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In Search of Lost Time
On the surface a traditional "Bildungsroman" describing the narrator’s journey of self-discovery, this huge and complex book is also a panoramic and richly comic portrait of France in the author’s lifetime, and a profound meditation on the nature of art, love, time, memory and death. But for most readers it is the characters of the novel who loom the largest: Swann and Odette, Monsieur de Charlus, Morel, the Duchesse de Guermantes, Françoise, Saint-Loup and so many others — Giants, as the author calls them, immersed in Time. "In Search of Lost Time" is a novel in seven volumes. The novel began to take shape in 1909. Proust continued to work on it until his final illness in the autumn of 1922 forced him to break off. Proust established the structure early on, but even after volumes were initially finished he kept adding new material, and edited one volume after another for publication. The last three of the seven volumes contain oversights and fragmentary or unpolished passages as they existed in draft form at the death of the author; the publication of these parts was overseen by his brother Robert.
For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin’s acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation to take into account the new definitive French editions of À la recherche du temps perdu (the final volume of these new editions was published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1989).
For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin’s acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation to take into account the new definitive French editions of À la recherche du temps perdu (the final volume of these new editions was published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1989).
4211 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1927
About the author
Marcel Proust
1,918 books6,474 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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January 30, 2016
Why did Proust have to write a 4000 page novel, especially when there is not any discernable, coherent plot? Was it really necessary to have those extended society scenes, some of which lasted for 150 pages or so? Couldn’t the whole thing have been tightened up a little and cut down to 1000 pages or so?
I asked myself these questions at various points over the nine months it took me to journey through Proust’s masterpiece. It was not until the final two volumes (and particularly the latter half of Time Regained) that it all started to make sense. The point Proust is trying to make can only be experienced (as opposed to realized intellectually) if you have plodded through the seemingly endless series of anecdotes, asides and philosophical musings.
Proust is trying to tell us how the experiences of our past slip away from our memory and, as such, no longer have any obvious impact on us. In some cases, (i.e. sexual jealousy and grief), this is a good thing, lest the pain of these losses would forever burden us. But it also isolates us from those moments of pleasure, of experiencing pure beauty. We can try, through the vehicle of voluntary memory to retrieve “the good old days” but we will get nothing more than a snapshot, and will not feel the experience of what it was really like in those moments. The only way to recapture lost time, Proust tells us, is through the involuntary memories that spontaneously arise from random sensory input (the taste of a madeleine soaked in tea, the experience of standing on uneven paving stones, the clang of a spoon against a dish) as it triggers the memories of the last time we experienced the same sensations along with the other physical and emotional sensations with which the catalytic sensation is associated. The experience of these sensations is actually of a purer form than we experienced when they happened to us the first time, because they are not impeded by all the other competing stimuli that were impinging on us at the time. At the time, for example, we may have been disappointed that this resort was not exactly what we had in mind, we may have been worried about the health of a loved one, we might be distracted by concerns of our professional careers. In this moment of recapturing the past, all that comes to us is the unadulterated form of the experience of pleasure.
Of course, this is a pretty unreliable mechanism to tap into our past and, as Proust shows, it is fleeting as well. The only way to recapture the past in a lasting way is through the creation of a work of art: which is where the book comes in. How does a writer depict an experience which is eventually forgotten, and is then perfectly recaptured years later? Well, you have to help the reader have the experience of long stretches of time, of the entirety of a long life lived, complete with all the hundreds of people and experiences and moments of inspiration and self-doubt that come with it. When, in the last pages of Time Regained, Proust describes the incident of the “good night kiss” (one of the earliest episodes of the book), I felt like this did occur 40 years ago, given how long ago I read it. And, as Proust, through his magnificent prose lovingly reconstructed the scene, it came back to me with the full force of his original description. He had succeeded in helping me recapture this literary event, and how beautiful the experience of it was!
I certainly don’t want to try to compete with the length of In Search of Lost Time itself with this review, so let me conclude quickly. Please, if you have any interest at all in serious literature, do not be thrown off by the length of this book. It is an unparalleled work of genius for which, as I hope I have argued successfully above, the length is an essential element. If you make the commitment, you will be rewarded.
I asked myself these questions at various points over the nine months it took me to journey through Proust’s masterpiece. It was not until the final two volumes (and particularly the latter half of Time Regained) that it all started to make sense. The point Proust is trying to make can only be experienced (as opposed to realized intellectually) if you have plodded through the seemingly endless series of anecdotes, asides and philosophical musings.
Proust is trying to tell us how the experiences of our past slip away from our memory and, as such, no longer have any obvious impact on us. In some cases, (i.e. sexual jealousy and grief), this is a good thing, lest the pain of these losses would forever burden us. But it also isolates us from those moments of pleasure, of experiencing pure beauty. We can try, through the vehicle of voluntary memory to retrieve “the good old days” but we will get nothing more than a snapshot, and will not feel the experience of what it was really like in those moments. The only way to recapture lost time, Proust tells us, is through the involuntary memories that spontaneously arise from random sensory input (the taste of a madeleine soaked in tea, the experience of standing on uneven paving stones, the clang of a spoon against a dish) as it triggers the memories of the last time we experienced the same sensations along with the other physical and emotional sensations with which the catalytic sensation is associated. The experience of these sensations is actually of a purer form than we experienced when they happened to us the first time, because they are not impeded by all the other competing stimuli that were impinging on us at the time. At the time, for example, we may have been disappointed that this resort was not exactly what we had in mind, we may have been worried about the health of a loved one, we might be distracted by concerns of our professional careers. In this moment of recapturing the past, all that comes to us is the unadulterated form of the experience of pleasure.
Of course, this is a pretty unreliable mechanism to tap into our past and, as Proust shows, it is fleeting as well. The only way to recapture the past in a lasting way is through the creation of a work of art: which is where the book comes in. How does a writer depict an experience which is eventually forgotten, and is then perfectly recaptured years later? Well, you have to help the reader have the experience of long stretches of time, of the entirety of a long life lived, complete with all the hundreds of people and experiences and moments of inspiration and self-doubt that come with it. When, in the last pages of Time Regained, Proust describes the incident of the “good night kiss” (one of the earliest episodes of the book), I felt like this did occur 40 years ago, given how long ago I read it. And, as Proust, through his magnificent prose lovingly reconstructed the scene, it came back to me with the full force of his original description. He had succeeded in helping me recapture this literary event, and how beautiful the experience of it was!
I certainly don’t want to try to compete with the length of In Search of Lost Time itself with this review, so let me conclude quickly. Please, if you have any interest at all in serious literature, do not be thrown off by the length of this book. It is an unparalleled work of genius for which, as I hope I have argued successfully above, the length is an essential element. If you make the commitment, you will be rewarded.
September 23, 2014
When you read Proust, and learn to appreciate his extraordinary, dreamy, hypnotic, truly inimitable style (this review is a mere shadow on the wall of a Platonic cave), which succeeds in making the syntax of language, usually as invisible as air, into a tangible element, so that, like literary yogis, we may feel, for the first time, how enjoyable the simple activity of reading, like breathing, can be; and discover the delights of sentences which took the author days to construct and us an hour to read, unpacking layers of subordinate clauses to discover, nestling inside their crisp folds, a simile as unexpected and delicious as a Swiss chocolate rabbit, wearing a yellow marzipan waistcoat and carrying an edible rake, found in its cocoon of tissue paper under a lilac bush during a childhood Easter egg hunt; or, steaming across the calm waters of a limpid grammatical lake in the capable hands of Captain Marcel and his crew, confident that they know the route from generations of experience, and will in due time, exactly on schedule, arrive at the main verb, pointing us tourists to it with justifiable, understated pride; then you will gradually come to identify with the alchemical author, spending twenty years sitting, propped up by pillows, in his velvet dressing-gown, transmuting the lead of his accumulated experience into gold, surrounded by galley proofs which he constantly rereads and revises, pasting in a parenthesis in the middle of this sentence, an apposition in that, so that the papers are gradually festooned, like bizarre Christmas decorations, with loops and curlicues of afterthoughts; and waiting for life, his unfaithful mistress, to leave him, simultaneously knowing that it is inevitable, and also that she will never do so, at least as long as this, the greatest and strangest of all novels, is still not quite finished...
July 31, 2009
I took today off work because I need to put everything I own into boxes so I can move tomorrow, but obviously I can't begin doing that until I get some of these obsessive thoughts about Proust out of my system. I mean, can I? Nope. I can't! After all, this house is where I read Proust -- wait, I read Swann's Way before I moved here, which is pretty nuts to think about -- and so how can I move without reviewing the whole thing?
I do feel pretty traumatized after finishing this book. Sort of shellshocked and confused with all these half-formed thoughts and intense inexplicable feelings bouncing around in me, and I don't know what to do with them or myself. Yesterday I wound up sitting in my friend's bar explaining Proust's aesthetic theories, but that kind of behavior'll get you kicked out of most places, and is not really becoming a young lady. And obviously that's where this website comes in.... what is it for, if not to unload just this kind of mental baggage?
Reading Proust made me wish I were more of a scholar, so I could try to puzzle out some kind of literary context for what this book is. I feel like people think of Proust as being stuffy and old-fashioned and all crusty and ancient, but I think a lot of that has to do with the subject matter (a lost time with superficial resemblance to Jane Austen's milieu), so it's kind of shocking to remember what else was going on while he was writing this. I know this is dumb and there're much better comparisons, but I kept thinking while reading this that it was like thinking your whole life that New York punk in the seventies was all about the Ramones and imagining you really got what was going on then from just listening to that.... but then when you're in your mid-twenties someone suddenly plays you Television for the first time, and you're like what? Like you think you know what modernism is, it's like Ulysses or whatever, but then you find out it's got this completely insane cousin across the river who's just doing all these things that appear at first to have no relationship at all to everything you ignorantly thought you kind of understood at least a little bit before. Again, I'm not much of a scholar and what I'm saying probably doesn't make any sense. To be honest, I don't even know what "modernism" means, I just know it sounds literary.... I think what I'm trying to get at is that the relevance of Proust's concerns to his time aren't immediately obvious because his approach to them initially seems so weird and unfamiliar. But then you realize, while you're in it, that Proust is actually so much of his time it's incredible, and that what he's saying and doing was hugely innovative and exciting at the beginning of the last century, and actually, I'd say, remains as much so today. And I just kind of wish that I knew more about art and literature and whatnot so I could tie it all in better, since I sense there're all these fascinating connections and reference points, but I don't know what they are. I'd sort of like to sneak into some college class or something where they're reading Proust, and listen in, or at least steal their syllabus.... do they even read Proust in college? I feel like they don't. I mean, I never heard of him when I was in college, or after. I really hadn't. I honestly had no idea who Proust was until I started hanging out on this website.
Anyway, for me the most relevant contemporary writer I thought of while reading this wasn't a novelist. A little background: I always really loathed the discipline of psychology and thought it was stupid. When I unwittingly enrolled in social work school, I was dismayed to discover that getting my MSW involved reading pages and pages of precisely this stuff I'd always looked down on.... My happy discovery was that Freud, at least, was actually a fabulous writer, and a lot of his ideas are totally fascinating and very beautiful. What I realized finally is that I just resented psychology for its pretension of pretending it's a science. But actually psychology's concerns and sometimes even their expression are hugely significant -- among the most significant -- and kind of wonderful. In fact, I decided, I love psychology, as long as it knows its place and realizes it's an art, not a science.... Freud said he wanted his case histories to read like short stories, so I think he understood this. Proust, of course, took this to an extreme, by exploring essentially the same territory, not in a short story, but in an extraordinarily long and in some ways kind of ridiculous novel. In Search of Lost Time is about the development of the mind, the experience of consciousness, the influence of past events and relationships on one's emotions and behavior.... all the same stuff Freud cared about, only it made more sense to me here, presented this way.
I completely lost my shit reading the last couple pages of this book, and broke down on some fundamental level in a way I imagine was akin to what you can get from really top-shelf psychotherapy. Towards the end of the book, Proust explains everything he's been trying to do, and just did, in writing this novel. It's his theory of art and specifically of literature, and it's pretty hard to argue with since you've watched him just do it. One of the things that Proust says is that readers of his book "would not be my readers but readers of themselves, my book serving merely as a sort of magnifying glass, such as the optician of Combray used to offer to a customer, so that through my book I would give them the means of reading in their own selves" (p. 384). I guess that could sound unexciting, ripped out of context, but he really does do this, and it truly is astounding. I felt throughly convinced by Proust's theory of what art is for, and as far as I'm concerned he was totally successful in accomplishing his aims. Like psychotherapy, ISoLT attempts to dive into the murk of the unconscious past to retrieve experiences and cognitions that have become inaccessible. Proust dives in and swims down to the bottom, and he finds them, and he grabs them, and he brings them back up and then hands them to you.... Which is pretty nuts. I mean, it's intense. I feel fucked up from it.
Hm. I thought I wanted to talk about this book, but maybe I just want to pack up my shit after all. I really do want to review this book, but maybe it's too soon? It's a really insane novel, and there's tons of stuff in it I'd really love to dork out about on here.... but yeah, maybe too soon. I might come back and say something more coherent later on, when it's all settled down a bit.
I guess the only thing I need to add right at this moment is that I really felt like Proust gave me this particular combination of the things I need most. I really can't read anything too difficult or serious, and to anyone who's considering giving Proust a try -- I can't emphasize this enough -- forget what you heard: this book is anything but a ponderous drag. It's silly and hilarious and smart and bizarre, and there's tons of fashion and sex and depravity and satire and insane plot twists that don't make any sense. I personally have a very short attention span and I cannot and do not read anything that isn't vastly entertaining. In Search of Lost Time is VASTLY ENTERTAINING!! (Except for The Captive, which is only somewhat entertaining.) This is not to say that it's for everyone, and I can see how lots of people would totally hate this. HOWEVER: it's definitely worth a shot, because this book could change your life. I mean that. It could. I'm a completely different person now than I was when I started. So what if this means I'm now an obsessively jealous, elitist, antisemitic, agoraphobic pervert who speaks exclusively in run-on sentences? I think I'm better for it, and you might be too.
I do feel pretty traumatized after finishing this book. Sort of shellshocked and confused with all these half-formed thoughts and intense inexplicable feelings bouncing around in me, and I don't know what to do with them or myself. Yesterday I wound up sitting in my friend's bar explaining Proust's aesthetic theories, but that kind of behavior'll get you kicked out of most places, and is not really becoming a young lady. And obviously that's where this website comes in.... what is it for, if not to unload just this kind of mental baggage?
Reading Proust made me wish I were more of a scholar, so I could try to puzzle out some kind of literary context for what this book is. I feel like people think of Proust as being stuffy and old-fashioned and all crusty and ancient, but I think a lot of that has to do with the subject matter (a lost time with superficial resemblance to Jane Austen's milieu), so it's kind of shocking to remember what else was going on while he was writing this. I know this is dumb and there're much better comparisons, but I kept thinking while reading this that it was like thinking your whole life that New York punk in the seventies was all about the Ramones and imagining you really got what was going on then from just listening to that.... but then when you're in your mid-twenties someone suddenly plays you Television for the first time, and you're like what? Like you think you know what modernism is, it's like Ulysses or whatever, but then you find out it's got this completely insane cousin across the river who's just doing all these things that appear at first to have no relationship at all to everything you ignorantly thought you kind of understood at least a little bit before. Again, I'm not much of a scholar and what I'm saying probably doesn't make any sense. To be honest, I don't even know what "modernism" means, I just know it sounds literary.... I think what I'm trying to get at is that the relevance of Proust's concerns to his time aren't immediately obvious because his approach to them initially seems so weird and unfamiliar. But then you realize, while you're in it, that Proust is actually so much of his time it's incredible, and that what he's saying and doing was hugely innovative and exciting at the beginning of the last century, and actually, I'd say, remains as much so today. And I just kind of wish that I knew more about art and literature and whatnot so I could tie it all in better, since I sense there're all these fascinating connections and reference points, but I don't know what they are. I'd sort of like to sneak into some college class or something where they're reading Proust, and listen in, or at least steal their syllabus.... do they even read Proust in college? I feel like they don't. I mean, I never heard of him when I was in college, or after. I really hadn't. I honestly had no idea who Proust was until I started hanging out on this website.
Anyway, for me the most relevant contemporary writer I thought of while reading this wasn't a novelist. A little background: I always really loathed the discipline of psychology and thought it was stupid. When I unwittingly enrolled in social work school, I was dismayed to discover that getting my MSW involved reading pages and pages of precisely this stuff I'd always looked down on.... My happy discovery was that Freud, at least, was actually a fabulous writer, and a lot of his ideas are totally fascinating and very beautiful. What I realized finally is that I just resented psychology for its pretension of pretending it's a science. But actually psychology's concerns and sometimes even their expression are hugely significant -- among the most significant -- and kind of wonderful. In fact, I decided, I love psychology, as long as it knows its place and realizes it's an art, not a science.... Freud said he wanted his case histories to read like short stories, so I think he understood this. Proust, of course, took this to an extreme, by exploring essentially the same territory, not in a short story, but in an extraordinarily long and in some ways kind of ridiculous novel. In Search of Lost Time is about the development of the mind, the experience of consciousness, the influence of past events and relationships on one's emotions and behavior.... all the same stuff Freud cared about, only it made more sense to me here, presented this way.
I completely lost my shit reading the last couple pages of this book, and broke down on some fundamental level in a way I imagine was akin to what you can get from really top-shelf psychotherapy. Towards the end of the book, Proust explains everything he's been trying to do, and just did, in writing this novel. It's his theory of art and specifically of literature, and it's pretty hard to argue with since you've watched him just do it. One of the things that Proust says is that readers of his book "would not be my readers but readers of themselves, my book serving merely as a sort of magnifying glass, such as the optician of Combray used to offer to a customer, so that through my book I would give them the means of reading in their own selves" (p. 384). I guess that could sound unexciting, ripped out of context, but he really does do this, and it truly is astounding. I felt throughly convinced by Proust's theory of what art is for, and as far as I'm concerned he was totally successful in accomplishing his aims. Like psychotherapy, ISoLT attempts to dive into the murk of the unconscious past to retrieve experiences and cognitions that have become inaccessible. Proust dives in and swims down to the bottom, and he finds them, and he grabs them, and he brings them back up and then hands them to you.... Which is pretty nuts. I mean, it's intense. I feel fucked up from it.
Hm. I thought I wanted to talk about this book, but maybe I just want to pack up my shit after all. I really do want to review this book, but maybe it's too soon? It's a really insane novel, and there's tons of stuff in it I'd really love to dork out about on here.... but yeah, maybe too soon. I might come back and say something more coherent later on, when it's all settled down a bit.
I guess the only thing I need to add right at this moment is that I really felt like Proust gave me this particular combination of the things I need most. I really can't read anything too difficult or serious, and to anyone who's considering giving Proust a try -- I can't emphasize this enough -- forget what you heard: this book is anything but a ponderous drag. It's silly and hilarious and smart and bizarre, and there's tons of fashion and sex and depravity and satire and insane plot twists that don't make any sense. I personally have a very short attention span and I cannot and do not read anything that isn't vastly entertaining. In Search of Lost Time is VASTLY ENTERTAINING!! (Except for The Captive, which is only somewhat entertaining.) This is not to say that it's for everyone, and I can see how lots of people would totally hate this. HOWEVER: it's definitely worth a shot, because this book could change your life. I mean that. It could. I'm a completely different person now than I was when I started. So what if this means I'm now an obsessively jealous, elitist, antisemitic, agoraphobic pervert who speaks exclusively in run-on sentences? I think I'm better for it, and you might be too.
December 11, 2020
Después de casi dos años en su compañía, unos días atrás me despedí de Marcel… y ya lo echo de menos. No es que llegáramos a hacernos grandes amigos, ni por asomo. Me pareció un tipo bastante repelente, y él, con absoluta seguridad, no renunciaría ni a un segundo de su trabajo por levantar sus ojos hacia mí, cosa que, por otra parte, todos, yo más que nadie, le agradecemos inmensamente. Pero vaya si me ha hecho disfrutar este jodido Marcel con todo su impudor, con su coquetería, con su impiedad, con su mala leche, con su sufrimiento egoísta y, por encima de todo, con su genio, porque es de esos autores, capaz como pocos, de hacernos…
Por descontado que no me leí en ese ambiente por el que el autor nos ha paseado a lo largo y ancho de estos siete tomos en el que la sociedad lo es todo, donde no seguir la moda, los modos y la opinión general es un pecado imperdonable, en el que la muerte de un amigo o un familiar no nos puede impedir la asistencia al acto social de la temporada, donde se traiciona hasta lo más querido y se prefiere la humillación privada a la humillación púbica de no ser visto en según qué actos. No leí en mí mismo esa realidad hipócrita, insensible, intolerante, esnob y cruel que se movía (y se sigue moviendo) por esos salones que el autor no creó en siete novelas, pero que en cierta forma vio que todo era bueno.
Y en la misma media fui incapaz de leerme a su imagen y semejanza en este ser, como ya dije en su momento, absolutamente dependiente de las opiniones ajenas, egoísta, cobarde y putero, patológicamente necesitado de protagonismo, tan profundo en sus reflexiones como superficial en sus inclinaciones, 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. Alguien para el que todo adquiere más importancia en su ausencia y para quién el amor solo puede significar dolor, pues únicamente se puede amar aquello que no se alcanza y lo que nos es imposible alcanzar solo nos puede procurar dolor. Un ser contradictorio y complejo que disfruta más del deseo de un placer futuro e incierto que del gozo de uno seguro y presente, que siente siempre la resistencia de lo que persigue mientras lamenta la entrega de lo que ya desdeña, para quien un deseo frustrado puede transmutarse en amor con la misma facilidad que una pretensión largamente ansiada se le disuelve, una vez conseguida, en amarga decepción.
Y pese a todo, leer a Proust es una experiencia incomparable, pero también compleja. Como también dije en otro sitio, 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 nos dé todo su fruto.
Y ya, sin más que decir, me despido de todos ustedes esperando que, en estos tiempos de jodida pandemia, se encuentren bien. Yo bien, gracias a Proust.
Por el camino de Swann (En busca del tiempo perdido, #1)
El mundo de Guermantes (En busca del tiempo perdido, #3)
Sodoma y Gomorra (En busca del tiempo perdido, #4)
La prisionera (En busca del tiempo perdido, #5)
La fugitiva (En busca del tiempo perdido, #6)
El tiempo recobrado (En busca del tiempo perdido, #7)
“… salir de nosotros mismos, (de hacernos) saber lo que ve otro de ese universo que no es el mismo que el nuestro, y cuyos paisajes nos serían tan desconocidos como los que pueda haber en la luna”Efectivamente, algo así como en la luna me sentí en esta gran velada de siete días a la que asistí como si de la fastuosa creación de un nuevo universo se tratara. Una velada a la que quizás ni siquiera estuviera invitado pues no creo ser uno de esos convidados que el autor requiere como lector de sus libros, esos que se leerán a sí mismos en ellos.
Por descontado que no me leí en ese ambiente por el que el autor nos ha paseado a lo largo y ancho de estos siete tomos en el que la sociedad lo es todo, donde no seguir la moda, los modos y la opinión general es un pecado imperdonable, en el que la muerte de un amigo o un familiar no nos puede impedir la asistencia al acto social de la temporada, donde se traiciona hasta lo más querido y se prefiere la humillación privada a la humillación púbica de no ser visto en según qué actos. No leí en mí mismo esa realidad hipócrita, insensible, intolerante, esnob y cruel que se movía (y se sigue moviendo) por esos salones que el autor no creó en siete novelas, pero que en cierta forma vio que todo era bueno.
Y en la misma media fui incapaz de leerme a su imagen y semejanza en este ser, como ya dije en su momento, absolutamente dependiente de las opiniones ajenas, egoísta, cobarde y putero, patológicamente necesitado de protagonismo, tan profundo en sus reflexiones como superficial en sus inclinaciones, 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. Alguien para el que todo adquiere más importancia en su ausencia y para quién el amor solo puede significar dolor, pues únicamente se puede amar aquello que no se alcanza y lo que nos es imposible alcanzar solo nos puede procurar dolor. Un ser contradictorio y complejo que disfruta más del deseo de un placer futuro e incierto que del gozo de uno seguro y presente, que siente siempre la resistencia de lo que persigue mientras lamenta la entrega de lo que ya desdeña, para quien un deseo frustrado puede transmutarse en amor con la misma facilidad que una pretensión largamente ansiada se le disuelve, una vez conseguida, en amarga decepción.
Y pese a todo, leer a Proust es una experiencia incomparable, pero también compleja. Como también dije en otro sitio, 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 nos dé todo su fruto.
Y ya, sin más que decir, me despido de todos ustedes esperando que, en estos tiempos de jodida pandemia, se encuentren bien. Yo bien, gracias a Proust.
Por el camino de Swann (En busca del tiempo perdido, #1)
Un amor de Swann (En busca del tiempo perdido, #1.2)A la sombra de las muchachas en flor (En busca del tiempo perdido, #2)
El mundo de Guermantes (En busca del tiempo perdido, #3)
Sodoma y Gomorra (En busca del tiempo perdido, #4)
La prisionera (En busca del tiempo perdido, #5)
La fugitiva (En busca del tiempo perdido, #6)
El tiempo recobrado (En busca del tiempo perdido, #7)
Shelved as 'reviews-of-books-i-didnt-read'
January 27, 2019IN AN ALTERNATE UNIVERSE
Marcel eats the madeleine.
Marcel : Oh, that really reminds me of something...
Marcel's friend : Oh yes? What?
Marcel : ….. I can't quite put my finger on it....er….hmmm. No, it's gone.
Marcel's friend: Oh well. It probably wasn't that important.
Marcel eats the madeleine.
Marcel : Oh, that really reminds me of something...
Marcel's friend : Oh yes? What?
Marcel : ….. I can't quite put my finger on it....er….hmmm. No, it's gone.
Marcel's friend: Oh well. It probably wasn't that important.
October 16, 2017
In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself.
I struggled with Proust, on and off, for three years. I read these books sitting, standing, lying down, in cars and on trains, waiting in airports, on commutes to work, relaxing on vacation. Some of it I read in New York, some in Madrid, Lisbon, Vienna. By now this book functions as my own madeleine, with different passages triggering memories from widely scattered places and periods in my life.
I am surprised I reached the end. Every time I put down a volume, I was sure I would never pick up another; each installment only promised more of the same and I had already had more than enough; but then the nagging sense of the incomplete overcame my aversion and, with mixed feeling, I would pick up the next one and repeat the experience.
Throughout this long voyage, my response to Proust has been consistent—I should say consistently inconsistent—alternately admiration and frustration. There are times when I fall completely under Proust’s spell, and times when I find his writing intolerable. Probably this mixture has much to do with what Harold Bloom called the “anxiety of influence,” since almost as soon as I finished the first volume, I started working on a novel, a novel which very clearly bears the traces of Proust’s influence. It may be that, with Proust, I have something of an Oedipal complex, and I need to lodge criticism at his work in order to clear the air for my own—though I don’t know. What I do know is that my reactions to this book have proven tempestuous and I have yet to spur myself to write a fair review.
When approaching a novel of this size and complexity, it is difficult to know where to start. Can In Search of Lost Time even be called a novel? In a writing class my instructor told us that any story needs to have a protagonist, an objective, a series of obstacles, a strategy for overcoming these obstacles, a sequence of failures and successes, all of it culminating in a grand climax that leads directly to a resolution. If you look carefully, you can, indeed, make out the bare outline of this dramatic pattern in Proust’s work. But, like the slender skeleton of a peacock buried under a mountain of feathers, this outline serves as a vague scaffold over which are draped colorful ornament; and it is the ornament that attracts our attention.
In most novels, any given passage will serve some dramatic purpose: characterization, description, plot. However, there are times when the author will pull back from the story to make a more general comment, on society, humanity, or the world. These comments are, very often, pungent and aphoristic—the most quotable section of the whole book, since they do not depend on their context. Some authors, like Dickens, very infrequently make these sorts of remarks; others, like George Elliot, are full of them: “Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know of no speck so troublesome as self.”
Elliot’s masterpiece, Middlemarch, is distinguished for being simultaneously didactic and dramatic, equal parts analysis and art. Proust goes even further in the direction of analysis, totally overwhelming every other aspect of the book with his ceaseless commentary. No event, however insignificant, happens without being dissected; the Narrator lets no observation go unobserved, even at the cost of being redundant. This endless exegesis, circling the same themes with relentless exactitude, is what swells this book to its famously vast proportions. Tolstoy, no laconic writer, used less than half the length to tell a story that spanned years and encompassed whole nations. The story Proust tells could have been told by, say, Jane Austen in 400 pages—although this would leave out everything that makes it worth reading.
Different as the two authors are, the social milieu Proust represents is oddly reminiscent of Jane Austen’s world, being populated by snobby aristocrats who jostle for status and who never have to work, a world of elegant gatherings, witty conversation, and artistic dilettantism. Austen and Proust also share an affinity for satirizing their worlds, although they use different means for very different ends. In any case, both Austen’s England and Proust’s France are long gone, and it can be very difficult for the modern reader to sympathize with these characters, whose priorities, manners, and lifestyle are so distant from our own. Why should we care about soirées and salons, dukes and duchesses, who do nothing but gossip, pursue petty love affairs, and pontificate ignorantly in their pinched world?
Yet this narrow social milieu, though always in focus, only forms the backdrop for Proust’s real purpose; and this purpose is suitably universal: to create a religion of art. A new religion was needed. Proust was writing at a turbulent time in European history: in the aftermath of the Death of God, as the fin de siècle high society of his youth was shattered by World War I, as new notions of psychology overturned old verities of human behavior, as every convention in art, music, and literature was being broken. Even the physical world was becoming unrecognizable—populated by quantum fields and bending space-time. It was the world of Freud’s unconscious, Einstein’s relativity, and Picasso’s cubism, when new theories about everything were embraced. Granted, Proust may have been only peripherally aware of these historical currents, but he was no doubt responsive to them, as this novel amply proves.
In this book, Proust sets out to show that our salvation lays in art. This means showing us that our salvation does not lay in anything else. Specifically, Proust must demonstrate that social status and romantic love, two universal human aspirations, are will-o’-the-wisps. He does this subtly and slowly. First, as a young man, the Protagonist is awed by high society. The names of famous actresses, writers, composers, and most of all socialites—the aristocratic Guermantes—hold a mysterious allure that he finds irresistible. He slowly learns how to behave in salons and to hold his own in conversation, eventually meeting all the people he idolized from afar. But when he finally does make the acquaintance of these elite socialites, he finds that their wit is exaggerated, their knowledge superficial, their opinions conventional, their artistic taste deficient. In short, the allure of status was empty.
And not only that, temporary. In the final volume, Proust demonstrates that status waxes and wanes with changes of fashion, often in unforeseen ways. By the end of the book, Rachel, who began as a prostitute, is a celebrated actress; while Berma, who began as a celebrated actress, ends as a broken down old women, still respected but no longer fashionable. The Protagonist’s friend, Bloch, who is a flatfooted, stupid, and awkward man, ends the book as a celebrated author, despite a total lack of originality or wit. The Baron de Charlus, an intensely proud man, ends up doffing his hat to nearly anyone he runs into in the street, while the rest of society ostracizes him. Status, in other words, being based on nothing but mass whim, is liable to change whimsically.
Proust’s views of love are even more cynical. The Protagonist does have a genuine affection for his mother and grandmother; but these are almost the only genuine bonds in the entire long novel. When Proust looks at romantic love, he sees only delusion and jealousy: an inability to see another person accurately combined with a narcissistic urge to possess and a paranoia of losing them. The archetypical Proustian relationship is that between Swann and Odette, wherein Swann, a figure in high-society, has a casual dalliance with Odette, a courtesan, and despite not thinking much of Odette, Swann nearly loses his mind when he begins to suspect she is cheating on him. He marries Odette, not out of romantic passion, but in order to gain some measure of peace from his paranoid jealousy.
Summarized in this way, Proust’s views seem, if somewhat disenchanted, hardly radical. But the real thrust of Proust’s thinking depends on a truly radical subjectivism. This book, as Harold Bloom points out, is wisdom literature, firmly rooted in the introspective tradition of Montaigne. But Proust is more than introspective. A true Cartesian, Proust is solipsistic. And much of his rejection of worldly sources of happiness, and his concomitant embrace of art, depends on this intensely first-person view of the world.
In his emphasis on the subjective basis of reality, Proust’s thought is often oddly reminiscent of Buddhism. Our personalities, far from being stable, are nothing but an endless flux that changes from moment to moment; each second we die and are born again. What’s more, we perceive other people through the lens of our own desires, knowledge, opinions, and biases, and therefore never perceive accurately. There are as many versions of you as there are people to perceive you. Thus we never really know another person. Our relationships with friends and lovers are really relationships with mental constructions that have only a tenuous connection with the real person:
The bonds between ourselves and another person exist only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and with which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.
You might think that this is a shockingly cynical view, and it is; but Proust adheres to it consistently. Here he is on friendship:
… our friends being friends only in the light of an agreeable folly which travels with us through life and to which we readily accommodate ourselves, but which at the bottom of our hearts we know to be no more reasonable than the delusions of the man who talks to furniture because he believes that it is alive…
And love, of course, comes off even worse than friendship:
Almost everyone was surprised at the marriage, and that in itself is surprising. No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourselves.
In the dissolving acid of Proust’s solipsism, one can see why he considers both social status and romantic love as vain pursuits, since they are not, and can never be, based on anything but a delusion.
Of course, status and love do bring people happiness, at least temporarily. But Proust is careful to show that all happiness and sadness caused by these things have nothing to do with their reality, but only with our subjective understanding of that reality. Depending on how we interpret a word or analyze an intention; depending on whether we hold someone in esteem or in contempt—depending, in short, on how we subjectively understand what we experience—we will be happy or sad. The source of all suffering and bliss is in the mind, not the world, but we are normally blind to this fact and thus go on mistakenly trying to alter the world: “I had realized before now that it is only a clumsy and erroneous perception which places everything in the object, when really everything is in the mind…”
As you can see, we are moving in a strikingly mystical direction, where love and success are just egotistic delusions, hypostatized mental artifacts that we mistake for solid reality. So what should we do? Proust’s answer to this predicament is also mystical in flavor. Normally we are trapped by our perspective, thinking that we are viewing reality when we are actually just experiencing our own warped mental apparatus. To break us out of this trap we must first experience unhappiness: “As for happiness, that is really useful only in one way only, by making unhappiness possible.” And unhappiness results when something we mistook to be solid—reputation, love, even life itself—is shown to be fleeting and unreal, that our everyday reality is based on nothing but lies, mistakes, and misunderstandings. You might say this is Proust’s version of Christian consolation. For in the despair that opens up during these crises, we can give up our fantasies and partake in Proustian mysticism.
This mysticism consists in reconnecting with our basic sensations. To do this, Proust does not, like the Buddhists, turn to meditation on the present moment. Instead, he relies on art and memory. Normal language is totally inadequate to this task. Our words, being universally used, only convey that aspect of experience that is common to everyone; all the individual savor of a perception, its most essential quality, is lost. But great artists—like the fictitious Vinteuil, Bergotte, or Elstir—can use their medium to overcome the usual limits of discourse, transmitting the full power of their perspectives. Even so, this artistic communication can only act as a spur for our own introspective quest. Shorn of illusory happiness, inspired by example, we can probe our own memory and experience the bliss of pure experience.
Memory is essential in this, for Proust thinks that it is only by juxtaposing one experience with another that we can see the perception in its pure form, without any reference to our conventional reality. This is why moments of involuntary memory, like the madeleine episode, are so important for Proust: it is in these moments, when a present experience triggers a long-buried memory, that we can re-visit the experiences of our past, free from delusion, as a pure impartial spectator. The final Proustian wisdom is essentially contemplative, passive, aesthetic, able to see the ironies of human life and to appreciate the recurring patterns of human existence.
Proust’s goal, then, is to do for the reader what Bergotte, Elstir, and Vinteuil did for his Narrator: to create art that acts as a window to the self. And his style is exactly suited to this purpose. In my review of a book on meditation, I noted what I called the “novelistic imagination,” which is our tendency to see the world as a setting and ourselves as the Protagonist, beset by trials and tribulations. Meditation aims to break out of this rather unrealistic mindset by focusing on the present moment. Proust’s aim is similar but his method is different. He takes the narrative tendency of the novelistic imagination, and stretches and stretches, pulling each sentence apart, twisting it around itself, extending the form and padding the structure until the narration is hardly narration at all, until you are simply swimming in a sea of sounds.
By doing so, Proust allows you to feel the passage of time, to make time palpable and real, and to feel our memory processing and being activated over and over again in response to passing sensations. This way, Proust hopes to bring us in contact with reality: “An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates, and what we call reality is a certain connection between these immediate sensations and the memories which envelop us simultaneously with them…”
This is my attempt to elucidate Proust’s aesthetic religion. Of course, like any religion of art, it is objectionable for manifold reasons: it lacks any moral compass, it is elitist, it is purely passive. Not only that, but Proust connects with his religion a solipsism that is questionable on philosophic grounds, not to mention cynical in the extreme. It is a cold, antisocial, unsympathetic doctrine, with appeal only to disenchanted aesthetes. But of course, this is ultimately a work of art and not of philosophy; and so In Search of Lost Time must be judged on literary grounds.
When it comes to the criteria by which we judge a usual novelist—characterization, dialogue, plot—I think Proust is somewhat weak. There is, of course, little plot to speak of. And although Harold Bloom thought that Proust was a rival of Shakespeare when it came to characterization—a judgment that baffles me—I felt very little for any of the people in this novel. They all speak in Proust’s longwinded voice, and so never came alive for me. It always seems as if I am overhearing Proust describe someone rather than meeting them myself.
But of course one cannot appraise Proust using these standards. This novel is, above all, audacious. It is a modernist tour de force, which turns nearly every novelistic convention on its head. More than that, it is a novel of ideas, which puts forward a radical view of the human predicament and its own answers to the perennial questions of life. It is wisdom literature rooted deeply in tradition, while being absolutely original and uncompromising in its newness. It is both intensely beautiful and intensely ugly—hideously sublime. For anyone who can pull themselves through all its pages, it will leave them deeply marked. I know I have been.
March 8, 2023
Lo so che sei un lettore compulsivo e a star bloccato su un libro per 6 mesi non ce la fai. Sì, perché è un libro unico e le 7 parti devono andare in binge reading. Lo so che mi dirai: è inattuale, roba polverosa di un secolo fa. E poi: ci sono queste frasi infinite e tra un inciso e una subordinata ti sei già perso e devi andare in rewind, peggio che perdersi nei flussi sgangherati di Joyce [forse no…]. E ancora: paginate e paginate in cui Marcel indulge lentissimamente in minuziose descrizioni o pippe mentali.
Lo so, lo so, ma tu non sai che ti perdi.
Provaci e vivrai un’avventura, nientemeno che la ricerca del tempo. Scontato? Non tanto. Come ha detto qualcuno, io ti giuro che l’ho provata l’estasi metacronica, quando il cerchio si chiude, e senti come una vertigine quando ripensi alle pietre miliari della tua vita, che ti risalgono alla memoria e rivivi con esse tutta la vita che hai percorso, i tanti io che sei stato nella metamorfosi continua che il tempo ci impone.
Per Marcel, e noi con lui, è la mamma che ti legge la favola della buona notte, sono le passeggiate in campagna, dalla parte di Guermantes e da quella di Meseglise, è una spiaggia della Normandia e la banda delle ragazze in fiore, sono gli amori grandi e disperati per Gilberte, per Albertine, la morte dell’amata nonna, la morte del più caro amico, la ricerca della propria vocazione artistica, la frequentazione del gran mondo dell’aristocrazia, con i suoi salotti futili, sfatta nei tratti fisici nel magnifico gran ballo finale, rappresentazione plastica del trascorrere del Tempo e dei suoi effetti.
Per me basta questo.
Ma c’è tantissimo altro.
Pagine di pura poesia: i paesaggi nella campagna attorno a Parigi (Combray), i paesaggi della Normandia, i viaggi in treno, Venezia, il Bois de Boulogne di giorno e di notte, Parigi sotto le bombe della 1a guerra mondiale, una donna che dorme, semplicemente le descrizioni di interni, le variazioni di luce, un cielo, un fiore fecondato da un insetto.
Pagine divertenti: personaggi come Madame Verdurin, il barone Charlus, le feste ed i salotti, le scorribande nei bordelli, le scene erotiche o sado-maso (è anche un romanzo queer, a tratti ossessionato ed ossessionante, a riflettere i tormenti interiori dell’autore in un epoca ed un mondo non certo confortevoli per un omosessuale).
Pagine di storia: l’eco e gli strascichi della rivoluzione e dell’Impero francesi, delle guerre guerreggiate e di quelle diplomatiche tra le potenze europee ottocentesche, il trapasso dell’aristocrazia e l’ascesa della borghesia, l’affaire Dreyfuss e la questione ebraica, la 1a guerra mondiale, il progresso della scienza e della tecnica (l’auto, l’aereo, il telefono, l’elettricità).
Pagine di arte: tanti richiami musicali, teatrali, letterari, pittorici. E le grandi riflessioni su cosa sia e quali debbano essere gli obiettivi dell’arte.
Ti ho convinto?
*****
Il Grand Hotel di Balbec-Cabourg, costa della Normandia “Ma la mattina dopo! …., che gioia, pregustando già il piacere della colazione e della passeggiata, vedere alla finestra, e in tutti i vetri delle librerie, come negli oblò d’una cabina di piroscafo, il mare nudo, senz’ombre, eppure all’ombra per metà della sua distesa, delimitata da una linea sottile e mobile, e seguire con gli occhi le onde che si slanciavano una dopo l’altra come tuffatori da un trampolino!”
Johanness Vermeer, Veduta di Delft “Ma poiché un critico aveva scritto che nella Veduta di Delft di Vermeer … quadro ch’egli adorava e credeva di conoscere alla perfezione, un piccolo lembo di muro giallo (di cui non si ricordava) era dipinto così bene da far pensare, se lo si guardava isolatamente, a una preziosa opera d’arte cinese, d’una bellezza che poteva bastare a se stessa, Bergotte mangiò un po’ di patate, uscì di casa e andò alla mostra. … Quello che si può dire è che tutto, nella nostra vita, avviene come se vi fossimo entrati con un fardello di obblighi contratti in una vita anteriore; non vi è nessuna ragione, nelle nostre condizioni di vita su questa terra, perché ci sentiamo obbligati a fare il bene, a essere delicati o anche soltanto educati, né perché un artista ateo si senta obbligato a ricominciare venti volte qualcosa che susciterà un’ammirazione così poco importante per il suo corpo divorato dai vermi, come il lembo di muro giallo dipinto con tanta sapienza e raffinatezza da un artista per sempre ignoto, identificato appena sotto il nome di Vermeer. Tutti questi obblighi, che non trovano sanzione nella vita presente, sembrano appartenere a un mondo diverso, fondato sulla bontà, lo scrupolo, il sacrificio, un mondo totalmente diverso da questo, e dal quale usciamo per nascere a questa terra prima forse di tornarvi a rivivere sotto il dominio di quelle leggi sconosciute cui abbiamo obbedito perché ne portavamo l’insegnamento dentro di noi senza sapere chi ve le avesse tracciate – quelle leggi cui ci avvicina ogni lavoro profondo dell’intelligenza e che rimangono invisibili soltanto (e chissà, poi?) agli sciocchi.”
Lucian Freud, Reflection (1985) “E io che fin dall’infanzia ero vissuto alla giornata, ma con un’impressione definitiva di me stesso e degli altri, mi accorsi allora per la prima volta, dalle metamorfosi verificatesi in tutte quelle persone, del tempo che era passato per loro, il che mi sconvolse con la rivelazione che esso era passato anche per me”
Lo so, lo so, ma tu non sai che ti perdi.
Provaci e vivrai un’avventura, nientemeno che la ricerca del tempo. Scontato? Non tanto. Come ha detto qualcuno, io ti giuro che l’ho provata l’estasi metacronica, quando il cerchio si chiude, e senti come una vertigine quando ripensi alle pietre miliari della tua vita, che ti risalgono alla memoria e rivivi con esse tutta la vita che hai percorso, i tanti io che sei stato nella metamorfosi continua che il tempo ci impone.
Per Marcel, e noi con lui, è la mamma che ti legge la favola della buona notte, sono le passeggiate in campagna, dalla parte di Guermantes e da quella di Meseglise, è una spiaggia della Normandia e la banda delle ragazze in fiore, sono gli amori grandi e disperati per Gilberte, per Albertine, la morte dell’amata nonna, la morte del più caro amico, la ricerca della propria vocazione artistica, la frequentazione del gran mondo dell’aristocrazia, con i suoi salotti futili, sfatta nei tratti fisici nel magnifico gran ballo finale, rappresentazione plastica del trascorrere del Tempo e dei suoi effetti.
Per me basta questo.
Ma c’è tantissimo altro.
Pagine di pura poesia: i paesaggi nella campagna attorno a Parigi (Combray), i paesaggi della Normandia, i viaggi in treno, Venezia, il Bois de Boulogne di giorno e di notte, Parigi sotto le bombe della 1a guerra mondiale, una donna che dorme, semplicemente le descrizioni di interni, le variazioni di luce, un cielo, un fiore fecondato da un insetto.
Pagine divertenti: personaggi come Madame Verdurin, il barone Charlus, le feste ed i salotti, le scorribande nei bordelli, le scene erotiche o sado-maso (è anche un romanzo queer, a tratti ossessionato ed ossessionante, a riflettere i tormenti interiori dell’autore in un epoca ed un mondo non certo confortevoli per un omosessuale).
Pagine di storia: l’eco e gli strascichi della rivoluzione e dell’Impero francesi, delle guerre guerreggiate e di quelle diplomatiche tra le potenze europee ottocentesche, il trapasso dell’aristocrazia e l’ascesa della borghesia, l’affaire Dreyfuss e la questione ebraica, la 1a guerra mondiale, il progresso della scienza e della tecnica (l’auto, l’aereo, il telefono, l’elettricità).
Pagine di arte: tanti richiami musicali, teatrali, letterari, pittorici. E le grandi riflessioni su cosa sia e quali debbano essere gli obiettivi dell’arte.
Ti ho convinto?
*****
Il Grand Hotel di Balbec-Cabourg, costa della Normandia “Ma la mattina dopo! …., che gioia, pregustando già il piacere della colazione e della passeggiata, vedere alla finestra, e in tutti i vetri delle librerie, come negli oblò d’una cabina di piroscafo, il mare nudo, senz’ombre, eppure all’ombra per metà della sua distesa, delimitata da una linea sottile e mobile, e seguire con gli occhi le onde che si slanciavano una dopo l’altra come tuffatori da un trampolino!”
Johanness Vermeer, Veduta di Delft “Ma poiché un critico aveva scritto che nella Veduta di Delft di Vermeer … quadro ch’egli adorava e credeva di conoscere alla perfezione, un piccolo lembo di muro giallo (di cui non si ricordava) era dipinto così bene da far pensare, se lo si guardava isolatamente, a una preziosa opera d’arte cinese, d’una bellezza che poteva bastare a se stessa, Bergotte mangiò un po’ di patate, uscì di casa e andò alla mostra. … Quello che si può dire è che tutto, nella nostra vita, avviene come se vi fossimo entrati con un fardello di obblighi contratti in una vita anteriore; non vi è nessuna ragione, nelle nostre condizioni di vita su questa terra, perché ci sentiamo obbligati a fare il bene, a essere delicati o anche soltanto educati, né perché un artista ateo si senta obbligato a ricominciare venti volte qualcosa che susciterà un’ammirazione così poco importante per il suo corpo divorato dai vermi, come il lembo di muro giallo dipinto con tanta sapienza e raffinatezza da un artista per sempre ignoto, identificato appena sotto il nome di Vermeer. Tutti questi obblighi, che non trovano sanzione nella vita presente, sembrano appartenere a un mondo diverso, fondato sulla bontà, lo scrupolo, il sacrificio, un mondo totalmente diverso da questo, e dal quale usciamo per nascere a questa terra prima forse di tornarvi a rivivere sotto il dominio di quelle leggi sconosciute cui abbiamo obbedito perché ne portavamo l’insegnamento dentro di noi senza sapere chi ve le avesse tracciate – quelle leggi cui ci avvicina ogni lavoro profondo dell’intelligenza e che rimangono invisibili soltanto (e chissà, poi?) agli sciocchi.”
Lucian Freud, Reflection (1985) “E io che fin dall’infanzia ero vissuto alla giornata, ma con un’impressione definitiva di me stesso e degli altri, mi accorsi allora per la prima volta, dalle metamorfosi verificatesi in tutte quelle persone, del tempo che era passato per loro, il che mi sconvolse con la rivelazione che esso era passato anche per me”
March 13, 2013
Celebrity Death Match Special: In Search of Lost Time versus Harry Potter
The francophone world was stunned by today's release of papers, sealed by Proust for 100 years after publication of the initial volume of his famous series, which finally reveal his original draft manuscripts. In the rest of this review, you can find out what Proust's books looked like before his well-meaning but unworldly editor decided that French literateurs would prefer something slightly different.
The francophone world was stunned by today's release of papers, sealed by Proust for 100 years after publication of the initial volume of his famous series, which finally reveal his original draft manuscripts. In the rest of this review, you can find out what Proust's books looked like before his well-meaning but unworldly editor decided that French literateurs would prefer something slightly different.
November 20, 2014
In another LIST book (1Q84) it was said that unless you have the opportunity to be in jail or have to hide out for a long time, you can't read the whole of In Search of Lost Time.
Volume 1. Swann’s Way (★★★★☆)
Volume 2. Within a Budding Grove (★★★☆☆)
Volume 3. The Guermantes Way (★★☆☆☆)
Volume 4. Cities of the Plain (★★★★★)
Volume 5. The Captive (★★★★★)
Volume 6. The Fugitive (★★★★☆)
Volume 7. Time Regained (★★★★★)
Volume 1. Swann’s Way (★★★★☆)
Volume 2. Within a Budding Grove (★★★☆☆)
Volume 3. The Guermantes Way (★★☆☆☆)
Volume 4. Cities of the Plain (★★★★★)
Volume 5. The Captive (★★★★★)
Volume 6. The Fugitive (★★★★☆)
Volume 7. Time Regained (★★★★★)
November 17, 2015
“We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you, have not been shaped by a paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have sprung from very different beginnings, having been influenced by evil or commonplace that prevailed round them. They represent a struggle and a victory.”
Proust is a great teacher. This may sound embarrassingly platitudinous, and yet I find that it is a fact altogether too easily overlooked in our incessant praise (or bemoaning) of his technical achievements as a stylistic innovator. Setting aside for a while the whole issue of innovative narrative technique (which is nonetheless essential to the realization of his thought through literary art), we can appreciate that he has something important to teach us about what it means to be wise, or, in short, a more fully realized human being.
He does so by bodying forth through narrative a model (I'd even say, a paradigm) of the process of self-knowledge. In so doing, he becomes an indispensable companion to our own most personal and intimate developmental struggle to compass the manifold, disjointed flux of experience into a coherent, meaningful whole that we can point to as “our self.” As psychologists now recognize, a series of narrative acts (or “acts of meaning,” as Jerome Bruner put it) weave together, one by one, the fabric of our identity. What we are fundamentally is a narrative identity, a carefully demarcated world of meaning to which we cling in the face of the flux (notice Proust's recurring focus of description: thresholds and borders, doorways and windows, walls and fences). The slow construction of this most fundamental narrative unity that constitutes the real ground of our most mundane awareness is Proust's chosen theme.
This fundamental understanding of the self-making self is, paradoxically, the culmination of the pursuit of self-knowledge. And in this, Proust puts his finger on the very pulse of what identity means and can mean in our historical epoch. As Charles Taylor points out in Sources of the Self, the fundamental understanding of an ineradicable and refractory (to the theoretical understanding and its search for pure transparency) poietic element that lies at the heart of all our acts of knowing is foundational for modern thought in general. In short, we make the self we strive to know, necessarily. Deliberations about meanings to entertain and construct form the very ground we stand on in our attempts to reflect and to know Self.
In this, Proust's narrative art implicitly critiques the foundational move of Western philosophy and intellectual history alike: namely, Plato's separation between narrative and knowledge, theoria and poiesis, art and philosophy. Proust seems to say that theoria is poietic, and poiesis is theoretical, and reminds us the more primal etymological sense of narrative (gno – to know). In this, he elevates the modern novel to the status of a privileged epistemic instrument and redefines the aim of wisdom. The artist stakes out for himself his own wisdom path distinct from that of the philosopher. The knowing to be sought is the kind of knowing we live by. His narrative re-enacts those acts of knowing by which we structure a life-story and come to affirm a self, and then later, transcend it.
The mainstream of modern thought has, of course, led in the opposite direction. Reductionist mechanism aspires to corner the mind into some ultimate system, a self-made cage of thought - a Theory of “Everything” - from which it may never again emerge to see the light of day. Any access to immediate experience must be mediated by said totalizing System; any experience that does not fit therein is to be explained away. While we managed to keep at bay political totalitarianism as a civilization, intellectual totalitarianism still rules the day as an ever-appetizing lodestar. If we could but persuade ourselves to stay in the box we made, we might buy ourselves some semblance of certainty, provided we forget we ourselves have fabricated it. William Barrett, in “The Illusion of Technique,” outlines this totalizing aspect of modern thought well when he shows how time and again, the great thinkers of modernity are subject to the irresistible temptation to “reify the objects of their symbolism,” thereby becoming “victims of their own language.”
Proust's approach to the whole question of how we may become wise differs from this mainstream in two ways: first, he avoids becoming a “victim of (his) symbolism” by adopting a “meta” stance vis-a-vis his own cognitive framings, and second, he validates the adequacy to experience of his methodology by continually touching base with where we actually stand in our most intimate dealings with the world through a close description of detail.
I already touched on the first, but essentially, the critical decision here lies in his not assuming transparency and instead foregrounding and scrutinizing the constructive process of knowing a life as it unfolds. There is wisdom in this, for by pretending that our mental filters are transparent to reality, we risk mistaking the specks of dirt on our windowpane for features in the landscape. The fundamental working metaphor Proust operates with here is the magic lantern of the mind. This is introduced early on in the context of one of those childhood revelations that seems to suddenly make clear for us the sense of this strange, shadowy life. The young narrator lying in his bed awaiting sleep while struggling with separation anxiety from his mother, watched the projected fairytale images of the magic lantern gliding across his walls, furniture, doorknob. The reference to Plato's Cave is unmistakable, and yet the wisdom to be found here lies not in "peering through" to the substantial origin of these shadowy fairytale forms that float over the surface of our awareness. The umbilical chord to such cosmic orders is severed, for Proust as for so many moderns. We are left floating in a sea of images, that strange, in-between realm where mind approaches nature but never quite rests in a secure grasp of it.
The best lucidity we can hope for comes from an acceptance of the free-floating quality of the magic lantern of our minds: it touches reality only when, as the projected fairytale images, the form is distorted as it glides over an obtruding object, such as the doorknob. The entire rest of the narrative is like a grand cartography of the magic lantern of the mind, and of the unshakable, unsettling, yet poignant sense of irreality that it brings to the heart of even our most lucid daylight experience. In this, Proust has a lot in common with the stripping down of layer upon layer of formal illusion that characterizes Zen meditation. The work is indeed much like a guided meditation manual. The hard-earned lucidity to be found at the culmination of the gathering back together act at the end of the narrative, in Time Regained, is one not of “seeing through” to some architectonic world-structure (which must always in the end be a cognitive artifact endlessly referencing us even as we struggle to wipe ourselves out of our picture); it is instead a lucidity that comes from a comprehensive grasp of the ineradicable stain our filtration systems leave on even the most intimate, seemingly immediate moments. We never stand in the light of day. It is a scary realization, but an unshakable one, and one that peers at the very heart of the human condition. We always stand in the shadow of our own form, and of our limited capacity for realization. Our relation to reality must be understood (and more fully realized) by incrementally beating against our walls, at last coming to make peace with them, and in so doing, finding our only possible transcendence.
And second, we come to the crucial revelation detailed description allows and that theoretical systems by their nature must overlook. Detailed description, while making lazy readers cringe, is the writer's best friend, as well as his/her greatest advantage over the philosophical systematizer. It is how the modern novel becomes a philosophically significant epistemic instrument. In my review of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, I noted that Kant and Proust can be understood as complementary opposites of the phenomenological spectrum, and that a fully realized self-understanding must encompass both the stances that they represent. Kant offers the phenomenology of logical principles, Proust the sketch of phenomenological form by which we gain a hold of lived experience. I'd add here that there's simply no philosophical substitute for Proust and for the kind of world-disclosure his narrative technique enables: he is a better cartographer of Heidegger's Clearing and Husserl's Lifeworld than they ever could be (although I deeply admire both). And this is because his (literary) methodology allows him to scrutinize and lay bare the workings of that fundamental act of reflective thought: description. It goes right to the heart of our moment-to-moment encounter with reality in re-enacting the constructive framing we impose through our descriptions.
One has to admire the lucidity and tenacity with which Proust takes up his analytical scalpel to the most indefinite, amorphous phenomena. He is, in my estimation, a cartographer of indefinite who charts the limits of representation, and thus, of our capacity for lucidity and meaning. To define and articulate the undefinable details of lived experience – while foregrounding the constructive nature of all such articulation, definition, and cognitive framing - is both his (insane) narrative task and greatest epistemic achievement. Relish a densely descriptive paragraph of his, say, of a summer field, or of the subtly shifting feel of the atmosphere and mood change of a room as different personages enter and exit. Countless pages meticulously render articulate what we usually allow to fester untapped in the margins of liminal awareness, through synaesthetic descriptions that try to recapture the comprehensive feel of the mingling of shades at twilight, of the shifting of air currents, of the interpenetration of music and scent, and then of the pain of lack running through it all, of never attaining some culminating state of sufficiency. For my own part, far from having to strain to appreciate the descriptive passages, I find they provide meditative exercise that gives me the tools to better bring my day-to-day experiences to articulate clarity, instead of lazily allowing them to glide past. In so doing, they intensify my capacity for awareness and presence in the world. Both cognitive form and narrative technique here are opened up to their widest capaciousness and plasticity in order to incorporate not only dramatic action, but its peripheral reverberation, not only central figure but its background of embeddedness, not only words but their echoes, too.
I feel more alive after reading Proust, more present to my experiences, and more ashamed at how much of my life I let slip by me each and every day. The perspective the narrator achieves over his life here makes our usual biographical sense seem botched and anemic. In comparison, it seems like we have scarcely deigned to show up for our life story much at all. Instead of integrating and transcending in a moment of lucidity that surpasses our highest attained perspectival unity, as the narrator does at the culmination of the narrative when the various strands somehow coalesce, we just let it all slip by, rush on to the next thing, and through this habit enacted out of laziness, skim through our lives without delving deeper into the mystery they disclose. Experience washes over us and past us, leaving us untransformed and not building up to a unity, which is indeed wholly ours.
His analysis of the pervasiveness of Habit as our substitute for awareness here is sobering. “Most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services.” He shows how through it, we fall back on prematurely fossilized interpretive structures - “our personality” - and fail to rise up to the task of continuing to develop resources for gathering meanings as they continue to unfold and emerge. The entire work seems to urge us to recall that psychological maturation, unlike physical, doesn't occur automatically or is finished once and for all at a specific moment in time after puberty. It ends with death, or with its psychological correlative – the death we experience when we opt out of the necessarily ongoing struggle to continue articulating an increasingly integrative perspective on our lives. Premature unity is psychological death; through it, our lives become a foreclosed matter. As Beckett notes in his study of Proust, “The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day.” The same goes for our own little life-world. There is no resting in the process of endless formal development until death because experience never ceases to unfold new capacities for revelation. Our understanding can never rest content with yesterday's story when facing today's experiences.
Proust shows us what the stakes for self-knowledge are, and this is as inspiring for us ordinary (barely aware) mortals as it is supremely humbling. And it is enabling, as any creative work should be. It shows the way to greater realization.
Proust is a great teacher. This may sound embarrassingly platitudinous, and yet I find that it is a fact altogether too easily overlooked in our incessant praise (or bemoaning) of his technical achievements as a stylistic innovator. Setting aside for a while the whole issue of innovative narrative technique (which is nonetheless essential to the realization of his thought through literary art), we can appreciate that he has something important to teach us about what it means to be wise, or, in short, a more fully realized human being.
He does so by bodying forth through narrative a model (I'd even say, a paradigm) of the process of self-knowledge. In so doing, he becomes an indispensable companion to our own most personal and intimate developmental struggle to compass the manifold, disjointed flux of experience into a coherent, meaningful whole that we can point to as “our self.” As psychologists now recognize, a series of narrative acts (or “acts of meaning,” as Jerome Bruner put it) weave together, one by one, the fabric of our identity. What we are fundamentally is a narrative identity, a carefully demarcated world of meaning to which we cling in the face of the flux (notice Proust's recurring focus of description: thresholds and borders, doorways and windows, walls and fences). The slow construction of this most fundamental narrative unity that constitutes the real ground of our most mundane awareness is Proust's chosen theme.
This fundamental understanding of the self-making self is, paradoxically, the culmination of the pursuit of self-knowledge. And in this, Proust puts his finger on the very pulse of what identity means and can mean in our historical epoch. As Charles Taylor points out in Sources of the Self, the fundamental understanding of an ineradicable and refractory (to the theoretical understanding and its search for pure transparency) poietic element that lies at the heart of all our acts of knowing is foundational for modern thought in general. In short, we make the self we strive to know, necessarily. Deliberations about meanings to entertain and construct form the very ground we stand on in our attempts to reflect and to know Self.
In this, Proust's narrative art implicitly critiques the foundational move of Western philosophy and intellectual history alike: namely, Plato's separation between narrative and knowledge, theoria and poiesis, art and philosophy. Proust seems to say that theoria is poietic, and poiesis is theoretical, and reminds us the more primal etymological sense of narrative (gno – to know). In this, he elevates the modern novel to the status of a privileged epistemic instrument and redefines the aim of wisdom. The artist stakes out for himself his own wisdom path distinct from that of the philosopher. The knowing to be sought is the kind of knowing we live by. His narrative re-enacts those acts of knowing by which we structure a life-story and come to affirm a self, and then later, transcend it.
The mainstream of modern thought has, of course, led in the opposite direction. Reductionist mechanism aspires to corner the mind into some ultimate system, a self-made cage of thought - a Theory of “Everything” - from which it may never again emerge to see the light of day. Any access to immediate experience must be mediated by said totalizing System; any experience that does not fit therein is to be explained away. While we managed to keep at bay political totalitarianism as a civilization, intellectual totalitarianism still rules the day as an ever-appetizing lodestar. If we could but persuade ourselves to stay in the box we made, we might buy ourselves some semblance of certainty, provided we forget we ourselves have fabricated it. William Barrett, in “The Illusion of Technique,” outlines this totalizing aspect of modern thought well when he shows how time and again, the great thinkers of modernity are subject to the irresistible temptation to “reify the objects of their symbolism,” thereby becoming “victims of their own language.”
Proust's approach to the whole question of how we may become wise differs from this mainstream in two ways: first, he avoids becoming a “victim of (his) symbolism” by adopting a “meta” stance vis-a-vis his own cognitive framings, and second, he validates the adequacy to experience of his methodology by continually touching base with where we actually stand in our most intimate dealings with the world through a close description of detail.
I already touched on the first, but essentially, the critical decision here lies in his not assuming transparency and instead foregrounding and scrutinizing the constructive process of knowing a life as it unfolds. There is wisdom in this, for by pretending that our mental filters are transparent to reality, we risk mistaking the specks of dirt on our windowpane for features in the landscape. The fundamental working metaphor Proust operates with here is the magic lantern of the mind. This is introduced early on in the context of one of those childhood revelations that seems to suddenly make clear for us the sense of this strange, shadowy life. The young narrator lying in his bed awaiting sleep while struggling with separation anxiety from his mother, watched the projected fairytale images of the magic lantern gliding across his walls, furniture, doorknob. The reference to Plato's Cave is unmistakable, and yet the wisdom to be found here lies not in "peering through" to the substantial origin of these shadowy fairytale forms that float over the surface of our awareness. The umbilical chord to such cosmic orders is severed, for Proust as for so many moderns. We are left floating in a sea of images, that strange, in-between realm where mind approaches nature but never quite rests in a secure grasp of it.
The best lucidity we can hope for comes from an acceptance of the free-floating quality of the magic lantern of our minds: it touches reality only when, as the projected fairytale images, the form is distorted as it glides over an obtruding object, such as the doorknob. The entire rest of the narrative is like a grand cartography of the magic lantern of the mind, and of the unshakable, unsettling, yet poignant sense of irreality that it brings to the heart of even our most lucid daylight experience. In this, Proust has a lot in common with the stripping down of layer upon layer of formal illusion that characterizes Zen meditation. The work is indeed much like a guided meditation manual. The hard-earned lucidity to be found at the culmination of the gathering back together act at the end of the narrative, in Time Regained, is one not of “seeing through” to some architectonic world-structure (which must always in the end be a cognitive artifact endlessly referencing us even as we struggle to wipe ourselves out of our picture); it is instead a lucidity that comes from a comprehensive grasp of the ineradicable stain our filtration systems leave on even the most intimate, seemingly immediate moments. We never stand in the light of day. It is a scary realization, but an unshakable one, and one that peers at the very heart of the human condition. We always stand in the shadow of our own form, and of our limited capacity for realization. Our relation to reality must be understood (and more fully realized) by incrementally beating against our walls, at last coming to make peace with them, and in so doing, finding our only possible transcendence.
And second, we come to the crucial revelation detailed description allows and that theoretical systems by their nature must overlook. Detailed description, while making lazy readers cringe, is the writer's best friend, as well as his/her greatest advantage over the philosophical systematizer. It is how the modern novel becomes a philosophically significant epistemic instrument. In my review of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, I noted that Kant and Proust can be understood as complementary opposites of the phenomenological spectrum, and that a fully realized self-understanding must encompass both the stances that they represent. Kant offers the phenomenology of logical principles, Proust the sketch of phenomenological form by which we gain a hold of lived experience. I'd add here that there's simply no philosophical substitute for Proust and for the kind of world-disclosure his narrative technique enables: he is a better cartographer of Heidegger's Clearing and Husserl's Lifeworld than they ever could be (although I deeply admire both). And this is because his (literary) methodology allows him to scrutinize and lay bare the workings of that fundamental act of reflective thought: description. It goes right to the heart of our moment-to-moment encounter with reality in re-enacting the constructive framing we impose through our descriptions.
One has to admire the lucidity and tenacity with which Proust takes up his analytical scalpel to the most indefinite, amorphous phenomena. He is, in my estimation, a cartographer of indefinite who charts the limits of representation, and thus, of our capacity for lucidity and meaning. To define and articulate the undefinable details of lived experience – while foregrounding the constructive nature of all such articulation, definition, and cognitive framing - is both his (insane) narrative task and greatest epistemic achievement. Relish a densely descriptive paragraph of his, say, of a summer field, or of the subtly shifting feel of the atmosphere and mood change of a room as different personages enter and exit. Countless pages meticulously render articulate what we usually allow to fester untapped in the margins of liminal awareness, through synaesthetic descriptions that try to recapture the comprehensive feel of the mingling of shades at twilight, of the shifting of air currents, of the interpenetration of music and scent, and then of the pain of lack running through it all, of never attaining some culminating state of sufficiency. For my own part, far from having to strain to appreciate the descriptive passages, I find they provide meditative exercise that gives me the tools to better bring my day-to-day experiences to articulate clarity, instead of lazily allowing them to glide past. In so doing, they intensify my capacity for awareness and presence in the world. Both cognitive form and narrative technique here are opened up to their widest capaciousness and plasticity in order to incorporate not only dramatic action, but its peripheral reverberation, not only central figure but its background of embeddedness, not only words but their echoes, too.
I feel more alive after reading Proust, more present to my experiences, and more ashamed at how much of my life I let slip by me each and every day. The perspective the narrator achieves over his life here makes our usual biographical sense seem botched and anemic. In comparison, it seems like we have scarcely deigned to show up for our life story much at all. Instead of integrating and transcending in a moment of lucidity that surpasses our highest attained perspectival unity, as the narrator does at the culmination of the narrative when the various strands somehow coalesce, we just let it all slip by, rush on to the next thing, and through this habit enacted out of laziness, skim through our lives without delving deeper into the mystery they disclose. Experience washes over us and past us, leaving us untransformed and not building up to a unity, which is indeed wholly ours.
His analysis of the pervasiveness of Habit as our substitute for awareness here is sobering. “Most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services.” He shows how through it, we fall back on prematurely fossilized interpretive structures - “our personality” - and fail to rise up to the task of continuing to develop resources for gathering meanings as they continue to unfold and emerge. The entire work seems to urge us to recall that psychological maturation, unlike physical, doesn't occur automatically or is finished once and for all at a specific moment in time after puberty. It ends with death, or with its psychological correlative – the death we experience when we opt out of the necessarily ongoing struggle to continue articulating an increasingly integrative perspective on our lives. Premature unity is psychological death; through it, our lives become a foreclosed matter. As Beckett notes in his study of Proust, “The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day.” The same goes for our own little life-world. There is no resting in the process of endless formal development until death because experience never ceases to unfold new capacities for revelation. Our understanding can never rest content with yesterday's story when facing today's experiences.
Proust shows us what the stakes for self-knowledge are, and this is as inspiring for us ordinary (barely aware) mortals as it is supremely humbling. And it is enabling, as any creative work should be. It shows the way to greater realization.
November 17, 2020
I read the whole damn thing, for which I feel like demanding a medal. A famous quote about this work goes, "I may be thicker skinned than most, but I just can't understand why anyone should take thirty pages to describe how he tosses about in bed because he can't get to sleep. I clutched my head."
I heartily agree. Nor do I like dinner parties that take longer to read about than they took to occur. The main problem with Proust (and his admirers) is that they are convinced that the French aristocracy, with all their trivial concerns and all their trivial conversations, were actually interesting. In reality, they were very dull and conventional people. One of Proust's friends actually said that to him, but Proust was too status-struck to listen.
The only character in the books I liked was Charles Morel, because he screwed everyone over and treated them like dirt. By the time I finished, I thought they deserved him.
I heartily agree. Nor do I like dinner parties that take longer to read about than they took to occur. The main problem with Proust (and his admirers) is that they are convinced that the French aristocracy, with all their trivial concerns and all their trivial conversations, were actually interesting. In reality, they were very dull and conventional people. One of Proust's friends actually said that to him, but Proust was too status-struck to listen.
The only character in the books I liked was Charles Morel, because he screwed everyone over and treated them like dirt. By the time I finished, I thought they deserved him.
December 13, 2015
The first volume of 'In Search of Lost Time' (ISoLT), or 'Remembrance of Things Past' (RoTP), or 'À la recherche du temps perdu' (Merde mère un autre?) was first published in France 100 years ago this month. I started reading in February, and now end this beast in November. Apparently, I needed a little wind-up to start and if the last 12 hours is any indication, I will need a wee bit of time to settle down from the mess Proust has left in my head.
This is a book that feels like a hypnotic river that both transports, nourishes, warms and transcends. 4211 pages later and I feel like this is a novel I want to read again (both immediately and much much later). I had barely put down Time Regained and I was, like an orobus, reaching for 'Swann's Way'. I'm going to chew on my BIG review of ISoLT for awhile. I don't know if I'm ready to try to explain or even understand the whole of Proust yet. Hell, I'm not sure I'm ready to look at myself that closely yet.
Reading Proust was a bit like reading 'Finnegans Wake'. Certainly not the details or style mind you. Proust wasn't deliberately sending his prose into language fractals, neologisms and ghillie suits of his own idioglossia. Proust isn't trying to capture or interpret the night or dreams (although dreams and sleep do play a part of ISoLT). Proust isn't trying to hide, he is seeking to uncover.
Both works, however, are best approached as literature that shouldn't be sipped. These are pieces that you need to let wash over you. You will miss parts for sure, but unless you are a Joyce or Proust scholar you won't uncover 1/10 of what they are really sending your direction anyway. Let the prose roll. Let the message(s) seep into your conciousness. Beware of the designs of the left-brained temptor to stop every sentenece and try to comprehend completely what was written. Finnegans wake is too obscure and ISoLT is too damn long to do this. Pull your feet up, push your head back, and float -- damn you all.
[a quick after note: the first four books of Proust I read were the Viking Translations done by Lydia Davis (Bk 1), James Grieve (Bk 2), Mark Treharne (Bks 3-4). The last three (Bks 5-7) were the Modern Library's Enright - Scott Moncrieff translations.]
June 16, 2022
I began Vol. 1 on the Eurostar into Paris.
Vol. 2 got soaked through and warped on a long walk in Cambridge.
Vol. 3 kept me company on a living room floor in London.
Vol. 4 was hailed on near Brighton.
Vol. 5 and 6 were read at home in my loft-bedroom.
I completed Vol. 7 in Paris again, in Pere Lachaise Cemetery, in front of Proust's very tomb.
After a false start with Vol. 1 back in 2019, I finished Vol. 1 in 2020. It drained me but I was in awe of Proust. I took a long break before returning to Vol. 2 in 2021. By the time I was ready for Vol. 3, now in March 2022, I had been reading the novel for 2 years. Since March I have read a volume every month (technically two volumes in May as they are combined into one) to finish now, in June. My journey with Proust rushed to a sudden end after a long and slow beginning.
I was keen to see if it changed my life or something of the sort. I don't think it has, but maybe it's too early to tell. Am I glad I did it though? Or rather, was it worth it? I think it's hard to know how to answer that; I think there's so much pressure put onto making the most of your time, or not wasting time, these days. There's constant movement and stimulation from almost every direction. It's very rare to see someone just standing and staring into space. I think reading Proust is a little like putting the world into slow-motion, and even after putting the book down, the world is a little slower. That's the thing with reading, it helps us to understand, but it also helps us to think and to live. So in some way I could say Proust has helped me to live and understand better. It was really a test of endurance than difficulty; Proust is not 'hard' to read, he's just long, oh so long. The novel finishes at over 4000 pages long. For me the best volumes are the first and the third. The last three were never edited by Proust and they are full of inconsistencies, but having said that, the prose itself hardly suffers without the edits he probably imagined.
It's surreal to say I'm done, though I'm not and never will be. I guess thanks for the long ride, Proust. I wish I tallied up how long I physically spent reading these books, timed myself per reading session, to add it all up. The guy I work with has something like 4000 hours on this one particular computer game, which I worked out for him as being equivalent to spending five months straight without stopping. Five months of his life on a computer game. But we spend our time where we enjoy it, and he enjoys it. To him, no doubt, spending God knows how many hours reading this book about a boy dipping a biscuit into his tea and remembering the whole of his human experience and ruminating on life, art, time, memory, love, sexuality, being, etc., probably seems like an utter waste of time and effort. C'est la vie.
Volume 1 review.
Volume 2 review.
Volume 3 review.
Volume 4 review.
Volume 5 review.
Volume 6 review.
Volume 5 and 6 combined review.
Volume 7 review.
Vol. 2 got soaked through and warped on a long walk in Cambridge.
Vol. 3 kept me company on a living room floor in London.
Vol. 4 was hailed on near Brighton.
Vol. 5 and 6 were read at home in my loft-bedroom.
I completed Vol. 7 in Paris again, in Pere Lachaise Cemetery, in front of Proust's very tomb.
After a false start with Vol. 1 back in 2019, I finished Vol. 1 in 2020. It drained me but I was in awe of Proust. I took a long break before returning to Vol. 2 in 2021. By the time I was ready for Vol. 3, now in March 2022, I had been reading the novel for 2 years. Since March I have read a volume every month (technically two volumes in May as they are combined into one) to finish now, in June. My journey with Proust rushed to a sudden end after a long and slow beginning.
I was keen to see if it changed my life or something of the sort. I don't think it has, but maybe it's too early to tell. Am I glad I did it though? Or rather, was it worth it? I think it's hard to know how to answer that; I think there's so much pressure put onto making the most of your time, or not wasting time, these days. There's constant movement and stimulation from almost every direction. It's very rare to see someone just standing and staring into space. I think reading Proust is a little like putting the world into slow-motion, and even after putting the book down, the world is a little slower. That's the thing with reading, it helps us to understand, but it also helps us to think and to live. So in some way I could say Proust has helped me to live and understand better. It was really a test of endurance than difficulty; Proust is not 'hard' to read, he's just long, oh so long. The novel finishes at over 4000 pages long. For me the best volumes are the first and the third. The last three were never edited by Proust and they are full of inconsistencies, but having said that, the prose itself hardly suffers without the edits he probably imagined.
It's surreal to say I'm done, though I'm not and never will be. I guess thanks for the long ride, Proust. I wish I tallied up how long I physically spent reading these books, timed myself per reading session, to add it all up. The guy I work with has something like 4000 hours on this one particular computer game, which I worked out for him as being equivalent to spending five months straight without stopping. Five months of his life on a computer game. But we spend our time where we enjoy it, and he enjoys it. To him, no doubt, spending God knows how many hours reading this book about a boy dipping a biscuit into his tea and remembering the whole of his human experience and ruminating on life, art, time, memory, love, sexuality, being, etc., probably seems like an utter waste of time and effort. C'est la vie.
Volume 1 review.
Volume 2 review.
Volume 3 review.
Volume 4 review.
Volume 5 review.
Volume 6 review.
Volume 5 and 6 combined review.
Volume 7 review.
March 18, 2017
11/2/2010 Oggi ho terminato di leggere "Dalla parte di Swann".
"Ma quando di un antico passato non sussiste niente, dopo la morte degli esseri, dopo la distruzione delle cose, soli, più fragili ma più intensi, più immateriali, più persistenti, più fedeli, l'odore e il sapore restano ancora a lungo, come anime, a ricordare, ad attendere, a sperare, sulla rovina di tutto il resto, a reggere, senza piegarsi, sulla loro gocciolina quasi impalpabile, l'immenso edificio del ricordo".
Il ricordo rimane vivo e sconfigge anche la morte.
9/7/2010 Oggi ho terminato la lettura di “all’ombra delle fanciulle in fiore”.
“E il timore di un avvenire in cui saremo privati della vista e della compagnia di coloro che amiamo e dai quali ci viene oggi la gioia più cara, si accresce se pensiamo che al dolore di una simile privazione si aggiungerà non sentirla come dolore, restarvi indifferente..; sarebbe dunque una vera morte di noi stessi, morte seguita da resurrezione, ma di un io diverso, all’amore del quale non possono giungere le parti dell’antico io condannato a morire. Sono queste che provano sgomento e oppongono un rifiuto, con ribellioni in cui si deve vedere un modo segreto, parziale, tangibile, reale della resistenza alla morte, della lunga, disperata e quotidiana resistenza alla morte frammentaria e continua che si insedia in noi per tutta la durata della nostra vita…”
li 11/10/2010 ho terminato di leggere "i Guermantes".
"Un uomo, che sia diventato sordo del tutto, non può nemmeno far scaldare accanto a sè un bollitore pieno di latte senza dover spiare con gli occhi nel recipiente scoperchiato il riflesso bianco, iperboreo, simile a quello di una tempesta di neve, che è il segno premonitore al quale sarà bene ubbidire togliendo, come il Signore arresta le onde, la spina elettrica, infatti quella specie di uovo ascendente e convulso del latte che bolle sta salendo, sollevandosi irregolarmente, gonfia, arrotonda qualche vela semicapovolta che la panna aveva increspato e ne lancia nella tempesta una di madreperla che l'interruzione di corrente, se l'uragano elettrico è scongiurato in tempo, farà girare su se stessa e getterà alla deriva mutata in petali di magnolia."
Anche l'attività quotidiana più semplice come il bollire il latte è poesia nella penna di Proust.
13/1/2011: ho terminato la lettura di Sodoma e Gomorra.
" In qualsiasi momento la consideriamo, la nostra anima nella sua totalità ha un valore quasi soltanto fittizio, nonstante il cospicuo bilancio delle sue ricchezze, poichè ora le une ora le altre sono indisponibili, sia che si tratti di ricchezze effettive o immaginarie, e nel mio caso, per esempio, quella dell'antico nome di Guermantes o quelle, tanto più gravi, del vero ricordo della nonna. Perchè ai turbamenti della memoria sono legate le intermittenze del cuore. E' probabile sia l'esistenza del nostro corpo, simile per noi a un vaso in cui sarebbe rinchiusa la nostra spiritualità, a farci supporre che tutti i nostri beni interiori, le nostre gioie passate, tutti i nostri dolori siano perennemente in nostro possesso. Forse è altrettanto inesatto credere che essi svaniscano o ritornino. In tutti i casi, se restano in noi, la maggior parte del tempo risiedono in una zona sconosciuta dove non ci sono di alcuna utilità, e dove anche i più usuali sono soffocati dai ricordi di altro ordine e che escludono ogni simultaneità con essi nella nostra coscienza. Ma se riusciamo a riafferrare l'insieme di sensazioni in cui sono custoditi, essi hanno, a loro volta, il medesimo potere di espellere tutto ciò che è incompatibile con essi, di installare in noi soltanto l'io che li ha vissuti".
19/3/2011: ho terminato la lettura de "la prigioniera". Per me credo sia il volume della Recherche che più mi ha affascinato.
"Ciò che ci lega alle persone sono le mille radici, quei fili innumerevoli che sono i ricordi della serata di ieri, le speranze del mattino di domani, quella trama continua di abitudini da cui non riusciamo a liberarci. Così come esistono avari che accumulano per generosità, noi siamo dei prodighi che scialano per avarizia, e sacrifichiamo la nostra vita non tanto a un essere quanto a tutto ciò che egli ha saputo legare a sè delle nostre ore, dei nostri giorni, delle cose al cui confronto la vita ancora da vivere, la vita relativamente futura, ci sembra più remota, più distaccata, meno intima, meno nostra."
17/5/2011: ho terminato di leggere "la fuggitiva".
"Ogni donna sente che, più il suo potere su un uomo è grande, il solo modo di andarsene è fuggire.Fuggitiva perchè regina.E' così.Certo, esiste una distanza immensa tra la noia che solo un istante prima essa ci ispirava e quel furioso bisogno di averla presso di sè per il fatto che se ne è andata."
"La vera vita, la vita finalmente scoperta e messa in luce, di conseguenza la sola vita realmente vissuta, è la letteratura, vita che, in un certo senso, dimora in ogni momento in tutti gli uomini così come nell'artista. Ma essi non la vedono perchè non cercano di portarla alla luce".
Il mio viaggio con Proust è terminato. Cinque stelle non rappresentano il valore di quest'opera monumentale, le ho messe simbolicamente: le mie stelle sono dieci, cento, mille...
"Ma quando di un antico passato non sussiste niente, dopo la morte degli esseri, dopo la distruzione delle cose, soli, più fragili ma più intensi, più immateriali, più persistenti, più fedeli, l'odore e il sapore restano ancora a lungo, come anime, a ricordare, ad attendere, a sperare, sulla rovina di tutto il resto, a reggere, senza piegarsi, sulla loro gocciolina quasi impalpabile, l'immenso edificio del ricordo".
Il ricordo rimane vivo e sconfigge anche la morte.
9/7/2010 Oggi ho terminato la lettura di “all’ombra delle fanciulle in fiore”.
“E il timore di un avvenire in cui saremo privati della vista e della compagnia di coloro che amiamo e dai quali ci viene oggi la gioia più cara, si accresce se pensiamo che al dolore di una simile privazione si aggiungerà non sentirla come dolore, restarvi indifferente..; sarebbe dunque una vera morte di noi stessi, morte seguita da resurrezione, ma di un io diverso, all’amore del quale non possono giungere le parti dell’antico io condannato a morire. Sono queste che provano sgomento e oppongono un rifiuto, con ribellioni in cui si deve vedere un modo segreto, parziale, tangibile, reale della resistenza alla morte, della lunga, disperata e quotidiana resistenza alla morte frammentaria e continua che si insedia in noi per tutta la durata della nostra vita…”
li 11/10/2010 ho terminato di leggere "i Guermantes".
"Un uomo, che sia diventato sordo del tutto, non può nemmeno far scaldare accanto a sè un bollitore pieno di latte senza dover spiare con gli occhi nel recipiente scoperchiato il riflesso bianco, iperboreo, simile a quello di una tempesta di neve, che è il segno premonitore al quale sarà bene ubbidire togliendo, come il Signore arresta le onde, la spina elettrica, infatti quella specie di uovo ascendente e convulso del latte che bolle sta salendo, sollevandosi irregolarmente, gonfia, arrotonda qualche vela semicapovolta che la panna aveva increspato e ne lancia nella tempesta una di madreperla che l'interruzione di corrente, se l'uragano elettrico è scongiurato in tempo, farà girare su se stessa e getterà alla deriva mutata in petali di magnolia."
Anche l'attività quotidiana più semplice come il bollire il latte è poesia nella penna di Proust.
13/1/2011: ho terminato la lettura di Sodoma e Gomorra.
" In qualsiasi momento la consideriamo, la nostra anima nella sua totalità ha un valore quasi soltanto fittizio, nonstante il cospicuo bilancio delle sue ricchezze, poichè ora le une ora le altre sono indisponibili, sia che si tratti di ricchezze effettive o immaginarie, e nel mio caso, per esempio, quella dell'antico nome di Guermantes o quelle, tanto più gravi, del vero ricordo della nonna. Perchè ai turbamenti della memoria sono legate le intermittenze del cuore. E' probabile sia l'esistenza del nostro corpo, simile per noi a un vaso in cui sarebbe rinchiusa la nostra spiritualità, a farci supporre che tutti i nostri beni interiori, le nostre gioie passate, tutti i nostri dolori siano perennemente in nostro possesso. Forse è altrettanto inesatto credere che essi svaniscano o ritornino. In tutti i casi, se restano in noi, la maggior parte del tempo risiedono in una zona sconosciuta dove non ci sono di alcuna utilità, e dove anche i più usuali sono soffocati dai ricordi di altro ordine e che escludono ogni simultaneità con essi nella nostra coscienza. Ma se riusciamo a riafferrare l'insieme di sensazioni in cui sono custoditi, essi hanno, a loro volta, il medesimo potere di espellere tutto ciò che è incompatibile con essi, di installare in noi soltanto l'io che li ha vissuti".
19/3/2011: ho terminato la lettura de "la prigioniera". Per me credo sia il volume della Recherche che più mi ha affascinato.
"Ciò che ci lega alle persone sono le mille radici, quei fili innumerevoli che sono i ricordi della serata di ieri, le speranze del mattino di domani, quella trama continua di abitudini da cui non riusciamo a liberarci. Così come esistono avari che accumulano per generosità, noi siamo dei prodighi che scialano per avarizia, e sacrifichiamo la nostra vita non tanto a un essere quanto a tutto ciò che egli ha saputo legare a sè delle nostre ore, dei nostri giorni, delle cose al cui confronto la vita ancora da vivere, la vita relativamente futura, ci sembra più remota, più distaccata, meno intima, meno nostra."
17/5/2011: ho terminato di leggere "la fuggitiva".
"Ogni donna sente che, più il suo potere su un uomo è grande, il solo modo di andarsene è fuggire.Fuggitiva perchè regina.E' così.Certo, esiste una distanza immensa tra la noia che solo un istante prima essa ci ispirava e quel furioso bisogno di averla presso di sè per il fatto che se ne è andata."
"La vera vita, la vita finalmente scoperta e messa in luce, di conseguenza la sola vita realmente vissuta, è la letteratura, vita che, in un certo senso, dimora in ogni momento in tutti gli uomini così come nell'artista. Ma essi non la vedono perchè non cercano di portarla alla luce".
Il mio viaggio con Proust è terminato. Cinque stelle non rappresentano il valore di quest'opera monumentale, le ho messe simbolicamente: le mie stelle sono dieci, cento, mille...
September 24, 2018
همهی روزهای جوانی ما با رفتن به طرف خانهی سوان شروع شد، با عشق سوان گرما گرفت و روزها و شب ها گذشت تا به زمان بازیافته برسیم.پس از پروست باید ممنون مرحوم مهدی سحابی نازنین باشیم که به کتاب چیره شد و توانست دست به ترجمهی چنین شاهکاری بزند. مینو بر او انوشه باد!
October 12, 2023
"Inconceivable boredom associated with the most extreme ecstasy which it is possible to imagine."
H. James
"An enormous and yet singularly light and translucent work . . . the best novel of its era.”
Nabokov
"There are many pages of Proust that are as tedious as life itself."
Borges
"The greatest novelist of the twentieth century.”
Greene
"A hermaphrodite, toadlike creature spooning his own tepid juice over his face and body."
A. Huxley
"Proust's great work has the simplicity and majesty of a cathedral."
A. Maurois
“Life is too short, and Proust is too long.”
A. France
“Reading Proust isn't just reading a book, it's an experience and you can't reject an experience.”
Gaddis
"The greatest fiction to date."
Maugham
"The clumsy centipedalian crawling of the interminable sentences . . ."
A. Bennett
“One reads Proust and thinks him very accomplished.”
Pound
"I don't understand [Proust]. To me, that's not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange."
Cormac M.
"A great writer . . . it cannot be estimated yet what these books have opened out for us and for the future; they are loaded with a wealth of discovery."
Rilke
"In a half-whispered voice [Proust] relates the most long-winded and boring dream of a fruitless and bloodless man -- a man who lives outside of reality."
Gorky
"There are, I suppose, faults to be found, but I am in a state of amazement; as if a miracle were being done before my eyes. . . . The pleasure becomes physical: like sun and wine and grapes and perfect serenity and intense vitality combined."
Woolf
"There is no special truth in him; he writes a careless self-indulgent prose, doesn't he? . . . Epithet follows epithet like tea cakes in flutes of paper."
Gass
"I wish I had written it myself."
Faulkner
"Proust shows life as analytical and immobile. The reader finishes his sentences before he does.”
Joyce
"It is a tiring style, but it does not tire the mind. One's fatigue is a fatigue of the heart, a blood fatigue. One is exhausted and angry after an hour, submerged, dominated by the crest and break of metaphor after metaphor."
Beckett
Somehow they’re all correct?
* * * * *
À la recherche du temps perdu
Book 1: 4.4 stars
Book 2: 4.3 stars
Book 3: 4.6 stars
Book 4: 4.2 stars
Book 5-6: 3.8 stars
Book 7: 4.7 stars
intangibles / je ne sais quoi: 5 stars
Total = 4.6-ish stars rounded up
* * * * *
So this summer I spent 63 days reading Proust and only Proust; I realized, finally, that I needed to narrow my focus due to many failed attempts to reach the summit over the years (beginning at age 17, when I first bought the Random House edition). I had read various other books by/on Proust over the past two decades, and had read enough sections of Temps perdu to know that it was extremely good, but somehow everything else in my reading list kept taking precedence.
In any event, two somewhat challenging months later, and the novel was roughly as good as I had expected from the sampling I’d read over the years; i.e., very, very good. With that said, I’m never reading Proust again (beyond maybe revisiting the best couple hundred pages); it’s great but not in the stratosphere of books like Ulysses or Memoires d'Hadrien that I'll happily reread every few years until I die.
Some books just take more work; Proust definitely reminds me of Broch or Gaddis, where the work-to-enjoyment ratio is high -- still definitely 'worth it', yet probably not for rereading. (I should note here that I have no sense of obligation to finish novels that I don't enjoy, and would have happily stopped reading Proust at any point if I thought he wasn't worth the effort.) The closest analogy I can think of is reading especially difficult or dense philosophy, where it’s challenging, but in a good way; I don’t think anyone reads Husserl or Scotus for “enjoyment,” precisely, yet they're still a joy to read at some level.
One thing I’ll say though; if you read Book 1 and don't love it, if you aren't blown away by the Overture / Combray sections, and aren’t impressed with the psychological themes of Swann in Love, if you don’t love the prose, then I would consider stopping there -- the remaining six books are (generally speaking) more of the same.
* * * * *
I'm certainly critical of some aspects of Temps perdu, but I just want to emphasize here at the outset that when Proust is good, he’s just off-the-charts ridiculously amazing. Along with thousands of great lines, immortally impressive pages include (Random House pagination):
Book 1: I:46-47, I:50-51, I:64-66, I:68, I:142, I:145, I:164-166, I:428, I:462
Book 2: I:684, I:704-705, I:871-872, I:899-900, I:959, I:995
Book 3: II:7-10, II:61, II:95, II:157, II:323-357 (grandmother’s death), II:399, II:436-437, II:617-620
Book 4: II:657, II:778-809 (intermittencies of the heart), II:927-928, II:1062, II:1132, II:1148
Book 5: III:74, III:100-101, III:186, III:251-252, III:259-262, III:380-382, III:413
Book 6: III:692
Book 7: III:709, III:757-758, III:778, III:785-786, III:828, III:876, III:898-909 (the revelation of involuntary memory), III:910-916, III:931, III:939, III:1087-89, III:1107
I would put these 155 pages up against the best 155 pages of any novelist of any era; I think probably Joyce comes out ahead but I can’t think of too many others who are really in contention. And this doesn’t even get into his other strengths; e.g., Proust’s descriptions of nature are relatively rare (he prefers inner landscapes) but even those are incredibly good:
II(3):360: "The fog had lifted. The grey light, falling like a fine rain, wove without ceasing a transparent web through which the Sunday strollers appeared in a silvery sheen."
II(3):400: "A few drops of rain fall soundlessly on the ancient water which, in its divine infancy, remains always the color of the weather and continually forgets the reflections of clouds and flowers."
II(4):894: ". . . taking her head in my hands, and showing her the wide shadows, flooded and silent, which extended in the gathering dusk to a horizon closed by the parallel chains of distant blue hills."
Proust is also an aphorism factory and it’s hard to even narrow down the best ones . . . here's a few selected at random:
I(2):594: “All original painting and music must always appear complicated and exhausting.”
I(2):955: "An artificial novelty is never so effective as a repetition that manages to suggest a fresh truth."
II(3):44: "His playing has become so transparent, so imbued with what he is interpreting, that one no longer sees the performer himself -- he is simply a window opening upon a great work of art."
II(3):236: "Society is like sexual behavior, in that no one knows what perversions it may develop once aesthetic considerations are allowed to dictate its choices."
II(3):358: "A change in the weather is sufficient to create the world and ourselves anew."
II(3):430: "The highest praise of God consists in the denial of him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect it can dispense with a creator."
III(5):382: "The great men of letters have never created more than a single work, or rather have never done more than refract through various media an identical beauty which they bring into the world."
III(7):916: "An artwork in which there are theories is like an object which still has its price-tag on it."
III(7):927 ". . . that flight to get away from our own life which goes by the name of erudition."
Letters 393: “Art is the perpetual sacrificing of inclination to truth.”
And there are so many other things that he gets right . . . the metaphors are unique and almost comically creative; virtually all of the essays on philosophy/art criticism/psychology are worth reading: the analysis of Elstir's painting at the end of Book 2, the opening essay on homosexuality in Book 4, the aesthetics essays in Book 5 and Book 7, and certainly the revelation in Book 7 of involuntary memory, which is up there with Joyce's Dollymount Strand vision in Portrait. Also, the characters -- where do you even begin with how good these characters are. They're similar to the archetypal yet individual characters of Tolstoy; St. Loup, Charlus, Francoise, Mme. Verdurin, Swann, Odette, and Elstir are just as memorable to me as Kitty, Anna, Vronsky, and the rest.
Critics have of course praised the tour de force scenes such as the death of the narrator's grandmother, etc., but there are so many other minor scenes that don't get enough credit -- i.e., Swann tactfully bringing up his impending death at the Guermantes salon in the final four pages of Book 3 is so brilliant and darkly comic that I wonder why more critics haven't talked about it; Proust's virtuosity here is almost intimidating. Another thing that I don't think Proust gets enough credit for is the subtlety of the narrator's aging, it's a very slow and carefully calibrated adjustment where you suddenly realize, every few hundred pages, that the narrator is no longer a teeanger, is no longer a young man, etc., despite a strong continuity in the prose style -- it's similar to the real-life experience of looking in the mirror and suddenly realizing that you've aged a few years.
With all that said, I cannot avoid talking about:
THE PROBLEM WITH ALBERTINE
So when I first completed Proust, before I dove into the manuscript tradition to figure out what was going on, my first instinct was that the narrative became seriously bogged down with Albertine around the middle of Book 4, and that despite occasional good scenes in Books 4-6, the entire Albertine cycle was significantly weaker than the other material in Temps perdu. I have some other minor issues with Proust, to be sure -- e.g., I think it’s fair to say that the salon/party scenes are, in general, simply not very good. If they were kept at a more reasonable length, I don’t think there’s any issue; but Gide should have talked Proust down from the length of these scenes. I’m not saying that the party scenes are somehow ‘unnecessary’ or ‘boring’; they're well-written in terms of line-by-line prose, I understand why they’re in the novel, they add depth to the characters, etc. I’m saying they’re simply too long; Proust did not edit them correctly -- e.g., II(3):450-601 is repetitive in an unhelpful and uninteresting way, nothing is gained after the first 70 pages or so.
The problem with Albertine, on the other hand, is a bit more serious. The sudden shift out of the Albertine narrative at III(6):670, with about forty pages left in Book 6, felt suspicious to me, and actually was the impetus for me to dig into Tadié’s scholarship and figure out if my intuition was correct, i.e., that the whole ‘Albertine novels’ sequence was a later addition grafted onto a pre-existing narrative. (Oddly enough, I went through an identical process after reading Gaddis's Recognitions, where I had a suspicion that the inferior 400-page "Greenwich Village novel" was jammed into the superior 500-page "Gwyon/Wyatt Novel," and it turned out that I was right.)
Before working through Tadié, I had a vague sense that you could maybe improve Temps perdu by cutting the slowest few dozen pages of Swann in Love, tighten the Gilberte / Albertine material in Book 2, cut some of the party scenes in Book 3, most of the Albertine saga in Books 4-6, etc. Also the reveries are great, but there are, by any standard, too many of them; you wouldn’t lose the ‘atmosphere’ of Proust if you had a tightened version that was a thousand (or, frankly, even two thousand) pages shorter.
I certainly wouldn't say that these less-impressive sections are ‘bad’, exactly; rather, it’s like Paradise Lost, of which Harold Bloom said: “It is a work that no one wishes were longer.” No one is saying that Milton isn’t a genius, but just that if he had published a version of Paradise Lost that was 30% shorter, maybe it would be better. (And if, say, someone were to stumble across a longer version of Paradise Lost in manuscript form in the Bodleian Libraries in 2039, it wouldn't be better just because it had more text by Milton.)
Anyway, it turns out that the "condensed Proust" that I vaguely had in mind -- cutting a couple of the party scenes, almost everything with Albertine, and retaining all of the best passages (Overture-Combray, St. Loup, Elstir at Balbec, grandmother's death + intermittencies, the opera opening and early scenes in Book 3, the Charlus concert scene + drama at the Verdurins, most of Book 7), is PRECISELY Proust's first completed version of the novel.
It is generally known, and even mentioned in the introduction to Montcrieff, that Proust had completed a three-volume version of Temps perdu in 1911-1912, which was in the later proofing/editing stages by early 1914. WW1 broke out, and publishing was no longer possible -- lead (used in printing presses) and paper were needed for the war effort -- which gave Proust a few years to expand his story by another 700,000 words, with the bulk of the writing happening in late 1914-1917.
Tadié goes into the full manuscript history on pp. 562-655 of his Proust: A Life and it’s just surreal. Everything that drags or is somehow unideal in the 1.3-million-word version -- or at least the vast, vast majority of it -- was added in 1914-1917 (with slight expansions in 1918-1921). Proust's original 1912 three-volume version had Overture/Combray, Swann in Love, Gilberte, Bergotte, Elstir, all of Balbec (except for the Albertine scenes, crucially), Charlus's concert and drama at the Verdurins, the grandmother’s death + intermittencies, the St. Loup material, the airplane/car passages, the full conclusion and involuntary memory revelation in Book 7 (without the interminable party scene at the end), and so on . . . the “greatest hits” of the seven-volume version were already there, completed, in a three-volume version, in 1912. (Incidentally, Proust instructed his housekeeper to burn the 32 notebooks containing the original, superior version of Temps perdu, which is . . . great.)
Tadié is normally quite restrained and respectful of Proust, but he appears to be equally dismayed by this 1914-1917 development, writing: "Suddenly the book was thrown into confusion by the invention of the character of Albertine." Proust himself referred to ALL of Albertine -- including where she was retroactively added to Book 2 and Book 3 -- as “the episode,” or as Tadié says, “that is to say, the whole story of Albertine,” which Proust “added to sections and chapters that had already been written and structured."
A key bit of biographical data is important here – Proust had a (self-admitted, and by any measure) tempestuous, unhealthy, and obsessive sexual relationship with his secretary, Alfred Agostinelli, from late 1913 until the latter's death in May 1914. Most Albertine sections were originally drafted in 1915; it should be kept in mind that many of Proust's friends were dying in WW1 at this point, and he was also taking a heroic amount of drugs (amyl nitrate, barbituates, opiates, datura, pure adrenaline) . . . in short, our author was not having a good time, mentally. His experience with Agostinelli is very clearly the impetus for the Albertine episode, which has such totally reasonable passages as, e.g.: "A person need have no sincerity, nor even of skill in lying, in order to be loved. Here I mean by 'love' reciprocal torture" (III:105).
If the Albertine cycle had been published as a second, completely separate novel -- which it almost certainly should have been -- then this second novel would undoubtedly be seen as the inferior work. And again, it's worth noting that even the best scenes and mini-essays in Book 4 and Book 5 were written prior to 1913; e.g., the automobile scene with Albertine was originally written in 1907 with a different character.
I'm not saying that Proust completely failed to incorporate the Albertine novel into Temps perdu; he did a reasonably good job of fitting Albertine into the preexisting novel. But this second stage has the least interesting material, by far. I think you can argue for an interlude from Book 4 to Book 7 where Morel-Charlus form a thematic counterpart to Marcel-Albertine, the homosexuality material, etc.; there’s a very good 300-page novel in there somewhere. But adding 1,400 pages on Albertine simply overdoes it; the novel becomes top-heavy, unbalanced by too many love interests. The early delicately constructed balance of Gilberte and Oriane as the narrator's two loves (both of whom are strongly connected to Swann, whose affair with Odette forms the model for the narrator) is now confused by adding a third love interest; it just doesn't quite work. In Proust's defense, he was only 136 pages into editing Book 5 when he died, and odds are high that he would have ended up cutting a fair amount of the weakest material in Books 5-6 . . . but I have to go with the version we have.
This is not to say that nothing of value was added in 1914-1917; the "Paris at war" scenes in Book 7 are indisputably impressive, the addition of the destruction of the Combray church (III:822) is brilliant, and some (though not all) of the essays in Book 7 were added in 1915-16. But the Proust of 1907-1912 is a very different writer, and clearly a better writer in my opinion, than the Proust of 1914-1921.
In short, if Gavrilo Princip had stopped at any other cafe in Sarajevo on the afternoon of June 28, 1914, Gallimard would have published a 600,000 word, three-volume version of Temps perdu in 1915 that would likely have been held in even higher esteem than the 1.3m-word version that we have in our timeline.
And as I later learned, many Proust scholars enthusiastically support the idea of a shortened/condensed Proust. Shattuck writes: “We have Frazer and Gibbon in one-volume editions . . . when copyright expires, will we be offered a pocket Proust?” and then he offers a version that is similar to mine, though he proposes cutting slightly more material out of Books 3-4, along with some other adjustments. I can basically get on board with his version, though, again, I wouldn’t cut quite as much; I also think you can maybe make a good version of the Albertine cycle, but it would need to be considerably shorter.
(end of part 1)
[I sincerely apologize but there is somehow actually a second, equally long part of this review]
H. James
"An enormous and yet singularly light and translucent work . . . the best novel of its era.”
Nabokov
"There are many pages of Proust that are as tedious as life itself."
Borges
"The greatest novelist of the twentieth century.”
Greene
"A hermaphrodite, toadlike creature spooning his own tepid juice over his face and body."
A. Huxley
"Proust's great work has the simplicity and majesty of a cathedral."
A. Maurois
“Life is too short, and Proust is too long.”
A. France
“Reading Proust isn't just reading a book, it's an experience and you can't reject an experience.”
Gaddis
"The greatest fiction to date."
Maugham
"The clumsy centipedalian crawling of the interminable sentences . . ."
A. Bennett
“One reads Proust and thinks him very accomplished.”
Pound
"I don't understand [Proust]. To me, that's not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange."
Cormac M.
"A great writer . . . it cannot be estimated yet what these books have opened out for us and for the future; they are loaded with a wealth of discovery."
Rilke
"In a half-whispered voice [Proust] relates the most long-winded and boring dream of a fruitless and bloodless man -- a man who lives outside of reality."
Gorky
"There are, I suppose, faults to be found, but I am in a state of amazement; as if a miracle were being done before my eyes. . . . The pleasure becomes physical: like sun and wine and grapes and perfect serenity and intense vitality combined."
Woolf
"There is no special truth in him; he writes a careless self-indulgent prose, doesn't he? . . . Epithet follows epithet like tea cakes in flutes of paper."
Gass
"I wish I had written it myself."
Faulkner
"Proust shows life as analytical and immobile. The reader finishes his sentences before he does.”
Joyce
"It is a tiring style, but it does not tire the mind. One's fatigue is a fatigue of the heart, a blood fatigue. One is exhausted and angry after an hour, submerged, dominated by the crest and break of metaphor after metaphor."
Beckett
Somehow they’re all correct?
* * * * *
À la recherche du temps perdu
Book 1: 4.4 stars
Book 2: 4.3 stars
Book 3: 4.6 stars
Book 4: 4.2 stars
Book 5-6: 3.8 stars
Book 7: 4.7 stars
intangibles / je ne sais quoi: 5 stars
Total = 4.6-ish stars rounded up
* * * * *
So this summer I spent 63 days reading Proust and only Proust; I realized, finally, that I needed to narrow my focus due to many failed attempts to reach the summit over the years (beginning at age 17, when I first bought the Random House edition). I had read various other books by/on Proust over the past two decades, and had read enough sections of Temps perdu to know that it was extremely good, but somehow everything else in my reading list kept taking precedence.
In any event, two somewhat challenging months later, and the novel was roughly as good as I had expected from the sampling I’d read over the years; i.e., very, very good. With that said, I’m never reading Proust again (beyond maybe revisiting the best couple hundred pages); it’s great but not in the stratosphere of books like Ulysses or Memoires d'Hadrien that I'll happily reread every few years until I die.
Some books just take more work; Proust definitely reminds me of Broch or Gaddis, where the work-to-enjoyment ratio is high -- still definitely 'worth it', yet probably not for rereading. (I should note here that I have no sense of obligation to finish novels that I don't enjoy, and would have happily stopped reading Proust at any point if I thought he wasn't worth the effort.) The closest analogy I can think of is reading especially difficult or dense philosophy, where it’s challenging, but in a good way; I don’t think anyone reads Husserl or Scotus for “enjoyment,” precisely, yet they're still a joy to read at some level.
One thing I’ll say though; if you read Book 1 and don't love it, if you aren't blown away by the Overture / Combray sections, and aren’t impressed with the psychological themes of Swann in Love, if you don’t love the prose, then I would consider stopping there -- the remaining six books are (generally speaking) more of the same.
* * * * *
I'm certainly critical of some aspects of Temps perdu, but I just want to emphasize here at the outset that when Proust is good, he’s just off-the-charts ridiculously amazing. Along with thousands of great lines, immortally impressive pages include (Random House pagination):
Book 1: I:46-47, I:50-51, I:64-66, I:68, I:142, I:145, I:164-166, I:428, I:462
Book 2: I:684, I:704-705, I:871-872, I:899-900, I:959, I:995
Book 3: II:7-10, II:61, II:95, II:157, II:323-357 (grandmother’s death), II:399, II:436-437, II:617-620
Book 4: II:657, II:778-809 (intermittencies of the heart), II:927-928, II:1062, II:1132, II:1148
Book 5: III:74, III:100-101, III:186, III:251-252, III:259-262, III:380-382, III:413
Book 6: III:692
Book 7: III:709, III:757-758, III:778, III:785-786, III:828, III:876, III:898-909 (the revelation of involuntary memory), III:910-916, III:931, III:939, III:1087-89, III:1107
I would put these 155 pages up against the best 155 pages of any novelist of any era; I think probably Joyce comes out ahead but I can’t think of too many others who are really in contention. And this doesn’t even get into his other strengths; e.g., Proust’s descriptions of nature are relatively rare (he prefers inner landscapes) but even those are incredibly good:
II(3):360: "The fog had lifted. The grey light, falling like a fine rain, wove without ceasing a transparent web through which the Sunday strollers appeared in a silvery sheen."
II(3):400: "A few drops of rain fall soundlessly on the ancient water which, in its divine infancy, remains always the color of the weather and continually forgets the reflections of clouds and flowers."
II(4):894: ". . . taking her head in my hands, and showing her the wide shadows, flooded and silent, which extended in the gathering dusk to a horizon closed by the parallel chains of distant blue hills."
Proust is also an aphorism factory and it’s hard to even narrow down the best ones . . . here's a few selected at random:
I(2):594: “All original painting and music must always appear complicated and exhausting.”
I(2):955: "An artificial novelty is never so effective as a repetition that manages to suggest a fresh truth."
II(3):44: "His playing has become so transparent, so imbued with what he is interpreting, that one no longer sees the performer himself -- he is simply a window opening upon a great work of art."
II(3):236: "Society is like sexual behavior, in that no one knows what perversions it may develop once aesthetic considerations are allowed to dictate its choices."
II(3):358: "A change in the weather is sufficient to create the world and ourselves anew."
II(3):430: "The highest praise of God consists in the denial of him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect it can dispense with a creator."
III(5):382: "The great men of letters have never created more than a single work, or rather have never done more than refract through various media an identical beauty which they bring into the world."
III(7):916: "An artwork in which there are theories is like an object which still has its price-tag on it."
III(7):927 ". . . that flight to get away from our own life which goes by the name of erudition."
Letters 393: “Art is the perpetual sacrificing of inclination to truth.”
And there are so many other things that he gets right . . . the metaphors are unique and almost comically creative; virtually all of the essays on philosophy/art criticism/psychology are worth reading: the analysis of Elstir's painting at the end of Book 2, the opening essay on homosexuality in Book 4, the aesthetics essays in Book 5 and Book 7, and certainly the revelation in Book 7 of involuntary memory, which is up there with Joyce's Dollymount Strand vision in Portrait. Also, the characters -- where do you even begin with how good these characters are. They're similar to the archetypal yet individual characters of Tolstoy; St. Loup, Charlus, Francoise, Mme. Verdurin, Swann, Odette, and Elstir are just as memorable to me as Kitty, Anna, Vronsky, and the rest.
Critics have of course praised the tour de force scenes such as the death of the narrator's grandmother, etc., but there are so many other minor scenes that don't get enough credit -- i.e., Swann tactfully bringing up his impending death at the Guermantes salon in the final four pages of Book 3 is so brilliant and darkly comic that I wonder why more critics haven't talked about it; Proust's virtuosity here is almost intimidating. Another thing that I don't think Proust gets enough credit for is the subtlety of the narrator's aging, it's a very slow and carefully calibrated adjustment where you suddenly realize, every few hundred pages, that the narrator is no longer a teeanger, is no longer a young man, etc., despite a strong continuity in the prose style -- it's similar to the real-life experience of looking in the mirror and suddenly realizing that you've aged a few years.
With all that said, I cannot avoid talking about:
THE PROBLEM WITH ALBERTINE
So when I first completed Proust, before I dove into the manuscript tradition to figure out what was going on, my first instinct was that the narrative became seriously bogged down with Albertine around the middle of Book 4, and that despite occasional good scenes in Books 4-6, the entire Albertine cycle was significantly weaker than the other material in Temps perdu. I have some other minor issues with Proust, to be sure -- e.g., I think it’s fair to say that the salon/party scenes are, in general, simply not very good. If they were kept at a more reasonable length, I don’t think there’s any issue; but Gide should have talked Proust down from the length of these scenes. I’m not saying that the party scenes are somehow ‘unnecessary’ or ‘boring’; they're well-written in terms of line-by-line prose, I understand why they’re in the novel, they add depth to the characters, etc. I’m saying they’re simply too long; Proust did not edit them correctly -- e.g., II(3):450-601 is repetitive in an unhelpful and uninteresting way, nothing is gained after the first 70 pages or so.
The problem with Albertine, on the other hand, is a bit more serious. The sudden shift out of the Albertine narrative at III(6):670, with about forty pages left in Book 6, felt suspicious to me, and actually was the impetus for me to dig into Tadié’s scholarship and figure out if my intuition was correct, i.e., that the whole ‘Albertine novels’ sequence was a later addition grafted onto a pre-existing narrative. (Oddly enough, I went through an identical process after reading Gaddis's Recognitions, where I had a suspicion that the inferior 400-page "Greenwich Village novel" was jammed into the superior 500-page "Gwyon/Wyatt Novel," and it turned out that I was right.)
Before working through Tadié, I had a vague sense that you could maybe improve Temps perdu by cutting the slowest few dozen pages of Swann in Love, tighten the Gilberte / Albertine material in Book 2, cut some of the party scenes in Book 3, most of the Albertine saga in Books 4-6, etc. Also the reveries are great, but there are, by any standard, too many of them; you wouldn’t lose the ‘atmosphere’ of Proust if you had a tightened version that was a thousand (or, frankly, even two thousand) pages shorter.
I certainly wouldn't say that these less-impressive sections are ‘bad’, exactly; rather, it’s like Paradise Lost, of which Harold Bloom said: “It is a work that no one wishes were longer.” No one is saying that Milton isn’t a genius, but just that if he had published a version of Paradise Lost that was 30% shorter, maybe it would be better. (And if, say, someone were to stumble across a longer version of Paradise Lost in manuscript form in the Bodleian Libraries in 2039, it wouldn't be better just because it had more text by Milton.)
Anyway, it turns out that the "condensed Proust" that I vaguely had in mind -- cutting a couple of the party scenes, almost everything with Albertine, and retaining all of the best passages (Overture-Combray, St. Loup, Elstir at Balbec, grandmother's death + intermittencies, the opera opening and early scenes in Book 3, the Charlus concert scene + drama at the Verdurins, most of Book 7), is PRECISELY Proust's first completed version of the novel.
It is generally known, and even mentioned in the introduction to Montcrieff, that Proust had completed a three-volume version of Temps perdu in 1911-1912, which was in the later proofing/editing stages by early 1914. WW1 broke out, and publishing was no longer possible -- lead (used in printing presses) and paper were needed for the war effort -- which gave Proust a few years to expand his story by another 700,000 words, with the bulk of the writing happening in late 1914-1917.
Tadié goes into the full manuscript history on pp. 562-655 of his Proust: A Life and it’s just surreal. Everything that drags or is somehow unideal in the 1.3-million-word version -- or at least the vast, vast majority of it -- was added in 1914-1917 (with slight expansions in 1918-1921). Proust's original 1912 three-volume version had Overture/Combray, Swann in Love, Gilberte, Bergotte, Elstir, all of Balbec (except for the Albertine scenes, crucially), Charlus's concert and drama at the Verdurins, the grandmother’s death + intermittencies, the St. Loup material, the airplane/car passages, the full conclusion and involuntary memory revelation in Book 7 (without the interminable party scene at the end), and so on . . . the “greatest hits” of the seven-volume version were already there, completed, in a three-volume version, in 1912. (Incidentally, Proust instructed his housekeeper to burn the 32 notebooks containing the original, superior version of Temps perdu, which is . . . great.)
Tadié is normally quite restrained and respectful of Proust, but he appears to be equally dismayed by this 1914-1917 development, writing: "Suddenly the book was thrown into confusion by the invention of the character of Albertine." Proust himself referred to ALL of Albertine -- including where she was retroactively added to Book 2 and Book 3 -- as “the episode,” or as Tadié says, “that is to say, the whole story of Albertine,” which Proust “added to sections and chapters that had already been written and structured."
A key bit of biographical data is important here – Proust had a (self-admitted, and by any measure) tempestuous, unhealthy, and obsessive sexual relationship with his secretary, Alfred Agostinelli, from late 1913 until the latter's death in May 1914. Most Albertine sections were originally drafted in 1915; it should be kept in mind that many of Proust's friends were dying in WW1 at this point, and he was also taking a heroic amount of drugs (amyl nitrate, barbituates, opiates, datura, pure adrenaline) . . . in short, our author was not having a good time, mentally. His experience with Agostinelli is very clearly the impetus for the Albertine episode, which has such totally reasonable passages as, e.g.: "A person need have no sincerity, nor even of skill in lying, in order to be loved. Here I mean by 'love' reciprocal torture" (III:105).
If the Albertine cycle had been published as a second, completely separate novel -- which it almost certainly should have been -- then this second novel would undoubtedly be seen as the inferior work. And again, it's worth noting that even the best scenes and mini-essays in Book 4 and Book 5 were written prior to 1913; e.g., the automobile scene with Albertine was originally written in 1907 with a different character.
I'm not saying that Proust completely failed to incorporate the Albertine novel into Temps perdu; he did a reasonably good job of fitting Albertine into the preexisting novel. But this second stage has the least interesting material, by far. I think you can argue for an interlude from Book 4 to Book 7 where Morel-Charlus form a thematic counterpart to Marcel-Albertine, the homosexuality material, etc.; there’s a very good 300-page novel in there somewhere. But adding 1,400 pages on Albertine simply overdoes it; the novel becomes top-heavy, unbalanced by too many love interests. The early delicately constructed balance of Gilberte and Oriane as the narrator's two loves (both of whom are strongly connected to Swann, whose affair with Odette forms the model for the narrator) is now confused by adding a third love interest; it just doesn't quite work. In Proust's defense, he was only 136 pages into editing Book 5 when he died, and odds are high that he would have ended up cutting a fair amount of the weakest material in Books 5-6 . . . but I have to go with the version we have.
This is not to say that nothing of value was added in 1914-1917; the "Paris at war" scenes in Book 7 are indisputably impressive, the addition of the destruction of the Combray church (III:822) is brilliant, and some (though not all) of the essays in Book 7 were added in 1915-16. But the Proust of 1907-1912 is a very different writer, and clearly a better writer in my opinion, than the Proust of 1914-1921.
In short, if Gavrilo Princip had stopped at any other cafe in Sarajevo on the afternoon of June 28, 1914, Gallimard would have published a 600,000 word, three-volume version of Temps perdu in 1915 that would likely have been held in even higher esteem than the 1.3m-word version that we have in our timeline.
And as I later learned, many Proust scholars enthusiastically support the idea of a shortened/condensed Proust. Shattuck writes: “We have Frazer and Gibbon in one-volume editions . . . when copyright expires, will we be offered a pocket Proust?” and then he offers a version that is similar to mine, though he proposes cutting slightly more material out of Books 3-4, along with some other adjustments. I can basically get on board with his version, though, again, I wouldn’t cut quite as much; I also think you can maybe make a good version of the Albertine cycle, but it would need to be considerably shorter.
(end of part 1)
[I sincerely apologize but there is somehow actually a second, equally long part of this review]
August 21, 2023
This is not a positive review. (my appreciative review of the entire book is posted on book 7- you can see it there https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... );
I’m trying to find an excuse pleading in the defense of in search of lost time’s length, but I just can’t bring myself to think that a grown man complains in his book about having wasted his « time » all his life and then proceed not to think things through enough before writing a 4000-pages narrative for over a decade to manifest a thematic scheme he coulda done quicker with more imagination ?
How are you expressing through the end of the book that you’ve learned something from those experiences while implying another by the styllistic decisions of that very book?
I have two major artistic frustrations with this story
1- With his presentation, one of his most important themes is being inhibited:
I’ve already talked about it, somnambulist prose increase the expression of some themes and dampens the expressions of others.
So I will just go to my next artistic frustration.
2- The length does not have satisfying thematic justifications.
First of all, these are the themes of the story.
1-Voluntary remembrance of past things (and its chaotic and overwhelming nature)
2-involuntary remembrance (and its haphazard nature)
3-Idealized version of an unlived reality,
4-Seeking the unknown first-thinking later,
5-leading to the loss of his past life,
6-seeking now deeply the essence of objects that Interest him before acting on whatever,
7-appreciating the mundane reality more than the deceitful, dreamed, anticipated future,
8-the fleetingness of all things because of the passage of time
9- Only years later, he realize Nostalgia made him realize past memories he so wanted to apprehend are conserved for eternity inside him
10- Reliving his memories (which we are doing right now by reading the book)
--
There were no need for this book to be 7 pages long…
Swann’s Way express all of these themes, except the full loss of his past life (#5), and theme #10. (Theme #9’s reveal is dependent of when them #10 is achieved).
There's nothing from book 2 (nearly a thousand pages) to book 6 that adds thematic depth to anything beside theme 5 (the loss of his past long life), and theme 10 (reliving his memories).
Basically the length of the book Is justified by trying to express the significance of those two themes.
-
1st reason why the book is this long - Theme 10: Writing the book to relive all those memories
The story is so lengthy partly because Proust is reliving in full details his past life as a consolatory experience for his past mistakes. (and unexpected awareness of self-growth -which is already fully expressed in Swann’s way through themes #6, #7, and #8).
I understand that everyone is different, I really do.
But themes need to be assessed by how meaningful they are.
Otherwise everyone can just write about a theme like ‘peeing is so liberating’ and we can’t critique them on that.
The meaningfulness of a theme is assessed by its importance on life.
And I just found Proust’s theme 10 very low on that.
And so this meaningfully low theme, should not warrant this much damage it is causing to another important theme (nostalgia effect – because it is too long to get to that).
The audience’s comfort to apprehend every themes is not being maximized.
--
2nd reason why the book is this long- Theme 5: the full loss of his past life (#5):
imagine if a writer had conceptual imagination and structure a narrative where the life span of the individual progresses more quickly while highlighting all of what is already highlighted on Swann’s way (the very first book).
But Proust did not want to be bothered with that organization.
And This refusal of thematic conception would be okay if what he did had a positive impact on any themes… but it does not.
On a thematic level, the only thing that book 2 ( I repeat nearly a thousand pages), 3, 4, 5 and book 6 contribute is to progress the lifespan of the narrator but slowly. (theme #5)
The metaphysical realism of the theme is not even felt by this narrative choice because people’s lives aren’t a series of similar experiences.
Narrating them to infinity does not increase the realism of the life experience.
So in either cases (if the narrative were shorter, and if the narrative is as long as it is right now), this specific theme of loss of his past life would feel the same to the audience because Proust narrates the exact same types of events.
---
To me, the length of this book does not have satisfying thematic justifications (a meaningfully low consolation, and an ineffective increase of the realism of a theme).
I’m trying to find an excuse pleading in the defense of in search of lost time’s length, but I just can’t bring myself to think that a grown man complains in his book about having wasted his « time » all his life and then proceed not to think things through enough before writing a 4000-pages narrative for over a decade to manifest a thematic scheme he coulda done quicker with more imagination ?
How are you expressing through the end of the book that you’ve learned something from those experiences while implying another by the styllistic decisions of that very book?
I have two major artistic frustrations with this story
1- With his presentation, one of his most important themes is being inhibited:
I’ve already talked about it, somnambulist prose increase the expression of some themes and dampens the expressions of others.
So I will just go to my next artistic frustration.
2- The length does not have satisfying thematic justifications.
First of all, these are the themes of the story.
1-Voluntary remembrance of past things (and its chaotic and overwhelming nature)
2-involuntary remembrance (and its haphazard nature)
3-Idealized version of an unlived reality,
4-Seeking the unknown first-thinking later,
5-leading to the loss of his past life,
6-seeking now deeply the essence of objects that Interest him before acting on whatever,
7-appreciating the mundane reality more than the deceitful, dreamed, anticipated future,
8-the fleetingness of all things because of the passage of time
9- Only years later, he realize Nostalgia made him realize past memories he so wanted to apprehend are conserved for eternity inside him
10- Reliving his memories (which we are doing right now by reading the book)
--
There were no need for this book to be 7 pages long…
Swann’s Way express all of these themes, except the full loss of his past life (#5), and theme #10. (Theme #9’s reveal is dependent of when them #10 is achieved).
There's nothing from book 2 (nearly a thousand pages) to book 6 that adds thematic depth to anything beside theme 5 (the loss of his past long life), and theme 10 (reliving his memories).
Basically the length of the book Is justified by trying to express the significance of those two themes.
-
1st reason why the book is this long - Theme 10: Writing the book to relive all those memories
The story is so lengthy partly because Proust is reliving in full details his past life as a consolatory experience for his past mistakes. (and unexpected awareness of self-growth -which is already fully expressed in Swann’s way through themes #6, #7, and #8).
I understand that everyone is different, I really do.
But themes need to be assessed by how meaningful they are.
Otherwise everyone can just write about a theme like ‘peeing is so liberating’ and we can’t critique them on that.
The meaningfulness of a theme is assessed by its importance on life.
And I just found Proust’s theme 10 very low on that.
And so this meaningfully low theme, should not warrant this much damage it is causing to another important theme (nostalgia effect – because it is too long to get to that).
The audience’s comfort to apprehend every themes is not being maximized.
--
2nd reason why the book is this long- Theme 5: the full loss of his past life (#5):
imagine if a writer had conceptual imagination and structure a narrative where the life span of the individual progresses more quickly while highlighting all of what is already highlighted on Swann’s way (the very first book).
But Proust did not want to be bothered with that organization.
And This refusal of thematic conception would be okay if what he did had a positive impact on any themes… but it does not.
On a thematic level, the only thing that book 2 ( I repeat nearly a thousand pages), 3, 4, 5 and book 6 contribute is to progress the lifespan of the narrator but slowly. (theme #5)
The metaphysical realism of the theme is not even felt by this narrative choice because people’s lives aren’t a series of similar experiences.
Narrating them to infinity does not increase the realism of the life experience.
So in either cases (if the narrative were shorter, and if the narrative is as long as it is right now), this specific theme of loss of his past life would feel the same to the audience because Proust narrates the exact same types of events.
---
To me, the length of this book does not have satisfying thematic justifications (a meaningfully low consolation, and an ineffective increase of the realism of a theme).
August 25, 2021
#در_جستجوی_زمان_از_دست_رفته# را با همهی کش و قوسها در مسیر خواندنش تمام کردم! چند ساعتی است که به پروست و افکارش و ارتباط بین این کتاب و کتاب دوباتن به نام" پروست چگونه میتواند زندگی شما را دگرگون کند" فکر میکنم... پروست در این رمان سعی کرده به ژرفای معنای زندگی بپردازد و شاید به همین خاطر است که روایتی مستقیم و داستانگونه را لمس نمیکنیم! رگههای فلسفی در سطر به سطر کتاب دیده میشود. بسیاری معتقدند که دغدغه زمان محوریترین موتیف این مجموعه است. پروست عجیب به این موضوع پرداخته است حتی در انتخاب نام کتاب نیز به این امر نظر ویژهای داشته است: "زمان، آدمها را دگرگون میکند، اما تصویری که از آنها داریم را ثابت نگه میدارد. هیچ چیز دردناکتر از دگرگونی آدمها و ثبات خاطره نیست" "ژیل دلوز" معتقد است این اثر جستجوی حقیقت است حقیقتی که رابطهی تنگاتنگ با زمان دارد.اما به گمانم دغدغه اصلی پروست"انسان" است. انسانی دربند زمان، مکان و خاطرات. انسانی که به جرم انسان بودن درگیر عشق، درد و رنج است و چه بسا عشق در این مسیر هزارتوی زندگی اندکی التیام باشد!
در جستجوی زمان از دست رفته مهمترین و مفصلترین رمان قرن بیستم محسوب میشود که در ۷ جلد به چاپ رسیده است.
اما تجربه من از خواندن این اثر:
رمانی بس خواندنی بود منتها همتی فراوان برای خواندن این مجموعه ۷ جلدی نیاز است و دیدی فلسفی و روان شناختی برای درک تابلوی پروست از انسان!
در جستجوی زمان از دست رفته مهمترین و مفصلترین رمان قرن بیستم محسوب میشود که در ۷ جلد به چاپ رسیده است.
اما تجربه من از خواندن این اثر:
رمانی بس خواندنی بود منتها همتی فراوان برای خواندن این مجموعه ۷ جلدی نیاز است و دیدی فلسفی و روان شناختی برای درک تابلوی پروست از انسان!
July 31, 2016
Questa non è una recensione, ce ne sono in giro già abbastanza. Anzi, ciò che è stato scritto a proposito della Recherce supera di gran lunga il numero di pagine della Recherche stessa. Inoltre, se continuano ad esserci lettori che macinano con gioia le 2000 e più pagine del romanzo, un motivo ci sarà: è bello.
Quindi mi limito a lasciare qui qualche appunto, pensieri che mi vengono in mente durante la lettura.
DALLA PARTE DI SWANN
Ho sempre associato questa prima parte alla primavera e anche oggi mi fa lo stesso effetto. Immagino siano le descrizioni delle passeggiate e dei paesaggi. Non vedo l'ora che il tempo mi permetta di leggere all'aperto.
Intanto Swann ha incontrato Odette ed il guinzaglio si fa sempre più corto, fino a sfociare in un matrimonio socialmente esecrabile. Odette è un personaggio triste, una mantenuta senza altra dote che la bellezza, che non si fa scrupolo ad usare.
Odette e Swann avranno una bambina: conclusa la generazione dei padri, si passa al parco a giocare coi figli
ALL'OMBRA DELLE FANCIULLE IN FIORE
Perché leggere Proust oggi? Anche solo per la descrizione del teatro, e dell'emozione di andarci per la prima volta. Il nostro giovane è passato dall'essere mammone ad essere terribilmente romantico.
Proust è in grado di descrivere i bagni pubblici come se fossero una sala da tè.
Non riesco a capire esattamente quanti abbia il fanciullo che va in vacanza a Balbec. Prima gioca alla lotta con Gilberte traendone un piacere da adulto, ora è in crisi nel dover lasciare la madre per una breve vacanza. Intanto si ubriaca, dietro consiglio medico, per affrontare le emozioni di un viaggio in treno (lascio a voi pendolari eventuali battute sull'abbinamento alcool-trenitalia).
Ed eccomi alle ultime pagine del secondo libro. Il giovanotto è in vacanza al mare e la nonna è ormai dimenticata a favore di un gruppo di ragazze tra cui spicca Albertine, la fanciulla che darà titolo a uno dei prossimi volumi.
Il ragazzino è un marpioncello in divenire. Nota ogni ragazza in egual misura, per tutte sembra trovare un particolare di suo interesse. Quando ne "conquista" una, il che spesso significa semplicemente esserle presentato ed aver scambiato due parole, ammette candidamente che la conoscenza e l'abitudine cancellano la passione. La realtà è infatti molto meno passionale dei sogni ad occhi aperti.
Io intanto provo piacere ed interesse a vederlo crescere. Non è un personaggio simpatico: è spesso superficiale, attirato più dalla moda che dalla sostanza. Si è creato una sorta di persona immaginaria a cui aspira: va a teatro credendo di cadere vittima di una sorta di sindrome di Stendhal e ci rimane male perché ha provato "solo" il piacere di un normale intrattenimento. Ma dato che altri raccontano quella stessa opera come un capolavoro creto dall'attrice protagonista, allora ecco che il nostro eroe si ri-racconta l'esperienza fino a farla combaciare con lo standard che si era inventato. Al giorno d'oggi si parlerebbe di peer-pressure (fare cose e tenere certi atteggiamenti per soddisfare il gruppo a cui si appartiene), lui riesce a farsi peer-pressure da solo.
I GUERMANTES
Ed eccoci nella casa nuova. Francoise è simpatica come sempre, ma sono arrivata al primo scoglio. Saint-Loup e la celebrazione dell'arte militare mi annoiano parecchio, voglio tornare alle seghe mentali del protagonista.
Saint-Loup è l'uomo zerbino, erede di Swann. Il nostro eroe punta alla zia di Saint-Loup, ma senza costrutto. La cosa interessante è la cronaca dell'affare Dreyfuss, che viene superficialmente citato dai personaggi.
Sono alle ultime pagine di questo volume e sto facendo fatica. La scrittura di Proust è sempre ottima e una volta ricominciato a leggere veleggio serenamente tra salotti e frivolezze, ma il problema è proprio riprendere in mano il racconto dopo una pausa. Sono, infatti, 547 pagine (1534-987) di salotti, di viziate signore aristocratiche che fanno battutine di spirito a cui tutti ridacchiano per dovere (non fanno ridere), donne che fanno le eccentriche a tutti i costi credendo così di farsi notare, principesse di spirito popolano che per dimostrarsi d'ampie vedute trattano gli inferiori come simpatici animaletti bisognosi di attenzioni. Facendo un paragone con la cultura popolare italiana mi è venuto in mente l'episodio di Fantozzi in cui i dipendenti della megaditta vengono invitati a cena a casa della Contessa Serbelloni Mazzanti Viendalmare e lei continua a chiamarli "inferiori".
E, diciamocelo, questa Guermantes è davvero antipatica, una gatta morta.
Il mazzo di asparagi di Elstir-Manet che i Guermantes non hanno comprato
SODOMA E GOMORRA
Ma che simpatico questo Proust. Esordisce con una descrizione piuttosto allegra dell'omosessualità maschile, ma quando viene ipotizzata quella femminile allora è scandalo e fastidio.
Però, amico Proust, un filo d'azione potresti anche mettercela. Un colpo di scena, che so. Guarda, accetto anche due lacrimucce in stile "C'è posta per te", ma andiamo avanti. Interessante la digressione sull'etimologia di alcuni termini, ma ora basta con queste conversazioni superficiali da salotto. Mi sento come l'invitata che non conosce nessuno, non condivide i gusti degli altri e se ne sta in un angolo sbocconcellando un pasticcino e sorridendo ebete, cercando una scusa per potersi allontanare presto dal party più noioso della storia.
LA PRIGIONIERA
Titolo esaustivo. Il nostro eroe è sempre più disturbato e ritiene che infilarsi Albertine in casa sia un miglioramento. La fanciulla ci sta perché si fa mantenere mica male e tanto lo frega come vuole. Continuano le ansie per le supposte relazioni omosessuali di Albertine.
Secondo me di lesbico Albertine non ha nulla, ma questo Christian Grey d'antan semplicemente non vuole che lei abbia relazioni con esseri umani diversi da lui e Francoise. E diciamocelo: anche Francoise ci mette del suo per abusare psicologicamente di Albertine.
Poi abbiamo i Verdurin, che con tutti i difetti non riusciamo però ad abbandonare. Sono come dei parenti alla lontana, quelli strani che devi sopportare a matrimoni e funerali.
ALBERTINE SCOMPARSA
E dopo l'omosessualità allegra del tomo precedente, esordiamo con una simpatica accusa di corruzione di minore.
No, fermi tutti! E adesso?
E adesso nulla, il chiodo è sempre lo stesso: Albertine è lesbica? Ha mai fatto sesso con altre ragazze? Se sì, come/cosa ha fatto?
Qualcuno dia un abbonamento Pornhub a quest'uomo!
Muore giovane chi è caro agli dei.
IL TEMPO RITROVATO
Non riesco a crederci, sono alla fine. Guerra e sadomaso.
No, ma dai, adesso parte il pippone malinconico. In effetti, a poche (relativamente parlando) pagine dalla fine la necessità di congedarsi e fare il punto della situazione è sentita. Ritorna la madeleine iniziale, ancora più carica di significato ora che sappiamo tutta la storia.
6 mesi, 2000 pagine, tanti personaggi peculiari che sono diventati una sorta di famiglia letteraria: il treno è in ritardo? Ottimo, approfittiamone per andare a vedere cosa fanno questi eccentrici francesi.
Ebbene, sono arrivata alla fine. Troppo presto, non ero pronta. E adesso? Con chi li passo i prossimi 6 mesi, ora che non ho più la compagnia di questi vanesi, superficiali francesi?
http://www.marcelproust.it/
Quindi mi limito a lasciare qui qualche appunto, pensieri che mi vengono in mente durante la lettura.
DALLA PARTE DI SWANN
Ho sempre associato questa prima parte alla primavera e anche oggi mi fa lo stesso effetto. Immagino siano le descrizioni delle passeggiate e dei paesaggi. Non vedo l'ora che il tempo mi permetta di leggere all'aperto.
Intanto Swann ha incontrato Odette ed il guinzaglio si fa sempre più corto, fino a sfociare in un matrimonio socialmente esecrabile. Odette è un personaggio triste, una mantenuta senza altra dote che la bellezza, che non si fa scrupolo ad usare.
Odette e Swann avranno una bambina: conclusa la generazione dei padri, si passa al parco a giocare coi figli
ALL'OMBRA DELLE FANCIULLE IN FIORE
Perché leggere Proust oggi? Anche solo per la descrizione del teatro, e dell'emozione di andarci per la prima volta. Il nostro giovane è passato dall'essere mammone ad essere terribilmente romantico.
Proust è in grado di descrivere i bagni pubblici come se fossero una sala da tè.
Non riesco a capire esattamente quanti abbia il fanciullo che va in vacanza a Balbec. Prima gioca alla lotta con Gilberte traendone un piacere da adulto, ora è in crisi nel dover lasciare la madre per una breve vacanza. Intanto si ubriaca, dietro consiglio medico, per affrontare le emozioni di un viaggio in treno (lascio a voi pendolari eventuali battute sull'abbinamento alcool-trenitalia).
Ed eccomi alle ultime pagine del secondo libro. Il giovanotto è in vacanza al mare e la nonna è ormai dimenticata a favore di un gruppo di ragazze tra cui spicca Albertine, la fanciulla che darà titolo a uno dei prossimi volumi.
Il ragazzino è un marpioncello in divenire. Nota ogni ragazza in egual misura, per tutte sembra trovare un particolare di suo interesse. Quando ne "conquista" una, il che spesso significa semplicemente esserle presentato ed aver scambiato due parole, ammette candidamente che la conoscenza e l'abitudine cancellano la passione. La realtà è infatti molto meno passionale dei sogni ad occhi aperti.
Io intanto provo piacere ed interesse a vederlo crescere. Non è un personaggio simpatico: è spesso superficiale, attirato più dalla moda che dalla sostanza. Si è creato una sorta di persona immaginaria a cui aspira: va a teatro credendo di cadere vittima di una sorta di sindrome di Stendhal e ci rimane male perché ha provato "solo" il piacere di un normale intrattenimento. Ma dato che altri raccontano quella stessa opera come un capolavoro creto dall'attrice protagonista, allora ecco che il nostro eroe si ri-racconta l'esperienza fino a farla combaciare con lo standard che si era inventato. Al giorno d'oggi si parlerebbe di peer-pressure (fare cose e tenere certi atteggiamenti per soddisfare il gruppo a cui si appartiene), lui riesce a farsi peer-pressure da solo.
I GUERMANTES
Ed eccoci nella casa nuova. Francoise è simpatica come sempre, ma sono arrivata al primo scoglio. Saint-Loup e la celebrazione dell'arte militare mi annoiano parecchio, voglio tornare alle seghe mentali del protagonista.
Saint-Loup è l'uomo zerbino, erede di Swann. Il nostro eroe punta alla zia di Saint-Loup, ma senza costrutto. La cosa interessante è la cronaca dell'affare Dreyfuss, che viene superficialmente citato dai personaggi.
Sono alle ultime pagine di questo volume e sto facendo fatica. La scrittura di Proust è sempre ottima e una volta ricominciato a leggere veleggio serenamente tra salotti e frivolezze, ma il problema è proprio riprendere in mano il racconto dopo una pausa. Sono, infatti, 547 pagine (1534-987) di salotti, di viziate signore aristocratiche che fanno battutine di spirito a cui tutti ridacchiano per dovere (non fanno ridere), donne che fanno le eccentriche a tutti i costi credendo così di farsi notare, principesse di spirito popolano che per dimostrarsi d'ampie vedute trattano gli inferiori come simpatici animaletti bisognosi di attenzioni. Facendo un paragone con la cultura popolare italiana mi è venuto in mente l'episodio di Fantozzi in cui i dipendenti della megaditta vengono invitati a cena a casa della Contessa Serbelloni Mazzanti Viendalmare e lei continua a chiamarli "inferiori".
E, diciamocelo, questa Guermantes è davvero antipatica, una gatta morta.
Il mazzo di asparagi di Elstir-Manet che i Guermantes non hanno comprato
SODOMA E GOMORRA
Ma che simpatico questo Proust. Esordisce con una descrizione piuttosto allegra dell'omosessualità maschile, ma quando viene ipotizzata quella femminile allora è scandalo e fastidio.
Però, amico Proust, un filo d'azione potresti anche mettercela. Un colpo di scena, che so. Guarda, accetto anche due lacrimucce in stile "C'è posta per te", ma andiamo avanti. Interessante la digressione sull'etimologia di alcuni termini, ma ora basta con queste conversazioni superficiali da salotto. Mi sento come l'invitata che non conosce nessuno, non condivide i gusti degli altri e se ne sta in un angolo sbocconcellando un pasticcino e sorridendo ebete, cercando una scusa per potersi allontanare presto dal party più noioso della storia.
LA PRIGIONIERA
Titolo esaustivo. Il nostro eroe è sempre più disturbato e ritiene che infilarsi Albertine in casa sia un miglioramento. La fanciulla ci sta perché si fa mantenere mica male e tanto lo frega come vuole. Continuano le ansie per le supposte relazioni omosessuali di Albertine.
Secondo me di lesbico Albertine non ha nulla, ma questo Christian Grey d'antan semplicemente non vuole che lei abbia relazioni con esseri umani diversi da lui e Francoise. E diciamocelo: anche Francoise ci mette del suo per abusare psicologicamente di Albertine.
Poi abbiamo i Verdurin, che con tutti i difetti non riusciamo però ad abbandonare. Sono come dei parenti alla lontana, quelli strani che devi sopportare a matrimoni e funerali.
ALBERTINE SCOMPARSA
E dopo l'omosessualità allegra del tomo precedente, esordiamo con una simpatica accusa di corruzione di minore.
No, fermi tutti! E adesso?
E adesso nulla, il chiodo è sempre lo stesso: Albertine è lesbica? Ha mai fatto sesso con altre ragazze? Se sì, come/cosa ha fatto?
Qualcuno dia un abbonamento Pornhub a quest'uomo!
Muore giovane chi è caro agli dei.
IL TEMPO RITROVATO
Non riesco a crederci, sono alla fine. Guerra e sadomaso.
No, ma dai, adesso parte il pippone malinconico. In effetti, a poche (relativamente parlando) pagine dalla fine la necessità di congedarsi e fare il punto della situazione è sentita. Ritorna la madeleine iniziale, ancora più carica di significato ora che sappiamo tutta la storia.
6 mesi, 2000 pagine, tanti personaggi peculiari che sono diventati una sorta di famiglia letteraria: il treno è in ritardo? Ottimo, approfittiamone per andare a vedere cosa fanno questi eccentrici francesi.
Ebbene, sono arrivata alla fine. Troppo presto, non ero pronta. E adesso? Con chi li passo i prossimi 6 mesi, ora che non ho più la compagnia di questi vanesi, superficiali francesi?
http://www.marcelproust.it/
May 10, 2013
There are some writers that have made such a unique contribution to literature and to art that they are considered among the best, if not the best, and not just in their own country, but in the world. Such a writer was Marcel Proust. He has been called the greatest novelist of the 20th century, and the novel, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, compared to Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling. But Michelangelo was known as “The Divine”, while Proust was called a hypochondriac, a dilettante, a homosexual and a mama’s boy. All of these things were true, to a certain extent, and when the first volume of In Search of Lost Time (Swann’s Way) was published in 1913, Proust’s friends were shocked that he had produced such a masterpiece. As Marcel himself said, there was not just one Proust, but many, and his many selves were often paradoxical and antithetical to each other. He used the ways of a hypochondriac to make people, mostly his mother, give him special treatment, yet he had his first asthma attack at age nine and struggled with ill health until his death at age 51. He was a social-climbing dilettante yet spent the last ten years of his life as a virtual recluse, shielded from the outside world by the cork-lined walls of his bedroom. He was a homosexual who wrote and spoke as if he deplored homosexuality. And he was a mama’s boy who used the love and anguish of that relationship as a springboard for the novel’s deep and enduring truths about all forms of love and devotion and life and art.
But do we really need to know anything about the writer to understand, or even appreciate, the work itself? Remembrance of Things Past, or as it is more accurately titled now, In Search of Lost Time, is often described as a semi-autobiographical work, so can’t we just read the books to know the man? No, in answer to both questions, but…yes. Although Proust only peripherally identifies the “Narrator” in Lost Time as himself, the book closely parallels his life, possibly a better phrase would be reflects his life (as some key things are reversed, as if seen in a mirror). And at the risk of sounding dramatic, Proust gave this life- mentally & physically- to the service of writing these volumes. He gave the novel his life and in return, it gave him immortality. Proust was aware of this “bargain with the devil” he’d made, and when he wrote fin at the end of the novel, he told his housekeeper/companion “Now I can die”…and shortly afterward, he did. Knowing something of the life of this man can help illuminate the world of Lost Time, as a reading of Lost Time illuminates not just Marcel’s life but all lives, our own included. That’s one of the reasons why this work is regarded as one of the world’s best, and why it is as relevant to us now as it was then and as it will continue to be in the future
In Search of Lost Time actually consists of seven volumes, the first being Swann’s Way. When these volumes were being translated into English, the translator changed the title, A la recherché du Temps Perdu, to a line from Shakespeare, “Remembrance of Things Past”. This is not only a bad interpretation of In Search of Lost Time , it’s not even what the novel is about. Marcel hated it. He didn’t much care for Swann’s Way either, which in French is Du cote de chez Swann, but what could he do? He was only the author.
So what is the novel about? And if it’s so great, why do so many people start reading it but give up before they even reach the famous madeleine scene? Is it because of Proust’s famously long sentences (the Proust Society of America says his longest is 958 words & may be the longest sentence in all of literature)? Or because, as one critic complained after the publication of Swann’s Way, that Proust takes fifteen pages to tell how he turns over in bed at night? Yes. But when the long sentences and the seemingly random and rambling passages begin to coalesce into a whole, and the invisible web of past, present and future becomes visible and clear, then the magnitude of this work and the joy of reading it shines through.
But what is it about? It's about life, from one life to all lives.
But do we really need to know anything about the writer to understand, or even appreciate, the work itself? Remembrance of Things Past, or as it is more accurately titled now, In Search of Lost Time, is often described as a semi-autobiographical work, so can’t we just read the books to know the man? No, in answer to both questions, but…yes. Although Proust only peripherally identifies the “Narrator” in Lost Time as himself, the book closely parallels his life, possibly a better phrase would be reflects his life (as some key things are reversed, as if seen in a mirror). And at the risk of sounding dramatic, Proust gave this life- mentally & physically- to the service of writing these volumes. He gave the novel his life and in return, it gave him immortality. Proust was aware of this “bargain with the devil” he’d made, and when he wrote fin at the end of the novel, he told his housekeeper/companion “Now I can die”…and shortly afterward, he did. Knowing something of the life of this man can help illuminate the world of Lost Time, as a reading of Lost Time illuminates not just Marcel’s life but all lives, our own included. That’s one of the reasons why this work is regarded as one of the world’s best, and why it is as relevant to us now as it was then and as it will continue to be in the future
In Search of Lost Time actually consists of seven volumes, the first being Swann’s Way. When these volumes were being translated into English, the translator changed the title, A la recherché du Temps Perdu, to a line from Shakespeare, “Remembrance of Things Past”. This is not only a bad interpretation of In Search of Lost Time , it’s not even what the novel is about. Marcel hated it. He didn’t much care for Swann’s Way either, which in French is Du cote de chez Swann, but what could he do? He was only the author.
So what is the novel about? And if it’s so great, why do so many people start reading it but give up before they even reach the famous madeleine scene? Is it because of Proust’s famously long sentences (the Proust Society of America says his longest is 958 words & may be the longest sentence in all of literature)? Or because, as one critic complained after the publication of Swann’s Way, that Proust takes fifteen pages to tell how he turns over in bed at night? Yes. But when the long sentences and the seemingly random and rambling passages begin to coalesce into a whole, and the invisible web of past, present and future becomes visible and clear, then the magnitude of this work and the joy of reading it shines through.
But what is it about? It's about life, from one life to all lives.
September 7, 2018
Dopo averlo letto in una traduzione non molto soddisfacente, tento una rilettura in lingua, e provo la stessa sensazione di quando io, miope da sempre, esco dal negozio dell'ottico indossando un nuovo paio di occhiali con la gradazione aggiornata, e alzo lo sguardo verso gli alberi, e mi accorgo che quelle chiome che prima percepivo come macchie verdi sono in realtà composte di foglie.
Ecco, è una rilettura lentissima, in cui mi godo ogni singola parola-foglia, invece di sorbire questa densissima prosa frase per frase - ritmo che già non sarebbe agile né scorrevole, data la lunghezza media dei periodi proustiani. Mi godo il piacere di scoprire quanto bene lo ricordassi dalla prima lettura; il piacere di imparare parole nuove; il piacere un po' maligno di vedere che i punti in cui la traduzione mi aveva lasciato scontenta o dubbiosa nella lingua originale scorrono che è una meraviglia. Mi durerà un anno, 'sto libro, ma sarà un anno speso bene.
7.6.2018. Finito oggi “Le côté de Guermantes”. Continuo a oscillare fra due sensazioni, fra “me lo ricordo così bene che mi pare di averlo letto ieri” e “ma l’altra volta non avevo capito proprio niente!”, e probabilmente sono vere entrambe, a turno.
Ogni tanto mi fermo e tossisco, semisoffocata dal boccone troppo grosso di un periodo lungo due pagine. Allora riprendo in mano la traduzione, dipano, confronto, scopro la musica interna fatta di anticipazioni, sospensioni, rimandi, parallelismi, chiasmi, e mi rendo conto della titanica difficoltà di tradurre questa musica, il ritmo che pare incespicante ed è sapientemente calcolato, mai lasciato al caso.
Ogni tanto mi sento soffocare dalla mostruosa bellezza di una frase che pare costruita solo per la sua musicalità e in cui invece ogni parola ha spessore, profondità, eco.
Ogni tanto vengo presa dalla frenesia di finire, di concludere, e brucio dieci pagine in cinque minuti: poi, obbediente alla necessità di seguire il ritmo dettato da Proust, torno indietro e pazientemente rileggo con proustiana, ineluttabile lentezza.
18.7.2018. Finito "Sodome et Gomorrhe". Snob, autoreferenziale, irresoluto, egocentrico, nevrotico, profittatore, stalker, arrampicatore, mammone... Niente da fare, io l'amo.
3.8.2018. Finito "La Prisonnière". Mi viene in mente V. M. Manfredi, che in "Akropolis" racconta come, preparando per un esame di greco dodici canti dell'Iliade, passò dal tradurre parola per parola a comprendere un'altra lingua. Non dico di avere imparato il francese, ma sono decisamente meno impedita. E di notte, mi capita di fare sogni proustiani. Quest'uomo mi crea dipendenza.
7.9.2018. Finito l'ultimo volume, che dà senso a tutta l'opera, mostrando come i piccoli episodi, che a volte mi hanno fatto pensare "ok, va bene l'introspezione, ma dedicare tante pagine a un particolare come questo mi pare eccessivo", fossero pietre fondamentali della costruzione perfettamente, splendidamente circolare, del libro che racconta se stesso - come in quel disegno di Escher delle due mani che si disegnano reciprocamente. Restano monumentali nella memoria l'epitaffio di Saint-Loup, l'intuizione della poetica del Tempo nella biblioteca della principessa di Guermantes (ultimo, beffardo avatar di M.me Verdurin), e la parata delle maschere funerarie della matinée Guermantes, dove sfilano i personaggi già noti, grottescamente trasformati dalla vecchiaia e in attesa della morte incombente. E il mio personaggio preferito, la fidata e crudele Françoise. E l'ultima fanciulla in fiore, la figlia di Gilberte e di Saint-Loup. E accidenti a lui, ho già voglia di ricominciarlo.
Ecco, è una rilettura lentissima, in cui mi godo ogni singola parola-foglia, invece di sorbire questa densissima prosa frase per frase - ritmo che già non sarebbe agile né scorrevole, data la lunghezza media dei periodi proustiani. Mi godo il piacere di scoprire quanto bene lo ricordassi dalla prima lettura; il piacere di imparare parole nuove; il piacere un po' maligno di vedere che i punti in cui la traduzione mi aveva lasciato scontenta o dubbiosa nella lingua originale scorrono che è una meraviglia. Mi durerà un anno, 'sto libro, ma sarà un anno speso bene.
7.6.2018. Finito oggi “Le côté de Guermantes”. Continuo a oscillare fra due sensazioni, fra “me lo ricordo così bene che mi pare di averlo letto ieri” e “ma l’altra volta non avevo capito proprio niente!”, e probabilmente sono vere entrambe, a turno.
Ogni tanto mi fermo e tossisco, semisoffocata dal boccone troppo grosso di un periodo lungo due pagine. Allora riprendo in mano la traduzione, dipano, confronto, scopro la musica interna fatta di anticipazioni, sospensioni, rimandi, parallelismi, chiasmi, e mi rendo conto della titanica difficoltà di tradurre questa musica, il ritmo che pare incespicante ed è sapientemente calcolato, mai lasciato al caso.
Ogni tanto mi sento soffocare dalla mostruosa bellezza di una frase che pare costruita solo per la sua musicalità e in cui invece ogni parola ha spessore, profondità, eco.
Ogni tanto vengo presa dalla frenesia di finire, di concludere, e brucio dieci pagine in cinque minuti: poi, obbediente alla necessità di seguire il ritmo dettato da Proust, torno indietro e pazientemente rileggo con proustiana, ineluttabile lentezza.
18.7.2018. Finito "Sodome et Gomorrhe". Snob, autoreferenziale, irresoluto, egocentrico, nevrotico, profittatore, stalker, arrampicatore, mammone... Niente da fare, io l'amo.
3.8.2018. Finito "La Prisonnière". Mi viene in mente V. M. Manfredi, che in "Akropolis" racconta come, preparando per un esame di greco dodici canti dell'Iliade, passò dal tradurre parola per parola a comprendere un'altra lingua. Non dico di avere imparato il francese, ma sono decisamente meno impedita. E di notte, mi capita di fare sogni proustiani. Quest'uomo mi crea dipendenza.
7.9.2018. Finito l'ultimo volume, che dà senso a tutta l'opera, mostrando come i piccoli episodi, che a volte mi hanno fatto pensare "ok, va bene l'introspezione, ma dedicare tante pagine a un particolare come questo mi pare eccessivo", fossero pietre fondamentali della costruzione perfettamente, splendidamente circolare, del libro che racconta se stesso - come in quel disegno di Escher delle due mani che si disegnano reciprocamente. Restano monumentali nella memoria l'epitaffio di Saint-Loup, l'intuizione della poetica del Tempo nella biblioteca della principessa di Guermantes (ultimo, beffardo avatar di M.me Verdurin), e la parata delle maschere funerarie della matinée Guermantes, dove sfilano i personaggi già noti, grottescamente trasformati dalla vecchiaia e in attesa della morte incombente. E il mio personaggio preferito, la fidata e crudele Françoise. E l'ultima fanciulla in fiore, la figlia di Gilberte e di Saint-Loup. E accidenti a lui, ho già voglia di ricominciarlo.
Want to read
January 31, 2022I was feeling a bit flat today but came home to this little gem which has lifted my spirits a little!
It seems they've tried their best to make the individual covers as boring as possible but, as a whole, this collection is presented very nicely! Can't wait to start slowly working my way through these!
It seems they've tried their best to make the individual covers as boring as possible but, as a whole, this collection is presented very nicely! Can't wait to start slowly working my way through these!
Read
December 1, 2019A few scattered thoughts on this book:
“Reality exists in memory alone.”
We instinctively shrink from this thesis, not because it isn’t meaningful, but because it goes against some (perhaps ill-placed and quite materialistic) sense of action that permeates our modern lives. And yet inevitably we should still be drawn to its spell, as who has not felt that joy Proust has described at least once in their lives? Just today I read Józef Czapski's remarkable Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp and visions and memories of a great book I read earlier this year but have scarcely given a thought to afterwards, Shalamov's equally brutal and beautiful Kolyma Stories, came instantly into my mind unbidden. I remembered the chilly environment I read it in during the height of winter, and more amazingly recalled even my own visions of the book I had while reading it: pines on the slope of a pure white hill just barely thrusting out of the snow, clutching a loaf of bread amidst the machinations of other inmates, and the all too sudden release from captivity only to see signs of your former imprisonment wherever you look and a promise of an even stranger happiness. The contradictory impulse reigns supreme as we Search for this feeling in all aspects of all our lives, whether through art or observation of the laws of man, yet this involuntary sensation must come completely unbidden all the same. The solution presented is quite simple, oft repeated but not often heeded, that we should strive not necessarily for new experiences but for new eyes.
This resignation from the present, this active search for a meaning that is inside ourselves runs so counter to our modern values, but instead of struggling against it, perhaps we should seek to take what lessons we can from it, for does not the creation of most, if not all art require a separation from our earthly realities, if only for a moment, to draw upon memory in our solitude?
It’s the ultimate Idealist state of existence outside of time when involuntary memory is experienced, and this is generally what this book equally strives to do in art. As Czapski put it, in Proust's book he doesn't simply lay down a bunch of plain facts and laws of humanity, but rather the effect of those facts when it comes in contact with his own head to send off literary sparks and reflections that comprise his work.
For our Search and the many states of existence that will inevitably comprise it, and states within states in a long continual line bound only by our feeble consciousness, much suffering is needed. Proust marries the ideas of Goethe and Dostoevsky in Time Regained, a major accomplishment spanning three centuries and perhaps able to only be adequately done by representation, that is to say by fiction. This is already a miracle in itself, and Proust tells it in such prose too that his call to action of all young prospective artists may have the opposite effect of making them wither under the spell of his sentences that one can't even hope to replicate, thereby making a possible shameful imitation even more shameful from how much it will inevitably pale in comparison. It is fine, however, Proust (like Ruskin) acknowledges that first we must cast off our influences to make something truly worthwhile, and it's clear how much Proust himself has swallowed, digested, and spat out writers from every possible milieu to create his work.
What art and involuntary memory are is nothing less than a salvation from death. A figure perhaps long forgotten by history is invoked in the character of Swann, reviving the real person for just a moment from oblivion, and my own joy was immense when I rediscovered the pleasure I had at reading the Kolyma Stories, a part of my life that could have been completely swallowed by Time and never remembered otherwise. Thus does an artist play god in a way that concerns the human soul, something that science is yet quite in the dark about.
Moreover, the thesis above is not Proust's entire thesis exactly, as Proust is the first one to point out how faulty our memory can be. What matters is artistic invention and construction, panning the gold from the muck of the rest of our life to use it in creation, precisely what Elstir meant thousands of pages ago in the second book of the Search and what the narrator takes much too long to realize himself. This realization is absolutely essential so that the Search itself is not some dull autobiography. Proust in his unbound writing and often unabashed delight in his own sentences on nature, art, and life frees at once the constraints of the novel from its formulaic predecessors and his own soul from the burdens of the society which he frequented and the indifferent bourgeois face he had to put on his whole life. Why have me explain it, however? The most astonishing passage in Time Regained sheds light upon it all, albeit in just as unorganized a fashion as is befitting Proust. That same passage has such a rousing proclamation, the same mentioned earlier in this review, that I think the time for writing reviews is really over, but I will contradict myself further on in this same review.
Confirmed public enemy No. 1: Habit. No. 2 it seems is the cursed logic of human intellect, sufficient to be a dish-washer perhaps, but sterile to the imagination.
An extraordinary way of seeing this book is a collection of mini-essays, each with no beginning nor end, ceaselessly blending into one other and corroborating the others’ text. This is not so extraordinary in itself until you observe that as evidence for the claims about life, society, and all manners of things in general, Proust uses as evidence the characters and events of his own book, in their essence entirely fictional. And what if they’re based on real people, one must admit that there must be some aspects of people that not even Proust could even begin to infer on and would be easier to invent rather, thereby making Proust’s work a self-containing universe, as Nabokov stated a “fairy-tale” of sorts, a universe not necessarily with laws different from our own, but one which those very laws are transposed and made more fantastic, which is why on seeing some brilliant observation of Proust’s that we have no doubt thought before on our own but in a diminished sense, we exclaim “I couldn’t have said it better myself!”, as if language itself was useless in our dull, present world.
In any case ISoLT is an adequate retelling of Paradise Lost, doubtless the most unique we’ll see in our lifetimes as I don't place much faith in adaptations as a rule. Certainly there are better gods to worship.
The more I read the more I see the need to record my thoughts on books, being scornful of this concept earlier, but now that I’ve decided, I won’t do things halfway. A book that’s grown in my estimation over time is Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, and I can’t even be entirely certain what I thought about it as at that time I never wrote it down. Miraculously just seeing the pictures in Sebald's novel is enough to trigger memories of the time and place in which I experienced the book, but alas not of reflections that can often be put down in prose, and my original observation is in fact one of the few things I actually did write down in a status update, so no wonder I remember it!
The writing of Proust is as equally as flowery as it is brutal. Despite its often humorous nature the novel is very cruel at times and incredibly despairing, callous, and paranoid at others. A great and complete novel has all these aspects of life however, and of course this one is no exception.
A little six page passage in The Captive, in otherwise a quite tiresome part, contains nearly perfect writing, and it turns out is one of the last Proust ever added on. It concerns a description of the painting Proust had said was the most beautiful, Vermeer’s View of Delft, and the death of a certain artist, and there could be no more fitting eulogy and requiem for the creation of art during our too too brief lifespan. Despite what Cormac McCarthy claims about him, no one perhaps understands and writes about death better than Proust.
Good old Harold Bloom in an introduction to my edition mentions Shakespeare no less than 10 times in 20 pages, yet his observations that Proust rivals Shakespeare in the amount of characters that one can't sum up in a single phrase or two is entirely correct. One of my personal favorites is Bloch, and the very fact that Proust created such an amusing and serious character at once despite being a relatively secondary one, like some of Dostoevsky’s best, testifies already to the great quality of character writing that most people appreciate him for (and also the additional fact that undoubtedly Proust pokes fun at himself with the character). In this book there could easily be found another, implied but not shown, all about Bloch’s adventures and rise in the literary underworld, perhaps in contrast to the narrators rise in society but absolute inability to write, and I would read it just as eagerly. Another case could be made of the beloved character Saint-Loup, whose personal arc of development in various directions is extremely strong yet is still quite a peripheral character during large swaths of the novel though he could have easily become the protagonist of one, same could be said of characters like the Baron de Charlus, Morel, etc. etc.
Many say that Proust changed their point of view on certain aspects of life: for the books we read too and the art we see and hear this is the case, that our view on them can be changed by Proust, and this facet is often overlooked. My entire review for Robert Walser came into my head one day when I was in the process of opening up The Captive. In a most amusing passage Proust makes a genius and unique observation of Dostoevsky’s work that is quite illuminating, but in the next sentence calls Tolstoy a student of Dostoevsky. I had something here in my brief note about the concept of involuntary connectivity in Balzac’s and Wagner’s work but I completely forgot it, so I'll save that for a reread I suppose.
Proust mentions that a truth in life can be better expressed when “recomposed” as in music, but also in a work like ISoLT, which makes it greater than any sterile analysis might do. In fact it seems that one of the largest impressions upon Proust that gave way to the genesis of this book was music, just as important if not more so than the madeleine in tea, as Proust has had similar experiences throughout his whole past of this involuntary memory, but would not have been able to recognize the artistic impulse it possessed had he not first recognized this expression of a higher truth in music. So this involuntary recall for the past does not preclude our more classical and Romantic recognition of truth in art; they go hand in hand. Perhaps I may be drawing too similar of a comparison between the narrator and Proust or making assumptions, but they are not without them being based in the text.
Despite Proust's great wealth of quotable material, I don't include any here except for the first one as they can be quite odious when read out of context and can often give the completely wrong impression. Rather, I encourage you to read the book and create yourself a batch of quotes from his work and realize what a futile and no doubt tiring effort it has been. Reading just one of his books instead of all seven is like removing a seventh of a sliver of a great painting to look at, still acceptable to an extent, but extracting single quotes one at a time is like taking a splotch of paint or two from small areas and spreading them out before you only to see what an incomprehensible mess you've made out of a masterpiece, and you might as well weep yourself to sleep at night like when Marcel didn't get a good-night's kiss from his mother.
“Reality exists in memory alone.”
We instinctively shrink from this thesis, not because it isn’t meaningful, but because it goes against some (perhaps ill-placed and quite materialistic) sense of action that permeates our modern lives. And yet inevitably we should still be drawn to its spell, as who has not felt that joy Proust has described at least once in their lives? Just today I read Józef Czapski's remarkable Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp and visions and memories of a great book I read earlier this year but have scarcely given a thought to afterwards, Shalamov's equally brutal and beautiful Kolyma Stories, came instantly into my mind unbidden. I remembered the chilly environment I read it in during the height of winter, and more amazingly recalled even my own visions of the book I had while reading it: pines on the slope of a pure white hill just barely thrusting out of the snow, clutching a loaf of bread amidst the machinations of other inmates, and the all too sudden release from captivity only to see signs of your former imprisonment wherever you look and a promise of an even stranger happiness. The contradictory impulse reigns supreme as we Search for this feeling in all aspects of all our lives, whether through art or observation of the laws of man, yet this involuntary sensation must come completely unbidden all the same. The solution presented is quite simple, oft repeated but not often heeded, that we should strive not necessarily for new experiences but for new eyes.
This resignation from the present, this active search for a meaning that is inside ourselves runs so counter to our modern values, but instead of struggling against it, perhaps we should seek to take what lessons we can from it, for does not the creation of most, if not all art require a separation from our earthly realities, if only for a moment, to draw upon memory in our solitude?
It’s the ultimate Idealist state of existence outside of time when involuntary memory is experienced, and this is generally what this book equally strives to do in art. As Czapski put it, in Proust's book he doesn't simply lay down a bunch of plain facts and laws of humanity, but rather the effect of those facts when it comes in contact with his own head to send off literary sparks and reflections that comprise his work.
For our Search and the many states of existence that will inevitably comprise it, and states within states in a long continual line bound only by our feeble consciousness, much suffering is needed. Proust marries the ideas of Goethe and Dostoevsky in Time Regained, a major accomplishment spanning three centuries and perhaps able to only be adequately done by representation, that is to say by fiction. This is already a miracle in itself, and Proust tells it in such prose too that his call to action of all young prospective artists may have the opposite effect of making them wither under the spell of his sentences that one can't even hope to replicate, thereby making a possible shameful imitation even more shameful from how much it will inevitably pale in comparison. It is fine, however, Proust (like Ruskin) acknowledges that first we must cast off our influences to make something truly worthwhile, and it's clear how much Proust himself has swallowed, digested, and spat out writers from every possible milieu to create his work.
What art and involuntary memory are is nothing less than a salvation from death. A figure perhaps long forgotten by history is invoked in the character of Swann, reviving the real person for just a moment from oblivion, and my own joy was immense when I rediscovered the pleasure I had at reading the Kolyma Stories, a part of my life that could have been completely swallowed by Time and never remembered otherwise. Thus does an artist play god in a way that concerns the human soul, something that science is yet quite in the dark about.
Moreover, the thesis above is not Proust's entire thesis exactly, as Proust is the first one to point out how faulty our memory can be. What matters is artistic invention and construction, panning the gold from the muck of the rest of our life to use it in creation, precisely what Elstir meant thousands of pages ago in the second book of the Search and what the narrator takes much too long to realize himself. This realization is absolutely essential so that the Search itself is not some dull autobiography. Proust in his unbound writing and often unabashed delight in his own sentences on nature, art, and life frees at once the constraints of the novel from its formulaic predecessors and his own soul from the burdens of the society which he frequented and the indifferent bourgeois face he had to put on his whole life. Why have me explain it, however? The most astonishing passage in Time Regained sheds light upon it all, albeit in just as unorganized a fashion as is befitting Proust. That same passage has such a rousing proclamation, the same mentioned earlier in this review, that I think the time for writing reviews is really over, but I will contradict myself further on in this same review.
Confirmed public enemy No. 1: Habit. No. 2 it seems is the cursed logic of human intellect, sufficient to be a dish-washer perhaps, but sterile to the imagination.
An extraordinary way of seeing this book is a collection of mini-essays, each with no beginning nor end, ceaselessly blending into one other and corroborating the others’ text. This is not so extraordinary in itself until you observe that as evidence for the claims about life, society, and all manners of things in general, Proust uses as evidence the characters and events of his own book, in their essence entirely fictional. And what if they’re based on real people, one must admit that there must be some aspects of people that not even Proust could even begin to infer on and would be easier to invent rather, thereby making Proust’s work a self-containing universe, as Nabokov stated a “fairy-tale” of sorts, a universe not necessarily with laws different from our own, but one which those very laws are transposed and made more fantastic, which is why on seeing some brilliant observation of Proust’s that we have no doubt thought before on our own but in a diminished sense, we exclaim “I couldn’t have said it better myself!”, as if language itself was useless in our dull, present world.
In any case ISoLT is an adequate retelling of Paradise Lost, doubtless the most unique we’ll see in our lifetimes as I don't place much faith in adaptations as a rule. Certainly there are better gods to worship.
The more I read the more I see the need to record my thoughts on books, being scornful of this concept earlier, but now that I’ve decided, I won’t do things halfway. A book that’s grown in my estimation over time is Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, and I can’t even be entirely certain what I thought about it as at that time I never wrote it down. Miraculously just seeing the pictures in Sebald's novel is enough to trigger memories of the time and place in which I experienced the book, but alas not of reflections that can often be put down in prose, and my original observation is in fact one of the few things I actually did write down in a status update, so no wonder I remember it!
The writing of Proust is as equally as flowery as it is brutal. Despite its often humorous nature the novel is very cruel at times and incredibly despairing, callous, and paranoid at others. A great and complete novel has all these aspects of life however, and of course this one is no exception.
A little six page passage in The Captive, in otherwise a quite tiresome part, contains nearly perfect writing, and it turns out is one of the last Proust ever added on. It concerns a description of the painting Proust had said was the most beautiful, Vermeer’s View of Delft, and the death of a certain artist, and there could be no more fitting eulogy and requiem for the creation of art during our too too brief lifespan. Despite what Cormac McCarthy claims about him, no one perhaps understands and writes about death better than Proust.
Good old Harold Bloom in an introduction to my edition mentions Shakespeare no less than 10 times in 20 pages, yet his observations that Proust rivals Shakespeare in the amount of characters that one can't sum up in a single phrase or two is entirely correct. One of my personal favorites is Bloch, and the very fact that Proust created such an amusing and serious character at once despite being a relatively secondary one, like some of Dostoevsky’s best, testifies already to the great quality of character writing that most people appreciate him for (and also the additional fact that undoubtedly Proust pokes fun at himself with the character). In this book there could easily be found another, implied but not shown, all about Bloch’s adventures and rise in the literary underworld, perhaps in contrast to the narrators rise in society but absolute inability to write, and I would read it just as eagerly. Another case could be made of the beloved character Saint-Loup, whose personal arc of development in various directions is extremely strong yet is still quite a peripheral character during large swaths of the novel though he could have easily become the protagonist of one, same could be said of characters like the Baron de Charlus, Morel, etc. etc.
Many say that Proust changed their point of view on certain aspects of life: for the books we read too and the art we see and hear this is the case, that our view on them can be changed by Proust, and this facet is often overlooked. My entire review for Robert Walser came into my head one day when I was in the process of opening up The Captive. In a most amusing passage Proust makes a genius and unique observation of Dostoevsky’s work that is quite illuminating, but in the next sentence calls Tolstoy a student of Dostoevsky. I had something here in my brief note about the concept of involuntary connectivity in Balzac’s and Wagner’s work but I completely forgot it, so I'll save that for a reread I suppose.
Proust mentions that a truth in life can be better expressed when “recomposed” as in music, but also in a work like ISoLT, which makes it greater than any sterile analysis might do. In fact it seems that one of the largest impressions upon Proust that gave way to the genesis of this book was music, just as important if not more so than the madeleine in tea, as Proust has had similar experiences throughout his whole past of this involuntary memory, but would not have been able to recognize the artistic impulse it possessed had he not first recognized this expression of a higher truth in music. So this involuntary recall for the past does not preclude our more classical and Romantic recognition of truth in art; they go hand in hand. Perhaps I may be drawing too similar of a comparison between the narrator and Proust or making assumptions, but they are not without them being based in the text.
Despite Proust's great wealth of quotable material, I don't include any here except for the first one as they can be quite odious when read out of context and can often give the completely wrong impression. Rather, I encourage you to read the book and create yourself a batch of quotes from his work and realize what a futile and no doubt tiring effort it has been. Reading just one of his books instead of all seven is like removing a seventh of a sliver of a great painting to look at, still acceptable to an extent, but extracting single quotes one at a time is like taking a splotch of paint or two from small areas and spreading them out before you only to see what an incomprehensible mess you've made out of a masterpiece, and you might as well weep yourself to sleep at night like when Marcel didn't get a good-night's kiss from his mother.
October 22, 2022
و تمااااااااااام شد.
شروع خوانش ۲۴ اسفند ماه ۱۴۰۰
پایان خوانش ۳۰ مهرماه ۱۴۰۱
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
این اثر سترگ دوستداشتنی یکی از بهترین تجربههای خوانش کتاب برای من خواهد بود.
الان واقعا نمیتونم فکرم رو جمعوجور کنم و کامنتی درخور برای این مجموعه بنویسم. اما میتونم بگم که اگر بپرسید ارزش داره وقت بگذارید و بخونیدش حتما در پاسخ خواهم گفت:
البته! شک نکنید. برید سراغش و لذت ببرید.
شروع خوانش ۲۴ اسفند ماه ۱۴۰۰
پایان خوانش ۳۰ مهرماه ۱۴۰۱
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
این اثر سترگ دوستداشتنی یکی از بهترین تجربههای خوانش کتاب برای من خواهد بود.
الان واقعا نمیتونم فکرم رو جمعوجور کنم و کامنتی درخور برای این مجموعه بنویسم. اما میتونم بگم که اگر بپرسید ارزش داره وقت بگذارید و بخونیدش حتما در پاسخ خواهم گفت:
البته! شک نکنید. برید سراغش و لذت ببرید.
January 22, 2022
I’m really hating life right now. I’m in search of my lost time having read the five books I have in this omnibus so far.
June 12, 2021
در جستجوی زمان از دست رفته، یه رمان خیلی بلنده. بهتره بگم یه مجموعه رمان هست.
من توی ذهنم اینطوری تقسیمش کردم. طبق حسی که بهم میداد.
جلد اول کتاب عشق و حسادت و دروغ
جلد دوم دوره ی نوجوانی همراه با جستجوی نیمه گمشده
جلد سوم خاله زنک بازی های خفه کننده. شنیدن صدای لباس افراد!
جلد چهارم (سدوم و عموره) کتابی در مورد همه ی انواع و اقسام رابطه ! با تاکید بر مردم شهر سدوم
جلد پنجم (اسیر) واکاوی عمیق یک عشق سخت
جلد ششم ( گریخته) فراموشی
جلد هفتم (زمان بازیافته) پیری. موج سنگین گذر زمان.
خوندن کتاب برای من خیلی طول کشید. شروع آبان 96 و پایان مهر 99. این وسط حدود هفت ماه نتونستم حتی یه نصفه جلد رو بخونم. تقریبا خوندن کتاب متوقف شده بود.
کتاب توضیحات خیلی زیادی در مورد چیزهای مختلف میده، من یه جاهایی به خودم میگفتم صد رحمت به ادبیات روسیه.
یعنی اینطوری بود که صادقانه، در سه جلد اول، قسمت های کمی از کتاب بود که احساس کنم چقدر پروست خوبه. ولی از جلد سدوم و عموره این احساس کم کم برام پیدا شد. و اوج گرفت. هر چی جلوتر میرفتم ، بیشتر شکه میشدم از نبوغ پروست. بیشتر توی وجودم احساسش میکردم. و البته سرعت خوندنم هم بیشتر میشد. چون دیگه کسل نمیشدم و جذابیت مفاهیم مورد بحث رو کم کم درک میکردم.
میگن کسی که «جستجو» رو بخونه، نگاهش، حساسیت هاش، و حتی لذتهاش متفاوت میشه از قبل. شاید دلیلش اینه که پروست مجبورت میکنه «صبوری کردن برای لذت یک درک» رو تمرین کنی.
اینم دو تا ارجاع به کتاب، که از کافه کتاب برداشتم.
ادبیات به ما میآموزد که به زندگی بیشتر ارزش بدهیم، ارزشی که خود نتوانستیم درک کنیم و تنها به یاری کتاب میفهمیم که چقدر عظیم بوده است. (کتاب زمان بازیافته – جلد هفتم رمان در جستجوی زمان از دست رفته – صفحه ۲۹)
کتابم چیزی جز نوعی عدسی بزرگکننده مانند آنهایی نخواهد بود که عینکساز کومبره به مشتریانش میداد؛ کتاب من، که به یاریاش به خوانندگانم وسیلهای خواهم داد که درون خودشان را بخوانند. در نتیجه از ایشان نخواهم خواست که ستایش یا تحقیرم کنند، فقط این که به من بگویند که آیا همین است که من میگویم، آیا واژههایی که در درون خود میخوانند همانهایی است که من نوشتهام. (کتاب زمان بازیافته – صفحه ۴۱۰)
https://kafebook.ir/%d8%b7%d8%b1%d9%8...
این لینک کافه کتاب هست در مورد جستجو، هفت جلد رو در هفت لینک جدا توضیح داده. خواستید سر بزنید.
پ.ن: حدود هشت ماه میگذره از تموم شدن مطالعه ی کتاب در جستجو. من تفاوت زیادی در خودم احساس میکنم. در جستجو رخنه میکنه توی حواس پنجگانه ی خواننده. حالا بارها به خودم میام که دارم میگم لامسه. چون نسیم رو به لحظه حس کردم. یا سایه ی میله های دیوار رو روی زمین میبینم و میگم بینایی!
من این نبودم. پروست من رو تبدیل کرده به کسی که گاهی، آگاهانه، یکی از حواس پنجگانه اش رو عمیقا درک میکنه.
حالا فکر میکنم این آدم جدید بهتر میتونه پروست رو بفهمه. پس یه بار دیگه باید، جستجو رو بخونم، چون ارزشش رو دارم که برای خودم وقت بذارم. چون پروست معلم سخاوتمندی هست برای من.
من توی ذهنم اینطوری تقسیمش کردم. طبق حسی که بهم میداد.
جلد اول کتاب عشق و حسادت و دروغ
جلد دوم دوره ی نوجوانی همراه با جستجوی نیمه گمشده
جلد سوم خاله زنک بازی های خفه کننده. شنیدن صدای لباس افراد!
جلد چهارم (سدوم و عموره) کتابی در مورد همه ی انواع و اقسام رابطه ! با تاکید بر مردم شهر سدوم
جلد پنجم (اسیر) واکاوی عمیق یک عشق سخت
جلد ششم ( گریخته) فراموشی
جلد هفتم (زمان بازیافته) پیری. موج سنگین گذر زمان.
خوندن کتاب برای من خیلی طول کشید. شروع آبان 96 و پایان مهر 99. این وسط حدود هفت ماه نتونستم حتی یه نصفه جلد رو بخونم. تقریبا خوندن کتاب متوقف شده بود.
کتاب توضیحات خیلی زیادی در مورد چیزهای مختلف میده، من یه جاهایی به خودم میگفتم صد رحمت به ادبیات روسیه.
یعنی اینطوری بود که صادقانه، در سه جلد اول، قسمت های کمی از کتاب بود که احساس کنم چقدر پروست خوبه. ولی از جلد سدوم و عموره این احساس کم کم برام پیدا شد. و اوج گرفت. هر چی جلوتر میرفتم ، بیشتر شکه میشدم از نبوغ پروست. بیشتر توی وجودم احساسش میکردم. و البته سرعت خوندنم هم بیشتر میشد. چون دیگه کسل نمیشدم و جذابیت مفاهیم مورد بحث رو کم کم درک میکردم.
میگن کسی که «جستجو» رو بخونه، نگاهش، حساسیت هاش، و حتی لذتهاش متفاوت میشه از قبل. شاید دلیلش اینه که پروست مجبورت میکنه «صبوری کردن برای لذت یک درک» رو تمرین کنی.
اینم دو تا ارجاع به کتاب، که از کافه کتاب برداشتم.
ادبیات به ما میآموزد که به زندگی بیشتر ارزش بدهیم، ارزشی که خود نتوانستیم درک کنیم و تنها به یاری کتاب میفهمیم که چقدر عظیم بوده است. (کتاب زمان بازیافته – جلد هفتم رمان در جستجوی زمان از دست رفته – صفحه ۲۹)
کتابم چیزی جز نوعی عدسی بزرگکننده مانند آنهایی نخواهد بود که عینکساز کومبره به مشتریانش میداد؛ کتاب من، که به یاریاش به خوانندگانم وسیلهای خواهم داد که درون خودشان را بخوانند. در نتیجه از ایشان نخواهم خواست که ستایش یا تحقیرم کنند، فقط این که به من بگویند که آیا همین است که من میگویم، آیا واژههایی که در درون خود میخوانند همانهایی است که من نوشتهام. (کتاب زمان بازیافته – صفحه ۴۱۰)
https://kafebook.ir/%d8%b7%d8%b1%d9%8...
این لینک کافه کتاب هست در مورد جستجو، هفت جلد رو در هفت لینک جدا توضیح داده. خواستید سر بزنید.
پ.ن: حدود هشت ماه میگذره از تموم شدن مطالعه ی کتاب در جستجو. من تفاوت زیادی در خودم احساس میکنم. در جستجو رخنه میکنه توی حواس پنجگانه ی خواننده. حالا بارها به خودم میام که دارم میگم لامسه. چون نسیم رو به لحظه حس کردم. یا سایه ی میله های دیوار رو روی زمین میبینم و میگم بینایی!
من این نبودم. پروست من رو تبدیل کرده به کسی که گاهی، آگاهانه، یکی از حواس پنجگانه اش رو عمیقا درک میکنه.
حالا فکر میکنم این آدم جدید بهتر میتونه پروست رو بفهمه. پس یه بار دیگه باید، جستجو رو بخونم، چون ارزشش رو دارم که برای خودم وقت بذارم. چون پروست معلم سخاوتمندی هست برای من.
Currently reading
July 26, 2016Initially published in French between 1913 and 1927, Marcel Proust’s seven-part work In Search of Lost Time (also called Remembrance of Things Past) has undergone a befuddling series of translations. The “Moncrieff–Kilmartin–Enright” version, made available for this Modern Library publication, is essentially the original C. K. Scott Moncrieff translation with further revisions by Terence Kilmartin in 1984 (based on the 1954 definitive French text) and D. J. Enright in 1992.
As I finish each volume, I will rate and review it individually. All seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time can be found on my À-la-recherche-du-temps-perdu shelf. They are also listed here:
________________________________________
In Search of Lost Time
1. Swann’s Way – my review (★★★★★)
2. Within a Budding Grove – my review (★★★★☆)
3. The Guermantes Way – my review (currently reading)
4. Sodom and Gomorrah – my review (☆☆☆☆☆)
5. The Captive¹ – my review (☆☆☆☆☆)
6. The Fugitive¹ – my review (☆☆☆☆☆)
7. Time Regained² – my review (☆☆☆☆☆)
________________________________________
¹In the Modern Library edition, The Captive and The Fugitive are combined into a single volume, but I will rate/review them separately.
²The Kilmartin–Enright revision of Time Regained is based on an English translation by Andreas Mayor, as Scott Moncrieff died in 1930.
As I finish each volume, I will rate and review it individually. All seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time can be found on my À-la-recherche-du-temps-perdu shelf. They are also listed here:
________________________________________
In Search of Lost Time
1. Swann’s Way – my review (★★★★★)
2. Within a Budding Grove – my review (★★★★☆)
3. The Guermantes Way – my review (currently reading)
4. Sodom and Gomorrah – my review (☆☆☆☆☆)
5. The Captive¹ – my review (☆☆☆☆☆)
6. The Fugitive¹ – my review (☆☆☆☆☆)
7. Time Regained² – my review (☆☆☆☆☆)
________________________________________
¹In the Modern Library edition, The Captive and The Fugitive are combined into a single volume, but I will rate/review them separately.
²The Kilmartin–Enright revision of Time Regained is based on an English translation by Andreas Mayor, as Scott Moncrieff died in 1930.
October 14, 2022
این اثر به حدی برام ارزشمنده که نمیدونم چه طور باید وصفش کنم.
با تک تک جزئیات پروست تو این مدت زندگی کردم و بله زندگی به قبل و بعد از خوندن «در جستجوی زمان از دست رفته» تقسیم میشه؛ چون دیگه میدونی پرداختنهای ذهنی تو غیرطبیعی نیست پروست هم قبلتر بهش اشاره کرده؛ چون میبینی پروست چه شکلی توی هر زمینهای اون خطهایی رو میده که تو عمق ذهنت بهش وصل بودی؛
چون دیگه میدونی مادلن چیه؛
چون میدونی عشق ممکنه چه شکلی باشه و بشه؛
چون میدونی سوان کیه؛
چون میدونی اثر هنری رو چه شکلی باید حس کرد و هنرمند کیه؛
چون میدونی شرح دادن یعنی چی؛
چون دیگه میدونی واژه کردن تنهایی چیه؛
چون صدای جنگ رو میشنوی؛
چون میدونی صورتی آسمونی چه رنگیه؛
چون از جزئیات لذت میبری.
مرسی از آقای سحابی برای این ترجمه.
و ما چه خوشاقبال بودیم که تونستیم شاهکار شما رو بخونیم آقای پروست. ~~
با تک تک جزئیات پروست تو این مدت زندگی کردم و بله زندگی به قبل و بعد از خوندن «در جستجوی زمان از دست رفته» تقسیم میشه؛ چون دیگه میدونی پرداختنهای ذهنی تو غیرطبیعی نیست پروست هم قبلتر بهش اشاره کرده؛ چون میبینی پروست چه شکلی توی هر زمینهای اون خطهایی رو میده که تو عمق ذهنت بهش وصل بودی؛
چون دیگه میدونی مادلن چیه؛
چون میدونی عشق ممکنه چه شکلی باشه و بشه؛
چون میدونی سوان کیه؛
چون میدونی اثر هنری رو چه شکلی باید حس کرد و هنرمند کیه؛
چون میدونی شرح دادن یعنی چی؛
چون دیگه میدونی واژه کردن تنهایی چیه؛
چون صدای جنگ رو میشنوی؛
چون میدونی صورتی آسمونی چه رنگیه؛
چون از جزئیات لذت میبری.
مرسی از آقای سحابی برای این ترجمه.
و ما چه خوشاقبال بودیم که تونستیم شاهکار شما رو بخونیم آقای پروست. ~~
September 13, 2019
رائعة من روائع الأدب الفرنسي"البحث في الزمن الضائع" قد جمعت كل أنماط وأشكال الرواية فيها، في نسج محكم، بالغ الدقة..
وبمناسبة ذكرى مئوية حصول مارسيل پروست على جائزة Rix Goncourt1919
ستخرج طبعة جديدة للنور؛ تجمع فيها أجزائها السبعة.
وبمناسبة ذكرى مئوية حصول مارسيل پروست على جائزة Rix Goncourt1919
ستخرج طبعة جديدة للنور؛ تجمع فيها أجزائها السبعة.
December 30, 2018
"It was only a [book], but sighing deeply, he let his thoughts feed on it, and his face was wet with a stream of tears." —Reworking of Virgil, Aeneid, 1.464-465
I had no deep familiarity with famous authors, having only heard their names in passing: Austen, Ovid, Virgil, Dickens, Shakespeare, Nabokov, Wilde, &c.
I had heard of some individual works too; Don Quixote, War & Peace, Ulysses, The Three Musketeers &c.; but I had no conception of what time period they belonged to, or the types of works that they were, only that they were considered great works of literature (and mostly fiction; at the time I was unaware of many non-fiction works.)
I decided, at some point, that I wanted to experience the fruits of these Author's labours; I did not want to live the rest of my life ignorant of these great works, as I had done up to that point; knowing only of Austen that she wrote a series of novels, knowing the names of a few, but not having read them; only hearing that Ulysses was an artistic masterwork, but never experiencing it.
"Real life, life at last laid bare and illuminated—the only life in consequence which can be said to be really lived—is literature, and life thus defined is in a sense all the time immanent in ordinary men no less than in the artist. But most men do not see it because they do not seek to shed light upon it. And therefore their past is like a photographic dark—room encumbered with innumerable negatives which remain useless because the intellect has not developed them."
I decided the best way to experience these works was to do so chronologically; that way I could see how the novel evolved throughout time, and see any influences that authors may have had on each other. I went over to the Penguin website, and noticed they had a function where you could order works by the time period in which they were written, and in a chronological fashion; I spent a few hours working my way through, noting down any authors and their works I had heard of, and many works that I had not.
Not wanting to limit myself to the works Penguin had published under their Classics range, I decided the next best thing to do was to search for some lists bearing titles such as Best Books in the World or Top 100 Books to Read Before You Die &c.
But before I looked at any of these, Google directed me to the website: www.thegreatestbooks.org
The owner of the site explained that the books were intelligently and algorithmically sorted; not from just any and every list under the sun, but from 114 different lists that had to meet various criteria to be included, each bearing a different weighting based on these criteria.
Perfect, I thought, this saves me a lot of work.
I saw a few books I had heard of near the top, Lolita, Ulysses, Don Quixote at No.2 [1] . . .
. . . And at the very top, the book that was, according to 114 different lists, the greatest piece of fiction ever written, was a work called In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust.
In Search of Lost Time?
Proust?
Interesting . . . I've never heard of him . . .
I began to read the short description of the work that the site provided: "Swann's Way, the first part of A la recherche de temps perdu, Marcel Proust's seven-part cycle, was published in 1913. In it, Proust introduces the themes that run through the entire work . . ."
I stopped there [2], three parts of that description standing out:
I. "Swann's Way"
Something about that wording resonated with me.
II. "the first part of . . . Marcel Proust's seven-part cycle . . ."
This Swann's Way was only the beginning of aseven—part
Something about that term, cycle, had an incredible appeal; to me, it gave the work a certain gravitas; infused it with a grandeur that, to my mind, made the gap between In Search of Lost Time and Don Quixote at No. 2, much larger than the gap separating Don Quixote from the book that occupied the No. 3 spot.
III. "In it, Proust introduces the themes that run through the entire work . . ."
That was it. With this fragment of a sentence, In Search of Lost Time soared free, occupying a place in my mind, far higher than any other work that I had heard of, appealing to me more and more. I had never heard of it or the author; it was incredibly long; it seemed not to be concerned principally with plots like most other books would be, but with themes. Themes plural; there were many of these, many themes that the author skilfully weaved throughout this immense work.
In Search of Lost Time.
Time.
Surely Time would be one of these themes; and is there a higher, a more grandiose idea, than Time?
Perhaps there is. Lost Time. The Search for Lost Time . . .
I had always been aware of Time.
As I was growing up, for reasons which, thankfully, proved to be fallacious, I had the idea that I would die relatively young. I would look around at my classmates and think, "How nice it must be, to not live with this spectre of death constantly by your side; to think about growing old; to plan for things far, far away; plans for the future . . ."
__________
Years passed, and I found myself watching a show called Six Feet Under [3].
In the second season an exchange stuck in my mind. Two characters are in a restaurant, and the talk turns to life. And death . . .
"So you definitely don't believe in any kind of a life after death?"
"I think people live on through the people they love and the things they do with their lives . . . if they manage to do things with their lives."
"But that's it, that's it? That's all there is, there's nothing more, there's nothing like bigger?"
"Just energy."
"But there's no plan, no—"
"No, there's definitely no plan. Just survival . . ."
"How can you live like that? I mean, what if you found out you were gonna die tomorrow?"
"I've been prepared to die tomorrow since I was - years old."
"Really?"
"Yeah, pretty much"
"Well, why since you were -?"
"Because I read a report on the effect nuclear war would have on the world, and it was pretty clear to me at that point that this was definitely gonna happen."
"When you were -?"
"And I wake up every day pretty much surprised that, um . . . everything is still here."
"Well, I don't understand how you can live like that."
"Well, I thought we all did."
The show, and in particular this exchange, really cemented the fact in my mind, not that at the end of our long, rich lives, we will die, old and frail; but that you could die . . . right now.
I could die right now. Any one of us, could die at any time. It could be of a heart attack, a slip in the shower, a speeding car, a gun-wielding maniac . . .
What did I take from all this? That if there was anything I wanted to do in life, if there were places I wanted to go, books I wanted to read, I needed to begin . . .
"The idea of Time was of value to me for yet another reason: it was a spur, it told me that it was time to begin."
So I did.
After I graduated University, I decided to take a year off. Free from the shackles of Science, I could turn to Literature.
To the two eternals; to Truth, and to Art.
Throughout my time at University, I had outlined what I was going to read during this year. I planned to finish reading about the History of the Roman Empire, and then turn to Philosophy and Fiction.
As I began to read some novels, I better understood my interests when it came to fiction. I was left dissatisfied with some of the stories I was reading. I began to think I should perhaps abandon these novels and stick with non-fiction; with my Philosopher friends, and Ancient Historians
". . . Since literature, if I was to trust the evidence of these books, had no very profound truths to reveal: and at the same time it seemed to me sad that literature was not what I had thought it to be."
As a result, some books were removed from my list, and replaced by others.
But In Search of Lost Time was always on there.
And so, halfway through May, at the beginning of Summer, I laid on my bed, with Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to In Search of Lost Time propped open by my side, and began . . .
__________
I opened the cover, and flicked through the preliminary pages at the start of the book
I had some vague notions of what the work would be about.
It's englished as In Search of Lost Time and, previously, Remembrance of Things Past.
Perhaps Proust will talk about the past, and incorporate the potent nostalgia of youth, the days when we were free to play and laugh, no troubles on our minds; either way, I hoped that Time would play a key part . . .
I got to the contents:
SWANN'S WAY
Overture
Combray
Swann in Love
Place-Names: The Name
And then to the first page of the Overture:
"For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly, that I had not even time to say to myself: "I'm falling asleep."'
What a beautiful opening.
I read on, and finished the Overture . . .
I don't think I had, at that point, a clear idea of what Romanticism was, in terms of a way of living; I was aware there was Romantic Music, and Romantic Art, but I had never given a deep consideration to what characteristics a Romantic Person would possess, but, after reading the Overture, I knew that Proust's Narrator was a Romantic; and I recognised some of myself in this Narrator; certain ways of thinking, of magnifying mundane aspects of life into large, lofty ideas, of
__________
There were days when I was reading, that I rally hated Proust, days where he was boring me out of my mind; the mundaneness of all these dinners; were they really necessary? (Yes)
But there were other days, spectacular days,
". . . days which had suddenly illuminated for me not only the old groping movements of my thought, but even the whole purpose of my life and perhaps of art itself."
where, interspersed throughout these dinners, the Narrator would notice, perhaps, some small detail of someone's dress; or the lingering scent of perfume in the air, as a lady brushed past him;
"In this perfume . . . in this perfume of a changed sky and tillage and world there was all the diverse melancholy of regret and absence and youth."
or the way someone pronounced a particular letter, of a particular word; and he would use these observations of incredible details to begin a lengthy discourse, offering glimpses into how he views the world, and hit on absolute, fundamental truths as he was doing so.
"She told me that with you one saw things one would never see otherwise, things that no one had ever thought of mentioning before, that you showed her things she'd never dreamed of, and that even in the well known things she was able to appreciate details which without you she might have passed a dozen times without ever noticing."
And on reading these, I felt a resonance stronger than any that I had ever experienced; I had shared with Seneca some fundamental philosophies; I had shared with Joyce, the appreciation of how the mind flits rapidly from one subject to another; but here, with Proust's Narrator, I was experiencing not just thoughts and philosophies, but the very way I experienced life, on a day to day basis; some of these discourses that the Narrator was making were hitting incredibly close to home.
"The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself."
__________
Upon reading it for the first time, there was one passage, not a lengthy discourse, but a succinct sentence (which, for me, apotheosized the Narrator's Romanticism), that lodged itself in my mind, never to be forgotten.
The Narrator is speaking with a young lady, whilst pretending to read a newspaper. She says:
"The only thing is, I'm supposed to be going for a ride on my bike this afternoon. You see, Sunday's the only day we've got."
"But won't you catch cold, going bare-headed like that?
"Oh, I shan't be bare-headed, I'll have my cap, and I could get on without it with all the hair I have."
And then:
. . . with all the hair I have."
I raised my eyes to those flavescent, frizzy locks and felt myself caught in their swirl and swept away, with a throbbing heart, amid the lightning and the blasts of a hurricane of beauty.
In that single sentence, one of the most beautiful and powerful I have had the pleasure to read, the Narrator's heartbeat quickens, as he loses himself amidst the delicate power, the alluring femininity, in his Apuleian [4] love of this lady's long, flowing hair.
This, to me, is an exemplification of the power and beauty of Romanticism, and Proust does this over and over again throughout In Search of Lost Time.
__________
Hours went by, days turned into weeks, and eventually, I finished the Search.
I remember slowly turning those last few pages, with great reverence and ceremony, and then closing the cover.
Wow.
I was impressed.
I let the feeling sink in. I listened to the In Our Time episode on Proust.
I thought it was great.
Better than Don Quixote? Probably.
Better than Ulysses? Perhaps.
But it was just a book. Just a novel. An incredible one, no doubt, but I had read other incredible novels, like the two mentioned above, and perhaps I would read others I considered just as good.
But for now, it was back to Truth, back to Philosophy, and so I continued on; Plato and Aristotle were next on my list, and Time was running out . . .
__________
As my self-allotted "year-off" was coming to an end, I decided to watch Six Feet Under again; one episode per day in the evenings after I had finished my reading for the day.
It had been 3-4 years since I watched it the first time, and I thought it would be a fitting show to watch, coinciding with the conclusion of what had been a truly life-changing year for myself.
Hours went by, days turned into weeks, and the end of the show was in sight.
(Now, I'm venturing into what some may consider mild spoiler territory for Six Feet Under, but, having watched it myself, twice, I would not consider anything I'm about to say a real spoiler. But for those of you who want to avoid any inkling of a spoiler, skip the next 5 paragraphs.)
The finale of Six Feet Under is hailed as a finale ne plus ultra.
Particularly, the last five minutes of the finale. Now the first time I had watched Six Feet Under, I found the finale affecting, to be sure, and it had me on the verge of tears.
But this time . . .
As I watched those final 5 minutes, tears streaming down my face, scenes of Proust were flashing before my eyes. The whole idea of ISOLT was in my mind, and, strongest of all, was a particular illustration that graced the copy I was reading, an illustration of
For those five minutes, I had one of the most powerful experiences I have ever had. The truth of Time, and death, completely overcame my soul:
Time rages on, in a relentless march, stopping for no one. Time has no consideration for your hopes or your dreams or your wildest fantasies.
People are forgotten. Long treasured memories fade. Childhood vanishes. Youth disappears. Age creeps in, your body withers and frays; and eventually you die. Perhaps alone, on a hospital bed, a long time in the future . . .
Or perhaps tomorrow. Or today. Or right now; perhaps before you finish reading this review . . .
__________
I don't know if it was from that point on, but Proust's magnum opus was constantly in my thoughts. I couldn't let it go. I was seeing flashes of the Narrator's experiences in my every day life. His Romanticism and Philosophies; his analogies with art.
And I don't think he will ever leave my thoughts . . .
It's strange, In Search of Lost Time is the only work that I have truly started to appreciate only after having read it.
"As we recall certain days in the summer which we found too hot while they lasted, and from which only after they have passed do we extract their unalloyed essence of pure gold and indestructible azure."
I knew how good Ulysses was as I was reading it, and I still think about it often.
But In Search of Lost Time has affected me, perhaps more than any other work.
__________
If you asked me to pick a book to take to a desert island, asked me to pick only a single work that I could read from now until the end of time; as much as I love Livy; adore Montainge; honour Seneca; reverence Joyce; venerate Plato; admire Plutarch; esteem Emerson; my very first thought, is to say:
Marcel Proust,
"The author of remarkable works of art which were constantly in my thoughts."
and In Search of Lost Time.
"I felt myself enhanced by this work which I bore within me as by something fragile and precious which had been entrusted to me."
reading it
". . . teaches us to take a more exalted view of the value of life, a value at the time we did not know how to appreciate and of whose magnitude we have only become aware through the book."
__________
Proust, if I could speak to you, I want to thank you, I want to tell you that
"You have opened up a world of ideas to me which I never suspected, and whatever I may have become I owe entirely to you."
that your masterwork has
"the power to make me rediscover days that were long past, the Time that was lost."
and that, as I read, I, like your Narrator,
". . . was ready to believe that the supreme truth of life resides in art."
__________
(Saved 19/11/2017. Incomprehensibly incomplete . . .)
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