The Year of Reading Proust discussion

This thread is for the discussion that will take place through Sunday, 6 Jan. of Swann's Way, to page 64 in ML edition / page 48 in the LD translation (through Combray, Part I).

I think it's good because it mirrors the wording on Proust's reading schedule post. Good idea, Kris. It will make it super clear.

Jason wrote: "I think it's good because it mirrors the wording on Proust's reading schedule post. Good idea, Kris. It will make it super clear."

Yay! Sometimes it's good to be obsessive. :)

OK, first folder finished. Jason, there are 8 threads in this one -- do we need to reconfigure settings so all show?

Okay, so here's the thing:

If we leave these threads unsticky, then the order of them will just float according to most-recent-posting. So in that case it will not matter (I don't think) for them to be all shown.

However, if we wanted to, we could actually "stick" them all. If we stick them all, from bottom to top, they would remain in that order permanently. And then yeah, in that case it would make sense to show them all.

What do you think? Float or stick?

I am fine with having them float as long as people can find the last thread easily. One of us may need to go in and post or make it sticky just before that discussion to avoid confusion. What do you think?

I think that's fine. I think you've set it up so it's really clear to people. In the book club group I manage, the thread for the current book we're reading naturally floats to the top during the month that the book starts being read. It's practically no effort on my part as long as the threads/folders are set up well, as you've done here.

I am curious on how many of you foresee your reading schedule next year based on the Proust schedule. If you finish the scheduled pages in a day or two at the beginning of the week will you then switch to another book or would you just keep forging ahead? If so, will that affect the discussion? Does it make the most sense to read the first volume to its completion even if getting well ahead and then reading another book or more while waiting until the next volume is scheduled to start?

Jeremy wrote: "I am curious on how many of you foresee your reading schedule next year based on the Proust schedule. If you finish the scheduled pages in a day or two at the beginning of the week will you then s..."

I began reading ISOLT (really in earnest for the first time) a couple of months ago, and was already into Volume II when I discovered this reading group. I'm continuing to forge ahead and will circle back to prior volumes / pages as the discussions occur.

Proustitute wrote: "@Jeremy

Proust can be time-consuming, not the least because of his prose. It all depends on the reader, of course, but many might want to explore some of the art works he mentions, compositions, l..."

Also, for those who wish to forge ahead of the weekly reading schedule, I'd recommend writing up notes for yourself for the different sections. Then when a given section's discussion week arrives, you can refresh your memory if you're far ahead of the pack... This novel is pretty densely packed, so you'll be well served to leave yourself a trail of notes as you go.

Great points! When I asked the question I wasn't thinking of the supporting works. And taking notes! I am not used to doing so but I would love to get into that habit.

I would ask myself what o'clock it could be; I could hear the whistling of trains, which, now nearer and now farther off, punctuating the distance like the note of a bird in a forest, shewed me in perspective the deserted countryside through which a traveller would be hurrying towards the nearest station: the path that he followed being fixed for ever in his memory by the general excitement due to being in a strange place, to doing unusual things, to the last words of conversation, to farewells exchanged beneath an unfamiliar lamp which echoed still in his ears amid the silence of the night; and to the delightful prospect of being once again at home.

I was delighted when my memory retrieved this echo from the very beginning of Swann's Way as I traveled with young Marcel en route to a certain destination in [chapter and volume omitted to avoid spoiling]. I am suddenly reminded of a line from Led Zepellin ... "I am a traveler of both time and space, to be where I have been ..."

Jeremy wrote: "I am curious on how many of you foresee your reading schedule next year based on the Proust schedule. If you finish the scheduled pages in a day or two at the beginning of the week will you then s..."

I'll be reading other books as well, so I think if I finish the scheduled pages in a couple days, I will read something else until the next week. I don't expect this to be a page turner that I can't put down, so I think sticking to the schedule will be better for me. That way I won't feel like reading Proust has taken over my whole life.

I marked my copy (ML) with post-it tabs to know where each week's reading "assignment" concludes. I won't read ahead as I have found my ability to participate in discussions is reduced when I have done so in the past.

A large portion of my other reading will include literature set in Paris, and published in the century before Proust was publishing.

That's a good idea, Elizabeth.

I'll be reading as the speed suits me. Then I'll reread and take notes the passage that the group is currently discussing. I just finished Swann's Way and am going back to highlight and take notes.

I just couldn't wait... Too excited... I have started reading. I've already scrawled and scribbled notes all over my copy of Swann's Way. I'm already besotted with Proust's prose.

I did the post-it notes too on my swedish paper-back edition, but will try and read it parallel in english on my kindle also.

I got big plans for 2013 reading-wise so will most likely stick to the schedule. Proust is lovely when you are totally immersed in the flow of the words though. I like to 'binge-read' at times with wild abandon :-D

I'm in the middle of reading IJ, too, which is harder and not to my interest. Debating whether to drop this tome or power through it this weekend.

I discovered Proust in a French literature class in college. It was the first all-French immersion course I ever took. & 'Du cote de chez Swann' was on our reading list. I wasn't even close to ready but enough of the content penetrated through the language barrier that I continued on in English, afterwards.

Basically, Swann's Way is a complete blank spot in my memory. So starting it now feels like reading it for the first time, except I know everything that happens, and I'm amazed. All the major themes of the book are here in the first five pages. Memories that are absent when you try to call them up but can be triggered. The places. The names - Mme de Saint-Loup! Would have been meaningless to me when I read for the first time, but strikes me right at the heart now.

I was wondering what the Bressant style was!

I have a few notes. ;-)

His recalling the madeleines dunked in tea and the memories it evoked had me recalling morning breakfast with my father and how he would let me dunk my toast in his coffee with milk and sugar. My mother drank hers black, and was not to my liking. This was a good memory for me, as my father died just before I turned 9, and perhaps not unlike Proust's memory. It isn't the same dunking toast in my own cup - it needs to be someone else's, and, frankly, not a lot of folks are ready to have you do that.

Proustitute wrote: "Why had I forgotten the dualistic portrait of Swann that Proust creates in these opening scenes?"

That struck me too - but I thought it was so appropriate that the book starts by giving us a terrifically wrong view of Swann. It's another way that the initial pages give a summary of everything that's to come. Because by the end, the narrator (and we) have been wrong about everyone, over and over. (Or at the least, we see a host of similar reversals between a personal and a public view).

Am struck by parallels too - between the magic lantern that projects the story of Golo and Genevieve de Brabant on the wall, the description of how a sleeping man, on waking, "holds in a circle around him the sequence of the hours, the order of the years and worlds," and then the description of Swann (and all people, really) as a "transparent envelope" that we can fill up with the parts of them we see, and may never reflect who they really are.

All the same thing, really, but explained in different ways. Iterated.

I have a margin note "transference" at the section where the boy sends a note to his mother.

I imagined that Swann would have laughed heartily at it if he had read my letter and had guessed its purpose; whereas, on the contrary, as I was to learn in due course, a similar anguish had been the bane of his life for many years ...

Proust then goes on for 2 pages to discuss how Swann might wait at the bottom of the stairs for a woman. This seemed to me the conflating of emotions over the same, yet different, circumstance. That the narrator chose this moment to equate the child narrator and Swann.

Sorry, but I had sort of forgotten that the discussions are to be conducted here. I am reposting my comment on the Dedication page (originally as a Reading Update)

---------
First volume is dedicated to Gaston Calmette, He was a journalist of Le Figaro and one of the first supporters of La recherche, since he proposed to serialize the novel in the newspaper.

He was assassinated in his office by the wife of the Minister of Finance.

See Carter on this.
------------

And then, my reply to Karen with a bit more info:

--------
Since Calmette is mentioned in many pages in Carter, the most expedient is wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaston_C...

and the French version with a somewhat different emphasis on her motives:

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaston_C...

Basically, une histoire de boudoir et de politique...

Proustitute wrote: "Also, as Swann is described as having "fair, almost red hair, dressed in the Bressant style," here's an image showing Jean Baptiste Prosper Bressant's hair:

"

Thank you for this. I read this in bed and did not feel like running out to the computer to check on this Bressant hairdo.

Started reading and can't help but think of The Memory Chalet and the comparison with Tony Judt who was also an invalid, suffering from Lou Gehrig's Disease. I was always fascinated by Judt remembering hour long speeches by mentally placing trains of thought in different areas and rooms that he would recollect as he mentally walked about his house. Proust also revisted rooms to revive his memory. As I am reading, I have a great sense of Tony Judt having read Proust's own account (before me)of being trapped in his body and identifying and receiving comfort and strength from his words.

Jonathan wrote: "The tea and madeleine episode has become rightfully iconic among readers-- and as an icon it's been simplified, stripped of some of its context, haloed in gold instead of surrounded by weird detail..."

I agree with you on that. This is my first time reading this and I'm amazed at the exquisiteness of his description. The detailing is more than a person obsessed with details, which I never got that impression, but of someone noticing the microcosm of things that most people don't notice. Those "plump little cakes" were associated with the change in emotion, the comfort of ritual, the almost erotic description of sensations, the timelessness of time, and the entering of the spiritual plane of existence within the mundane. He captured very well the subjective moments we've had when we suspect the common every day things are more than they really are. Exquisite!

Reemk10 wrote: "Started reading and can't help but think of The Memory Chalet and the comparison with Tony Judt who was also an invalid, suffering from Lou Gehrig's Disease. I was always fascinated by Judt remembe..."

This isn't Proust's idea, or Judt's. It goes back a long ways further - to the Renaissance at least - it's a method of memorizing that was a standard part of the classical education called the Memory Palace.

I've always loved the concept of the memory palace (it's very effective, if you ever try it, by the way), but it hadn't occurred to me to connect it with Proust. Maybe because, even if the link is strong, Proust is making an almost opposite point.

The memory palace is designed to facilitate excellent recall, especially in stressful situations like when giving speeches. But Proust is talking about memories that can't be called up consciously, on demand. Only in certain circumstances - in the moments between sleeping and waking, and then only if you're lucky and your physical body and the light in the room where you lie overlap with another room at another time, for example. And these are memories rich enough to mistake for a revival of the experience itself.

Why does he refer to an "odor memory?" He clearly describes a taste memory.

I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shiver ran through me and I stopped ...

Elizabeth (Alaska) wrote: "Why does he refer to an "odor memory?" He clearly describes a taste memory.

I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mix..."

Taste and smell work together. You lose your taste if you can't smell.

Aloha wrote: "Taste and smell work together. You lose your taste if you can't smell. "

Taste is 90% smell. My comment was that he relates this as a taste memory, not an odor memory. I'd have to go back and look, and I believe he does speak also to the odor of the tea, but that is not what evokes the memory.

Proustitute wrote: "I posted this in another thread a while back, but perhaps worth revisiting and reposting in light of what Jonathan brings up:

http://www.firstnerve.com/2009/03/odo...-..."

I think the blogger underestimated the impact of Proust's description. Proust may not be the first to observe sense and memory, but he is the first to describe it in a magical way.

Elizabeth (Alaska) wrote: "Aloha wrote: "Taste and smell work together. You lose your taste if you can't smell. "

Taste is 90% smell. My comment was that he relates this as a taste memory, not an odor memory. I'd have to go..."

Proust mostly described in the taste sense and the physical description of the cake, but by saying "odor memory" he's adding an extra depth of observation to how we taste, which is tasting with the waft of odor to our sense of smell, kind of like in a wine tasting when you move the back of your throat to force the air to better touch your sense of smell.

Proustitute wrote: "I'm both laughing and cringing at the narrator's descriptions of his great-aunt's disgust over mixing with, but especially marrying, members of different social classes even if this is to their ben..."

This has been my main observation lately. From my personal experience, I've noticed great change in people when my own life changed. Sometimes the change is shocking. That made me reassess what I value.

Proustitute wrote: "Also, as Swann is described as having "fair, almost red hair, dressed in the Bressant style," here's an image showing Jean Baptiste Prosper Bressant's hair:

"

Thanks, P. That helps me to put a face to Swann's character.

Aloha wrote: "Proust mostly described in the taste sense and the physical description of the cake, but by saying "odor memory" he's adding an extra depth of observation to how we taste, which is tasting with the waft of odor to our sense of smell, kind of like in a wine tasting when you move the back of your throat to force the air to better touch your sense of smell. "

I'm very literal - I didn't read between the lines as the blogger did, apparently.

Fantastic, thanks Proustitute.

According to Bookdrum, Proust's taste/smell experience came with toast and tea. He changed toast to madeleine's because of the symbolic significance of the cakes: The shell-like shape of a madeleine has been compared to the scallop-shells worn by the pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela, who would have passed through Illiers (Combray) on their way to Spain, during Proust's childhood (hence its "severe, religious folds" on page 54). The madeleine is therefore a symbol of a 'pilgrimage' to the past. The link is http://www.bookdrum.com/books/in-sear... .

Andreea suggested this site over at the Literary References in Proust thread and it's been a wonderful resource.

In Contre Saint-Beuve it is toast too. He must have changed it to a madeleine for the reasons above. (Toast's a bit boring!)

To follow on from Reemk's comment on Proust revisiting rooms, it seems he was very drawn to objects that reminded him of their owners, or times. Hence the "involuntary memory" being so powerful I guess. for instance, he literally begged by letter for a friend to send him a photograph from many years earlier (the one my profile picture is taken from, where he's playing air guitar on a tennis racquet, serenading Jeanne Pouquet who is stood above him.) He claimed his memory was terrible and he needed triggers or menemonic devices to help him recall. One might also remark that this was kind of a fetishisation of object, the nueraesthenic Mummy's boy who feared losing what he knew he so tenuously held to (memory, life itself?). His project was his life in fiction, in a way. He had to get those words down, and had to get it right.

As new readers will find later on, this fetishisation (and indeed perhaps Proust's own wish to confess or be rid of it) finds its way into the novel again via a photograph. Sources tell us too that he gave family photos to a nearby male brothel, too.

I appreciate your comments, very interesting takes on memory. Another thing that I found unusual is that Proust is supposedly writing as a child, yet he makes comments about a tortured mind, falling into the terrifying abyss, a sickness of uncertainty, hours of anguish etc. which strike me as being very odd thoughts for a child. How old was he at this point in the story?

Reemk10 wrote: "I appreciate your comments, very interesting takes on memory. Another thing that I found unusual is that Proust is supposedly writing as a child, yet he makes comments about a tortured mind, fallin..."

My take is that he is writing as an adult his memories as a child. I will look for the references in which I think an adult is talking, but I am reading it in French. Proust is very skilled in shifting viewpoints and moving across time.

So Proust is presenting us with an account through the eyes of a child and the in hindisght perspective of an adult that can now interpret his experiences growing up of his somewhat troubled childhood. Would you say that he is looking back at things through a depressed state of mind?

Here is a photo I look at a local museum which displayed an actual Magic Lantern:
Magic Lantern and Slides, c1890's
The magic lantern was a popular form of entertainment in the late 19th century and early 20th century. The slides are inserted and projected.

Reemk10 wrote: "So Proust is presenting us with an account through the eyes of a child and the in hindisght perspective of an adult that can now interpret his experiences growing up of his somewhat troubled childh..."

He uses the various past sentences that French has, even when he is talking of his childhood scenes. But there are also some subtle indications that he is narrating this at a later stage (will look for them). I do not see him as depressed, just very nostalgic and extremely sensitive. There is a great deal of humor as well.

I think you are right on the money, Kalli. In some ways, Proust can be rather an unreliable narrator at times, and certainly a puzzling one (as we've seen with his "nesting" of voices/selves).

Lovely pic, Proustitute. That's Marcel's bedroom in the Proust museum at Illiers-Combray. I found it very revealing to walk around it. I was very surprised when I found that famous garden bell isn't a tinkle tinkle type of bicycle bell by the way. I had imagined it genteel and pleasant, but ferruginuos is the right word. It's loud! I think Mr. Swann must have had a special touch to have it ring so sweetly.

Thank you for posting the link to all the photos. I'd never seen them before!

Elizabeth (Alaska) wrote: "Why does he refer to an "odor memory?" He clearly describes a taste memory.

I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mix..."

He also describes odor as a trigger for memory earlier -- the smell of varnish on the stairs:

"And so I must set forth without viaticum; must climb each step of the staircase “against my heart,”3 as the saying is, climbing in opposition to my heart’s desire, which was to return to my mother, since she had not, by kissing me, given my heart leave to accompany me. That hateful staircase, up which I always went so sadly, gave out a smell of varnish which had, as it were, absorbed and crystallised the special quality of sorrow that I felt each evening, and made it perhaps even crueller to my sensibility because, when it assumed this olfactory guise, my intellect was powerless to resist it. When we have gone to sleep with a raging toothache and are conscious of it only as of a little girl whom we attempt, time after time, to pull out of the water, or a line of Molière which we repeat incessantly to ourselves, it is a great relief to wake up, so that our intelligence can disentangle the idea of toothache from any artificial semblance of heroism or rhythmic cadence. It was the converse of this relief which I felt when my anguish at having to go up to my room invaded my consciousness in a manner infinitely more rapid, instantaneous almost, a manner at once insidious and brutal, through the inhalation—far more poisonous than moral penetration—of the smell of varnish peculiar to that staircase." (36)

The madeleine episode strikes me as a bookmark to the wonderful opening when he describes the kaleidoscope of images, dreams, memories, dreams, and sense impressions that open up before him at night when he is in bed. (Those passages make me want to revisit Bachelard's The Poetics of Space ASAP.) He's using these beautiful, evocative descriptions of the flow of impressions and memories in commonplace settings and actions, and providing us with some of his speculations and insights on how memory works. What are the triggers, how does he experience the memories, how does he excavate them, etc.

Proustitute wrote: "I'm both laughing and cringing at the narrator's descriptions of his great-aunt's disgust over mixing with, but especially marrying, members of different social classes even if this is to their ben...

Why had I forgotten the dualistic portrait of Swann that Proust creates in these opening scenes? By this I mean not even solely the public versus the private Swann, which will come later on, but the different versions of our public selves, how we are one self with one group of people and an entirely different self with another group of people—and also how we are forced to be these selves due to the limited social scope of those with whom we interact and who refuse to acknowledge that we have other sides to our personalities which, in our exchanges with them, are often suppressed just as they are expressed in the company of others. "

I was laughing and cringing at those passages as well. And the narrator's description of a "social personality" and how it is created grabbed my attention:

"But then, even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people. Even the simple act which we describe as “seeing someone we know” is to some extent an intellectual process. We pack the physical outline of the person we see with all the notions we have already formed about him, and in the total picture of him which we compose in our minds those notions have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice as if it were no more than a transparent envelope, that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is these notions which we recognise and to which we listen. "(23-24)

And then the continuation of the passage in which the Narrator describes how the family built their idea of Swann following this process ends so beautifully, " "...this early Swann in whom I can distinguish the charming mistakes of my youth, and who in fact is less like his successor than he is like the other people I knew at that time, as though one’s life were a picture gallery in which all the portraits of any one period had a marked family likeness, a similar tonality—this early Swann abounding in leisure, fragrant with the scent of the great chestnut-tree, of baskets of raspberries and of a sprig of tarragon." (24)

I also love the character sketches in this section -- in particular those of the great-aunts. Their obscure attempts to thank Swann for the wine made me smile. And I loved this passage,

"So complete was their negation of interest in anything which seemed directly or indirectly connected with worldly matters that their sense of hearing—having finally come to realise its temporary futility when the tone of the conversation at the dinner-table became frivolous or merely mundane without the two old ladies’ being able to guide it back to topics dear to themselves—would put its receptive organs into abeyance to the point of actually becoming atrophied. So that if my grandfather wished to attract the attention of the two sisters, he had to resort to some such physical stimuli as alienists adopt in dealing with their distracted patients: to wit, repeated taps on a glass with the blade of a knife, accompanied by a sharp word and a compelling glance, violent methods which these psychiatrists are apt to bring with them into their everyday life among the sane, either from force of professional habit or because they think the whole world a trifle mad." (27-28)
Such brilliant social observations.

Liberty wrote: "Kris wrote: "Elizabeth (Alaska) wrote: "Why does he refer to an "odor memory?" He clearly describes a taste memory.

He's also dipped the madeline in linden tea, which has a lovely smell and distinct smell, so it is both taste and smell together. As someone said earlier, taste is 90% smell. "

So true -- and especially when I think of the experience of drinking tea, the aroma from the steam is an integral (and pleasurable) part of the experience.