Time Regained

Time Regained

"In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self."
And every writer too, it would seem. While continuing to excavate the sexual mores of society, snobbery, human attraction, the meaning of art etc this volume is where our narrator describes how and why he starts to write. His thoughts and conclusions are, one presumes, close to being Proust's own. The events in the life, he says, are not nearly as important as the perception of the motivating forces that inspire them, for those are the truths of humanity, no different in the drawing room or the hovel, although expressed in a different manner. "Just as a geometer, stripping things of their sensible qualities, sees only the linear substratum beneath them, so the stories that people told escaped me, for what interested me was not what they were trying to say but the manner in which they said it and the way in which this manner revealed their character and their foibles; or rather I was interested in what had always, because he gave me specific pleasure, been more particularly the goal of my investigation: the point that was common to one being and another. And as soon as I perceived this my intelligence - until that moment slumbering, even if sometimes the apparent animation of my talk might disguise from others a profound intellectual torpor..."

The Sweet Cheat Gone / Albertine Disparue (2nd post)

 The Sweet Cheat Gone / Albertine Disparue (2nd post)

In this book Proust returns again and again to the idea of a sort of RAPTURE engendered in the mind. Even if only for a moment we can have experiences which are so rich that they seem of a different magnitude of experience to everyday life. And yet they can be inspired by the most commonplace objects and attached to the most quotidian experiences. This is because the real epiphanies happen inside our head and are the result of intellect, emotion and memory acting upon experience.

I was reminded at times of passages in Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet. Pessoa's narrator feels that the real journeys are internal -  "Only extreme feebleness of imagination can justify anyone needing to travel in order to feel." Proust's Marcel says something similar - "Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination." Whatever we see is not transferred COMPLETE to our consciousness, it is interpreted and shaped by our consciousness.

The Sweet Cheat Gone / Albertine Disparue (1st Post)

The Sweet Cheat Gone

This is the second last volume in Proust's masterpiece and it is difficult to discuss it without there being some spoilers, although I will try to keep these to a minimum. For although plot is not pre-eminent in this book, it is full of twists and turns.

Albertine has gone and Marcel alternately misses her and explains how he is forgetting her. He is still eaten with jealousy, both of what is happening in the present and what might have happened in the past. Before she left, Marcel imagined he had fallen out of love but her leaving turns the wheel once more and fills his heart with loss: "a moment ago, before Françoise came into the room, I had supposed that I was no longer in love with Albertine, I had supposed that I was leaving nothing out of account; a careful analyst, I had supposed that I knew the state of my own heart. But our intelligence, however great it may be, cannot perceive the elements that compose it and remain unsuspected so long as, from the volatile state in which they generally exist, a phenomenon capable of isolating them has not subjected them to the first stages of solidification. I had been mistaken in thinking that I could see clearly into my own heart."

The Captive, Post Two. (a short one this time)

The Captive - Marcel Proust: Post Two

One of the most effective scenes in The Captive is one in which Marcel, who rarely leaves his room, imagines the sounds of the world outside waking up as a musical composition. This is an excerpt and the whole piece raised some nostalgia for city life. Over a number of pages Proust compares the calls of traders and the sounds on shops opening and carts passing to plainchant, song and symphony. It is a wonderful passage of description, of unseen streets.

The Captive / La Prisonnière

Love the way these copies straddle the decimal divide.

The Captive - Marcel Proust

The captive is Albertine, who Marcel* keeps in his apartment, unbeknownst to his friends. The captive is also Marcel, who is so jealous of Albertine that his movements are severely constrained by his need to watch her all the time. And as one expects by now (if you've got this far into Remembrance of Things Past) these positions are also reflected and refracted through other characters, particularly the relationship between scion of the Guermantes family Baron de Charlus and Morel, the socially ambitious violinist. However the focus of the book is very much on Marcel and Albertine.

Cities of the Plain (Second Post)

Cities of the Plain (Sodom and Gomorrah) Second Post 

I am building up a backlog of 'draft posts' at the moment and need to clear them away. They sort of nag at me and interfere with my concentration. Do other bloggers have the same issue?

As I mentioned in my first post on Cities of the Plain, I marked enough quotes to produce a novella length post. I'll try to be judicious and excavate a couple of themes that struck me while reading and have stayed with me for the month since.

Cities of the Plain (Sodom and Gomorrah) First Post

Cities of the Plain (Sodom and Gomorrah)

I expected to be well finished my journey with Proust by this time but the year is proving a slow reading one. Some of this may be down to the fact that Proust demands to be read slowly, with great attention, but it is more that I am finding it difficult to find TIME to read. And then even more difficult to find time to blog.

The Guermantes Way (Second Post)

The Guermantes Way (Second Post) - Marcel Proust

Well, so much for promises. (see first post) As Proust says, life is always a little different to our expectations of it. I fully intended posting a second post hot on the heels of my previous one but my ability to type (and read) is being severely compromised by an episode of back pain. On top of discomfort I am also in a fairly constant state of slight wooziness due to the painkillers. (This is of course to excuse in advance the fact that this post may make even less sense than usual.)

The Guermantes Way (First Post)

The Guermantes Way

I am now half way through Proust's masterpiece, and, I feel, gathering some impetus. In The Guermantes Way, Proust focuses even more strongly on society as Marcel makes his first forays into the Fauborg Saint Germain - the aristocratic center of Parisian society. The Guermantes whose family gave their name to one of the paths Marcel and his family used to walk on in the halcyon childhood days at Combray are at the centre of the wittiest Parisien drawing rooms. The Guermantes wit is famous, at least in the mind of our aspiring social climber cum narrator. We are told that this impression has been altered by time, however. All the time we are being told that we are moving towards the maturity of Marcel, a time when he is less credulous, less fatuous in his obsessions, when he becomes the author of this work.

The book explores many social issues as well as the evolution of the artist. As we move through society our viewpoint is often turned towards instances of anti-semitism, homophobia, the life of servants and  the emptiness at the heart of 'society'.

Early on we are given a view of the 'young master' from the family's servant Francoise. This gives us a different angle on the narrator than he paints himself, and ties in with further thoughts on the position of servants amoung his circle. "Ah, Combray, when shall I look on thee again, poor land! When shall I pass the blessed day among thy hawthorns, under our own poor lily oaks, hearing the grasshopper sing, and the Vivonne making a little noise like someone whispering, instead of the wretched bell from the young master, who can never stay still for half an hour on end without having me run the length of that wicked corridor. And even then he makes out I don't come quick enough; you'd need to hear the bell ring before he has pulled it, and if you're a minute late, away he flies into the most towering rage." The fact that Francoise starts out reminiscing about Combray and the hawthorns that Marcel values so highly serves to emphasize both their similarities and differences. The thwarted desires of one of the Guermantes' footmen to see his betrothed is revisited many times in the book, with his wishes often being raised and dashed on a malicious whim.

The narrator realizes the awful situation of servants and tells us that it is only our tendency to see what is as normal and acceptable that allows us to accept this. This ties it to the recurring theme that the world we see is never the world before us but one altered and edited by our preconceptions. "The life led by our servants is probably of an even more monstrous abnormality, which only its familiarity can prevent us from seeing."

But Marcel, at the time, was dazzled by the Guermantes name, and felt that they and their circle must be somehow superhuman. As his love for Gilberte earlier, so his feelings for the Guermantes can never survive reality as they are wildly unrealistic. "The life which I supposed them to lead there flowed from a source so different from anything in my experience, and must, I felt, be so indissolubly associated with that particular house that I could not have imagined the presence, at the Duchess's parties, of people in whose company I myself had already been, of people who really existed. For not being able suddenly to change their nature, they would have carried on conversations there of the sort that I knew; their partners would perhaps have stooped to reply to them in the same human speech; and, in the course of an evening spent in the leading house in the Fauborg Saint-Germain, there would have been moments identical with moments I had already lived. Which was impossible. It was thus that my mind was embarrassed by certain difficulties, and the Presence of Our Lord's Body in the Host seemed to me no more obscure a mystery than this leading house in the Fauborg, situated here, on the right bank of the river, and so near that from my bed, in the morning, I could hear its carpets being beaten."

Sarah Bernhardt was one of Proust's models for Berma.
Here she is playing Hamlet.

We are also reminded of his visit to the theatre to see the great actress Berma in an earlier volume. Then, he was in love with the idea of plays and actresses but now they are only secondary to the aristocracy who he can see in their boxes. Also he has changed his views on art and is now besotten with painting and tapestries - "..since my visits to Elistir, it was on certain tapestries, certain modern paintings that I had brought to bear the inner faith I once had in this acting, in this tragic art of Berma.."

The irony is that this time he is able to appreciate Berma whereas the previous time he was too full of expectation to actually appreciate her skills "-the talent of Berma, which had evaded me when I sought so greedily to seize its essential quality, now, after these years of oblivion, in this hour of indifference, imposed itself, with all the force of a thing directly seen, on my admiration."

He explains the difference between the two theatrical experiences. "My own impression, to tell the truth, though more pleasant than on the earlier occasion, was not really different. Only, I no longer put it to the test of a pre-existent, abstract and false idea of dramatic genius, and I understood now that dramatic genius was precisely this. It had just occurred  to me that if I had not derived any pleasure from my first hearing of Berma, it was because, as earlier still when I used to meet Gilberte in the Champs-Elysées, I had come to her with too strong a desire."

The whole theatre scene is long and vivid, one of the centerpieces of the book. Once again Proust calls on the metaphoric assosciation between the social lives of the aristocracy and the lives of fish in a tank. "The Marquis de Palancy, his face bent downwards at the end of his long neck, his round bulging eye glued to the glass of his monocle, was moving with a leisurely displacement through the transparent shade and appeared no more to see the public in the stalls than a fish that drifts past, unconscious of the press of the curious gazers, behind the glass wall of an aquarium."

Later in the novel Marcel will get into the fish tank and get to see these queer fish up close. Unlike Alice the world at the other side of the glass will prove similar to the one in which he has spent his life so far. Only imagination makes it different.

For a novel with so many words (approx 1,500,000 apparently, I haven't counted) we are presented with arguments outlining that words don't quite do what they say: "We feel in one world, we think, we give names to things in another; between the two we can establish a certain correspondence, but not bridge the interval." - "..at that time I still supposed that it was by means of words that one communicated the truth to others."

Proust, of course, withdrew from society and wrote in a cork lined room, so silence was the companion to the writing of these words. Indeed a world without the spoken word might in fact be an improvement - "And for this totally deaf man, since the loss of a sense adds as much beauty to the world as it's acquisition, it is with ecstasy that he walks now on an earth grown almost an Eden, in which sound has not yet been created." Like the temporal distance which allowed Proust to look back on his earlier life and infatuations with ironical disregard, we need to be aware that our view of the world will change as our relationship to it changes. We need to find some distance in order to appreciate the world more clearly.

This series is a challenging read, and just as challenging to blog about. The sheer size of The Guermantes Way alone (800 plus pages) makes it difficult enough to write about but the fact that it is referring back and also referring forward makes it more so. However, the size and complexity of the novel seems to be getting some of the ideas inserted deeply into my consciousness. I hope to post again on The Guermantes Way in the next few days and to be back in a few weeks with posts on Cities of the Plain.

On Reading

2012, A Reader's Eye View

2012 is proving a far less prolific reading year for me than 2011, even more so than I had planned. I knew that reading Proust would severely limit the number of books I read but I have also slowed down considerably in the number of pages read. There are a number of reasons for this. Proust, as his readers will know, demands greater attention than most. Last year I noted how much my reading slowed down while reading The Book of Disquiet and Proust is having a similar effect. Sentences are long and complicated, and the ideas propounded in one are altered by the next in a way that will give the inattentive reader a sense that he has lost his place.

So at this point in the year, after almost two months, I have read one book in it's entirety (The Savage Detectives) and am almost through five of the twelve volumes in my edition of In Remembrance of Things Past. (Half way through The Guermantes Way). At this point last year I had twelve books read, so the difference is pronounced.

Of course this hasn't stopped me buying books and I have added the first two books of David Peace's Red Riding Quartet to my 2012 TBR shelf and am planning to contribute to a Muriel Spark Reading Week. Spark is one of my favourite writers and I hope to read a novel Robinson and a volume of short stories, The Go Away Bird. They are both short.

How I will tackle the other books on my TBR shelf I don't know but I'm hoping that my reading accelerates as the year progresses.

Within a Budding Grove (Second Post)

Within a Budding Grove

In Within a Budding Grove Proust builds on Swann's Way, subtly reworking events and perceptions from different angles. One of the pleasures is recognizing some of the parallels. It was only when rereading two of my posts that one of them struck me, and maybe it can stand as an exemplar.

I've quoted at length from the scene at the party in Swann's Way, which is the big social set piece in this book. Part of this quote was about monocles and he described one as"an accidental and perhaps purely symbolical fragment of the glass wall of his aquarium, a part intended to suggest the whole..."
In the big social set piece in Within a Budding Grove, as I quoted here Proust describes the dining room of the Grand Hotel as becoming, when lit, "an immense and wonderful aquarium." 

Within a Budding Grove (First Post)

Within a Budding Grove

I'm now finished the first four books of my twelve volume edition of Remembrance of Things Past, more slowly than was my intention but also more quickly at times than it feels like being read. There is a leisurely pace to Proust's sentences and they open up more readily, I find, when read slowly. The long sinuous threads can also get completely lost if you try to read too quickly.

The book is broken into three sections - Madame Swann at Home; Place Names: The Place; and Seascape, with Frieze of Girls. It grows ever more apparent that the major driving force of the novel is an exploration of sexuality, and more particularly, homosexuality. Although professing heterosexuality there are many hints and ellipses that seem to point to a strain of homosexuality in the narrator. His fascination with Gilberte Swann and her mother Odette at times seem simply ruses to penetrate M Swann's household. Proust himself was gay and Marcel, the narrator, is very much based on Marcel, the novelist. He is however, a self professed heterosexual in this novel. The tension between these poles is perhaps the most volatile and interesting element in the novel. It makes one feel somewhat ambiguous about Marcel's attempts to connect directly with his memory - it feels that there is a lie sitting in the heart of his rhapsodies of remembered sensation. But is the book really lying or is it inviting us to read THROUGH the story.

The Discreet Charm of Marcel Proust

À la recherche du la Bourgeoisie


I didn't expect to find a possible inspiration for Buñuel's Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie but Proust can be every bit as scathing as Buñuel in his descriptions of the foibles of the failing aristocracy.

"sharp instruments and lynched messiahs"

Kill yr Idols

I've taken a break from In Search of Lost Time in order to read The Savage Detectives for next weekends readalong. After reading the passage below, from The Savage Detectives, I'm now desperate to prove I'm not desperate by finishing In Search of Lost Time.
The following quote is from The Savage Detectives. The call to Kill Yr Idols is from Sonic Youth.

Swann's Way

Swann's Way - Marcel Proust


In which our author remembers his obsessive love for his mother and how it coloured his days and more particularly nights  - How the visits of M Swann affected this - How M Swann was plucked from his life as a jaded socialite by the firm hand of a musical Cupid and the treacherous journey that ensued - How the narrator found in Swann's daughter a vessel for his attentions - and much else besides...

It's not often that you read a book that gave birth to an adjective - I can now understand Proustian as something more than a set of preconceptions. Like the molecules that stimulate the olfactory system, and sometimes memories, Proust's sentences (building slowly and leisurely,  clause following clause, exploring the least sensation and smallest moments in high seriousness) are complex constructions. At first I was tempted to apply the adjective Prousty, finding the writing and subject matter overly precious but gradually the book wove it's spell and started to reveal a guiding intelligence which was as much at home in irony and satire as in rhapsodic remembering of the smallest twitch of a swooning adolescent.

Fellini's Swann

Swann in Love La Dolce Vita

As I read the following description I was forcibly reminded of Marcello in La Dolce Vita. His intelligence, his social mobility and his moral and spiritual decrepitude mirror those of Swann.
When Marcello sees the young waitress who appears as a chink of light in the turgidity of his life he describes her as like an angel in a painting. I must watch the film again to see how the parallels play off each other.

Proust on Giotto's "Charity" & "Envy"

Proust on Giotto
One of the pleasures that the internet can add to reading, is the opportunity, if your attention is arrested by a particularly vivid description of an artwork, or building, to view images of the object thus described. This allows the reader to implement a sort of 'gold standard' to judge the writer's descriptive and interpretative powers. They are 24 carat in this instance, I hope you agree.

on "Charity"

"... it is without any apparent suspicion of what she is about that the powerfully built housewife who is portrayed in the the Arena beneath the label 'Caritas', and a reproduction of whose portrait hung upon the wall of my schoolroom in Combray, incarnates that virtue, for it seems impossible that any thought of charity can ever  have found expression in her vulgar and energetic face. By a fine stroke of the painter's invention she is tumbling all the treasures of the earth at her feet, but exactly as if she were treading grapes in a wine-press to extract their juice, or, still more, as if she had climbed on a heap of sacks to raise herself higher; and she is holding out her flaming heart to God, or shall we say 'handing' it to Him, exactly as a cook might hand up a corkscrew through the skylight of her underground kitchen to some one who had called down to ask her for it from the ground level above."

Resolutions 2012

Plans for 2012

Last year I managed to kickstart my reading by setting myself a target of reading 100 books for the year. I made 85 before I had to resort to the works of Roger Ackroyd in order to get over the line.

This year I have been trying to think of a slightly different set of resolutions but had only really decided on reading In Remembrance of Things Past by January 1st. That and a reread of The Savage Detectives for the group read hosted by Rise and Richard. I was intending to try and read the Proust in January but the pace I'm setting means that's not a possibility. Also I'll have to take a break to read The Savage Detectives after I finish the first volume - Swann's Way.