Through Sunday, 15 Dec.: Time Regained

[Kalliope]

ReemK10 (Paper Pills) wrote: "I wonder with so many of you studying Proust as you are, carefully making mental notes on everything,if you ever just experience the aesthetic beauty of the text. I was reading Proust while I was o..."

Reem,

I am reading the weekly sections at least twice. First I do a relatively fast read, with little underlining and listening to the Audio version while I read it. Proust was such a stylist that the sound of his sentences was important. Then I do a second read looking up the notes and writing things on the margin. This is a very slow read, and as the Audio has chapters, I use those for my breaks to go to the computer and write my posts based on my markings.

I can only read Proust at home where it is very quiet.. Anything else I'll read while commuting or in any setting, but not Proust.. I need the kind of tranquility in which he wrote the work.

In such setting I can enjoy how beautifully Proust wrote.

This week the section is so interesting, that some parts will require a third reading.. no cutting corners here.

[Eugene]

Apologetics (from Greek ἀπολογία, "speaking in defense") is the discipline of defending a position (often religious) through the systematic use of information.

...

Apologetics in Literature

Similar to religious apologies, this form of writing often appears historically in literature. Dissimilarly, however, literary apologies defend either poetic and aesthetic qualities, or the author's ability to write about the subject directly following the apology.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apologetics

Before the Narrator's bald confession, …the work of art was the sole means of rediscovering Lost Time…And I understood that all these materials for a work of literature were simply my past life, quoted in message 48. Proust and the Narrator, who are identical here, engage in a literary apologetics and it is before the Narrator has wholly begun to write--a preface--but because of the unusual anger, "inferior" and other pejorative phrases, in the writing one can think that Proust was also addressing the critics, in the voice of the Narrator, who reviewed his earlier volume(s).

Backyard swings move to and fro...there are 200 plus pages left in the volume...later, after I deal with the sheep going to Winter pasture, I will give you another type of apologetics, and of course my opinion, that the Narrator engages in, the fro.

[ReemK10 (Paper Pills)]

Kalliope wrote: "ReemK10 (Paper Pills) wrote: "I wonder with so many of you studying Proust as you are, carefully making mental notes on everything,if you ever just experience the aesthetic beauty of the text. I wa..."

Kalliope, I really don't know how to describe it because you and I are reading two different versions of Proust, and for sure in the original French, it has to be ultimately more superior. But Martin I believe understands where I'm coming from. Remember at the beginning where we said that the Davis translation was pure music, well MKE has ups and downs, and that is why I sometimes think that 2 different people are translating here because they are of two extremes, or perhaps that is the original intention of Proust, that we go through daily life, slowly, laboriously, and then bam he takes us for a roller coaster ride and has us holding on to every word for dear life. That, in any case is how I have been reading Proust. I hated the war section, and yes, I wasn't feeling well in the days that I was reading it, but now it's like without a doubt Time Regained is getting its five star rating! For me, personally I don't think I could do an audio listen because the voice on the audio would stick in my head, and I would be reading it listening to that voice. I have to hear Proust's words in my own head for me to enjoy them.
I loved where he said some authors resort to description while others make an impression on the reader. Proust gives us our very own foam memory pillow.

It's funny how the madeleine moment is the one most referred to when people write about Proust (articles), and yes it is is a good introduction, but there is sooooo much more!

[Fionnuala]

ReemK10 (Paper Pills) wrote: "I wonder....if you ever just experience the aesthetic beauty of the text....."

Oh, Reem, it is the way Proust builds his sentences that has kept me reading through to the end. He's like a word 'mason' of some rare kind, always choosing the most strikingly carved expression, the most harmonious image, the most perfectly crafted metaphor. The sentences that result hypnotise me. Please excuse me resorting to such high-flown expression but I want to convey that, first and foremost, it is the writing that draws me in and I have been saying that from almost the beginning of the year - and I am reading, not listening to the words - I think they might be even more impressive if I were hearing them. And although some sections aren't as easily accessed as others - although I think the war section was easier than many - the beauty of Proust's expression is always, always present. I agree with you that this present section is full of treasures but they are buried deep and so a certain amount of 'close reading' is called for, I think...

Martin wrote: "It is amazing how it speaks to our own experiences, memories, emotions.."

That is the second reason why I have kept up with the reading. In spite of the ups and downs of my real life during this past year, when, at times, it would have been simpler to just drop this extra and time consuming activity, I held on because I wanted to decipher, to understand, what I felt this man was saying about his own vécu, his own re-lived experience, and the universal truths to be learned from the recounting of it.

[Kalliope]

Fionnuala wrote: "ReemK10 (Paper Pills) wrote: "I wonder....if you ever just experience the aesthetic beauty of the text....."

Oh, Reem, it is the way Proust builds his sentences that has kept me reading through to..."

The hypnotising effect is exactly what I have enjoyed most, and I think the audio version has contributed greatly to it.. The reading/listening in my bedroom, with only the side lamp, (and thereby reading in similar conditions to those in which it was written), calmed me down immediately and I could be tranported to Proust's world.

@Reem - It's funny how the madeleine moment is the one most referred to when people write about Proust (articles), and yes it is is a good introduction, but there is sooooo much more!

Completely agree.. I now think that to mention the madeleine is to show that one has not read further than the first volume. I found this week the framing role of Sande's novel very powerful.

@Martin.. The same reasons that made you read the work again will also compell me to go reread this novel again.

[ReemK10 (Paper Pills)]

Okay wonderful, you were both analyzing so carefully, I was afraid that you were missing out on the joy of reading and there you were both hypnotized! :)
Kalliope, how intriguing that you recreated the effect of Proust's bedroom. I will read anywhere and anytime that I am not next to my laptop and the hopeless addiction I've developed to it!

[Kalliope]

ReemK10 (Paper Pills) wrote: "Okay wonderful, you were both analyzing so carefully, I was afraid that you were missing out on the joy of reading and there you were both hypnotized! :)
Kalliope, how intriguing that you recreated..."

Reem, I reread sections and then I go and sit at the computer and enjoy writing out the quotes. Makes me pay more attention to the writing.

It is only this novel that I feel I have to read in those secluded circumstances.. the rest I can read while standing on the street and waiting for a bus.

[Eugene]

When the Narrator says of his involuntary memories, ...they had come to me, in frivolous pleasures, in indolence, in tenderness, in unhappiness... ML p. 304, quoted in message 48, it's the beginning of an apology, or rather of an apologetics, for his past selfish behavior which he euphemises here by calling "frivolous".

He goes on from p. 304 and explains for 28 pages, until the Guermantes butler tells him that he can enter, that the music has finished, his 'reasons' for his selfish thoughts and actions.

The Narrator has been far from a humble person and overt humility here could border on the sentimental so mercifully he stays away from it directly--he tip toes in--we have a flawed Narrator still but a little wider than his former narrow self.

The are questions remaining: his remembered involuntary experiences have been all 'sugar and spice': the joy at his childhood in Combray, the happiness of his adolescence in Balbec, the discovery of subjects from which to make literature, etc. but what does he do with involuntary memories that are 'snakes and snails' that he can't voluntarily control; what does he do with remembered horrors that would make Dante and Virgil pale?

How will the present be altered or alter his involuntary memory?

[Fionnuala]

Ce travail qu'avaient fait notre amour-propre, notre passion, notre esprit d'imitation, notre intelligence abstraite, nos habitudes, c'est ce travail que l'art défera, c'est la marche en sens contraire, le retour en profondeurs où ce qui a existé réellement gît inconnu de nous qu'il nous fera suivre (p 297)
I'm trying to understand this...in terms of the title of this book.

[Kalliope]

Fionnuala wrote: "Ce travail qu'avaient fait notre amour-propre, notre passion, notre esprit d'imitation, notre intelligence abstraite, nos habitudes, c'est ce travail que l'art défera, c'est la marche en sens contr..."

Not there yet in my reread...

On another theme..

Flicking through the letters to the neighbor, I find a reference to Prométhée ... He mentions that Hahn had just returned from conducting this piece (and the notes expand and identify this as Prométhée triomphant based on the text by Paul Reboux. It was a choral for one voice.

This is one of the letters reproduced in a photograph.

[Marcelita]

ReemK10 (Paper Pills) wrote: "I wonder with so many of you studying Proust as you are, carefully making mental notes on everything,if you ever just experience the aesthetic beauty of the text. I was reading Proust...

"How can a novel written so long ago, just speak so personally to me?"

Psychological Laws

"If I went to a dinner-party I did not see the guests: when I thought I was looking at them, I was in fact examining them with X-rays. The result was that, when all the observations I had succeeded in making about the guests during the party were linked together, the pattern of the lines I had traced took the form of a collection of psychological laws in which the actual purport of the remarks of each guest occupied but a very small space." MP (p 40)

"In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity, the contrary also being true, at least to a certain extent, for the difference between the two texts may sometimes be imputed less to the author than to the reader." MP (p 322)

[Marcelita]

Shared this before...
When I first began reading Proust...and was in my infatuation stage, where I could not stop talking about him to the point of being irritating...someone asked me, "Why?" And I answered, "Because he understands me."

I smiled, when I saw one of my selves in this passage:

"The insistence with which M. de Charlus kept reverting to this topic—into which his mind, constantly exercised in the same direction, had indeed acquired a certain penetration—was in a rather complex way distinctly trying.

"He was as boring as a specialist who can see nothing outside his own subject, as irritating as an initiate who prides himself on the secrets which he possesses and is burning to divulge, as repellent as those people who, whenever their own weaknesses are in question, blossom and expatiate without noticing that they are giving offense, as obsessed as a maniac and as uncontrollably imprudent as a criminal." MP (The Captive)

[Marcelita]

There is a horizontal thread of "slanted light" throughout the novel...

"A level ray of the setting sun recalls to me instantaneously an episode in my early childhood to which I had never since that time given a thought: my aunt Léonie had a fever which Doctor Percepied feared might be typhoid and and for a week I was made to sleep in Eulalie’s little room looking out on the Place de l’Eglise, which had nothing but rush mats on the floor and over the window a muslin curtain that was always buzzing with a sunshine to which I was not accustomed. And seeing how the recollection of this little old-fashioned servant’s bedroom suddenly added to my past life a long stretch of time so different from the rest and so delicious,...." MP

Then:

Now:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/51366740...
"When François-Valentin was in his mid-twenties, he married Catherine-Virginie Torcheux from the nearby village of Cernay.
"The couple (grandparents) established a general store at number 11, place du Marché, opposite the church of Saint-Jacques. There they earned their living by selling a variety of items, including honey, a chocolate touted as being good for your health, spices, cotton, pottery, hardware, spirits and liqueurs, and candles made from their own supply of wax."
Carter's biography, "Marcel Proust: A Life"


http://www.flickr.com/photos/51366740...
"After his return to Illiers and his marriage (to Adrien's Proust's sister, Élisabeth) Jules (Uncle) operated a successful notions shop at 14, place du Marché, opposite the church of Saint—Jacques." Carter

"Proust visited his elderly grandmother in her tiny apartment above the store." (Carter)


Virginia Proust with Marcel (right) and Robert

http://www.flickr.com/photos/51366740...
"(Virginia) retired to an apartment a few doors down from above
a shop, at number 6, and there, in the front room, with its rugs
plaiting and calico curtains, she kept sitting for twenty-three years, watching the market square below and the church in the face." (Painter)

Curious...was one of these apartments the model for "Eulalie’s little room looking out on the Place de l’Eglise," with the slanted light?

Video tour of Illiers-Combray, in French with vintage photographs; 4min 28s.
http://www.ina.fr/video/ORC8909110349...

[Eugene]

I feel for Proust/the Narrator as I'm having trouble with my housekeeper but my current sorrows will be soon over.

Françoise, will we see you again?

Sorrows are servants, obscure and detested, against whom one struggles, beneath whose dominion one more and more completely falls, dire and dreadful servants whom it is impossible to replace and who by subterranean paths lead us towards truth and death. ML p. 320

[Fionnuala]

I'm struck by how many references there are in this section to writing as painting, peindre, and to the artist's studio, l'atelier where the model poses, la femme qui posait devant nous, and to the need for the writer to have kept a record of everything in his sketchbook, his carnet de croquis, even if that essential record needed to be carried out in his unconscious mind.

[Kalliope]

Marcelita wrote: "There is a horizontal thread of "slanted light" throughout the novel...

"A level ray of the setting sun recalls to me instantaneously an episode in my early childhood to which I had never since th..."

Marcelita, I love the photo of the grandmother and the two boys.

The slanted light is one facet of his fascination with the sun- and moonlight.

[Kalliope]

Fionnuala wrote: "I'm struck by how many references there are in this section to writing as painting, peindre, and to the artist's studio, l'atelier where the model poses, la femme qui posait devant nous, and to the..."


I agree. The painterly is always there but in this section it is very prominent.. even his inner book is an "enluminure"....!!!

[Fionnuala]

There are many references to death in this section - and while reading, I had a sudden thought - I wish Proust could have spoken to us of death after he'd experienced it - what a Temps Retrouvé that would be!!!!


But enough frivolity - back to his analysis of writing: speaking of the multitude of people who may have served as models for the many characters in the Recherche, he says, I'm paraphrasing, that a book is like a cemetery in which the names on most of the tombs have been erased. But sometimes, he says, we remember a name without knowing if anything of the person who owned that name has survived, like that particular young woman with the intense eyes, the lazy voice, is she in this cemetery? if she is resting there, where exactly, but we don't know, and anyway how to find her beneath all the flowers..
Cette jeune fille aux prunelles pronfondément enfoncées, à la voix trainante est-elle ici? et si elle y repose en effet, dans quelle partie, on ne sait plus, et comment trouver sous les fleurs? P306

And I thought of Agostinelli, he of the dark and intense eyes, whose grave was only rediscovered quite recently, the name illegible, the gravestone lying in bits on the ground, the flowers growing up between the stones...

[Kalliope]

Fionnuala wrote: "There are many references to death in this section - and while reading, I had a sudden thought - I wish Proust could have spoken to us of death after he'd experienced it - what a Temps Retrouvé tha..."

I had, indeed, forgotten about Agostinelli... his gravestone is in the book.. and the same can be said for Bertrand de Fénélon.....

[Fionnuala]

Kalliope wrote: "The painterly is always there but in this section it is very prominent.. even his inner book is an "enluminure"....!!! .."

Oh yes, those beautiful Books of Hours, which were popular in the medieval period, by the Limbourg brothers, for example, all that detail and such craft in the making, such delicate brushtrokes, and I'm thinking, it's not a bad metaphor for our Narrator's body and soul book, his book of les moindres épisodes, his book of minutes and hours and years...

[Fionnuala]

Marcelita wrote: "When I first began reading Proust...and was in my infatuation stage, where I could not stop talking about him to the point of being irritating...someone asked me, "Why?" And I answered, "Because he understands me." "

This sentence is for you, Marcelita:

L'ouvrage de l'écrivain n'est qu'une espèce d'instrument optique qu'il offre au lecteur afin de lui permettre de discerner ce que sans ce livre, il n'eût peut-être pas vu en soi même. p 315

[Kalliope]

Fionnuala wrote: "Marcelita wrote: "When I first began reading Proust...and was in my infatuation stage, where I could not stop talking about him to the point of being irritating...someone asked me, "Why?" And I ans..."

Perfect fit. Perfect mirror. Perfect reflection.

[Eugene]

This "train(s) of thought" of the Narrator as he waits in the Guermantes library for the music to finish so he can enter the party is a thicket of apologetics, in the sense of his explaining and offering a 'defense' of his newly chosen course: art over society, and over love.

...the austere lesson that it is not to individuals that we should attach ourselves, that it is not individuals who really exist and are, in consequence, capable of being expressed, but ideas. ML p. 318

...but the pages I would write were something that Albertine, particularly the Albertine of those days, would quite certainly never have understood. It was, however, for this very reason...that she had fertilized me through unhappiness...Had she been capable of understanding my pages, she would, for that very reason, not have inspired them. ML p. 228

Albertine the idea, "the austere lesson"...apologetics, like this in medias res, provide Proust's causes (explanations) after their effects, ie. after the "Albertine cycle".

[Marcelita]

"...the task was to interpret the given sensations as signs of so many laws and ideas...." MP (p 273)

I read the word "chain" several times in this passage...and then coupled it with the studies of "chaining."

Did Proust stumbled upon this "vigorous" experience of "chaining?"

"One idea that has recently become the subject of studies on involuntary memory is chaining. This is the concept that involuntary memories have the tendency to trigger other involuntary memories that are related. Typically, it is thought to be the contents of involuntary memories that are related to one another, thereby causing the chaining effect.
In a diary study done by J.H Mace, participants reported that frequently, when one involuntary memory arose, it would quickly trigger a series of other involuntagry memories. This was recognized as the cueing source for involuntary memories.[1]
In work by Bernsten, the diary method was also applied to the study of involuntary memory chaining. The main hypothesis was that chaining would also occur on autobiographical memory tasks. Participants were asked to report the presence of involuntary memories while performing an autobiographical memory task. Results showed that participants did experience involuntary memory recall when they were recalling the past deliberately (also known as voluntary memory). This implies that involuntary memory production occurs as a product of chaining from voluntary memory—deliberate recall of the past."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Involunt...


St. Marks Baptistry; Steel engraving - 1864
Artist - Engraver - Publisher:
David Roberts - Carter - Blackie and Son, London, Paternoster Row, Glasgow and Edinburgh.

"But it was a pen which, unintentionally, like a schoolboy amusing himself with a real pen, I had charged with electricity, and now a thousand trifling details of Combray which for years had not entered my came lightly and spontaneously leaping, in follow-my-leader fashion, to suspend themselves from the magnetised nib in an interminable and trembling CHAIN of memories." MP (p 283)

"Gradually, thanks to its preservation by our memory, the CHAIN of all those inaccurate expressions in which there survives nothing of what we have really experienced comes to constitute for us our thought, our life, our our 'reality,'...." MP (p 298)

"Why it was that precisely and uniquely this kind of sensation should lead to the production of a work of art was a question to which I proposed to try and find an objective answer, by following up the thoughts which had come to me, linked in a continuous CHAIN, in the library, and I felt that the impulse given to the intellectual life within me was so vigorous now that I should be able to pursue these thoughts just as well in the drawing-room, in the midst of the guests, as alone in the library." MP (333)

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

http://books.google.com/books?id=kFYY...

https://www.academia.edu/2902715/Invo...

[Elizabeth]

I love the "costume party" theme...where the Narrator sees the effects of age as merely costumes his friends have put on. Also...about the "sanatorium" he goes to, evidently for years, and never mentions. I think this ties in with the whole is the Narrator Proust himself or not? Well, here's a thought: as far as I know Proust himself never went to a sanatorium "for years"; perhaps this is one reason he says absolutely nothing about that interval of time.

[Fionnuala]

Yes, Elizabeth, I saw the sanitorium as a useful strategy to explain the years passing.
But even though he may never have attended one, perhaps Proust was advised to take such a 'cure' and that's why the idea presented itself. Doctors swear by them here in France, especially for asthma and other respiratory conditions.

[Eugene]

One of my adventures found me with a polyamorist lover and one day she said disparagingly to me, "Your nothing but a serial monogamist." How I wish I had this quote to keep me company.

For to the woman whom we have loved most in our life we are not so faithful as we are to ourself, and sooner or later we forget her in order—since this is one of the characteristics of that self—to be able to begin to love again. ML p. 317

[Marcelita]

Fionnuala wrote: "Yes, Elizabeth, I saw the sanitorium as a useful strategy to explain the years passing.
But even though he may never have attended one, perhaps Proust was advised to take such a 'cure' and that's ..."

Yes, Proust entered a sanitarium after his mother died. He chose "Dr. Jules Déjerine’s clinic for nervous disorders and reserved a room for three months."
[...]
"Given his state of near collapse and unprecedented grief, Marcel dreaded the prospect of the treatment, which called for being kept in isolation in strange quarters." Carter, Marcel Proust: A Life.

You will not be surprised to learn that Proust bent the rules.

[Fionnuala]

Marcelita wrote: "Yes, Proust entered a sanitarium after his mother died. He chose "Dr. Jules Déjerine’s clinic for nervous disorders and reserved a room for three months.."

How interesting, Marcelita, especially as I'm reading The Magic Mountain at the moment. And I'm nor surprised he broke the rules - a man after my own...inner rebel.

[Kate]

La vraie vie...c'est la litterature. (MP)

reminds me of Logan Pearsall Smith :"People say that Life is the thing but on the whole I prefer reading."

Or, Flaubert : "Le seul moyen de supporter la vie c'est de s'etourdir avec la litterature."

Have often felt like that.

[Elizabeth]

Eugene. Two remarks. What is a polyamorist?

And how I wish my household had a housekeeper...wait...we do; it's me!

[ReemK10 (Paper Pills)]

Kate wrote: "La vraie vie...c'est la litterature. (MP)

reminds me of Logan Pearsall Smith :"People say that Life is the thing but on the whole I prefer reading."

Or, Flaubert : "Le seul moyen de supporter la ..."

Thank you Kate! I am going to borrow this to post on my tumblr!!

[Fionnuala]

Kate wrote: "La vraie vie...c'est la litterature. (MP) reminds me of Logan Pearsall Smith :"People say that Life is the thing but on the whole I prefer reading."
Or, Flaubert : "Le seul moyen de supporter la vie c'est de s'étourdir avec la littérature."...."

Good quotes, Kate.
Here's Julian Barnes' take on the subject:
“Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books.” from Flaubert's Parrot

[Eugene]

Elizabeth: to do polyamory justice you should Google it & I'm terrible keeping my house clean.

[Fionnuala]

I've been thinking about why I've never felt the need, during this year of reading the Recherche, to read any of the secondary literature, the critical studies which set out to explain Proust's philosophy and methodology. The first reason is that thanks to this reading group, I've been able to bat ideas back and forth with some of you and clarify things for myself in the process. But the second reason, and by far the most important, is that Proust explains his thought processes in the most minute detail. He circles every idea contained in his writing many times over and eventually addresses the questions that are raised in readers' minds as they read. At this stage, when I find myself thinking, hmm, what is he saying here, I know before I even finish that thought, that the answer will be given on the next page or at least within the next ten, but I know it will be given. As Julian Barnes, whom I quoted above, says: "Books are where things are explained to you." He may have been referring to Flaubert but I think it fits for Proust as well.

[Kalliope]

Fionnuala wrote: "I've been thinking about why I've never felt the need, during this year of reading the Recherche, to read any of the secondary literature, the critical studies which set out to explain Proust's phi..."

I agree. Proust is not difficult in that sense. He does not need outside explanations because he says it himself. My guess now is that a fair amount of secondary material do not add a great deal to what is there already in Proust's words. Although some authors (Kristeva, Barthes?) probably help in making us realize further the implications.

[Kalliope]

A great part of this weeks section could stand on its own. It could be Proust's Treatise on Aesthetics.

He addresses, as Kate and FioFio indicate above, the ancient debate of Life versus Art (Literature), which in earlier trimes would be expressed as Nature and Art..

He also adds his own concept of "vérité".. it follows his comment on reality:

Ce que nous appelons la réalité est un certain rapport entre ces sensations et ces souvenirs qui nous entourent simultanément -- rapport que supprime une simple vision cinématographique, laquelle s'éloigne par là d'autant plus de vrai qu'elle prétend se borner à lui... p. 289.

And he continues onto the vérité concept..

...la vérité ne commencera qu'au moment où l'écrivain prendra deux objets différents, posera leur rapport, analogue dans le monde de l'art à celui qui est le rapport unique qui est de la loi causale dans le monde de la science, et les enfermera dans les anneaux nécessaires d'un beau style. p. 289.

[Fionnuala]

Love that quote about style, Kall.

But another thought I've had recently, and to which Proust hasn't provided the answer, at least not yet, is how clear was he when he began the Recherche about where he wanted it to end? Everything points to him having worked out the narrative curve well in advance - the Combray, Swann, place names, people's names, Gilberte, Albertine, La Duchesse de G, etc., are all picked up in Le Temps Retrouvé as it seems they were intended to be in the original plan worked our before he began writing, perhaps as early as 1908. And if we presume that La Prisonnière and Albertine Disparue were not part of the original plan since they are modeled on events in Proust's own life from 1912 onwards when he employed Agostinelli and when A subsequently left him and was later killed. My puzzlement concerns one of the key elements in the Recherche, and presumably present from the beginning, the notion of art created through suffering. Had he already suffered or did he just know that he was destined to suffer and transform that suffering into art? And furthermore, was the way he chose to live out his final years, i.e., writing from his bed and hardly ever going out, him fulfilling the planned narrative curve of the book or the planned book obliging him to live in this way.
Please don't answer all at once...

[Kalliope]

In an earlier post it was mentioned and discussed his use of the image of "translator", but here is the proper quote..

..je m'apercevais que ce livre essentiel, le seul livre vrai, un grand écrivain n'a pas dans le sens courant de l'inventer, puisqu'il existe déjà en chacun de nous, mais à le traduire. Le devoir et la tâche d'un écrivain sont ceux d'un traducteur. p. 290.

[Manny]

Kalliope wrote: "A great part of this weeks section could stand on its own. It could be Proust's Treatise on Aesthetics.

He addresses, as Kate and FioFio indicate above, the ancient debate of Life versus Art (Lit..."

I am strongly tempted to think that the passages you quote are linked to the ones I have just been reading in Kant, near the end of the Transcendental Analytic ("Systematic Representation Of All Synthetic Principles Of Pure Understanding").

[Kalliope]

Manny wrote: "Kalliope wrote: "A great part of this weeks section could stand on its own. It could be Proust's Treatise on Aesthetics.

He addresses, as Kate and FioFio indicate above, the ancient debate of Lif..."

Manny, I think you have to reread this last volume, or at least some sections. My sense is that a great part, or at least the main key, to what you are looking for is in this last elucidating volume.

[Manny]

I have exactly the same feeling. I think I will do that!

[Kalliope]

Fionnuala wrote: "Love that quote about style, Kall.

But another thought I've had recently, and to which Proust hasn't provided the answer, at least not yet, is how clear was he when he began at the Recherche about..."

Many questions here FioFio... But to me his suffering starts the night of the reading of François le Champi in Combray.. and the incident with the parents that followed it... it is as if his life took the wrong turn then..., even though all his later experiences, some of which entailed suffering while others were very common or "médiocres", have after all supplied the material out of which he is producing the work of art and through which he restores the sense of his life.

And he also sees that, after all, "l'intelligence" which he has often deprecated, has its uses and abilities.

Je sentais pourtant que ces vérités que l'intelligence dégage directement de la réalité ne sont pas à dédaigner entièrement, car elles pourraient enchâsser d'une matière moins pure mais encore pénétrée d'esprit, ces impressions que nous apporte hors du temps l'essence commune aux sensations du passé et du présent, mais qui plus précieuses sont aussi trop rares pour que l'oeuvre d'art puisse être composée seulement avec elles... Leur perception me causait de la joie; pourtant il me semblait me rappeler que plus d'une d'entre elles, je l'avais découverte dans la souffrance, d'autres dans bien médiocres plaisirs. p. 300.

[Kalliope]

Following the quotes in #93, and to give it the proper attention, here is the moment of illumination, the climax, in Proust's own words.

Alors, moins éclatante sans doute que celle qui m'avait fait apercevoir que l'oeuvre d'art était le seul moyen de retrouver le Temps perdu, une nouvelle lumière se fit en moi. Et je compris que tous ces matériaux de l'oeuvre littéraire, c'était ma vie passée; je compris qu'ils étaient venus à moi, dans les plaisirs frivoles, dans la paresse, dans la tendresse, dans la douleur, emmagasinés par moi sans que je devinasse plus leur destination, leur survivance même, que la graine mettant en réserve tous les aliments que nourriront la plante..p. 301.

I love the word "emmagasiner".

[Fionnuala]

Kalliope wrote: "But to me his suffering starts the night of the reading of François le Champi in Combray.. and the incident with the parents that followed it... it is as if his life took the wrong turn then..., even though all his later experiences, some of which entailed suffering while others were very common or "médiocres", have after all supplied the material out of which he is producing the work of art and through which he restores the sense of his life"

Such a good answer, Kalliope.
Yes I remember that enigmatic line on page 286 when he speaks of la nuit la plus douce et la plus triste de ma vie où j'avais hélas - dans un temps où me paraissaient bien inaccessibles les mystérieux Guermantes - obtenu de mes parents une première abdication d'où je pouvais faire dater le déclin de ma santé et de mon vouloir, mon renoncement chaque jour aggravé è une tâche difficile

It is just that many of the added paperolles in this volume seemed to concern Albertine, and I was struck by that since it underlines that the huge sorrow caused by A was not in the original plan.

[Kalliope]

And in the quote above he resorts again to Botany, and the imagery is further developed a bit later on... Very powerful.

Ainsi toute ma vie jusqu'à ce jour aurait pu et n'aurait pas pu être résumé sous ce titre: Une vocation. Elle ne l'aurait pas pu en ce sens que la littérature n'avait joué aucun rôle dans ma vie. Elle l'aurait pu en ce que cette vie, les souvenirs de ses tristesses, de ses joies, formaient une réserve pareille à cet albumen qui est logé dans l'ovule des plantes et dans lequel celui-ci puise sa nourriture pour se transformer en graine, en ce temps où on ignore encore que l'embryon d'une plante se développe, lequel est pourtant le lieu de phénomènes chimiques et respiratoires secretes mais très actifs. Ainsi ma vie était elle en rapport avec ce qu'amènerait sa maturation. p. 301.

[Kalliope]

Fionnuala wrote: "Kalliope wrote: "But to me his suffering starts the night of the reading of François le Champi in Combray.. and the incident with the parents that followed it... it is as if his life took the wrong..."

Probably the Albertine episode, representing the lowest point became also the moment of inflexion..., but still part of a trend whose origins he traces to that night in Combray... And that is why when he encounters an edition of Sande's novel in the Guermantes library, he starts crying.

Which reminds me that I leave for a bit the computer, I shall be able to finish François le Champi, since I am close to the end.

[Fionnuala]

Phillida wrote: "...I'm fascinated by the conception and acting-out of an idea of love that is purely egocentric, that requires jealousy and misery, that does not require reciprocity. It diverges vastly from my own experience (engaged, mutual, finding satisfaction not in misery but in happiness). I appreciate the presentation of the narrator's love-world, but wouldn't want to be part of it.."

There's a line in this week's reading - and I can't find it now, Phillida (a kindle edition would be useful!) - where I think he mentions love and changes it to 'to be loved'. He implied a similar relationship to love in the earlier volumes - 'love' means being loved - he wanted to see himself reflected in the eyes of the lover. He is consistent, and extremely honest in all of this. Perhaps there is a little of that selfish approach to 'love' in all of us?

[ReemK10 (Paper Pills)]

Fionnuala wrote: "Phillida wrote: "...I'm fascinated by the conception and acting-out of an idea of love that is purely egocentric, that requires jealousy and misery, that does not require reciprocity. It diverges v..."

I don't think that is the line that Fionnuala was referring to.Could it be:

....this observation of La Bruyere: "Men often want to love where they cannot hope to succeed; they seek their own undoing without being able to compass it, and if I may put it thus, they are forced against their will to remain free." Whether or not this is the meaning that the aphorism had for the man who wrote it( to give it this meaning, which would make it finer, he should have said " to be loved" instead of " to love"), there is no doubt that, with this meaning, the sensitive lover of literature reanimates it and swells it with meaning until is ready to burst, he cannot repeat it to himself without overflowing with joy, so true and beautiful does he find it -- but in spite of all this he has added to it nothing, it remains merely an observation of La Bruyere." (MKE 297)


... and Fionnuala, I will also be borrowing your Barnes quote. Merci! :)

[Fionnuala]

Phillida wrote: " The pages 308 ff. are full of passages that illustrate the reification of his love as he passes it on from one person to the next...."

Yes. Even as was forgetting Albertine, he was looking around - in Venice - for someone new to 'pass' his love on to, some lacemaker or laundry person( and that's something I want to come back to), if I remember rightly, so you are correct about the 'reification' of love.

@Reem, that was the line I was thinking about - thanks for locating it. But now I'm not sure I understand it so 'll have to go back and reread that bit - but it's easier to find now!