Jeffrey’s Comments (group member since Aug 08, 2012)

Jeffrey’s comments from the The Year of Reading Proust group.

Out of all of ISOLT, this was my least favourite volume - still that is not to say it's not brilliant. In fact I payed homage to the narrator and Robert de Saint-Loup in the barracks at Doncières in my own novel.

I'm curious if others have the same opinion of Guermantes Ways.

Ah, the kiss! The kiss becomes the prototype for adult love experiences (separation, jealousy, paranoia). This panic recurs through the novel. And the fulfillment of the kiss is devastating because it is momentary - to have the kiss is not to have it (it's gone). It's the anguish of time - to have it is not mourn it. The intensity of the narrator's desire cause the desire to stay in the 'not yet'. Loss of the kiss is a sort of loss of life (the bed is as a tomb and a kiss is a 'host' (15) that allows redemption and resurrection (reborn).

The narrator tries to convert the fleeting moment in to stable terms therefore he prepares for it ("as a painter who can hove his subject for short sittings only prepares his pallet") , tries to separate and extract it from those things that diminish it. The kiss is also described as a 'work of art'.

I think it's also important that this narrator's note to his mother is the first act of writing in the book. It was a sort of literary subterfuge to get his mother but also has a secondary function, the letter is an intermediary - a continuation of his own body. The letter being ignored (or misread) also leads the boy to - out of frustration - to literature.

The total panoramic vision of Combray rising up out of the tea cup is one of my favourite parts of ISOLT. The fragment (biscuit/memory) of the oral experience translates into visual totality ("all the flowers in our garden..."). This creates a certain tension between mouth and eyes. There is also a constant tension in novel between cooking and building - Françoise, the cook, is described as a master builder and a Gothic artist (her food is like a 13th century cathedral (97)). As well, building is compared to food (floors like honey and steeple like a loaf of bread).

The scene also illustrates an opposition between the sacred and profane (85) - a theme that runs through the novel. The narrator insists the the church is not the town - there is a clear line of demarcation - rather like Aunt's bed table with sacred books beside pepsin ("The Virgin and a bottle of Vichy-Celestins").

Every time I go to Paris I say I'm going to to to Illiers-Combray. But have yet to make it. Anyone ever go?

By the way, you can get a madeleine at any Starbucks :)

Jeffrey

The madeleine moment is brilliant but I also love the image of the magic lantern. Memory is projected onto the walls and furniture which are changed by what is superimposed (projected) on them. I think the metaphor of the magic lantern becomes ubiquitous to the rest of novel - not sure what is real and what is projected - yet, like the magic lantern, it's also beautiful. Every object or person ibn ISOLT becomes like the doorknob in the narrator's room... "which was different to me from all the other doorknobs in the world, inasmuch as it seemed to move of its own accord and without my having to turn it, so unconscious had its manipulation become - lo and behold, it was now an astral body for Golo." Objects in the novel are always flickering and unstable. Now what do you think of that kiss?

I took a full-year course reading all of ISOLT back in university. Looking forward to a lively discussion here over 2013.
Jeffrey