Jacob’s Comments (group member since Nov 14, 2014)

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

Thanks for the generous replies. I'm reading this novel a second time almost entirely because I want to be influenced by Proust. It's encouraging to find that he's rubbing off on me, at least in the few minutes after reading him while his voice still echoes in my mind.

Marcelita, it's difficult to discover the origin of the details in a novel, like a surname. While driving I've jotted down last names I saw on mail boxes that I thought might someday make a good character name. It's remarkable to wonder if you just happened upon the inspiration for Albertine's family name. I'll keep this in mind for the tour I'd like to make of Proust's world in France. It lends so much more reality to the fictional character, even if for Proust it was just a name on a stone that he liked.

Steph, I think your observation that we're not the same person as time goes by bears remembering as I continue to read. I haven't yet thought about it much but I suspect that someone could write a dissertation - or several - on this topic in ISOLT.

I noticed that I made a counting error in the second week's reading. We'll have to read 10 extra pages that week because I don't want to redo the entire schedule.

The Guermantes Way

Each quote is found at the end of a paragraph. These quotes are from the Penguin edition (this volume is translated by Mark Treharne). I don’t have the MKE translation of this volume so when I had the option I tried to choose quotes that included a proper noun. After each quote I cite the approximate page percentage of the line. The percentage is of the text ISoLT only, excluding introductions and prefaces, end notes and summaries.

May 2
"It causes us pain that she is unaware of them, and we try to console ourselves with the thought that precisely because they are never visible she has perhaps added to her present opinion of us this possibility of undisclosed advantages" (~10.23%).

May 9
"Since this call had come on the very day I had been wanting to telephone my grandmother, I had never for a moment doubted that it was she who was asking for me. it was pure coincidence that both the post-office and the hotel had been jointly mistaken" (~21.81%).

May 16
"She was consoled by the unfailing presence at these Fridays of hers of her dutiful relation, the Princess de Poix, her own special Guermantes, who never went near Mme de Villeparisis, despite the fact that she was an intimate friend of the Duchesse" (~31.88%).

May 23
"So what I need to do is to corner him now, while there are just the two of us, say to him: "Right, vote for me", and he'll have no alternative'" (~41.95%).

May 30
We are reading until the end of Part I, ~51.17%. The last sentence contains a spoiler so I recommend you just read to the end of Part I. (view spoiler)["She smiled at me sadly and gripped my hand. She had realized she had no need to hide from me what I had guessed straight away, that she had had a slight stroke." (hide spoiler)] This week's reading is five pages short and next week's five pages long to coincide with the volume's division.

June 6
"...we are unable to resist a sudden start of alarm or delight if there falls upon us from on high, like an aerolith engraved with our name, which we thought was unknown on Venus or Cassiopeia, an invitation to dinner or a snippet of wicked gossip" (~63.93%). NB: There is a chapter division in this section.

June 13
"...the same aberration that typified court life under Louis XIV, which removes scruples of conscience from the domain of the affections and morality and transforms them into questions of pure form" (~72.32%).

June 20
"Then, as I looked and listened to Mme de Guermantes, I could see, calmly imprisoned in the unending afternoon of her eyes, an expanse of sky of the Ile-de-France of of Champagne, bluish, slanting, at the same angle of incline as in the eyes of Saint-Loup" (~82.38%).

June 27
"'Wrap yourself up properly,' the others would not speak to the man with a cold for a fortnight, out of jealousy for the favour conferred on him" (~92.45%).

July 4
End of The Guermantes Way.

My first time reading ISOLT took me four years. I don't think you should get discouraged if you can't finish it in a single year but if you read along with us as much as you can (or other groups before or after) I certainly think the accomplishment and payoff is worth it. Good luck!

There are always a several paragraphs each week in which the psychological observations strike me. Not that I always find them particularly brilliant as observations, although the way he winds them into the narrative is, but they still resonate with my experience. Here is one example from this week which I will quote at length:

Since that moment when I first heard the name 'Simonet', I have often tried over the years to remember how it must have sounded there on the esplanade, in my uncertainty about its shape, which I had not quite noticed, about its meaning and the identity of this or that person to whom it might belong: full of the imprecision and foreignness which we later find so moving, when our unremitting attention to this name, with its letters more deeply imprinting in us with each passing second, has turned it (as the name of 'the Simonet girl' was to be turned for me, but not until several years later...

This paragraph is a good representation of the novel as a whole, a search for lost time, some kind of archaeology of memory. In part, he's talking about those times we become conscious of the fact that a unique experience has become normal. When this happens I, like the narrator, try to recall the original experience in all its novelty and brilliance before it had become ordinary and banal. This section of the book (the entire book) is itself an overt attempt to return to the original experience although he recognizes at this moment that his return is not entirely (or not yet) complete.

I think it's worth taking a moment every once in a while and recalling the first moment of our experience of something (or someone) that dazzled us. It helps refresh its value. It's fascinating to recall how moved I was by a place that amazed me at a first glance, a place that I've since become acquainted with and made my home. If I was dazzled at first glance, how much more in awe should I be now that I know the place well if I only sit up and take notice?

The same, of course, is true of the people we know and care about as the narrator observes.

Admittedly, I've read into this a bit because he's more directly referring to the inverse of what I've described: the fact that novel experiences are at first vague. The things we come to value in a person (or a place) are often not even the things we noticed first. It's odd to think about the qualities of a person I love and realize that these qualities were entirely absent from or at least peripheral to my first excitement. Our first passion is often wildly inaccurate (even when our love is entirely merited for qualities we discover later but aren't yet aware of). This is, I think, a key point he's establishing in the Balbec half of the volume: the way his expectations and initial impressions both determine and differ from what he comes to know later. This has already been the case with M. de Charlus and Saint-Loup.

End of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower/Within a Budding Grove.

“These are the farms known as Les Écorres, the Marie-Thérèse, the Croix-d’Heuland, the Bagatelle, the Californie and the Marie-Antoinette. It was the last of these that the little gang of girls had adopted” (~90.6%).

After so much time in the Parisian salons, I've also become claustrophobic. It makes the imagery and sensations in Balbec all the more welcome. I would say it has something to do with my introversion, but Proust and his narrator also seem very introverted.

In the last paragraph from last week someone, Mme Bontemps (I think) actually addressed the narrator, which is rare, but we never get to hear his answer. In fact, I remember other occasions when there was a dialogue which included the narrator; he quoted others but not himself. This happens a lot in his conversations with Mme Swann. It gives the impression that he never talks although it's clear that it's a false impression. If he never talked he wouldn't get invited all the time, right? Sometimes he gives us an overview of what he said via indirect discourse, but that's not quite the same thing. It's reached the point that I don't know if he actually answered but just didn't tell us about it or if someone interrupted him and didn't let him answer.

In the example I mentioned above, Mme Bontemps asks him a question and Mme Cottard replies. Did he answer in between? In his conversations with Mme Swann, is he answering all the time, sometimes, or never? This might seem like pointless speculation but it plays into a large issue, namely, why do we get so little information about the narrator in a story that's written autobiographically. I've heard people refer to the narrator of ISoLT as "the man with too many qualities" but this isn't immediately evident. We can't even figure out his age! At the very least, I'd say that the narrator's relationship with the story he's narrating is so unique I can't figure it out.

I found the narrator's obsession with Gilberte interesting insofar as it repeats aspects of her father's obsession with her mother, at least in a more naive way. Swann seemed self-consciously infatuated while the narrator's flashes of self-conscious reflection are made retrospectively. Proust describes everything which such sensuous detail that the present seems very real — right there in front of me, so to speak. When I hear the voice of an older, retrospective narrator break into the narration I get a strong sense of contrast with what is being narrated. An example is when he tell us how his love for Gilberte will be replaced by another love:

"Because you are now in love with someone who will one day mean nothing to you, you refuse out of hand to meet someone who means nothing to you now, but whom you will one day come to love, someone whom you might have loved sooner if you had agreed to an earlier meeting, who might have curtailed your present sufferings (before replacing them, of course, with others)" (Penguin epub 215/567).

To return to a theme I had been fixated on in January, the shift in pronoun seems significant. All of a sudden the older narrator jumps into to reminisce about something that hasn't happened yet (at least for his readers). Again, as with a paragraph from one of the first pages of Swann's Way, he uses "on" in French which James Grieve translates as "you." I think it's clear that the narrator is talking about himself here (and to himself). Here's the French if anyone's interested:

On refuse dédaigneusement, à cause de ce qu'on aime et qui vous sera un jour si égal, de voir ce qui vous est égal aujourd'hui, qu'on aimera demain, qu'on aurait peut-être pu, si on avait consenti à le voir, aimer plus tôt, et qui eût ainsi abrégé vos souffrances actuelles, pour les remplacer il est vrai par d'autres.

“…but that he could not bear to stay till the end of the play, with its ridiculous lines turned out by a writer who was gifted but given to bombast, and who only came to be deemed a great poet as the result of a deal, as a reward for the sedulous self-interest with which he promoted the dangerous haverings of the socialists” (~56.4%).

I was also really surprised that Mme. Swann and Odette are the same. Then again, I'm a rather naive reader and often surprised by plot points I should have foreseen.

I didn't connect Odette's absence with the birth of Gilberte either. I don't think we have any reason to suspect that Swann knows at the time, right? He's happy, as I remember, because she's so far away and beyond his jealousy.

This week we end with, "I began to wonder whether originality really shows that great writers are gods, each of them reigning over a kingdom which is his alone, whether misleading appearances might not be the result of hard work, rather than the expression of a radical difference in essence between distinct personalities” (~23%).

I've just finished this section. Here are my unorganized ramblings after reviewing this section along with some of my favorite quotes.

I was struck by the narrator’s comparison of Swann’s love to morphine addiction. It rings very true to my experience. “As they say in surgery, his love was no longer operable” (Penguin epub, 342/480). While I found Swann's love tedious, as someone said above, I recognize that that's part of the point. It's easy and enjoyable to experience fear, love, etc. through the life of a character, it's less enjoyable to experience the oppression of an obsessive love. Nonetheless, it's part of the experience which, I think, has a meaningful payoff throughout the novel.

Again we have the narrator intrude upon Swann’s story: “like my grandfather, who, the year before had invited him to my mothers wedding” (343/480). This also is the only hint (that I’ve noticed) of the relationship between the two different settings of the two parts of Swann's Way.

I love this satirical jab Proust makes of his contemporaries (or competition):

“M. de Bréauteé asked: ‘My dear, what in the world are you doing here?’ of a society novelist who had just settled into the corner of his eye a monocle which was his only organ of psychological investigation and pitiless analysis and answered with an air of mystery and self-importance, rolling the r: -I am observing!”

I think Proust qualifies as a society novelist but unlike the one he mocks here, he’s hardly lacking in psychological insight.

I still find the relationship between the narrator's consciousness and that of his subjects difficult to negotiate. Here’s one example from the many:

“Mme de Cambremer, since she had very few acquaintances, being all the happier to have a companion, Mme de Franquetot, who was in contrast extremely well connected, believing there was something elegant, something original, about showing all her fine friends that she preferred, to their company, an obscure lady with whom she shared memories of her youth” (361/480).

Where does the narrator, who’s clearly present as a finite individual and living within the same narrative universe as his subjects, where does he get his insights into the motivations of these two women? The best option that I can come up with is that he’s taking creative license with the history he’s relating - i.e., he’s been told the history in rough detail and now retelling it with his own projections used to fill in the details. At the very least it seems that the details related from the apparently omniscient view of the narrator says as much about the narrator himself as it does the narratees.

A relevant quotes spoken by Mme des Laumes regarding Swann’s absurd infatuation:

“‘I do find it absurd that a man of his intelligence should suffer over a person of that sort, who isn’t even interesting — because they say she’s an idiot,’ she added with the wisdom of people not in love who believe a man of sense should be unhappy only over a person who is worth it” (376/480).

Then there’s the fantastic instance of Swann’s involuntary memory beginning with the paragraph, “But suddenly it was as though she had appeared in the room…” (~80.48% into the text). The trigger this time is Vinteuil’s sonata. The narrator tells us,

“In place of the abstract expressions ‘the time when I was happy’, ‘the time when I was loved’, which he [Swann] had often used before now without suffering too much, for his mind had enclosed within them only spurious extracts of the past that preserved nothing of it, he now recovered everything which had fixed for ever the specific, volatile essence of that lost happiness” (378/480).

This instance of involuntary memory is entirely overshadowed by the episode of the madeleine but I find it even more striking, perhaps because music has this effect on me more than tastes do.

Swann’s obsession with this piece of music makes this earlier statement quite interesting to reflect upon: “We often entertained him [M. Vinteuil] at the house [at Combray]. But he was extremely prudish, and stopped coming so as not to meet Swann, who had made what he called ‘an unsuitable marriage, as is the fashion these days’” (147/480). Apparently there's a time between part two and part one when Swann gets to know the composer.

Swann drives me crazy too. It's hard to respect him until I remember that as a reader of my own history I often drive myself crazy. Nothing makes us as stupid as infatuation.

Because I loved the first part of Swann's Way so much I get excited every time the narrator allows himself to appear. It helps me realize that despite the seeming irrelevance of this extended aside, Swann's love is somehow important to the narrator's story. More than that, it makes me wonder how much of the narrative of Swann's love is affected by the narrator's story to come. It’s so obvious to me that it seems trivial that the events and experiences of my life, the ideology I develop and the values I cultivate all have an effect on how I interpret the histories of other people, especially the people who are closely connected to me. Whether their histories mirror or justify my experience, contrast or conflict with it, I have a singular perspective on their history which influences how I understand it. Maybe this is the narrator's way of admitting to his reader that he has a perspective on Swann's story which isn’t entirely disinterested, that the story he narrates in the omniscient mode isn't entirely objective after all.

Nope. Good catch. I'll change it. It should be around 34%.

Our reading this week ends here:
“It was after nightfall, and the columns of stone had been desolidified by the moonlight, which, by turning them into cardboard cut-outs, and reminding me of a stage set for Orpheus in the Underworld, gave me my very first glimpse of beauty” (~11.3%).

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower/Within a Budding Grove

I apologize that I’ve gotten behind, both in my reading and participation in this group. I’ll try to get all the schedules up this week so my procrastination isn’t a factor for the other volumes. I’ll also make sure I contribute to the conversations as I catch up this week.

Each quote is found at the end of a paragraph. These quotes are from the Penguin edition (this volume is translated by James Grieve). I don’t have the MKE translation of this volume so when I had the option I tried to choose quotes that included a proper noun. After each quote I cite the approximate page percentage of the line. The percentage is of the text ISoLT only, excluding introductions and prefaces, end notes and summaries.

February 28
“It was after nightfall, and the columns of stone had been desolidified by the moonlight, which, by turning them into cardboard cut-outs, and reminding me of a stage set for Orpheus in the Underworld, gave me my very first glimpse of beauty” (~11.3%).

March 7
"I began to wonder whether originality really shows that great writers are gods, each of them reigning over a kingdom which is his alone, whether misleading appearances might not be the result of hard work, rather than the expression of a radical difference in essence between distinct personalities” (~23%).

March 14
“Well I for one shan’t be going, said Odette. We’ll just look in briefly at the last Wednesday of the run. Mme Bontemps did not seem enraptured by this suggested adjournment” (~33.8%).

March 21
“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%).

March 28
“…but that he could not bear to stay till the end of the play, with its ridiculous lines turned out by a writer who was gifted but given to bombast, and who only came to be deemed a great poet as the result of a deal, as a reward for the sedulous self-interest with which he promoted the dangerous haverings of the socialists” (~56.4%).

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%).

April 11
“Perhaps the unconscious well-being drawn from the summer’s day helped to swell, like a tributary, the joy I had taken in seeing Harbour at Carquethuit (~79.2%).

April 18
“These are the farms known as Les Écorres, the Marie-Thérèse, the Croix-d’Heuland, the Bagatelle, the Californie and the Marie-Antoinette. It was the last of these that the little gang of girls had adopted” (~90.6%).

April 25
End of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower/Within a Budding Grove.

We finish Swann's Way this week. Stick with it. It's a long road but such a fantastic journey!

"'My poor dear, forgive me, I feel I'm hurting you, it's over and done with, I'm not thinking about it any more'" (Davis, ~85.7%).

“'My poor darling, you must forgive me; I know I’ve distressed you, but it’s all over now; I won’t think of it any more'” (p. 500 in Modern Library, MKE 1992).

Not a bit, Simon, I appreciate it. I'll have to read your second comment later in the week.