The Year of Reading Proust discussion

This thread is for the discussion that will take place through Sunday, 15 Sept. of The Captive, to page 187 (to the paragraph beginning: “Already, in the case of quite a number of woman at any rate...”)

Sometimes, just sometimes, I can get mildly irritated with Our Narrator, but then he ingratiates himself again with knowing little nods to his own obsessions:

after over 30 pages that turn and turn and turn around the question of his own jealousy I get this one sentence that makes me forgive him almost anything:

"Je piétinais sur place dans de douloureuses banalités."

(p. 103 folio classique)

Mais oui.

Karen and All,

FYI there's a book called Sydney and Violet that has several chapters concerning Proust himself. S & V were a literary couple during the Modernist era and they became good friends of Proust's in the last three years of his life. Of course this was when he was furiously trying to finish his saga and was feeling terrible so they mostly had a pen pal relationship. Over all S & V wasn't a great book but I loved the Proust section.

I should have said as well that, per the author, S & V were some of the first readers of Proust in England and they did everything they could to get the word out about how wonderful he was. Proust dedicated Sodom and Gomorrah to Sydney Schiff.

Thanks Cynthia, I read your excellent review of that book and noted it to myself:

http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

I know a lot of people found the beginning of this volume somewhat more sombre, or found a different tone, but I'm with CeCe, I think it has a lot to do with the confinement, the lack of ever going outside of the narrator's ceaselessly active mind.
But he endears himself to me when he makes me laugh again: I love how Albertine speaks in a rather over-precious literary style when she's talking of the ice cream, it's a beautifully rendered parody of the style we have come to know, and the narrator looks on her speaking like this somewhat bemused, although he is also not without criticism

"Je trouvais que c'était un peu trop bien dit.."

And before that:

".. sans moi elle ne parlerait pas ainsi, elle a subi profondément mon influence, elle ne peut donc pas ne pas m'aimer, elle est mon oeuvre."

(p.120, folio classique)

Then she really takes off with a somewhat over the top architectural and geographical ice cream philosophy, but it all goes wrong when she mentions Mlle Vinteuil.

Couldn't I tell my little sparrow's hop among a thousand? More bird imagery, the use of which signifies to me the imprisonment of birds in cages. It's clear to me that the narrator considers Albertine his prisoner.

In so far as the relations with women whom we abduct are less permanent than others, the reason is that the fear of not succeeding in procuring them or the dread of seeing them escape is the whole of our love for them and that once they have been carried off from their husbands, torn from their footlights, cured of the temptation to leave us, dissociated in short from our emotion whatever it may be, they are only themselves, that is to say next to nothing, and, so long desired, are soon forsaken by the very man who was so afraid of their forsaking him.

Having no personal experience in abduction, I'll have to accept the narrator's proposition. He believes that to to maintain his love he must retain the fear of her unfaithfulness, and thus is himself a prisoner of his own obsessive jealousy.

It's a paradox, but they must both be prisoners.

Cynthia wrote: "I should have said as well that, per the author, S & V were some of the first readers of Proust in England and they did everything they could to get the word out about how wonderful he was.
Proust dedicated Sodom and Gomorrah to Sydney Schiff...."

Sydney Schiff translated the last volume, after Moncrieff died, in 1930, without completing the novel.

Unregistered* wrote: "Couldn't I tell my little sparrow's hop among a thousand? More bird imagery, the use of which signifies to me the imprisonment of birds in cages. It's clear to me that the narrator considers Albert..."

That's interesting that the translator has chosen a sparrow - the original uses the word bécasse, which, as far as I know, is a woodcock, and Larousse also gives the colloquial meaning as a 'femme peu intelligente' - a bit like saying silly goose I suppose, but then that would make her sound flat-footed and ungainly!

ah yes, I see

And when we come to the scene when the Narrator picks up the phone and..

Pendant qu'Albertine allait ôter ses affaires et pour aviser au plus vite, je me saisis du récepteur du téléphone, j'invoquai les Divinités implacables, mais ne fis qu'exciter leur fureur qui se traduisit par ces mots: Pas libre.

The "Divinités implacables" immediately brought to mind one of my favorite operas, Alceste by Gluck. Proust has mentioned Gluck once in the previous volume.

Here you have the Aria with the Divinités Implacables with Anne Sophie von Otter singing it...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxnogU...

The above passage continues, with great humour (and which stands out as a contrast to the anguish and the jealousy that keeps the Narrator so preoccupied), by making reference to the contemporary painters who follow the manner of the 18th art (Boucher and Fragonard).

We already encountered Paul César Helleu, the "Watteau à vapeur" in the previous volume.

I love it... "Devant le téléphone".

Just a quick post. I was curious about the name Jehan being that it reminded me of Jehan Sadat.

"I wanted to know the original spelling of the name Jean. I learned it when I received a letter from a nephew of Mme de Villeparisis who signs himself—as he was christened, as he figures in the Almanach de Gotha—Jehan de Villeparisis, with the same handsome, superfluous, heraldic h that we admire, illuminated in vermilion or ultramarine, in a Book of Hours or in a stained-glass window."(MKE 39)

" The European continent and in all French-speaking countries, Jean, pronounced [ʒɑ̃], is a male name derived from the Old French Jehan.

Jehan de Villeparisis




Proust actually had a member of his own family who was named Jehan.

"The Proust family, one of the oldest in the small town of Illiers, near Chartres, can be traced back as far as the sixteenth century. Adrien's ancestors, for the most part, belonged to the middle class and held administrative posts that, under the ancien régime, were normally reserved for notables. The records list Prousts who were bailiffs, elected representatives, and lawyers. In 1589 Jehan Proust was listed as a member of the Assembly of Notables, a civic institution dating from the Middle Ages." http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/c/...

ReemK10 (Paper Pills) wrote: "Just a quick post. I was curious about the name Jehan being that it reminded me of Jehan Sadat.

"I wanted to know the original spelling of the name Jean. I learned it when I received a letter from..."

This image is from André Vincens' website about Proust's characters.
http://proust-personnages.fr/?page_id...
He gathers portraits from various places...not sure where this painting originated.
(André often uses David Richardson's portraits.)

"...as he figures in the Almanach de Gotha—Jehan de Villeparisis..."

http://www.almanachdegotha.org/id266....

apropos of Devant le téléphone

Somewhere in his essays Gore Vidal laments the loss to prosterity arising from the replacement of letters as the means of everyday communication by the telephone, and expresses the fervent hope that somewhere, someone has Nixonesque tapes so that we may one day be enlightened by the Collected Phonecalls of Truman Capote.

One of the most egregious details to come out of the recent data snooping revelations to me was not that the sleuths are able to listen in should they so choose, I'd always figured they could, but that the whole of global electronic communications (email, browsing and search histories, IP numbers, telephone and skype calls, etc) is being collected and stored in perpetuity - or at least until the cost of electricity requires that the plugs on the data centres be pulled.

One can only hope that one day this trove will be available for mining by historians and writers of creative genius so we can enjoy also where there would come spontaneously to the listener a smile all the more genuine because it is conscious of being unobserved.

"Are you coming with us to-morrow, you naughty man?" she asked before leaving me. "Where are you going?" "That will depend on the weather and on yourself. But have you written anything to-day, my little darling? No? Then it was hardly worth your while, not coming with us..." Moncrieff

The conflation of desires: the Narrator wants to write as we all know & to have love around him as any sensible and feeling 20 year old would. But he loves more when love is distanced from him; is not jealousy a distance and that of death too. Think of his realized state in Balbec after the permanent distance of the death of his grandmother, think of the distance that the visitor Swann created between him and his good night kiss from Mamma in Combray. And we must also think that he is distanced from his other desire, that of writing. He writes nothing. What will bring these distances of art and love closer together for him? What will he realize?

We read on.

Unregistered* wrote: "Somewhere in his essays Gore Vidal laments the loss to prosterity arising from the replacement of letters as the means of everyday communication by the telephone..."

Proust liked novelties, but eventually he came to think of the telephone similarly to you. He got rid of it in his house and if he needed to get in touch with someone, he would send Céleste out to call from a public phone.

As I was reading the part: "If only I'm not killed," he says to himself, " how shall I enjoy myself too!" Life has in fact suddenly acquired a higher value in his eyes, because he puts into life everything that it seems to him capable of giving instead of the little tht he normally demands of it."(MKE 101-102)

This reminded me of something I read before about Proust answering this question posed in 1922 by L'Intransigeant:

"A scientist announces that the world will end. How do you think that people would behave between the time when they acquired this news and the moment of apocalypse? And what would you do in these last hours?"

He replies: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-ent...

The letter has not come; no messenger appears with it; what can have happened? anxiety is born afresh, and love. It is such people more than any others who inspire love in us, for our destruction. For every fresh anxiety that we feel on their account strips them in our eyes of some of their personality. We were resigned to suffering, thinking that we loved outside ourselves, and we perceive that our love is a function of our sorrow, that our love perhaps is our sorrow... Moncrieff

It seems to me that the long, long paragraphs we have become accustomed to over the previous books are much less in evidence here, and I see a lot more short narrative sentences than usual. I wonder how much is authorial intent and how much from the abbreviated editing process.

Richard wrote: "It seems to me that the long, long paragraphs we have become accustomed to over the previous books are much less in evidence here, and I see a lot more short narrative sentences than usual. I wonde..."

In the G-F edition there are almost no paragraph breaks. I normally mark the sections when we begin a new volume but with this one it was impossible. It was already difficult with S&G but with this one I just had to start reading and hope that I would be able to recognize the end of the section. Last night I spent a fair amount of time trying to locate the one for this week. I found it thanks to an electronic version that I have on the side.

All the breaks are in the middle of the paragraph.

The importance of sound and a sort of substitute for vision is again very important in this section. The Narrator himself states it.

It is the sound of the bells that bring him the memories of the sun, and of the sensation of the sun, from both the Combray and the Balbec days.

Il y avait des jours où le bruit d'une cloche qui sonnait l'heure portait sur la sphère de sa sonorité une plaque si fraîche, si puissamment étalée de mouillé ou de lumière, que c'était comme une traduction pour aveugles, ou si l'on veut, comme une traduction musicale du charme de la pluie, ou du charme du soleil..... je me disais que tout peut se transposer et qu'un univers seulement audible pourrait être aussi varié que l'autre.

Poor Narrator, has enclosed himself in his room.

And yet, in spite of the above, he immediately uses again the verb "voir" as he then says that he then sees all his memories unroll in his mind, memories which instants before were invisible.

Such a visual writer....

I am fascinated by the lucidity of the Narrator and the "finesse" in his self-analysis.

The whole passage on his procrastination is acutely smart. It is even this tendency of his-- to "leave it for later"-- that affects the way he deals with his jealousy, the most pressing of his interests or passions.

La prisonnière and all the images of fleeing and flying away, and of wings...

A ces êtres-là, à ces êtres de fuite, leur nature, notre inquiétude attachent de ailes. Et même auprès de nous, leur regard semble nous dire qu'ils vont s'envoler. La preuve de cette beauté, surpassant la beauté, qu'ajoutent les ailes, est que bien souvent pour nous un même être est successivement sans ailes et ailé.

And Agostinelli had fallen when flying.

In an earlier volume it was mentioned that Friedrich Nietzsche is brilliant; some of his writing is termed aphoristic, as is described the writing of Blaise Pascal in his Pensées.

This volume is aphoristic too, in an odd sense, but in a discursive manner as he connects his thoughts novelistically. I tend in my Kindle edition to highlight his aphorisms; for example, "love is sorrow," even though I may or may not agree with him, or better, I may not understand his propositions as of yet, but they are carried in my memory to measure the reality I encounter in the future or, as the Narrator writes, by reopening the past.

Eugene wrote: ""love is sorrow," even though I may or may not agree with him..."

But I can understand his perspective. At one point many of us were heart-wrenched fools (especially at 18-19), when love felt like misery...

·Karen· wrote: "Then she really takes off with a somewhat over the top architectural and geographical ice cream philosophy..."

I was reminded of Victorian "Jellies" ...jello in modern speak but made from gelatin and not out of the box...when I read of the architectural ices and flavors. Here are some antique and contemporary examples. I've made jellies from scratch. They are delicious...and as Albertine points out, lemon does present its own challenge!

I wonder if these elaborate molds were adapted to flavored ices? Albertine spoke of the old molds.





Made from this mold...discussed in a recipe book dated 1905...



http://foodhistorjottings.blogspot.co...


Center obelisk mold...



Another antique mold...



Contemporary:

In recent years Bompas and Parr have revived the Victorian tradition
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesi...

An entire jello exhibit of San Francisco...
http://sobadsogood.com/2013/05/26/her...

EDITED: Removed images of contemporary molds (left links) and added two more creams made from antique molds

Albertine grew from the status of a paper doll to a living breathing young woman with this week's section.

I actually had this vision of when I was a child and would lay out my paper dolls with their piles of lovely elaborate paper dresses...dressing and undressing them...delicate folding back their little paper tabs. Delighting in new garments. Speaking for them. Putting them carefully back into their little suitcase. That was Albertine...until this week.

In one fell swoop she came to life as she described her desire for and pleasure in the ices.

"...pausing for a moment when she had brought off a simile to laugh that beautiful laugh of hers which was so painful to me because it was so voluptuous." ML p 165

"They make raspberry obelisks too, which will rise up here and there in the burning desert of my thirst, and I shall make their pink granite crumble and melt deep down in my throat...(and here the deep laugh broke out, whether from satisfaction at talking so well, or in self-mockery for using such carefully contrived images, or, alas from physical pleasure at feeling inside herself something so good, so cool, which was tantamount to a sexual pleasure)." ML p 165

She goes on to say she will set her lips to work to destroy pillar by pillar those Venetian churches (made of strawberry)..."all those monuments will pass from their stony state into my inside which thrills already with their melting coolness." ML p 166

Voluptuous, Sexual, Sensual...Albertine is alive and self possessed...and hearing her own words she would be a handful for any young man.

Visions of the young Odette were hovering in my mind. If Albertine is "held captive" it is on her terms and because she is reaping benefit and rewards that make it worth her while. While the Narrator is the one imprisoned in a world of his own making...he is the little sparrow/woodcock in the airless cage.

"...and at the same time seeing that she was not unaccompanied-to display every day greater ingenuity than Sheherazade. Unfortunately, if by a similar ingenuity the Persian storyteller postponed her own death, I [the Narrator] was hastening mine."

Albertine is coming and going daily. Her activities truly are a mystery. She is the only character who roams the world in this volume to date.

Under Albertine's influence, I seem to be "lusting" after antique molds! ;-)

Ices and Frozen Desserts
Ivan Day at Food & Company

Ce Ce wrote: "·Karen· wrote: "Then she really takes off with a somewhat over the top architectural and geographical ice cream philosophy..."

I was reminded of Victorian "Jellies" ...jello in modern speak but ma..."

CeCe... these are Wonderful.... haha....

I relished the "painted" scene of the vendors in the morning outside the Narrator's window...these visual/verbal splendors are some of my favorite passages in ISOLT.

Aside from my pleasure in developing the rich image in my mind, I was struck with the vivid and bittersweet contrast of teeming life outside his window, the sight and sounds speaking to him in his cloistered existence.

Visions of Aunt Leonie watching the street from her bedroom window...and of course he speaks of his familial heritage...all coming to life in him...particularly Aunt Leonie.

The remarkable weaving of this novel, layer upon layer, speaking not only to the Narrator's memory but our own as we recall what we already know.

Just as I am feeling the weight...the isolation...the melancholy...the Narrator makes me laugh out loud. As Albertine is requesting dinners made only of the things sold in season by the shouting vendors, the Narrator realizes green beans are two months away, same with cream cheese...AND the dessert grapes from Fountainebleau.

"(And I thought with dismay of all the time that I should have to spend with her before those grapes were in season.)" ML p 163

LOL...was this before, or after, those two little pimples appeared on Albertine's forehead?

My audio version is brilliant in this section. The reader is acting out and singing all the advertised products. Marvellous. And very funny.

Kalliope wrote: "The "Divinités implacables" immediately brought to mind one of my favorite operas, Alceste by Gluck. Proust has mentioned Gluck once in the previous volume.

Here you have the Aria with the Divinités Implacables with Anne Sophie von Otter singing it...
"

Tragic...and so heart wrenchingly beautiful.

Thank you, Kalliope

Certain things in Paris don't change: the litanies of the vegetable venders dans les marchés.

To quote or not to quote?

Have we ever discussed why the mother always wrote letters to her son quoting Madame de Sevigne? Didn't she do the same when she wrote to her own mother?

"I began to read Mamma's letter. Behind her quotation from Mme de Sevigne....(MKE180)

As I read this, I couldn't help but think why? Why didn't she use her own words to express herself? Why was she always quoting?

I quote: "Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."

Oscar Wilde

While I was surprised that the mother did this, I have to admit that I too am a sucker for a good quote!

Why do we quote?

Ce Ce thanks for sharing all that delicious -looking ices and jello!

ReemK10 (Paper Pills) wrote: "

"I began to re..."

Proust certainly was interested in seventeenth century literature, but if Mme de Sévigné was the favourite of his mother, he seemed more interested in Racine and Molière.

And there is in this wonderful beautiful use of music imagery when talking about the noises coming for the street:

Dehors des thèmes populaires finement écrits pour des instruments variés depuis la corne du raccommodeur de porcelaine, ou la trompette de rempailleur de chaises, jusqu'à la flûte du chevrier qui paraissait dans un beau jour être un pâtre de Sicile, orchestraient légèrement l'air matinal, en une "Ouverture pour un jour de fête"

and it continues praising the sense of Sound..

L'ouie, ce sens délicieux nous apporte la compagnie de la rue dont elle nous retrace toutes les lignes, dessine toutes les formes qui y passent, nous en montrant la couleur. (G-F 211).

So, as pointed out above in #23, here again, even when he is paying attention to the sense of Sound, he uses terms from the sense of Sight, and from painting....

He can't get away from conceiving in visual terms, even when his knowledge of the world comes to him through sounds...

And now Mussorgsky is mentioned for the first time, with his Boris Godunov. In relation to the "Ouverture pour un jour de fête" that comes to the Narrator from the street.

The beginning of the section below is rather apt.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fFYHZ...

In my edition there is a note on the sentence:

.. c'était avec la tristesse et le vague de Maeterlinck, musicalement transposée par Debussy, que le marchand d'escargots dans un de ces douloureux finales par où l'auteur de Pelléas s'apparente au Rameau. "Si je dois être vaincue, est-ce à toi d'être mon vainqueur?"

that says that the quoted sentence is not from Rameau, but from Gluck's "Armide" and that the sentence is originally "Ah, si la liberté me doit être ravie, est-ce à toi d'être mon vainqueur?"

There are two operas Armide. One by Gluck and another by Lully... Both use the same libretto.

Debussy was interested in reviving Rameau (not only Chopin as discussed earlier and recently in the Lounge -- one of his pieces in the Images set is "Hommage à Rameau").

Here is Marc-André Hamelin playing this beautiful piece (I have this DVD)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DVsDz...

And in the book Femmes peintres et salons au temps de Marcel Proust: de Madeleine Lemaire à Berthe Morisot, when discussing the Salon of the Princesse de Polignac, the Salon that paid most attention to the musical avant-garde, it mentions how a Rameau opera was staged at her mansion.

Either way.. all interesting and beautiful..Lully, Rameau and Gluck

Here is this Aria from Lully's

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TV_Jdp...

And by Gluck

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcRFrd...

Both Lully and Gluck were foreigners working in the French court. The first was Italian in Louis XiV's and Gluck was Marie Antoinette's music teacher and he was also Austrian.

Kalliope wrote: "And there is in this wonderful beautiful use of music imagery when talking about the noises coming for the street:l..."

Bill Carter, in his Online Course (www.proust-ink.com) compares the street cries to "The Strawberry Song" in Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess."
From the 1959 film, sing by Helen Thigpen
"Street Cries; Strawberry Woman...Crab Man"
www.youtube.com/watch?v=brdpGv_EYCQ

George Gershwin visited Charleston, South Carolina, when writing the opera. I like to imagine that there was a note or two from the French Huguenots who settled in that port, after escaping religious persecution.

CeCe: Albertine grew from the status of a paper doll to a living breathing young woman with this week's section.

I've been giving quite a lot of thought to Proust's characterization and still feel Albertine is almost a ghost in comparison to other more solidly created personalities. To me, the author seems to portray her as an object rather than a subject, and the living breath not yet instilled. Pygmalion still under construction.

Bloom discusses at length Proust's characterization and I yesterday posted on this in the new thread on the main page in the w/spoiler section. I think the post, which has NO spoiler but the links may, is very revelant to understanding Proust's technique.

I enjoyed very much the street noises - it reminded me of that part in La Boheme, but thought it all rather ironic a theme for a writer living in room lined with cork to exclude exterior sounds. The colour of the streets seems to give pleasure to the narrator.

Wasn't there an earlier reference in ISOLT to Mussorgsky's Pictures from an Exhibition?

@Eugene I've been wondering somewhat about your comment on distance, or separation as indispensible for maintaining the narrator's love for Albertine. He comments several times about the need for others to wish to possess the object he has abducted and is holding captive; and should she be undesired by others, he'd fall indifferent to her. Jealousy is necessary to maintain love, which is the wellspring of the whole work's comedy.

I feel this is a well worthwhile topic to explore a little further and hope, if you've time, you can expand a little on your thoughts. thx

Unregistered* wrote: "Wasn't there an earlier reference in ISOLT to Mussorgsky's Pictures from an Exhibition?.."

I do not recall he has so far mentioned Pictures. May be later on. This is my first read.

I have Proust as Musician, but will not tackle it until I have finished the novel.

Jean Milly says that the section on sleeping and dreaming and the goddess Mnémotechnie, was added and inserted by Proust in a handwritten section to the typed parts.

In my edition it is about 3 pages.

From Et souvent une heure du sommeil.... G-F p.218
until
...aux amours, on ne le retrouve pas.p. 221.

Thus it is that jealousy is endless, for even if the beloved object, by dying for instance, can no longer provoke it by her actions, it so happens that posthumous memories, of later origin than any event, take shape suddenly in our minds as though they were events also, memories which hitherto we have never properly explored, which had seemed to us unimportant, and to which our own meditation upon them has been sufficient, without any external action, to give a new and terrible meaning. Moncrieff

Huis Clos

It is hard enough to say: "Why did you stare at that girl who went past?" but a great deal harder to say: "Why did you not stare at her?" Moncrieff

Françoise as the matchmaker and paintings...

Et Françoise, en bonne et honnête servante qui entend faire respecter son maître comme elle le respecte elle-même, s'étai drapée de cette majesté qui ennoblit les entremetteuses dans ces tableaux des vieux maîtres, ou à côté d'elles s'effacent presque dans l'insignifiance la maîtresse et l'amant. G-F p. 237.

I cannot find paintings that correspond very closely to the description but there is the famous one by Vermeer, a painter that figures prominently in Proust's writing.

.


I like this one by Clouet called The Letter, and given that the scene above takes place after the Narrator has read his mother's letter and is about to send her his reply... then... not too irrelevant..

Just to say I am hanging in here, keeping up with Proust but not with this discussion.

I, too, get irritated with our Narrator. He cries all night because he doesn't get his good-night kiss from his girl-friend -- whom he may not really love. What? ! ?? And all because of Mama! ? ??? I would like to shake him at such moments.

And then I get to thinking about the layers to the pronoun "I" and the various intentions in each layer. There is the Author (Marcel Proust) who has a narrator write about his youth -- and the narrator may have reasons to portray his younger self as something of a self-preoccupied idiot (and, maybe even as more of an idiot than he really was) in order to make something clear to us by the end. And, of course, the Author may be letting the narrator portray his younger self as an idiot for a number of reasons. Given all of these layers of intentionality and given the fact that a number of characters in the book actually say they find the young man charming and likeable and something of a catch, I realize that the young man may not be quite as irritating as I am thinking he is at any one moment.

Or, maybe he really is.

I love being captured in this world.

At the same time, I have been re-reading Augustine's Confessions and Jean-Luc Marion's In the Self's Place which, with its discussion of memory and self in Augustine may have a some interesting light to throw on Proust. Maybe I will be able to see it all in time.

Reem: re quoting Mme de Sevigne; she says it better than anyone else possibly could. Have you read her Letters? A total delight. Some critics call her style "cinematic." And I love when the Narrator says when his mother saw the words "my daughter" in the Letters, "she seemed to hear her mother's voice."