimism of his examination of consciousness, his diagnosis of the unreliability of relationships and the incoherence of personality, his attentiveness to the bleak truths he has to tell of time, of its unrelenting wear and tear, its indifferent outlasting of all human endeavor, its gradual annulment of our dearest joys and even our cruelest sorrows, voiding them of all that once made them ours. Life, as Proust tells it, is disappointment and loss -- loss of time, as his title says, and loss of youth of course; loss of freshness of vision, of belief, of the semblance it once gave to the world; and loss of self, a loss against which we have only one safeguard, and that unsure: memory.

Swann's Way

2006-09-09T07:26:00.000-05:00

Cross-posted at Of Books and Bicycles

So I’ve now finished the first volume of Proust’s novel (and I’m counting each volume as a separate book!). It’s taken me about two months to read the entire thing; I’ve been reading in small chunks of about 10 pages or so, and read about 50 pages a week. For me, that’s the perfect way to read it; regularly enough to keep the story and ideas fresh in my mind, but at a slow enough pace to absorb it and to keep from feeling bogged down. This is most definitely not a book to rush.

And I’ve found it so very rewarding. Proust’s sentences are beautiful, long and digressive and convoluted, but they do yield their meaning, even if I have to read them a couple of times and turn the pages back and forth and back and forth to piece everything together. The book has sections that read quickly as well, particularly in the long middle section that tells the story of Swann and Odette. Here I found myself getting caught up in the story and the pages flew by. But best of all are Proust’s insights into consciousness, into what it’s like to be a young boy, for example, a very intense, intelligent, yearning young boy. We see him as both a little ridiculous – one of the things I liked was how I could imagine exactly why his parents found him exasperating – and as completely sympathetic and awe-inspiring and wonderful. His longing for his mother, and later for Gilberte, is moving; we know that such an intense, emotional child is bound to experience much struggle and pain.

This volume does have a carefully-wrought structure, although one entirely of Proust’s own devising; we begin with the unnamed narrator and a story of longing, and we end with that same narrator, a little older, longing still. All through the novel, Proust explores the way the mind mediates our experiences, shaping them through memory or desire; he considers how art affects his characters – the crucial role music and painting play in Swann’s love affair with Odette, for example. The novel is very much about reading; we learn a little about the narrator’s reading habits and desires in the first section, but also characters attempt to read one another, Swann desperately trying to understand Odette, the narrator reading much into everything his mother says, and then at the end turning the same attention toward Gilberte. The book trains readers to pay close attention, to their own minds and to other people and to the world. It contains some of most beautiful, detailed descriptions of nature I’ve read.

And the novel’s length strikes me as necessary, and not only because Proust needs the length to say what he wants to say about his characters and his ideas; there is something about living with this book for a long time, in much the same way that in reading Clarissa we come to feel like she is a companion, that we live with her, that we know her and she is a part of our lives. In Proust, we spend many, many hours luxuriating in the complexity of the mind and of emotion. We are forced – if we read carefully – to experience things slowly and to pay attention, to dig deeply into life.

And the way the narrative moves around in time, from the narrator as an older man describing himself as he is now, to the narrator telling stories from his childhood, to the narrator telling Swann’s story which took place before he was born, forces us to consider how our experience of time differs from “regular” clock time. In our minds, we move through time, back and forth, from past to present to future, easily and quickly. Proust’s central theme is memory, that capacity that holds us together and gives us a coherent identity. Except that our memories are not ours to control. A coherent identity may be an illusion, one fostered by memory, our ability to hold together disparate chunks of time, and undermined by memory too, since we can remember and forget involuntarily.

I’m looking forward to the other volumes; I’m curious about what Proust does with plot, oddly enough, perhaps. What will happen to these characters? Or will we even stay with these characters, or move on to others? But most of all, I’m looking forward to the company of Proust’s prose and his mind.

Two Swanns in Love

2006-09-04T11:14:00.000-05:00

I wanted to do a wrap-up of Swann in Love now that I have seen the film version and found my lost copy of Milton Hindus' book. When we can see this first volume in relation to the entire novel, perhaps there will be more thoughts to post.

"Swann in Love" is a French film that offers a good example of how a story changes through point of view. Though Proust's novel uses a first person narrative, he is virtually omniscient, as well as telling his story from hindsight. This allows us to see and understand all the characters and their motivations clearly. In the film, people are introduced and events occur that simply cannot mean much when they are removed from the fullness of the novel's treatment.

The film also is a not very good adaptation of a good story. It shows how truly important a director is in translating a novel to film. The film begins after Swann has fallen in love with Odette, and he is now falling into jealousy. There are numerous scenes faithful to the novel. Between these are moments of flashback, when Swann recalls their first times together. Presented in this way his jealousy comes across not as strong, because we don't have the foundation of their early relationship to contrast. Perhaps the flashbacks were meant to give the impression of Proust's scenes of involuntary memory, but in the film they don't really work.

The film also attempts to convey the power of music over Swann. The sonata is begun and he suddenly stops walking, goes into a sort of mesmerized state, grips a chair back. Visually, though, this does not convey the sensations that the novel does.

We see in the film the detail of Botticelli's painting which first causes Swann to find Odette worthy of love. Here, then, is the face of Odette:

Odette comes across as a coquette from the start of the film, which, initial suggests to the contrary, she did not to me in the novel. (Perhaps I am too much like Swann!) I would have preferred the revelation to come more gradually, and still remain uncertain, until the end. The film also jumps ahead, beyond the end of the book, to show us Gilberte and Mme. Swann--quite unchanged in her beauty and bearing--and Swann near death.

The character of the Baron de Charlus is wonderfully fun. There is a brief scene in which he is rebuffed by a young man, which seems rather out of place in the story of Swann. One reason it stands out so is that it is not from Swann's point of view, as is the rest of the movie. A basic rule is that if one is going to break an established point of view, there had better be an overwhelming reason, because it generally always weakens the story. If the scene is meant to illuminate some aspect of Swann's love, I missed it. One of my favorite scenes is when Swann is in desperate search of Odette through the streets of Paris, and an attractive young lady asks him for a ride in his carriage, clearly offering herself to him. Swann completely ignores her, telling his driver to remind him to order more firewood or some such thing. True to the novel, it demonstrates without a doubt the grip of love which held Swann, that he would rather be in search for something that he might not find and was yet but a desire, than to partake of what is freely offered him. The film also does a good job of presenting the difference in the social gatherings of the Guermantes and Verdurins, though, again, snippets of conversation too often come from all directions and, without support from the rest of the novel, produce confusion. The film left me eager to return to Proust.

So, back to the novel.

My thoughts began insensibly to wander. The moonlight shining into the room reminded me of a certain moonlight night in England--the night after a picnic party in a Welsh valley. Every incident of the drive homeward, through lovely scenery, which the moonlight made lovelier than ever, came back to my remembrance, though I had never given the picnic a thought for years, though, if I had tried to recollect it, I could certainly have recalled little or nothing of that scene long past. Of all the wonderful faculties that help to tell us we are immortal, which speaks the sublime truth more eloquently than memory? Here was I, in a strange house of the most suspicious character, in a situation of uncertainty, and even of peril, which might seem to make the exercise of my recollection almost out of the question, nevertheless, remembering, quite involuntarily, places, people, conversations, minute circumstances of every kind, which I had though forgotten forever; which I could not possibly have recalled at will, even under the most favorable auspices. And what cause had produced in a moment the whole of this strange, complicated, mysterious effect? Nothing but some rays of moonlight shining in at my bedroom window.

Proustian as all; yet this comes from the 1852 short story "The Traveler's Story of a Terribly Strange Bed", by Wilkie Collins. Did Proust know it?

In A Reader's Guide to Marcel Proust, Milton Hindus calls Proust's novel the literary equivalent of Wagner's Ring cycle. I find this a particularly apt description. Both men were initially accused of not knowing how to create traditional works of art, because both were creating something new. Both works are internally connected through the whole by theme, or lietmotifs. Today we understand this, and often begin reading Proust's novel having some foreknowledge of it; yet what must it have been like for readers in 1913 who had only the first book, who had not yet seen or could even conceive of Proust's ultimate architecture?

There is so much to take in from this novel, already I am going back to reread sections, and finding key elements I had merely read through quickly without really comprehending what they meant. The novel seems to demand a second reading, and yet, having finally completed reading two thousand some pages, will the desire to reread them still exist?

Proust on Procrastination

2006-09-04T04:43:00.000-05:00

I have now read about 150 pages of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (James Grieve translation) and I am entranced. We hear about an older Swann and a slightly older Marcel -the latter who has now gained admittance to the Swann household. Here he has met and impressed Bergotte and resolved to write.

Given Marcel's already admitted laziness it is not too surprising that on page 155 we have a marvelous description of the process of procrastination.

If I had not been so determined to set to work, I might have made an effort to start at once. But given that my resolve was unbreakable, given that within twenty-four hours, inside the empty frame of tomorrow where everything fitted so perfectly because it was not today, my best intentions would easily take material shape, it was really preferable not to think of beginning things on an evening when I was not quite ready - and of course the following days were to be no better suited to beginning things. However, I was a reasonable person. When one had waited for years, it would be childish not to tolerate a delay of a couple of days..........
Unfortunately, tomorrow turned out not to be that broad,bright,outward-looking day that I had feverishly looked forward to.

Haven't we all been there!!

Colette and Proust meet

2006-09-02T06:50:00.000-05:00

Cross-posted at Of Books and Bicycles

Stefanie recently wrote about commonplace books; I'm afraid I'll never be organized or energetic or diligent enough to keep one of those, so thank goodness for the blog, where I can at least keep track of some of the quotations I admire from my reading. Now why I can be organized and energetic enough to post on my blog every day but not enough to keep a commonplace book, I'm not sure, but, anyway, here's something I'd put in my commonplace book if I had one.

The quotation is taken from Colette's autobiographical novel Claudine en Menage (translated as Claudine Married), and it describes Claudine's meeting with a young man who is obviously Proust. I realize that calling it an autobiographical novel is complicated, but Judith Thurman, Colette's biographer, and others regularly look to the Claudine novels for information -- however difficult to sort out -- about Colette's life. Thurman describes the passage as Colette's "fictional version of her encounter with the young Proust at Mme Arman's [which] gives us a glimpse of the way she was beginning to project an exaggerated stage version of herself in public." What's cool about it for me is, simply, that it's a meeting between two of my literary heroes:

One Wednesday [she writes], at the house of old Ma Barmann[Mme Arman], I was cruised, politely, by a young pretty-boy of letters. (Beautiful eyes, that kid, a touch of conjunctivitis, but never mind ...). He compared me ... to Myrtocleia, to a young Hermes, to a Cupid by Proud'hon; he ransacked his memory and secret museums for me, quoting so many hermaphroditic masterpieces that ... he almost spoiled my enjoyment of a divine cassoulet, the specialty of the house ...
My little flatterer, excited by his own evocations, didn't let go of me .... Nestled in a Louis XV basket chair, I heard him, without really listening, parade his literary knowledge .... He contemplated me with his long-lashed, caressing eyes and murmured, for the two of us:
Ah, yours is the daydream of the child Narcissus; it's his soul, filled with sensuality and bitterness..."
"Monsieur," I tell him firmly, "you're delirious. My soul is filled with nothing but red beans and bacon rinds."

This strikes me as perfect, capturing both Colette and Proust -- or at least stereotyped, exaggerated, fictionalized versions of them -- with devastating accuracy. From the illness, to the ransacking of his memory, to the extensive literary knowledge, to the dreaminess, Colette seems to get Proust down pat. And Colette (Claudine) gets to have the attention of a famous person, and gets to condescend to him too, calling him her "little flatterer" quite dismissively, and getting the final, funny last word in.

But, lest we think these two figures will always be at odds, Thurman goes on to say:

The "young pretty-boy of letters" who wasn't yet "Proust" had recognized the true face and impure true feelings of the young misfit who wasn't yet "Colette" and understood the narcissism forced upon her by her imposture.

I shall see, as I read through the biography, where, if anywhere, this relationship goes.

The Unseen Kiss

2006-08-27T15:54:00.000-05:00

I must say, the scene where Swann and Odette are in the carriage together after Swann has searched everywhere for her is such a beautiful moment. He "adjusts" her cattleyas and then:

she seemed to require all her strength to hold her face back, as though an invisible force were drawing it toward Swann. And it was Swann who, before she let her face fall, as though despite herself, onto his lips, held it back for an instant, at a certain distance, between his two hands. He wanted to give his mind time to catch up, to recognize the dream it had caressed for so long and to be present at its realization, like a relative summoned to witness the success of a child she has loved very much. Perhaps Swann was also fastening upon this face of an Odette he had not yet possessed, an Odette he had not yet even kissed, this face he was seeing for the last time, the gaze with which, on the day of our departure, we hope to carry away with us a landscape we are about to leave forever.

Wow, is that ever a charged scene! It reminds me of a Humphrey Bogart movie. But at least there we get to see the kiss, get to cheer as lips finally meet. Why, I wonder, does Proust not allow us the pleasure of Swann and Odette kissing? Is he saying the kiss itself does not matter, only what comes before and after it? Or is it because, in spite of Proust's powers of detailed description, even he could not describe the consummating kiss? Is it better left to our imaginations, allowing us to insert kisses we have had?

The next thing we know we find out that Swann and Odette had sex. I found the transition to be jarring, from the luminous passage to narrative of how they come to call having sex "make cattleya." Maybe the sudden change is the brilliance of Proust, from sublime anticipation to the cutesy and mundane and Swann anxious that their flush of joy can't last forever. An illustration of how quickly things change? Even when we try to delay the moment, change is inevitable.