The Year of Reading Proust discussion

This thread is for the discussion that will take place through Sunday, 22 Dec. of Time Regained, to page 445 (to the paragraph beginning: “I told Mme de Guermates...”)

Interesting how the Narrator now situates Swann as the corner stone of his work.

Both the material and the decision to become a writer.

En somme si j'y réfléchissais la matière de mon expérience laquelle serait la matière de mon livre me venait de Swann... , de sorte que ma présence même en ce moment chez le Prince de Guermantes où venait de me venir brusquement l'idée de mon oeuvre (ce qui faisait que je devais à Swann non seulement la matière mais la décision) p. 321.

I think it was Fionnuala who pointed a few weeks ago that there was already the indication that the two paths, Guermantes and Swann, eventually meet.

This is now stated more clearly. The Guermantes way originates from Swann's.

le côté de Guermantes s'étant en ce sens procéder du "côté de chez Swann" p. 321.

This week my reading is a real patchwork. The order of paragraphs varies a fair amount between the Pléiade and the GF editions.

Without using the famous word "Correspondances" from Baudelaire's poem and aesthetic ideas on synaesthesia, he refers to the concept behind it.

C'est le poète lui-même qui, avec plus de choix et de paresse, recherche volontairement, dans l'odeur d'une femme par example, de sa chevelure, et de son sein, les analogies inspiratrices qui lui évoqueront "l'azur du ciel immense et rond" et "un port rempli de flammes et de mâts". J'allais chercher à me rappeler les pièces de Baudelaire à la base desquelles se trouve ainsi une sensation transposée... p. 326.

The two quotes come from "La Chevelure":

Ô toison, moutonnant jusque sur l'encolure !
Ô boucles ! Ô parfum chargé de nonchaloir !
Extase ! Pour peupler ce soir l'alcôve obscure
Des souvenirs dormant dans cette chevelure,
Je la veux agiter dans l'air comme un mouchoir !

La langoureuse Asie et la brûlante Afrique,
Tout un monde lointain, absent, presque défunt,
Vit dans tes profondeurs, forêt aromatique !
Comme d'autres esprits voguent sur la musique,
Le mien, ô mon amour ! nage sur ton parfum.

J'irai là-bas où l'arbre et l'homme, pleins de sève,
Se pâment longuement sous l'ardeur des climats ;
Fortes tresses, soyez la houle qui m'enlève !
Tu contiens, mer d'ébène, un éblouissant rêve
De voiles, de rameurs, de flammes et de mâts :

Un port retentissant où mon âme peut boire
A grands flots le parfum, le son et la couleur ;
Où les vaisseaux, glissant dans l'or et dans la moire,
Ouvrent leurs vastes bras pour embrasser la gloire
D'un ciel pur où frémit l'éternelle chaleur.

Je plongerai ma tête amoureuse d'ivresse
Dans ce noir océan où l'autre est enfermé ;
Et mon esprit subtil que le roulis caresse
Saura vous retrouver, ô féconde paresse,
Infinis bercements du loisir embaumé !

Cheveux bleus, pavillon de ténèbres tendues,
Vous me rendez l'azur du ciel immense et rond ;
Sur les bords duvetés de vos mèches tordues
Je m'enivre ardemment des senteurs confondues
De l'huile de coco, du musc et du goudron.

Longtemps ! toujours ! ma main dans ta crinière lourde
Sèmera le rubis, la perle et le saphir,
Afin qu'à mon désir tu ne sois jamais sourde !
N'es-tu pas l'oasis où je rêve, et la gourde
Où je hume à longs traits le vin du souvenir ?

Kalliope wrote: "Interesting how the Narrator now situates Swann as the corner stone of his work.
Both the material and the decision to become a writer..."

Yes, and we realise that we have been waiting for Swann's resurrection since the end of Le Côté de Guermantes. It was written in the beginning...

Page 328: is this the first written record of the word gaga?

I love that this masquerade matinée is a double déguisement - that the guests are not only disguised by their layers of powder and paint but also by the distorting lantern of time, just as Golo, long before, was distorted by the door handle of the bedroom in Combray.
And then, the matinée is described as a vue optique of the years that have gone by, a view in perspective of those years similar to the way a two dimensional image is given perspective in a zograscope.
But the Narrator realises that he has also been transformed by time just when he has finally decided on undertaking a work that will examine des réalités extra-temporelles.

Fionnuala wrote: "Page 328: is this the first written record of the word gaga?

I love that this masquerade matinée is a double déguisement - that the guests are not only disguised by their layers of powder and pai..."

I don't recall having read "gaga" before.

Many images of visual distortion and illusion, as you say, but with a different effect on the Narrator from the lanterne magique of his childhood.

Here is a zograscope.. Probably there was one also in the social room in the Sanatorium in The Magic Mountatin..

I had to laugh at Proust's description of... Botox?

Odette again...

.. comme injectée d'un liquide, d'une espèce de paraffine qui gonfle la peau mais l'empêche de se modifier, avait l'air d'une cocotte d'autrefois "naturalisée". p. 356.

Dear Fionnula : re John Banville : his novel about the spy was of course The Untouchable.
He wrote The Infinities, not The Divinities!
Apologies. I must have some kind of nominal aphasia.
Suis-je gateuse?

Fionnuala wrote: "...That the guests are not only disguised by their layers of powder and paint but also by the distorting lantern of time, just as Golo, long before, was distorted by the door handle of the bedroom in Combray...."

And then we (and the Narrator) wonder if it is all just a dream we've been floating through. Will we wake up to find our cheek resting on the open pages of the George Sand book, waiting for Mother's kiss?

Kate wrote: "Dear Fionnula : re John Banville : his novel about the spy was of course The Untouchable.
He wrote The Infinities, not The Divinities...."

But since there were so many divinities in The Infinities, perhaps you called it just right!

@Martin - I like your ending! Could it be....

@Kalliope, I've been keeping a list of all the parallels with TMM....

Social personalities, that is what this week's reading so far has been about; "changes" that will "hold part of my work together" and that part is the Narrator's view on people and their changing social personality which was mentioned early on in the first volume.

From changes accomplished in society I was all the better able to extract important truths, worthy of being used as the cement which would hold part of my work together, for the reason that such changes were by no means, as at the first moment I might have been tempted to suppose, peculiar to the epoch in which we lived. ML p. 407

According to Proust, but in other words, these changes were "general" meaning they were 'truthful', and not specific to the lived epoch; they were as such everlasting.

Now we've had the Madeline Moments that show the Narrator accessibility to the past via involuntary memory. He can recall the past truthfully now; but even though he has the truthful past before him, the Narrator's question remains what will he write about of his past life?

This answer was not well documented in the novel so far; but Proust is a moralist and a moralist's topic is other people so changes in social personality fit well into the fabric of the novel and suit the author.

Proust has chosen to write about the Narrator's views of social personality, their change from the past to the present. You will remember the 'coda' from Volume 1 where the Narrator (the same person as now) walks across the Bois and recalls Odette at a former time--he remembers, he writes (thinks)--in other words by his memory and his art he has regained the past in the present.

Proust and the Narrator have many interesting views on changing--from past to present--or the difference--from viewpoint--of social personality and here is one of them:

But these friends were to some extent Swann's neighbours in life, their own lives had developed along lines near enough to his own for their memories to be fairly full of him, whereas other men who were more remote from Swann—at a greater distance measured not perhaps socially but in terms of intimacy, which caused their knowledge of him to be vaguer and their meetings with him rarer—possessed of him recollections that were less numerous and in consequence conceptions that were less fixed. ML p. 404

In an anachronistic novel as this is; it is wise to recall where the passages, that are meaningful to you come from, as they may not be in chronological order.

For those of you who don't visit the lounge, you might like to drop by to see the invite to the new Divine Comedy and Decameron read for 2014. We would like to see you join the new group!

ReemK10 (Paper Pills) wrote: "For those of you who don't visit the lounge, you might like to drop by to see the invite to the new Divine Comedy and Decameron read for 2014. We would like to see you join the new group!"

Thank you, Reem. I signed up, may be for only the Dante read.

It does not really belong to this thread, but we can use our memories to recall when the Narrator spoke of the San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice.

I have come upon this church now in Ruskin's Stones and this is what he thought of the façade of the church--

It is impossible to thing a design more gross, more barbarous, more childish in conception, more servile in plagiarism, more insipid in result, more contemptible under every point of rational regard.

He did not like the way the problem of the pillared façade of a building which had to have a main nave and two side aisles and clerestories.

Here is the beautiful church (to my and to Proust's eyes)

Martin wrote: "Fionnuala wrote: "...That the guests are not only disguised by their layers of powder and paint but also by the distorting lantern of time, just as Golo, long before, was distorted by the door hand..."

Certainly Sand's novel is very important, Martin. I have just finished reading it and hope to post my review soon.

Fionnuala wrote: " I've been keeping a list of all the parallels with TMM.... ..."

You must be close to finishing TMM. I would love to see your list of the coincidences.

Kalliope wrote: "You must be close to finishing TMM. I would love to see your list of the coincidences. "

Oh yes, TMM has finished with me and I'm nearly done with it too...

..."Gracious me, it appears to be true that poor Madame d'Arpajon is dead." Even the people who did not need this death to make them feel any joy in being alive, were rendered happy by it. For every death is for others a simplification of life, it spares them the necessity of showing gratitude, the obligation of paying calls. ML p. 425

About a year ago I told Mia that I was reading Proust and she said, "I did my thesis on Proust; I missed reading a volume thinking there were only six," and she smiled mysteriously. Then, I didn't ask her which one she'd missed but I'm curious now that I've almost finished the novel. I think it was volume 6, but maybe it was volume 4...I really don't know; when I see her again I will ask her.

Which leads me to a possible opportunity that Mia had and we perhaps don't. Maybe not reading a volume of ISOLT was like the Narrator being away from Paris for ~20 years: could she observe the physicality of the novel in a new fashion like the Narrator observed how his acquaintances had aged during his absence. Can she see a devastation of Time--which one?--depending on the volume she missed, as the Narrator sees the ravages wrought by Time outwardly and inwardly in this volume.

We readers know much about the Narrator--everything that Proust has told us. We can't study his social personality in the way he studied the difference in social personalities of society and his acquaintances; we see a continuum from a young child to an adult. Or can we study his changes indirectly? There are many things new as of his return to Paris, many things new about him.

For my friendship with each one had been multiple, I had known her at different times when she had been a different woman for me and I myself had been a different person, steeped in dreams of a different colour. ML p. 442

Eugene wrote: "Social personalities, that is what this week's reading so far has been about; "changes" that will "hold part of my work together" and that part is the Narrator's view on people and their changing s..."

Thinking of Morel...

"For the fact is that there is no humiliation so great that one should not accept it with unconcern, knowing that at the end of a few years our misdeeds will be no more than an invisible dust buried beneath the smiling and blooming peace of nature. The man whose reputation is momentarily under a cloud will soon find himself, thanks to the balancing mechanism of Time, caught and held between two new social levels which will have for him nothing but deference and admiration." MP p. 378

The 'secret' of A la recherche, if you think it has a secret, is on the pages of the novel and it is as plain as the nose on your face in this last volume. Alas, the mystery is of a different kind and is like individual beauty being in the eyes of the beholder.

We are here to read the author, not a commenting reader's parsing of his words and thought, so let Marcel Proust speak to you in the voice of the Narrator about "an urgent, a supremely important appointment" with himself that happens late in this week's reading.

Certainly it was my intention to resume next day, but this time with a purpose, a solitary life...for the duty of writing my book took precedence now over that of being polite or even kind. ML p. 436

But I should have the courage to reply to those who came to see me or tried to get me to visit them that I had, for necessary business which required my immediate attention, an urgent, a supremely important appointment with myself. ML p. 436

...I realised that our powers of exaltation are being given a false direction when we expend them in friendship, because they are then diverted from those truths towards which they might have guided us to aim at a particular friendship which can lead to nothing. ML p. 437

I was doing some research today at the Smithsonian Archives on Park Avenue South, looking for a 1911 letter Proust wrote to René Gimpel about the Japanese scaps of paper that expand in water.

After I found the letter, written from 102 Boulevard Haussmann, I came across another letter written from 44 rue de Hamelin.

Proust had written: "Address Confidential"

What did the 2nd letter say, Marcelita?

And tell us if the Smithsonian Archives; where on Park Avenue South?

*of

These days I am reading The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War 1890-1914 and I came upon this..

..while in France the life of the "haut monde" centered upon the Jockey Club, whose members played polo, drank whiskey and had their portraits painted in hunting pink by Helleu, the French equivalent of Sargent.

And I find there is a book called Marcel Proust et le Jockey Club, by Louis de Beauchamp. No data in GR... will enter it later on.

Eugene wrote: "..."Gracious me, it appears to be true that poor Madame d'Arpajon is dead." Even the people who did not need this death to make them feel any joy in being alive, were rendered happy by it. For ever..."

Eugene, thanks for quoting this, in particular the "For every death is for others a simplification of life" part as I had deliberately highlighted that, for me, absolute 'nailing' of a part of me, and by extension, humankind that is so rarely talked about. I felt just that after my Dad, whom I loved dearly, died as there was no question but that his Death simplified my relationship with my Mother in particular and therefore my life in general.

What is a particular feature of Proust for me is that insights like this are presented in quite a matter of fact way, not held up as "INSIGHTS".

I can't ready anymore without feeling the impending loss of ending. In a sense actually, I've always been reading for the end but now it's coming, I'm not so sure I want it.

One of the many aspects that interested me this week was the role of dreams...."the Guermantes...plunged their roots more deeply into my past life, down to a level at which I had dreamed more...". Dreaming, which I think is Narrator imagining Mme de G before actually meeting her eg, is the activity that gives a memory roots - seems to be what he's saying. Which is frankly fascinating!

More examples of why I have loved this year's reading - humour. The Princesse de Nassau leaving the room and pressing the narrator's hand in a questioning way as if to ask with her eyes: "We were a little bit naughty together in my cab once, weren't we?".

And "She seemed to allude to something that has in fast never happened, but this was hardly difficult for her since a strawberry tart could send her into an ecstasy...." Pure farce.

Kalliope wrote: "This week my reading is a real patchwork. The order of paragraphs varies a fair amount between the Pléiade and the GF editions."

Trying not to miss any of the sections in the patchwork arrangement, between the Audio and the GF edition, I have been baffled in my second reading by a passage that will interest Manny and FioFio.

For Manny - again on ideas - and with a fascinating realization on the power of "noms" fading away..

Et si les noms avaient perdu pour moi de leur individualité, les mots me découvraient tout leur sens. La beauté des images est logée à l'arrière des choses, celle des idées à l'avant. De sorte qu'on ne cesse de d'émerveiller quand on les a atteintes, mais qu'on ne comprend les secondes que quand on les a dépassées.

And For FioFio's interest on the concept of "dehors du temps" - outside of time.

Puisque j'avais décidé qu'elle (la matière du livre) ne pouvait être uniquement constituée par les impressions véritablement pleines, celles qui sont en dehors du temps, parmi les vérités avec lesquelles je comptais les sertir, celles qui se rapportent au temps, au temps dans lequel baignent et s'altèrent les hommes, les sociétés, les nations, tiendraient une place plus importante. p. 320.

This section was not in my Audio (Pléiade).

If the whole work is based upon the notion of "une vie perdue", we get in this section also another concept, that of "une vie manquée".. those other lives one could have led, had one not chosen a particular path. For a given choice is made at the expense of not having chosen something else... The Narrator regrets that he will never know what his other possible lives would have been.

I found this a very powerful thought.

And the path he chose had been marked by Swann (post 2 above)

Si Swann ne m'avait pas parlé de Balbec je n'aurais pas connu Albertine, la salle à manger de l'hôtel, les Guermantes. Mais je serais allé ailleurs, j'aurais connu des gens différents, ma mémoire comme mes livres serait remplie de tableaux tout autres, que je ne peux même pas imaginer et dont la nouveauté, inconnue de moi, me séduit et me fait regretter de n'être pas allé plutôt avec elle, et qu'Albertine et la plage de Balbec et de Rivebelle et les Guermantes ne me fussent pas restés toujours inconnus. p. 322.

The notes say that the long quotes from Chateaubriand's Mémoires d'outre-tombe are in Céleste's handwriting.

Kalliope wrote: "Puisque j'avais décidé qu'elle (la matière du livre) ne pouvait être uniquement constituée par les impressions véritablement pelines, celles qui sont en dehors du temps, parmi les vérités avec lesquelles je comptais les sertir, celles qui se rapportent au temps, au temps dans lequel baignent es s'altèrent les ommes, les sociétés, les nations, tiendraient une place plus importante. p. 320.."

I haven't been able to find time to finish this week's section - and tomorrow is Saturday already...bougre!

I'm suddenly not able to post comments from the computer and cannot do the reply.

I am about to watch Raoul Ruiz's Time Regained

Albertine

Libertine

Kalliope wrote: "Albertine

Libertine"

:)

Eugene wrote: "What did the 2nd letter say, Marcelita?"

I gave all the letters to a French reader in my Village-Proust group to translate. So anxious to see what she finds!

The archives are located at 300 Park Avenue South Suite 300, right below Madison Park.
Really, just an office, where the fantastic librarian searches for the micofilm you need.

The Smithsonian has also digitized Whistler's papers.
http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/jam...

Proust and Whistler met only once...page 197.
http://books.google.com/books?id=DGy4...


Méry Laurent was one of the models for Odette...with her Japanese environment and her love of men....and they for her.


Édouard Manet. "Woman in a Bathtub" Musee d’Orsay.

"The last work, in which Méry leans over and sponges herself as the water runs daintily down her left leg, “presents all the characteristic features of Manet’s art: a very special blend of spontaneity and freshness … with rigorous composition and a taste for clear curved lines across horizontals that subdivide the background of the picture: mirror, dressing table, flowered cretonne in subtly colored folds …. The woman posing looks at the artist unafraid, confident that her nude body, though imperfect, encounters a friendly and indulgent gaze." Jeffrey Meyers, Impressionist Quartet (p. 79)


"In 1894 she had her house on the Boulevard Lannes rebuilt in the Renaissance style and furnished inside in a Japoniste manner. She had verses inscribed in the stone facade, by Coppée and Mallarmé. She was immortalised by Marcel Proust as Odette in his work A la recherche du temps perdu, Un amour de Swann."

"In 1889 she became the lover (!) of *Reynaldo Hahn; the following year she was described by Mallarmé in a letter to JW as 'the most sensitive person I know."
http://www.whistler.arts.gla.ac.uk/co...

These letters are from the James McNeill Whistler collection in the University of Glasgow, Special Collections, [ca. 1830-1963.]

*Méry's will:
"I bequeath to my dear friend Mr. Reynaldo Hahn, 9 rue Alfred de Vigny, half of my possessions to the bank of France (which has the number of my book), my whole house and everything in it , ...."

"These pages are my last wishes as I said, I want them to be executed completely and are fully written in my hand healthy mind - the rest will take care my dear notary to help my dear executor Reynaldo Hahn who j sends my last thought in my last breath."
http://translate.google.com/translate...

Thinking of Méry's personal charisma and Odette's.
http://www.petroz.com/portrait.htm
http://translate.google.com/translate...

The fragmentary Gilberte of today... ML p. 443

The Narrator knew but fragments of Gilberte, first near the hawthorns in the Méséglise way, then as an infatuated playmate on the Champs-Élysées, then as a love in Swann's house in Paris, then as a woman married to Saint Loup, then as a householder during the war and finally as a widow during the war years and upon his return to Paris some time later.

...I had known her at different times when she had been a different woman for me and I myself had been a different person, steeped in dreams of a different colour. ML p. 442

Social personalities are exemplified here in the partial knowledge that both the reader and the Narrator have of Gilbete. He, being the protagonist, evidences more of a continuum that we know better than the fragmentary knowlege we have of Gilberte. But there is much we don't know also about the Narrator--and we will never know--as he may never know everything about Albertine.

The Narrator's family remained ignorant of Swann's "brilliant" and fashionable social life in the Combray section of the first volume. There you knew something that the characters didn't know, much like Gilbert remained ignorant of her husband's affair with Morel which the Narrator knew of, but up until this volume, the Narrator didn't know that he could write.

With each character we have but a partial understanding and so on in this fugue of knowing and unknowing...

Fionnuala wrote: "Kalliope wrote: "Puisque j'avais décidé qu'elle (la matière du livre) ne pouvait être uniquement constituée par les impressions véritablement pelines, celles qui sont en dehors du temps, parmi les ..."

Bougre!

We feel the lack of sufficient editing when we find a repetition of terms one page away.

In page 326: il était affublé d'une barbe blanche

next page: il s'était affublé d'une extraordinaire barbe d 'une invraisemblable blancheur..

Once the Narrator is in the grand Salon and begins to encounter personalities in the "Bal de têtes" he encounters M. D'Argencourt.

The Narrator laughs out loud.

J'eus un fou rire devant ce sublime gaga...

Proust's contemporaries have commented how he and his friends would often stand in the social gatherings in a corner, laughing.

We should not have been surprised to find a fair amount of humour in his novel.

And to the dimension of Time, the Narrator is adding now that of space.

This should interest Manny.

... Pour celui d'un être qui se deforme tout au long de son trajet dans l'abîme où il est lancé, abîme dont nous ne pouvons exprimer la direction que par des comparaisons également vaines, puisque nous ne pouvons les emprunter qu'au monde de l'espace, et qui, que nous les orientons dans le sens de l'elévation, de la longueur ou de la profondeur, ont comme seul avantage de nous faire sentir que cette dimension inconcevable et sensible existe. p. 332

The Narrator gives a neat summary of the way groups disintegrate and reform, and the way origins are distorted and reshaped, so that a man of the calibre of Swann, the voisin de campagne jeune ami de mon grand-père, is as if he had never existed. His time is well and truly lost, his memory deleted, the past rewritten in the new simplified language of l'École Berlitz.

Another mention of the mirror element, which should please Marcus.,..

We do not see our own aspect. We only see the way the others look, through an opposite mirror.

Car nous ne voyions pas notre propre aspect, nos propres âges, mais chacun, comme un miroir opposé voyait celer de l'autre. p. 337.

The concept of Time as an artist..., and how It fashions its models along the unfolding of their lives...

Bref, l'artiste, le Temps, avait "rendu" tous ces modèles de telle façon qu'ils étaient reconnaissables. Mais ils n'étiraient pas ressemblants, non parce qu'il les avait flattés mais parce qu'il les avait vieillis. Cet artiste-là du reste travaille fort lentement.... p. 342.

And now, who is he referring to? - Marcelita may know..

Who is this lady who lives locked up in an apartment and is surrounded by Cubist paintings?..

Patronage of Cubism was found more amongst foreigners living in Paris, such as Gertrude Stein. Would Proust have known about her?

Picasso did sign an exclusivity contract - with Kahnweiler.

Et comme au XVIIè siècle d'illustres dames entraient en religion elles vivaient dans un appartement rempli de peintures cubistes, un peintre cubiste ne travaillant que pour elles et elles ne vivaient que pour lui.p. 351

Kalliope wrote: "Another mention of the mirror element, which should please Marcus.,..

We do not see our own aspect. We only see the way the others look, through an opposite mirror.

Car nous ne voyions pas notre..."

yes absolutely Kalliope a mirror is not the most accurate mirror, other people are.