ReemK10 (Paper Pills)’s Comments (group member since Dec 26, 2012)

ReemK10 (Paper Pills)’s comments from the The Year of Reading Proust group.

You're very good at tying things together Kalliope.

I just came across this:

‘Sydney and Violet: Their Life with T.S. Eliot, Proust, Joyce,’ by Stephen Klaidman
By Michael Dirda, Published: November 13

http://www.washingtonpost.com/enterta...

Kalli, I went searching for answers and found this book, but not much on it though. Have you seen it before?

Proust, the One, and the Many
Identity and Difference in A la recherche du temps perdu

Erika Fülöp

http://www.legendabooks.com/titles/is...

She speaks of :
jealousy as a literary theme and narrative device
- the psychology and metaphysics of jealousy, love triangles
- the roles and representation of jealousy in the Proustian novel and the figure of Swann
- Proustian influence on later representations of love and jealousy (Radiguet, Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon)
- jealousy in life and writing (Proust and Agostinelli, Gide and Cocteau)
- queer, male and female jealousy
at this symposium we missed:
http://100yearsofjealousy.weebly.com/

I was rather troubled with the ending of The Fugitive because I was waiting in anticpation for the brilliant final act that he usually ends each volume with, and as I flipped the page and realized it was the last, I thought what happened, where is it?!!The last sentence was fine but it wasn't enough. I was much too greedy as I have become spoiled by Proust. Then I thought well perhaps it is because I already knew that Gilberte and St. Loup were going to be married, and figured, yes, that had to be it. But I was still troubled.Clearly, this volume was written during ill health.

Then I realized that in this volume, Proust reminded me of Fyodor Dostoeyvsky with whom I've had a troubled past because I don't think I've ever finished reading him even though I've tried a few times. I'm not an academic, but I believe I read somewhere that he always employed opposites in his writing, that everything had a polar opposite. It occurs to me that the Narrator and Albertine, and Gilberte and Robert as couples are opposites. N trying to buy Albertines love even though she was interested in women, and Gilberte trying to buy Robert's love even though he loved men. The Captive and The Fugitive are all about loss,loss, loss and grieving, and of course readers will all relate and identify and crave his psychological observations.

The way in which Proust speeds up and slows down time does remind me of Fionnuala's comment that it is like listening to an accordian, or maybe a violin.

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307...

and maybe a touch of revenge to get back at Gilberte for not loving him!

Eugene wrote: "Reem must be an old friend of Mamma from Combray,

Some old friends of my mother, who belonged more or less to Combray, came to see her to discuss Gilberte's marriage...

"...She (Odette) managed t..."

LOL Eugene, I've never cared for Gilberte much, but I suppose Swann's Way has to meet the Guermantes Way at some point in the novel.

This was shared with me on twitter:

http://www.thekitchn.com/how-to-make-...

Kalliope wrote:
Reem is certainly our Sherlock À la recherche du "post" perdu.... Yes, that possibility acquires a new light now....

LOL, love it!

I was wandering about the web googling when I was brought into our group and saw this post by Karen that mentions Odette being with Forcheville. Gilberte, we know has become Mille de Forcheville! Could Gilberte actually be his daughter?

Karen- message 29: Feb 2,2013:
Replying to my own message 12: I suppose now in the clear light of morning that Forcheville was still in the house when Swann came back an hour later, having heard movement and steps the first time he was there. When he came back after an hour, Odette did let him in, so presumably the 'uncle' to whom she opened was Swann. And Forcheville was probably hiding in the boudoir.
I was a bit thrown by the strange logic in Swann's thoughts. When he makes out that sentence in Odette's letter, 'I was right to open the door, it was my uncle' the text says something like 'Open! So Forcheville must have been there just now when Swann had rung and she had had him sent away' There's a bit of a discrepancy between open and being sent away.
An example of how Proust brings you up short every now and again. And maybe how we are forced to mistrust Swann's view of things.

Elizabeth wrote: "Reem: I'd never thought of what the change of shoes symbolized...besides the utter selfishness of both the Duc & Duchesse. But..Freud...feet...red to black...gives one a lot to think about."




ELIZABETH!!you got met to go searching for clues and I found a wonderful story. But first...


“Don’t worry about dinner” the Duke said. “They’ll wait for us. But wearing a pair of black shoes & a red dress is a fate worse than death”
While the Duchess changed her shoes the Duke said we should leave “Otherwise she’ll keep chatting with you & then she’ll be dying of hunger”

Despite constant allusions to death & dying in their conversation, the Duke & Duchess simply ignored the fact that Swann actually was dying.

The Duke had no compunction in discussing his ailments with a dying man since they were his own ailments & thus seemed of greater importance

“Don’t listen to the doctors” roared the Duke as we were descending his steps. “You’re sound as a bell Swann. You’ll live to bury us all!” (http://www.proustguide.com/PAGES/BEDS...) .... but forget this link


The red and black shoes actually come from a story by Hans Christian Anderson!!! Do check this out: specifically page 33

http://www.uva.nl/binaries/content/do...

and there are a lot more references to the color red, and red and black. I need to print this out to read. There is a lot here that will be of interest.

Marcelita wrote: "ReemK10 (Paper Pills) wrote: "Marcelita, you are so good to keep chasing after your passion. I'm delighted that you had such a good time that you'd like to attend more group gatherings with the Pro..."

Marcelita, you're much too modest!! Well, your cover is blown now. Interesting about choosing white as a color to wear. Reminds me of Odette's fondness for white and her white cattleyas?! lol I was also thinking the other day about Oriane changing from black to red shoes. What did that symbolize?

Marcelita, I have to say I'm dying to know what you look like. Nick called you glamorous and Eugene called you the prettiest woman in the room. Yes, you're certainly much too modest around us.

Jocelyne wrote: "Marcelita, your excitment is so palpable that I feel giddy without the Veuve Cliquot in my veins. I love the lantern. I should ask more young men if they kiss their mother.

Reem, I forgot how to ..."

Jocelyne, just click on my profile page. You'll find it there.:)

Oh and I just found this: ....to transform their personality into a sort of mirror....

“But genius, and even great talent, springs less from seeds of intellect and social refinement superior to those of other people than from the faculty of transforming and transposing them. To heat a liquid with an electric lamp requires not the strongest lamp possible, but one of which the current can cease to illuminate, can be diverted so as to give heat instead of light. To mount the skies it is not necessary to have the most powerful of motors, one must have a motor which, instead of continuing to run along the earth's surface, intersecting with a vertical line the horizontal line which it began by following, is capable of converting its speed into lifting power. Similarly, the men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or their culture the most extensive, but those who have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live only for themselves, to transform their personality into a sort of mirror, in such a way that their life, however mediocre it may be socially and even, in a sense, intellectually, is reflected by it, genius consisting in reflecting power and not int he intrinsic quality of the scene reflected.”

― Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, Part 2

Marcus wrote: "And him seeing himself in the mirror in the meeting in Paris with Andree , Reem. That That's end still haunts me - think there's something about ghosts only being visible in the mirror"

Yes Marcus, remember also the very first pages of Swann's Way where he writes:

while a strange and pitiless mirror with square feet, which stood across one corner of the room, cleared for itself a site I had not looked to find tenanted in the quiet surroundings of my normal field of vision: that room in which my mind, forcing itself for hours on end to leave its moorings, to elongate itself upwards so as to take on the exact shape of the room, and to reach to the summit of that monstrous funnel, had passed so many anxious nights while my body lay stretched out in bed, my eyes staring upwards, my ears straining, my nostrils sniffing uneasily, and my heart beating; until custom had changed the colour of the curtains, made the clock keep quiet, brought an expression of pity to the cruel, slanting face of the glass, disguised or even completely dispelled the scent of flowering grasses, and distinctly reduced the apparent loftiness of the ceiling. Custom! that skilful but unhurrying manager who begins by torturing the mind for weeks on end with her provisional arrangements; whom the mind, for all that, is fortunate in discovering, for without the help of custom it would never contrive, by its own efforts, to make any room seem habitable.

Kalliope wrote: "ReemK10 (Paper Pills) wrote: "I can't find where BP posted her photo of Proust in Venice, but I just came across it in this article:

On the eve of publication Proust set out his artistic credo in ..."

My goodness you have everything organized so well! I was like where is that photo now? lol More power to you Kalliope! It is indeed a fabulous photo because Proust seems to have been caught off guard.

Regarding the curated identity term, I posted this quote in my tumblr:
"As we see our face, figure, and dress in the [looking] glass, and are interested in them because they are ours, and pleased or otherwise with them according as they do or do not answer to what we should like them to be; so in imagination we perceive in another’s mind some thought of our appearance, manners, aims, deeds, character, friends, and so on, and are variously affected by it. … A self-idea of this sort seems to have three principal elements: the imagination of our appearance to the other person, the imagination of his judgment of that appearance, and some sort of self-feeling, such as pride or mortification."Charles Horton Cooley’s “The Looking Glass Self,” written in 1902

... and it had me thinking of Proust and his magic lantern as a parallel to the looking glass. Proust was the ultimate curator of his identity as he had so much to work with.

I can't find where BP posted her photo of Proust in Venice, but I just came across it in this article:

On the eve of publication Proust set out his artistic credo in Le Temps: “Je ne publie qu’un volume, Du côté de chez Swann, d’un roman qui aura pour titre général A la recherche du temps perdu. J’aurais voulu publier le tout ensemble; mais on n’édite plus d’ouvrages en plusieurs volumes. Je suis comme quelqu’un qui a une tapisserie trop grande pour les appartements actuels et qui a été obligé de la couper” (“ . . . I would have liked to have published the whole thing together, but works are no longer published several volumes at a time. I am like somebody who has a wall hanging too big for the intended rooms and who has been obliged to cut it up”). He points out that his novel “is dominated by the distinction between involuntary and voluntary memory” and goes on to stress that the “Je”, i.e. the Narrator, of the novel is not him, before concluding “The pleasure that an artist gives us, is to introduce us to another universe” – "Le plaisir que nous donne un artiste, c'est de nous faire connaître un univers de plus". He must have known these words could be fully applied to his own forthcoming work.

http://timescolumns.typepad.com/stoth...

Marcelita, you are so good to keep chasing after your passion. I'm delighted that you had such a good time that you'd like to attend more group gatherings with the Providence group. I'm sure that they can learn a lot from your pinterest collection. Did Bill Carter make a slide of that? He should have!

Smiling@ your asking the valet driver if he kisses his mother.

Has anyone read this book:Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature. Julia Kristeva. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Pp. 407. $37.00

Speaking of madeleines...

Going back to Proust's earliest drafts, she traces the interconnected themes of the madeleine, mamma, and incest through the various Proustian layers, from the early influence of George Sand's novel François le champi, which Proust's mother read to him and whose main character was named Madeleine, to his own early short story, "L'Indifférent," whose heroine he named Madeleine. Kristeva reveals the relationships between the famous little cake and the women called Madeleine, and the consequences of Proust's excessive love for his mother, both in life and as his alter ego, the narrator of his novel. She also examines the influence on the text of what she perceives to be the narrator's disguised Jewishness and homosexuality and demonstrates how "Proust's novel integrates biographical information (most notably, Proust's ambivalent attitude toward Jewishness) and aesthetic debates within the cryptogram of each character" (41).
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modernis...
(Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature (review)
William C. Carter )

Marcelita wrote: "Elizabeth wrote: "And another; no one has mentioned this, but I think it is one of the most heart-breaking passages in the entire work. During the Venice episode, the Narrator mentions how his mot..."

"In the end, we get older, we kill everyone who loves us through the worries we give them, through the troubled tenderness we inspire in them, and the fears we ceaselessly cause." Marcel Proust

Perhaps this can make up for that lost edition:

http://www.evene.fr/citations/theme/p...

Charles wrote: "Bon jour! I was in Paris, November 2nd, and Marcel was pictured on the cover of, I believe, the weekend edition of le Figaro (a full-sized glossy magazine like the U.S."Life magazine.") I was not..."

Welcome to our lounge Charles. I tried to find something for you, but the best that I could come up with was this:

http://www.lefigaro.fr/mon-figaro/201...

I'll see if I can do better.

Elizabeth wrote: "And another; no one has mentioned this, but I think it is one of the most heart-breaking passages in the entire work. During the Venice episode, the Narrator mentions how his mother is waiting pat..."

You're right Elizabeth. I noticed where she said, "You know," she said, " your poor grandmother used to say: It's curious, there's nobody who can be as unbearable and as nice as that child!" (MKE 888)

He had to have been a very difficult, demanding child who when he fell asleep looked like an angel. I think because he was very, very good at noticing things, he had the ability to make other people feel very special.