Last section of Combray - discussion thread 4

[Traveller]

Hi everyone, this is the thread where we end of with the Combray section, before entering the "Swann in Love" section.

It starts off with:

And it was at that moment, too—because of a countryman who was passing by, who seemed rather cross already and was more so when my umbrella nearly went in his face, and who responded without warmth to my “fine weather, isn’t it, perfect for a walk”—that I learned that the same emotions do not arise simultaneously, in a preestablished order, in all men.

French: Et c’est à ce moment-là encore – grâce à un paysan qui passait, l’air déjà d’être d’assez mauvaise humeur, qui le fut davantage quand il faillit recevoir mon parapluie dans la figure, et qui répondit sans chaleur à mes « beau temps, n’est-ce pas, il fait bon marcher » – que j’appris que les mêmes émotions ne se produisent pas simultanément, dans un ordre préétabli, chez tous les hommes.

and ends with:

"and sweeping aside the wall of the passage; the well of the courtyard would be enthroned on the spot where, a moment earlier, my dressing-room had lain, and the dwelling-place which I had built up for myself in the darkness would have gone to join all those other dwellings of which I had caught glimpses from the whirlpool of awakening; put to flight by that pale sign traced above my window-curtains by the uplifted forefinger of day."

[Traveller]

To be quite honest, I didn't know where the start of this section should be anymore, but a good landmark to go by, seems to be where the narrator says in English: “Damn, damn, damn, damn.”!" and in French, "« Zut, zut, zut, zut. »

...and in the passages immediately after, Proust again seems to prove me wrong in accusing him of solopsism, where he shows that he is aware of the fact that he and other people don't necessarily share the same opinions, needs and awareness. And now I'm going to have to hunt for Stephen's mention of the peasant girl.

Stephen wrote: "Shortly after this, the narrator is seen yearning to find a peasant girl. No doubt as part of his psychological habit of escapism. Considering the oppressiveness of bourgeois values he's depicting, who can blame him? ..."

Ok, yes, I guess that would be escapism, because the peasant girl would be the only one who would be welcoming, as opposed to females of higher classes.
It does also appear, in the following passages, as if he is going through a sexual awakening.

In these passages too, there seems to come a growing awareness of his individuality and his separateness from the world, where he says, for example:
"I no longer believed that the desires which I formed during my walks, and which were not fulfilled, were shared by other people, that they had any reality outside of me. They now seemed to me no more than the purely subjective, impotent, illusory creations of my temperament."

I find it flabbergasting how he always covers up his mother's moral deficiencies: " (Miss Vinteuil) was in deep mourning, because her father had died a short time before. We had not gone to see her, my mother had not wanted to because of a virtue of hers which alone limited the effects of her goodness: her sense of decency; but she pitied her deeply.." Honestly! That's not how one expresses pity or sympathy! Ugh, yuck...

...and how does he know what is going on in his mother's mind? The narrator is putting thoughts there that he has no way of knowing. He is almost morphing into an omniscient narrator instead of sticking with a first-person voice. By the same token, he is also putting thoughts into Miss Vinteuil's mind when her friend enters the room he is spying into.

I mean, this, for example, is classic omniscient narrator viewpoint and certainly not first-person viewpoint: "And time and again, deep inside her, a timid and supplicant virgin entreated and forced back a rough and swaggering brawler." It's like Proust wants to have his cake and eat it. (Granted, early fiction was generally narrated by an omniscient narrator, so I suppose it was a bit more acceptable to mix narrative voice over a century ago.)

Still, if he's only peeping at them for the first time in this scene, how does he know her well enough to know the following: "Mlle. Vinteuil's scrupulous and sensitive heart did not know what words ought to come to her spontaneously to suit the scene that her senses demanded. She searched as far away from her true moral nature as she could to find a language that would fit the depraved girl she wanted to be, but the words she thought that girl would have uttered sincerely seemed false on her own lips. "

Stephen wrote: And then a little bit more up ahead he actually makes it explicit about his interest in sadism. A bomb goes off in one's head for everything we've been reading up until now.

Interesting that his notions of cruelty is in connection to someone who is dead and gone, and has no notion of what is taking place on the plane that he had left behind. I suppose this is where the Catholic mindset kicks in, with their belief of people lingering behind after death, and possibly cognizant of things transpiring in the realm that they have left behind.

Ok, and I am now reminded that this kind of sanctimonious moralizing is what I detested also in the work of for example George Eliot and Émile Zola. Much as I liked their works as a whole, when that judgmental finger-wagging came out, I was hearing chalk screech on a blackboard. Funny thing is that this is not necessarily a hallmark of pre-20th century fiction. I can, for example, remember that Victor Hugo gave a lot of his opinion but without sounding nearly this melodramatic and sanctimonious. Even the writing style of the Marquis De Sade (who tended to root for the other side) has a more objective tone than this.

If I were to analyze the situation, if it was a real occurrence, I would be inclined to guess that poor Miss Vinteuil had been suffering greatly from lack of a mother, and was probably looking for a mother figure in her “friend”. If the girls vilified the father, it’s probably because he took a stance as sanctimonious and alienating, as unsympathetic and cruel, as that of the narrator.

"It was not evil which gave her the idea of pleasure, which seemed agreeable to her; it was pleasure that seemed to her malign. "
I suppose one cannot judge a person for the milieu they grew up in, and of course, to some Catholics, (and maybe not just Catholics, let's set the record straight - but I mean in this specific context it is of course Catholic ) that almost every kind of pleasure is a sin, and deprivation, sacrifice and masochism is a virtue. I’m not meaning to sound judgmental on that, (and I myself believe that self-sacrifice if it does good is a virtue), but those of us who have been raised, even if only partly, by Catholic monks or nuns will know what I mean.

“…that indifference to the sufferings one causes which, whatever other names one gives it, is the terrible and lasting form assumed by cruelty. The father is already dead… the only suffering that takes place now, is in her own, poor, befuddled soul, and to me, that requires pity, not condemnation…

[Traveller]

Aaanyway, after the sudden shock of those few pages of clumsy, disorienting surrealism, the writing all of a sudden again takes on the character of a sweet reverie, of happy people floating along in the most beautiful, heavenly landscape, iridescent with the most beautiful colors, blessed with the most beneficent bounty that nature can give, with beauty radiating from the sky above, from on the land and from in the water.

The narrator's reveries start to focus on the Guermantes family, and suddenly we find it for the first time: The narrator, out of the blue tells us that he has had, for a time already, the desire to become a writer, and ruminates on it with some anxiety.

...and then, while sitting in the church and regarding the Comtesse Guermantes, comes an interesting expression again, of how the human gaze, or “visual perception”, if you will, can work. This time I’m working it from the French:
Et – ô merveilleuse indépendance des regards humains, retenus au visage par une corde si lâche, si longue, si extensible qu’ils peuvent se promener seuls loin de lui – pendant que Mme de Guermantes était assise dans la chapelle au-dessus des tombes de ses morts, ses regards flânaient çà et là, montaient le long des piliers, s’arrêtaient même sur moi comme un rayon de soleil errant dans la nef, mais un rayon de soleil qui, au moment où je reçus sa caresse, me sembla conscient. Quant à Mme de Guermantes elle-même, comme elle restait immobile, assise comme une mère qui semble ne pas voir les audaces espiègles et les entreprises indiscrètes de ses enfants qui jouent et interpellent des personnes qu’elle ne connaît pas, il me fut impossible de savoir si elle approuvait ou blâmait, dans le désœuvrement de son âme, le vagabondage de ses regards.

In the Moncrieff/Enright, that would be :

And then—oh, marvellous independence of the human gaze, tied to the human face by a cord so loose, so long, so elastic that it can stray alone as far as it may choose—while Mme de Guermantes sat in the chapel above the tombs of her dead ancestors, her gaze wandered here and there, rose to the capitals of the pillars, and even rested momentarily upon myself, like a ray of sunlight straying down the nave, but a ray of sunlight which, at the moment when I received its caress, appeared conscious of where it fell. As for Mme de Guermantes herself, since she remained motionless, sitting like a mother who affects not to notice the mischievous impudence and the indiscreet advances of her children when, in the course of their play, they accost people whom she does not know, it was impossible for me to determine whether, in the careless detachment of her soul, she approved or condemned the vagrancy of her eyes.

So he does have very interesting ideas about how a gaze can work, and the previous time we noticed it, wasn’t just a fluke!

[Stephen]

Very interesting takes on what I take to be the meatiest part of the novel so far. Psychologically, Proust's/the narrator's reading of the lesbian affair is so dense I've had to read it several times just to sort it all out. I feel this is Proust at his best; I love psychologically dense portraiture. However...

First, the formal aspect (I'm glad you keep returning to this, Traveller. How a writer says what he says is just as important as what he says. I don't mean the usual guff about how he reads "on the sentence level" but how he organizes reality structurally. It's the predicate for all else).

[ ...and how does he know what is going on in his mother's mind?]

Lol. He doesn't. He's cheating. And you're going to find throughout the great length of this novel that he cheats often. I was thinking of this earlier when he's describing the interactions between the aunt Leonie, Francoise, and the people who came in and out of the dying woman's room. The boy, supposedly witnessing all this, remains an eerily silent observer. We get little to no indication that he's actually there to be interacted with (for the women aren't shown interacting with the boy). That *might* have been an instance where he witnessed what he describes, silently, eerily non-communicative. But there will be plenty of examples later on where the narrator couldn't possibly have been present, nor received the amount of detail he's relaying to us by hearsay. Let alone from other people's minds. It's a mystery to me why Proust has been able to get away with this. Most other writers would get laughed out of the room, but for any number of reasons Proust is given a pass.

As for the psychological substance of this section, all the subtleties he's analyzing can be boiled down to this idea, "that indifference to the sufferings one causes which, whatever other names one gives it, is the most terrible and lasting form of cruelty."

He's fascinated by this question, because he cannot tell how indifferent Francoise and Mlle Vinteuil are in their actions. He's actually titillated by the idea that the suffering these women cause is deliberate. For Francoise "had developed in her a feeling which we had mistaken for hatred and which was really veneration and love." Why does this question interest him? Related to his need for escape, it may be a tactic to use against the moral oppressiveness he's witnessing all around him (to me more bourgeois than Catholic, but that's debatable).

Rereading the section, I see his need for a peasant-girl is repeated several times.
[Ok, yes, I guess that would be escapism, because the peasant girl would be the only one who would be welcoming, as opposed to females of higher classes.]
Not necessarily welcoming, and not necessarily women of "higher" classes, just ones not automatically inclined to looks of contempt (a la little freckled Gilberte).

[I find it flabbergasting how he always covers up his mother's moral deficiencies]
From that same paragraph I was more annoyed by the inveterate snobbery found in these lines about M. Vinteuil and his piano playing: "...the task of copying out the whole of his later work, the modest pieces, we imagined, of an old piano-teacher, a retired village organist, which we assumed were of little value in themselves, though we did not despise them because they meant so much to him..."
The "we imagined..." So they hadn't even heard him play and knew his pieces were sixth-rate? What if he played simply for pleasure, maybe even just to please his daughter? Doesn't seem a part of the snobs' calculus.

[Interesting that his notions of cruelty is in connection to someone who is dead and gone, and has no notion of what is taking place on the plane that he had left behind. I suppose this is where the Catholic mindset kicks in...]
Not just Catholic. The Buddhist tradition believes that the spirit still inhabits the earth for a period of time, as a mourning period. Japanese to this day perform ritual ceremonies on the 49th day after death to mark the soul's passing fully into the afterworld.

Mlle Vinteuil definitely comes off as sympathetic. The narrator himself wishes to believe in her goodness. Traveller focused on the issue of pleasure, its permissiveness and prohibitions. For me, the big question is - yet again - but how old are these two women being spied upon? I get the impression that the daughter is not that much older than the narrator. The female who seduced her is described as a "girl" at one point (here the French would probably be very helpful), but she sounds older to me than the daughter, certainly creepier and more cynical.

I found her the vile one in this scene, if we're going to be judgmental about it. I read the narrator's perspective as wishing to believe in the goodness of the daughter ("To which Mlle Vinteuil replied in words of gentle reproach—“Come, come!”—which testified to the goodness of her nature"), mirroring his desire to believe in the goodness of the father, despite what everyone - including his family - has been saying about him. The seducer encouraged Mlle Vinteuil to disrespect her father's memory so soon after death (that's the vile part to me), maybe for no more a reason than to undress her.

Again, if we're going to be judgmental, I prefer the narrator's humanity to the seducer's:
"And yet I have since reflected that if M. Vinteuil had been able to be present at this scene, he might still, in spite of everything, have continued to believe in his daughter’s goodness of heart..."
The "in spite of everything" - not that his daughter was engaged in a lesbian affair, but that she had disrespected his memory so soon after his death. The narrator's making a distinction between the public and private M. Vinteuil.

Impressive. That's a kind of forgiveness that's rarely seen in the novel so far.

[Fionnuala]

Traveller wrote: "Aaanyway, after the sudden shock of those few pages of clumsy, disorienting surrealism, the writing all of a sudden again takes on the character of a sweet reverie, of happy people floating along i..."

I haven't reached the beautiful walk along the Vivonne yet, Traveller, but I have finished the Mlle Vinteuil section and found an interesting note about it in my Flammarion edition. It seems that in a letter to the critic Paul Souday who had questioned the necessity for the Montjouvain scene in the first volume, Proust explains that it is essential because the memory of it will be the pierre anguleux of volumes V and VI. So he sees it as a keystone— because of the jealousy that the memory will inspire in the narrator later. Mlle Vinteuil herself will not be the cause of the jealousy but rather her partner in the Montjouvain scene who becomes a leading character in the later volumes.
I find it so interesting that the Combray section contains these tiny glimpses of so many characters who will be important later, such as Gilberte, her mother, the Baron Charlus, Mme de Villeparisis, the Guermantes, Bergotte, Bloch, and now Mlle Vinteuil's partner. Proust was building his 'cathedral' with a lot of careful planning.
Edit: I see Stephen has referred to Vinteuil's music in the previous comment. It's interesting that my edition has another note saying that Proust had included a line referring to the eventual discovery of the beauty of Vinteuil's music by the narrator in this section but then removed it. So he seems to have wanted the narrator and his family to remain in the dark for longer about the value of Vinteuil's music for plot reasons—rather than to deliberately make them appear condescending or snobbish.

[Traveller]

Stephen wrote: "Not just Catholic. The Buddhist tradition believes that the spirit still inhabits the earth for a period of time, as a mourning period. .."

Yes, I did reflect later on, on my knee-jerk reaction to this scene. I'll get to the religious ideas in a mo, I just want to mention something first: -something that bothered me from more or less the moment the unnamed woman walked into the room, was how forced and unnatural and "false" the whole set-up feels. It felt very much like a type of deux-ex-machina kind of artificial manipulation which doesn't make any psychological sense beyond the idea that perhaps the two of them had hated the father all along because the father was, in being worried for his daughter's soul, being oppressive. ...and it really irritated me that Proust did this - I suppose it will become more clear later on as to why he inserted this strange unnatural scene that feels as if it was weaved from a different sort of fabric than the usual fabric of the story that was for some reason, forcibly stitched into place here.

Ha, well, as to my pointing fingers at the Catholics, I guess to lovers of history as a subject, due to their sins from long ago, it is easy to scapegoat the poor old Catholics since some (but not all, I geddit) among their ranks have acted monstrously. But I didn't say what I said because they are such an easy scapegoat, but specifically because the narrator is obviously steeped in Catholic dogma. (On the other hand, one doesn't really see him being observant in the sense of for example praying a lot, mind you, and confession isn't even mentioned).

However, to your point, yes, indeed there are many cultures around the world who believe that the dead can either contact us or that we can contact them, or that some sort of bond remains. I mean, ancestor-worship like one gets in Africa and other places is a form of that, no? But I do realize that I was injecting my own personal belief into my reaction and that that's not helpful.

Many people believe that one can have a link to the departed, and that is comforting for them, I get that. Yet one feels that even to a person of faith, if you "go up to heaven" your cares about the world you left behind would/should be less and you would/should be more focused on the presence of God and/or whatever else it is that you find up there in heaven, and that was why I said that the suffering seems to me, to be more in the poor Miss Vinteuil, in her confusion and pain, since she doesn't seem to know if she is Arthur or Martha.

I think we do disagree on some of the details, but even if you can't agree with my distaste with self-righteousness - I do agree with you on the odiousness of the snobbery, especially that horrible little word "despise" - let me go and check what the French says in those sentences.

Stephen wrote: "The "in spite of everything" - not that his daughter was engaged in a lesbian affair, but that she had disrespected his memory so soon after his death. The narrator's making a distinction between the public and private M. Vinteuil.

Impressive. That's a kind of forgiveness that's rarely seen in the novel so far.

However, the narrator has the presumption to call miss Vinteuil an evil sadist!
"But, appearances apart, in Mlle Vinteuil’s soul, at least in the earlier stages, the evil element was probably not unmixed. A sadist of her kind is an artist in evil, which a wholly wicked person could not be, for in that case the evil would not have been external, it would have seemed quite natural to her, and would not even have been distinguishable from herself; "

I suppose he is with the latter bit, implying that this 'evilness' is forced on her, but calling someone "evil" and a "sadist" are strong judgments indeed!
We can perhaps try to be charitable to the narrator and grant him that he is at that point a young person still who is influenced by his family - and yet, it's the adult form of the narrator narrating all this to us- surely he as an adult should know better than to make such uncharitable assumptions!

... but I hope we can agree that the "snobbery" you find so odious has a sort of agreement with the "sanctimonious self-righteousness" that I find odious. After all, it was Jesus who said "Let him without sin cast the first stone..."

I'm actually surprised at your mild response. I was expecting a whole lot more flak from the Proust-lovin masses out there...

[Traveller]

Fionnuala wrote: "and now Mlle Vinteuil's partner. Proust was building his 'cathedral' with a lot of careful planning.."

Ha, if your message was visible to me before I posted my long one above, I could have left large parts of it out, since you have just answered my musings about it, thanks, Fionnuala! I shall leave it in, in any case - just so you know I was wondering about the very thing that you answered !

[Fionnuala]

It's interesting that you felt the scene rang somehow 'false', Traveller.
It's certainly out of place as regards chronology because the narrator says it happened a couple of years after Tante Léonie died and Tante Léonie is still alive in most of the other parts of the Combray section which, after all, mostly focusses on the narrator's many holidays at her house with his parents. In the facsimile edition of the proofs of the Combray section which I've been looking through I see that Proust changed the timing of the Montjouvain episode. He stroked out dans cet automne qui suivait la mort de ma tante Léonie and replaced it with quelques années plus tard. So originally, he had imagined it as happening right after the funeral—which makes certain sense as we don't know if the narrator's family continued to visit Combray after she died, except to settle her affairs that autumn. I think that might have been Paul Soudey's point: why introduce this lesbian scene that chronologically belongs in a later volume, right here? But Proust had his reasons.

[Traveller]

Fionnuala wrote: "It's interesting that you felt the scene rang somehow 'false', Traveller.
It's certainly out of place as regards chronology because the narrator says it happened a couple of years after Tante Léonie died and Tante Léonie is still alive in most of the other parts of the Combray section... "

That's interesting Fionnuala. ...but tell me, did he add that section in at a different date than writing the rest of Combray as well?

Sometimes it feels to me as if he's patched little bits in after having written the original as a whole.

The tone and tenor of this specific scene feels even more different than the other little pieces that feel like additions to Combray, and at the end of it, it's suddenly as if night turned to day in the flip of a switch and we suddenly find ourselves back in the utopian reverie we had found ourselves in before the "friend" walked through that door.

I can maybe explain how that piece felt to me like this: I used to do exceptionally well at school except for one subject in primary school where we had to learn practical hand skills such as basic cooking and woodwork and sewing. I was ok with crocheting and sewing but I really couldn't knit to save my life! I made a real mess of it until my mother took pity on me and finished knitting my little baby pullover for me. Well, I'm very surprised that the teacher turned a blind eye, because even to me it was obvious which part I had 'knitted' and which part my mother had knitted.

Well - that's how that scene feels to me - allegorically speaking, the 'feel' of it is as if I had knitted the fabric of that scene, instead of my mother, and as if she had knitted the rest of Combray.

The other part that felt false, is that I cannot imagine two real human beings acting the way that those two did. :)

[Traveller]

A few thoughts again:

Interesting how he tries to reconcile his idea of a romanticized Duchesse de Guarmantes with the actual flesh and blood woman that he sees before him.
He’s actually talking about a kind of confirmation bias when he deals with that:
“Now that I was impelled to consider it beautiful by all the thoughts I had brought to bear on it—and perhaps most of all by what is a kind of instinct to preserve the best parts of ourselves, by the desire we always have not to be disappointed—placing her once again (since she and that Duchesse de Guermantes whom I had evoked until then were one and the same) above the rest of humanity…”

Also interesting how charitably people of lesser rank seem to regard those separated from themselves purely by happenstance of birth:
“Mme. de Guermantes found herself surrounded by all those people of Combray whose names she did not even know, but whose inferiority too loudly proclaimed her supremacy for her not to feel a sincere benevolence toward them, and whom, besides, she hoped to impress even more by her good grace and simplicity.”

I find it interesting that he seems to equate “writing talent” with “ intellectual value and references to abstract truths”. I’m wondering what, to the intelligentsia and the literary establishment of the day, constituted “good writing”.

For me personally, good writing is having a unique voice, which, though it is unique is still coherent enough to be capable of pleasing and/or adding value to the life of the reader.

Nobody in literary critical circles seems to really be able to come up with a concrete ideal, and whereas most seem to agree on the fact that there should at least be some universal abstract truths present, I’ve never seen them place a criterion for fiction (as opposed to writing that is clearly in the philosophy genre as opposed to literary fiction genre) to be intellectually challenging. In fact, many would argue that really good fiction is written on several levels so that it can be universally enjoyed, albeit in varying degrees of depth.

Hmmmm… when he says: “But so arduous was the task imposed on my consciousness by the impressions I received from form, fragrance or color—to try to perceive what was concealed behind them”, I wonder if he is hinting at a sort of Platonic “essence”, or if he is simply alluding to a sort of "creative" essence available to the artist to extract, if only that artist is talented enough. ...and he does seem to work at this, doesn't he? ...with his play on light and color and smell and feel and movement and dimensions, and, to a lesser extent, sound - he does seem to have an amazing talent for making landscapes come alive.

The narrator gives the impression of being at times a very analytical person, which sort of alternates with him waxing poetic, and then at times deducing people’s thoughts and making judgmental conclusions based on those deductions which are much less coldly analytical than his more “philosophic” musings.. It’s an interesting, if not always cohesive mix, but I suppose it does, to a degree, lend a sort of mystical depth to the narrator's mind.

[Fionnuala]

Traveller wrote: "That's interesting Fionnuala. ...but tell me, did he add that section in at a different date than writing the rest of Combray as well?
Sometimes it feels to me as if he's patched little bits in after having written the original as a whole."

The proof edition I have is the one that was sent to Proust for final corrections during the months leading up to publication in 1913, Traveller. The Montjouvain scene was in those proofs but he crossed a section of it out. The notes say he reused it in volume V. It refers to Mlle Vinteuil's thoughts on her friend's actions so I'm presuming he gave those lines to the narrator in the later book. I agree with you that the scene is unlikely but what I think is unlikely is the narrator being in a position to observe it, not the actions of the girls themselves (M Vinteuil is easy to mock, the narrator had already described to us his over-solicitous behavior towards his daughter, and almost laughed at it then). But as Stephen has already pointed out, Proust sometimes allows his narrator to observe scenes he couldn't have been present at, and you will see that Proust gives him this kind of 'spying' behavior frequently too, so it's fitting that these patterns are present already in 'Combray'. Seeing the structure that's been laid down in this first chapter get built upon is for me one of the most interesting things about the work. And interesting too that the kaleidoscope image recurs near the end. The entire work is like a kaleidoscope with characters appearing, disappearing, changing, distorting.

About your 'patching bits in' remark, you're on to something there as Proust did reuse pieces of writing he'd written/published earlier. He's open about it in the Martinville bell towers piece, but it's present elsewhere too. My notes say that one of the descriptions of flowers in this section is a pastiche of something he'd written earlier which itself was a pastiche of Flaubert's nature descriptions from L'Éducation sentimentale.
The description of the boys using glass carafes to catch tiny fish had appeared elsewhere too. I admired that piece a lot and can see why he reused it. The notion of the container and the contained, and how the container can become the contained—as when the carafe is in the water as well as being full of water, is something I find useful when thinking of the Recherche as a whole.

And speaking of containers and contained, I've just reached the last image in the Combray section, the ray of morning light, le doigt levé du jour, shining through the tightly closed curtains of the narrator's current bedroom where he's been reflecting on his memories throughout a sleepless night. That image made me think of a Neolithic passage tomb at Newgrange in Ireland into which a ray of light shines once a year at winter solstice. It's fitting to include it, I think, as Proust had a keen interest in many aspects of the Celtic world.

This is the last comment from me as I don't intend rereading the Swann section but I may pick up again at the last section of this first volume because it continues where the Combray section left off and is another of my favourite parts.

[Traveller]

Fionnuala wrote: " I've just reached the last image in the Combray section, the ray of morning light, le doigt levé du jour, shining through the tightly closed curtains of the narrator's current bedroom where he's been reflecting on his memories throughout a sleepless night ..."

Thanks for the image - that is a beautiful ending to "Combray", isn't it, and it fit in well with Proust's mention of a "false" dawn in the first few pages of Combray, with the section about the anguished malade wishing for aid, which we now might suspect was the narrator, pining for his mother's presence.

I wonder if Proust is aware of how incestuous and how intense his oedipal obsession appears. It’s really rather extreme:

“Comme j’aurais donné tout cela pour pouvoir pleurer toute la nuit dans les bras de maman ! Je frissonnais, je ne détachais pas mes yeux angoissés du visage de ma mère, qui n’apparaîtrait pas ce soir dans la chambre où je me voyais déjà par la pensée, j’aurais voulu mourir.

(How readily would I have sacrificed them all, just to be able to cry all night long in Mamma’s arms! Quivering with emotion, I could not take my anguished eyes from my mother’s face, which would not appear that evening in the bedroom where I could see myself already lying, thinking that I would wish to be dead.)

Oh! ...but I am going to interrupt myself with a sudden recollection of a passage that I had forgotten to jot down in my notes and so can't place it exactly, but at a point where he discusses potential physical relations with women, he does make it clear that what really make his mother's love so precious for him, is that it is unconditional, and that he can therefore trust that it is devoid of any ulterior motive.

There is probably a lot to say about the very last page or two of “Combray", where he summarises his thoughts about memory, but I think that for now I am going to call it a day and move on to Swann in Love with the following thoughts:

The very last little bit of Combray is full of little narrational mysteries. Initially, one can’t help wondering exactly what the narrator means when he mentions the following:

As I observed, as I noted the shape of their spires, the shifting of their lines, the sunlight on their surfaces, I felt that I was not reaching the full depth of my impression, that something was behind that motion, that brightness, something which they seemed at once to contain and conceal.

[…] I did not know why I had taken such pleasure in the sight of them on the horizon and the obligation to try to discover the reason seemed to me quite painful; I wanted to hold in reserve in my head those lines moving in the sun, and not think about them anymore now. And it is quite likely that had I done so, the two steeples would have gone forever to join the many trees, rooftops, fragrances, sounds, that I had distinguished from others because of the obscure pleasure they gave me which I never thoroughly studied.

…and then just a bit further on, we finally find out what this mystery previously hinted at, in earlier passages as well, which is concealed behind forms, colors, sounds, dimensions, movement is: it is the narrator’s desire to express these things in writing, to turn what he sees, feels, hears, etc. into writing:

“Without saying to myself that what was hidden behind the steeples of Martinville had to be something analogous to a pretty sentence, since it had appeared to me in the form of words that gave me pleasure, I asked the doctor for a pencil and some paper and I composed, despite the jolts of the carriage, and in order to ease my conscience and yield to my enthusiasm, the following little piece:”

And finally, almost right at the end of “Combray” the mystery is finally solved.
I wonder if Proust really did his first piece of descriptive writing in the same way that the narrator did; on a piece of paper on a moving carriage with three towers as his subject. It is indeed a very nice and original piece of writing. One can see why he felt that he had talent.

Thanks for the feedback about Proust's tendencies to pastiche, Fionnuala. One can only guess that he thought about his childhood holidays a lot, and wrote pieces about it from time to time. I have for a while now, been wondering why he writes such a lot - the entire first volume of his novel it seems - without ever mentioning his life as a child in Paris.
I know, Fionnuala, that you would tell me that it's because the novel is actually a carefully constructed cathedral, so I will be patient and wait to see how it all fits in later. :P

I love what you did with the piece he wrote about the tadpoles in the glass container - how you expand it to symbolise the entirety of the novel.

And for now, on to Swann in Love! -the thread of which is to be found here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

[Jan]

Just finished the end of Combray, after having lost track of which division. I love the image of the steeples changing in perspective from his vantage point on the carriage. Always loved winding paths doing the same, changing as one walks along, unspooling in front of one. A metaphor of sorts for the whole endeavor. Not to mention his pride at his creation as of the hen and her egg.

Also (and this is from an earlier section), appreciate the Tablet explanation of the origin of description of father's strange behavior toward Bloch; made more sense in that original context.

[Traveller]

Jan wrote: "Just finished the end of Combray, after having lost track of which division. I love the image of the steeples changing in perspective from his vantage point on the carriage. Always loved winding pa..."

That piece is rather well-written, isn't it? Proust does seem pretty skilled at investing places and objects with new and interesting symbolism and meaning.