Involuntary Memory

Time Lost

2010-03-14T11:36:00.003-05:00

Wow!

In the second half of 2006, I began reading Remembrance of Things Past, or what today commonly is titled In Search of Lost Time. Today I finished it. This is not to say that the title changed while I was reading it. But I didn't really recapture time, either.

I thought I had been reading for two years. Actually, I spent three and a half years reading this monumental novel. I did not spend every moment, nor even every day, with it. In truth, I cheated on it with many other books during that time. Not because it didn't satisfy me, but because I always am in the process of reading several books at any one time. Proust was especially good for Sunday mornings. But often, too, I picked up this novel and read myself to sleep, night after night. With a paperback edition of The Da Vinci Code, I might get through ten pages before my eyes fell shut. With Proust, it was more like two pages.

What I did not experience while reading, rather curiously, was the passage of time within the novel. Perhaps that is because so much actual time passed while I read. Perhaps I failed as a reader. This probably adversely affected my full appreciation of the end.

Some time ago, someone mentioned that the social gatherings recorded in the novel were usually boring, though accurately depicted. I found this to be true as well, and much of the novel is given to those occasions. I confess to gaining more insight, and taking more away from the novel, by reading commentary and criticism on these passages, rather than the novel itself.

Near the end, Proust notes that a reader will get out of a novel only what is within himself. This was certainly true for me, when I read the passage concerning Vermeer. I am a fan of the film All the Vermeers in New York, but I did not understand its connection to Proust's novel until I read the novel. At the end of the film is a voice-over that is wonderfully haunting. And the text of this I discovered to have come straight from Proust's pen. I read it, felt a chill of recognition, and then read it again, for the sheer enjoyment at it's beauty. It is one of the best passages in the novel.

Three sections I felt stood out from the rest and deserved special recognition. The least of these comes near the end, as Proust discourses on literature. Not only is this a general theory of literature, it is also the narrator's discoveries of his own powers and his own hopes for what he may achieve. It is an explanation and description of Proust's novel, as well as a gauge by which a reader may judge all novels.

The second of my favorite sections was diffused in earlier parts of the novel, and echoed in the end, concerning the actress Berma, and the narrator's impressions of her. Though the same theme is repeated in many instances throughout the novel, for me the message of disillusionment was conveyed best through this character.

My favorite section of the novel was the entire part titled "Swann's Way". The depiction of love, from its wonderful beginnings to its bitter endings, was brilliant. This, with all its attendant jealousy, was a major theme throughout the novel. The love between the narrator and Albertine, especially, echoed some of the same sentiments, but failed to rise to the same level. This early section shot me into the rest of the book, and really provided most of the foundation for the remainder of the novel.

I would definitely recommend reading the entire novel. If it wasn't so long, I would read it again, hoping for a more thorough appreciation of all the elements, having now also read the commentary. Was I to reread something, though, I would turn first to Thomas Hardy, who for me is much more accessible, and probably even more heart-wrenching. But given a limited amount of time, and a desire to sample Proust, one could not go wrong to read "Swann's Way" alone.

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.

Place-Names

2006-08-24T11:33:00.000-05:00

I finished Swann's Way and began Within a Budding Grove. In case you have not read this far yet, I will say only that I was surprised how things turned out for M. Swann.

Building on the binocular theory as I am trying to understand it, we read at the end of "Swann in Love" the theme in miniature that Shattuck suggests Proust presents full-blown in the entire novel. One day a letter arrives for Swann that begins for him a reassessment of all his friends. We are told that Swann

knew quite well as a general truth, that human life is full of contrasts, but in the case of any one human being he imagined all that part of his or her life with which he was not familiar as being identical with the part which he was.

Isn't this common among many people? We are always shocked when the politician we respect and vote for is revealed to enjoy cross-dressing and cock-fighting. We always think the neighbor next door is quiet and friendly until the police arrest him on child pornography charges. Faced with this commonality, the narrator wonders

What criterion ought one to adopt, in order to judge one's fellows?

I wondered how Swann would escape his dilema of love. His discovery of an

undercurrent of falsehood which debased for him all that had remained most precious, his happiest evenings

seems to do the trick, and this section ends well for him.

What seems to be happening is Proust sets out beautiful phrases that encapsulate all the details of his specific examples. Later (if we remember them) these same phrases turn out to be foreshadowings. A first reading gives us a sense of wonder; a second reading would likely gives us a sense of appreciation. So is the way "Swann in Love" closes.

Stefanie recently wondered about autobiographical details inserted by an author into his writing. I have also wondered how much of Proust is in the characters other than the narrator--for instance, do any of the details of Swann's love come from Proust's own experience? Though it seems unlikely he personally experienced everything he writes so insightfully about, how did he come to know such things so well and so precisely? A quote from the end of the section gives us only a hint:

like certain novelists, he had distributed his own personality between two characters....

In the last section of the book, the narrator rhapsodizes about names. He notes that

names themselves are not very comprehensive;

suggesting that a name alone does not conjure memories like a madeleine soaked in tea. Names seem to lead inevitably to disenchantments--experienced as the death of gods--as they can only ever be the smallest abstraction of something real. Like Swann, always eager to talk about Odette, to speak of anything that had to do with her, such as the street she lives on, the narrator now falls for Gilberte. Having been so long dazzled by the people who seemed of high society by their association with Swann and the Verdurins and the Guermantes, by his love he gains new powers of perceptions, and for the first time he sees such people as

containing in themselves no beauty that my eyes might have endeavoured, as in the old days, to extract from them.... They were just women, in whose elegance I had no belief, and whose clothes seemed to me unimportant.

The close of the book comes with the revelation that

The reality that I had known no longer existed.

The final three sentences once again wrap everything together in a tight, melifluous package that leaves us completely under Proust's influence. We don't want to spoil the effect by including it here, for those who haven't reached it yet, but instead allow the experience to come in its proper place. Enjoy.

Reading Through Proust's Binoculars

2006-08-19T16:53:00.000-05:00

Roger Shattuck, in his book Proust's Binoculars: A Study of Memory, Time, and Recognition in "A la recherche du temps perdu", posits that this novel is a book of disenchantments.

The privileged moments experienced by the narrator define his "profoundest sense of reality--a fleeting recreation of the past in the present, conferring a rare and pleasurable sensation of timelessness."

The narrator speaks of looking at his experiences at the Guermantes' dinner party through an "interior stereoscope." He speaks of seeing things double in time as one might see something double in space. This is the basis for Shattuck's theory, that Proust's idea of memory is a "stereoscopic or stereologic consciousness which sees the world simultaneously (and thus out if time) in relief." He makes the meaning of this idea clear, and reveals the form and reason of the novel's structure of interval and forgetting: "Merely to remember something is meaningless unless the remembered image is combined with a moment in the present affording a view of the same object or objects. Like our eyes, our memories must see double;..." The novel is structured, and the narrator's experiences revealed, in the binocular nature of human vision: "the disagreement between the two different versions of space which reach our consciousness from two separated eyes." It is the combination of slightly dissimilar images in memory that provides the most accurate perceptions.

Part of the feeling of intimacy so many have noted may be a result of what Shattuck calls "a series of inconglomerate thought processes" by which we identify and follow the narrator. It is an unusual mixture of personal memories described with the thoughts as they happened, and past events reconstructed with thoughts in hindsight.

Proust's first uncompleted novel, Jean Santeuil, was discovered about twenty years after his death. Justin O'Brien found in it the germ of In Search of Lost Time, although Proust "has not yet learned to orchestrate his themes. The greatest value of this volume ... is to make the world appreciate at last the ingenious composition of his more familiar definitive work--the very quality upon which, as it was least apparent at first, he himself most insisted." In a letter to Paul Souday, Proust wrote, "My composition is veiled and its outline only gradually perceptible because it unfolds on so vast a scale."

Shattuck believes that forgetting in the novel is just as important as remembering, that having forgotten provides the temporal distance between memories that gives relief similar to that rendered by the spacial distance between our eyes. As a working formula for the novel, we can see the reason behind its length, and are provided with a clue in the brilliant final paragraph of the overture, which closes the opening so satisfactorily that it could stand alone, while at the same time acts as the most beautiful opening sequence to the grand drama which follows, most specifically:

I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy....

My reading of "Swann in Love" is about three-quarters complete, and it is proving to be a joyful, painful, detailed section. The binocular vision in the macrocosm of the novel is here presented in microcosm, as Swann goes through every possible nuance of love. As we make the following points about Swann in love, we might put aside the image of a cup of tea for the more telling image of a cattleya, the flower which, for Swann and Odette, becomes a verb.

Swann's appreciation for a phrase of music launches his love for Odette. His comparison of Odette to works of art begs the question, does he love her solely for her resemblance to a painting he admires; or does his admiration of a painting predispose him to love her?

Swann's love takes on for him the elements of religion in a certain class of men:

the perpetual sacrifice which they are making of their comfort and of their practical interests has engendered a spiritual charm.

Later, when, engulfed in jealousy, Swann begins to long for death, it is

in order to escape not so much from the keenness of his sufferings as from the monotony of his struggle.

Odette takes on supreme importance in Swann's life. The narrator observes

Other people are, as a rule, so immaterial to us that, when we have entrusted to any one of them the power to cause so much suffering or happiness to ourselves, that person seems at once to belong to a different universe, is surrounded with poetry, makes of our lives a vast expanse, quick with sensation, on which that person and ourselves are ever more or less in contact.

We wonder how, for it seems inevitable, Swann will ever free himself from Odette.

One evening like any other, sure of meeting Odette at the Verdurins', Swann arrives to find she has already gone, and he goes in desperate search of her through the city. He is so affected by her absence that, from then on, he does anything to avoid the

possibility of a fresh outbreak of the heart-sickness which had manifested itself in him that evening, when he had failed to find her at the Verdurins'.

Proust continues to beautifully dissect love, showing Swann engaged in copying Odette's habits, adopting her opinions, and

being initiated into every one of the ideas in Odette's mind, of feeling that he had an equal share in all her tastes.

Swann recognises that other men found Odette a fascinating and desirable woman, which further arouses Swann's own desire

to secure the absolute mastery of even the tiniest particles of her heart.

After an offer of "cattleya" is rejected by Odette, Swann's suspicions take hold of him, and he subsequently makes a fool of himself by spying at the window, which he mistook for Odette's, of two old gentlemen. This experience becomes for Swann an occasional involuntary memory. From this comes the answer to one of my first questions: is there such a thing as voluntary forgetting?

To determine not to think of it was but to think of it still, to suffer from it still.

And when Swann forgets his sufferings, a word casually uttered, like a madeleine soaked in tea, had the power to resurrect in him the same bodily pain of the actual experience of his act of jealousy.

One of the first examples of disenchantment revealed by the binocular perception described by Shattuck comes when Odette manipulates and lies to Swann about seeing him. He suspects nothing in her words to him, but vaguely recalls in her expression a sorrow that he had seen once before, and then, he remembers:

it was when Odette had lied, in apologising to Mme. Verdurin on the evening after the dinner from which she had stayed away on a pretext of illness, but really so that she might be alone with Swann.

It is at this time Swann examines Odette's letters, and finds one she has written to M. de Forcheville which sets in motion the full expression of Swann's jealousy, extending, so far, for twenty-five thousand words.

Another minor example of the binocular perception comes when Mme. Verdurin uses the same words to express her rage at Swann as Francoise used at Combray when the chicken refused to die.

Swann's recognition of his sufferings provides strong reasoning behind the need for binocular perception in time in order to fully understand our experiences:

since it had been with a regular progression, day after day, that Odette had chilled towards him, it was only by directly contrasting what she was today with what she had been at first that he could have measured the extent of the change that had taken place.

Dr. Cottard, one of the guests at the Verdurins', murmurs a witty euphemism:

"I must just go and see the Duc d'Aumale for a minute."

However, the good doctor has not heard Forcheville's pun about the serpent-a-sonates, and it must be explained to him. Unfortunately, the edition we have does note offer any footnotes that might explain these plays on words to English readers. Perhaps those with the Davis translation can shed some light?

One final observation: reading Proust, at least in the Moncrieff translation, makes one, unconsciously perhaps, tend to think and write, if not in wholly digressive phrases, or subordinating clauses, at least with an abundance of commas.

Swann In Love, first part

2006-08-15T10:42:00.000-05:00

Having completed the first part of "Swann in Love" I feel that I am woefully behind in my reading. There are many thoughts running through my head, but they have not yet come together. (Perhaps this is the precise effect on the mind that the novel is meant to create, to replicate the experience of the narrator.) So I will offer a few scattered observations.

Proust pops up everywhere. Is this not because his novel encompasses all of our experience of life? It certainly seems to be the one book to take to the desert island, and more so the required reading of every human being than Oprah's claim for Uncle Tom's Cabin, or whatever it was she choose.

The love of Swann and Odette is a clinical case. The ways by which one falls in love and pursues that love are so carefully dissected, and for those who think it shallow and unlike their own truer love, it must be as a revelation.

Is Swann's love for Odette just as much an aspect of Swann's Way as the physical path? Is this to set up a contrast to the narrator's love affairs later in the novel? Is Swann's relationship with the Verdurins also an aspect of his Way? He seems to think awfully highly of them as the first part of this section ends.

In this section, the narrative has turned almost imperceptively omniscient. How does the narrator know what has happened between Swann and Odette when they are alone together? Even allowing Swann has reported all the details to the narrator, how does the narrator know what Odette is thinking, or feeling, her motivation behind certain actions? I don't think we are to believe he has collected all this information from the principal characters, but simply accept the switch in point of view. Yet it leads me to wonder, are these pure childhood memories or are they adult reconstructions? Are these episodes that the adult writer is now using to tell his story to the reader, but which he did not really know as a child, as he does other parts of the story? As most of Proust's characters are said to be variations on actual people, was Proust privy to both sides in another pair of the sort of love he describes between Swann and Odette, was he privy to one side and extrapolated the other, was he writing about one love that he had experienced himself, or was he creating all of it from scratch?

What is the significance of the essay on Vermeer that Swann once started writing, gave up for a time, used as an excuse, and has now taken up again?

On beginning to write

2006-08-14T18:23:00.000-05:00

I recently wrote about the fabulous scene in Swann’s Way where the narrator sees Mme. de Guermantes for the first time and is enraptured with her; what I just realized is that immediately after that scene comes the story of how the narrator becomes a writer. In a way, it makes sense that these two scenes are right next to each other – they are about artistic discovery, about beauty, about the excitement of seeing something newly. After he has seen Mme. de Guermantes, the narrator despairs at his inability, up until that point, to write. But it is as though the beauty he sees in her inspires him to produce beauty himself:

Then, quite apart from all these literary preoccupations and not connected to them in any way, suddenly a roof, a glimmer of sun on a stone, the smell of the road would stop me because of a particular pleasure they gave me, and also because they seemed to be concealing, beyond what I could see, something which they were inviting me to come take and which despite my efforts I could not manage to discover.

I love the way the narrator feels that the objects he sees around him are calling out to him to discover them. In response, he observes these objects, trying to figure out what it is they are saying:

I would stay there, motionless, looking, breathing, trying to go with my thoughts beyond the image or the smell. And if I had to catch up with my grandfather, continue on my way, I would try to find them again by closing my eyes; I would concentrate on recalling precisely the line of the roof, the shade of the stone which, without my being able to understand why, had seemed to me so full, so ready to open, to yield me the thing for which they themselves were merely a cover.

Earlier he had expected that philosophical ideas were going to inspire him to write, and his despair at his inability to write came because these ideas were getting him nowhere. But he learns here that it’s the material world and its beauty that will be his source of inspiration. When he sees the Martinville church and its steeples, he feels so compelled to figure out their source of fascination that he gets paper and pencil and begins to write while on a bumpy carriage ride. And this is how he responds to having written, finally:

When in the corner of the seat where the doctor’s coachman usually placed in a basket the poultry he had bought at the market in Martinville, I had finished writing it, I was so happy, I felt it had so perfectly relieved me of those steeples and what they had been hiding behind them, that, as if I myself were a hen and had just laid an egg, I began to sing at the top of my voice.

Beautiful, yes?

I Laughed Out Loud

2006-08-11T15:33:00.000-05:00

So I'm reading along in Swann'a Way this afternoon and the narrator is going on and on about how he loves hawthorns and I don't recall ever seeing a hawthorn. Wikipedia helped and it turns out to be a pretty shrub in the rose family and suddenly I want a hawthorn of my own, but the pink ones are not hardy in my plant zone. The white ones are just as nice though and now I am on the lookout for a variety that will fit my yard. nevermind for now where it will go. If you would like a hawthorn but don't have a yard to plant it in, there is always the bonsai option.

But I am digressing. Proust has an interesting narrative style that has probably been going on the whole time but that I just really noticed. As the young boy narrator rhapsodizes about his love of hawthorns, an older, adult narrative voice intervenes with observations, but yet it is all from the boy as if it were happening here and now. Since we are reliving the boy's experiences I expect boyish observations. But the grown up narrator's observations are inserted as the boy's observations. But as the reader I know I am in the memory of the grown up narrator so the adult observations make sense. But for me as a reader, it is easy for me to forget that all this is memory. All of it produced a pleasantly odd sensation that I can't describe and so am babbling in circles trying to explain. Anybody know what I am trying to get at?

This is not what made me laugh though. Right after I'm shaken by the conjunction of the adult's and the boy's point of view, the narrator turns all boy in his longing for Gilberte:

I loved her, I was sorry I had not had the time or the inspiration to insult her, hurt her, and force her to remember me. I thought her so beautiful that I wished I could retrace my steps and shout at her with a shrug of my shoulders: "I think you're ugly, I think you're grotesque, I loathe you!"

Ah yes, I am sure if he had said any of that to Gilberte she would have fallen madly in love with him too because how could she resist such wooing words of love?

Intimacy

2006-08-08T07:51:00.000-05:00

I started reading The Proust Project last night. The book consists of short essays by various writers writing about their favorite passage from In Search of Lost Time. I pretty much just read the introduction by André Aciman. He writes about encountering Proust for the first time which isn't necessarily the reading, but the first time a person has even heard the name. He said the memories are probably fuzzy or inaccessible for most, but trying to remember is an important part of the "Proust experience." I started thinking back and gave up because it seems that Proust has always been there and it would be impossible to separate him out.

That's just an interesting aside, what really caught my attention was this:

The novel is about intimacy, the miracle of intimacy--intimacy with others, intimacy with oneself, intimacy when we'd all but given up believing it existed--because there is also this about Proust that strikes an unmistakable chord: if intimacy is difficult to come by, it is because honesty is just as scarce, honesty with others and, above all, with oneself. One either feels this call to intimacy or one stops reading.

This passage struck me because there have already been several people here who have mentioned feelings of intimacy while reading Proust. Aciman believes the intimacy springs from a fusion between the lives of Proust and the reader. He suggests that it feels as though the novel is a novel about the reader's life, that all the reader must do is change the time and place and names. I can't say that I feel as though I am reading my life, but I can say that Proust seems to have infused my life. His benevolent presence seems to be everywhere.

For the record, Aciman's favorite passage is the one I coincidentally mentioned the other day, the one with the moonlight walk and the Telegraph Office and Hubert Robert. Aciman sees the passage to being about time and being lost and how being lost creates a timeless moment. I hope the rest of The Proust Project is as good as Aciman's introduction.

Pieter de Hooch

2006-08-07T07:27:00.000-05:00

He would begin with the sustained violin tremolos that are heard alone for a few measures, occupying the entire foreground, then all of a sudden they seemed to move away and, as in those paintings by Pieter de Hooch, which assume greater depth because of the narrow frame of a half-open door, away in the distance, in a different color, in the velvet of an interposed light, the little phrase would appear, dancing, pastoral, interpolated, episodic, belong to another world.

--Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

The Lydia Davis translation does note that de Hooch was a Dutch painter known of his handling of light and perspective, but a visual of a mother looking for lice in her daughter's hair is always of use, is it not?

Who is Hubert Robert?

2006-08-06T12:48:00.000-05:00

In each garden the moonlight, like Hubert Robert, scattered its broken staircases of white marble, its fountains, its half-open gates. Its light had destroyed the Telegraph Office. All that remained of it was one column, half shattered but still retaining the beauty of an immortal ruin. (Davis translation, pg 117)

Davis is pretty good at making note of people and places, but not this time. I should have suspected that Hubert Robert was a French artist. He lived 1733-1808, was prolific and apparently quite the man of daring adventures. He got caught in the Terror and was supposed to be guillotined, but lucky for him, some other fellow was mistaken for him and Robert got to keep his head. He also knew Voltaire who had him paint the decorations of his theater.

I suppose Proust's contemporary audience would know exactly who Robert was. Me, I am grateful for Google. But now that I know who he was, I think it interesting how Proust uses Robert's art as a basis for description of the Telegraph Office. It might have looked something like this:

Okay, maybe nothing so dramatic, but it does make the Telegraph Office seem more than it is, don't you think?

The reading experience

2006-08-03T18:20:00.000-05:00

Proust has an extraordinary passage in the Combray section of Swann’s Way (p. 86-88 in the Davis translation) on the pleasures of reading, where he traces the levels of experience and sensation he undergoes as he reads. First, though, he considers the relationship of the mind to the world outside the mind:

And wasn’t my mind also like another crib in the depths of which I felt I remained ensconced, even in order to watch what was happening outside? When I saw an external object, my awareness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it, lining it with a thin spiritual border that prevented me from ever directly touching its substance; it would volatize in some way before I could make contact with it, just as an incandescent body brought near a wet object never touches its moisture because it is always preceded by a zone of evaporation.

We have no real contact with the world; our consciousness of it is everything. This calls into question what the “real” is. If our perceptions of the world outside the mind take place in the mind, then what is the difference between having an image in our minds taken from a book and having one taken from the scene in front of our eyes? It’s all image:

All the feelings we are made to experience by the joy or the misfortune of a real person are produced in us only through the intermediary of an image of that joy or that misfortune; the ingeniousness of the first novelist consisted in understanding that in the apparatus of our emotions, the image being the only
essential element, the simplification that would consist in purely and simply abolishing real people would be a decisive improvement.

I’m not sure what to think of this, exactly; it recalls an earlier question of mine about the value of the world outside the mind: is he belittling it, or failing to see it? Is there really no difference between the real world and the imagined world? His focus on the means of perception seems to imply, sometimes, that everything is mind and we have access to nothing beyond the mind. Yet Proust is wonderful at evoking the feeling of what it’s like to be in the world, so I don’t think he’s belittling it. Paradoxically, a heightened awareness of the mind accompanies, in Proust, a heightened awareness of the world outside the mind. Awareness of the mind doesn’t become solipsistic; it seems to lead to a greater interest in what lies beyond it.

Proust then charts the workings of his mind as he reads, working from the inside, where all the action really takes place, outward. He begins with the innermost level, which is:

my belief in the philosophical richness and the beauty of the book I was reading, and my desire to appropriate them for myself, whatever the book might be.

His reading begins with desire – desire for truth and beauty. After this come “the emotions aroused in me by the action in which I was taking part” – the emotions evoked by the story itself. This is a particularly intense form of experience; the author:

provokes in us within one hour all possible happinesses and all possible unhappinesses just a few of which we would spend years of our lives coming to know and the most intense of which would never be revealed to us because the slowness with which they occur prevents us from perceiving them.

Reading offers the chance to pursue truth and beauty and also experience in a more intense form than we might find elsewhere. Proust’s narrator finds himself caught up in the experiences of characters who seem as real to him as real people. Next:

Already less interior to my body than these lives of the characters, next came, half projected in front of me, the landscape in which the action unfolded and which exerted on my thoughts a much greater influence than the other, the one I
had before my eyes when I lifted them from the book.

When fully absorbed in reading, we find that the landscape of the book becomes more real than wherever we may be sitting with our book in hand. The narrator is in Combray, but he might find himself homesick for mountains from a distant land. Finally,

Continuing to trace from the inside to the outside these states simultaneously juxtaposed in my consciousness, and before reaching the real horizon that enveloped them, I find pleasures of another kind, the pleasure of being comfortably seated, of smelling the good scent of the air, of not being disturbed by a visit ….

He finally comes to world he actually exists in, and is aware of the sensations of his own body. And that is the narrator’s description of reading – a jumble of feeling, image, and sensation. When reading, the narrator holds together in his mind many different levels of experience, different places, different emotions, different people, different realities.

One volume down

2006-08-03T17:24:00.000-05:00

I've experienced a strange reluctance to post here as I read. I'm sure most of that is because I like to form my own impressions of a book as a whole before being swayed by another's opinions, but I suspect part of it is also a nagging feeling of not having finished an assignment. But now my once pristine paperback copy of Swann's Way is fully post-it note-ed and slightly the worse for wear, I have explained to each of my relatives who asked me while I was on vacation why it was I was reading a seven part novel I had to confess didn't have much of a plot (prompting from one aunt what is possibly the only known comparison of Swann's Way to Napoleon Dynamite), and I have nearly overdosed on beautiful, quotable passages. I found it enthralling and suffocating and I loved every minute of it, even when I was yelling at Swann for being such a freaking idiot over Odette.

I have some thoughts on the events at the end of "Swann In Love" but I think I'll save those for another post a little later. For now, I need to clear my head a bit before I crack open the next volume.

Why read Proust

2006-08-03T10:51:00.000-05:00

As my own life threatens to become submerged in a sea of minutiae, I thought we could all use some inspiration to continue with our reading, so here are some thoughts from Arnold Weinstein’s “Recovering Your Story” essay on Proust. (Note on Weinstein: He’s a plot spoiler! You’ve been warned.)

To assent to Proust requires rethinking who we are, where we are (in the sense of where does the inner “I” reside), what do we have, what have we lost, how we might get it back. And this mandates acknowledging a kind of absolute poverty in ourselves – in knowing and owning ourselves – that is at complete odds with all our apparent possessions, such as houses, cars, money in the bank, all those things that can be seen in a “walking mirror.”

…And whereas we might regard such writing as merely playful or cunning, the real impact of such vision transcends style altogether and moves into our own backyard: Our own lives, experiences and perceptions are multiple, kaleidoscopic. Here is the payoff: A novel that upends our own complacent certainties, teaches us to make friends with metamorphosis, shows us what a shimmering thing a life is.

All the Way to Combray

2006-07-31T19:26:00.000-05:00

Having made it through Combray, several questions formed in reflection are eager to appear here, in the hope of finding answers to accompany them. We probably don't yet know the answers, but might hold these questions in mind as we continue our journey, witnessing Swann in Love.

When seven different people are asked to recall the details to a crime scene, there is usually seven different responses. A selective memory often allows one to make better sense of events. What evidence is there that Proust's narrator engages in autobiographical memory, remembering things with cognitive, emotional, or otherwise personal shadings that better coincide with his belief in himself than the actual events?

Though my father and mother owned a pink Cadillac before I was born, I remember riding in it. When a fantasy or lie is repeated and held so strongly, it often comes to resemble reality. What evidence is there that Proust's narrator holds false memories?

Involuntary memory is meant to signify recollections which come unbidden to mind. The heat of an emotional moment alone can sear an event into our memories. We can also store something as a memory on purpose, for example by repeating one's telephone number over and over. What evidence is there that Proust's narrator either intentionally or unintentionally remembered events?

Thousands of pages of memories are recalled by Proust's narrator involuntarily, enacted by a single sensory experience. What evidence is there that this involuntary memory is or is not fuller or more complete than a memory recalled by active effort?

The prominence of one sense over another leads to different forms of memory: space, image, taste, touch, smell, sound. Does Proust's narrator experience one form in preference over another? Is it possible to retain memories of each sensory experience to the same degree of completeness?

Can something which is forgotten be remembered later?

If there is such a thing as involuntary memory, is there also such a thing as voluntary forgetting?

Gardens in a Cup of Tea

2006-07-27T16:26:00.000-05:00

My reading of Proust is progressing slower than a stroll along the Meseglise Way, and I feel like I'm falling behind here. Rather than wait until I am through Combray (about twenty-five more pages), I want to offer a couple initial thoughts.

I had the opportunity to browse a mega-chain bookstore a couple weeks ago, and picked up the new translation of Le Cote du Swann. I sat down and read the introduction which Stefanie has already discussed. Though it sounds as if a certain degree of collaboration went into the individual translations, I still don't like the idea of different people of different backgrounds working on pieces of a whole. And it sounds as if the Moncrieff version stays truer to the style and effect of the original, while the new versions try to give a more precise translation of the words. I'm a devoted fan of Moncrieff.

When the narrator and Mamma can't sleep, Mamma proposes they read. But no books are at hand. She says, "Would you like me to get out the books now that your grandmother is going to give you for your birthday?" Ah, the good old days, when books were given as birthday presents. Remember, books still make great gifts!

The narrator often thinks in his sleep of what he has just been reading. This has happened to me numerous times, when I am truly immersed in a book: I set it aside to go to sleep, and the story continues in the form of a lucid dream, so I become the author of what happens next. It occurs only when I first fall asleep, and I never cease to be astounded when I wake up and I am no longer holding a book.

The narrator has dreams of women who sometimes bear a resemblance to some woman he has met while awake. When dreams like this happen to me, I am left with an unsettling wonder about whether or not the person who has appeared in my dream has had the same dream, can see or sense the dream in me, or has somehow projected to me an unknown or hidden truth.

I feel as if I get lost in some of the passages of dialogue--lose myself along Swann's Way--but I am following the suggestion of others to plow ahead and gain the overall feeling of the work instead of trying to reread and gain a deeper understanding of each line. I did find the obtuse compliments paid to Swann quite amusing. Otherwise, the passages of narrative resonate with me better.

Finally, a great deal of this book centers around the phenomenon of involuntary memory. So far, and the general sense I have of it is, the experience is a positive one; the memories are fond. Is this always the way with involuntary memory? Do negative experiences become blocked in some way from being activated involuntarily? One passage on this point, or counterpoint, struck me as most interesting. The narrator was in the habit of making mental lists of the talents of actors

which I used to murmur to myself all day long: lists which in the end became petrified in my brain and were a source of annoyance to it, being irremovable.

The sense of being irremovable turns these into involuntary negative memories. I hope this side of the theme is explored further.

The nature of plain old boring conscious memory

2006-07-26T11:13:00.000-05:00

Potential backtracking here, but as I was sitting here at work, a memory of a description I read in Swann's Way came floating into my mind from nowhere, like a palid, dyspeptic cousin of Proust's own powerful recollections. It was the image he ascribes to his old school memory of Combray, where there was a house, two floors connected by a staircase, his room, the dining room, the garden and the gate. And that was about all - islands of light floating in darkness, areas of recollection surrounded by a general and passive amnesia.

How apt! That's how I remember cities, locations, even people. When I think of Barcelona, I recollect the Gaudi Cathedral (or more accurately, the marvelous facade), a few rooms in Picasso's house, the exterior of a bar at which I sat, all connected by a vague impression of cobbled streets lit by lamplight at dusk. And that's about it. A childhood home is but the series of cascading little pools in the front surrounded by ferns, a massive pool in the back, an impression of a brick-walled kitchen, and the steep road outside down which I would glide on my bike and labor back up every day.

Even friends seem so distilled - a few key memories, rich moments that are tied to faces and names. Though, to refine this a little, I find that my impression of friends, even long term friendships, the tone, if you will, is predicated by the previous few months experiences. With conscious effort I can summon our rich history, but casual thought brings to mind only the previous few encounters, the general sense and feeling I have directed towards them. Thus a friend that I've known for the previous ten years, if I am still in regular contact, is viewed through the lens of the past few months, while a friend I haven't seen in ages is viewed in a more casual, poor Proustian sense, composed of a few signatory memories that are statically keyed to my memory of them.

Has this made sense? My point is that Proust's recollection of his Combray world pre-madeleine is fantastically accurate as to how I visualize and recollect my past. Now I need me some madeleine-style memories to explode those fragments into submersive wholes!

For that matter, have any of you guys ever experienced a total sensory immersion memory experience Proustian extravaganza before? I'm going to try and recollect if I have, but the problem is that my memory of that moment of complete immersion is now fragmented by the imperfect nature of my experience and memory since! (Did that make sense as well?)

Proust and art

2006-07-23T09:46:00.000-05:00

Cross-posted at Of Books and Bicycles

I’m about 100 pages into Swann’s Way and noticing how often Proust talks about art, and how he even more often talks about reading. His descriptions of the experience of reading are among the best I’ve ever read. (I feel, as I’m reading this, that I find something blog-worthy on just about every page. How do people who try to write something large and definitive about this book do it?) When it comes to writing about Proust, what I most want to do is give you a quotation and say, isn’t that great? And then another quotation and another, and say, isn’t that just brilliant? Don’t you love it?

On the narrator’s grandmother and books:

Though she judged frivolous reading to be as unhealthy as sweets and pastries, it did not occur to her that a great breath of genius might have a more dangerous and less invigorating influence on the mind even of a child than would the open air and the sea breeze on his body.

That’s the wonder and the danger of books, isn’t it, that you just never know what effect they will have. Yes, children should read great works of genius, and, no, you absolutely cannot control how they read them or what they will learn. This lesson seems worth learning, though; again, about the grandmother:

In fact, she could never resign herself to buying anything from which one could not derive an intellectual profit, and especially that which beautiful things afford us by teaching us to seek our pleasure elsewhere than in the satisfactions of material comfort and vanity.

The novel describes a tension between art for the sake of beauty and art for the sake of moral edification. The tension appears in the grandmother’s attitude – she wants art to teach an anti-materialistic lesson and yet she thinks in terms of “intellectual profit.” The language of materialism is still there. Are we supposed to “gain something” from art? Or are we supposed to seek out beauty for beauty’s sake? Or, in seeking out beauty for beauty’s sake, do we gain something, perhaps unintentionally? The narrator (and presumably Proust) comes down on the side of art for art’s sake. This is about the narrator’s mother reading aloud from a George Sand novel; Sand’s prose:

always breathes that goodness, that moral distinction which mama had learned from my grandmother to consider superior to all else in life, and which I was to teach her only much later not to consider superior to all else in books too …

What the narrator wants is not moral distinction, but beauty. For him, any lessons to be learned from art begin with beauty, not with a moral sense.

The narrator often thinks in artistic terms, in terms of how a novelist or a painter might see the world. He thinks about his childhood view of Swann, so different from the Swann he knew as an adult, and says about the mistaken, childhood version of Swann that he “resembles less the other Swann than he resembles the other people I knew at the time, as though one’s life were like a museum in which all the portraits from one period have a family look about them, a single tonality.”

This reminds me of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie where every portrait Mr. Lloyd paints comes to look like Miss Jean Brodie rather than the ostensible subject. The artists in both examples see what they want to see, paint what they are really thinking about rather than what appears in front of them. The way people make sense of their lives, then, the things they are willing to see and the things they aren’t, what they choose to focus on and what they block out, is similar to the way artists take the materials they have around them and transform them to fit into their own vision. It’s all an act of interpretation, and we all do it, all the time.

This interpretation, this transformation of the everyday, can happen in conversation too. Describing the “lady in pink,” the narrator says:

She had taken some insignificant remark of my father’s, had worked it delicately, turned it, given it a precious appellation, and encasing it with one of her glances of the finest water, tinged with humility and gratitude, had given it back changed into an artistic jewel, into something “completely exquisite.”

An “artist” can be found anywhere, transforming the seemingly insignificant into something beautiful. I can see why Virginia Woolf admired Proust; this scene reminds me of Mrs. Ramsay and her dinner party; Mrs. Ramsay is another artist whose medium is people and conversation, an artist who can transform a meal – a thing that happens every day – into something exquisite and perfect.

I haven’t even gotten to the reading scene, so I must return to it later, or perhaps someone else will write about it. It is a wonderful description of the way the book, the mind, and the outside world blur when one is reading.

Literary Influences

2006-07-22T09:13:00.000-05:00

I am almost done with Edmund White's Proust biography. I've been keeping track of Proust's literary and philosophical influences and I thought I'd share what I have thus far discovered.

Proust "intensely admired" George Eliot and was particularly fond of Middlemarch. He identified with Causobon who spent his life on one "great" work. Proust believed, as White puts it, "that life presents us but one book to write, the story of our own existence which we must merely 'translate.' " I imagine admiring a character who failed to complete his life's work was a reflection of Proust's concern about his own work. In his late 30s he was so ill with asthma he was always telling his friends that he expected to die soon. Yet he managed to live until he was 52.

Proust also admired, and was friends with, Anatole France. France wrote the preface to Proust's first book Pleasures and Days in 1896. Yet even he complained to his secretary, not to Proust, that Proust wrote "sentences interminable enough to make you consumptive." With friends like these...

Other authors Proust read and admired are Balzac, Shakespeare (I wonder what reading Shakespeare in another language is like?), Flaubert, and Goethe. He was especially admiring of Ruskin and translated two of his books, The Bible of Amiens and Sesame and Lilies into French. Proust did not know much English though so he had his mother and an Enlishwoman, Marie Nordlinger, write a word-by-word translation for him which he then rewrote. Apparently he managed a translation that sounded very much like Ruskin. What Proust liked best about Ruskin were his aesthetic ideas. He didn't care a whit for Ruskin's ideas about reform. If anybody has read, or knows anything about Ruskin, a post about his ideas would be interesting (hint, hint).

Proust also read, and disagreed with Sainte-Beuve. In fact In Search of Lost Time was originally conceived as a short novel called Against Sainte-Beuve, Memories of a Morning. I know even less about Saint-Beuve than I do about Ruskin. I searched my library's catalog though and found what appears to be an essay Proust wrote about Sainte-Beuve. I say "appears" because for some reason, even though the books are in English, my library insists on listing their titles in French. I have requested it and will be sure to post about it if it turns out to be worthwhile.

Sorry

2006-07-20T20:09:00.000-05:00

I had to turn on word verification for comments. I hate word verification. But two days in a row now we've gotten comment spam. Stupid spammers.

A mobile sense of self

2006-07-18T20:54:00.000-05:00

I feel the same trepidation that Dorothy experienced when writing up her first post on Proust; what consoles me is that the rest of you will be not only understanding if my post rambles and fails to connect, but perhaps can even help me reach the conclusion I'm striving for!

I've just finished reading Part One, which terminated in the infamous and shockingly violent scene with the madeleine. Throughout those first sixty or so pages, I watched out for the interplay between memory, dreams and active thought, trying to codify their relationship to each other. Not sure I got very far, but here are my thoughts:

Involuntary memory isn't just activated by objects, but by any kind of external stimuli. In the very first paragraph, there's a fascinating line where the narrator actually identifies with the immediate subject of his book, becoming of all things a church or a quartet. Self, and one's sense of self, can be disarmed by the power of dreams, by memory, by any strong sense of dislocation resulting from either being ambushed by sleep, or by a sleep too deep or potent.

Check out this quote from page 4:

But for me it was enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was so heavy as completely to relax my consciousness; for then I lost all sense of the place in which I had gone to sleep, and when I awoke in the middle of the night, not knowing where I was, I could not even be sure at first who I was; I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as my lurk and flicker in the depths of the cave-dweller; but then the memory - not yet of the place in which I was, but of the various other places where I had lived and might now very possibly be - would draw me up out of the abyss of not-being, from which I could never have escaped by myself; in a flash I would traverse centuries of civilization, and out of a blurred glimpse of oil-lamps, then of shirts with turned-down collars, would gradually piece together the original components of my ego.

Sense of self is clearly a fragile thing; it can be robbed by simply a deep sleep, or an engrossing dream, or as we later see, sent outside of time (in a sense) by an involuntary memory. When I read these first 60 pages the first time, I chalked up their effusive explorations of random stimuli and domestic memories to Proust's own excitement at starting his book, much like a thorough bred horse will stomp and prance as it seeks to leave the racing gate. But now, looking at it closer, I wonder if it is not all a setup of the themes Proust will explore throughout the rest of the novel.

Another line leaps out at me:

Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves and not anything else; by the immobility of our conception of them.

Could you somehow reverse this? Perhaps the apparent immobility of our sense of self is forced upon us by the conviction that we are ourselves and not anything else; by the immobility of our self-conception? Could Proust perhaps be seeking to explode this immobility through his recounting of his nocturnal experiences, and demonstrate just how mercurial our sense of self is, liable to be affected not just by our dreams, but by people's perception of whom we are, a la Swann? Thus a thigh can create a woman, a room can dictate our sense of time, and a madeleine can take us back, beyond normal memory, so that we seem to wholly exist within a town of our childhood.

Long Sentences

2006-07-18T07:53:00.000-05:00

I have read in various places that Proust's long sentences are intimidating for a majority of people. I can't say that I have ever been intimidated by a sentence before. The accumulation of sentences, yes, but not the individual sentence. Proust's sentences may be long, but wow, they contain so much! Apparently Proust spoke in long sentences too. According to Edmund White in his little Proust biography,

Proust's complicated way of talking was dubbed by his friends with the French made-up verb proustifier, "to Proustify."

I find this a highly amusing tidbit. It is good to know that Proust is consistent in speech and print and I now have a new verb for when someone starts getting complicated and long-winded.

Voluntary and Involuntary Memory

2006-07-16T16:26:00.000-05:00

Dorothy highlighted a passage from the madeleine scene yesterday in which memory is portrayed as something beyond the reach of the intellect and rests mainly in the realm of chance. The madeleine is an example of involuntary memory. What I find most curious about Proust's idea is that he places the key to memory in objects. The taste or smell or feel of an object can unlock a memory in such a way that one is transported back in time to relive it. But finding the key is purely chance, if we don't encounter the right object before we die, then we will never experience whatever memory that object is the key to. We don't even know what the keys look like though so we can't even search for them.

This makes me feel sad. I know our memories are not perfect, all I have to do is talk to me sister about our childhood and it is abundantly clear that I remember things she doesn't, she remembers things I don't and if we both remember the same thing we each remember it differently. What makes me sad is the idea that there are things I could remember if only the right key came along. I am tempted to dredge my mind for childhood objects--sea shells, rubber flip-flops, Hostess Cupcakes, pecans--which I might acquire to wake up a memory or two. But then I wonder, do I want to remember? Why should I care? Will reliving a summer's day at the beach or a particular day when I walked to school make much difference to me in the here and now? Proust is currently silent on why or if it matters. Perhaps this will be revealed later.

Involuntary memory is set in opposition to voluntary memory. Voluntary memory is "the memory of the intelligence." Because of the origin of a voluntary memory, Proust sees it as being dead: "the information it gives about the past preserves nothing of the past itself." Is this true? I recall moments at will and remember feelings and details, close my eyes and am there. Am I just fooling myself, allowing my imagination to fill in the details rather than actually remembering? Which leads me to another question. If I experience an involuntary memory of say, a hike in the mountains, can I then recall it at will, or does that turn it into a voluntary memory? Or would I need to use the key if I wanted to experience the memory again? And would it work?

So much to think about. Maybe someone who knows Proust better than I has a few answers, or maybe the answers will arrive as I read. If nothing else, Proust is giving me a lesson in patience.

Reading Proust

2006-07-15T09:09:00.000-05:00

Cross-posted at Of Books and Bicycles

Writing about Proust makes me nervous, just like the thought of reading him once did. But now I’ve read enough to know the reading is not so very, very difficult. And now’s the time to learn that writing about him isn’t so very, very difficult either.

For me, the trick to reading Proust is patience; I can’t read too many pages at once, or I’ll feel like I’ve got too much to absorb. What this means is that I’ll be reading Proust forever, which, at this early point at least, I’m thinking isn’t so bad. Because what a companion the narrator is turning out to be! I love following his thoughts wherever they lead, and they do lead all over the place, from one time to another, one story to another.

Most of the first section is taken up with the narrator’s memories of his childhood, and especially his childhood attempts to claim his mother’s attention – specifically, to make sure she gives him his goodnight kiss. The pain he feels when he can’t have her attention is overwhelming – I feel his despair and sadness very strongly. It reminds me that children, with very little experience of the world, have no larger context with which to understand their sufferings. The narrator as a child has nothing else in his life but his family; they are his universe, and when the universe doesn’t follow its regular patterns, it is, truly, a catastrophe. The novel begins with the narrator as an adult looking back on his childhood; this structure leads us to wonder what the true meaning of this childhood suffering is. Is it really that the child lacks a larger context with which to make sense of pain and loss, and when he gains one, this suffering at his mother’s absence will subside? Or does gaining a larger context change nothing, so that one’s childhood sufferings really become the defining moments of one’s life? This passage leads me to think it is the latter:

But for a little while now, I have begun to hear again very clearly, if I take care to listen, the sobs that I was strong enough to contain in front of my father and that broke out only when I found myself alone again with Mama. They have never really stopped; and it is only because life is now becoming quieter around me that I can hear them again, like those convent bells covered so well by the clamor of the town during the day that one would think they had ceased altogether but which begin sounding again in the silence of the evening.

In the midst of the child’s suffering, however, I found humorous scenes, particularly of the narrator’s great-aunts. When Swann gives the family a case of wine (for those of you not familiar with the novel, Swann is a friend of the narrator’s parents, and a frequent visitor at their house), the aunts thank him in a manner so obscure Swann could never recognize the thank you for what it was, but the aunts are confident they have done their social duty. They comically refuse to recognize Swann’s true social status, much higher than they give him credit for. One of the great-aunts:

Had him push the piano around and turn the pages on the evenings when my grandmother’s sister sang, handling this creature, who was elsewhere so sought after, with the naïve roughness of a child who plays with a collector’s curio no more carefully than with some object of little value.

This mistake leads the narrator to consider the uncertainty of identity:

None of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others. Even the very simple act that we call “seeing a person we know” is in part an intellectual one. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and of the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly occupy the greater part.

The “Swann” that the narrator’s family sees is very much their own construction – they see only parts of him, the parts they are comfortable with and that make sense to them – and the “Swann” that other people see will be very different.

Not only is our perception of other people incomplete, contingent, shaped by what we are willing and able to see in them and not what is really “there, ” but our perception of ourselves is equally uncertain. It is this idea that introduces the famous “madeleine” scene. About our relationship with our own past, the narrator says:

It is a waste of effort for us to try to summon it, all the exertions of our intelligence are useless. The past is hidden outside the realm of our intelligence and beyond its reach, in some material object (in the sensation that this material object would give us) which we do not suspect. It depends on chance whether we encounter this object before we die, or do not encounter it.

The narrator then goes on to discuss the madeleine dipped in tea and the memories this suddenly and unexpectedly invokes in him. He has no control over these memories; they are involuntary, coming to him without any foreknowledge or effort on his part. Because of the tea and the madeleine, consumed at just the right time, memories flood him, memories that, as I understand it, he will spend many of the following pages describing. But he might possibly have missed this experience entirely; it is chance that allows us to access our own pasts, our chance encounters with objects that can suddenly unlock memories held unknowingly in our minds. When the objects that surround us do speak to us in this way, telling us something about who we are, then we can only accept it as a gift we are giving to ourselves – a gift of ourselves to ourselves.

Characters

2006-07-15T07:54:00.000-05:00

I've read up to the end of the first part of "Combray" and I must say I am enjoying Proust very much. It strikes me that he writes in a sort of literary hyperlink where you have this guy in bed with insomnia and you get to the part about laying a certain way and there is a link and you click on it and it takes you to Combray where little Marcel can't sleep because he did not get a kiss from his Mama.

At Combray we meet quite a cast of characters. The family cracks me up. Grandma taking a walk in the garden no matter the weather and her reconnaisance missions when someone rings the doorbell. The aunts who want to thank Swann for the wine and think that by saying some neighbors are really good they are being so very clever and Swann will take the compliment and think them so witty. Grandpa, who also has trouble saying what he means, trying to manipulate Swann to talk about a certain subject. And the whole family thinking they are above Swann in social standing and those, but not them, who associate with Swann drop a little lower in their view. But in reality Swann has a higher social standing than the family does and he is the one paying them a compliment rather than the other way around. Hilarious, with such subtlety. The way Proust develops these characters with the use of choice detail is enjoyable. I can see the family sitting in the garden, know who they are, what they like and don't like without having more than a few descriptive things said about them.

There is much in these first pages to talk about, but I had to bring up the pleasure the quirky characters provide before getting to the more serious stuff.

Heading for the finish line!

2006-07-14T17:15:00.000-05:00

Okay, folks, wish me well this weekend: I am going to sprint the last 100 pages of "Swann's Way" before I head off to Yosemite next week.

General comment about the experience: Terrific. Loved it. Absolutely crazy over the Combray half of the book. Swann's Way started a bit roughly, but evened out and now, 100 pages from the end, Proust is tossing off some seriously snippy writing -- fur is flying, let me tell you!

More next week...Let's talk madeleine's Monday, shall we?

Proust and Asthma

2006-07-13T07:48:00.000-05:00

I read a bit of Edmund White's short biography of Proust last night and came upon this passage:

Asthma was one of the great decisive factors in Proust's development. Because of it he was constantly treated as an invalid (and regarded himself as permanently sickly). Because of it he missed many months of school, was afraid to travel, and constantly had to cancel plans to see friends. Because of it he spent many days in a row, even weeks, lying perfectly still, struggling to breather. And because of it, at least indirectly, he died an early death at fifty-one. [...]Because of it he was forced to spend much of his life in bed. [...] Because of it he was forced to embrace solitude, but it also provided him with a ready excuse for keeping people at bay when he wanted to work. Because of it his family and friends and servants were tyrannized by his needs, sometimes even his whims.

I don't want to imply that illness makes writers great, because I don't think that is necessarily true, but because of his asthma he was able to write in the beginning of Swann's Way (Davis, pg 4 hardcover) about the invalid waking in a strange hotel in the middle of the night, seeing the light under the door and thinking it is almost morning. Proust writes "he will be able to ring, someone will come help him. The hope of being relieved gives him the courage too suffer." But the hope doesn't last long when the invalid realizes the lights are being turned off and the servants are going to bed and "he will have to suffer the whole night through without remedy."

For some reason I find this passage of less than a paragraph beautiful and sad and touching. It stirs up compassion and understanding and pity in me. The images shimmer up to my consciousness from time to time during my day and make me stop and think about being unwell and alone in a strange room. I think it is the line "The hope of being relieved gives him the courage to suffer" is what gets me most. That is a line that could not be written by someone who never experienced a major of chronic illness.

Often, but only a little at a time

2006-07-10T20:40:00.000-05:00

I came across this passage recently, about Swann's father losing his wife:

He could not be consoled for the death of his wife, but, during the two years he survived her, he would say to my grandfather: "It's odd, I think of my poor wife often, but I can't think of her for long at a time." "Often, but only a little at a time, like poor old Swann," had become one of my grandfather's favorite phrases, which he uttered apropos of the most different sorts of things.

Apropos of a different sort of thing, this phrase strikes me as a good description of how I will most likely read Proust. I'm not sure I can spend hours, or even much more than an hour on it, but I think I will return to it frequently. This is how I've begun, at any rate, by reading Proust a little at a time, 10 pages or so, savoring it, and then moving on to something else, ready before too long to return to it again. How about you?

De Botton on Proust

2006-07-10T14:45:00.000-05:00

Hello, I found this interview from NPR on with Alain De Botton's comments on Proust, and thought you all might want to check it out at some point.

Happy Birthday!

2006-07-10T07:22:00.000-05:00

It's Proust's birthday today. I found it out quite by accident but it made me very happy for some reason.

I began reading the Lydia Davis Swann's Way in bed on Saturday evening. Even though I read it before, it didn't quite strike me as being so beautiful the first time around. But Saturday night and again on Sunday, I found myself reading sentences over and over for no other reason than they were so exquisite.

And as far as notetaking, I am trying out a system of marking passages and of "indexing" at the top of each page what the major themes on the page are like "Mama refuses to kiss Marcel," and "Grandma's theory of weather and health." Hard to say at this point if the indexing will help since I am only on page 37 and everything is still fresh. I know the Modern Library editions have a "synopsis" at the back of the book, but looking at their headings they do not jog my memory like my top-of-page notes do--and this is all about memory in more way than one!

I plan on celebrating Proust's birthday by reading Proust. What better homage could there be?

Hello!

2006-07-08T20:08:00.000-05:00

I'm very excited about this venture, and doubly so for doing it with a group of people who's blogs I enjoy reading. Proust has long been a passion of mine, ever since I took a course on him back in college and read all of La Recherche in a frenzied blur. It was as far from Davis' suggested 'surrendering' as once can get, and I'm eager to attempt a slow, luxurious reading in which I can take my time and savor the experience. I've also got a lot of material saved up from that course which I plan to re-read, and am more than willing to scan or type up anything of particular interest for everybody to enjoy!

I've never been in a group bicycle ride, but reading Dorothy's blog has made such a metaphor seem apt for our endeavour. A bunch of strangers, gathering to enjoy a challenging past time, excited to test ourselves and willing to help each other accomplish our goal.

So - race on!

Lydia Davis's introduction

2006-07-08T17:30:00.000-05:00

First of all, if you haven't yet, check out Stefanie's post on two different introductions to Swann's Way. I thought I'd give a few quotations from the Lydia Davis introduction that I liked and didn't like. Writing this post is my way of getting in the mood to take on the novel itself, which I plan to do this evening. I'm psyching myself up.

Here is a description of Proust in conversation, and if the story isn't true, it should be:

One friend, though surely exaggerating, reported that Proust would arrive late in the evening, wake him up, begin talking, and deliver one long sentence that did not come to an end until the middle of the night. The sentence would be full of asides, parentheses, illuminations, reconsiderations, revisions, addenda, corrections, augmentations, digressions, qualifications, erasures, deletions, and marginal notes. It would, in other words, attempt to be exhaustive, to capture every nuance of a piece of reality, to reflect Proust's entire thought.

Isn't that perfect? Also:

Proust felt ... that a long sentence contained a whole, complex thought, a thought that should not be fragmented or broken. The shape of the sentence was the shape of the thought, and every word was necessary to the thought: "I really have to weave these long silks as I spin them," he said. "If I shortened my sentences, it would make little pieces of sentences, not sentences."

Here is Davis on how art shapes reality:

For only in recollection does an experience become fully significant, as we arrange it in a meaningful pattern, and thus the crucial role of our intellect, our imagination, in our perception of the world and our re-creation of it to suit our desire; thus the importance of the role of the artist in transforming reality according to a particularly inner vision: the artist escapes the tyranny of time through art.

I like this up until the last line. Nothing, I think, escapes the tyranny of time and the conclusion seems rather banal. But I like the description of how memory and imagination shape experience, and I like how Davis's "we" includes both Proust and, graciously, us. I'm not so sure about this claim, however:

The power of the intellect, and the imagination, have come to transform the inadequacy or tediousness of the real.

Here Davis describes how Swann's vision of Odette changes when he compares her to a painting. I'm not sure I care for this dismissal of the "real" in favor of the transformations of art. Art can give meaningful shape and form to our lives, but does admiring that process have to involve seeing the "real" as inadequate? However, I will have to withhold judgment until I read the novel.

Books About Proust

2006-07-08T11:03:00.000-05:00

I went a little Proust crazy at the library the other day but I managed to stop myself before I had requested more than three Proust books. There are others I want to look at too, but I only have two eyes and so many hours in the day and this is a long project and I must pace myself in order to make it to the end. That said, I am glad you are all with me, otherwise I would very likely burn out somewhere in the middle. The books I got from the library may be of some interest. They are:

Marcel Proust by Edmund White. It is in the Penguin Lives biography series. If you've not chanced upon the series before, it is very good. Writers writing about writers. And the books are all slim. Not definitive, but a taste to whet the appetite.

The Year of Reading Proust by Phyllis Rose. It appears to be a sort of interleaved memoir and reading of Proust. I am worried it is more memoir than Proust but hoping it might be good anyway.

The Proust Project edited by Andre Aciman. This is a book of short essays solicited from 28 writers. The writers writing on their favorite passage from Proust. One of the best things about it is, it appears to be organized by book, so the essays on Swann's Way are first and on down the line.

And there is another book I found on my own TBR shelf that I had completely forgotten about because it was hidden behind some other books. It is called The Sense of an Interior: Four Writers and the Rooms that Shaped Them by Diana Fuss. The four writers are Helen Keller, Sigmund Freud, Emily Dickinson and Marcel Proust. It looks like it will be interesting and I find myself wondering how it got shoved to the back of my shelf. I'm sure it was waiting for just the right time to reveal itself. That's my reasoning anyway and I'm sticking to it!

Note Taking

2006-07-05T21:10:00.000-05:00

I am beginning my reading of Swann's Way this evening. I'll be using he Lydia Davis translation and I, like Stefanie, found her introduction to be excellent. Indeed, I think that the introduction gave me the confidence I need to get through the text this time around. Interestingly enough, I think that having just finished a Henry James novel also helped me prepare for Proust. Both men like long, meandering sentences. I am excited to begin this endeavor!

I do have a question for my fellow Proust readers, though: how do you plan (if, indeed, you do) to take notes? I am not a big fan of writing in the margins of the text, although sometimes it is the most convenient way to jot down thoughts, etc. I do have a little Moleskine notebook that I could use as well, but fishing for the notebook could be inconvenient if I am, say, reading the book on the subway, etc.

Which brings me to another question: WHERE do you plan on reading your Proust? Do you think that the book would be best enjoyed and understood if you set aside a certain place and time each day to read it? I am thinking this might be my best approach. I discovered in my last several attempts at reading Proust that the text requires my full concentration and devotion. Who knows, maybe this time the sentences will seem to flow better and I'll not be able to put Proust down!

I am very interested in the logistics/mechanics of your reading of Proust. How do you plan to "make yourself comfortable" for the experience, so to speak?

Madeleine Recipes

2006-07-04T08:32:00.000-05:00

Becky mentions resisting buying madeleines to eat while reading Swann's Way but I say indulge! You can even make your own. Sadly for me, unless I can get my wizard-in-the-kitchen husband to figure out a vegan version--substitutes for milk, butter and eggs are required--I am going to have to depend on the rest of you to tell me what the cookies taste like. If he does come up with a goo recipe, I'll be sure to pass it along.

2006-07-03T23:31:00.000-05:00

I have to admit that I've never read a word of Proust. Not a quote, a line, or a phrase. The only reason I even know of him is through some sort of literary diffusion by which his name has been dispersed through the pages of other books. I know there is something to do with a madeline (and I suspect I shall have to resist buying some at the grocery store to accompany my reading) and, well, that's about it. I'm excited to tackle these books with a group though and hope I'll be able to keep up!

Proust in England

2006-07-03T09:30:00.000-05:00

I first attempted to read "Swann's Way" during a trip to England several years ago. My husband and I decided to visit Oxford and while there, the Oxford University Press store. Warning to readers: if you have are unable to control yourself in a bookstore DO NOT GO THERE. We purchased many books that we then shipped back to the U.S.

One of my many purchases there was "Swann's Way." I was in grad school at the time and my roommate was reading part of it for a class. She described the whole iconic Madeline scene and I felt like it was just the sort of thing I would like to read. So once I bought the book I was ready to dive right in.

Reading Proust on buses and trains and in bed and breakfasts in England when you can snatch a few minutes here and there is not ideal. I had no idea when I started the book how incredibly detailed everything would be. No idea that sentences would go on forever. No idea that at times there was very little action. It was hard to hold my attention, but I knew somehow that I liked it and would need to finish it. Someday.

I've since tried a couple times to read the book. Its never quite been the right moment and I've always felt that I needed some support to get through it. I think I've finally found that moment and the support!

So, I will be reading the Lydia Davis translation. Thanks to Stefanie's post I will get to that introduction today. I am currently reading "Absurdistan" by Gary Shteyngart and once done with it will be ready for Proust. Just finished "A Potrait of a Lady" (loved it) and needed something much different from James and Proust!

An Introductory Comparison

2006-07-02T20:07:00.000-05:00

Initially I had decided to read the Moncrieff/Killmartin/Enright Modern Library edition of Proust but since I was able to get the new translation as a bargain book I am now waffling. If I were to choose solely on the introductions, I would choose Lydia Davis's translation hands down. Her introduction is informative, insightful, and goes against the nature of all introductions to classics I have ever read by also being useful. Plus, it doesn't give anything away. But I am getting the impression there really isn't anything to give away in Proust. Davis suggests the way to read Proust is

in the full, slow reading and rereading of every word, in complete submission to Proust's subtle psychological analyses, his precise portraits, his compassionate humor, his richly colored and lyrical landscapes, his extended digressions, his architectonic sentences, his symphonic structures, his perfect formal design.

That makes me want to dive right it. If you don't have the Davis translation, I recommend you borrow it from the library or take a few minutes to read it when next you are at the book store.

The Modern Library introduction was written by Richard Howard who has a Pulitzer to his name. It is an unfortunate introduction in that Howard attempts to set a light and breezy tone to make first time readers comfortable and confident. His is a letter of introduction to both the first time reader and to Proust introducing the modern American reader to him (as if Proust cares). Far from making this reader feel excited and confident in the book I am about to read, Howard succeeds in making me feel like a six year old whose hand needs to be held while crossing a busy intersection. He tells Proust that modern American readers are intimidated by his reputation for being difficult and his long sentences. He asserts that we are not likely to understand Proust's interest in time and the past because Americans "have a kind of allergy to the past." By the end Howard is fervently wishing that through his charitable introductions of new readers to Proust and Proust to his new readers, that we will get along and "proceed some way together."

Whereas Davis's introduction is everything I could want in an introduction, Howard's is nearly useless. If you manage to dig past the tripe there are a few bits of information that can be cleaned up for use. What I like best about Davis's introduction is that she writes with the assumption that I am an intelligent reader. She acknowledges Proust's difficult reputation and explains the reasons for it, explains what Proust was up to with the long sentences and the minimal use of punctuation as well as a few other points.

I have not yet placed my bookmark into either translation. I have not yet chosen my bookmark (an important thing to consider--something fru-fru? Serious? Artsy? It contributes to the whole enterprise at hand). My plan is to read a few pages of each edition and then decide which I like best. I know I shouldn't allow the introductions to influence me, but I must admit I am slightly inclined to Davis.

On reading Proust

2006-07-02T09:15:00.000-05:00

These two volumes of Proust arrived in the mail yesterday. They got here incredibly fast; I'd only ordered them two days earlier. The volumes are attractive. I love the cut edges; the print is fairly large, and at only 400 or so pages each, they don't look overwhelmingly long. Of course, if I bought all the volumes at once and set them side by side, they might look overwhelmingly long.

This will be my first encounter with Proust; beyond the short quotation here and there, I haven't read him before. I have the impression that it will be difficult; I've heard of long sentences, long paragraphs, not much action, pages and pages detailing the tiniest of impressions. I am curious about whether I will love this, which I very well might, or whether I will be bored by it. Or a little bit of both.

I am certainly ready to give it a try though. I don't plan to start reading Swann's Way for another week or so, but I'm looking forward to it, and hoping that the discussion here will help me understand the book and keep me enthusiastic.

Overture

2006-06-30T13:07:00.000-05:00

My normal reading habit is to settle into bed with my book at the end of the day. The normal result is that I read maybe two pages and then fall asleep. If I'm determined to read a long work, such as a 1,000-plus page novel, I have to devote other, more wakeful, times of the day to the effort.

Writers are commonly taught that one should never end a chapter with a character going to sleep. The thought is that if there is a break in the action that permits the character to sleep, then the reader will be prone to sleep as well. The goal of the writer should be to keep the reader reading, to write a book that is un-put-down-able.

Proust begins his masterpiece with his narrator going to sleep. In minute detail.

We managed six pages last night before quickly dosing off.

FYI

2006-06-29T11:57:00.000-05:00

If it took Proust fourteen years to write his masterpiece, how long will it take to read?

If you choose to accept this mission, take a deep breath.

My reading will be from the two-volume Random House 1934 edition, translated as Remembrance of Things Past by C.K. Scott Moncrieff. As English translations and page numbers vary among editions, I will try to make the position and context of any references clear, so others can follow if they choose.

Assisting me in my reading will be Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life; Roger Shattuck, Proust's Binoculars; and Milton Hindus, A Reader's Guide to Marcel Proust.

Available online at the University of Adelaide Library are the French texts of the first four volumes, and the complete seven volumes of Moncrieff's English translation.

Welcome!

2006-06-29T07:28:00.000-05:00

Hello and welcome everyone. In case you didn't know about it, Barnes and Noble has several of the books of the new translation in hardcover as bargain books!

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

Guermantes Way

Sodom and Gomorrah

I was able to pick up a copy of the new translation of Swann's Way in the store as a bargain book but it does not appear to be available online. Everyone is welcome to read whichever translation he or she wants. I think it will be interesting to find out the differences in them.

You can begin posting Proust thoughts and links right away. Let's aim to begin discussion on section one of "Combray" in Swann's Way by July 15th. Depending on your translation, that comes out to 50-60 pages of reading. We'll keep the pace of 50-60 pages a week after that and make adjustments as needed.

If I have linked your name to your blog and you don't want the link, let me know. Likewise, if you have a blog and I didn't get your name linked to it let me know. Thanks and happy reading!

Involuntary Memory

Time Lost

The End of the Guermantes Way

On finishing In Search of Lost Time

Proust on Art

Back to Proust

Generalized Impressions

More Place-Names

The Intermittancies of the Heart

I am a laggard!

Unrequited Love

The Sportswriter

Proust on Writers

Art and Life and Proust

Happy Birthday Scott Moncrieff!

High praise for Proust

Desire

Proust and inconsistency of emotion

a quick note on Time Regained

Introductions and Uncertainties

A Few Questions

Introductions

Swann's Way

Two Swanns in Love

Proust on Procrastination

Colette and Proust meet

The Unseen Kiss

Place-Names

Reading Through Proust's Binoculars

Swann In Love, first part

On beginning to write

More posts on Proust

I Laughed Out Loud

Intimacy

Pieter de Hooch

Who is Hubert Robert?

The reading experience

One volume down

Why read Proust

All the Way to Combray

Gardens in a Cup of Tea

The nature of plain old boring conscious memory

Proust and art

Literary Influences

Sorry

A mobile sense of self

Long Sentences

Voluntary and Involuntary Memory

Reading Proust

Characters

Heading for the finish line!

Proust and Asthma

Often, but only a little at a time

De Botton on Proust

Happy Birthday!

Hello!

Lydia Davis's introduction

Books About Proust

Note Taking

Madeleine Recipes

Proust in England

An Introductory Comparison

On reading Proust

Overture

FYI

Welcome!