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À la recherche du temps perdu #2
In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove
A new definitive text of Marcel Proust's novel was published by the Bibliotheque de la Pleiade in 1989. For the present six-volume edition, D. J. Enright has further revised Terence Kilmartin's acclaimed revision of C. K. Scott Moncrieff's translation, and has incorporated significant new material. As a result, Proust's masterpiece emerges with renewed freshness and authority in this unassailable translation. Each volume contains notes, addenda and synopses, and the sixth and final volume also includes a Guide to the complete work.
634 pages, Hardcover
First published June 23, 1919
About the author
Marcel Proust
1,713 books6,874 followersMarcel Proust was a French novelist, best known for his 3000 page masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time), a pseudo-autobiographical novel told mostly in a stream-of-consciousness style.
Born in the first year of the Third Republic, the young Marcel, like his narrator, was a delicate child from a bourgeois family. He was active in Parisian high society during the 80s and 90s, welcomed in the most fashionable and exclusive salons of his day. However, his position there was also one of an outsider, due to his Jewishness and homosexuality. Towards the end of 1890s Proust began to withdraw more and more from society, and although he was never entirely reclusive, as is sometimes made out, he lapsed more completely into his lifelong tendency to sleep during the day and work at night. He was also plagued with severe asthma, which had troubled him intermittently since childhood, and a terror of his own death, especially in case it should come before his novel had been completed. The first volume, after some difficulty finding a publisher, came out in 1913, and Proust continued to work with an almost inhuman dedication on his masterpiece right up until his death in 1922, at the age of 51.
Today he is widely recognized as one of the greatest authors of the 20th Century, and À la recherche du temps perdu as one of the most dazzling and significant works of literature to be written in modern times.
Born in the first year of the Third Republic, the young Marcel, like his narrator, was a delicate child from a bourgeois family. He was active in Parisian high society during the 80s and 90s, welcomed in the most fashionable and exclusive salons of his day. However, his position there was also one of an outsider, due to his Jewishness and homosexuality. Towards the end of 1890s Proust began to withdraw more and more from society, and although he was never entirely reclusive, as is sometimes made out, he lapsed more completely into his lifelong tendency to sleep during the day and work at night. He was also plagued with severe asthma, which had troubled him intermittently since childhood, and a terror of his own death, especially in case it should come before his novel had been completed. The first volume, after some difficulty finding a publisher, came out in 1913, and Proust continued to work with an almost inhuman dedication on his masterpiece right up until his death in 1922, at the age of 51.
Today he is widely recognized as one of the greatest authors of the 20th Century, and À la recherche du temps perdu as one of the most dazzling and significant works of literature to be written in modern times.
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October 30, 2023
Peacockery… Exclusive circles exist under the sign of swagger…
Time runs, now the narrator is a hypochondriac, nervous and susceptible youth and he is a product of his milieu. He falls in love but his love is unrequited and his heart is broken. He finds a refuge by the sea and spends his days immersed in romantic daydreams and amorous fantasies.
The lovelorn live under the sign of suffering…
Perusing the past Marcel Proust meticulously describes every minute detail so any insignificant trifle turns into an important and special thing…
High society exists under the sign of hypocrisy… They smile at each other sweetly and stab each other in the back.
However, wishing to magnify themselves in the eyes of the princely or ducal families which are their immediate superiors, these aristocrats also know that they can do this only if they enhance their name with something extraneous to it, something which, other names being equal, will make theirs prevail: a political influence, a literary or artistic reputation, a large fortune.
Time runs, now the narrator is a hypochondriac, nervous and susceptible youth and he is a product of his milieu. He falls in love but his love is unrequited and his heart is broken. He finds a refuge by the sea and spends his days immersed in romantic daydreams and amorous fantasies.
The lovelorn live under the sign of suffering…
In love, happiness is an abnormal state, capable of instantly conferring on the pettiest-seeming incident, which can occur at any moment, a degree of gravity which in other circumstances it would never have. What makes one so happy is the presence of something unstable in the heart, something one contrives constantly to keep in a state of stability, and which one is hardly even aware of as long as it remains like that. In fact, though, love secretes a permanent pain, which joy neutralizes in us, makes virtual and holds in abeyance; but at any moment, it can turn into torture, which is what would have happened long since, if one had not obtained what one desired.
Perusing the past Marcel Proust meticulously describes every minute detail so any insignificant trifle turns into an important and special thing…
Theoretically we are aware that the earth is spinning, but in reality we do not notice it: the ground we walk on seems to be stationary and gives no cause for alarm. The same happens with Time. To make its passing perceptible, novelists have to turn the hands of the clock at dizzying speed, to make the reader live through ten, twenty, thirty years in two minutes. At the top of a page, we have been with a lover full of hope; at the foot of the following one, we see him again, already an octogenarian, hobbling his painful daily way round the courtyard of an old people’s home, barely acknowledging greetings, remembering nothing of his past.
High society exists under the sign of hypocrisy… They smile at each other sweetly and stab each other in the back.
December 29, 2021
(Book 685 From 1001 Books) - À la recherche du temps perdu II: À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (À la recherche du temps perdu #2) = In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (In Search of Lost Time, #2), Marcel Proust
Writing about this novel should be a separate book in itself. You do not know where to start, as if you want to describe the pyramids of "Egypt" stone by stone, and you really do not know how to deal with the storm of words, the glorious word is small for this novel. Far superior to the Gothic cathedrals, the opera's of Wagner, Beethoven, and all of the Expressionists. But what we learn most about this novel is that, the book is full of a concern, a concern called the fear of death, and the fear of dying, and not saying all the words that eat your mind. This may or may not be understandable to many people. That your brain is full of words, that knock themselves on this door and that wall, to get out, but they can not, they despise life, and devote themselves to an incredible imagination, with which nothing can be equal to it.
در جستجوی زمان از دست رفته؛ کتاب دوم - مارسل پروست (مرکز) ادبیات؛ تاریخ نخستین خوانش ماه نوامبر سال1994میلادی
عنوان: در جستجوی زمان از دست رفته، کتاب دوم: در سایه ی دوشیزگان شکوفا؛ نویسنده: مارسل پروست؛ مترجم: مهدی سحابی؛ تهران، نشر مرکز، سال1372، شابک9643052176؛ چاپ پنجم سال1385؛ موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان فرانسه - سده20م
کتاب نخست: «طرف خانه سوان»؛ کتاب دوم: «در سایه دوشیزگان شکوفا»؛ کتاب سوم: «طرف گرمانت یک»؛ کتاب چهارم: «طرف گرمانت دو»؛ کتاب پنجم: «سدوم و عموره»؛ کتاب ششم «اسیر»؛ کتاب هفتم «آلبرتین گمشده (گریخته)»؛ کتاب هشتم: «زمان بازیافته»؛
نوشتن در باره ی این رمان، خود باید کتابی جداگانه باشد؛ نمیدانید از کجا آغاز کنید، تو گویی بخواهید سنگ به سنگ اهرام «مصر» را، توصیف نمایید، و واقعا نمیدانید، با طوفان واژه ها و کلمات، چگونه برخورد کنید، واژه ی باشکوه، برای این رمان، کوچک است؛ شکوهی به مراتب برتر از ساختمان کلیساهای جامع «گوتیک»، اپراهای «واگنر»، «بتهوون»، و همگی «اکسپرسیونیست»ها؛ اما چیزی که، بیش از هر چیز، از این رمان درمییابیم، این است، که کتاب، از یک دغدغه، سرشار است، دغدغه ای به نام «هراس از مرگ»، و «ترس از مُردن»، و نگفتن آن همه واژه ای که، روانتان را میخورند؛ شاید این، برای مردمان بسیاری، قابل درک نباشد، و نیست؛ اینکه مغزتان پر از واژه هایی باشد، که خودشان را، به این در و آن دیوار میکوبند، تا خارج شوند، ولی نمیتوانند، زندگی را، ناچیز میشمارند، و خود را، وقف تخیلی خیال انگیز و باورنکردنی میکنند، که هیچ چیز را، یارای برابری با آن نیست؛ اینگونه میشود، که برترین وصف یکی از بزرگترین شاهکارهای تاریخ ادبیات، به شرح بیماری محدود میشود، و به این هم باور دارم، که بسیاری از شاهکارهای ادبی، پر از حالات انسانهای بیمار هستند؛ از «داستایوسکی» و «کافکا» گرفته، تا «سلین»، «هدایت»، «میشیما»، «فاکنر»، «وولف» و «جویس»، و ...؛ انسانها چیزی را نمیآفرینند، تا جاودانه شود، و همیشه این متفاوتها هستند، که جاودانه میشوند؛ «در جست و جوی زمان از دست رفته»، یکی از همین متفاوتهاست
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 01/11/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 07/10/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی
Writing about this novel should be a separate book in itself. You do not know where to start, as if you want to describe the pyramids of "Egypt" stone by stone, and you really do not know how to deal with the storm of words, the glorious word is small for this novel. Far superior to the Gothic cathedrals, the opera's of Wagner, Beethoven, and all of the Expressionists. But what we learn most about this novel is that, the book is full of a concern, a concern called the fear of death, and the fear of dying, and not saying all the words that eat your mind. This may or may not be understandable to many people. That your brain is full of words, that knock themselves on this door and that wall, to get out, but they can not, they despise life, and devote themselves to an incredible imagination, with which nothing can be equal to it.
در جستجوی زمان از دست رفته؛ کتاب دوم - مارسل پروست (مرکز) ادبیات؛ تاریخ نخستین خوانش ماه نوامبر سال1994میلادی
عنوان: در جستجوی زمان از دست رفته، کتاب دوم: در سایه ی دوشیزگان شکوفا؛ نویسنده: مارسل پروست؛ مترجم: مهدی سحابی؛ تهران، نشر مرکز، سال1372، شابک9643052176؛ چاپ پنجم سال1385؛ موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان فرانسه - سده20م
کتاب نخست: «طرف خانه سوان»؛ کتاب دوم: «در سایه دوشیزگان شکوفا»؛ کتاب سوم: «طرف گرمانت یک»؛ کتاب چهارم: «طرف گرمانت دو»؛ کتاب پنجم: «سدوم و عموره»؛ کتاب ششم «اسیر»؛ کتاب هفتم «آلبرتین گمشده (گریخته)»؛ کتاب هشتم: «زمان بازیافته»؛
نوشتن در باره ی این رمان، خود باید کتابی جداگانه باشد؛ نمیدانید از کجا آغاز کنید، تو گویی بخواهید سنگ به سنگ اهرام «مصر» را، توصیف نمایید، و واقعا نمیدانید، با طوفان واژه ها و کلمات، چگونه برخورد کنید، واژه ی باشکوه، برای این رمان، کوچک است؛ شکوهی به مراتب برتر از ساختمان کلیساهای جامع «گوتیک»، اپراهای «واگنر»، «بتهوون»، و همگی «اکسپرسیونیست»ها؛ اما چیزی که، بیش از هر چیز، از این رمان درمییابیم، این است، که کتاب، از یک دغدغه، سرشار است، دغدغه ای به نام «هراس از مرگ»، و «ترس از مُردن»، و نگفتن آن همه واژه ای که، روانتان را میخورند؛ شاید این، برای مردمان بسیاری، قابل درک نباشد، و نیست؛ اینکه مغزتان پر از واژه هایی باشد، که خودشان را، به این در و آن دیوار میکوبند، تا خارج شوند، ولی نمیتوانند، زندگی را، ناچیز میشمارند، و خود را، وقف تخیلی خیال انگیز و باورنکردنی میکنند، که هیچ چیز را، یارای برابری با آن نیست؛ اینگونه میشود، که برترین وصف یکی از بزرگترین شاهکارهای تاریخ ادبیات، به شرح بیماری محدود میشود، و به این هم باور دارم، که بسیاری از شاهکارهای ادبی، پر از حالات انسانهای بیمار هستند؛ از «داستایوسکی» و «کافکا» گرفته، تا «سلین»، «هدایت»، «میشیما»، «فاکنر»، «وولف» و «جویس»، و ...؛ انسانها چیزی را نمیآفرینند، تا جاودانه شود، و همیشه این متفاوتها هستند، که جاودانه میشوند؛ «در جست و جوی زمان از دست رفته»، یکی از همین متفاوتهاست
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 01/11/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 07/10/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی
January 28, 2016
I've long debated with myself - and friends - the actual benefits of re-reading versus a fresh read of a new book. Would re-reading really bring me a considerable number of new reflections, ideas and opinions to add to the first impressions I've gathered on my first read? And wouldn't this time spent on this repeated task be better employed by reading a completely different book that would instead and therefore give me completely different reflections on different subjects I perhaps haven't touched yet? In short: would a re-read prove effective considering time spent and rewards obtained?
For being in the middle of a serious Proustmania - obsession, really - I decided to re-read all of the volumes of his Recherche, even having questioned so much and for so long the advantages of a re-read. Well, in addition to everything else which I'll address along this review, this rexperience came to show me that, for some books, a re-read is extremely beneficial - if not almost required -, especially in the case of a very long novel, with intricate plot, underlying motifs and interconnections that are impossible not only to absorb - but also to notice - on a first read.
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower starts off by addressing one of Proust's most important beliefs - and a theme that will recurrently permeate his narrative: that what we understand to be someone, how we perceive and describe them, expect them to be, are merely an effort of our own intelligence into molding all of the characteristics we've been shown and seen through our own perception into an sculpture we believe to be a fully functional person. In order to develop his point, it seems the second volume makes a case of confusing us: majestic Swann is described as someone of little prestige while buffoon Dr. Cottard is a must-have guest in any respectable dinner party. Surely the writer confused their names after such a long hiatus between volumes?
A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs was only released in 1919, a good six years after the first volume was published due to the Great War. This time, however, Proust wasn't to pay for the publication costs and the book would even win the prestigious Prix Goncourt award, making him widely known and appreciated not only in France, but also across Europe.
The changes we observe in characters' reputations and actions are not exclusively confined to Swann and Dr. Cottard. Besides them, we also learn of M. Norpois and how his political views evolved over time. Just in the first twenty pages or so of this volume, the writer already sends us the clear message that people and their status are never set in stone and prepares us to a big roller-coaster ride when it comes to his characters (and that will last throughout all of the volumes). Proust's treatment of his personages feels like a superposition of a multitude of layers constituted of their past beings with the addition of the most current state at that particular time, which, granted, is only at the surface for a brief period, shortly being covered by yet another fresh and new layer that is for its turn as expirable as the previous one. This constant shift is, of course, accompanied by his narrator's - and our own - which follows the same pattern and, with these ever changing subjects, arises a million possibilities as to what will happen every time a character reappears, thus making Proust's creations always exciting and never predictable.
In addition to the conditions mentioned above - of a person's own interior alterations and how our perception of those is in constant transformation as well - there is the question of change of reputation by association. Being someone respected and admired in the most prestigious and intimate circles of the Parisian society wasn't enough to keep Swann from having his esteem considerably downgraded after his marriage to Odette, like those chemical elements that form a good substance while associated with hydrogen and are poisonous while in a chemical reaction with lead. Following this pattern, other characters will go up and down in the social scale depending on whom they're associated with, and also accompanying their respective ups and downs.
Just like the characters change depending on the point of view they're being observed from - much like the narrator's description of the Martinville steeples and their positions in relation to each other while on his car trip -, certain events on the plot also do so. Seemingly insignificant little moments - such as an insistent look from someone, a face expression, a phrase that appears to be innocently said in the midst of a longer dialogue or even a statement surrounded by a lengthy digression from the narrator that could be overlooked - retroactively take on a huge importance when analyzed from another perspective (even if that only comes 500 or 600 pages later) and one can't help to admire Proust's skillful incorporation of such "little details" that make his future events feel natural once they're fully developed, just as in life, where things certainly don't appear to us classified by importance - or even by the future importance they'll attain in our lives - and always in the right order. This is one of the characteristics that make his writing so organic and lifelike and what, at the same time, may be perceived as boring for some readers.
Still on the subject of how an event from one volume is important and brought to life again on a subsequent volume, we continue to witness how the narrator is incapable to control his nervous impulses - an inability that was first exposed to us in the goodnight kiss drama from Swann's Way - and easily gives in to his impulses even though he's fully aware of the consequences. Only this time such matters are related to love: his ungovernable need to establish a love connection with Gilberte and to receive it back from her makes him go to such lengths and to scheme manipulations that could be easily attributed to a sociopath. Besides the aforementioned connection to the previous volume, these pages are also connected to a subsequent one, anticipating in hundreds of pages his behavior and conduct he's to develop later in another relationship.
But back to the concerned volume, while Charles Swann is no longer a renowned gentleman, he still greatly influences the narrator's life, as the falling gent seems to be the one who drives our hero to accomplish those that were mere dreams in his mind when it came to places he wanted to visit: it's because of Swann and his mention of how Bergotte (the narrator's favorite writer) admires Berma that our pupil develops his obsession with the theatre and the great actress; it's also Swann who invites him to enter the much anticipated Gilberte's world and her mother's salon life (his first one) and, to conclude the dream trinity, his trip to Balbec was rekindled in his desires after a comment made by Charles about the roman cathedral in that beach. While Swann's and the Guermantes ways were still separate paths to the narrator, it was through Swann that he was able to enter the Guermantes way, for was in Balbec (following Swann's recommendation) that he eventually met important characters that lived in that still obscure world. It is precisely because of this trip that the narrator embarked on that we can also call this volume a book of firsts: the first time he meets people from the Guermantes clan; the first time he meets the artist - Elstir - that will influence his life and art so much; and the first time he sees the young girls in flower. All events that might seem like random plot directions but that, in the future, come together to form an unity.
After much longing in the first volume, the narrator finally makes a trip he's been anticipating for so long, and what a trip! Not only the change of scenery was a breath of fresh air, providing us a warm beach breeze, after the cloistered feeling that came from the first chapter (Madame Swann at Home), but this second part (Place-Names: The Place) depicts a major life changing experience: while I was reading this chapter for the second time, it hit me how much of the future developments comes from this single summer trip, like one of those occasions in life where you stop and analyze what could've been if this or that event never happened, if you never went to such place or never met a certain person; you're left with no clue as to who you'd be if not for that, almost like being born in a different time, country or family would make you a different person than you are now. In such a supple time in one's life - adolescence - where even going to a different school and bonding with other friends could design a different personality, imagine (and it really requires a powerful imagination to picture that) if you hadn't met three of the most important people - aside family - of your life. Aside the place and the people - or maybe because of them -, it's also at that time that the narrator stars playing with his theories and philosophies about life and art.
And now that I've mentioned 'art', I suppose it's time to talk about Elstir. Proust's brilliance in not only conceiving a fully realized painter - when he himself wasn't one - but also in developing and depicting his talents so precisely as if he actually existed impressed me so much. The way he described Elstir's painting talents is in complete relation with his own literary ones: while Proust makes use of involuntary memories (those sensations that are already in us, but that we can't recover through intelligence alone or we risk distorting them), Elstir makes use of involuntary first impressions (those visions that appear to us right before we make use of intelligence to recognize them properly and to fit them to a pattern); the difference being that Proust is revisiting a memory after it settled into his consciousness, and Elstir is painting a vision before it does so. Both artists try to isolate a singular true feeling, removing all rationalization that we've been programmed to attack with every unknown sensation that comes our way, like our white blood cells fighting foreign invaders.
It seems Marcel Proust and James Joyce will remain forever linked in my mind - they who only met once and had never read each other's works (although Joyce later admitted he had read parts of Swann's Way), and who are so far apart in their writing techniques, but that to me stand so close, not just because I read them at the same time last year (and now continue to do so as I'm re-reading the Recherche and the James Joyce biography by Richard Ellmann), but also because, having stated before that I wasn't much of a visual person while reading - that is, I could never really form a fixed image of what the writer was describing, I wasn't able to build that room and enter it in my imagination, only blindly feel the sensations the words awakened in me - after reading Joyce's Dubliners, began to be a little more creative in that aspect. So another positive aspect of re-reading is that we're able to approach the same text while provided with new tools to delve into it that we've acquired ever since finishing it the first time. While I was re-reading this second volume, I could picture what Proust meant when he described not only the sea and the sun and the landscapes his narrator envisioned outside of his window, but also even Elstir's paintings, which only existed in his mind. And the whole section the narrator spent in the painter's atelier that bored me a bit on my first read for I could not envision any of the described images, now became gorgeous and alive as if he actually removed the white sheets that were covering them.
Taking this review a bit to the personal side, one of the reasons this volume specifically resonated so deeply with me was due to the developed theories about loss and forgetting that Proust attributed to his narrator when he was obsessing about the end of his love for Gilberte or even for Albertine, but that can generally be used in the context of getting over someone - even with whom no romantic link is involved - that's gone away. I've always had a little trouble with that future when someone that is now so important, so vital, so present in my daily activities, simply won't be missed because time - and habit - will have worked their magic in making me comfortable with the new situation. As paradoxical as it can be - suffering because of a future time where we won't be suffering and fearing to forget exactly that which we won't remember -, it feels like an actual loss and it gets to me every time; whenever I changed schools, changed cities, changed jobs, I mourned about those friendships that I knew would cool down because of what would come from such situations.
I find it mesmerizing how Proust was able to write like that in a work of fiction (of course there's a lot of himself here and the very ideas he's developed his entire life), but for someone not currently experiencing all the situations while writing his book, it's pretty impressive how he could take a moment to dissect just about every possible feeling so well. And when you find yourself - or rather a piece of you - so masterfully depicted in a work of art, being thoroughly analyzed, looked at from every possible angle, considering all hypothesis and implications, you can't help but to consider it a tool to mirror life and to understand yourself better and to highly value it.
Rating: for a volume that stands on its own and gets better on second read, without losing its initial charm, but becoming even more interesting, and therefore strengthening in my not only my decision, but also my will to keep re-reading: 5 stars.
-------
For my re-reading experience of the entire À la recherche du temps perdu:
Vol 1. Swann's Way: ★★★★★ review
Vol 2. In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower: ★★★★★ review
Vol 3. The Guermantes Way: review
Vol 4. Sodom and Gomorrah: review
Vol 5. La Prisonnière (The Captive): review
Vol 6. Albertine disparue (The Fugivite): review
Vol 7. Time Regained: review
For being in the middle of a serious Proustmania - obsession, really - I decided to re-read all of the volumes of his Recherche, even having questioned so much and for so long the advantages of a re-read. Well, in addition to everything else which I'll address along this review, this rexperience came to show me that, for some books, a re-read is extremely beneficial - if not almost required -, especially in the case of a very long novel, with intricate plot, underlying motifs and interconnections that are impossible not only to absorb - but also to notice - on a first read.
"Thus it can be only after one has recognised, not without having had to feel one's way, the optical illusions of one's first impression that one can arrive at an exact knowledge of another person, supposing such knowledge to be ever possible. But it is not; for while our original impression of him undergoes correction, the person himself, not being an inanimate object, changes in himself, we think that we have caught him, he moves, and, when we imagine that at last we are seeing him clearly, it is only the old impressions which we had already formed of him that we have succeeded in making clearer, when they no longer represent him."
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower starts off by addressing one of Proust's most important beliefs - and a theme that will recurrently permeate his narrative: that what we understand to be someone, how we perceive and describe them, expect them to be, are merely an effort of our own intelligence into molding all of the characteristics we've been shown and seen through our own perception into an sculpture we believe to be a fully functional person. In order to develop his point, it seems the second volume makes a case of confusing us: majestic Swann is described as someone of little prestige while buffoon Dr. Cottard is a must-have guest in any respectable dinner party. Surely the writer confused their names after such a long hiatus between volumes?
A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs was only released in 1919, a good six years after the first volume was published due to the Great War. This time, however, Proust wasn't to pay for the publication costs and the book would even win the prestigious Prix Goncourt award, making him widely known and appreciated not only in France, but also across Europe.
The changes we observe in characters' reputations and actions are not exclusively confined to Swann and Dr. Cottard. Besides them, we also learn of M. Norpois and how his political views evolved over time. Just in the first twenty pages or so of this volume, the writer already sends us the clear message that people and their status are never set in stone and prepares us to a big roller-coaster ride when it comes to his characters (and that will last throughout all of the volumes). Proust's treatment of his personages feels like a superposition of a multitude of layers constituted of their past beings with the addition of the most current state at that particular time, which, granted, is only at the surface for a brief period, shortly being covered by yet another fresh and new layer that is for its turn as expirable as the previous one. This constant shift is, of course, accompanied by his narrator's - and our own - which follows the same pattern and, with these ever changing subjects, arises a million possibilities as to what will happen every time a character reappears, thus making Proust's creations always exciting and never predictable.
In addition to the conditions mentioned above - of a person's own interior alterations and how our perception of those is in constant transformation as well - there is the question of change of reputation by association. Being someone respected and admired in the most prestigious and intimate circles of the Parisian society wasn't enough to keep Swann from having his esteem considerably downgraded after his marriage to Odette, like those chemical elements that form a good substance while associated with hydrogen and are poisonous while in a chemical reaction with lead. Following this pattern, other characters will go up and down in the social scale depending on whom they're associated with, and also accompanying their respective ups and downs.
Just like the characters change depending on the point of view they're being observed from - much like the narrator's description of the Martinville steeples and their positions in relation to each other while on his car trip -, certain events on the plot also do so. Seemingly insignificant little moments - such as an insistent look from someone, a face expression, a phrase that appears to be innocently said in the midst of a longer dialogue or even a statement surrounded by a lengthy digression from the narrator that could be overlooked - retroactively take on a huge importance when analyzed from another perspective (even if that only comes 500 or 600 pages later) and one can't help to admire Proust's skillful incorporation of such "little details" that make his future events feel natural once they're fully developed, just as in life, where things certainly don't appear to us classified by importance - or even by the future importance they'll attain in our lives - and always in the right order. This is one of the characteristics that make his writing so organic and lifelike and what, at the same time, may be perceived as boring for some readers.
Still on the subject of how an event from one volume is important and brought to life again on a subsequent volume, we continue to witness how the narrator is incapable to control his nervous impulses - an inability that was first exposed to us in the goodnight kiss drama from Swann's Way - and easily gives in to his impulses even though he's fully aware of the consequences. Only this time such matters are related to love: his ungovernable need to establish a love connection with Gilberte and to receive it back from her makes him go to such lengths and to scheme manipulations that could be easily attributed to a sociopath. Besides the aforementioned connection to the previous volume, these pages are also connected to a subsequent one, anticipating in hundreds of pages his behavior and conduct he's to develop later in another relationship.
But back to the concerned volume, while Charles Swann is no longer a renowned gentleman, he still greatly influences the narrator's life, as the falling gent seems to be the one who drives our hero to accomplish those that were mere dreams in his mind when it came to places he wanted to visit: it's because of Swann and his mention of how Bergotte (the narrator's favorite writer) admires Berma that our pupil develops his obsession with the theatre and the great actress; it's also Swann who invites him to enter the much anticipated Gilberte's world and her mother's salon life (his first one) and, to conclude the dream trinity, his trip to Balbec was rekindled in his desires after a comment made by Charles about the roman cathedral in that beach. While Swann's and the Guermantes ways were still separate paths to the narrator, it was through Swann that he was able to enter the Guermantes way, for was in Balbec (following Swann's recommendation) that he eventually met important characters that lived in that still obscure world. It is precisely because of this trip that the narrator embarked on that we can also call this volume a book of firsts: the first time he meets people from the Guermantes clan; the first time he meets the artist - Elstir - that will influence his life and art so much; and the first time he sees the young girls in flower. All events that might seem like random plot directions but that, in the future, come together to form an unity.
After much longing in the first volume, the narrator finally makes a trip he's been anticipating for so long, and what a trip! Not only the change of scenery was a breath of fresh air, providing us a warm beach breeze, after the cloistered feeling that came from the first chapter (Madame Swann at Home), but this second part (Place-Names: The Place) depicts a major life changing experience: while I was reading this chapter for the second time, it hit me how much of the future developments comes from this single summer trip, like one of those occasions in life where you stop and analyze what could've been if this or that event never happened, if you never went to such place or never met a certain person; you're left with no clue as to who you'd be if not for that, almost like being born in a different time, country or family would make you a different person than you are now. In such a supple time in one's life - adolescence - where even going to a different school and bonding with other friends could design a different personality, imagine (and it really requires a powerful imagination to picture that) if you hadn't met three of the most important people - aside family - of your life. Aside the place and the people - or maybe because of them -, it's also at that time that the narrator stars playing with his theories and philosophies about life and art.
And now that I've mentioned 'art', I suppose it's time to talk about Elstir. Proust's brilliance in not only conceiving a fully realized painter - when he himself wasn't one - but also in developing and depicting his talents so precisely as if he actually existed impressed me so much. The way he described Elstir's painting talents is in complete relation with his own literary ones: while Proust makes use of involuntary memories (those sensations that are already in us, but that we can't recover through intelligence alone or we risk distorting them), Elstir makes use of involuntary first impressions (those visions that appear to us right before we make use of intelligence to recognize them properly and to fit them to a pattern); the difference being that Proust is revisiting a memory after it settled into his consciousness, and Elstir is painting a vision before it does so. Both artists try to isolate a singular true feeling, removing all rationalization that we've been programmed to attack with every unknown sensation that comes our way, like our white blood cells fighting foreign invaders.
It seems Marcel Proust and James Joyce will remain forever linked in my mind - they who only met once and had never read each other's works (although Joyce later admitted he had read parts of Swann's Way), and who are so far apart in their writing techniques, but that to me stand so close, not just because I read them at the same time last year (and now continue to do so as I'm re-reading the Recherche and the James Joyce biography by Richard Ellmann), but also because, having stated before that I wasn't much of a visual person while reading - that is, I could never really form a fixed image of what the writer was describing, I wasn't able to build that room and enter it in my imagination, only blindly feel the sensations the words awakened in me - after reading Joyce's Dubliners, began to be a little more creative in that aspect. So another positive aspect of re-reading is that we're able to approach the same text while provided with new tools to delve into it that we've acquired ever since finishing it the first time. While I was re-reading this second volume, I could picture what Proust meant when he described not only the sea and the sun and the landscapes his narrator envisioned outside of his window, but also even Elstir's paintings, which only existed in his mind. And the whole section the narrator spent in the painter's atelier that bored me a bit on my first read for I could not envision any of the described images, now became gorgeous and alive as if he actually removed the white sheets that were covering them.
"And our dread of a future in which we must forego the sight of faces, the sound of voices that we love, friends from whom we derive today our keenest joys, this dread, far from being dissipated, is intensified, if to the grief of such a privation we reflect that there will be added what seems to us now in anticipation an even more cruel grief; not to feel it as a grief at all—to remain indifferent; for if that should occur, our ego would have changed, it would then be not merely the attractiveness of our family, our mistress, our friends that had ceased to environ us, but our affection for them; it would have been so completely eradicated from our heart, in which today it is a conspicuous element, that we should be able to enjoy that life apart from them the very thought of which today makes us recoil in horror; so that it would be in a real sense the death of ourselves, a death followed, it is true, by resurrection but in a different ego, the life, the love of which are beyond the reach of those elements of the existing ego that are doomed to die."
Taking this review a bit to the personal side, one of the reasons this volume specifically resonated so deeply with me was due to the developed theories about loss and forgetting that Proust attributed to his narrator when he was obsessing about the end of his love for Gilberte or even for Albertine, but that can generally be used in the context of getting over someone - even with whom no romantic link is involved - that's gone away. I've always had a little trouble with that future when someone that is now so important, so vital, so present in my daily activities, simply won't be missed because time - and habit - will have worked their magic in making me comfortable with the new situation. As paradoxical as it can be - suffering because of a future time where we won't be suffering and fearing to forget exactly that which we won't remember -, it feels like an actual loss and it gets to me every time; whenever I changed schools, changed cities, changed jobs, I mourned about those friendships that I knew would cool down because of what would come from such situations.
I find it mesmerizing how Proust was able to write like that in a work of fiction (of course there's a lot of himself here and the very ideas he's developed his entire life), but for someone not currently experiencing all the situations while writing his book, it's pretty impressive how he could take a moment to dissect just about every possible feeling so well. And when you find yourself - or rather a piece of you - so masterfully depicted in a work of art, being thoroughly analyzed, looked at from every possible angle, considering all hypothesis and implications, you can't help but to consider it a tool to mirror life and to understand yourself better and to highly value it.
Rating: for a volume that stands on its own and gets better on second read, without losing its initial charm, but becoming even more interesting, and therefore strengthening in my not only my decision, but also my will to keep re-reading: 5 stars.
-------
For my re-reading experience of the entire À la recherche du temps perdu:
Vol 1. Swann's Way: ★★★★★ review
Vol 2. In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower: ★★★★★ review
Vol 3. The Guermantes Way: review
Vol 4. Sodom and Gomorrah: review
Vol 5. La Prisonnière (The Captive): review
Vol 6. Albertine disparue (The Fugivite): review
Vol 7. Time Regained: review
Read
March 20, 2014The only book I've ever abandoned after the first sentence.
And what a sentence! But I'll come back to that. Let me first hasten to defend myself, to present my credentials, because I realise that Proust is held in such high esteem as to be almost beyond criticism – not in the real world of course, that would be ridiculous, but on Goodreads certainly. Of the 29 Goodreads friends who have rated this, 25 give it five stars, three give it four stars – one (the only French reader) gives it three. That is an astonishingly high proportion of full marks.
So my apologies to all of you. I plead only the right to a subjective opinion, one that has not been arrived at trivially. My history with Proust is as follows. I read Swann's Way very slowly over a period of several weeks, a reading experience memorable mainly for the fact that my girlfriend kept waking me up because I had dozed off halfway through a sentence. (Reading it in bed was probably a mistake.) There was a lot I liked about it, but I admit I didn't quite grasp what all the fuss was about. I thought it insightful in parts, trite in others. It was also plotless and self-indulgent, but those things don't bother me on their own.
The real problem was the prose style.
For someone revered as a stylist, Proust to me seemed irritating at best, at worst barely readable. I am prepared to accept that this is my problem. In my notebook from that year I divided the page into two columns headed ‘Awesomeness’ and ‘Awkwardness’ to try and clarify in my mind the different reactions I was getting to his sentences. But I gradually got fixated on the second category. Phrases like
strike me as being not just recondite, but fundamentally unsound – in English, and I stress that caveat because I'm aware that there may be a translation issue going on. This kind of construction plays better in French, and although I do read French, I happened to read Proust in translation just because I have a Folio Society set of the Moncrieff/Kilmartin/Enright version. If you're going to tell me that this all flows more prettily in the original, I'm prepared to believe you. I think.
After I finished Swann's Way, my dubious reaction to it niggled at me. Surely I was missing something? As a rule I'm not someone who likes to follow popular opinion, but when so many people I respect seem to love this writer, maybe I have somehow failed to spot his essential charm…? So one day, several months later, I got the second volume down, poured myself a drink, sat in the garden and started reading. It opens:
I calmly closed the book again, got up, went inside and put it back on the shelf, where it has remained. (I went back and finished my drink.)
I love the audacity of this sentence. That is the only thing I love about it, though. I feel that every native speaker who reads it must have the same jarring sense of dislocation when they reach the words ‘my father’, because it's natural when reading it to assume that ‘My mother’ is the subject of the sentence, albeit immediately diverted by two long subordinate clauses. But eventually (on the third scan, in my case) it dawns that the only verb governed by ‘my mother’ is ‘having expressed’, and that the main clause hasn't even started until you get to his father. So what Proust has done here is to postpone the grammatical subject of his sentence until fifty-four words in. For the opening sentence of a novel! (And it introduces five separate characters!)
This is an unusual construction, to say the least. X having done Y, A did B is unremarkable; but introducing a subordinate clause set off by commas immediately after X leaves you hanging on, open-mouthed, for a finitive verb, and hence obscures the meaning. I understand that there are people who adore this style of writing and find it charming or delicate. I don't though, I find it deeply unfriendly. More than that, I find it somehow…creepy.
This is not because of the opacity itself. Because I'm a journalist, and because I like thinking about the mechanics of sentence structure, some friends have accused me of being overly harsh on writers who do not go for clarity and efficiency at all times. I do respect those qualities, but I deny the charge. I love complicated baroque prose styles, and there are plenty of writers who use Proustian effects in ways that move and excite me – Henry James, Thomas Pynchon, oh there's dozens really. It's really just Proust himself that leaves me cold. It's something to do with the intricate formal correctness of it – as though he's saying, ‘Claim to be confused by this if you must; I can assure you it adheres to all the rules.’ There is an over-earnest quality, a sickly intricacy, to his sentences. They seem to be made all of elbows.
The way he expresses himself is somehow true to the letter of language, without being true to its spirit. (At least in translation.)
So that's my experience of him. I'm sorry, but I am just constitutionally unable to get past the extreme ponderousness of expression to enjoy his flashes of insight. That's not to say that I've given up on Marcel, and when I have some more time I hope to try him again in French. But for now at least…he's staying on the shelf.
And what a sentence! But I'll come back to that. Let me first hasten to defend myself, to present my credentials, because I realise that Proust is held in such high esteem as to be almost beyond criticism – not in the real world of course, that would be ridiculous, but on Goodreads certainly. Of the 29 Goodreads friends who have rated this, 25 give it five stars, three give it four stars – one (the only French reader) gives it three. That is an astonishingly high proportion of full marks.
So my apologies to all of you. I plead only the right to a subjective opinion, one that has not been arrived at trivially. My history with Proust is as follows. I read Swann's Way very slowly over a period of several weeks, a reading experience memorable mainly for the fact that my girlfriend kept waking me up because I had dozed off halfway through a sentence. (Reading it in bed was probably a mistake.) There was a lot I liked about it, but I admit I didn't quite grasp what all the fuss was about. I thought it insightful in parts, trite in others. It was also plotless and self-indulgent, but those things don't bother me on their own.
The real problem was the prose style.
For someone revered as a stylist, Proust to me seemed irritating at best, at worst barely readable. I am prepared to accept that this is my problem. In my notebook from that year I divided the page into two columns headed ‘Awesomeness’ and ‘Awkwardness’ to try and clarify in my mind the different reactions I was getting to his sentences. But I gradually got fixated on the second category. Phrases like
I was well aware that I had placed myself in a position than which none could be counted upon to involve me in graver consequences at my parents' hands
strike me as being not just recondite, but fundamentally unsound – in English, and I stress that caveat because I'm aware that there may be a translation issue going on. This kind of construction plays better in French, and although I do read French, I happened to read Proust in translation just because I have a Folio Society set of the Moncrieff/Kilmartin/Enright version. If you're going to tell me that this all flows more prettily in the original, I'm prepared to believe you. I think.
After I finished Swann's Way, my dubious reaction to it niggled at me. Surely I was missing something? As a rule I'm not someone who likes to follow popular opinion, but when so many people I respect seem to love this writer, maybe I have somehow failed to spot his essential charm…? So one day, several months later, I got the second volume down, poured myself a drink, sat in the garden and started reading. It opens:
My mother, when it was a question of our having M. de Norpois to dinner for the first time, having expressed her regret that Professor Cottard was away from home and that she herself had quite ceased to see anything of Swann, since either of these might have helped to entertain the ex-Ambassador, my father replied that so eminent a guest, so distinguished a man of science as Cottard could never be out of place at a dinner-table, but that Swann, with his ostentation, his habit of crying aloud from the house-tops the name of everyone he knew, however slightly, was a vulgar show-off whom the Marquis de Norpois would be sure to dismiss as – to use his own epithet – a ‘pestilent’ fellow.
I calmly closed the book again, got up, went inside and put it back on the shelf, where it has remained. (I went back and finished my drink.)
I love the audacity of this sentence. That is the only thing I love about it, though. I feel that every native speaker who reads it must have the same jarring sense of dislocation when they reach the words ‘my father’, because it's natural when reading it to assume that ‘My mother’ is the subject of the sentence, albeit immediately diverted by two long subordinate clauses. But eventually (on the third scan, in my case) it dawns that the only verb governed by ‘my mother’ is ‘having expressed’, and that the main clause hasn't even started until you get to his father. So what Proust has done here is to postpone the grammatical subject of his sentence until fifty-four words in. For the opening sentence of a novel! (And it introduces five separate characters!)
This is an unusual construction, to say the least. X having done Y, A did B is unremarkable; but introducing a subordinate clause set off by commas immediately after X leaves you hanging on, open-mouthed, for a finitive verb, and hence obscures the meaning. I understand that there are people who adore this style of writing and find it charming or delicate. I don't though, I find it deeply unfriendly. More than that, I find it somehow…creepy.
This is not because of the opacity itself. Because I'm a journalist, and because I like thinking about the mechanics of sentence structure, some friends have accused me of being overly harsh on writers who do not go for clarity and efficiency at all times. I do respect those qualities, but I deny the charge. I love complicated baroque prose styles, and there are plenty of writers who use Proustian effects in ways that move and excite me – Henry James, Thomas Pynchon, oh there's dozens really. It's really just Proust himself that leaves me cold. It's something to do with the intricate formal correctness of it – as though he's saying, ‘Claim to be confused by this if you must; I can assure you it adheres to all the rules.’ There is an over-earnest quality, a sickly intricacy, to his sentences. They seem to be made all of elbows.
The way he expresses himself is somehow true to the letter of language, without being true to its spirit. (At least in translation.)
So that's my experience of him. I'm sorry, but I am just constitutionally unable to get past the extreme ponderousness of expression to enjoy his flashes of insight. That's not to say that I've given up on Marcel, and when I have some more time I hope to try him again in French. But for now at least…he's staying on the shelf.
July 9, 2024
[Original review of print edition]
There's a lot of stuff in Volume 2 of A la recherche du temps perdu, and people see different things in it. To me, though, the unifying theme is a continuation of Proust's analysis of how romantic relationships work, which he started in Un Amour de Swann. There, he examined one particular kind of relationship. Swann spends a fair amount of time with Odette, who is very nice to him and keeps saying how she wishes she could see him more often. Without realizing it, he comes to rely on her always to be there for him. One night, she isn't, and he suddenly discovers he's hooked. The balance of power changes completely: he needs her all the time, she's hardly ever available, and his life is taken over by psychotic jealousy. If you've never had this kind of thing happen to you, count yourself lucky.
In the second volume, Proust looks at two more kinds of patterns, where the relationship isn't as clearly defined as it is with Swann and Odette. He shows how hard it can sometimes be to understand that a relationship has started or ended. With the narrator and Gilberte, he's involved with her in an early-teen way, and then, somehow, things go wrong. He's mad at her, and thinks he won't see her for a bit. Then it continues a bit longer, and he still hasn't seen her. After a while, it's clear that the relationship is over, but it's not obvious whether he ever made a real decision to end it. He examines all his shifting thoughts and emotions in the minutest detail, and you still don't know. At least, I didn't.
With Albertine, in the last third of the book, we get the case that I find most interesting. He's at Balbec (apparently it's based on the real-life resort town of Cabourg; I first learned that from a Brigade Mondaine novel). He sees this rather rowdy gang of teenage girls who go around together, laughing and indulging in various kinds of horseplay. He's a sickly kid, and their boisterous animal spirits appeal to him. There's one in particular that he keeps on bumping into by accident. Her name is Albertine, and after a while he decides he's fallen in love with her.
Being Proust, he has to carefully go though all the times they've met, and look at how his feelings evolved in response to those chance meetings. When he reconstructs everything, an interesting fact emerges: he thought he was meeting the same girl every time, but in fact he may not have. It's possible that he met different girls on the different occasions, and the feelings just crystallized out as deciding that he was in love with Albertine. He doesn't know, and they don't know! If the book had been written 15 years later, I would have wondered if this was an allusion to the new quantum theory: you have, as it were, a wave-function of girls, which collapses into the single Albertine observation. But I'm pretty sure that that was still in the future, so Proust made it all up himself. Impressive. Conceivably, the causality went the other way: perhaps some quantum physicist was inspired by Proust's novel!
The thought I find so interesting here is that, as Proust shows, you can fall in love quickly, but then there is a philosophical problem: who are you falling in love with? At one point in my life, I was kind of interested in the semantics of denotation and reference, but linguistic philosophers like Kripke, Quine or Montague never seem to look at examples as complex as the ones that Proust makes up. I would love to know if someone has done an analysis of his books from this kind of angle. From the practical point of view, though, I think there is a useful lesson to be learned. If you fall in love quickly, the person you're in love with may not really exist. That's worth remembering.
__________________________
[From Noms de pays : le nom]
I have just posted a LARA version of A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs - you can find it here, view in Chrome or Firefox. We now have a total of 380,000 words text/42 hours audio of Proust in LARA form. As with Du côté de chez Swann, the French and English text have been taken from Gutenberg and the audio from LitteratureAudio, and I have automatically aligned them using the same methods.
__________________________
[And after another rereading...]
Proust is unique. Who else could even have imagined the idea of turning The Critique of Pure Reason into a romcom, let alone succeed in doing so? But he makes it seem like the inevitable development of Kant's thoughts.
There's a lot of stuff in Volume 2 of A la recherche du temps perdu, and people see different things in it. To me, though, the unifying theme is a continuation of Proust's analysis of how romantic relationships work, which he started in Un Amour de Swann. There, he examined one particular kind of relationship. Swann spends a fair amount of time with Odette, who is very nice to him and keeps saying how she wishes she could see him more often. Without realizing it, he comes to rely on her always to be there for him. One night, she isn't, and he suddenly discovers he's hooked. The balance of power changes completely: he needs her all the time, she's hardly ever available, and his life is taken over by psychotic jealousy. If you've never had this kind of thing happen to you, count yourself lucky.
In the second volume, Proust looks at two more kinds of patterns, where the relationship isn't as clearly defined as it is with Swann and Odette. He shows how hard it can sometimes be to understand that a relationship has started or ended. With the narrator and Gilberte, he's involved with her in an early-teen way, and then, somehow, things go wrong. He's mad at her, and thinks he won't see her for a bit. Then it continues a bit longer, and he still hasn't seen her. After a while, it's clear that the relationship is over, but it's not obvious whether he ever made a real decision to end it. He examines all his shifting thoughts and emotions in the minutest detail, and you still don't know. At least, I didn't.
With Albertine, in the last third of the book, we get the case that I find most interesting. He's at Balbec (apparently it's based on the real-life resort town of Cabourg; I first learned that from a Brigade Mondaine novel). He sees this rather rowdy gang of teenage girls who go around together, laughing and indulging in various kinds of horseplay. He's a sickly kid, and their boisterous animal spirits appeal to him. There's one in particular that he keeps on bumping into by accident. Her name is Albertine, and after a while he decides he's fallen in love with her.
Being Proust, he has to carefully go though all the times they've met, and look at how his feelings evolved in response to those chance meetings. When he reconstructs everything, an interesting fact emerges: he thought he was meeting the same girl every time, but in fact he may not have. It's possible that he met different girls on the different occasions, and the feelings just crystallized out as deciding that he was in love with Albertine. He doesn't know, and they don't know! If the book had been written 15 years later, I would have wondered if this was an allusion to the new quantum theory: you have, as it were, a wave-function of girls, which collapses into the single Albertine observation. But I'm pretty sure that that was still in the future, so Proust made it all up himself. Impressive. Conceivably, the causality went the other way: perhaps some quantum physicist was inspired by Proust's novel!
The thought I find so interesting here is that, as Proust shows, you can fall in love quickly, but then there is a philosophical problem: who are you falling in love with? At one point in my life, I was kind of interested in the semantics of denotation and reference, but linguistic philosophers like Kripke, Quine or Montague never seem to look at examples as complex as the ones that Proust makes up. I would love to know if someone has done an analysis of his books from this kind of angle. From the practical point of view, though, I think there is a useful lesson to be learned. If you fall in love quickly, the person you're in love with may not really exist. That's worth remembering.
__________________________
[From Noms de pays : le nom]
I have just posted a LARA version of A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs - you can find it here, view in Chrome or Firefox. We now have a total of 380,000 words text/42 hours audio of Proust in LARA form. As with Du côté de chez Swann, the French and English text have been taken from Gutenberg and the audio from LitteratureAudio, and I have automatically aligned them using the same methods.
__________________________
[And after another rereading...]
Proust is unique. Who else could even have imagined the idea of turning The Critique of Pure Reason into a romcom, let alone succeed in doing so? But he makes it seem like the inevitable development of Kant's thoughts.
December 7, 2017
کتاب سرخوردگی ها
آيا اين جملات الستيرِ نقاش، جوهر و هدف اصلى رمان نيست؟
پروست داستان را از درون ذهن پسرى خيالباف روايت مى كند، كه ذهنش پى در پى با پوشاندن جامه اى زرين از خيال به واقعيت، او را فريب مى دهد، و پى در پى با مواجهه با واقعيت از دروغين بودن خيالاتش سرخورده مى شود. پروست اين پسر را در موقعيت هاى مختلف قرار مى دهد و بدين ترتيب فريب هاى مختلفى كه تخيل مى تواند بزند را به ما نشان مى دهد تا از آن ها بر حذر باشيم: يك بار تخيلش با شنيدن تعريف از فلان بازيگر تئاتر او را تا عرش اعلى مى برد، و وقتى بازى پيش پا افتاده و لحن خشكش را مى بيند سر خورده مى شود. يك بار با شنيدن نام معمارى ايرانى كليساى شهر بلبك و درياى آن، خيال مى كند كليساى اسرار آميز شرقى بر صخره هايى بر فراز دريا واقع است و امواجى كه خود را به صخره ها مى كوبند تا پنجره هاى كليسا مى پاشند. اما وقتى به بلبك مى رود مى بيند كليسا كيلومترها از دريا دور است و معمارى ايرانى اش در تصوير جزئى اى از اژدها خلاصه شده كه اگر نشانش نمى دادند هرگز متوجهش نمى شد. يا وقتى كه دخترانى را گذرا مى بيند و در تخيلش آن ها را چنان زيبا مى بيند و وقتى جلو مى رود يا با آن ها صحبت مى كند، ناگهان تمام آن تصوير خيالى فرو مى ريزد، یا وقتی فکر می کند که عاشق این یا آن زن است و بعد می فهمد که آن چه اشتیاق یا عشق خوانده می شود، چیزی در درون خود اوست و حتی رسیدن به آن زن هم نمی تواند آن اشتیاق را تسکین دهد. و...
در جستجوى زمان از دست رفته، حداقل در جلد دوم، كتاب خيالات واهى است، کتاب سرخوردگی ها. ادراك ها و برداشت هاى اشتباهى كه از واقعيت داريم، به خاطر طنين يك اسم، يا يك پيشفرض غلط، يا يك مقايسۀ نادرست، يا... و مدت ها طول مى كشد تا بتوانيم از زنجير اين برداشت اشتباه در بياييم.
پروست با جملات فوق نشان مى دهد كه راه حل مصونيت از اين فريب هاى خيال، توجه كردن به كاركرد ذهن و تخيل است. خودآگاه شدن نسبت به این حقیقت که ذهن همیشه تمام آن چه که در بیرون است را به ما نشان نمی دهد، بلکه خودش آن را با درصد بالایی از احساسات و خاطرات و تخیلات مخلوط می کند. برای خودآگاه شدن به کارکرد ذهن، باید هر گاه كه ذهن ما را فريب مى دهد، خوب دقت كنيم، ماجرا را مرور كنيم، و ببينيم دقيقاً چه چیزهایی موجب خطاى ما شد تا ديگر به آن خطا دچار نشويم. يا مى توانيم به كمك خواندن اين كتاب كه از قبل شكل هاى مختلف فريبكارى تخيل را شرح داده، در مقابل حيله ها و ترفندهاى مختلف ذهن آماده شويم. کتابی که مثل «هنر همیشه بر حق بودن» انواع مغالطات ذهن را برای ما به وضوح به تصویر کشیده است. آیا به خاطر همین نیست که پروست کار خود را همچون کار پدرش – که با توصیه های پزشکی خود جلوی ابتلای پاریس به وبا را گرفت – می داند؟ ایجاد مصونیت نسبت به بیماری ای از جنس دیگر: بیماری فکری.
اگر کمی خیالبافی خطرناک باشد، راه درمانش کمتر کردن خیال نیست، بلکه باید خیال را بیشتر کرد. تا زمانی که ذهنتان را از خیال هایش دور نگه می دارید مانع آن می شوید که آن ها را خوب بشناسد. در نتیجه بعداً گول ظواهر بی شماری را می خورید، چون نتوانسته اید به ذاتِ آنها پی ببرید. باید خیال هایمان را خوب بشناسیم تا بتوانیم آنها را از زندگی جدا کنیم و دیگر از آنها رنج نکشیم. این جدایی خیال از زندگی اغلب آن قدر سودمند است که فکر می کنم شاید بد نباشد آدم آن را به عنوان پیشگیری عملی کند، مثل بعضی جراحانی که معتقدند برای پیشگیری از آپاندیسیت باید آپاندیس همۀ بچه ها را درآورد.
آيا اين جملات الستيرِ نقاش، جوهر و هدف اصلى رمان نيست؟
پروست داستان را از درون ذهن پسرى خيالباف روايت مى كند، كه ذهنش پى در پى با پوشاندن جامه اى زرين از خيال به واقعيت، او را فريب مى دهد، و پى در پى با مواجهه با واقعيت از دروغين بودن خيالاتش سرخورده مى شود. پروست اين پسر را در موقعيت هاى مختلف قرار مى دهد و بدين ترتيب فريب هاى مختلفى كه تخيل مى تواند بزند را به ما نشان مى دهد تا از آن ها بر حذر باشيم: يك بار تخيلش با شنيدن تعريف از فلان بازيگر تئاتر او را تا عرش اعلى مى برد، و وقتى بازى پيش پا افتاده و لحن خشكش را مى بيند سر خورده مى شود. يك بار با شنيدن نام معمارى ايرانى كليساى شهر بلبك و درياى آن، خيال مى كند كليساى اسرار آميز شرقى بر صخره هايى بر فراز دريا واقع است و امواجى كه خود را به صخره ها مى كوبند تا پنجره هاى كليسا مى پاشند. اما وقتى به بلبك مى رود مى بيند كليسا كيلومترها از دريا دور است و معمارى ايرانى اش در تصوير جزئى اى از اژدها خلاصه شده كه اگر نشانش نمى دادند هرگز متوجهش نمى شد. يا وقتى كه دخترانى را گذرا مى بيند و در تخيلش آن ها را چنان زيبا مى بيند و وقتى جلو مى رود يا با آن ها صحبت مى كند، ناگهان تمام آن تصوير خيالى فرو مى ريزد، یا وقتی فکر می کند که عاشق این یا آن زن است و بعد می فهمد که آن چه اشتیاق یا عشق خوانده می شود، چیزی در درون خود اوست و حتی رسیدن به آن زن هم نمی تواند آن اشتیاق را تسکین دهد. و...
در جستجوى زمان از دست رفته، حداقل در جلد دوم، كتاب خيالات واهى است، کتاب سرخوردگی ها. ادراك ها و برداشت هاى اشتباهى كه از واقعيت داريم، به خاطر طنين يك اسم، يا يك پيشفرض غلط، يا يك مقايسۀ نادرست، يا... و مدت ها طول مى كشد تا بتوانيم از زنجير اين برداشت اشتباه در بياييم.
پروست با جملات فوق نشان مى دهد كه راه حل مصونيت از اين فريب هاى خيال، توجه كردن به كاركرد ذهن و تخيل است. خودآگاه شدن نسبت به این حقیقت که ذهن همیشه تمام آن چه که در بیرون است را به ما نشان نمی دهد، بلکه خودش آن را با درصد بالایی از احساسات و خاطرات و تخیلات مخلوط می کند. برای خودآگاه شدن به کارکرد ذهن، باید هر گاه كه ذهن ما را فريب مى دهد، خوب دقت كنيم، ماجرا را مرور كنيم، و ببينيم دقيقاً چه چیزهایی موجب خطاى ما شد تا ديگر به آن خطا دچار نشويم. يا مى توانيم به كمك خواندن اين كتاب كه از قبل شكل هاى مختلف فريبكارى تخيل را شرح داده، در مقابل حيله ها و ترفندهاى مختلف ذهن آماده شويم. کتابی که مثل «هنر همیشه بر حق بودن» انواع مغالطات ذهن را برای ما به وضوح به تصویر کشیده است. آیا به خاطر همین نیست که پروست کار خود را همچون کار پدرش – که با توصیه های پزشکی خود جلوی ابتلای پاریس به وبا را گرفت – می داند؟ ایجاد مصونیت نسبت به بیماری ای از جنس دیگر: بیماری فکری.
این هم یکی از راه حل های مسئلۀ زندگی است که به اندازۀ کافی به چیزها و کسانی که از دور به چشم مان زیبا و اسرارآمیز آمده اند نزدیک شویم تا ببینیم که در آن ها از راز و زیبایی نشانی نیست. این، یکی از چند دستور سلامت است که می توان برگزید، که شاید چندان دلپسند نباشد، اما آن اندازه آرامش می آورد که زندگی مان را بگذرانیم و - از آن جا که امکان می دهد حسرت هیچ چیز را نخوریم، چون به ما می باوراند که به بهترینِ چیزها رسیدیم و بهترینش هم چیزی نبود - همچنین به مرگ تن دهیم.
February 10, 2021
Deuxième volume de la Recherche, À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs est un roman qui, si l’on fait abstraction du long flash-back, « Un Amour de Swann », fonctionne comme en miroir du premier volume, Du côté de chez Swann.
Le début des Jeunes filles en fleurs reprend, presque sans solution de continuité, là où nous en étions restés, avec l’hiver, les quartiers ouest de Paris et Gilberte, objet du désir du jeune Narrateur depuis le milieu du premier volume. Nous faisons plus ample connaissance avec plusieurs personnages évoqués précédemment : Berma, la tragédienne ; Norpois, le diplomate pédant qui décourage les ambitions littéraires du jeune Marcel ; puis Bergotte, qui, au contraire, l’exhorte à persévérer. Surtout, le désir du jeune homme de se rapprocher de Gilberte nous introduit dans l’intimité de la famille Swann. A partir de là, nous observons comment, progressivement, la passion pour Gilberte s’estompe au profit de sa mère, Odette. Tout se passe comme si, dans ces « intermittences su cœur », le regard du Narrateur se confondait avec celui du Charles Swann amoureux, que nous avions rencontré dans le premier volume.
Le milieu du roman est marqué par une césure très nette, presque comme une pliure, avec une ellipse de deux années d’intervalle depuis l’épisode de Gilberte. La belle saison est là, le Narrateur, sa grand-mère et Françoise quittent Paris pour Balbec (une station balnéaire imaginaire sur la côte Atlantique) et nous retrouvons, dans cette deuxième moitié du deuxième volume, une atmosphère très proche de celle que nous avions rencontrée à Combray, dans la première moitié du premier livre. Ambiance estivale, visite d’église médiévale, aristocrates et bourgeois en vacances, promenades en voiture, campagne riante, parfums amoureux et, bien entendu, jeunes filles en fleurs. Les noms de Combray sont ici parfois les mêmes (Bloch, Charlus), parfois assez similaires (le beau Saint-Loup remplace le charmant Swann ; les peintures d’Elstir relaient les livres de Bergotte). Mais, surtout, la jeune aubépine Gilberte s’est maintenant métamorphosée en une multitude de fleurs, parmi desquelles le cœur du Narrateur ne cesse de butiner, hésitant toujours avant de se poser sur l’une d’elles : la vendeuse de café au lait ? Mlle de Stermaria ? la belle pêcheuse de Carqueville ? Puis, dans la petite bande : Gisèle ? Andrée ? Rosemonde ? Albertine ?...
Durant tout l’épisode de Balbec (très supérieur a l’épisode parisien qui le précède, entre nous soit dit), les affects amoureux du Narrateur sont en pulsation continue, passant du désir a la désillusion, créant ainsi, de manière subtile, un suspens perpétuel. La prose de Proust, toujours fluide et mouvante, semble, elle aussi, battre comme un cœur entre différents états. D’abord, les marivaudages indécis et les jalousies du Narrateur, que Proust analyse de manière presque clinique. Ensuite, le « kaléidoscope » social, l’aquarium du Grand-Hôtel, la satire un peu bouffonne parfois, lorsqu’il décrit les papotages de tous les clowns, pédants et culs pincés qui peuplent Balbec. Enfin, la spéculation esthétique et métaphysique, quand il tente de cerner les réalités souvent fuyantes de la perception, de la mémoire et de la création artistique – les descriptions de paysages sont parmi les plus belles pages de Proust, que ceux-ci soient aperçus directement par le Narrateur, comme la mer changeante sous la fenêtre de l'hôtel, ou qu’ils soient vus à travers la création artistique, comme dans le cas du Port de Carquethuit, peint par Elstir.
Reste toutefois que, à travers toutes ces pulsations fluides, toutes ces intermittences mouvantes, il semble qu’on ne puisse s’accrocher a rien de solide. Tout n’est qu’illusion, la beauté s’efface, les rencontres déçoivent. Ne reste au fond, comme le dit le Narrateur vers la fin du roman, qu’une résignation douce au néant :
Sage résolution, sans doute. Rares sont ceux toutefois (et le Narrateur n’en fait pas plus partie que vous ou que moi), qui sont capables d’y plier leurs désirs.
> Vol. précédent : Du côté de chez Swann
> Vol. suivant : Le côté de Guermantes
Le début des Jeunes filles en fleurs reprend, presque sans solution de continuité, là où nous en étions restés, avec l’hiver, les quartiers ouest de Paris et Gilberte, objet du désir du jeune Narrateur depuis le milieu du premier volume. Nous faisons plus ample connaissance avec plusieurs personnages évoqués précédemment : Berma, la tragédienne ; Norpois, le diplomate pédant qui décourage les ambitions littéraires du jeune Marcel ; puis Bergotte, qui, au contraire, l’exhorte à persévérer. Surtout, le désir du jeune homme de se rapprocher de Gilberte nous introduit dans l’intimité de la famille Swann. A partir de là, nous observons comment, progressivement, la passion pour Gilberte s’estompe au profit de sa mère, Odette. Tout se passe comme si, dans ces « intermittences su cœur », le regard du Narrateur se confondait avec celui du Charles Swann amoureux, que nous avions rencontré dans le premier volume.
Le milieu du roman est marqué par une césure très nette, presque comme une pliure, avec une ellipse de deux années d’intervalle depuis l’épisode de Gilberte. La belle saison est là, le Narrateur, sa grand-mère et Françoise quittent Paris pour Balbec (une station balnéaire imaginaire sur la côte Atlantique) et nous retrouvons, dans cette deuxième moitié du deuxième volume, une atmosphère très proche de celle que nous avions rencontrée à Combray, dans la première moitié du premier livre. Ambiance estivale, visite d’église médiévale, aristocrates et bourgeois en vacances, promenades en voiture, campagne riante, parfums amoureux et, bien entendu, jeunes filles en fleurs. Les noms de Combray sont ici parfois les mêmes (Bloch, Charlus), parfois assez similaires (le beau Saint-Loup remplace le charmant Swann ; les peintures d’Elstir relaient les livres de Bergotte). Mais, surtout, la jeune aubépine Gilberte s’est maintenant métamorphosée en une multitude de fleurs, parmi desquelles le cœur du Narrateur ne cesse de butiner, hésitant toujours avant de se poser sur l’une d’elles : la vendeuse de café au lait ? Mlle de Stermaria ? la belle pêcheuse de Carqueville ? Puis, dans la petite bande : Gisèle ? Andrée ? Rosemonde ? Albertine ?...
Durant tout l’épisode de Balbec (très supérieur a l’épisode parisien qui le précède, entre nous soit dit), les affects amoureux du Narrateur sont en pulsation continue, passant du désir a la désillusion, créant ainsi, de manière subtile, un suspens perpétuel. La prose de Proust, toujours fluide et mouvante, semble, elle aussi, battre comme un cœur entre différents états. D’abord, les marivaudages indécis et les jalousies du Narrateur, que Proust analyse de manière presque clinique. Ensuite, le « kaléidoscope » social, l’aquarium du Grand-Hôtel, la satire un peu bouffonne parfois, lorsqu’il décrit les papotages de tous les clowns, pédants et culs pincés qui peuplent Balbec. Enfin, la spéculation esthétique et métaphysique, quand il tente de cerner les réalités souvent fuyantes de la perception, de la mémoire et de la création artistique – les descriptions de paysages sont parmi les plus belles pages de Proust, que ceux-ci soient aperçus directement par le Narrateur, comme la mer changeante sous la fenêtre de l'hôtel, ou qu’ils soient vus à travers la création artistique, comme dans le cas du Port de Carquethuit, peint par Elstir.
Reste toutefois que, à travers toutes ces pulsations fluides, toutes ces intermittences mouvantes, il semble qu’on ne puisse s’accrocher a rien de solide. Tout n’est qu’illusion, la beauté s’efface, les rencontres déçoivent. Ne reste au fond, comme le dit le Narrateur vers la fin du roman, qu’une résignation douce au néant :
Et c’est en somme une façon comme une autre de résoudre le problème de l’existence, qu’approcher suffisamment les choses et les personnes qui nous ont paru de loin belles et mystérieuses, pour nous rendre compte qu’elles sont sans mystère et sans beauté ; c’est une des hygiènes entre lesquelles on peut opter, une hygiène qui n’est peut-être pas très recommandable, mais elle nous donne un certain calme pour passer la vie, et aussi — comme elle permet de ne rien regretter, en nous persuadant que nous avons atteint le meilleur, et que le meilleur n’était pas grand’chose — pour nous résigner à la mort. (Pléiade, tome II, p. 300)
Sage résolution, sans doute. Rares sont ceux toutefois (et le Narrateur n’en fait pas plus partie que vous ou que moi), qui sont capables d’y plier leurs désirs.
> Vol. précédent : Du côté de chez Swann
> Vol. suivant : Le côté de Guermantes
November 18, 2023
A young man, very snobbish, talks about his favorite author, Bergotte, and his disappointment when he goes to the theatre for the first time to hear Berma.
He began to take an interest in young girls whose first names were Gilberte, Albertine, Andrée, and Rosemonde. So, naturally, he falls in love with Albertine.
It is a very demanding reading, which is difficult to resume and stop.
The sentences are long but necessary to convey the finesse of the protagonist's thoughts. You must take your time, read slowly, and savor each image to let the emotions come.
He began to take an interest in young girls whose first names were Gilberte, Albertine, Andrée, and Rosemonde. So, naturally, he falls in love with Albertine.
It is a very demanding reading, which is difficult to resume and stop.
The sentences are long but necessary to convey the finesse of the protagonist's thoughts. You must take your time, read slowly, and savor each image to let the emotions come.
March 24, 2020
Viene de...
Un ser absolutamente dependiente de las opiniones ajenas, egoísta, cobarde, putero y escritor en ciernes, patológicamente necesitado de protagonismo, de atención constante, tan profundo en sus reflexiones como superficial en sus inclinaciones (“la belleza es una sucesión de hipótesis que la fealdad reduce, al cortar la vía que ya veíamos abrirse a lo desconocido”), presa constante de extraños arrebatos sensitivos ante los más peregrinos estímulos de los que espera verdades para mí incomprensibles y que le procuran una felicidad o una tristeza indecibles de las que, en muchos casos, desconoce el motivo.
Pero que mi torpeza a la hora de elegir símiles no les lleve a engaño, nada como el trabajo en el campo puede estar más alejado del mundo proustiano, lleno de arte y vacuo oropel, de sensibilidad y apariencia, de sutileza e hipocresía. Yo, que soy bastante torpe con las sutilezas, sobre todo cuando encierran una malicia que casi nunca espero y de las que tristemente soy consciente, cuando lo soy, tarde para dar cumplida respuesta, he disfrutado perversamente con esta lectura plagada de ellas.
Continuará...
“«el Bergotte» era ante todo un elemento precioso y verdadero, oculto en el núcleo de todas las cosas y después extraído de ellas por aquel gran escritor gracias a su genio, extracción que era el fin del dulce cantor y no el de escribir a lo Bergotte.”Proust continúa en este segundo tomo con su excepcional descripción literaria de una personalísima forma de sentir, de una especial sensibilidad ante la vida y uno mismo, capaz de convertir en oro literario las naderías de una existencia tan mediocre e insulsa como la de cualquier mortal. Y lo hace a través de un personaje complejo y contradictorio, Marcel, tan atrayente como repulsivo, siendo cautivadoramente atractivo por ambos motivos.
Un ser absolutamente dependiente de las opiniones ajenas, egoísta, cobarde, putero y escritor en ciernes, patológicamente necesitado de protagonismo, de atención constante, tan profundo en sus reflexiones como superficial en sus inclinaciones (“la belleza es una sucesión de hipótesis que la fealdad reduce, al cortar la vía que ya veíamos abrirse a lo desconocido”), presa constante de extraños arrebatos sensitivos ante los más peregrinos estímulos de los que espera verdades para mí incomprensibles y que le procuran una felicidad o una tristeza indecibles de las que, en muchos casos, desconoce el motivo.
“Muy pocas veces experimentaba aquel placer, cuyo objeto tan sólo presentía, que debía crear yo mismo, pero en todas ellas me parecía que lo sucedido en el intervalo carecía de la menor importancia y que centrándome exclusivamente en su realidad podría comenzar por fin una vida verdadera.”Proust tuvo siempre muy presente, y lo plasmó con una maestría única y sublime, que todo los que nos ocurre nos ocurre en el interior y que es allí donde las experiencias alcanzan su esplendor, lo que en Proust llega a extremos delirantes. El amor, la amistad, las vivencias de cualquier tipo, todo parece tener más importancia en la ausencia. La misma presencia del objeto o sujeto, dice, nos desvía de lo importante, nos hace “permanecer en la superficie de nosotros mismos en lugar de proseguir nuestro viaje de descubrimientos en las profundidades”. Del mismo modo, cualquier acercamiento a persona, objeto o lugar precisan, para gozar del encuentro como corresponde, ser soñados previamente y así solazarse en todas las posibilidades todavía no excluidas por el hecho en sí, que en verdad carece de importancia pues “sólo nosotros podemos infundir a ciertas cosas que vemos —con el convencimiento de que tienen una vida propia— un alma que después conservan y desarrollan en nosotros”.
“Despojar de ella (la imaginación) nuestros placeres es reducirlos a sí mismos, a nada… Es necesario que la imaginación, despertada por la incertidumbre de poder alcanzar su objeto, cree un objetivo que nos oculte el otro y, al substituir el placer sensual por la idea de penetrar en una vida, nos impide reconocer dicho placer, probar su gesto verdadero, limitarlo a su alcance.”Y en este sentir tan especial, cómo no destacar por encima de cualquier otro la experiencia del amor, una experiencia, claro está, insatisfactoria pues siempre se desea más cuando se tiene y es atroz cuando no. Un amor que con excesiva frecuencia tiene por objeto a nosotros mismos pues nosotros somos los que creamos a las mujeres que amamos, dotándoles de esa capacidad de “prolongación, esa multiplicación posible, de uno mismo que es la felicidad” .
“Al estar enamorados de una mujer, proyectamos simplemente en ella un estado de nuestra alma, que, por consiguiente, lo importante no es el valor de la mujer, sino la profundidad de ese estado, y que las emociones que nos infunde una muchacha mediocre pueden permitirnos hacer remontar a nuestra conciencia partes más íntimas de nosotros, más personales, más lejanas, más esenciales, que el placer que nos brinda la conversación de un hombre superior o incluso la contemplación admirativa de sus obras.”Leer a Proust es una experiencia compleja. Por utilizar una expresión mil veces usada por el autor, leerle es como si aráramos un campo inmensamente generoso para todo aquel que no desfallece ni se acobarda ante las muchas rocas y raíces que, en forma de largas acotaciones entre guiones o de oraciones subordinadas dentro de oraciones subordinadas, deben ser previamente desenterradas, aclaradas y muchas veces apartadas a un lado para que la reja pueda sacar a la luz todo lo que la tierra lleva dentro o, al menos, la parte que a cada uno, según su capacidad y experiencia, le es accesible. Y no es que esas incontables rocas y raíces no sean sobradamente interesantes por sí mismas, todo lo contrario, nada es desechable en los campos de Proust, pero bien cierto es que no son pocas las ocasiones en las que, a causa de ellas, nos vemos obligados a pasar la reja una y otra vez por el mismo surco hasta conseguir que la tierra por fin respire y sea todo lo fecunda que en realidad es.
Pero que mi torpeza a la hora de elegir símiles no les lleve a engaño, nada como el trabajo en el campo puede estar más alejado del mundo proustiano, lleno de arte y vacuo oropel, de sensibilidad y apariencia, de sutileza e hipocresía. Yo, que soy bastante torpe con las sutilezas, sobre todo cuando encierran una malicia que casi nunca espero y de las que tristemente soy consciente, cuando lo soy, tarde para dar cumplida respuesta, he disfrutado perversamente con esta lectura plagada de ellas.
“Su esposa se había casado con él contra viento y marea, porque era una «persona hechizadora». Tenía —cosa que puede bastar para constituir un conjunto delicado y poco común— una barba rubia y sedosa, facciones agraciadas, voz nasal, mal aliento y un ojo de vidrio.”Grande es la ironía, el sarcasmo, la inteligencia maligna que se gastan estos ociosos esnobs, clasistas, racistas y muchas veces ridículos miembros pertenecientes a la alta burguesía y a la aristocracia parisina en sus comentarios y chismes de salón hacia rivales, conocidos y, en teoría, amigos, que se mueven por estas páginas. Y en ello no se queda atrás nuestro protagonista, un adolescente, por otra parte, presa de grandes picores por las frescas y traviesas muchachas en flor.
“Simonet debía de ser el (nombre) de una de aquellas muchachas; ya no cesé de preguntarme cómo podría conocer a la familia Simonet y, además, por mediación de personas a las que ésta considerara superiores a sí misma, lo que no sería difícil, si se trataba de simples zorrillas de clase baja.”Angelito
Continuará...
April 21, 2015
À L'OMBRE de la REPRÉSENTATION
On my review of Du côté de chez Swann I had concentrated on the pre-eminence of the visual. The careful attention paid by Proust to light, to colour, to objects that add colour such as flowers, and to painting and the visual arts in general, led me to conceive of his art as painterly writing. All those elements continue in this second volume. I could easily select another rich sample of quotes that would illustrate this visual nature. Indeed, sight is explicitly designated in this book as the principal sense. It is through seeing that we make sense of our world.
Things, people…
…, ne sont portés sur nous que sur une plane et inconsistante superficie, parce que nous ne prenons conscience d’eux que par la perception visuelle réduite à elle-même ; mais c’est comme déléguée des autres sens qu’elle se dirige vers… (les autres sens) vont chercher...les diverses qualités odorantes, tactiles, savoureuses, qu’ils goûtent ainsi même sans le secours des mains et des lèvres (559)
This extract then introduces another aspect which is the one on which I wish to focus this time.
..et, capables, grâce aux arts de transposition, au génie de synthèse où excelle le désir, de restituer sous la couleur.., ... 559
This review will examine the concept and activity of Transposition or Representation as the very core of what constitutes artistic creation.
FASHIONING the FASHIONS
In À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, we see the Narrator fascinated by the way people represent themselves. When he observes those who have awakened his imagination, he pays attention to the way they dress and cloak their presence. The choice of clothes is part of the way a person manifests the self.
And although the Narrator confesses that he is infatuated with Gilberte Swann, in reality his fascination is with the mother, with Odette, who has changed her life and made herself into Mme Swann. He notices how in her self-transformation Odette has moved from the rather theatrical Japonisme décor, outfits and somewhat garish choice of clothes,--that we saw from a close up in Un amour de Swann--to a more delicate style in which subtle pastel colours in silk crêpe reflect the tender and gentle manner seen in the depictions Watteau, the painter of the gallanterie, and which suit better the wife of Monsieur Swann.
But in this new style of clothes in which she has concocted herself there are traces of her past that the Narrator can sniff, as she lets her breasts be caressed by the silk and abandons herself to the enjoyment of the new luxury, (230, desquelles elle faisait le geste de caresser sus ses seins l’écume fleurie, et dans lesquelles elle se baignait, se prélassait, s’ébattait..). Similarly the decorative buttons are a quote of those more functional which in the past would have been an invitation to their being unbuttoned. (235 déceler une intention... une reminiscence indiscernable du passé).
Odette works relentlessly at transforming and creating her own image and is completely aware of the transcendence of her self-fashioning, for herself and for the world... (522 disciplinant ses traits avait fait de son visage et de sa taille cette création),. And also 234 On sentait qu’elle ne s’habillait pas seulement pour la commodité ou la parure de son corps, elle était entourée de sa toilette comme de l’appareil délicat et spiritualisé d’une civilisation.
Because with all this calculated impersonation, Odette is acting indeed as a creator. Rightfully, she feels satisfied with her art when she conceives her toilette (254... ayant l’air d’assurance et de calme du créateur qui a accompli son oeuvre et ne se soucie plus du reste)
SALONS and THEATRICALITY
But Odette’s transformation will reach its apex and she will be in full command of her new delicate and purified self, when she can also design her own setting, her own stage, her Salon. In that composition she can become, finally, a Grande Dame. Surrounded by white flowers, by white furniture, by white accoutrements, echoes of the Pre-Raphaelites, and of the original Primitives, will resonate. She can evoke images in which angels announce a miracle and designate the virginity in a woman, with all its inebriating effect. All of this thanks to the harmonies of a fully orchestrated (252 -- Symphonie en blanc majeur)
For it is through a Salon that a lady can best picture herself, fully. The emblematic surroundings situate one as the model to which one’s society can look. Salons are the dramatic setting in which something is created out of sheer theatricality. The guests form a frame around the Hostess who behaves as if she were the main guest, the main actress, the main sitter. So much so, that it becomes difficult for some people to be able to picture a lady, Odette, outside of her own Salon.
For the art of creating a Salon is the art of nothingness... (212 -- bien qu’ils ne fassent que nuancer l’inexistent, sculpter le vide, et soient à proprement parler les Arts du Néant: l’art... de savoir “réunir”, de s’entendre à grouper, de “mettre en valeur”, de “s’éffacer”, de servir de “trait d’union” (inverted commas in the original). And in this art we saw in the previous volume that Odette’s teacher had been Mme Verdurin who “était elle-même un Salon”.
REPRODUCTION or EYE LENSES
In a line of argument that Walter Benjamin may have picked up from Proust, the Narrator notices the other mode of visual representation, photography, with a similar view to his grandmother’s in the Combray section of the first novel. Industrial reproduction vulgarises that which art had filtered as beauty (495- il faut.. reconnaître que, dans la mesure où l’art met en lumière certaines lois, une fois qu’une industrie les a vulgarisées, l’art antérieur perd rétrospectivement un peu de son originalité).
But the Narrator is no reactionary. Photograhy has a value, since it stores images that have been lost (409 -- La photographie acquiert un peu de la dignité qui lui manque, quand elle cesse d’être une reproduction du réel et nous montre des choses qui n’existent plus). And more interestingly, it can also widen and enrich the capabilities of our eyes. “d’admirables” photographies de paysages et de villes... image différente de celles que nos avons l’habitude de voi…. telle de ces photographies “magnifiques” illustrera une loi de la perspective, nous montrera telle cathédrale que nos avons l’habitude de voir au milieu de la ville, prise au contraire d’un point choisi d’où elle aura l’air trente fois plus haute que les maisons et faisant éperon au bord du fleuve d’où elle est en réalité distante.
Futhermore, it is thanks to these reproduced images that the Narrator has constructed his mental and ideal picture of the church at Balbec before he can visit it. If sometimes his confrontation of reality leads him to disappointment, in this case representation is not at odds with its origin and has on the contrary aggrandized the significance of the original. The Narrator is conquered by awe when standing in front of the real object, the thing-in-itself (283 --maintenant c’est l’église elle-même, c’est la statue elle-même, elles, les uniques: c’est bien plus.
UNVEILING the CLOTHES
But if we saw that any one person will fashion her or his clothes with the idea of embodying the self in a particular desired way, here comes the artist, the painter, ready to disentangle that conception and model both the art of fashion designers and the projections of a sitter into yet another level of transformation.
For Elstir teaches the Narrator that the modistes are artists who with just one gesture they can convert simple matter into something sublime (571 their art “le geste delicat par lequel elles donnent un dernier chiffonement – aux noeuds et aux plumes d’un chapeau terminé). And yet, he will, with also a single gesture, unlock the camouflage set up by the fashion makers and the sitters and reveal their inner reality – (523 -- cette harmonie, le coup d’œil d’un grand peintre la détruit en une seconde,..
So the Narrator presents the duel between a sitter and her portraitist, in which they fight for different representation of her image. By the inclusion of a revealing element in the portrait of a cousin to the Princesse de Luxembourg, (523 - “un vaste décor incliné et violet qui faisait penser à la Place Pigalle) the painter leaves a trace that can lead to her dubious moral past. This is a signal which the sitter, however, may not detect – un grand artiste ne cherchera aucunement à donner satisfaction à...la femme …but the artist is not ready to compromise and he will désenchanter le spectateur vulgaire.
And it is in his portrait of Odette that the Elstir enthralls the Narrator by extracting from her that very quality which has fascinated our protagonist from early on but which Mme Swann had covered up. In her portrayal as Miss Sacripant, Elstir has rendered all her theatricality, fictitiousness and double-entendre. Not only is she dressed up in costume and figuring as someone else, but even her sex appeal is ambiguous and elusive.
506ff -- Odette – Miss Sacripant...le caractère ambigu de l’être dont j’avais le portrait sous les yeux tenait, sans que je le comprisse, à ce que c’était une jeune actrice d’autrefois en demi-travesti... en costume.. un être factice.
Dismantling the construction of the mantle of purity in which Mme Swann had wrapped herself, the painter has unfolded the full fan inside the young Narrator’s imagination by expanding the two poles of Odette’s spectrum, the Grande Dame or the Cocotte.
PAINTERLY REPRESENTATION
Elstir as Eye Opener.
For it is in the painter Elstir that, so far, our Narrator finds the most pure inspiration. When he finally encountered Bergotte, the object of his fascination from an early age, our Narrator felt disappointed. Prior to the meeting he had already become very familiar with the writer’s exquisite prose so there was no discovery. And may be as a sign of his youth, he had fallen into the trap of expecting appearances to match substance, when Bergotte’s common physique did not match his stylized prose. So, even though Bergotte sits at the crest of writing, the art in which the Narrator dreams to excel, it is another art medium that will, literally, open the Narrator’s eyes.
There is no disappointment in his meeting the metamorphosed Monsieur Biche. And this Biche-turned-into-Elstir presents him with new and unknown wonders.
Pervasive Images.
But one wonders at what point in time this Narrator has opened up his eyes. As we read these memories we do not know when the painterly way of conceiving things entered his mind. The novel is full of terms related to surfaces and paintings and frames. There are many fenêtres, cadres, rideaux, peintures doubles, cloth covered paintings, hublots (portholes), vitraux and vitrines, écrins, études en verre, rétables or predellas, and a lot of glass and glass gallerias. Here is an extract loaded with them.
454 -- changea le tableau que j’y trouvais dans la fenêtre... dans le verre glauque et qu’elle boursouflait de ses vagues rondes.. sertie entre les montants de fer de ma croisée comme dans les plombs d’un vitrail.... un tableau religieux au-dessus du maître-autel.. parties différentes du couchant, exposées dans les glaces des bibliothèques basses en acajou.... couraient le long des murs... on exhibe à côté les uns des autres dans une salle de musée les volets séparés que l’imagination seule du visiteur remet à leur place sur les prédelles d’un retable.
Observing Reality and Extracting Truth.
The Narrator comes to the realization that talent is neither inherited nor is it contagious. He had already admitted that by hanging out with Bergotte in social activities he would not absorb the writer’s mastery. Observing and talking with Elstir, he becomes mesmerized with the painter and tries to unlock the mystery of his artistic ability. He apprehends that it cannot be obtained by sheer effort of the conscious mind or l’intélligence. Time and memory are necessary to extract the truth out of the surrounding reality and these cannot be summoned by the pure and cold intellect. Perception tuned at its finest, together with a poetic eye, will bring the ability to dissolve one’s preconceived notions and 492--voir la nature telle qu’elle est, poétiquement”. One is to let free the whole array of immediate sensations and not let the intellect’s preconceptions.498 – L’effort que’Elstir faisait pour se dépouiller en présence de la réalité de toutes les notions de son intelligence.
Reality needs to be reflected, but the kind of mirror that is capable of reflecting beauty and truth is just not any mirror, it has to be the mirror of genius and it is in this mirroring activity that beauty is generated.
157 -- De même ceux qui produisent des oeuvres géniales sont... ceux qui ont le pouvoir, ... de rendre leur personnalité pareille à un miroir, de telle sorte que.... , le génie consistant dans le pouvoir réfléchissant et non dans la qualité intrinsèque du spectacle reflété.
Such is Elstir’s abiltiy at detecting hidden beauty, that the Narrator also learns from him that it can also be extracted out of common objects. This is a huge revelation for him, because he no longer needs to block obstacles and vulgar intrusions when he wants to admire his Balbec church. Elstir is capable of distilling beauty even out of Dead Nature, or Still Lives. 532 – “j’essayais de trouver la beauté là où je ne m’étais jamais figuré qu’elle fût, dans les choses les plus usuelles, dans la vie profonde des natures mortes.
Mental Transformation & Construction.
But registering sensations is not enough. As the Narrator tells us, the process that Leonardo called “cosa mentale” is necessary if one is to approach truth. The artist will arrange a new grouping of the constituent elements of the sensory experience and this new arrangement will reveal its deeper nature. 522 –- génie artistique – pouvoir de dissocier les combinaisons d’atomes et de grouper ceux-ci suivant d’un ordre absolu.
In the magic transformation in which beauty is distilled out of common elements, Elstir’s alchemy converts his atélier or studio into a Laboratory. Using his capabilities as Creator he will conjure up order out of chaos and will produce a new reality. 491 – L’atélier d’Elstir m’apparut comme le laboratoire d’une sorte de nouvelle création du monde, où, du chaos que sont toutes choses que nous voyons, il avait tiré.....
And in this he is comparable to the supreme creator because if He named things, Elstir renames them. 492 -- si Dieu le Père avait créé les choses en les nommant, c’est en leur ôtant le nom, ou en leur donnant un autre, qu’Elstir les recréait.
Art Becomes its own Force.
Depicted things enter a new realm of existence. They continue to be that which they may no longer are, but cease to be what they were by acquiring this new nature. 491 pris une dignité nouvelle du fait qu’ils continuaient à être, encore dépourvus de ce en quoi ils passaient pour consister…la vague ne pouvant plus mouiller ni le veston habiller personne.
With such a transformational ability, Art eventually is no longer just an outcome in a process. It will consolidate its own existence and become a new force. With this impulse it will act in a boomerang fashion and having emerged out of reality it will project itself back and change its nature. Similarly to the way Swann fell in love with Odette, by clothing her with Botticelli’s images, the Narrator begins to see a charm in Mme Elstir once he projects Titian onto her. These two artists, Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Fillipeppi (a.k.a. Botticelli) and Tiziano Vecellio are an example of how two individuals, before Elstir, were able to elicit beauty out of their sitters and surroundings, thanks to their sensibility and ability to transform and represent bequeathing to us their art and enriching our perceptions.
FINAL CURTAINS
In this volume we continue to accompany the Narrator in his Education Sentimentale, but as we join him in the exploration of his feelings, fascinations and obsessions, we witness the particular and wholehearted attention he pays to the phenomenon of artistic Representation. We see with his eyes how he discovers it through the visual arts and its aesthetics and participate in this Education Artistique.
And if the novel finishes with the opening of the curtains in the Narrators room, we shall now close them tightly until it is time to open them up again and let light stream in beautifully and poetically and enable us to continue to see.
And all of this we see through text.
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Page references are to the Gallimard-Folio edition.
FIFTEEN stars.
September 2, 2013
A Note about the Translation
I wanted to support the translation of this volume by James Grieve, a lecturer at my alma mater, Australian National University, when I was there in the 70’s.
I’m pretty sure he taught two of my close friends. While I can’t recall meeting him, I did socialise with one of his colleagues, Robert Dessaix, who subsequently became a talented writer.
It was a very capable French Department. However, in the 90’s, it was decimated by budget cuts and Grieve was made "redundant". He subsequently undertook a full teaching load for no remuneration, declining an opportunity to move to Sydney, so he could continue to cycle everywhere around Canberra and continue his commitment to the cause of French language and literature. ANU hasn’t even updated his CV to give him credit for this translation (which for what it’s worth was the favourite of Alain de Botton).
I approached Grieve’s translation a little sceptically at first. I still have a few quibbles (he translated "petite bande" as a "little gang" of girls, which you might do for punks, but I wonder about middle class girls, even if they were perceived as unruly). However, I quickly stopped paying attention to the translation and focussed on the pleasures of the text.
A Note about the Title
The novel continues and extends Proust’s literary analysis of love, focussing mainly on the narrator’s journey through late adolescence and his early sexual experiences (at ages 15 to 20, unless I’m mistaken).
The title of the Grieve translation is "In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower", in contrast to the Kilmartin translation "Within a Budding Grove".
Taken separately, it’s difficult to determine the intended meaning of each alternative title.
To what extent is sexuality implicit in the title?
This question reminded me of the title of Chapter 28 of Thomas Hardy’s "Far from the Madding Crowd", a highly sexually-charged chapter that goes by the name "The Hollow Amid the Ferns".
"Within a Budding Grove" might simply refer to a forest of trees, which bud in winter in preparation for spring, a fairly innocuous translation, if still a metaphor.
There is also an English song which might have been known to the translators:
"Yet soon the lovely days of Spring
Will leaf the budding grove."
The budding could also be symbolic of the adolescent experience and puberty of both genders, since females are not mentioned in this version.
On the other hand, given the literal meaning of the French title, the "budding grove" might be a more pointed reference to female puberty, a "rosebud" being slang for female genitalia (see also its significance in "Citizen Kane").
Grieve’s translation is more literal. The young women are in flower (or in bloom), a metaphor for puberty. Perhaps the shadow refers to the darkness of the girls’ transition to adulthood or the fact that they tower metaphorically over the narrator and cast a shadow over his life and social and sexual experiences?
What, There’s More?
After the tour de force that was the first volume, it still amazes me that Proust was able to continue writing about love with such insight, sophistication and wit (and there are more volumes to come).
He keeps finding new things to say, all of which seem to be definitive in their analysis.
Proust possessed amazing powers of observation. In the first volume they were directed partly at his own childhood relationship with his mother, but mainly at the relationship of Charles Swann and Odette de Crecey.
The second volume continues the scrutiny of Swann and the now Madame Swann, but the narrator moves to centre stage.
He is an older and greater participant in the action. However, even this statement has to be qualified in the case of Proust.
The great bulk of the text is what occurs in the narrator’s mind, as he responds to events and stimuli around him. He is still an acute observer. He doesn’t just look and think, he reviews, he criticizes, he critiques, as if every aspect of life is a literary or aesthetic experience.
At times, it approaches the lyrical and the musical, as if Proust were composing a symphony or an opera assembled from his responses and interactions.
The sensation of touch is not enough. He must cerebrally process the sensation and convert it into art. An animal can touch and feel, only a human can create Art. Proust worked at the pinnacle of what a human can fashion from their life experience.
Catherine Deneuve as Madame Odette Swann in the film of "Time Regained"
At Madame Swann’s
It quickly becomes apparent that Odette de Crecey from Volume 1 has married Charles Swann and had a daughter Gilberte, who is a similar age to the unnamed Marcel and is aged from 15 to 18 during the first section of the volume.
Odette divided opinion in volume 1, because she was a high class courtesan. Her marriage to Swann surprised Paris’ polite society and there are still many who scorn her. However, despite all expectations, it seems that their marriage has been a success, at least to the extent that it has been mutually advantageous, which after all is possibly the least we can expect of any marriage.
There are unresolved implications of dual infidelity, but they are back story and not the focus of this volume.
Swann has lifted Odette into High Society, and she is grateful. Odette has given Swann a daughter, who loves him, despite being equally strong-willed, but just as importantly Odette confers on Swann a "purely private satisfaction" that cements their relationship.
The status of the Swann family, despite Swann’s Jewish background, allows Odette to establish a successful literary salon, but also to redesign herself.
Her complexion is dark. In volume 1, her beauty was always played down. Now, "she seemed to have grown so many years younger, she had filled out, enjoyed better health, looked calmer, cooler, more relaxed". Her new pattern was "full of majesty and charm". She wore "this immutable model of eternal youth". At the same time, whatever she wore:
"...encompassed her like the delicate and etherealized epitome of a civilization."
These qualities are, apparently, attractive in a woman.
While Marcel purports to be in love with Gilberte, he is at least partly in love with Odette as well. Alternatively, he actually wants to be Odette, if only so that he can partner Swann, whom he admires. [This is not a simple relationship.]
Picasso’s "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon"
See Jim Everett's allusion to this painting here on Proust Reader
At Balbec
Two years later, presumably when Marcel is about 18 to 20, his health requires him to spend a few seasons at the beach resort town of Balbec.
He uses this time to forget his love for Gilberte. Instead, his attention is drawn to a "petite bande" of "jeunes filles en fleurs".
This provides the set up for much contemplation on the subject matter of volume 1, memory and the nature of love, as well as the complications introduced by adolescent sexuality.
It’s these issues I’d like to focus on for the rest of this review. I hope you’ll forgive me if I resort to the abstract or the impersonal, so as not necessarily to reveal the object of Marcel’s affection and spoil your reading of the novel.
A Critique of Pure Devotion
In volume 1, we learn much about the nature of love from the point of view of Swann, as narrated by Marcel. Presumably, the narrative was dictated at a later phase of his life. Here, we see him undergoing his own adolescent experiences, even if they were narrated subsequently.
We learn what the older Marcel knows, only not in chronological order. Proust adheres to a subjective order of revelation, which in a way reflects the fact that memory itself is not chronological. It prioritises itself according to laws that we might never know or understand.
From now on, I'd like to allow Proust's words to speak for themselves as much as possible.
The Subjectivity of Love
The Object of Our Affection is what we make of them:
"Love creates a supplementary person who is quite different from the one who bears our beloved’s name in the outside world and is mostly formed from elements within ourselves."
"Love having become so immense, we never reflect on how small a part the woman herself plays in it."
You love me, because I made you love me:
"This real Albertine was little more than an outline: everything else that had been added to her was of my own making, for our own contribution to our love – even if judged solely from the point of view of quantity – is greater than that of the person we love."
You’ll be my mirror:
"When we are in love, our love is too vast to be wholly contained within ourselves; it radiates outward, reaches the resistant surface of the loved one, which reflects it back to its starting point; and this return of our own tenderness is what we see as the other’s feelings, working their new, enhanced charm on us, because we do not recognise them as having originating in ourselves.”
The Conjunction of Love and Pain
"Whatever I longed for would be mine only at the end of a painful pursuit...this supreme goal could be achieved only on condition that I sacrifice to it the pleasure I had hoped to find in it."
The Quest for Beauty as a Source of Love and Life
"I was at one of those times of youth when the idle heart, unoccupied by love for a particular person, lies in wait for Beauty, seeking it everywhere, as the man in love sees and desires in all things the woman he cherishes."
"Looking at her, I was filled with that renewed longing for life which any fresh glimpse of beauty and happiness can bring."
The Desire to Please, to Possess and to Penetrate
In order to gain love, you must make the acquaintance of the one you desire and then seek their approval:
"I was not yet old enough, and had remained too sensitive, to have given up the wish to please others and to possess them."
First, you have to enter their field of vision and engage them in conversation:
"It was not only her body I was after, it was the person living inside it, with whom there can be only one mode of touching, which is to attract her attention, and one mode of penetration, which is to put an idea into her mind."
Sometimes, a kiss is not enough. You must incite admiration, desire and memory:
"Just as it would not have been enough for me, in kissing her, to take pleasure from her lips without giving her any in return, so I wished that the idea of me, in entering her, in becoming part of her, might attract not only her attention, but her admiration, her desire, and might force it to keep a memory of me against the day when I might be able to benefit from it."
The Relevance of Physical Intimacy
"I had thought the love I felt for Albertine did not depend on any hope of physical intimacy."
The Unattainability of the Love Object
"Love, mobile and pre-existing, focuses on the image of a certain woman simply because she will be almost certainly unattainable."
Sometimes, it’s not impossible, just difficult:
"I was inclined to magnify the simplest of pleasures because of the obstacles that lay between me and the possibility of enjoying them."
The Attainability of the Love Object
The more easily attainable the love, the less the pleasure:
"The main reason for the shrinking of the pleasure to which I had been so looking forward was the knowledge that nothing could now prevent me from enjoying it."
The Possession of the Love Object
"Our love too seems to have vanished at the very moment when we come into possession of a prize the value of which we have never really thought about."
The Postponement of Gratification
"It is seldom that a joy is promptly paired with the desire that longed for it."
The more you dally, the greater the dalliance:
"What monotony and boredom color the lives of those who drive directly…without ever daring to dally along the way with what they desire!"
But don’t dally too long:
"It is not certain that the happiness that comes too late, at a time when one can no longer enjoy it, when one is no longer in love, is exactly the same happiness for which we once pined in vain. There is only one person – our former self – who could decide the issue; and that self is no longer with us."
Be wary of sabotage and self-denial:
"The only thing I cared for, my relationship with Gilberte, was the very thing I was trying to sabotage, through my prolonging of our separation, through my gradual fostering not of her indifference toward me, but – which would come to the same thing in the end – of mine toward her. My unremitting effort was directed to bringing about the slow, agonizing suicide of the self that loved Gilberte."
Self-denial should not be conditional, lest the conditions not be met:
"...unless she made an unambiguous request for us to clarify our relationship, accompanied by a full declaration of her love for me, both of which I knew were impossible..."
The Satisfaction of One Desire Creates Another
"To possess a little more of her would only increase our need for the part of her that we do not possess; and in any case, within our part, since our needs arise out of our satisfactions, something of her would still lie forever beyond our grasp."
The Coincidence of Desire and Reality
"When reality coincides at last with something we have longed for, fitting perfectly with our dreams, it can cover them up entirely and become indistinguishable from them, as two symmetrical figures placed against one another seem to become one; whereas, so as to give our joy its full intensity of meaning, we would actually prefer every detail of our desires, even at the instant of fulfillment, to retain the presence of still being immaterial, so as to be more certain that this really is what we desired."
The Source of Our Memory
"The things that are best at reminding us of a person are those which, because they were insignificant, we have forgotten, and which have therefore lost none of their power. Which is why the greater part of our memory exists outside us, in a dampish breeze, in the musty air of a bedroom or the smell of autumn’s first fires, things through which we can retrieve any part of us that the reasoning mind, having no use for it, disdained, the last vestige of the past, the best of it, the part which, after all our tears seem to have dried, can make us weep again."
The Habits of Love
"This recurrence of pain and the renewal of my love for Gilberte did not last longer than they would have in a dream of her, for the very reason that my life at Balbec was free of the habits that in usual circumstances would have helped it to prevail. It was because of Habit that I had become more and more indifferent to Gilberte."
The Mutability of Love
"If we consciously or unconsciously outgrow those associations, our love, as though it was a spontaneous growth, a thing of our own making, revives and offers itself to another woman."
"There was in me a residue of old dreams of love, dating from my childhood, full of all the tenderness my heart was capable of, all the love it had ever felt, and which was now indistinguishable from it, which could be suddenly brought back to me by someone as different as possible from me."
"This liking for new places and people is of course worked into our forgetting of older ones."
The Indivisibility of Love
"My feeling was no longer the simple attraction of the first days: it was an incipient, tentative love for each or any of them, every single one of them being a natural substitute for any of the others."
The Resemblance of Our Love Objects
"There is a degree of resemblance between the women we love at different times; and this resemblance, though it devolves, derives from the unchanging nature of our own temperament, which is what selects them, by ruling out all those who are not likely to be both opposite and complementary to us, who cannot be relied on, that is, to gratify our sensuality and wound our heart. Such women are a product of our temperament, an inverted image or projection, a negative of our sensitivity."
You Are Too Like Me for Me To Love
"It was impossible for any love of mine for Andree to be true: she was too intellectual, too highly-strung, too prone to ailment, too much like myself. Though Albertine now seemed empty, Andree was full of something with which I was overfamiliar."
The Shadow
"At those moments in my life when I was not in love but wished I was, the ideal of physical beauty I carried about with me...was partnered by the emotional shadow, ever ready to be brought to real life, of the woman who was going to fall in love with me and step straight into the part already written for her...in the comedy of fondness and passion that had been awaiting her since my childhood...as long as she had a pleasant disposition and some of the physical characteristics required by the role."
Love or Enjoyment
"I sensed that those who know love and those who enjoy life are not the same people."
Emmanuelle Béart as Gilberte in the film of “Time Regained”
At the Zoo
[After and in the Words of Proust]
Madame Swann's
Easy step
Gave her coat
A loose and
Lazy sway.
Noticing,
I conferred
A shy glance,
Subtle but
Admiring,
Upon which,
Detected,
I was then
Rewarded
With a wink
Of her eye
And a slow
Flirtatious
Smile. Oh what
Ecstasy.
Ill Bergotten
[After and in the Words of Proust]
Matter-of-fact
And overrich,
The familiar,
Did he eschew.
Not content to
Toe the line, hence
Approached from some
Petty angle,
His ideas
Always sounded
Unbeauteous,
Wearisome and
Convoluted:
"A Cartesian
Devil, vainly
Endeavouring
To endure
Eternally
In equipoise."
Smartness for the
Sake of smartness,
Thus, were his words
Twisted around.
Ephemeral,
But not profound.
Avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne
[After and in the Words of Proust]
Madame Swann sauntered along the
Avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne,
Mellow, gentle, smiling and stately,
At the peak of wealth and beauty,
Delectable in the blooming
Summer season of her lifetime,
From which glorious point she watched
Worlds turn beneath her measured tread,
Until Prince de Sagan spied her.
His greeting evoked chivalry,
Polite and allegorical,
A noble homage to Woman,
Since recalled by Proust after noon
Any fine day in May, a glimpse
Of Madame Swann chatting with him
In the glow of wisteria.
Satisfied, at peace, in love, his
Spirit freed from hysteria.
Une Petite Bande
[After and in the Words of Proust]
Look there, far away
On the esplanade,
Making a strange mass
Of moving colours,
Five or six young girls
All as different
In their appearance
And their ways from the
Other bathers as
The odd gaggle of
Seagulls strutting on
The beach, wings flapping.
I wanted to support the translation of this volume by James Grieve, a lecturer at my alma mater, Australian National University, when I was there in the 70’s.
I’m pretty sure he taught two of my close friends. While I can’t recall meeting him, I did socialise with one of his colleagues, Robert Dessaix, who subsequently became a talented writer.
It was a very capable French Department. However, in the 90’s, it was decimated by budget cuts and Grieve was made "redundant". He subsequently undertook a full teaching load for no remuneration, declining an opportunity to move to Sydney, so he could continue to cycle everywhere around Canberra and continue his commitment to the cause of French language and literature. ANU hasn’t even updated his CV to give him credit for this translation (which for what it’s worth was the favourite of Alain de Botton).
I approached Grieve’s translation a little sceptically at first. I still have a few quibbles (he translated "petite bande" as a "little gang" of girls, which you might do for punks, but I wonder about middle class girls, even if they were perceived as unruly). However, I quickly stopped paying attention to the translation and focussed on the pleasures of the text.
A Note about the Title
The novel continues and extends Proust’s literary analysis of love, focussing mainly on the narrator’s journey through late adolescence and his early sexual experiences (at ages 15 to 20, unless I’m mistaken).
The title of the Grieve translation is "In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower", in contrast to the Kilmartin translation "Within a Budding Grove".
Taken separately, it’s difficult to determine the intended meaning of each alternative title.
To what extent is sexuality implicit in the title?
This question reminded me of the title of Chapter 28 of Thomas Hardy’s "Far from the Madding Crowd", a highly sexually-charged chapter that goes by the name "The Hollow Amid the Ferns".
"Within a Budding Grove" might simply refer to a forest of trees, which bud in winter in preparation for spring, a fairly innocuous translation, if still a metaphor.
There is also an English song which might have been known to the translators:
"Yet soon the lovely days of Spring
Will leaf the budding grove."
The budding could also be symbolic of the adolescent experience and puberty of both genders, since females are not mentioned in this version.
On the other hand, given the literal meaning of the French title, the "budding grove" might be a more pointed reference to female puberty, a "rosebud" being slang for female genitalia (see also its significance in "Citizen Kane").
Grieve’s translation is more literal. The young women are in flower (or in bloom), a metaphor for puberty. Perhaps the shadow refers to the darkness of the girls’ transition to adulthood or the fact that they tower metaphorically over the narrator and cast a shadow over his life and social and sexual experiences?
What, There’s More?
After the tour de force that was the first volume, it still amazes me that Proust was able to continue writing about love with such insight, sophistication and wit (and there are more volumes to come).
He keeps finding new things to say, all of which seem to be definitive in their analysis.
Proust possessed amazing powers of observation. In the first volume they were directed partly at his own childhood relationship with his mother, but mainly at the relationship of Charles Swann and Odette de Crecey.
The second volume continues the scrutiny of Swann and the now Madame Swann, but the narrator moves to centre stage.
He is an older and greater participant in the action. However, even this statement has to be qualified in the case of Proust.
The great bulk of the text is what occurs in the narrator’s mind, as he responds to events and stimuli around him. He is still an acute observer. He doesn’t just look and think, he reviews, he criticizes, he critiques, as if every aspect of life is a literary or aesthetic experience.
At times, it approaches the lyrical and the musical, as if Proust were composing a symphony or an opera assembled from his responses and interactions.
The sensation of touch is not enough. He must cerebrally process the sensation and convert it into art. An animal can touch and feel, only a human can create Art. Proust worked at the pinnacle of what a human can fashion from their life experience.
Catherine Deneuve as Madame Odette Swann in the film of "Time Regained"
At Madame Swann’s
It quickly becomes apparent that Odette de Crecey from Volume 1 has married Charles Swann and had a daughter Gilberte, who is a similar age to the unnamed Marcel and is aged from 15 to 18 during the first section of the volume.
Odette divided opinion in volume 1, because she was a high class courtesan. Her marriage to Swann surprised Paris’ polite society and there are still many who scorn her. However, despite all expectations, it seems that their marriage has been a success, at least to the extent that it has been mutually advantageous, which after all is possibly the least we can expect of any marriage.
There are unresolved implications of dual infidelity, but they are back story and not the focus of this volume.
Swann has lifted Odette into High Society, and she is grateful. Odette has given Swann a daughter, who loves him, despite being equally strong-willed, but just as importantly Odette confers on Swann a "purely private satisfaction" that cements their relationship.
The status of the Swann family, despite Swann’s Jewish background, allows Odette to establish a successful literary salon, but also to redesign herself.
Her complexion is dark. In volume 1, her beauty was always played down. Now, "she seemed to have grown so many years younger, she had filled out, enjoyed better health, looked calmer, cooler, more relaxed". Her new pattern was "full of majesty and charm". She wore "this immutable model of eternal youth". At the same time, whatever she wore:
"...encompassed her like the delicate and etherealized epitome of a civilization."
These qualities are, apparently, attractive in a woman.
While Marcel purports to be in love with Gilberte, he is at least partly in love with Odette as well. Alternatively, he actually wants to be Odette, if only so that he can partner Swann, whom he admires. [This is not a simple relationship.]
Picasso’s "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon"
See Jim Everett's allusion to this painting here on Proust Reader
At Balbec
Two years later, presumably when Marcel is about 18 to 20, his health requires him to spend a few seasons at the beach resort town of Balbec.
He uses this time to forget his love for Gilberte. Instead, his attention is drawn to a "petite bande" of "jeunes filles en fleurs".
This provides the set up for much contemplation on the subject matter of volume 1, memory and the nature of love, as well as the complications introduced by adolescent sexuality.
It’s these issues I’d like to focus on for the rest of this review. I hope you’ll forgive me if I resort to the abstract or the impersonal, so as not necessarily to reveal the object of Marcel’s affection and spoil your reading of the novel.
A Critique of Pure Devotion
In volume 1, we learn much about the nature of love from the point of view of Swann, as narrated by Marcel. Presumably, the narrative was dictated at a later phase of his life. Here, we see him undergoing his own adolescent experiences, even if they were narrated subsequently.
We learn what the older Marcel knows, only not in chronological order. Proust adheres to a subjective order of revelation, which in a way reflects the fact that memory itself is not chronological. It prioritises itself according to laws that we might never know or understand.
From now on, I'd like to allow Proust's words to speak for themselves as much as possible.
The Subjectivity of Love
The Object of Our Affection is what we make of them:
"Love creates a supplementary person who is quite different from the one who bears our beloved’s name in the outside world and is mostly formed from elements within ourselves."
"Love having become so immense, we never reflect on how small a part the woman herself plays in it."
You love me, because I made you love me:
"This real Albertine was little more than an outline: everything else that had been added to her was of my own making, for our own contribution to our love – even if judged solely from the point of view of quantity – is greater than that of the person we love."
You’ll be my mirror:
"When we are in love, our love is too vast to be wholly contained within ourselves; it radiates outward, reaches the resistant surface of the loved one, which reflects it back to its starting point; and this return of our own tenderness is what we see as the other’s feelings, working their new, enhanced charm on us, because we do not recognise them as having originating in ourselves.”
The Conjunction of Love and Pain
"Whatever I longed for would be mine only at the end of a painful pursuit...this supreme goal could be achieved only on condition that I sacrifice to it the pleasure I had hoped to find in it."
The Quest for Beauty as a Source of Love and Life
"I was at one of those times of youth when the idle heart, unoccupied by love for a particular person, lies in wait for Beauty, seeking it everywhere, as the man in love sees and desires in all things the woman he cherishes."
"Looking at her, I was filled with that renewed longing for life which any fresh glimpse of beauty and happiness can bring."
The Desire to Please, to Possess and to Penetrate
In order to gain love, you must make the acquaintance of the one you desire and then seek their approval:
"I was not yet old enough, and had remained too sensitive, to have given up the wish to please others and to possess them."
First, you have to enter their field of vision and engage them in conversation:
"It was not only her body I was after, it was the person living inside it, with whom there can be only one mode of touching, which is to attract her attention, and one mode of penetration, which is to put an idea into her mind."
Sometimes, a kiss is not enough. You must incite admiration, desire and memory:
"Just as it would not have been enough for me, in kissing her, to take pleasure from her lips without giving her any in return, so I wished that the idea of me, in entering her, in becoming part of her, might attract not only her attention, but her admiration, her desire, and might force it to keep a memory of me against the day when I might be able to benefit from it."
The Relevance of Physical Intimacy
"I had thought the love I felt for Albertine did not depend on any hope of physical intimacy."
The Unattainability of the Love Object
"Love, mobile and pre-existing, focuses on the image of a certain woman simply because she will be almost certainly unattainable."
Sometimes, it’s not impossible, just difficult:
"I was inclined to magnify the simplest of pleasures because of the obstacles that lay between me and the possibility of enjoying them."
The Attainability of the Love Object
The more easily attainable the love, the less the pleasure:
"The main reason for the shrinking of the pleasure to which I had been so looking forward was the knowledge that nothing could now prevent me from enjoying it."
The Possession of the Love Object
"Our love too seems to have vanished at the very moment when we come into possession of a prize the value of which we have never really thought about."
The Postponement of Gratification
"It is seldom that a joy is promptly paired with the desire that longed for it."
The more you dally, the greater the dalliance:
"What monotony and boredom color the lives of those who drive directly…without ever daring to dally along the way with what they desire!"
But don’t dally too long:
"It is not certain that the happiness that comes too late, at a time when one can no longer enjoy it, when one is no longer in love, is exactly the same happiness for which we once pined in vain. There is only one person – our former self – who could decide the issue; and that self is no longer with us."
Be wary of sabotage and self-denial:
"The only thing I cared for, my relationship with Gilberte, was the very thing I was trying to sabotage, through my prolonging of our separation, through my gradual fostering not of her indifference toward me, but – which would come to the same thing in the end – of mine toward her. My unremitting effort was directed to bringing about the slow, agonizing suicide of the self that loved Gilberte."
Self-denial should not be conditional, lest the conditions not be met:
"...unless she made an unambiguous request for us to clarify our relationship, accompanied by a full declaration of her love for me, both of which I knew were impossible..."
The Satisfaction of One Desire Creates Another
"To possess a little more of her would only increase our need for the part of her that we do not possess; and in any case, within our part, since our needs arise out of our satisfactions, something of her would still lie forever beyond our grasp."
The Coincidence of Desire and Reality
"When reality coincides at last with something we have longed for, fitting perfectly with our dreams, it can cover them up entirely and become indistinguishable from them, as two symmetrical figures placed against one another seem to become one; whereas, so as to give our joy its full intensity of meaning, we would actually prefer every detail of our desires, even at the instant of fulfillment, to retain the presence of still being immaterial, so as to be more certain that this really is what we desired."
The Source of Our Memory
"The things that are best at reminding us of a person are those which, because they were insignificant, we have forgotten, and which have therefore lost none of their power. Which is why the greater part of our memory exists outside us, in a dampish breeze, in the musty air of a bedroom or the smell of autumn’s first fires, things through which we can retrieve any part of us that the reasoning mind, having no use for it, disdained, the last vestige of the past, the best of it, the part which, after all our tears seem to have dried, can make us weep again."
The Habits of Love
"This recurrence of pain and the renewal of my love for Gilberte did not last longer than they would have in a dream of her, for the very reason that my life at Balbec was free of the habits that in usual circumstances would have helped it to prevail. It was because of Habit that I had become more and more indifferent to Gilberte."
The Mutability of Love
"If we consciously or unconsciously outgrow those associations, our love, as though it was a spontaneous growth, a thing of our own making, revives and offers itself to another woman."
"There was in me a residue of old dreams of love, dating from my childhood, full of all the tenderness my heart was capable of, all the love it had ever felt, and which was now indistinguishable from it, which could be suddenly brought back to me by someone as different as possible from me."
"This liking for new places and people is of course worked into our forgetting of older ones."
The Indivisibility of Love
"My feeling was no longer the simple attraction of the first days: it was an incipient, tentative love for each or any of them, every single one of them being a natural substitute for any of the others."
The Resemblance of Our Love Objects
"There is a degree of resemblance between the women we love at different times; and this resemblance, though it devolves, derives from the unchanging nature of our own temperament, which is what selects them, by ruling out all those who are not likely to be both opposite and complementary to us, who cannot be relied on, that is, to gratify our sensuality and wound our heart. Such women are a product of our temperament, an inverted image or projection, a negative of our sensitivity."
You Are Too Like Me for Me To Love
"It was impossible for any love of mine for Andree to be true: she was too intellectual, too highly-strung, too prone to ailment, too much like myself. Though Albertine now seemed empty, Andree was full of something with which I was overfamiliar."
The Shadow
"At those moments in my life when I was not in love but wished I was, the ideal of physical beauty I carried about with me...was partnered by the emotional shadow, ever ready to be brought to real life, of the woman who was going to fall in love with me and step straight into the part already written for her...in the comedy of fondness and passion that had been awaiting her since my childhood...as long as she had a pleasant disposition and some of the physical characteristics required by the role."
Love or Enjoyment
"I sensed that those who know love and those who enjoy life are not the same people."
Emmanuelle Béart as Gilberte in the film of “Time Regained”
At the Zoo
[After and in the Words of Proust]
Madame Swann's
Easy step
Gave her coat
A loose and
Lazy sway.
Noticing,
I conferred
A shy glance,
Subtle but
Admiring,
Upon which,
Detected,
I was then
Rewarded
With a wink
Of her eye
And a slow
Flirtatious
Smile. Oh what
Ecstasy.
Ill Bergotten
[After and in the Words of Proust]
Matter-of-fact
And overrich,
The familiar,
Did he eschew.
Not content to
Toe the line, hence
Approached from some
Petty angle,
His ideas
Always sounded
Unbeauteous,
Wearisome and
Convoluted:
"A Cartesian
Devil, vainly
Endeavouring
To endure
Eternally
In equipoise."
Smartness for the
Sake of smartness,
Thus, were his words
Twisted around.
Ephemeral,
But not profound.
Avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne
[After and in the Words of Proust]
Madame Swann sauntered along the
Avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne,
Mellow, gentle, smiling and stately,
At the peak of wealth and beauty,
Delectable in the blooming
Summer season of her lifetime,
From which glorious point she watched
Worlds turn beneath her measured tread,
Until Prince de Sagan spied her.
His greeting evoked chivalry,
Polite and allegorical,
A noble homage to Woman,
Since recalled by Proust after noon
Any fine day in May, a glimpse
Of Madame Swann chatting with him
In the glow of wisteria.
Satisfied, at peace, in love, his
Spirit freed from hysteria.
Une Petite Bande
[After and in the Words of Proust]
Look there, far away
On the esplanade,
Making a strange mass
Of moving colours,
Five or six young girls
All as different
In their appearance
And their ways from the
Other bathers as
The odd gaggle of
Seagulls strutting on
The beach, wings flapping.
August 24, 2018
Adolescent Aesthetics
The temptation to compare Philip Roth and Marcel Proust is one I can’t resist. Both Goodbye Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint seem to me inverted interpretations of Proust’s Within the Budding Grove. Using the same technique of relentless interior monologue, all are coming of age novels featuring sex, taste of one kind or another, and social class set against a background of contemporary manners and Jewish assimilation.
All three books assay the problems of male adolescence - hormones, separation from family, impending career - and their possible solutions. But whereas Roth views these problems as arising from perceived cultural deprivation, Proust shows how inadequacies emerge equally among the privileged in much the same way. And while Roth treats the evolution from child to adult in terms of neurosis to be overcome, Proust describes milestones in psychological and social realisation that are necessary steps to becoming a person.
Proust would likely agree with Roth’s take on adolescence: “A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature.” Marcel’s warring self is in essence not much different from Portnoy’s, although a tad more refined, “…our virtues themselves are not free and floating qualities over which we retain a permanent control and power of disposal..” says Marcel, inverting St. Paul's observations about vice.
But the aims of each author/protagonist differ fundamentally. Roth’s ambition through Portnoy is “to raise obscenity to the level of a subject.” Marcel’s goal is to experience romantic love in which he “penetrates the soul of another.” Sexual intimacy for the latter is an expected consequence of this spiritual union but not its objective, perhaps because of his access even as a young teenager to the brothels of Paris which he found unsatisfying.
As the son of a senior government official, Marcel is exposed to ministers of state, the nobility and other VIP’s from infancy. What he learns without knowing what he is learning is protocol, how to act formally in social situations: What to say and not to say, how to stand, who to quote, the techniques of assessing relative social standing, and distinguishing the outre from the avant garde.
Roth’s characters come from the antithesis of Paris, namely Newark, New Jersey. They too learn skills, those that are equally necessary to survive in a dominant culture which is not their own and in a political environment which may be just as brutal as that of Paris but far less gentile. Nevertheless the ‘manners’ each acquires because of his background are equally problematic for all.
For the Newark boys, their lower class immigrant Jewish roots impede assimilation into middle class American society; for Marcel, his learned reserve and internalised emotional calculation inhibit his naturalness and makes him shy in the company of the relatively free-wheeling middle classes. For all, their backgrounds get in the way of relations with women, the former with Gentile girls, the latter with modern females unimpressed by ‘breeding’. All persistently pursue the same ‘types’ with predictable, disappointing results.
What Roth seems to lack almost totally, however, and which Proust emphasises, even in his stylised accounts of sex and class, is the development of taste, the aesthetic sense which substitutes in Proust's work for religious belief. It is this sense of the beautiful that provides an increasingly important guide for Marcel’s actions.
Early in Within the Budding Grove, Marcel marks the centrality of the aesthetic even in relationships of love, “The bonds that unite us to another human being are sanctified when he or she adopts the same point of view as ourselves in judging one of our imperfections.”
He then goes on to make love instrumental to the appreciation of beauty rather than vice versa: “…fully as much as retirement, ill health, or religious conversion, a protracted love-affair will substitute fresh visions for the old…” This aesthetic sense is the pivot around which all of Proust’s writing in this volume rotates. It is what makes the work a coherent whole. And it is the lack of an equivalent centre of gravity in Roth that makes his work somewhat unsatisfying in comparison.
Marcel is aware of himself in a way that the Newark boys can’t be without a sense of the aesthetic. In Jungian terms (and there can be little doubt that Proust is a natural if not a well-read Jungian), Marcel is an Objective Introvert, that is he is particularly sensitive to his environment and he tends to adapt himself to that environment rather than to try to change it. He comes to know this towards the end of the volume: “…contrary to what I had always asserted and believed, I was extremely sensitive to the opinions of others…[and] I feel it is eminently sensible of them to safeguard their lives, while at the same time being unable to prevent myself pushing my own safety into the background.” That is, he learns; something that is not possible without an aesthetic standard of what constitutes learning.
But because Marcel has a developed aesthetic sense, he also has a solution to his, rather common, problem of objective introversion. He has another aspect to his personality which on its own also causes him additional and frequent trouble: he constantly projects himself onto other people. He believes that they are either like himself in terms of desires and likely responses, or that they conform to his primitively articulated ideal. This causes recurring disappointment - a famed actress is far less talented than he expects, church sculptures are less impressive than he had believed, a prospective friend turns out less approachable than he anticipates.
Marcel comes to know he does this and he begins to appreciate the consequences. But instead of trying to eliminate this tendency toward projection from his personality, something he recognises as impossible, he seeks to make it conscious as a sort of control on the other part of his personality, his natural introversion, “For beauty is a series of hypotheses which ugliness cuts short…” Projections are no longer neurotic (if they ever were), but a means to test the world, in an almost scientific way through hypotheses, to find out what is really there. This is a very clever psychological strategy that neither Freud nor Jung ever considered, a sort of pragmatic aesthetics which allows the parts of his psyche to function productively together. And it works.
Moreover, in the manner of St. Augustine, Marcel, recognises that aesthetically driven desire leads beyond itself, like a religious icon which points to a reality not yet occurring, “The most exclusive love for a person is always a love for something else.” It is this ‘something else’ which he first brings up in volume 1 and alludes to subtly throughout volume 2. Always just beyond our linguistic grasp, it is that which draws language forth. He goes even further and creates a quasi-religious ontology of that which lies beyond, “For a desire seems to us more attractive, we repose on it with more confidence, when we know that outside ourselves there is a reality that conforms to it, even if, for us, it is not to be realised.”
Therefore, Marcel’s/Proust’s aesthetic is, remarkably, both pragmatic and spiritual. Even more remarkably, it is also ethical. The advice of his painter friend Elstir is precise, “We do not receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves.” Although Marcel’s aspiration is to become a writer, this advice is general. ‘Discovery’ implies that there is something new to be seen, heard, touched, painted, talked about, invented. He is able to come to several conclusions therefore, which are rather more insightful than anything in Roth.
Regarding which of a gang of girls to woo, for example, he puts all his newly acquired skills together to picture the future somewhat longer than the subsequent few hours:
Innovative indeed for a man on the make.
The recognition and maturing of this aesthetic sense is the necessary next step from Marcel's insights in volume 1 about purposefulness, the capacity to choose appropriate purpose. The aesthetic criteria he is developing apply not only to appreciating beauty but to understanding what is important, that is, what is valuable. Value is not an economic category in Proust but an aesthetic one; therefore inseparable from taste. And it in taste that Marcel is more than a bit advanced over his New Jersey fellow-adolescents.
The temptation to compare Philip Roth and Marcel Proust is one I can’t resist. Both Goodbye Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint seem to me inverted interpretations of Proust’s Within the Budding Grove. Using the same technique of relentless interior monologue, all are coming of age novels featuring sex, taste of one kind or another, and social class set against a background of contemporary manners and Jewish assimilation.
All three books assay the problems of male adolescence - hormones, separation from family, impending career - and their possible solutions. But whereas Roth views these problems as arising from perceived cultural deprivation, Proust shows how inadequacies emerge equally among the privileged in much the same way. And while Roth treats the evolution from child to adult in terms of neurosis to be overcome, Proust describes milestones in psychological and social realisation that are necessary steps to becoming a person.
Proust would likely agree with Roth’s take on adolescence: “A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature.” Marcel’s warring self is in essence not much different from Portnoy’s, although a tad more refined, “…our virtues themselves are not free and floating qualities over which we retain a permanent control and power of disposal..” says Marcel, inverting St. Paul's observations about vice.
But the aims of each author/protagonist differ fundamentally. Roth’s ambition through Portnoy is “to raise obscenity to the level of a subject.” Marcel’s goal is to experience romantic love in which he “penetrates the soul of another.” Sexual intimacy for the latter is an expected consequence of this spiritual union but not its objective, perhaps because of his access even as a young teenager to the brothels of Paris which he found unsatisfying.
As the son of a senior government official, Marcel is exposed to ministers of state, the nobility and other VIP’s from infancy. What he learns without knowing what he is learning is protocol, how to act formally in social situations: What to say and not to say, how to stand, who to quote, the techniques of assessing relative social standing, and distinguishing the outre from the avant garde.
Roth’s characters come from the antithesis of Paris, namely Newark, New Jersey. They too learn skills, those that are equally necessary to survive in a dominant culture which is not their own and in a political environment which may be just as brutal as that of Paris but far less gentile. Nevertheless the ‘manners’ each acquires because of his background are equally problematic for all.
For the Newark boys, their lower class immigrant Jewish roots impede assimilation into middle class American society; for Marcel, his learned reserve and internalised emotional calculation inhibit his naturalness and makes him shy in the company of the relatively free-wheeling middle classes. For all, their backgrounds get in the way of relations with women, the former with Gentile girls, the latter with modern females unimpressed by ‘breeding’. All persistently pursue the same ‘types’ with predictable, disappointing results.
What Roth seems to lack almost totally, however, and which Proust emphasises, even in his stylised accounts of sex and class, is the development of taste, the aesthetic sense which substitutes in Proust's work for religious belief. It is this sense of the beautiful that provides an increasingly important guide for Marcel’s actions.
Early in Within the Budding Grove, Marcel marks the centrality of the aesthetic even in relationships of love, “The bonds that unite us to another human being are sanctified when he or she adopts the same point of view as ourselves in judging one of our imperfections.”
He then goes on to make love instrumental to the appreciation of beauty rather than vice versa: “…fully as much as retirement, ill health, or religious conversion, a protracted love-affair will substitute fresh visions for the old…” This aesthetic sense is the pivot around which all of Proust’s writing in this volume rotates. It is what makes the work a coherent whole. And it is the lack of an equivalent centre of gravity in Roth that makes his work somewhat unsatisfying in comparison.
Marcel is aware of himself in a way that the Newark boys can’t be without a sense of the aesthetic. In Jungian terms (and there can be little doubt that Proust is a natural if not a well-read Jungian), Marcel is an Objective Introvert, that is he is particularly sensitive to his environment and he tends to adapt himself to that environment rather than to try to change it. He comes to know this towards the end of the volume: “…contrary to what I had always asserted and believed, I was extremely sensitive to the opinions of others…[and] I feel it is eminently sensible of them to safeguard their lives, while at the same time being unable to prevent myself pushing my own safety into the background.” That is, he learns; something that is not possible without an aesthetic standard of what constitutes learning.
But because Marcel has a developed aesthetic sense, he also has a solution to his, rather common, problem of objective introversion. He has another aspect to his personality which on its own also causes him additional and frequent trouble: he constantly projects himself onto other people. He believes that they are either like himself in terms of desires and likely responses, or that they conform to his primitively articulated ideal. This causes recurring disappointment - a famed actress is far less talented than he expects, church sculptures are less impressive than he had believed, a prospective friend turns out less approachable than he anticipates.
Marcel comes to know he does this and he begins to appreciate the consequences. But instead of trying to eliminate this tendency toward projection from his personality, something he recognises as impossible, he seeks to make it conscious as a sort of control on the other part of his personality, his natural introversion, “For beauty is a series of hypotheses which ugliness cuts short…” Projections are no longer neurotic (if they ever were), but a means to test the world, in an almost scientific way through hypotheses, to find out what is really there. This is a very clever psychological strategy that neither Freud nor Jung ever considered, a sort of pragmatic aesthetics which allows the parts of his psyche to function productively together. And it works.
Moreover, in the manner of St. Augustine, Marcel, recognises that aesthetically driven desire leads beyond itself, like a religious icon which points to a reality not yet occurring, “The most exclusive love for a person is always a love for something else.” It is this ‘something else’ which he first brings up in volume 1 and alludes to subtly throughout volume 2. Always just beyond our linguistic grasp, it is that which draws language forth. He goes even further and creates a quasi-religious ontology of that which lies beyond, “For a desire seems to us more attractive, we repose on it with more confidence, when we know that outside ourselves there is a reality that conforms to it, even if, for us, it is not to be realised.”
Therefore, Marcel’s/Proust’s aesthetic is, remarkably, both pragmatic and spiritual. Even more remarkably, it is also ethical. The advice of his painter friend Elstir is precise, “We do not receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves.” Although Marcel’s aspiration is to become a writer, this advice is general. ‘Discovery’ implies that there is something new to be seen, heard, touched, painted, talked about, invented. He is able to come to several conclusions therefore, which are rather more insightful than anything in Roth.
Regarding which of a gang of girls to woo, for example, he puts all his newly acquired skills together to picture the future somewhat longer than the subsequent few hours:
“As in a nursery plantation where the flowers mature at different seasons, I had seen them, in the form of old ladies, on this Balbec shore, those shrivelled seed-pods, those flabby tubers, which my new friends would one day be. But what matter? For the moment it was their flowering time.”
Innovative indeed for a man on the make.
The recognition and maturing of this aesthetic sense is the necessary next step from Marcel's insights in volume 1 about purposefulness, the capacity to choose appropriate purpose. The aesthetic criteria he is developing apply not only to appreciating beauty but to understanding what is important, that is, what is valuable. Value is not an economic category in Proust but an aesthetic one; therefore inseparable from taste. And it in taste that Marcel is more than a bit advanced over his New Jersey fellow-adolescents.
June 22, 2018
sorry, david. this book is better than swann's way. to the extent that i may have to go back and give swann's way three stars so that when i give this book four stars it doesn't make them equals, and, having four books to go, i want to leave room for a five-star anticipation. the first half of swann's way had me understanding what people did not like about proust. there was a lot of me hating on the narrator and gacking over his precious daintiness. this one, though, phoar. it is true it took me a long time to read it, and it was partly because the lulling nature of his prose would cause me to drift off into my own batch of memories and i would realize that three subway stops had gone by, or ten minutes of my break had passed, or i was asleep (that happened a few times, not because it was boring, but because his style is so much like a gentle boat on a lazy stream and it's all memory and dreamy and suddenly i am actually dreaming. that's pretty powerful) and then, i realized my copy was defective, and eight pages were blank! that's like two proust-sentences - gone! so i had to get a new copy and transfer all my bookmarks, marking passages i liked, such as "In reality, there is in love a permanent strain of suffering which happiness neutralises, makes potential only, postpones, but which may at any moment become, what it would long since have been had we not obtained what we wanted, excruciating." which is just gorgeous. and there is so much like that in this book - so much delightfully neurotic stewing and examining every delicate memory of first, and second, love. marcel is a thinkier prufrock waiting and waiting and thinking and hesitating and eventually pouncing, but like my cat when she's just playing with me to please me; you can tell her heart is elsewhere. but everyone, not just you, david, said this book was a valley in between the literary heights of swann's way and guermantes way, but i thought it was stunning. i am taking a proust-break for a moment,maybe two or three books worth, because i can see myself getting wholly immersed in the proustiverse and becoming too introspective and examining the minutia of life and love and disappointments and that's something you really want to space out and not digest all at once, for the sanity's sake. but then i suspect i will not be able to stop until the bitter end. with brian's (deleted) aborted wedding scene.
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come to my blog!
October 4, 2022
If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower ~~ Marcel Proust
Volume II of Marcel Proust’s, In Search of Lost Time, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower is a joy to read. In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower is a masterfully engaging, witty and involving read. Proust is brilliant.
As In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower begins, we meet the Marquis de Norpois, a diplomat and colleague of Marcel's father. He convinces the Marcel's father that it would be good for our hero to go to the theatre and see Berma in a production of Racine's Phedre. He also assures Marcel's father that a career in letters would not be bad a bad thing for young Marcel to pursue; Marquis de Norpois saves young Marcel from the diplomatic future his father envisioned for him. Soon young Marcel introduces us into his world of dukes, duchesses and barons, and most importantly, young girls. Marcel is now an adolescent, and he experiences his first taste of the obsessive loves that will soon engulf him throughout his life.
Once more it is love that is at the center of Proust's masterpiece, specifically adolescent love. Marcel has fallen in love with Gilberte Swann, the lovely daughter of Swann and Odette, who is now Madame Swann. Marcel tries to get an invitation to the Swann’s home through the good graces of M. de Norpois, but Norpois refuses to do what would have given him so little trouble, and me so much joy. Eventually our young protagonist is invited to Gilberte's home, and becomes an intimate of the Swanns. He loves Gilberte intensely, but the more he loves her, the less interested she is. Suddenly, he end the relationship, and refuses to see Gilberte anymore, although he still visits with Mme. Swann. Marcel suffers terribly from the ending this, his first love.
Marcel's family decides that it would be good for his health if he were to make a trip to the seaside town of Balbec; this helps him to most past his first hearbreak. The sensitive Marcel, is at first disoriented by the strangeness of his hotel room and by the new people he encounters, but he quickly recovers, and enjoys a summer idyll on the beach, ensconced in the comforts of the Grand Hotel. He is accompanied by his grandmother; she is an old-fashioned and practical lady, who believes in the benefits of salt breezes and fresh air. Here, they encounter the Marquise de Villeparisis, an old friend of his grandmother's, who drives them about the countryside in her carriage and is Marcel's first close encounter with an aristocrat.
It is here that Marcel becomes friends with another member of the aristocracy, Robert de Saint-Loup, a soldier and relative of the Guermantes ~~ Saint-Loup is one of my favorite characters in In Search of Lost Time. Robert, despite his upbringing, is a leftist who reads extensively, and admires Marcel for his intellect. He also has his own young love troubles with Rachel, a struggling young actress and former prostitute ~~ there are many thoughout the pages of In Search of Lost Time. Marcel calls her Rachel quand du seigneur ~~ achel when from the lord ~~ because he saw her once in a brothel and she reminded him of the character of Rachel in an opera. Marcel remarks could have had her for twenty francs, while Saint-Loup is now expending many times that amount to keep her. Their relationship mirrors that of Swann and Odette in Swann in Love ~~ Saint-Loup is hopelessly in love despite their difference in social class, while Rachel is constantly unfaithful to him.
The good looks, glamour, the social ease, the light cultural references and ability to walk into any restaurant in Paris. Robert de Saint-Loup has everything you need to get by in Proust's world.
It is here, while mingling with this aristocratic group, Marcel has his first encounter with the strangely-behaved Baron de Charlus ~~ a paragon of charm and politeness and insolence and rudeness. The Baron will take an increasingly larger role as the tale progresses. He is perhaps the most bizarre and interesting of all Proust’s aristocratic creations. I have much to say about Charlus and Proust himself, but all in good time.
Saint-Loup takes Marcel to marvelous dinners at a restaurant called Rivebelle, where they drink and eat, and where Marcel dreams of possessing the women he sees there. One evening at Rivebelle, they encounter the artist Elstir, who appeared in Swann's Way as the young painter known as Biche, a frequent visitor to the salon of the Verdurin's. He has now gained considerably in fame. Saint-Loup and Marcel write him a letter from their table, and he invites them to visit him at his studio. Such is the power of the aristocracy.
The visit is postponed, however, because Marcel has again fallen in love. This time it is not one girl ~~a little band of five or six attractive girls who go about together, and who Marcel tries to connect with, to no effect. He finally makes good on his visit to Elstir and finds, to his surprise, that Elstir knows the little band, and particularly their leader, Albertine Simonet. Marcel ~~ after an introduction from Elstir and several false starts ~~ finally gets to know the little band and becomes a member ~~ think Laurie in Little Women. He is torn between Andree and Albertine as to which girl he loves the best. In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower concludes with Marcel attempting to kiss Albertine while she is alone in a room at his hotel, and she ... ~~ I'm not going to tell you ...
Love is the major theme of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower ~~ but but so too the idea that how we imagine something before we come to know it is often more beautiful or brilliant than its reality. Once we experience the reality, we are sadly disappointed.
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower concludes with the end of the summer season. The weather becomes stormy and cold. The other guests have left. Soon, Marcel and his grandmother pack up their things and head back to Paris ~~ where ...
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower ~~ Marcel Proust
Volume II of Marcel Proust’s, In Search of Lost Time, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower is a joy to read. In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower is a masterfully engaging, witty and involving read. Proust is brilliant.
As In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower begins, we meet the Marquis de Norpois, a diplomat and colleague of Marcel's father. He convinces the Marcel's father that it would be good for our hero to go to the theatre and see Berma in a production of Racine's Phedre. He also assures Marcel's father that a career in letters would not be bad a bad thing for young Marcel to pursue; Marquis de Norpois saves young Marcel from the diplomatic future his father envisioned for him. Soon young Marcel introduces us into his world of dukes, duchesses and barons, and most importantly, young girls. Marcel is now an adolescent, and he experiences his first taste of the obsessive loves that will soon engulf him throughout his life.
Once more it is love that is at the center of Proust's masterpiece, specifically adolescent love. Marcel has fallen in love with Gilberte Swann, the lovely daughter of Swann and Odette, who is now Madame Swann. Marcel tries to get an invitation to the Swann’s home through the good graces of M. de Norpois, but Norpois refuses to do what would have given him so little trouble, and me so much joy. Eventually our young protagonist is invited to Gilberte's home, and becomes an intimate of the Swanns. He loves Gilberte intensely, but the more he loves her, the less interested she is. Suddenly, he end the relationship, and refuses to see Gilberte anymore, although he still visits with Mme. Swann. Marcel suffers terribly from the ending this, his first love.
Marcel's family decides that it would be good for his health if he were to make a trip to the seaside town of Balbec; this helps him to most past his first hearbreak. The sensitive Marcel, is at first disoriented by the strangeness of his hotel room and by the new people he encounters, but he quickly recovers, and enjoys a summer idyll on the beach, ensconced in the comforts of the Grand Hotel. He is accompanied by his grandmother; she is an old-fashioned and practical lady, who believes in the benefits of salt breezes and fresh air. Here, they encounter the Marquise de Villeparisis, an old friend of his grandmother's, who drives them about the countryside in her carriage and is Marcel's first close encounter with an aristocrat.
It is here that Marcel becomes friends with another member of the aristocracy, Robert de Saint-Loup, a soldier and relative of the Guermantes ~~ Saint-Loup is one of my favorite characters in In Search of Lost Time. Robert, despite his upbringing, is a leftist who reads extensively, and admires Marcel for his intellect. He also has his own young love troubles with Rachel, a struggling young actress and former prostitute ~~ there are many thoughout the pages of In Search of Lost Time. Marcel calls her Rachel quand du seigneur ~~ achel when from the lord ~~ because he saw her once in a brothel and she reminded him of the character of Rachel in an opera. Marcel remarks could have had her for twenty francs, while Saint-Loup is now expending many times that amount to keep her. Their relationship mirrors that of Swann and Odette in Swann in Love ~~ Saint-Loup is hopelessly in love despite their difference in social class, while Rachel is constantly unfaithful to him.
The good looks, glamour, the social ease, the light cultural references and ability to walk into any restaurant in Paris. Robert de Saint-Loup has everything you need to get by in Proust's world.
It is here, while mingling with this aristocratic group, Marcel has his first encounter with the strangely-behaved Baron de Charlus ~~ a paragon of charm and politeness and insolence and rudeness. The Baron will take an increasingly larger role as the tale progresses. He is perhaps the most bizarre and interesting of all Proust’s aristocratic creations. I have much to say about Charlus and Proust himself, but all in good time.
Saint-Loup takes Marcel to marvelous dinners at a restaurant called Rivebelle, where they drink and eat, and where Marcel dreams of possessing the women he sees there. One evening at Rivebelle, they encounter the artist Elstir, who appeared in Swann's Way as the young painter known as Biche, a frequent visitor to the salon of the Verdurin's. He has now gained considerably in fame. Saint-Loup and Marcel write him a letter from their table, and he invites them to visit him at his studio. Such is the power of the aristocracy.
The visit is postponed, however, because Marcel has again fallen in love. This time it is not one girl ~~a little band of five or six attractive girls who go about together, and who Marcel tries to connect with, to no effect. He finally makes good on his visit to Elstir and finds, to his surprise, that Elstir knows the little band, and particularly their leader, Albertine Simonet. Marcel ~~ after an introduction from Elstir and several false starts ~~ finally gets to know the little band and becomes a member ~~ think Laurie in Little Women. He is torn between Andree and Albertine as to which girl he loves the best. In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower concludes with Marcel attempting to kiss Albertine while she is alone in a room at his hotel, and she ... ~~ I'm not going to tell you ...
Love is the major theme of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower ~~ but but so too the idea that how we imagine something before we come to know it is often more beautiful or brilliant than its reality. Once we experience the reality, we are sadly disappointed.
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower concludes with the end of the summer season. The weather becomes stormy and cold. The other guests have left. Soon, Marcel and his grandmother pack up their things and head back to Paris ~~ where ...
March 1, 2019
«Για χρόνια πλάγιαζα νωρίς...»
Αγάπη, μνήμη, αδιέξοδο.
Μέσα στην Προυστική αντίληψη της ζωής, στην θεωρία του περί τέχνης, στην αισθητική του, καραδοκεί υποχθόνια η αιώνια απογοήτευση.
Μια κατάσταση απελπισίας και απόγνωσης, ένα αδιέξοδο σκέψεων και πράξεων που οδηγεί σε έναν μακάβριο δρόμο φιλοσοφικής διαφυγής: κάθε είδους αυτοκτονία.
Όμως ο Προύστ, βρίσκει πάντα πνευματικά μονοπάτια ψυχικής ευδαιμονίας, αιχμαλωτίζει τις στιγμούλες, μας διδάσκει, να προκαλούμε τα χαμένα στην μνήμη μας κομμάτια, αυτά που θάβονται στα πέρασμενα, αυτά που ανακαλεί η καρδούλα μας αυθόρμητα και εξαφανίζει το πέρασμα του χρόνου χαρίζοντας μας ευτυχία τόσο μυρωδάτη και απαλή, τόσο ξεχωριστή και ανείπωτη που γίνεται ευδαιμονία.
Αυτή η στιγμή που φυλακίζουμε και μας προσφέρει μέθεξη απολαυστικής εξαΰλωσης προς την κάθε ανάμνηση δεν διαρκεί πολύ, ούτε ανακαλείται συνεχώς. Μας απελευθερώνει, μας γοητεύει, μας λυτρώνει αποσπασματικά, όπως οι επιθυμίες που μας σκλάβωσαν κάποτε, και μετά χάνεται, σαν φλασάκι απροσδιόριστης αναπαράστασης,αποκλειστικά
μέσα στην ψυχή μας.
Ο Προύστ γνώριζε πως για να σταθεροποιηθεί όσο γίνεται περισσότερο η υπερκόσμια χαρά της αναζήτησης πρέπει να διαρκέσει πολύ και με ένταση. Πρέπει, για να μην παρεμβάλλονται τα εμπόδια του παρόντος που τρέχει ασταμάτητα προς τη λήθη, αυτά, που υπάρχουν για να σκοντάφτει η επιθυμία στην απογοήτευση.
Έτσι, δημιούργησε τέχνη. Μία τέχνη απαράμιλλη, που φυλακίζει τις στιγμές μας, τις φευγαλέες, και γίνεται φράγμα απο χρώματα, μυρωδιές, ήχους, μελωδίες, αγγίγματα, λόγια, χάδια, φιλιά, άπειρες καληνύχτες με στερνούς αποχαιρετισμούς και γλυκά ξημερώματα νοσταλγίας σε ένα λυκόφως διάπυρης φαντασίας και αυτούσιων εικόνων.
Το φράγμα αυτό της τέχνης συγκρατεί για πάντα την αναζήτηση και αυξάνει τη διάρκεια στην αδιάκοπη ροή των πάντων.
Σκοπός της καλλιτεχνικής θεραπείας είναι η μονιμοποίηση του ελάχιστου χρόνου που μας αποκαλύπτεται η πραγματική όψη του κόσμου μας.
Μέσα στο σύμπαν του μυαλού μας, οι ανασκαφές της ψυχής και τα ευρήματα των ονείρων μας είναι οι αληθινές εντυπώσεις που ζουν αιώνια και χαρακτηρίζουν το γνήσιο απο το συμβατικό.
Κάθε μορφή συμβατικής λειτουργίας αποβαίνει μοιραία, καθώς εντείνει την ροή των τωρινών ορίων και θάβει τις αναμνήσεις ώστε να μην ξαναγυρίσουν.
Το δεύτερο μέρος του «αναζητώντας τον χαμένο χρόνο» κυριαρχείται απο τους αρχιερείς των εφηβικών χαμόγελων, της αιώνιας νιότης, της παντοτινής ζωής, της σωματικής έλξης που αναγνωρίζει μυστικά αρώματα πόθου και της γλυκιάς λαγνείας των ανώριμων φρούτων, των καρπών, που εξιτάρουν όσους καίγονται σε καταστάσεις έξαρσης απο την απροσδιόριστη ηδονή της ανεξήγητης θεϊκής φύσης.
Αναζητώντας τον έρωτα. Αναζητώντας απαντήσεις σε άλυτα μυστήρια του ανθρώπινου πνευματικού συμπαντος.
Η δύναμη της αγάπης χαρίζει την τόλμη της ανείπωτης δόξας που γίνεται σοφή παραφροσύνη και με θράσος προκαλεί τα μοιρολόγια θανάτου της ώριμης σκέψης να γίνουν τραγούδια διονυσιακής γιορτής και βακχικών τελετών στον άσβεστο βωμό κάποιας αιώνιας ιέρειας, που μιλάει μόνο με χρησμούς ηδονής.
Τα θεϊκά πόδια της νιότης αρνούνται να σταματήσουν τον χορό του έρωτα έστω κι αν γνωρίζουν πως τα πάντα στη φύση θα εξακολουθούν να υπάρχουν και μετά τον δικό τους θάνατο.
Αναζητούν απαντήσεις στο ερώτημα της παντοδυναμίας που πλημμυρίζει την ύπαρξη τους όταν δημιουργούν πλανήτες και σύμπαντα για να κατοικήσει ο πληθυσμός που ερωτεύεται.
Ο κόσμος που απεικονίζει την αγάπη μέσα απο τα βράχια της αιώνιας θάλασσας, το φεγγαρόφωτο της ασημένιας αυγής που φιλάει με πάθος τα όνειρα, μέχρι να πονέσουν απο την απόλυτη ηδονή, ο ουρανός που αναπολεί χρωματικές παλέτες και σύννεφα απο μάγισσες εποχές.
Πώς γίνεται όλα αυτά να εξακολουθούν να υπάρχουν και μετά τον θάνατο των ερωτευμένων με την αναζήτηση της αγάπης.
Προφανώς δε γίνεται να μπορέσει να αντέξει ο κόσμος περισσότερο απο τα θύματα του χρόνου. Οι εραστές των δυνάμεων της φύσης προσπαθούν να γνωρίσουν τη σαρκική τους απολύτρωση μέσα απο την επαφή της ολοκλήρωσης.
Μέσα σε αυτούς τους εραστές, μέσα σε όσους αγάπησαν και έλιωσαν απο τη φλόγα της αδημονίας και της έξαρσης, βρίσκεται κλεισμένος ολόκληρος ο κόσμος. Διότι οι αγάπες και οι έρωτες δεν είναι χαμένοι στον κόσμο μας, ο κόσμος μας βρίσκεται μέσα τους και μάλιστα αφήνει και περίσσευμα χώρου ώστε να μπορούν σε διαφορες γωνιές να πετούν περιφρονητικά σε στοίβες τους ήλιους, τα άστρα,τη Σελήνη, τη θάλασσα και τα χρόνια που προσπάθησαν να δραπετεύσουν και να ξεφύγουν απο την αναζήτηση.
Αναρωτιέμαι πώς θα έχω γίνει φθάνοντας στο τέλος του Προυστιανικού ταξιδιού. Πώς θα αφομοιώσω την Προυστιανική δογματική αναρχία. Πώς θα επανέλθω σε είδωλα ζωής μετά απο τους αντικατοπτρισμούς σε αυτόν τον καθρέφτη της ματαιοδοξίας.
Όπως είπε πολύ σοφά σε κάποια επιστολή προς τον Μαρσέλ Προύστ ο Αντρέ Ζιντ:
«Αγαπητέ μου Προύστ
Εδώ και λίγες μέρες δεν μπορώ να εγκαταλείψω το βιβλίο σας. Για ποιο λόγο αλίμονο!, ενώ το αγαπώ τοσο πολύ, να μου προξενεί τόση οδύνη....».
🖤🖤
Καλή ανάγνωση!!
Πολλούς ασπασμούς.!
Αγάπη, μνήμη, αδιέξοδο.
Μέσα στην Προυστική αντίληψη της ζωής, στην θεωρία του περί τέχνης, στην αισθητική του, καραδοκεί υποχθόνια η αιώνια απογοήτευση.
Μια κατάσταση απελπισίας και απόγνωσης, ένα αδιέξοδο σκέψεων και πράξεων που οδηγεί σε έναν μακάβριο δρόμο φιλοσοφικής διαφυγής: κάθε είδους αυτοκτονία.
Όμως ο Προύστ, βρίσκει πάντα πνευματικά μονοπάτια ψυχικής ευδαιμονίας, αιχμαλωτίζει τις στιγμούλες, μας διδάσκει, να προκαλούμε τα χαμένα στην μνήμη μας κομμάτια, αυτά που θάβονται στα πέρασμενα, αυτά που ανακαλεί η καρδούλα μας αυθόρμητα και εξαφανίζει το πέρασμα του χρόνου χαρίζοντας μας ευτυχία τόσο μυρωδάτη και απαλή, τόσο ξεχωριστή και ανείπωτη που γίνεται ευδαιμονία.
Αυτή η στιγμή που φυλακίζουμε και μας προσφέρει μέθεξη απολαυστικής εξαΰλωσης προς την κάθε ανάμνηση δεν διαρκεί πολύ, ούτε ανακαλείται συνεχώς. Μας απελευθερώνει, μας γοητεύει, μας λυτρώνει αποσπασματικά, όπως οι επιθυμίες που μας σκλάβωσαν κάποτε, και μετά χάνεται, σαν φλασάκι απροσδιόριστης αναπαράστασης,αποκλειστικά
μέσα στην ψυχή μας.
Ο Προύστ γνώριζε πως για να σταθεροποιηθεί όσο γίνεται περισσότερο η υπερκόσμια χαρά της αναζήτησης πρέπει να διαρκέσει πολύ και με ένταση. Πρέπει, για να μην παρεμβάλλονται τα εμπόδια του παρόντος που τρέχει ασταμάτητα προς τη λήθη, αυτά, που υπάρχουν για να σκοντάφτει η επιθυμία στην απογοήτευση.
Έτσι, δημιούργησε τέχνη. Μία τέχνη απαράμιλλη, που φυλακίζει τις στιγμές μας, τις φευγαλέες, και γίνεται φράγμα απο χρώματα, μυρωδιές, ήχους, μελωδίες, αγγίγματα, λόγια, χάδια, φιλιά, άπειρες καληνύχτες με στερνούς αποχαιρετισμούς και γλυκά ξημερώματα νοσταλγίας σε ένα λυκόφως διάπυρης φαντασίας και αυτούσιων εικόνων.
Το φράγμα αυτό της τέχνης συγκρατεί για πάντα την αναζήτηση και αυξάνει τη διάρκεια στην αδιάκοπη ροή των πάντων.
Σκοπός της καλλιτεχνικής θεραπείας είναι η μονιμοποίηση του ελάχιστου χρόνου που μας αποκαλύπτεται η πραγματική όψη του κόσμου μας.
Μέσα στο σύμπαν του μυαλού μας, οι ανασκαφές της ψυχής και τα ευρήματα των ονείρων μας είναι οι αληθινές εντυπώσεις που ζουν αιώνια και χαρακτηρίζουν το γνήσιο απο το συμβατικό.
Κάθε μορφή συμβατικής λειτουργίας αποβαίνει μοιραία, καθώς εντείνει την ροή των τωρινών ορίων και θάβει τις αναμνήσεις ώστε να μην ξαναγυρίσουν.
Το δεύτερο μέρος του «αναζητώντας τον χαμένο χρόνο» κυριαρχείται απο τους αρχιερείς των εφηβικών χαμόγελων, της αιώνιας νιότης, της παντοτινής ζωής, της σωματικής έλξης που αναγνωρίζει μυστικά αρώματα πόθου και της γλυκιάς λαγνείας των ανώριμων φρούτων, των καρπών, που εξιτάρουν όσους καίγονται σε καταστάσεις έξαρσης απο την απροσδιόριστη ηδονή της ανεξήγητης θεϊκής φύσης.
Αναζητώντας τον έρωτα. Αναζητώντας απαντήσεις σε άλυτα μυστήρια του ανθρώπινου πνευματικού συμπαντος.
Η δύναμη της αγάπης χαρίζει την τόλμη της ανείπωτης δόξας που γίνεται σοφή παραφροσύνη και με θράσος προκαλεί τα μοιρολόγια θανάτου της ώριμης σκέψης να γίνουν τραγούδια διονυσιακής γιορτής και βακχικών τελετών στον άσβεστο βωμό κάποιας αιώνιας ιέρειας, που μιλάει μόνο με χρησμούς ηδονής.
Τα θεϊκά πόδια της νιότης αρνούνται να σταματήσουν τον χορό του έρωτα έστω κι αν γνωρίζουν πως τα πάντα στη φύση θα εξακολουθούν να υπάρχουν και μετά τον δικό τους θάνατο.
Αναζητούν απαντήσεις στο ερώτημα της παντοδυναμίας που πλημμυρίζει την ύπαρξη τους όταν δημιουργούν πλανήτες και σύμπαντα για να κατοικήσει ο πληθυσμός που ερωτεύεται.
Ο κόσμος που απεικονίζει την αγάπη μέσα απο τα βράχια της αιώνιας θάλασσας, το φεγγαρόφωτο της ασημένιας αυγής που φιλάει με πάθος τα όνειρα, μέχρι να πονέσουν απο την απόλυτη ηδονή, ο ουρανός που αναπολεί χρωματικές παλέτες και σύννεφα απο μάγισσες εποχές.
Πώς γίνεται όλα αυτά να εξακολουθούν να υπάρχουν και μετά τον θάνατο των ερωτευμένων με την αναζήτηση της αγάπης.
Προφανώς δε γίνεται να μπορέσει να αντέξει ο κόσμος περισσότερο απο τα θύματα του χρόνου. Οι εραστές των δυνάμεων της φύσης προσπαθούν να γνωρίσουν τη σαρκική τους απολύτρωση μέσα απο την επαφή της ολοκλήρωσης.
Μέσα σε αυτούς τους εραστές, μέσα σε όσους αγάπησαν και έλιωσαν απο τη φλόγα της αδημονίας και της έξαρσης, βρίσκεται κλεισμένος ολόκληρος ο κόσμος. Διότι οι αγάπες και οι έρωτες δεν είναι χαμένοι στον κόσμο μας, ο κόσμος μας βρίσκεται μέσα τους και μάλιστα αφήνει και περίσσευμα χώρου ώστε να μπορούν σε διαφορες γωνιές να πετούν περιφρονητικά σε στοίβες τους ήλιους, τα άστρα,τη Σελήνη, τη θάλασσα και τα χρόνια που προσπάθησαν να δραπετεύσουν και να ξεφύγουν απο την αναζήτηση.
Αναρωτιέμαι πώς θα έχω γίνει φθάνοντας στο τέλος του Προυστιανικού ταξιδιού. Πώς θα αφομοιώσω την Προυστιανική δογματική αναρχία. Πώς θα επανέλθω σε είδωλα ζωής μετά απο τους αντικατοπτρισμούς σε αυτόν τον καθρέφτη της ματαιοδοξίας.
Όπως είπε πολύ σοφά σε κάποια επιστολή προς τον Μαρσέλ Προύστ ο Αντρέ Ζιντ:
«Αγαπητέ μου Προύστ
Εδώ και λίγες μέρες δεν μπορώ να εγκαταλείψω το βιβλίο σας. Για ποιο λόγο αλίμονο!, ενώ το αγαπώ τοσο πολύ, να μου προξενεί τόση οδύνη....».
🖤🖤
Καλή ανάγνωση!!
Πολλούς ασπασμούς.!
December 19, 2020
[UPDATED]
What I loved about this book was the evocation of adolescence. The narrator travels a bit in this book - to Balbec (a mélange of several Norman/Breton towns) with its beautiful old Gothic church (of which literally thousands litter the landscape in France - particularly in Brittany) and its seaside resort (roughly modelled after Cabourg as well as Trouville/Deauville in Normandy). But first, we see the life of Swann and Odette through his eyes. The reader needs to forgive Proust for re-inventing this story (Swann and Odette having been broken up definitively at the end of Chez Swann) and just enjoy the salon of Odette and her group of followers including the out-matched and ultimately doomed Bergotte (forever inferior to the Balzacs, Flauberts, Hugos, Dumas, and Stendahls who proceeded him). The pastiche of the ridiculously pretentious M. de Norpois was also amusing. But the best part of the book, the second half, breathes life into the youth of the narrator and introduces Albertine who will play a central role in the cycle La Recherche. The prose is languid and evocative as the title invokes in French. Once again, I feel that the original translation "In a budding grove", does not due justice to the Prussian title. "L'ombre" means shadow but in this context does seem to talk of a field with trees in flower around it (it makes me think of Manet's Dejeuner sur l'Herbe but with a much younger set of picnickers), "jeunes filles" means young girls fo course, but "en fleurs" evokes more of the fertility and beauty of the innocence of youth. English does not really have a nuance to it to give the same feeling to the reader. I would be at a loss to give a perfect translation here but "Budding Grove" excludes the presence of the young girls and the feelings on excitement and longing that their presence under the flowering trees brings out in the young Marcel as narrator.
The central action here which impacts the rest of La Recherche is the meeting of the narrator with Albertine. She is a fascinating character and is described with excruciating detail as the narrator successfully insinuates himself into the "petite bande" of Albertine, Rosemonde, Gisèle, and André whom he sees raising havoc on the boardwalk in front of his hotel. We are also introduced to the narrator's best friend, Robert de Saint-Loup, who will have an important role to play further on.
The character of Elstir and his discourses to Marcel about art are also invaluable and beautiful, but the central action is Marcel falling in love with Albertine. Rarely has an author captured the complex movements of an adolescent heart falling deeply in love for the first time as well as Proust does here. The text is very slow and extremely descriptive which puts off many of the uninitiated, but if you take the time to appreciate it, it is like walking through Musée d'Orsay and taking your time to look at every painting from Manet, Monet, Courbet, etc with eyes wide open from wonder and amazement.
Some of the moments that I most enjoyed:
- Albertine's beauty spot which moves around her face each time the narrator sees her
- Elstir's studio and his interesting and wonderful wife
- The night at Rivebelle with Saint Loup when the narrator gets drunk - he description of inebriation is accurate to a "t"
What I loved about this book was the evocation of adolescence. The narrator travels a bit in this book - to Balbec (a mélange of several Norman/Breton towns) with its beautiful old Gothic church (of which literally thousands litter the landscape in France - particularly in Brittany) and its seaside resort (roughly modelled after Cabourg as well as Trouville/Deauville in Normandy). But first, we see the life of Swann and Odette through his eyes. The reader needs to forgive Proust for re-inventing this story (Swann and Odette having been broken up definitively at the end of Chez Swann) and just enjoy the salon of Odette and her group of followers including the out-matched and ultimately doomed Bergotte (forever inferior to the Balzacs, Flauberts, Hugos, Dumas, and Stendahls who proceeded him). The pastiche of the ridiculously pretentious M. de Norpois was also amusing. But the best part of the book, the second half, breathes life into the youth of the narrator and introduces Albertine who will play a central role in the cycle La Recherche. The prose is languid and evocative as the title invokes in French. Once again, I feel that the original translation "In a budding grove", does not due justice to the Prussian title. "L'ombre" means shadow but in this context does seem to talk of a field with trees in flower around it (it makes me think of Manet's Dejeuner sur l'Herbe but with a much younger set of picnickers), "jeunes filles" means young girls fo course, but "en fleurs" evokes more of the fertility and beauty of the innocence of youth. English does not really have a nuance to it to give the same feeling to the reader. I would be at a loss to give a perfect translation here but "Budding Grove" excludes the presence of the young girls and the feelings on excitement and longing that their presence under the flowering trees brings out in the young Marcel as narrator.
The central action here which impacts the rest of La Recherche is the meeting of the narrator with Albertine. She is a fascinating character and is described with excruciating detail as the narrator successfully insinuates himself into the "petite bande" of Albertine, Rosemonde, Gisèle, and André whom he sees raising havoc on the boardwalk in front of his hotel. We are also introduced to the narrator's best friend, Robert de Saint-Loup, who will have an important role to play further on.
The character of Elstir and his discourses to Marcel about art are also invaluable and beautiful, but the central action is Marcel falling in love with Albertine. Rarely has an author captured the complex movements of an adolescent heart falling deeply in love for the first time as well as Proust does here. The text is very slow and extremely descriptive which puts off many of the uninitiated, but if you take the time to appreciate it, it is like walking through Musée d'Orsay and taking your time to look at every painting from Manet, Monet, Courbet, etc with eyes wide open from wonder and amazement.
Some of the moments that I most enjoyed:
- Albertine's beauty spot which moves around her face each time the narrator sees her
- Elstir's studio and his interesting and wonderful wife
- The night at Rivebelle with Saint Loup when the narrator gets drunk - he description of inebriation is accurate to a "t"
December 31, 2023
Within a Budding Grove or In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower is the second part of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Here, the story of the narrator continues. He is no longer the child narrator of Swann's Way, but an adolescent, whose thoughts, dreams, and ambitions are taking a mature turn. Having passed that stage ourselves, we know how teenagers are. They think that they are so high-minded and thus, become snobbish. It's the fault of the age, and we see a similar fault in our adolescent narrator here. But that's what makes this plotless journey more interesting. We enter the mind of a proud, know-it-all teenager, and take refuge in his thoughts and emotions. We feel happy when he acts wise and prudent, angry when he acts like a fool, and frustrated at his snobbery. But then, we remember our own adolescent stupidities, and with a generous heart, we forgive him.
The main effect of Proust's reminiscences is to take the reader back to a time that is physically lost to us but stays with us in our mental capacity. The memories are powerful, yet they aren't all accurate. Some will stay strong, and some are only vague remembrances. If we are asked to recount our teenage years, it will only be a collection of impressions, incidents, and events, gaps of which are filled with our mature perceptions. This is true for the narrator of this story, who is recounting his adolescent life as an adult. The narrative voice is both of the adolescent and of the adult so much so that we feel the narrator is much older for his age. Some may argue that this technique negates the realistic touch of the narrative. While this is true to some extent, I don't think Proust could have done it in any other way. Our memories of the past are lost in time and space, and summoning an accurate mental image of our past is simply impossible. There will be gaps which, without any intention to mislead, we will fill with our imagination. If we have a good deal of imagination in store, our stories will interest the listener just as Proust does.
What is admirable about these reminiscences is their ability to take the readers down their own memory lane, recalling a forgotten past, and making them nostalgic. I find this connection Proust makes, charming. Quite often, when you read the narrator's memories, your own pay you a visit, and you get lost in two separate yet connected worlds - that of the narrator and your own. This reading experience is delightful, and quite honestly, it is one of the reasons for my attraction. The other is, quite certainly, his writing. It is sheer poetry. You can easily lose yourself in the beauty of his words. The picture he paints through his poetry is absolutely bewitching. Proust had certainly known how to cast a spell.
I don't claim this to be an easy read. The long sentences, complex language, and verbosity can be daunting. But there also lies the attraction, to conquer and indulge in an ocean of poetry.
More of my reviews can be found at http://piyangiejay.com/
The main effect of Proust's reminiscences is to take the reader back to a time that is physically lost to us but stays with us in our mental capacity. The memories are powerful, yet they aren't all accurate. Some will stay strong, and some are only vague remembrances. If we are asked to recount our teenage years, it will only be a collection of impressions, incidents, and events, gaps of which are filled with our mature perceptions. This is true for the narrator of this story, who is recounting his adolescent life as an adult. The narrative voice is both of the adolescent and of the adult so much so that we feel the narrator is much older for his age. Some may argue that this technique negates the realistic touch of the narrative. While this is true to some extent, I don't think Proust could have done it in any other way. Our memories of the past are lost in time and space, and summoning an accurate mental image of our past is simply impossible. There will be gaps which, without any intention to mislead, we will fill with our imagination. If we have a good deal of imagination in store, our stories will interest the listener just as Proust does.
What is admirable about these reminiscences is their ability to take the readers down their own memory lane, recalling a forgotten past, and making them nostalgic. I find this connection Proust makes, charming. Quite often, when you read the narrator's memories, your own pay you a visit, and you get lost in two separate yet connected worlds - that of the narrator and your own. This reading experience is delightful, and quite honestly, it is one of the reasons for my attraction. The other is, quite certainly, his writing. It is sheer poetry. You can easily lose yourself in the beauty of his words. The picture he paints through his poetry is absolutely bewitching. Proust had certainly known how to cast a spell.
I don't claim this to be an easy read. The long sentences, complex language, and verbosity can be daunting. But there also lies the attraction, to conquer and indulge in an ocean of poetry.
More of my reviews can be found at http://piyangiejay.com/
November 21, 2016
“Our desires cut across one another, and in this confused existence it is rare for happiness to coincide with the desire that clamoured for it.”
― Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove
Marie Laurencin, 'Les jeunes filles'
My first recommendation when reading Proust is the reader MUST make sure they have a reliable bookmark, because when (not if, but when) you lose your place your faulty memory will not be able to remember exactly where you just were. One young nubile girl starts to blend into another young nubile girl who looks at this point a lot like her friend. One picked flower starts to smell like another from an earlier page; a page that seemed to exist a whole lifetime ago. One young man with mommy issues starts to look almost exactly like another young man with grand-mommy issues.
That being said, you don't read Proust for the lines. You read Proust for everything else. It is those moments between plot points where all the rich texture resides. There is something languorous about just simply letting Proust's prose wash over you ~~~ wave after wave. Suddenly, you really don't care if you've already read a certain page because you are content and you recognize that you will read it again in just a few pages anyway and it will be beautiful and true all over again.
― Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove
Marie Laurencin, 'Les jeunes filles'
My first recommendation when reading Proust is the reader MUST make sure they have a reliable bookmark, because when (not if, but when) you lose your place your faulty memory will not be able to remember exactly where you just were. One young nubile girl starts to blend into another young nubile girl who looks at this point a lot like her friend. One picked flower starts to smell like another from an earlier page; a page that seemed to exist a whole lifetime ago. One young man with mommy issues starts to look almost exactly like another young man with grand-mommy issues.
That being said, you don't read Proust for the lines. You read Proust for everything else. It is those moments between plot points where all the rich texture resides. There is something languorous about just simply letting Proust's prose wash over you ~~~ wave after wave. Suddenly, you really don't care if you've already read a certain page because you are content and you recognize that you will read it again in just a few pages anyway and it will be beautiful and true all over again.
April 26, 2013
WHY?
Or: The Brain on Proust
There’s a group of 7 ladies I’ve known for quite some time. We meet regularly for afternoon tea, going round turn and turn about, although Barbara has now been excused from hosting in deference to her great seniority and some health issues that come along with the seniority. We have nothing in common except that we are all English native speakers, living here in Germany, and all of us married at one time or another to German husbands. So it’s only the language that connects us; our teas are a place where we can let go and speak ‘naturally’ (ahem) without worrying about whether t’others will understand – although we’ve all been here for so long now that our English would probably sound oddly quaint to native ears, and we do spend considerable chunks of the afternoon attempting to find adequate equivalents of German words that have popped into our minds because the English is missing. A group of ladies that I meet regularly, and who I would definitely consider as friends, even though we do not necessarily share many common interests.
Recently we went out for a bit of a posh nosh to celebrate Angela’s 70th – there’s a wide range of ages too you see, and I’d like to point out that I am much the youngest. Now Angela is a reader, so I can talk to her about books – we pass stuff to each other too – and when Janet overheard that I had embarked on this project of reading Proust’s great masterpiece, she just looked at me and said:
“Why?”
And it was an incredulous why, a why-on-earth-would-you sort of why, not a why now, why have you chosen to do so at this juncture, as she made plain when I started to say that the initial trigger was the fact that it was 100th anniversary of publication, which led to the motivational force of an online group to help me through. No, but why would you do such a thing at all?
Now I have to admit that I was a bit flummoxed. No simple answer came to mind, especially since at that time I was struggling a little, so could not even say that I was enjoying it, because I have to say that at the time I wasn’t. And that struggle reached a real crisis point later that very week, as I was developing a cold and already beginning to feel woozy that evening. I dragged myself to work the next day, but then gave up and cancelled all classes and snuggled up with the cat on the sofa. Three days at home with very little human contact or physical exercise makes me go slightly stir-crazy. So when I had the strength to pick up a book again, to find myself trapped inside the head of a self-absorbed neurasthaenic endlessly obsessing over unrequited love for a cold-hearted companion nearly drove me to distraction. Pages and pages of interiors, pages and pages of nothing but his thoughts about Gilberte or Mme Swann. Why indeed.
But then at last! Fresh air and sunshine and the clear blue skies and seas of the Normandy coast! I could breathe freely again. I felt my mind opening like a flower in the sun. So here’s one good answer to that question: in Proust, everything is so much more intense than any other work. When he describes the inside of the church at Combray, when he bathes in the colours of the famous hawthorn flowers, when he ceaselessly agonizes over Gilberte, questioning himself and his motives, questioning her and her motives, pondering over strategies to win her, when he describes his room at the hotel in Balbec, everything, everything is seen with a preternatural attention to detail, to associations, to images called up in his mind.
And I have this theory that reading Proust is akin to meditation. Those infamous sentences that require multiple readings, sometimes, just in order to work out what the subject is in the following subordinate clauses, they demand a certain kind of concentration. No distractions: silence, laptop shut down, mobile switched off. And as you read, you develop a certain rhythm of thought, a deliberate slowing of pace, no skipping or skimming but a mindfulness, a quietening, a letting go of the world around you to find yourself one with the mind of an asthmatic man who lived more than a hundred years ago. And there are those mysterious moments where you feel your mind easing and stretching, new circuitry opening up, new dimensions glimpsed, a feeling of wholeness and integrity that results from a disintegration of self and your own petty concerns, that moment when you move beyond the text and discover new intellectual horizons, expansive, transformative, euphoric.
I wonder if there’s ever been a brain scan of someone on Proust?
October 27, 2020
It's brilliant; it's a bit boring; it's brilliant again; it's a bit boring again.
This book covers his initiation into sexual desire and romantic love, beginning with his obsession with Gilberte and ending with his summer sojourn on the Normandy coast where he falls for another unattainable girl. At times, because of the way he's mollycoddled by his family, it's hard to conceive of him as being much older than ten. It thus comes as a shock that he's capable of intellectual discourse and predatory sexual feeling. I enjoyed this volume less than the first. Maybe at the time some of his ideas about desire - of it being essentially projection - were novel but, though there are some gems of insight, I often found his formulations on the subject long-winded and even banal at times. And I've come to dread the advent of another set of brackets on his pages - I think I'm yet to find anything he puts in parentheses anything but an annoying distraction. Once or twice I found myself wishing Proust had lived an outwardly more interesting life - though there's no denying that he milked out every drop of nectar given to him.
I remember a startlingly brilliant passage about a sunrise seen from the sleeping car of a train. I remember a fantastic passage when he conceives of his feeling as being much grander and more momentous than the view of the sea and sky, as if there is more reality inside him than in the entire external universe. I remember a brilliant passage when he comes to conceive of desire as an inward journey with knowledge of self as the real and ultimate destination. And there's lots of great stuff about both the transfiguring and deluding powers of habit.
Onto volume three…
This book covers his initiation into sexual desire and romantic love, beginning with his obsession with Gilberte and ending with his summer sojourn on the Normandy coast where he falls for another unattainable girl. At times, because of the way he's mollycoddled by his family, it's hard to conceive of him as being much older than ten. It thus comes as a shock that he's capable of intellectual discourse and predatory sexual feeling. I enjoyed this volume less than the first. Maybe at the time some of his ideas about desire - of it being essentially projection - were novel but, though there are some gems of insight, I often found his formulations on the subject long-winded and even banal at times. And I've come to dread the advent of another set of brackets on his pages - I think I'm yet to find anything he puts in parentheses anything but an annoying distraction. Once or twice I found myself wishing Proust had lived an outwardly more interesting life - though there's no denying that he milked out every drop of nectar given to him.
I remember a startlingly brilliant passage about a sunrise seen from the sleeping car of a train. I remember a fantastic passage when he conceives of his feeling as being much grander and more momentous than the view of the sea and sky, as if there is more reality inside him than in the entire external universe. I remember a brilliant passage when he comes to conceive of desire as an inward journey with knowledge of self as the real and ultimate destination. And there's lots of great stuff about both the transfiguring and deluding powers of habit.
Onto volume three…
September 21, 2022
YouTube kanalımda Marcel Proust'un hayatı, bütün kitapları ve kronolojik okuma sırası hakkında bilgi edinebilirsiniz:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5e0i...
HAMDIM, PİŞTİM, PROUSTTUM
"Proustçu evren, parçalar halindeki bir evrendir, parçaları da parçalar halindeki başka evrenleri içerir." Gilles Deleuze
Hepimiz hayatlarımız boyunca aşık olabilmeyi ya da en azından aşk duygusuna sahip olmayı isteriz. Aşk kümesi çizgilerinin düşman rakipler tarafından kıskançlık koçbaşılarıyla aşılmaya çalışıldığı yerde, aşk, dışarıdan maddi bir sur gibi algılanır. Oysaki Mimar Sinan'ın çıraklık, kalfalık ve ustalık eserlerinde ya da tasavvuftaki "hamdım, piştim, yandım" sıralamasında olduğu gibi Marcel Proust 'un da kendisi için belirlediği "boşa harcadığımız zaman, kayıp zaman, ele geçirilen zaman ve yakalanan zaman" şeklinde bir zaman hiyerarşisi vardır. Marcel İhtiyaçlar Hiyerarşisi'nin tepesine ise maddi göstergelerin beyhudeliğinden vazgeçişle birlikte uyanan sanat arayışının, kitap karakterlerini manevileştirdiği noktayla birlikte ulaşılır.
Peki aşk, halihazırda sahipsiz bir çocuk gibi onu sahiplenmemizi mi bekler, yoksa içimizde doğuştan yüklenmiş ve keşfedilip açığa çıkarılmayı bekleyen madeni bir öz müdür?
Berger'ın Görme Biçimleri kitabında belirtildiğine benzer olarak, gözlerimizin bizzat gördüğü henüz maneviyatıyla tanışılmamış maddi görünüşe sahip olmak ve hayalimizdeki aşk çerçevesinin içinde bulunan kadının kendisine sahip olmak arasında ince bir çizgi vardır. Beğendiğimiz bir resmi aldığımızda nasıl ki o resme sahip olmuş gibi bir kibre bürünürsek, beğendiğimiz insanın peşinden koşturup aşk kavramını ona yakıştırdığımızda da o kişiyi ona sahip olma istencimizle doldururuz. Peki aşk ya da kişinin kendi kimliğini, kendi özbilincini inşa edebilmesi geçmişteki boşlukların doldurulmasıyla mı yoksa dolulukların boşaltılmasıyla mı gerçekleşir?
Tezatlıklar noktasında, Kayıp Zamanın İzinde serisinde ön plana çıkan zaman ve mekan sıçramaları, okurunu soğuk bir kış gününde nilüferlerin Marcel Proust kitapları olduğu bir edebiyat nehrinde aşk göstergelerinin aldatıcılığı, sosyete göstergelerinin boşluğu ve vasatlığı, duyumsanabilir çevre göstergelerinin maddiyatı arasında sıçrama kararsızlığına büründüren bir kurbağaya döndürür. Çiçek Açmış Genç Kızların Gölgesinde özelinde ise esas amaç Berma, Albertine, Andree vs. gibi karakterleri geçmişin mimikleriyle bir kil ustasının ilk şeklinden son şeklini verene kadar yoğurduğu bir karakter çalışma tezgahındaki gibi elde edip kenara atmaktansa, bu yoğurulmak için bekleyen silüetlerin salt somutluklarının ardında ne kadar sanatsal içselleştirmelerin yatabileceği potansiyelinin arayışıyla bağıntılıdır.
"Berma'nın bir jesti bir heykelin duruşunu çağrıştırdığı için güzeldir. Aynı şekilde Vinteuil'ün müziği, Boulogne Ormanı'nda bir gezintiyi çağrıştırdığı için güzeldir." (s. 44) Proust ve Göstergeler
Proust Yaşamınızı Nasıl Değiştirebilir eserinde belirtildiği üzere Marcel Proust'un babası olan Adrien Proust'un başarılarını kıskanmasıyla birlikte evrilen yazıp yazmama ikilemleri, Proust'un gençlik dönemlerinde kadınlardan aldığı olumsuz cevapların akabininde gelen varoluşsal edebi sancılar, Proust'un sıkıcı ve faydasız aristokrat arkadaşları, Proust'un aslında edebiyata ve yazmaya o kadar yeteneğinin olmamasından sonra gelen hayal kırıklıkları, acılar ve rahatsızlıklar dizisinin baharlaşmaya başladığı bir üründür Çiçek Açmış Genç Kızların Gölgesinde. Zaten Kayıp Zamanın İzinde serisi de zaman, mekan ve karakterlerin hayal kırıklıkları dizisi şeklinde örgülenmesiyle birlikte oluşmuş bir zaman yakalama mekanizmasıdır.
Halil Cibran'ın Kum ve Köpük kitabındaki "Şayet kış; "Bahar kalbimdedir benim." deseydi, kim inanırdı kışa?" aforizmasında, kış Proust'un yazamadığı zamanlar, baharlaşmaya başlayan zamanları ise Çiçek Açmış Genç Kızların Gölgesinde kitabıdır. Zira çiçek açmanın başlaması bize baharı hatırlatır. Gölgesinde dinlenebileceğimiz ağaçların varlığı bize hâlâ bir yerlerde mevsimlerin süregeldiğini hatırlatan yegane kanıtlardır.
Proustçu evreninin içindeki Çiçek Açmış Genç Kızların Gölgesinde evreni, hayal kırıklıkları dizisinin başlarındaki ilk halkalardan biridir. Bir şehre gittiğimizde üst beklentilerimizin dışında sonuçlarla karşılaştığımızda hayal kırıklığı fidanımıza su vermiş oluruz. Misal, tırtıl, kendisini küçük, hayatı boyunca yürümeye ve ezilmeye mahkum bir canlı olarak görür. Ne zaman ki kendisini kozalaştırır ve kelebeğe dönüşür, işte o zaman uçma yeteneğine kavuşur. Çiçek Açmış Genç Kızların Gölgesinde kitabı ise Marcel Proust'un kendini edebiyat anlamında küçük görme tırtıllığından, usta bir kelebek yazar olmaya erişmesi için oluşturmaya başladığı bir kozadır. Kozanın adı hayal kırıklıkları, acılar ve rahatsızlıkların insanın manevi özünü bulma arayışıdır.
Onlarca sayfa boyunca bir kız grubunun içinde sanatsal maneviyat potansiyeli yüklenecek kızın arayışı ön plana çıkar Çiçek Açmış Genç Kızların Gölgesinde kitabında. "Ama daha ayrıntılı, sevgili dostum, çok hızlı gitmeyin." felsefesini savunan Proust'a göre annesiyle mektuplaşmalarında kendi uyku düzenini uzun uzadıya detaylandırması gibi bir yoğunlukta aşk, sosyete, duyumsanabilirlik ve sanat göstergeleri de hayatın anlık akışında detaylanabilir. Bu yüzden Swann'ların Tarafı incelemesinde de dediğim gibi, Kayıp Zamanın İzinde serisinde zamanın sınır nöbetçisi Proust'tur.
Göstergebilim detaylarınca aşkın dostluktan daha çok gösterge içermesi potansiyeli ile Proust'un romanındaki genç kızlara bilinçsizce bir çiçek açtırması arasındaki atom çarpışmaları, romandaki karakterlerin çehrelerinin birlikten çoğullaşmasına ve anıtlarla dolu bir sokağın yandan görünen perspektifini hatırlatırcasına eklektik bir detaya kavuşur. Nitekim, Çiçek Açmış Genç Kızların Gölgesinde kitabı da bir duygulanımdır ve Swann'ların Tarafı duygulanımındaki maddiliğe ne kadar karşı koyabilirse o kadar hakiki ve manevi kitaplığına ulaşır. Guermantes Tarafı da Çiçek Açmış Genç Kızların Gölgesinde kitabının duygulanımlarının maddiliğini aşmak için çabalayacaktır. Edebiyat atomunun parçalanma evrelerinin maddilikleri arasında kaybolan okur, en sonunda ortaya devasa bir maneviyat enerjisi açığa çıkarmak için uğraşır.
"Arayış'ın ritmini, yalnızca belleğin katkıları ya da tortuları
değil, süreksiz hayal kırıklığı dizileri ve her dizide bunların aşılması için uygulanan yollar belirler." (s. 34)
Proust ve Göstergeler
Yeterince nesnel bir inceleme yazabildik mi? Proust da böyle olmamı isterdi eminim ki. Serinin karakterlerinin başlangıç koflukları gibi biz de okurlar olarak henüz çıraklar sayılırız. Nesnel bir yorum girişiminde bulunmama rağmen bu inceleme ne kadar hayal kırıklığıyla sonuçlanırsa, ileride yazacak olduğum incelemelerde edineceğim ve geçmişin raptiyelerine yönelteceğim çağrışım kağıtlarım beni mutlaka öznel bir yorum çaresine ulaştıracaktır.
"Her çıraklık çizgisi şu iki andan geçer: Nesnel bir yorum girişiminden kaynaklanan hayal kırıklığı, sonra da çağrışımsal tümeller inşa ettiğimiz öznel bir yorumla bu hayal kırıklığına çare bulma girişimi." (s. 44)
Proust ve Göstergeler
KAYNAKÇA:
Proust ve Göstergeler - Gilles Deleuze
Proust Yaşamınızı Nasıl Değiştirebilir - Alain De Botton
Görme Biçimleri - John Berger
Swann'ların Tarafı - Marcel Proust
http://dergiler.ankara.edu.tr/dergile...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5e0i...
HAMDIM, PİŞTİM, PROUSTTUM
"Proustçu evren, parçalar halindeki bir evrendir, parçaları da parçalar halindeki başka evrenleri içerir." Gilles Deleuze
Hepimiz hayatlarımız boyunca aşık olabilmeyi ya da en azından aşk duygusuna sahip olmayı isteriz. Aşk kümesi çizgilerinin düşman rakipler tarafından kıskançlık koçbaşılarıyla aşılmaya çalışıldığı yerde, aşk, dışarıdan maddi bir sur gibi algılanır. Oysaki Mimar Sinan'ın çıraklık, kalfalık ve ustalık eserlerinde ya da tasavvuftaki "hamdım, piştim, yandım" sıralamasında olduğu gibi Marcel Proust 'un da kendisi için belirlediği "boşa harcadığımız zaman, kayıp zaman, ele geçirilen zaman ve yakalanan zaman" şeklinde bir zaman hiyerarşisi vardır. Marcel İhtiyaçlar Hiyerarşisi'nin tepesine ise maddi göstergelerin beyhudeliğinden vazgeçişle birlikte uyanan sanat arayışının, kitap karakterlerini manevileştirdiği noktayla birlikte ulaşılır.
Peki aşk, halihazırda sahipsiz bir çocuk gibi onu sahiplenmemizi mi bekler, yoksa içimizde doğuştan yüklenmiş ve keşfedilip açığa çıkarılmayı bekleyen madeni bir öz müdür?
Berger'ın Görme Biçimleri kitabında belirtildiğine benzer olarak, gözlerimizin bizzat gördüğü henüz maneviyatıyla tanışılmamış maddi görünüşe sahip olmak ve hayalimizdeki aşk çerçevesinin içinde bulunan kadının kendisine sahip olmak arasında ince bir çizgi vardır. Beğendiğimiz bir resmi aldığımızda nasıl ki o resme sahip olmuş gibi bir kibre bürünürsek, beğendiğimiz insanın peşinden koşturup aşk kavramını ona yakıştırdığımızda da o kişiyi ona sahip olma istencimizle doldururuz. Peki aşk ya da kişinin kendi kimliğini, kendi özbilincini inşa edebilmesi geçmişteki boşlukların doldurulmasıyla mı yoksa dolulukların boşaltılmasıyla mı gerçekleşir?
Tezatlıklar noktasında, Kayıp Zamanın İzinde serisinde ön plana çıkan zaman ve mekan sıçramaları, okurunu soğuk bir kış gününde nilüferlerin Marcel Proust kitapları olduğu bir edebiyat nehrinde aşk göstergelerinin aldatıcılığı, sosyete göstergelerinin boşluğu ve vasatlığı, duyumsanabilir çevre göstergelerinin maddiyatı arasında sıçrama kararsızlığına büründüren bir kurbağaya döndürür. Çiçek Açmış Genç Kızların Gölgesinde özelinde ise esas amaç Berma, Albertine, Andree vs. gibi karakterleri geçmişin mimikleriyle bir kil ustasının ilk şeklinden son şeklini verene kadar yoğurduğu bir karakter çalışma tezgahındaki gibi elde edip kenara atmaktansa, bu yoğurulmak için bekleyen silüetlerin salt somutluklarının ardında ne kadar sanatsal içselleştirmelerin yatabileceği potansiyelinin arayışıyla bağıntılıdır.
"Berma'nın bir jesti bir heykelin duruşunu çağrıştırdığı için güzeldir. Aynı şekilde Vinteuil'ün müziği, Boulogne Ormanı'nda bir gezintiyi çağrıştırdığı için güzeldir." (s. 44) Proust ve Göstergeler
Proust Yaşamınızı Nasıl Değiştirebilir eserinde belirtildiği üzere Marcel Proust'un babası olan Adrien Proust'un başarılarını kıskanmasıyla birlikte evrilen yazıp yazmama ikilemleri, Proust'un gençlik dönemlerinde kadınlardan aldığı olumsuz cevapların akabininde gelen varoluşsal edebi sancılar, Proust'un sıkıcı ve faydasız aristokrat arkadaşları, Proust'un aslında edebiyata ve yazmaya o kadar yeteneğinin olmamasından sonra gelen hayal kırıklıkları, acılar ve rahatsızlıklar dizisinin baharlaşmaya başladığı bir üründür Çiçek Açmış Genç Kızların Gölgesinde. Zaten Kayıp Zamanın İzinde serisi de zaman, mekan ve karakterlerin hayal kırıklıkları dizisi şeklinde örgülenmesiyle birlikte oluşmuş bir zaman yakalama mekanizmasıdır.
Halil Cibran'ın Kum ve Köpük kitabındaki "Şayet kış; "Bahar kalbimdedir benim." deseydi, kim inanırdı kışa?" aforizmasında, kış Proust'un yazamadığı zamanlar, baharlaşmaya başlayan zamanları ise Çiçek Açmış Genç Kızların Gölgesinde kitabıdır. Zira çiçek açmanın başlaması bize baharı hatırlatır. Gölgesinde dinlenebileceğimiz ağaçların varlığı bize hâlâ bir yerlerde mevsimlerin süregeldiğini hatırlatan yegane kanıtlardır.
Proustçu evreninin içindeki Çiçek Açmış Genç Kızların Gölgesinde evreni, hayal kırıklıkları dizisinin başlarındaki ilk halkalardan biridir. Bir şehre gittiğimizde üst beklentilerimizin dışında sonuçlarla karşılaştığımızda hayal kırıklığı fidanımıza su vermiş oluruz. Misal, tırtıl, kendisini küçük, hayatı boyunca yürümeye ve ezilmeye mahkum bir canlı olarak görür. Ne zaman ki kendisini kozalaştırır ve kelebeğe dönüşür, işte o zaman uçma yeteneğine kavuşur. Çiçek Açmış Genç Kızların Gölgesinde kitabı ise Marcel Proust'un kendini edebiyat anlamında küçük görme tırtıllığından, usta bir kelebek yazar olmaya erişmesi için oluşturmaya başladığı bir kozadır. Kozanın adı hayal kırıklıkları, acılar ve rahatsızlıkların insanın manevi özünü bulma arayışıdır.
Onlarca sayfa boyunca bir kız grubunun içinde sanatsal maneviyat potansiyeli yüklenecek kızın arayışı ön plana çıkar Çiçek Açmış Genç Kızların Gölgesinde kitabında. "Ama daha ayrıntılı, sevgili dostum, çok hızlı gitmeyin." felsefesini savunan Proust'a göre annesiyle mektuplaşmalarında kendi uyku düzenini uzun uzadıya detaylandırması gibi bir yoğunlukta aşk, sosyete, duyumsanabilirlik ve sanat göstergeleri de hayatın anlık akışında detaylanabilir. Bu yüzden Swann'ların Tarafı incelemesinde de dediğim gibi, Kayıp Zamanın İzinde serisinde zamanın sınır nöbetçisi Proust'tur.
Göstergebilim detaylarınca aşkın dostluktan daha çok gösterge içermesi potansiyeli ile Proust'un romanındaki genç kızlara bilinçsizce bir çiçek açtırması arasındaki atom çarpışmaları, romandaki karakterlerin çehrelerinin birlikten çoğullaşmasına ve anıtlarla dolu bir sokağın yandan görünen perspektifini hatırlatırcasına eklektik bir detaya kavuşur. Nitekim, Çiçek Açmış Genç Kızların Gölgesinde kitabı da bir duygulanımdır ve Swann'ların Tarafı duygulanımındaki maddiliğe ne kadar karşı koyabilirse o kadar hakiki ve manevi kitaplığına ulaşır. Guermantes Tarafı da Çiçek Açmış Genç Kızların Gölgesinde kitabının duygulanımlarının maddiliğini aşmak için çabalayacaktır. Edebiyat atomunun parçalanma evrelerinin maddilikleri arasında kaybolan okur, en sonunda ortaya devasa bir maneviyat enerjisi açığa çıkarmak için uğraşır.
"Arayış'ın ritmini, yalnızca belleğin katkıları ya da tortuları
değil, süreksiz hayal kırıklığı dizileri ve her dizide bunların aşılması için uygulanan yollar belirler." (s. 34)
Proust ve Göstergeler
Yeterince nesnel bir inceleme yazabildik mi? Proust da böyle olmamı isterdi eminim ki. Serinin karakterlerinin başlangıç koflukları gibi biz de okurlar olarak henüz çıraklar sayılırız. Nesnel bir yorum girişiminde bulunmama rağmen bu inceleme ne kadar hayal kırıklığıyla sonuçlanırsa, ileride yazacak olduğum incelemelerde edineceğim ve geçmişin raptiyelerine yönelteceğim çağrışım kağıtlarım beni mutlaka öznel bir yorum çaresine ulaştıracaktır.
"Her çıraklık çizgisi şu iki andan geçer: Nesnel bir yorum girişiminden kaynaklanan hayal kırıklığı, sonra da çağrışımsal tümeller inşa ettiğimiz öznel bir yorumla bu hayal kırıklığına çare bulma girişimi." (s. 44)
Proust ve Göstergeler
KAYNAKÇA:
Proust ve Göstergeler - Gilles Deleuze
Proust Yaşamınızı Nasıl Değiştirebilir - Alain De Botton
Görme Biçimleri - John Berger
Swann'ların Tarafı - Marcel Proust
http://dergiler.ankara.edu.tr/dergile...
June 3, 2019
Somehow, an improvement on Volume 1, particularly in the book's second half, a languid summer in Balbec whose self-contained treatment of time and character reminds me of Magic Mountain. Structurally, there are similarities to Swann's Way - both feature an introspective and social beginning that segues into a linear narrative that, in many ways, could work as a self contained novel. Though not nearly as funny as Swann in Love, the beach section benefits from spending its time in the head of our protagonist, whose neuroses and weaknesses are fascinating case studies for a modern reader and are more interesting than Swann's simple charm. And Marcel is funny too, in his subtle way. (I laughed when he described a hilly walk as "a bit too vertical for my liking).
Suddenly, in short, you are finally in the novel. You begin to read the book like a novel. And it starts to come together.
The characters of Balbec, both major - the charming Saint-Loup, the changeable Albertine - and minor - the chatty elevator boy, the Greek chorus of restaurant diners - do wonderful work here, and the best moments, like when the narrator is surprised by Albertine on a meander, soar. I was not as into Madame Swann at Home, though Odette is of course a great character, because Proust's repetitive, drawn-out examination of the denouement of love can't help but seem sluggish. In a way, the whole volume speaks to the novel's theme: I like it better retroactively because I think of the great moments, those sections of such extreme beauty and observation, and forget that it meanders too much, and that at times I was frustrated. This project stands apart from anything else that I've read, for good and for bad.
Suddenly, in short, you are finally in the novel. You begin to read the book like a novel. And it starts to come together.
The characters of Balbec, both major - the charming Saint-Loup, the changeable Albertine - and minor - the chatty elevator boy, the Greek chorus of restaurant diners - do wonderful work here, and the best moments, like when the narrator is surprised by Albertine on a meander, soar. I was not as into Madame Swann at Home, though Odette is of course a great character, because Proust's repetitive, drawn-out examination of the denouement of love can't help but seem sluggish. In a way, the whole volume speaks to the novel's theme: I like it better retroactively because I think of the great moments, those sections of such extreme beauty and observation, and forget that it meanders too much, and that at times I was frustrated. This project stands apart from anything else that I've read, for good and for bad.
June 11, 2019
Omaggio a Madame Swann
"All'ombra delle fanciulle in fiore" , sfavillante nella traduzione di G. Raboni, è il Canto della Primavera nella grande opera proustiana.
Gilberte e Albertine ne sono le muse ispiratrici, creature lievi, per certi aspetti eteree.
Chi risalta particolarmente è però Odette, ora Madame Swann e madre di Gilberte, tant'è che in tutta la prima parte del libro m'è parsa lei la protagonista, quasi elevata a botticelliana Flora (L'altra parte è invece ambientata sulla costa di Normandia, a Balbec).
Il narratore stesso ne subisce il fascino. S'incanta a "sentir suonare Madame Swann. Il suo tocco mi sembrava far parte, come la sua vestaglia, come il profumo delle sue scale (...) di un tutto individuale e misterioso".
"All'improvviso, sulla sabbia del viale, lenta, calma e lussureggiante come il fiore più bello, (...) Madame Swann faceva sbocciare intorno a sé toilettes sempre diverse (...) ; e innalzava e dispiegava (...) la cupola serica d'un vasto ombrello identico per sfumatura alla cascata di petali del suo vestito".
"E' sopravvissuto il piacere che sempre provo (...) rivedendomi discorrere così con Madame Swann, sotto il suo parasole come sotto il riflesso d'un pergolato di glicini" .
"All'ombra delle fanciulle in fiore" , sfavillante nella traduzione di G. Raboni, è il Canto della Primavera nella grande opera proustiana.
Gilberte e Albertine ne sono le muse ispiratrici, creature lievi, per certi aspetti eteree.
Chi risalta particolarmente è però Odette, ora Madame Swann e madre di Gilberte, tant'è che in tutta la prima parte del libro m'è parsa lei la protagonista, quasi elevata a botticelliana Flora (L'altra parte è invece ambientata sulla costa di Normandia, a Balbec).
Il narratore stesso ne subisce il fascino. S'incanta a "sentir suonare Madame Swann. Il suo tocco mi sembrava far parte, come la sua vestaglia, come il profumo delle sue scale (...) di un tutto individuale e misterioso".
"All'improvviso, sulla sabbia del viale, lenta, calma e lussureggiante come il fiore più bello, (...) Madame Swann faceva sbocciare intorno a sé toilettes sempre diverse (...) ; e innalzava e dispiegava (...) la cupola serica d'un vasto ombrello identico per sfumatura alla cascata di petali del suo vestito".
"E' sopravvissuto il piacere che sempre provo (...) rivedendomi discorrere così con Madame Swann, sotto il suo parasole come sotto il riflesso d'un pergolato di glicini" .
June 7, 2016
After I finished the first volume of Proust’s masterpiece, I did what I always do when I finish a book: I wrote a review. And, in truth, I ended up being a bit harsh and hyperbolic in that review; but I soon came to second-guess myself. For, although I can’t say I exactly loved Swann’s Way (I liked it), that book had, without my being aware of it, completely undermined everything I thought I knew about fiction. Unconsciously, imperceptibly, my whole concept of the novel had changed.
So it feels a bit dishonest of me to say anything negative about Proust; maybe all my negative sentiments are just a psychological defense mechanism, meant to shield myself from feeling overwhelmed by the influence Proust has exerted over me. Maybe I’m just feeling the literary equivalent of an Oedipus complex, and am striking out at the father who nurtured me. Still, even if we know we are deluding ourselves, we must, in the end, accept the delusions, for we have nothing to replace them with. So here are mine.
I love Proust’s style, but I am bored by his subject—love. Perhaps you will think me odd, but I find love a very boring topic for art. I’ve heard too many love songs, read too many love poems, listened to too many lover’s complaints. It’s not that I’ve sought these out, mind you, but that they pervade our culture; and it’s a cultural obsession that I’ve always failed to understand. Love is, after all, an emotion—a very fine and very beautiful emotion, of course, but an emotion just the same. I don’t like reading odes to happiness or listening to songs about feeling lonely. Emotions are self-evident; they don’t need to be analyzed—they simply are. I don’t think many people will agree with me, but that’s how I’ve always felt—so that’s that.
To be fair, this book is far from a sappy love song. In many ways, it’s precisely the reverse: it does not attempt to evoke the feeling of love, but to analyze it. In Proust’s hands, a pen becomes a scalpel. He anatomizes every instant; he conducts autopsies of every slight memory. This book can be read as an account of exploratory surgery on Love’s cadaver, performed with a steady hand and a cynical eye.
But I must confess that even this bores me. Am I a philistine? Am I unfeeling? Perhaps. But, really, why is this phenomenon so fascinating to so many? I’d rather read a 500 page book analyzing our feelings of hunger. It wouldn’t be so different; a single trip through a supermarket could be as exciting as the trip to Balbec:
(Alright, that’s probably a horrid parody, but you get my drift.)
In short, I cannot say that I loved this book; but I can’t blame Proust for my particularities of taste. I did, however, very much like it; for, even if the subject bored me, it’s impossible not to be amazed by the depth of intelligence betrayed in every sentence, the brilliance lurking in every line. And, in my heart, I suspect that I will, once again, come to reproach myself for being harsh and hyperbolic in a review of Proust. My complaints are the complaints of a whining child, annoyed at his mother opening the blinds, letting the bright sunlight come streaming in. After all, it takes a long time for your eyes to adjust.
So it feels a bit dishonest of me to say anything negative about Proust; maybe all my negative sentiments are just a psychological defense mechanism, meant to shield myself from feeling overwhelmed by the influence Proust has exerted over me. Maybe I’m just feeling the literary equivalent of an Oedipus complex, and am striking out at the father who nurtured me. Still, even if we know we are deluding ourselves, we must, in the end, accept the delusions, for we have nothing to replace them with. So here are mine.
I love Proust’s style, but I am bored by his subject—love. Perhaps you will think me odd, but I find love a very boring topic for art. I’ve heard too many love songs, read too many love poems, listened to too many lover’s complaints. It’s not that I’ve sought these out, mind you, but that they pervade our culture; and it’s a cultural obsession that I’ve always failed to understand. Love is, after all, an emotion—a very fine and very beautiful emotion, of course, but an emotion just the same. I don’t like reading odes to happiness or listening to songs about feeling lonely. Emotions are self-evident; they don’t need to be analyzed—they simply are. I don’t think many people will agree with me, but that’s how I’ve always felt—so that’s that.
To be fair, this book is far from a sappy love song. In many ways, it’s precisely the reverse: it does not attempt to evoke the feeling of love, but to analyze it. In Proust’s hands, a pen becomes a scalpel. He anatomizes every instant; he conducts autopsies of every slight memory. This book can be read as an account of exploratory surgery on Love’s cadaver, performed with a steady hand and a cynical eye.
But I must confess that even this bores me. Am I a philistine? Am I unfeeling? Perhaps. But, really, why is this phenomenon so fascinating to so many? I’d rather read a 500 page book analyzing our feelings of hunger. It wouldn’t be so different; a single trip through a supermarket could be as exciting as the trip to Balbec:
I saw, sitting on the shelf, a little band of apples; and these apples, which lay there so innocently, so playfully, so indistinguishable from one another, at once absorbed my total attention. I saw them there, sitting in the harsh light of the supermarket, their waxy skin gleaming attractively; and this gleam of light awakened in my stomach rumblings and stirrings, which, as I reflected, must have existed there all along, dormant, waiting to be awakened by the sight of some fruit. But as I reached out my hand, picking up the apple that most caught my fancy, my expectations were shattered; it felt so weightless in my hand, and its waxy skin felt so much like plastic, that my desire was immediately destroyed, my hunger abated, and I put back the apple—thrown back once more into that confusion of hunger, knowing that I wanted food, but not knowing what I wanted to eat.
(Alright, that’s probably a horrid parody, but you get my drift.)
In short, I cannot say that I loved this book; but I can’t blame Proust for my particularities of taste. I did, however, very much like it; for, even if the subject bored me, it’s impossible not to be amazed by the depth of intelligence betrayed in every sentence, the brilliance lurking in every line. And, in my heart, I suspect that I will, once again, come to reproach myself for being harsh and hyperbolic in a review of Proust. My complaints are the complaints of a whining child, annoyed at his mother opening the blinds, letting the bright sunlight come streaming in. After all, it takes a long time for your eyes to adjust.
March 21, 2022
Virginia Woolf on Proust....
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7013...
===========
“If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.”
― Marcel Proust
=======
About two-thirds the way through this book he makes a new friend, Saint-Loup, and sometimes they talk for hours. But afterward Proust would say: "I felt vexed at not spending the time alone"
Solitude is the school of genius...
"Yet, in sacrificing not just the joys of foregathering with the fashionable, but the joys of friendship too, to the pleasure of dallying the whole day in this lovely garden, perhaps I was not ill advised. Those who have the opportunity to live for themselves— they are artists....for them, friendship is a dereliction of that duty, a form of self-abdication. Even conversation, which is friendship’s mode of expression, is a superficial digression, through which we can make no acquisition.
We may converse our whole life away without speaking anything other than the interminable repetitions that fill the vacant minute; but the steps of thought we take during the lonely work of artistic creation all lead us downward, deeper into ourselves, the only direction that is not closed to us, the only direction in which we can advance, albeit with much greater travail, toward an outcome of truth....Those of us whose law of growth is one of purely internal growth, and who cannot escape the impression of boredom inseparable from the presence of a friend, an impression that comes from having to stay at the surface of the self, instead of sounding our depths for the discoveries that await us, can only feel tempted by friendship."
=====================
Proust describes the art of Elstir [Monet], whom he met in Balbec...
The fact was that Elstir’s intent, not to show things as he knew them to be, but in accordance with the optical illusions that our first sight of things is made of, had led him to isolate some of these laws of perspective, which were more striking in his day, art having been first to uncover them. A bend in the course of a river, or the apparent contiguity of the cliffs bounding a bay, seemed to make a lake, completely enclosed, in the middle of the plain or the mountains. In a painting done at Balbec on a stiflingly hot summer’s day, a recess of the coastline, held between walls of pink granite, appeared not to be the sea, which could be seen farther off: the unbrokenness of the ocean was suggested only by seagulls wheeling above what looked like solid stone, but which for them was wind and wave. The same canvas defined other laws, such as the Lilliputian grace of white sails at the foot of the immense cliffs, set on the blue mirror like sleeping butterflies, and certain contrasts between the depth of the shadows and the pallor of the light. This play of shadows, which photography has also spread far and wide, had fascinated Elstir so much that at one point he had enjoyed painting veritable mirages, in which a château topped by a tower looked like a completely circular château with a tower growing out of the roof, and another one, inverted, beneath it, either because the extraordinary purity of a fine day gave the shadow reflected in the water the hardness and glitter of stone, or because morning mists made the stone as insubstantial as shadow.
Similarly, beyond the sea, behind a stretch of woodland, the sea began again, turned pink by the setting sun, but it was the sky. The sunlight, as though inventing new solids, struck the hull of a boat and pushed it back beyond another one lying in the shade; it laid the steps of a crystal staircase across the surface of the morning sea, which, though in fact smooth, was broken by the angle of illumination. A river flowing under the bridges of a city was shown from a point of view that split it, spread it into a lake, narrowed it to a trickle, or blocked it by planting a hill in it, covered with woods, where the city-dwellers like to go for a breath of evening air; and the rhythm of the disrupted city was marked only by the inflexible verticality of the steeples, which did not climb skyward but seemed, rather, like gravity’s plumb line marking the beat in a triumphal march, to have the whole vague mass of houses hanging beneath them, ranged in misty tiers along the crushed and dismembered river. Even that semihuman part of nature, a footpath along a clifftop or on a mountainside (Elstir’s earliest works dating from the period when landscapes had to feature the presence of a character), was affected, like rivers or the ocean, by the eclipses of perspective. And whether a mountain ridge, a haze of spume rising from a waterfall, or the sea prevented one from seeing the road in its entirety, visible to the character but not to us, the little human figure in outdated clothes, lost among this wilderness, often seemed to have stopped in front of an abyss, the route he was following having come to an end; and then, three hundred yards higher up, among the pine woods, we would be touched and reassured to see the reappearance of the thin white line of sandy path, friendly to the wanderer’s tread, the intervening turns and twists of which, disappearing around the gulf or the waterfall, had been hidden from us by a mountainside.
================
More beautiful descriptive writing....
Sunrises are a feature of long train journeys, like hard-boiled eggs, illustrated papers, packs of cards, rivers with boats straining forward but making no progress. As I sifted the thoughts that had been in my mind just a minute before, to see whether or not I had slept (my uncertainty about the matter already inclining me to the affirmative), I glimpsed in the windowpane, above a little black copse, serrated clouds of downy softness in a shade of immutable pink, dead and as seemingly indelible now as the pink inseparable from feathers in a wing, or a pastel dyed by the fancy of the painter. But in this shade I sensed neither inertia nor fancy, only necessity and life. Soon great reserves of light built up behind it. They brightened further, spreading a blush across the sky; and I stared at it through the glass, straining to see it better, as the color of it seemed to be privy to the profoundest secrets of nature. Then the train turned away from it, the railway line having changed direction, the dawn scene framed in the window turned into a village by night, its roofs blue with moonlight, the washhouse smeared with the opal glow of darkness, under a sky still bristling with stars, and I was saddened by the loss of my strip of pink sky, till I caught sight of it again, now reddening, in the window on the other side, from which it disappeared at another bend in the line. And I dodged from one window to the other, trying to reassemble the offset intermittent fragments of my lovely, changeable red morning, so as to see it for once as a single lasting picture.
The landscape became hilly and steep, and the train came to a halt at a little station between two mountains. Through the gorge, beside the swift stream, all one could see was the house of a grade-crossing keeper up to its windowsills in the flowing water. If a person can be the epitome of a place, conveying the charm and tang of its special savor, then this was demonstrated, more so than by the peasant girl I had longed for in the days of my lonely rambles along the Méséglise way, through the Roussainville woods, by the tall girl whom I saw come out of the keeper’s house and start walking toward the station, along a footpath lit by the slanting rays of the sunrise, carrying a crock of milk. In that valley, hidden from the rest of the world by the surrounding heights, the only times she ever saw people would be when a train made its brief halt there. She walked along beside the train cars, pouring out coffee with milk for a few of the passengers who were up and about. Glowing in the glory of the morning, her face was pinker than the sky.
========
another writing sample....
On certain days, the Swanns would decide to stay at home all afternoon. So, as we had been so late having lunch, I could watch the sunlight quickly dwindle up the wall of the little garden, drawing with it the end of this day, which earlier had seemed to me destined to be different from other days. And despite the lamps of all shapes and sizes, glowing on their appointed altars all about the room, brought in by the servants and set on sideboards, teapoys, corner shelves, little low tables, as though for the enactment of some mysterious rite, our conversation produced nothing out of the ordinary, and I would go home, taking with me that feeling of having been let down which children often experience after Midnight Mass.
=====
From Elstir [Monet]....
"There is no such thing,” he said, “as a man, however clever he may be, who has never at some time in his youth uttered words, or even led a life, that he would not prefer to see expunged from memory. He should not find this absolutely a matter for regret, as he cannot be sure he would ever have become as wise as he is, if indeed getting wisdom is a possibility for any of us, had he not traversed all the silly or detestable incarnations that are bound to precede that final one. I know there are young men, sons and grandsons of distinguished men, whose tutors, since their earliest high-school years, have taught them every nobility of soul and excellent precept of morality. The lives of such men may contain nothing they would wish to abolish; they may be happy to endorse every word they have ever uttered. But they are the poor in spirit, the effete descendants of doctrinarians, whose only wisdoms are negative and sterile. Wisdom cannot be inherited— one must discover it for oneself, but only after following a course that no one can follow in our stead; no one can spare us that experience, for wisdom is only a point of view on things. The lives of men you admire, attitudes you think are noble, haven’t been laid down by their fathers or their tutors— they were preceded by very different beginnings, and were influenced by whatever surrounded them, whether it was good, bad, or indifferent. Each of them is the outcome of a struggle, each of them is a victory."
======
Postscript....
The Introduction to Book 2 by James Grieve, who translated this volume, gives credit to Proust, but also very grumpy to the point of making me laugh.
A scholar-reviewer responds....
"He digresses to dissent vehemently from the notion of Proust as a social critic, calling him "a cosseted Parisian whose Right Bank world was narrow, who preferred to live in the past, in bed, in a cork-lined room, who rarely travelled and never did a day's work".
This seems superfluous: moreover, it seems misguided. Proust's social canvas is as great as that of Tolstoy (another cosseted layabout) and dwarfs Proust's much-loved George Eliot. Proust was hardly unworldly: before he took to his cork-lined room he trained as a lawyer, took a degree in literature, was an active supporter of Dreyfus and - more obviously - a much sought-after socialite; his work was the novel which would in time provide work for Grieve himself."
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7013...
===========
“If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.”
― Marcel Proust
=======
About two-thirds the way through this book he makes a new friend, Saint-Loup, and sometimes they talk for hours. But afterward Proust would say: "I felt vexed at not spending the time alone"
Solitude is the school of genius...
"Yet, in sacrificing not just the joys of foregathering with the fashionable, but the joys of friendship too, to the pleasure of dallying the whole day in this lovely garden, perhaps I was not ill advised. Those who have the opportunity to live for themselves— they are artists....for them, friendship is a dereliction of that duty, a form of self-abdication. Even conversation, which is friendship’s mode of expression, is a superficial digression, through which we can make no acquisition.
We may converse our whole life away without speaking anything other than the interminable repetitions that fill the vacant minute; but the steps of thought we take during the lonely work of artistic creation all lead us downward, deeper into ourselves, the only direction that is not closed to us, the only direction in which we can advance, albeit with much greater travail, toward an outcome of truth....Those of us whose law of growth is one of purely internal growth, and who cannot escape the impression of boredom inseparable from the presence of a friend, an impression that comes from having to stay at the surface of the self, instead of sounding our depths for the discoveries that await us, can only feel tempted by friendship."
=====================
Proust describes the art of Elstir [Monet], whom he met in Balbec...
The fact was that Elstir’s intent, not to show things as he knew them to be, but in accordance with the optical illusions that our first sight of things is made of, had led him to isolate some of these laws of perspective, which were more striking in his day, art having been first to uncover them. A bend in the course of a river, or the apparent contiguity of the cliffs bounding a bay, seemed to make a lake, completely enclosed, in the middle of the plain or the mountains. In a painting done at Balbec on a stiflingly hot summer’s day, a recess of the coastline, held between walls of pink granite, appeared not to be the sea, which could be seen farther off: the unbrokenness of the ocean was suggested only by seagulls wheeling above what looked like solid stone, but which for them was wind and wave. The same canvas defined other laws, such as the Lilliputian grace of white sails at the foot of the immense cliffs, set on the blue mirror like sleeping butterflies, and certain contrasts between the depth of the shadows and the pallor of the light. This play of shadows, which photography has also spread far and wide, had fascinated Elstir so much that at one point he had enjoyed painting veritable mirages, in which a château topped by a tower looked like a completely circular château with a tower growing out of the roof, and another one, inverted, beneath it, either because the extraordinary purity of a fine day gave the shadow reflected in the water the hardness and glitter of stone, or because morning mists made the stone as insubstantial as shadow.
Similarly, beyond the sea, behind a stretch of woodland, the sea began again, turned pink by the setting sun, but it was the sky. The sunlight, as though inventing new solids, struck the hull of a boat and pushed it back beyond another one lying in the shade; it laid the steps of a crystal staircase across the surface of the morning sea, which, though in fact smooth, was broken by the angle of illumination. A river flowing under the bridges of a city was shown from a point of view that split it, spread it into a lake, narrowed it to a trickle, or blocked it by planting a hill in it, covered with woods, where the city-dwellers like to go for a breath of evening air; and the rhythm of the disrupted city was marked only by the inflexible verticality of the steeples, which did not climb skyward but seemed, rather, like gravity’s plumb line marking the beat in a triumphal march, to have the whole vague mass of houses hanging beneath them, ranged in misty tiers along the crushed and dismembered river. Even that semihuman part of nature, a footpath along a clifftop or on a mountainside (Elstir’s earliest works dating from the period when landscapes had to feature the presence of a character), was affected, like rivers or the ocean, by the eclipses of perspective. And whether a mountain ridge, a haze of spume rising from a waterfall, or the sea prevented one from seeing the road in its entirety, visible to the character but not to us, the little human figure in outdated clothes, lost among this wilderness, often seemed to have stopped in front of an abyss, the route he was following having come to an end; and then, three hundred yards higher up, among the pine woods, we would be touched and reassured to see the reappearance of the thin white line of sandy path, friendly to the wanderer’s tread, the intervening turns and twists of which, disappearing around the gulf or the waterfall, had been hidden from us by a mountainside.
================
More beautiful descriptive writing....
Sunrises are a feature of long train journeys, like hard-boiled eggs, illustrated papers, packs of cards, rivers with boats straining forward but making no progress. As I sifted the thoughts that had been in my mind just a minute before, to see whether or not I had slept (my uncertainty about the matter already inclining me to the affirmative), I glimpsed in the windowpane, above a little black copse, serrated clouds of downy softness in a shade of immutable pink, dead and as seemingly indelible now as the pink inseparable from feathers in a wing, or a pastel dyed by the fancy of the painter. But in this shade I sensed neither inertia nor fancy, only necessity and life. Soon great reserves of light built up behind it. They brightened further, spreading a blush across the sky; and I stared at it through the glass, straining to see it better, as the color of it seemed to be privy to the profoundest secrets of nature. Then the train turned away from it, the railway line having changed direction, the dawn scene framed in the window turned into a village by night, its roofs blue with moonlight, the washhouse smeared with the opal glow of darkness, under a sky still bristling with stars, and I was saddened by the loss of my strip of pink sky, till I caught sight of it again, now reddening, in the window on the other side, from which it disappeared at another bend in the line. And I dodged from one window to the other, trying to reassemble the offset intermittent fragments of my lovely, changeable red morning, so as to see it for once as a single lasting picture.
The landscape became hilly and steep, and the train came to a halt at a little station between two mountains. Through the gorge, beside the swift stream, all one could see was the house of a grade-crossing keeper up to its windowsills in the flowing water. If a person can be the epitome of a place, conveying the charm and tang of its special savor, then this was demonstrated, more so than by the peasant girl I had longed for in the days of my lonely rambles along the Méséglise way, through the Roussainville woods, by the tall girl whom I saw come out of the keeper’s house and start walking toward the station, along a footpath lit by the slanting rays of the sunrise, carrying a crock of milk. In that valley, hidden from the rest of the world by the surrounding heights, the only times she ever saw people would be when a train made its brief halt there. She walked along beside the train cars, pouring out coffee with milk for a few of the passengers who were up and about. Glowing in the glory of the morning, her face was pinker than the sky.
========
another writing sample....
On certain days, the Swanns would decide to stay at home all afternoon. So, as we had been so late having lunch, I could watch the sunlight quickly dwindle up the wall of the little garden, drawing with it the end of this day, which earlier had seemed to me destined to be different from other days. And despite the lamps of all shapes and sizes, glowing on their appointed altars all about the room, brought in by the servants and set on sideboards, teapoys, corner shelves, little low tables, as though for the enactment of some mysterious rite, our conversation produced nothing out of the ordinary, and I would go home, taking with me that feeling of having been let down which children often experience after Midnight Mass.
=====
From Elstir [Monet]....
"There is no such thing,” he said, “as a man, however clever he may be, who has never at some time in his youth uttered words, or even led a life, that he would not prefer to see expunged from memory. He should not find this absolutely a matter for regret, as he cannot be sure he would ever have become as wise as he is, if indeed getting wisdom is a possibility for any of us, had he not traversed all the silly or detestable incarnations that are bound to precede that final one. I know there are young men, sons and grandsons of distinguished men, whose tutors, since their earliest high-school years, have taught them every nobility of soul and excellent precept of morality. The lives of such men may contain nothing they would wish to abolish; they may be happy to endorse every word they have ever uttered. But they are the poor in spirit, the effete descendants of doctrinarians, whose only wisdoms are negative and sterile. Wisdom cannot be inherited— one must discover it for oneself, but only after following a course that no one can follow in our stead; no one can spare us that experience, for wisdom is only a point of view on things. The lives of men you admire, attitudes you think are noble, haven’t been laid down by their fathers or their tutors— they were preceded by very different beginnings, and were influenced by whatever surrounded them, whether it was good, bad, or indifferent. Each of them is the outcome of a struggle, each of them is a victory."
======
Postscript....
The Introduction to Book 2 by James Grieve, who translated this volume, gives credit to Proust, but also very grumpy to the point of making me laugh.
A scholar-reviewer responds....
"He digresses to dissent vehemently from the notion of Proust as a social critic, calling him "a cosseted Parisian whose Right Bank world was narrow, who preferred to live in the past, in bed, in a cork-lined room, who rarely travelled and never did a day's work".
This seems superfluous: moreover, it seems misguided. Proust's social canvas is as great as that of Tolstoy (another cosseted layabout) and dwarfs Proust's much-loved George Eliot. Proust was hardly unworldly: before he took to his cork-lined room he trained as a lawyer, took a degree in literature, was an active supporter of Dreyfus and - more obviously - a much sought-after socialite; his work was the novel which would in time provide work for Grieve himself."
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May 20, 2017An Open Letter to Marcel Proust:
Sir, thank you for having written what must be known only as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century; a work of genius.
Unfortunately, this letter cannot be a letter of exaltation, but a rather a letter of apology. You deserve all the adulation which you have received these past 100 years since the first volume of your novel was published. And the Proust group on goodreads is testimony to the faith which you have properly placed in your readers’ abilities to not settle for a simple book; you had the faith to believe in what you were to write and to believe in your book finding readers who could luxuriate in what can only be called a masterful work.
But for me, I can only apologize. Our minds would seem to work upon different currents. My literary experience has me ensconced in what was written after you wrote, in those works of fiction written by authors who must have learned an enormous amount of what you taught that fiction could be, what it could do. It is a matter of finding myself more at home in a postmodern aesthetic than a modern aesthetic.
If I dare oversimplify the contention over modernism, I have to place myself more in the camp with James Joyce than with yourself. But that is merely a matter of my preference for one genius over another, just as one may prefer Plato over Aristotle or Kant over Hegel or Heidegger over Wittgenstein. Whichever side one finds oneself, one can only believe that one is witnessing the heights to which thought can aspire. I am entirely incapable of disparaging your novel or your prose or your aesthetic, but only find myself traveling down other roads of thought and experience.
In the back of my mind I think it may be only a matter of language. I have a small suspicion that your thought, your writing, is at home only in the French language, and despite the efforts of three generations of the Englishing of your novel, the English language itself may not be a comfortable abode for your experience. Lacking masculine and feminine nouns and pronouns, perhaps your dependent clauses can only land as a clunk in English, so poorly adapted for this kind of subordination of one thought to another. I don’t know my French well enough to be certain of any such hypothesis, but it only leaves me wondering.
I have heard complaints posited against your narrator Marcel, that he is self-absorbed. I find such a judgement about Marcel to be entirely out of order. Much more than obsessing about himself, your narrator is highly attuned to the impressions which other human beings make upon him and the impressions he makes upon other human beings, and this entire complex of our affect and of our effect upon others results in a profound attunement to the moral shape of what it’s like to be a human being. Marcel does not believe that he exists sufficient unto himself, but experiences himself at all times enmeshed with the experiences and recognitions of other people, people upon whom he depends for his very being. Marcel finds his being at all times in and with others. Perhaps the fiction we need today is a fiction which would translate Marcel’s attunement to others into a twenty-first century character; that there is some gap between Marcel’s world and our own, that the gap is too large for us to translate Marcel’s world and his response to it into our own contemporary world of experience. But perhaps rather it is precisely this gap which is what fascinates so much in reading your novel; that it requires an imaginative and engaged reading by which one would find oneself as a reader dislocated into a strange world, and gaining from that distance a new insight into how we can shape ourselves as moral beings within our own world. And indeed, the further I read into your novel the more convinced I am that the very same difference in aesthetic preferences between us is at the very same time what links those postmodern novels I love so much with your very modernist novel, one of the three pinnacles of modernist noveling. Perhaps the aesthetic difference between the modernist and the postmodernist novel is nothing about this or that characteristic, but is reflective merely of the different shape we find ourselves in living under different conditions and different pressures, different traumas. Were you writing and reading today, would you find yourself attracted to a fiction like that of Joseph McElroy's? I do feel you would. And if I could recommend one book to you from my postmodernist library, it would indeed be his Women and Men; therein I suspect you would find a kindred thinker, a questioning about how to bring ourselves to a respect of the gap between us as individuals, as ones and simultaneously as twos.
I do not know at this time whether I will maintain my intended schedule to read your entire novel in 2013. I may luxuriate a bit and extend my reading into next year. But I am convinced that, despite our differences, I will not add to those statistics found here on goodreads whereby your first volume has received over 12,000 ratings while this second volume already has a mere one fifth of that number. I will not allow myself to be counted among those who have abandoned your work.
I thank you for your time in reading this, and I do look forward to returning to your novel in the not too distant future.
Sincerely,
Nathan “N.R.” Gaddis
Sir, thank you for having written what must be known only as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century; a work of genius.
Unfortunately, this letter cannot be a letter of exaltation, but a rather a letter of apology. You deserve all the adulation which you have received these past 100 years since the first volume of your novel was published. And the Proust group on goodreads is testimony to the faith which you have properly placed in your readers’ abilities to not settle for a simple book; you had the faith to believe in what you were to write and to believe in your book finding readers who could luxuriate in what can only be called a masterful work.
But for me, I can only apologize. Our minds would seem to work upon different currents. My literary experience has me ensconced in what was written after you wrote, in those works of fiction written by authors who must have learned an enormous amount of what you taught that fiction could be, what it could do. It is a matter of finding myself more at home in a postmodern aesthetic than a modern aesthetic.
If I dare oversimplify the contention over modernism, I have to place myself more in the camp with James Joyce than with yourself. But that is merely a matter of my preference for one genius over another, just as one may prefer Plato over Aristotle or Kant over Hegel or Heidegger over Wittgenstein. Whichever side one finds oneself, one can only believe that one is witnessing the heights to which thought can aspire. I am entirely incapable of disparaging your novel or your prose or your aesthetic, but only find myself traveling down other roads of thought and experience.
In the back of my mind I think it may be only a matter of language. I have a small suspicion that your thought, your writing, is at home only in the French language, and despite the efforts of three generations of the Englishing of your novel, the English language itself may not be a comfortable abode for your experience. Lacking masculine and feminine nouns and pronouns, perhaps your dependent clauses can only land as a clunk in English, so poorly adapted for this kind of subordination of one thought to another. I don’t know my French well enough to be certain of any such hypothesis, but it only leaves me wondering.
I have heard complaints posited against your narrator Marcel, that he is self-absorbed. I find such a judgement about Marcel to be entirely out of order. Much more than obsessing about himself, your narrator is highly attuned to the impressions which other human beings make upon him and the impressions he makes upon other human beings, and this entire complex of our affect and of our effect upon others results in a profound attunement to the moral shape of what it’s like to be a human being. Marcel does not believe that he exists sufficient unto himself, but experiences himself at all times enmeshed with the experiences and recognitions of other people, people upon whom he depends for his very being. Marcel finds his being at all times in and with others. Perhaps the fiction we need today is a fiction which would translate Marcel’s attunement to others into a twenty-first century character; that there is some gap between Marcel’s world and our own, that the gap is too large for us to translate Marcel’s world and his response to it into our own contemporary world of experience. But perhaps rather it is precisely this gap which is what fascinates so much in reading your novel; that it requires an imaginative and engaged reading by which one would find oneself as a reader dislocated into a strange world, and gaining from that distance a new insight into how we can shape ourselves as moral beings within our own world. And indeed, the further I read into your novel the more convinced I am that the very same difference in aesthetic preferences between us is at the very same time what links those postmodern novels I love so much with your very modernist novel, one of the three pinnacles of modernist noveling. Perhaps the aesthetic difference between the modernist and the postmodernist novel is nothing about this or that characteristic, but is reflective merely of the different shape we find ourselves in living under different conditions and different pressures, different traumas. Were you writing and reading today, would you find yourself attracted to a fiction like that of Joseph McElroy's? I do feel you would. And if I could recommend one book to you from my postmodernist library, it would indeed be his Women and Men; therein I suspect you would find a kindred thinker, a questioning about how to bring ourselves to a respect of the gap between us as individuals, as ones and simultaneously as twos.
I do not know at this time whether I will maintain my intended schedule to read your entire novel in 2013. I may luxuriate a bit and extend my reading into next year. But I am convinced that, despite our differences, I will not add to those statistics found here on goodreads whereby your first volume has received over 12,000 ratings while this second volume already has a mere one fifth of that number. I will not allow myself to be counted among those who have abandoned your work.
I thank you for your time in reading this, and I do look forward to returning to your novel in the not too distant future.
Sincerely,
Nathan “N.R.” Gaddis
May 22, 2021
.
در صفحات بسیاری در جستجو، ماجرا و شرح آن تنها بهانهای برای پرداختن به مبحث بنیادین چند و چون انگیزه و آفرینش هنری است. هنر موسیقی در طرف خانهی سوان و نقاشی در کتاب در سایهی دوشیزگان شکوفا، مجموعهی این هنرها که پروست دربارهی هرکدامشان با آگاهی یک کارشناس بهوش و پیشرفته سخن میگوید، بحث هنری جستجو را از آنچه به ظاهر جولانگاه اصلی آن است، یعنی ادبیات، فراتر میبرد و در مفهوم عام هنر متبلور میکند.
نگاه ریزبین و عمیق پروست برای بیان تمام حالات عشق و روابط آدمها برام شگفتانگیز بود و جلد دوم را بخاطر فضای رمانتیکش دوست داشتم.
در صفحات بسیاری در جستجو، ماجرا و شرح آن تنها بهانهای برای پرداختن به مبحث بنیادین چند و چون انگیزه و آفرینش هنری است. هنر موسیقی در طرف خانهی سوان و نقاشی در کتاب در سایهی دوشیزگان شکوفا، مجموعهی این هنرها که پروست دربارهی هرکدامشان با آگاهی یک کارشناس بهوش و پیشرفته سخن میگوید، بحث هنری جستجو را از آنچه به ظاهر جولانگاه اصلی آن است، یعنی ادبیات، فراتر میبرد و در مفهوم عام هنر متبلور میکند.
نگاه ریزبین و عمیق پروست برای بیان تمام حالات عشق و روابط آدمها برام شگفتانگیز بود و جلد دوم را بخاطر فضای رمانتیکش دوست داشتم.
December 30, 2019
It may have taken me more than a month to finish reading this work, but it was certainly well worth the effort. This novel got better and better as I worked my way to the end. I loved in particular the second part ('Swann in Love') of the first novel (Swann's Way) of 'Remembrance of Things Past', and it was also the second part of Within A Budding Grove (also published as 'In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower') that captured my attention more than the first part. Overall I prefer this novel to the first. As there are many outstanding reviews available, I won’t provide any further detail; suffice to say that I look forward to reading the rest of Proust’s masterpiece. However, I suspect that it will be a long-term project.
June 24, 2023
Sunrises are a feature of long train journeys, like hard-boiled eggs, illustrated papers, packs of cards, rivers with boats straining forward but making no progress.
Oh this line! As someone who was a very poor Ukrainian for most of my life, I've never travelled inside Ukraine by air. And since the country is huge, I met a LOT of sundowns and sunrises in trains. I mean maybe in 2011 I traveled with my student ticket from Zaporizhzhya to Simferopol, Crimea for 8 hryvnas ~ 1 dollar back then. And from Simferopol to Sevastopol for even cheaper!
Oh and the hard-boiled eggs! I would also add kotlety.. Now please imagine a steel box of the car sitting in the direct sun, no conditioner obviously, and most window are broken and can't be open. Now add hard-boiled eggs and kotlety into that mix! The smell, oh the smell, I had my madeleine moment right there. Things you get nostalgic for, jeez.
Anyway my thoughts about this second part. Firstly I am flabbergasted about all the five stars. And a little jealous that this book seem to bring somehow I don’t know how people to climax with its writing. Is it a French thing? It must be! And I won’t even act like I get them French. I never even watched an episode of Emily in Paris after all.
So Proust gets obsessed with one girl then another all the while obsessing over his obsession over a few obsessions of his. Just the same few thoughts over and over.
He doesn’t care to create a character or a story, it’s just all about himself, everything else is refracted through the uneven mirror.
“For genius lies in reflective power, and not in the intrinsic quality of the scene reflected.”
Just look at this example of him writing a scene:
He just doesn’t care, the plot part to be done with asap so he’s able to return to his obsessions.
Aah surely he’s a genius and its the French thing, right?
Oh this line! As someone who was a very poor Ukrainian for most of my life, I've never travelled inside Ukraine by air. And since the country is huge, I met a LOT of sundowns and sunrises in trains. I mean maybe in 2011 I traveled with my student ticket from Zaporizhzhya to Simferopol, Crimea for 8 hryvnas ~ 1 dollar back then. And from Simferopol to Sevastopol for even cheaper!
Oh and the hard-boiled eggs! I would also add kotlety.. Now please imagine a steel box of the car sitting in the direct sun, no conditioner obviously, and most window are broken and can't be open. Now add hard-boiled eggs and kotlety into that mix! The smell, oh the smell, I had my madeleine moment right there. Things you get nostalgic for, jeez.
Anyway my thoughts about this second part. Firstly I am flabbergasted about all the five stars. And a little jealous that this book seem to bring somehow I don’t know how people to climax with its writing. Is it a French thing? It must be! And I won’t even act like I get them French. I never even watched an episode of Emily in Paris after all.
So Proust gets obsessed with one girl then another all the while obsessing over his obsession over a few obsessions of his. Just the same few thoughts over and over.
He doesn’t care to create a character or a story, it’s just all about himself, everything else is refracted through the uneven mirror.
“For genius lies in reflective power, and not in the intrinsic quality of the scene reflected.”
Just look at this example of him writing a scene:
Then Gilberte whispered to me:
“I’m so happy! You’ve really bowled over my great friend Bergotte! He’s just told my mother that he thought you were highly intelligent.”
“Where are we going?” I asked her.
“Well, you know me, I don’t really mind where we go....”
As Bergotte lived not far from my parents’ house, he and I shared a carriage.”
He just doesn’t care, the plot part to be done with asap so he’s able to return to his obsessions.
Aah surely he’s a genius and its the French thing, right?
January 15, 2022
"It is because they imply the sacrifice of a more or less advantageous position to a purely private happiness that, as a general rule, ‘impossible’ marriages are the happiest of all."
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower also translated as Within a Budding Grove is the second installment in Marcel Proust's masterpiece In Search of Lost Time. Beginning with the remarkable transformation of Swann's mistress, Odette Crécy, and our young narrator's pursuit of the daughter of Swann and Odette, Gilberte, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower is an engaging continuation of Proust's story. As our narrator recounts the anxieties and obsessions of young love, he evokes the seaside resort of Balbec. This evocation feels both impressionistic and fully developed. Wonderful writing! It is during his time in Balbec that his attention shifts from Gilbert to Albertine and he entertains the idea that he will become a writer.
“It was she whom I loved and whom I could not therefore see without that anxiety, without that desire for something more, which destroys in us, in the presence of the person we love, the sensation of loving.”
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower also translated as Within a Budding Grove is the second installment in Marcel Proust's masterpiece In Search of Lost Time. Beginning with the remarkable transformation of Swann's mistress, Odette Crécy, and our young narrator's pursuit of the daughter of Swann and Odette, Gilberte, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower is an engaging continuation of Proust's story. As our narrator recounts the anxieties and obsessions of young love, he evokes the seaside resort of Balbec. This evocation feels both impressionistic and fully developed. Wonderful writing! It is during his time in Balbec that his attention shifts from Gilbert to Albertine and he entertains the idea that he will become a writer.
“It was she whom I loved and whom I could not therefore see without that anxiety, without that desire for something more, which destroys in us, in the presence of the person we love, the sensation of loving.”
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