Simon’s Comments (group member since Dec 27, 2014)

Simon’s comments from the One Year In Search of Lost Time ~ 2015 group.

I really liked this week's part, a lot of ideas to think about and two interesting new characters.

Here we get a small hint and direct statement about the narrator's age:

the salient feature of the absurd age I was at – an age which, for all its alleged awkwardness, is prodigiously rich – is that reason is not its guide, and the most insignificant attributes of other people always appear to be consubstantial with their personality.
(...)
There is scarcely a single one of our acts from that time which we would not prefer to abolish later on. But all we should lament is the loss of the spontaneity which urged them upon us. In later life, we see things with a more practical eye, one we share with the rest of society; but adolescence was the only time when we ever learned anything.
(p. 310)

The second part of that is a nice little reflection on youth and was highlighted by 8 others on Kindle (again, i only found out now on my Kindle for PC).

I find these new characters, Saint-Loup and M. or Baron de Charlus quite interesting, two aristocratic, proposedly intellectuals, both flawed though especially in their perception and overestimation of themselves. Saint-Loup is not as openminded as the narrator and disregards people who don't read Nietzsche or listen to Wagner:

Saint-Loup was not intelligent enough to realize that intellectual worth is unrelated to belief in any particular aesthetic doctrine;
(p. 313)

This is also my motivation for a lot of reading:

He was one of those ‘intellectuals’ 39 whose ready admiration keeps them immersed in books, satisfying a hunger for ideas.
(p. 312)

My edition has an annotation on 'intellectuals' that the french term 'intellectuel' "as a noun [only] became widespread in 1898, an acute phase of the Dreyfus Affair".

I also like the whole discussion of how differently others view you compared to yourself, culminating in this advice:

one should make a rule of never speaking of oneself, given that it is a subject on which we may be sure our own view and that of others will never coincide.
(...)
Each time we have spoken of ourselves, we may be sure that our harmless, cautious words, received with ostensible politeness and a pretence of approval, have later inspired a diatribe of unfavourable judgment on us, full of exasperation or hilarity at our expense.
(p. 322)

And here is another great psychological observation that was confirmed and made famous in science not too long ago (1999), now called the Dunning-Kruger effect:

Inaccuracies and incompetence in no way reduce self-assurance. The opposite is more usual:
(p. 351)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%...

April 4
“If she really did intend to leave him, no doubt she would wait quietly until she had ‘made her pile’, which, in view of the sums doled out by Saint-Loup, looked as though it might take a very short time, although any time, however short, would afford my new friend a little extra happiness — or unhappiness” (~68.1%).

I was a bit behind this week, now i have a few passages to share. I didn't manage to find much made for discussion unfortunately, but a few wonderful passages. Much of this part was about the narrator's awakening desires for girls.

This could make for an aphorism and i just found out it was highlighted 8 times by Kindle readers: (i turned off seeing that on my actual Kindle)

Were it not for habit, life should seem delightful to beings constantly under threat of dying, in other words to all humankind.
(p. 292)

This one i could relate to:

though she always eschewed technical terms, she could not conceal the fact that she was an expert on the things she spoke of. It was as though she felt she must apologize for this expertise,
(p. 287)

I sometimes feel like this too, when i talk about something i know better than whoever i'm talking to, like the piano, it feels uncomfortable to potentially be bragging or "teaching" others things you know well and consider perhaps consider elemental. It shouldn't be like this of course, we should all be happy to teach or learn new things.

This is a beautiful passage showing what this part is about:

As soon as I knew that each beautiful girl I happened to see would welcome my kiss on her cheek, I became curious about her soul; and the whole universe had begun to seem more interesting.
Mme de Villeparisis’s carriage went too quickly for me to do more than glimpse the girl coming up towards us; and yet, since beauty in a human being is different from the beauty of a thing, since we feel it belongs to a unique person with an awareness of the world and a will, no sooner had the girl’s individuality, a vague hint of soul, a will unknown to me, taken shape in a microscopic image, minute but complete, caught from her passing glance, than I could feel quickening within myself, like a mysterious replica of pollens ready for the pistils, the equally vague and minute embryo of the desire not to let this girl go on her way without her consciousness registering my presence, without my intervening between her and her desire for somebody else, without my being able to intrude upon her idle mood and take possession of her heart.
(p. 291)

this is a beautiful way to convert sensuality to something... platonic perhaps:

My eyes rested on her skin and my lips could almost believe they had done likewise. It was not only her body I was after, it was the person living inside it, with whom there can only be one mode of touching, which is to attract her attention, and one mode of penetration, which is to put an idea into her mind.
(...)
But just as it would not have been enough for me, in kissing her, to take pleasure from her lips without giving her any in return, so I wished that the idea of me, in entering her, in becoming part of her, might attract not only her attention, but her admiration, her desire, and might force it to keep a memory of me against the day when I might be able to benefit from it.
(p. 295)

And this theme, mirroring Swann's waning desire for Odette once he could possess her, is an idea often put one way or another in this part, that longing for someone may be created by not being able to fulfill it, and collapse once one can:

I had lost not only my anxiety at perhaps not being able to see her again, but with it part of my desire to do so. It felt as though I had touched her person with invisible lips and that she had liked it. As happens with physical possession, this forcible insertion of myself into her mind, this disembodied possession of her, had taken away some of her mystery.
(p. 296)

All page numbers Penguin Kindle Edition.

Hello David, nice to meet you! As a part-time philosophy student I'm mourning a bit for your philosophy group membership, but you will find great ideas and reading experiences in ISOLT as well.
Feel free to start discussions about anything Proust, and don't hesitate to revive Swann's way discussion threads, i'll be glad to revisit them!

Thanks, Dolors! Interesting points, but to me that still doesn't explain his indifference to discussion, and "how material were the things I looked for in life" etc.

Dolors, that passage doesn't say that milk is popular in spain, but that spain is popular. So, since Spain (olé) is popular, milk (au lait) must be, too.
That passage might also relate to the discussion which doctors are good in their field and if they need to have wisdom (or understanding for Marcel's artisic personality).

The attachment to his mother doesn't need to tell his age though, as Proust himself was extremely attached to his all life long, one could say he never grew up in that regard.
"What is for you the greatest unhappiness?"
"To be separated from maman" - Proust's answer in the Proust questionnaire

Yes, it's evident the narrator idolizes Mme Swann, he seems very taken by her beauty and style (especially her clever dresses in these parts). I think it's even fair to say there's quite some erotic tension between the two. There was one scene I can't remember exactly, where I think Marcel complimented Mme Swann on her looks and she smiled at him flirtatiously.

And yes, the narator's age continues to be unclear, but I had the impression that somewhere in the second novel, maybe right at the beginning, the narrator ages some years compared to the first novel, because of his beginning love and sexual attractions.

Same surprise about Mme Swann and Odette for me, too.
And good point, Teresa, i guess he cannot be sure. Either this worry didn't find its way into the novel (yet), or Swann is just pretty sure from what he knows about Odette's activities in that period.

Our reading ends:

“He did not answer, whether because of surprise at my statement, attentiveness to his work, a sense of protocol, hardness of hearing, respect for place, fear of danger, laziness of mind or the manager’s instructions” (~45.3%).

There is still a lot of time this week, so keep it up, fellow Proustians, it's worth it! And if you fell behind, just continue where you where and discuss in the older threads. I'm probably not the only one still willing to discuss there.

some comments since i am already finished with the part this week:

i didn't find much to comment on this week (though as always much to highlight and think about), but this was something i didn't understand:

how indifferent I was to discussion, however elevated it might be, how happy I became with mere mental idleness, with simple contentment; but I was uneasily aware of how material were the things I looked for in life, of how unnecessary the intellectual life seemed to me.
(...)
And in that ideal way of life which I did not dare to speak of, intellectual pleasures had no part.
(p.144)

like Bergotte, i dont quite understand why the narrator claims to have no interest in intellectual pleasures when he wants to be a writer, loves theater and books like those by Bergotte, etc etc. I guess in this ideal utopic life he would just live on love, friendship, nature around him, etc., but it seems doubtful to me that he would abandon intellectual things completely.

Our reading ends:
Mme Bontemps did not seem enraptured by this suggested adjournment. (~33.8%)

and two pessimistic points on love and relationship:
first of all, a definite overall negative evaluation of love:

there are few truly happy outcomes in the life of a feeling which can generally look for no better reward than a shift in the site of the pain it entails. At times, however, a temporary remission is granted, and for a while one may have the illusion of being cured.
(p. 74)

And these two quotes could be seen as showing how your partner shapes your future social circle, reading habits and an intellectual life on the lowest common denominator:

[of Swann's recently aquired cliche manner of talking]
Swann had acquired his facility in saying such things, which he said in all sincerity; and it was an ability he had kept. It served him now with the people who visited his wife.
(p. 89)

In any case, Swann was blind not only to the gaps in Odette’s education, but also to her poverty of mind. Indeed, when she told one of her silly stories, he would listen to her full of an obliging, cheerful, even admiring attentiveness, which could only be explained by his finding her still sexually arousing.
(p. 94)

I don't want to be arrogant by affirming this, but to me there is little doubt that from the Swann we initially got to know in Swann's Way to married Swann, his behavior, way with Marcel, thinking and social circle took a dramatic, often irrational turn.

I loved this week's part, and while i didn't have a lot to comment on in the first part of the book, this week i've created tons of notes.

To start off with something nice, Marcel's mother comparing Mme Swann's socializing to war is genuine humour which really made me laugh:

as though Mme Swann’s brisk and impetuous conquest of new acquaintances was a colonial war: ‘Now that the Tromberts are subdued, the neighbouring tribes will not hold out much longer.’ If she happened to pass Mme Swann in the street, she would tell us about it that evening: ‘I saw Mme Swann today in full battle order. She must have been launching an incursion into the lands of the Massechuto, the Singhalese or the Tromberts.’
(p. 90, Penguin, Kindle)

I found myself in this quote among others:

just as my mind, like a fluid whose only dimensions are those of the container into which it is poured, had once expanded so as to fill the vast vessel of my genius, so now it shrank and fitted exactly into the exiguous confines of the mediocrity to which M. de Norpois had suddenly consigned it.

This shows how we overestimate our qualities to ourselves from time to time, then humbly shrink when we are shown our objective faults or how superior someone else's skills are. And ive seen this inflated view of ones qualities confirmed as a natural tendency in some psychology research, which somewhat healthily protects our confidence.
Oops, this quote actually belongs to the week 1 part. Well, there goes my ego ;)

Here is an interesting inconsistency in the story, or at least Swanns memory (by way of the narrator of course):

the thought of that afternoon when he had stood outside the little hôtel in the rue La Pérouse banging on the door.
(p.99)

As an annotation in the Penguin Edition says, when this was originally narrated in Swann's Way, actually Swann rang the door, then banged on the windows of a room after noone answered. So either Proust just mixed this up, or, and in any case if we agree that a work lives on its own and what its author had in mind does not matter, Swann's memory itself got mixed up here, as it so often happens to all of us, when we mix up details of the past in memory, and can even firmly believe to remember things that never happened. I like this latter explanation of course ;)

i agree, Judy, blind unreasonable infatuation portrayed perfectly in all its unending glories!

Yes, it was A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement, Barbara, thanks!
Teresa, i'd probably agree as i wrote above that Proust's great observations are rather psychological (or even neuroscientific) than social. And his non-representative sample of people in the novel does worry me.

Is Proust really an excellent observer of sociology and social dynamics?
James Grieve, the translator of Penguin's ISOLT Vol. 2, makes following controversial, but interesting statement in the preface, which might upset some Proustians:

I think it is misleading too to speak of Proust’s sharp ‘powers of observation’, of ‘the immensity of his social canvas’, to say he has ‘a grasp of how society works’ and gives ‘a vast panorama of society’. 6 Proust’s book is much more about the power of covert sexual transgressiveness to undermine a social order founded on class, snobbery and money. True, his characters include duchesses and scullery-maids, ambassadors and liftboys. But there is little in between. And they are all seen from a perspective which likens them to one another. Proust needed little evidence in support of his generalizations. He certainly professes a sort of Balzacian expertise in diagnosing the ills of the social body; but his sociology is hampered by the shallowness of his sample and by his prizing of introspection over observation of externals. This should surprise no one: he was a cosseted Parisian whose Right-bank world was narrow, who preferred to live in the past, in bed, in a cork-lined room, who rarely travelled and never did a day’s work.

Proust, Marcel (2003-10-02). In Search of Lost Time: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower Vol 2 (pp. xiii-xiv). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Then he proposes Proust's real strength, which...

... lie in his analysis of the ordinary, his close acquaintance with feelings, the pessimism of his examination of consciousness, his diagnosis of the unreliability of relationships and the incoherence of personality, his attentiveness to the bleak truths he has to tell of time, of its unrelenting wear and tear, its indifferent outlasting of all human endeavour, its gradual annulment of our dearest joys and even our cruellest sorrows, voiding them of all that once made them ours. (...)

(p. xiv).

I do think he has a point in that Proust's sample of society is heavily skewed towards carefree noble or rich persons, and it's hard to compare these characters to most people today, who have a regular working schedule. I also read a review of an equally large-scale novel deemed 'The British Proust' which praised it for its more realistic and common characters over Proust, but i don't remember the title.
Still, I think many of Proust's social, more so the psychological observations apply to most people.

What do you think?

Interesting points, Jacob. I simply assume Proust is inconsistent with his narrator and style, and i don't really care to analyze this kind of thing too much, but I can see that you do quite a bit, and i respect that.
I hope you'll catch up soon, but as you seem to take quite some time to dig into the details, you shouldn't hurry over that either.

don't worry Jacob, everyone can fall behind from time to time. now we have the schedule and can keep it up easily until the end of book two. thanks for the work already, setting up the schedule!

i finished too and i don't know what to say as it doesn't end spectacularly, but brings this part full circle by Marcel's love for Gilberte, Swann's daughter. And i don't have my PC right now. I only now realized how strange it is that Swann marries Odette after he realized their relationship was doomed to fail at the end of the penultimate chapter.
I can only say that it was more than worth it and i'm still of the opinion that Swann's Way is an excellent standalone novel. From page 200 on or so i already wouldn't need to read another word to be completely amazed. Even if some say that Swann's Way only has its meaning in relation to the whole of ISOLT, i've already seen more than enough.