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read in January, 2008
Jess said:
"I wouldn't even know where to begin writing about (much less reviewing, gasp) the first volume of Proust's masterpiece. So I'm copying and pasting an article about it from salon.com that I found entertaining and witty. It's long (though I had to cu...more
I wouldn't even know where to begin writing about (much less reviewing, gasp) the first volume of Proust's masterpiece. So I'm copying and pasting an article about it from salon.com that I found entertaining and witty. It's long (though I had to cut over 3,000 words to make it fit), but if you're a member of a site called Goodreads, maybe you won't mind.
Reading "In Search of Lost Time"
By Jane Smiley
Aug 28, 2005 | After I finished "In Search of Lost Time," I called the real literary types that I happen to know -- the ones who make their livings by being famously well-read -- and I asked them if they had read the whole thing, too. Mostly this was to introduce the idea that I had read the whole thing -- but I thought it was a good idea to first show deference to their superior reading programs before happening to mention this accomplishment with which I had impressed myself. Mais non! as they say in France. Yet all of them knew someone who had read all seven volumes; that person was Richard Howard, who introduces the Modern Library edition of the novel. I wondered: Could he be the only one other than me and Alain de Botton, who wrote "How Proust Can Change Your Life"? If so, I am here to tell you, we are a lucky group, and it is time for you to begin, because reading all of Proust is not hard.
First, you buy all seven volumes in a uniform edition -- mine came in a six-book set -- and you arrange them in a row next to your bed, the bathtub or your favorite chair, wherever you are most comfortable reading. For a few days, let's say no longer than a week, you glance at them from time to time and pick them up and look at the covers. You can even flip the pages -- but don't read anything. You are familiarizing yourself with this new acquaintance. You are coming to recognize his appeal. You are letting him impose upon you, because for the next 70 days or so, you are going to organize your free time around him.
You are going to find that he is both more friendly and more alien than you ever imagined. You are going to be charmed and also offended, sometimes disapproving, and occasionally bored. Quite often you are going to be impressed -- his capacity for thinking things through is going to seem almost infinitely great. Mostly, though, if you are like I was, you are going to come to anticipate your daily what? -- Dose? Encounter? Immersion? Meditation? -- with greater and greater eagerness but also greater and greater languor. You are going to come, at least in your own way, to feel French. When you have finished "In Search of Lost Time," you will be convinced that you know something visceral about Frenchness, and that that knowledge is important.
Of course everyone knows that "In Search of Lost Time" begins with a madeleine dipped in tea, except that it doesn't. It begins with falling asleep while reading a book. Someone, "I," a voice who occasionally calls himself "M.," closes his eyes and wakes up a half-hour later, thinking that his book is still in his hands, and by a process of association, begins to think about all sorts of things: the time, an imagined traveler, the comfort of his bed. He sleeps again and is reminded of earlier nights and long ago dreams. The first event he relates is one that happens to have been singular in what seems to be a lonely childhood; unable to sleep and longing for his mother, he is discovered on the stairs by his parents as they go up to bed after a late evening of socializing with their neighbor, Swann. M. expects to be disciplined ("Too late: my father was upon us. Instinctively, I murmured, though no one heard me, 'I'm done for!'"), but he is not. The normally strict father is sympathetic and merciful, and suggests that M.'s beloved mother spend the night with the child.
In order to pass the time, she reads him a novel by George Sand; already his literary sensibility is at work -- "Beneath the everyday incidents, the ordinary objects and common words, I sensed a strange and individual tone of voice." And so have you. Fifty-five pages in, and something has happened. In 10 more pages, you will have done your first day's reading without getting to the madeleine, but Proust's rhythm is well established. It is, let's say, andante: measured, conversational, even ordinary, but seductive and intimate. And that constitutes his promise for all of the 4,200 pages left to go -- his seven volumes will be seductive, intimate, measured and conversational in a way that was unprecedented in the novel of his day and unmatched since.
Since "In Search of Lost Time" is a story and an essay on what stories mean, skipping sections quickly turns into stopping altogether as you lose the thread of his argument and the relationship of his argument to his story. Besides, there is no way to imbibe his "strange and individual tone of voice," both the Proust-ness of it and the Frenchness of it, without prolonged exposure. Proust's seven volumes form a cycle. They are not, though they pretend to be, Proust's memoir. Many significant facts have been changed to enhance the effect of the novel, in order for it to seem, to the author and the reader, to actually recapture the past -- that is, Proust's childhood and the ambience of pre-World War I France. Here is where the madeleine comes in. Shortly after telling about his single night of bliss with his mother, he recounts how it was a family custom to visit his elderly great-aunt on Sunday afternoons. As refreshment, she often offered her visitors madeleines and cups of lime-flower tisane. When, as a young man, M. happens to enjoy this combination again, a sense memory of visits to the long dead great-aunt returns to him. As he gets older, and the volumes of the novel progress, he despairs of making anything of his life and his literary aspirations until several repeated instances of this effect show him how he might portray scenes and senses from his past with enough intensity to go beyond memory, and therefore beyond loss, grief and sadness. In the last volume, he tells how three sense memories in a short space of time motivate him to finally get started, and to produce the seven volumes you have beside your bed.
M. is a friendly fellow, and the past he wishes to recapture is a possibly unique period of European and French history -- the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As you progress through "Within a Budding Grove" you will certainly be able to picture it when you think of all the Matisse, Pissarro, Cezanne, Toulouse-Lautrec and Monet paintings you have ever seen. The light is bright, ocean and sky are everywhere, the human figures are beautifully dressed, and that astonishing combination of lush vegetation and stone buildings that is the French countryside is constantly in your mind. Here are the mirrored cafes and there is the flashily attired army on parade, and M. and his friend Albertine even see a hot-air balloon. But after all, M. is French, and closely related, in a literary sense, to the Marquis de Sade on one side and Honoré de Balzac on the other.
And then there is love, which M. explores by imprisoning his beloved Albertine (who is based not on a girl but on a man Proust loved named Agostinelli) in his house in Paris (Vol. 5) and keeping her until she manages to escape and run away (Vol. 6). It is clear from the beginning that M. is ambivalent about Albertine. When he meets her, she is part of a larger group of girls who are breezy, active and liberated. They play tennis and ride bicycles, perhaps have lovers, and perhaps are each other's lovers (M. can never decide). He chooses Albertine out of the group almost by chance, but once he has chosen her, he becomes obsessed with her, while also doubting whether he can marry her, or, indeed, marry at all. He lures her to his Paris maison while his mother is away in the country and keeps her there, partly by promising her marriage and partly by giving her gifts. Whenever she acts trustworthy and affectionate, he is put off and grows bored. Only when she arouses his jealousy does he actually experience love (remember, this is a book about a very young man).
M. also explores ideas of love by spying upon the homosexual encounters of many of his male friends and discovering what he soon realizes is a broad and deep underground of ruling-class homosexual connections partially concealed by wealth, marriage, costume, parties and politics. If "In Search of Lost Time" is undeniably about everything that passes through the consciousness of M., one of those things is sex -- what he feels about it, how he gets it, who else seems to be getting it, what it means to individuals and to social networks, whether it is worth it, what is more interesting and less interesting, and what it makes people do that they otherwise might not do. He seems to agree with the opinion that the Marquis de Sade expresses in the 18th century novel "Justine," that woman are for making economic, social and familial liasons; what men really want is to be buggered, or whipped, by the lower orders.
It is important that you go about your business while you pursue your reading project. You have to take M. with you on planes and trains and into hotels and to the dentist's office and into your child's piano lesson. "In Search of Lost Time" will not have its full effect if you sequester it. It must diffuse into your life, color every place you go and every scene you look at with its own tints.
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