Classics and the Western Canon discussion
Proust - Swann's Way
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Swann's Way - Overture and Combray
Thomas wrote: "Any thoughts about the incident of "sadism" in the house of the (late) M. Vinteuil? The sexual content of the scene is rather tame by today's standards, but the point of the scene -- Mlle. Vinteui..."I know I wouldn't want to read much more of that. And yes, I'm afraid we're in a land of weak men.
I don't know if Mlle. Vinteuil hates her father or if this is some ritual dreamt up by her girlfriend for some sick reason.
" ...(though the narrator does point out that this impression will be important later on.)" --
I love the way the narrator throws in these anticipatory asides! It feels so intimate.
As for the "land of weak men": goofily, this is something that never even occurred to me, but yeah, it sure seems to be true when I think about it. Except for the father, most of the men in the novel who are NOT weak only show "strength" in ugly ways: cruelty or domination of their wives, etc. Or they're strong in many areas of their lives, but have one extreme weakness.
" ...(though the narrator does point out that this impression will be important later on.)" --
I love the way the narrator throws in these anticipatory asides! It feels so intimate.
As for the "land of weak men": goofily, this is something that never even occurred to me, but yeah, it sure seems to be true when I think about it. Except for the father, most of the men in the novel who are NOT weak only show "strength" in ugly ways: cruelty or domination of their wives, etc. Or they're strong in many areas of their lives, but have one extreme weakness.
And the child doesn't see men in the milieu of work -- if they work. You would expect women to have power at home.
Everyman wrote: "Bill wrote: "Proust, along with many other great novelists, ..."One thing we may want to discuss when we get to the end of the reading (or may not because by then the answer may have become self-evident..."
Tricky, that. This is really a single novel in seven volumes which is why I think reading it straight through is essential.
Patrice wrote: "...Is he saying that is only through art that we can really reach into the soul of another person?..."It does seem to me so far that Proust belongs to that cadre of individuals who privilege art above the rough and tumble of ordinary life.
Laurele wrote: "...And yes, I'm afraid we're in a land of weak men..."Laurele -- I'd be wary of stereotypes and cultural perceptions of "weakness" and "strength." (I include the Dreyfus affair in that wariness.)
I was fascinated by this "death mask" in the Getty of Proust. Somehow for me it differed significantly from many of his photographs in life.
http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/a...
The Wiki article one of the possible prototypes for Swann was also interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_...
Lily wrote: "Laurele -- I'd be wary of stereotypes and cultural perceptions of "weakness" and "strength." (I include the Dreyfus affair in that wariness.)"Perhaps you could expand on this. Where do you find the strength in any of the male characters we've seen so far? The narrator's father seems to be have authority in the family, but he also seems to be more interested in his barometer than his son. I don't see that as stregth exactly. What stereotypes and cultural perceptions are clouding my reading here?
(And as a housekeeping matter, could you please post references in the other thread rather than this one? Thanks.)
Lily wrote: "Laurele wrote: "...And yes, I'm afraid we're in a land of weak men..."Laurele -- I'd be wary of stereotypes and cultural perceptions of "weakness" and "strength." (I include the Dreyfus affair i..."
Most of the more popular pictures of Proust were taken when he was in his twenties - early thirties, but in his forties his health declined a lot, he started to take a lot of drugs and stopped leaving his flat so when he died at 51 he was no longer that dashing.
I think it's, hmm, strange? to talk about a 6 or 7 year old boy being weak and/or having a Mommy complex. At the time when the story in the overture takes place, the Narrator was very young and I don't think there's anything unusual or wrong in his wanting his mum to give him a kiss goodnight or sleep with him when he's sick/agitated and can't sleep.
I'm probably not going to get a chance to start reading until this weekend. Can I ever catch up?
Ibis3 wrote: "I'm probably not going to get a chance to start reading until this weekend. Can I ever catch up?"You can do it! Dip a madeleine and you're half way there...
Thomas wrote: "(And as a housekeeping matter, could you please post references in the other thread rather than this one? Thanks.) ..."I guess (like the sisters and wine?) I was being too oblique. I posted the Getty picture of Proust because to me it portrayed almost a more virile appearing man than many of the rather effete pictures of him in life (my very personal reaction, I understand that), so to the extent that the narrator reflects Proust, I was attempting to suggest appearances can be deceptive. At least, I always had wondered what made Proust attractive (in real life or fiction) and that picture gave me a clue. (sexual appeal/strength?)
Insofar as the other link was concerned, it was intended to indicate that a man with connections like Swann is probably the type that that can command a journal and significant art trade, neither activities without aspects of strength. Should I have pulled from the text instead! Well, probably, yes, and you are welcome to your opinion. I did what I did and I doubt I destroyed the story or pulled authority. But, you are welcome to let me know again your differing views on the subject, Thomas. (I probably erred the most by mentioning the strengths needed to take a stand on the Dreyfus affair, since that is beyond this first book. Although you can probably argue I was premature about Swann as well, we have been introduced to him and know he has a life beyond the neighborhood.)
I haven't pulled specifics from the text, but my own reaction was a range of human traits and also the difficulty of categorizing characteristics as "strong" versus "weak" (e.g., M @132). I don't know that I would apply either label. (Which you didn't either, in your initial post. My response was actually to Laurele's post.)
Lily wrote: "Thomas wrote: "(And as a housekeeping matter, could you please post references in the other thread rather than this one? Thanks.) ..."I guess (like the sisters and wine?) I was being too oblique...."
Thanks for the clarification, and sorry if I sounded contentious. I'm actually just interested in what you think, and not at all interested in what Wikipedia has to say. If you can point to specific examples in the book that would be great.
Patrice wrote: "What jumped out at me this time around is how much of this book is about death. I had mentioned before how "lost time" made me think of death but listening to it, I hear how many times he mentions it. First there is the image of the sick kid in bed all of the time. Then he's surrounded by a grandmother and an sick old aunt. He describes the aunt's forehead as "lifeless". Even the lime blossoms are called "embalmed". Nice observations. Reading them I thought of poor M. Vinteuil, once again. The death theme seems to me to be related in a vague way to the sleeping theme as well, but maybe that's just me remembering sleep as the brother of death in mythology. Does the dawn coming in the last paragraph of Combray give us some hope?
Thomas wrote: "...If you can point to specific examples in the book that would be great..."I'm not sure what you are looking for examples of. I am really not interested in categorizing. I think others here have been giving observations and I don't know that I can add anything beyond what I thought I had done, albeit indirectly. I'm going to have to let this one just go. Sorry.
I am behind in the reading and I have not yet finished the Combray section yet but one thing that I am starting to notice is that there seems to be a lack of male characters presented in the book thus far. Other than the frequent visits of Swann of whom not much has really been said and who has not had much interaction with the narrator, it seems there are very few male characters. I have not read all of the posts yet since I haven't yet finished with this section but I do recall reading someone made a mention of the fact that there are a lot of weak men within the book and I have to admit that there was a moment earlier in the book when I forgot that the narrator was in fact a boy, and I had a moment of thinking, oh wait is the narrator supposed to be a girl? But than I recalled that at one point he was referred to as being a boy.
I am now beginning to wonder if his sensitive nature is do to the fact that he has had predominantly female influences in his life and seems to have the strongest memories of his mother, aunts, grandmother. His father only makes infrequent appearances and the narrator does not seem to have a very strong connection with him, and so it seems that he lacks any real strong father figures/male role models in his life.
Patrice wrote: "I'm enjoying this reading a lot and i definitely think it has something to do with the awareness of time slipping away. There are more years behind than ahead of me and life is a series of memories. Part of the search for lost time has something to do with death approaching, I think. "
I think one of the last paragraphs of the section emphasises this theme of death perfectly:
The flowers which played then among the grass, the water which rippled past in the sunshine, the whole landscape which served as environment to their apparition lingers arou€nd the memory of them still with its unconscious or unheeding air; and, certainly, when they were slowly scrutinised by this humble passer-by, by this dreaming child–as the face of a king is scrutinised by a petitioner lost in the crowd–that scrap of nature, that corner of a garden could never suppose that it would be thanks to him that they would be elected to survive in all their most ephemeral details; and yet the scent of hawthorn which strays plundering along the hedge from which, in a little while, the dog-roses will have banished it, a sound of footsteps followed by no echo, upon a gravel path, a bubble formed at the side of a waterplant by the current, and formed only to burst–my exaltation of mind has borne them with it, and has succeeded in making them traverse all these successive years, while all around them the one-trodden ways have vanished, while those who thronged those ways, and even the memory of those who thronged those trodden ways, are dead.
You can see too what Proust is doing with sentence structure and rhythm. He write as very long and quite poetical sentence describing a beautiful scene from nature, then suddenly at the end he tells you that all those who had seen that scene are now dead.
Early in the paragraph "which served as an environment to their apparition" suggest death at the outset. But yes it's beautiful.
Patrice wrote: "I'm beginning to get the feeling that he's saying something about the structure of French society ie he compares his aunt to Louis the XIV, Francoise is the peasantry and the cure, the church? I h..."There seems to be a huge amount of class consciousness in general. The narrator's idolization of Mme. Guermantes comes to mind. He sees her, and after his initial surprise that she doesn't look exactly as he imagined, he seems to persuade himself that she really is as glorious as he imagined. I guess it's typical of youthful idealism, but it's definitely class oriented.
It's a book about "memory and time," "What time does to memory and what memory does to time, how they interact. And it's also about what happens to someone in later years when they discover that some of the certainties they've always relied on, certainties in their mind and memory ... are beginning to be undermined."....."Memory, is far more edited.... than we'd like to believe."
"I have a brother who's a philosopher," .. "He maintains that almost all memories are false, all fallible, and that memory is the act of imagination, rather than the act of a lucid remembering machine somewhere up in our brains. I have a more sort of old-fashioned, pragmatic view of memory. But I certainly increasingly think that it's not only faulty but sometimes over-reliant on the imagination."
Although these statements reference the 2011 Mann Booker winner The sense of an Ending, they would be equally valid for Swann's Way. The memory process builds a sense of self and identity. By exploring Marcel's transition from sleep to wakeful consciousness he is exploring his grasp of self in the environment. In waking he first identifies physical objects and then through memory endows them with meaning, historical self-meaning which is his identity. As the Swann's Way moves to encounters with others the process of identity becomes more complex, but still reliant on the selective memory that endows meaning.
Is memory voluntary or involuntary or both?
Patrice wrote: "And what he wrote made me wonder. Was it a justification for his life or did he really believe it? Did he really think that the real cannot compete with the imaginary? Or was he saying something else?.."The little boy/narrator is a fictional character. We have no proof that the character's words are equal to Proust's beliefs. Instead, the character's beliefs may be presented as part of an argument/perspective for the reader to contemplate. And of course, all the other characters' perspectives can be looked at as additional food for thought, in comparison and contrast with the narrator.
If the act of reading is applying imagination,experience, memory to the squiggles on the page, then how would that be different than the act of awakening consciousness at the beginning of the novel?
Patrice wrote: "Interesting. French society is very class conscious, generally, and I'm sure much more so then. But I'm wondering what he is saying about it. His aunt is not exactly admirable. It's interesti..."
I think it's a bit too early on to say anything definitive about class in the novel, but it's also illuminating to look at how the Narrator's family write off people whom, they think, are very middle/lower class. For example, although they've known Swann and his family before he was born, they remain obstinate to the fact that he has connections with the aristocracy.
Regarding reading vs living, I think Proust personally would agree with you that living takes precedence (which is just one reason why we shouldn't try to equate the Narrator with Proust). In his essay Days of Reading he says, responding to Ruskin's claim that reading is a conversation with the 'greats' through which we can learn everything worth knowing:
Reading is on the threshold of spiritual life; it can introduce us to it, but it does not constitute it. [...] It becomes dangerous, on the other hand, when, instead of awakwenning to personal life of the mind, reading tends to substitute itself for it, when truth appears to us no longer as an ideal that we can only realize by the intimate progress of our thought and by the effort of our heart but a material thing sandwiched between the leaves of books like a honey wholly prepared by others and that we only have to take the trouble of reaching, on library shelves, and forthwith taste passively in a perfect repose of body and mind.
Having said that, the mentions of reading and literature in Swann's Way are often quite unnerving. We're constantly told by the Narrator that he's abandoned all attempts to write, that he'll never be a writer, etc. and yet we're reading his words on paper so obviously somebody must have written them. It's quite confusing and enticing at the same time.
But it's not the only confusing and enticing aspect of the book, of course. I'm finding myself much more interested in little episodes and episodic characters whose backstory has been barely touched upon than in the Narrator. I know that probably some of them will be explained later on, but at the same time I have a hunch that some will never be resolved. Examples of these episodes would be the aunt Leonie's past as a 'loose woman', Eulalie and the kitchen maid, the melange a trois in the Vinteuil household, even Swann's father.
I was struck by the class-consciousness also. Remarkably for a republic, noble titles seem to mean a great deal. Swann is different: he mixes easily with the upper middle class, and doesn't mention that he's a friend of the Prince of Wales.These people are quite a contrast with the French of Les Miserables. No-one is hungry, no-one is in want, no-one except the servants seems to need to work for a living.
Well, the narrator's father works. He seems to have some kind of high-ish position in the government.
Roger wrote: "I was struck by the class-consciousness also. Remarkably for a republic, noble titles seem to mean a great deal. Swann is different: he mixes easily with the upper middle class, and doesn't ment..." The Narrator seems fascinated by the idea of nobility, but I don't think that officially they were that important. I know, for example that Proust's close friend Antoine Bibesco (who was -supposedly- the inspiration for Robert de St. Loup) called himself a 'prince' but the title was completely meaningless. His grandfather was indeed the ruler of Wallachia, but he renounced his title after ruling for only 5 years, the rule in Wallachia was not hereditary anyway, the term 'prince' never existed among Wallachian nobility and Wallachia itself ceased to exist as an independent country in 1877.
Here's a wild idea!The biological concept of ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny (recapitulation theory in wikipedia) briefly is that animals developing from embryo to adult go through stages resembling successive stages in the evolution of their remote ancestors. With this theory in the back of the mind, might the awakening scene be a recapitulation of the awakening of consciousness birth to death? Might Proust be exploring the development of consciousness and the identity of the self? I think the presence of the book is inviting the reader to draw parallels between the work of imagination in the book (presumably a fiction) and the process of awakening, which seems also to be an act of imagination in that the reconstruction of reality on awakening is selective and shaped by the memory of experience overlaid on the physical objects present in the room. We are reading a book about someone reading a book. The book falls away and the reader carries on the process that the author constructs...using memory, experience, and imagination to live in a "real" world.
Just a stab at it!
Susan wrote: " With this theory in the back of the mind, might the awakening scene be a recapitulation of the awakening of consciousness birth to death? Might Proust be exploring the development of consciousness and the identity of the self?"Wow! I like it. I'm not so sure about the biological part of it, but I like the psychological aspect. Awakening as birth, the first stage of consciousness, recovering or remembering time past. There is a lot of room for interpretation here, but I like this approach a lot.
Patrice wrote: "Did you believe that? I had a hard time with it. What exactly was his point? Again, that reading is more real than real life? It's hard to imagine. It seems to me that reading about it would be far less moving than the real person in pain."So much in this book has to do with image and imagination. Francoise feels the suffering she imagines, but she has no empathy for the person actually suffering from the thing she is reading about. The old aunt never leaves her room but she has to learn from others everything that goes on outside so she can picture it in her imagination. Vinteuil denies his daughter's "behavior" and probably the fact that she hates him as well.
But the fact that M. Vinteuil perhaps knew about his daughter's behavior does not imply that his worship of her would thereby be diminished. Facts do not find their way into the world in which our beliefs reside; they did not produce our beliefs, they do not destroy them; they may inflict on them the most constant refutations without weakening them...
If this is all a memory of the narrator, the details that are selected must have been selected for a reason. It is a work of art, and art can either be truthful or manipulative, just as memory can be selective to distort the truth of the past. I think we're meant to be shocked by Francoise's reaction to the medical book, and we are meant to be shocked by Vinteuil's daughter. These details have been selected by the narrator for a reason, but I'm not quite sure what the reason is yet. It's all very foggy to me so far.
Thomas wrote: "If this is all a memory of the narrator, the details that are selected must have been selected for a reason. It is a work of art, and art can either be truthful or manipulative, just as memory can be selective to distort the truth of the past. I think we're meant to be shocked by Francoise's reaction to the medical book, and we are meant to be shocked by Vinteuil's daughter. These details have been selected by the narrator for a reason, but I'm not quite sure what the reason is yet. It's all very foggy to me so far."The details are created by the writer of this work of fiction. The narrator is a fictitious character who, we must assume, is remembering the details as he is to create the meaning the writer wishes to communicate.
What I keep running up against is that the writing sounds so much like an autobiographical memoir it is sometimes difficult to see the art, if that makes sense. There is this kind of 'legend' of Proust that we all seem to know (before we read the book) of the invalid genius writing in his bed. I wish I knew nothing about Proust's life so I could read the story without trying to guess which parts are fiction and which parts might be autobiography.
Patrice wrote: "Yes, Jim, in re-reading the posts here I do notice that I'm not the only one who thinks that the narrator IS Proust. Well, who else could he be? When something is written in the first person it's hard not to assume it is written in the author's voice. And I think he's done such a great job of sounding authentic that when he suddenly doesn't we notice.Is that the point? Isn't part of what he's saying that we get fooled into believing that what we read is true just as what we remember is true? I wonder if he's playing with us? I just had a thought... probably wrong, but the surrealist painters...Dali, Magritte...they painted dreams. Proust starts off saying that he doesn't know what's real and what isn't when he's half asleep...The aunt never knows when she's awake or asleep either. I'm going to have to think about this. Any ideas? "
I know too much hearsay about Proust and not enough factual information to know what is real and what is fiction. If I had never heard his name/legend, never seen his photograph, never heard people deify him as a genius, my reading would be going much smoother, LOL!
Short of pulling out the Ouija board and questioning his spirit (while attached to a polygraph machine), it might be best to categorize his work as fiction. There are so many layers, images, allusions, and so on, it's just too hard to say what is Proust and what is fiction. And then there's the question, "Why try to separate it at all? Why not just let it all wash over me as a beautiful prose/poem/stream-of-consciousness fictional memoir and set aside analysis?"
I suppose that having only read the L'Ouverture and Combray, it's way too early to answer any of these questions. Maybe when I read the last sentence of Volume 7, I can look back (probably when I'm much older) and better contemplate/understand what I've read.
I don't know if he's playing with us, or if he is skillfully bringing us into his own thinking about memory and reality. Maybe this is the core of his art.
Jim wrote: "The details are created by the writer of this work of fiction. The narrator is a fictitious character who, we must assume, is remembering the details as he is to create the meaning the writer wishes to communicate."But (at least at this point in the narrative) we don't know whether we're following the narrator's stream of consciousness and thus a set of completely involuntary recollections OR reading the narrator's manuscript - we're told numerous times that the narrator wanted to be a writer and we're even given a sample of his juvenilia (the page about the church steeples when he goes on a carriage ride, it's towards the end of the section) which is very similar in tone/language/style to the main narrative so this too is possible.
Since there is no real town of Combray, perhaps a French reader would know immediately that this is a work of fiction.
Patrice wrote: "I think he wants us to discover ourselves through his art."
I think so, too. I'm awestruck over the amazingly astute questions and insights all of you have had about the whole work after reading such a little bit of it!
But I've also slowly come to realize and accept that I'm a person who's pretty much NEVER going to "get it" on my first reading of any great work (Moby Dick being the one exception; even if I was wrong, I did experience what felt like lightning bolts of revelation the first time through). Maybe this general inability does free me up to read the classics in a more relaxed way the first time around because my expectations for understanding what the author is doing are just about nil, and I know I'll be reading it again. On the second reading, the insights come flooding in on their own, the way it seems to happen for many of you the first time around.
I'm only posting this in case there are other readers out there who are like me and who hesitate to contribute to the conversations here because of this problem. I only think it feels like a problem in comparison to the others who post here, but I also think those of us in the non-comprehending camp ought to try to chime in with our own, probably more surface impressions, even when we don't feel like they're up to snuff.
I think so, too. I'm awestruck over the amazingly astute questions and insights all of you have had about the whole work after reading such a little bit of it!
But I've also slowly come to realize and accept that I'm a person who's pretty much NEVER going to "get it" on my first reading of any great work (Moby Dick being the one exception; even if I was wrong, I did experience what felt like lightning bolts of revelation the first time through). Maybe this general inability does free me up to read the classics in a more relaxed way the first time around because my expectations for understanding what the author is doing are just about nil, and I know I'll be reading it again. On the second reading, the insights come flooding in on their own, the way it seems to happen for many of you the first time around.
I'm only posting this in case there are other readers out there who are like me and who hesitate to contribute to the conversations here because of this problem. I only think it feels like a problem in comparison to the others who post here, but I also think those of us in the non-comprehending camp ought to try to chime in with our own, probably more surface impressions, even when we don't feel like they're up to snuff.
Roger wrote: "Since there is no real town of Combray, perhaps a French reader would know immediately that this is a work of fiction."Mais bien sûr! Très perspicace, Roger!
Like the Iliad and other long, great works, I am discovering that there are well known passages (but not always by me), frequently referred to directly or obliquely by other authors. Those are a delight to encounter, just in and of themselves. (Last night I added a reference to a blog about one passage that will appear in "Swan in Love.")
Andreea wrote: "Jim wrote: "The details are created by the writer of this work of fiction. The narrator is a fictitious character who, we must assume, is remembering the details as he is to create the meaning the ..."Sorry! I realize I didn't write that very clearly. When I wrote "the writer of this work of fiction", I meant "Proust, writer of Swann's Way."
Jim wrote: "...If I had never heard his name/legend, never seen his photograph, never heard people deify him as a genius, my reading would be going much smoother, LOL!..."Jim -- Do you expect sympathy? Is the problem much different for Proust than for Shakespeare or Woolf or Joyce or Homer or Dante or ...?
Perhaps because one doesn't sense the same risk they may be embedding their own story in the tale they are telling?
Andreea wrote: "...The Narrator seems fascinated by the idea of nobility, but I don't think that officially they were that important...."France was working itself through some changes in identity that are very difficult for me to comprehend as an American, much more familiar with our history than that of France, with its literally centuries of monarchical rule.
Lily wrote: "Jim wrote: "...If I had never heard his name/legend, never seen his photograph, never heard people deify him as a genius, my reading would be going much smoother, LOL!..."Jim -- Do you expect sympathy? Is the problem much different for Proust than for Shakespeare or Woolf or Joyce or Homer or Dante or ...? "
I see a difference. The popular image of Proust is commingled with his work in a way I don't find with the others.
@145 Patrice wrote: "...Francoise is still mourning her dead parents and his mother asks about them so she can talk about them. Over and over he repeats this theme of death. ..."Ironically, this appears in the wiki entry for Cormac McCarthy: "In one of his few interviews (with The New York Times), McCarthy reveals that he is not a fan of authors who do not 'deal with issues of life and death,' citing Henry James and Marcel Proust as examples."
Not sure I agree with McCarthy, if this is an accurate attribution.
Jim wrote: "Patrice wrote: "Yes, Jim, in re-reading the posts here I do notice that I'm not the only one who thinks that the narrator IS Proust. Well, who else could he be? When something is written in the fir..."Even if we think that the narrator is Proust (which I don't, really, but it has been brought up quite a few times), he's not the real Proust, but the Proust that he wants us to see him as. So when the narrator is remembering his childhood, he's remembering it the way he wants to remember it, and presenting it to us in the way that he wants us to think that he remembered it. It's a bit of a convoluted idea, but one worth considering. Proust must have understood that public writing (whether this be a novel or not, and I haven't made my mind up) is necessarily caught up in issues of self-presentation.
Upon reading, I was most struck by the passage (page 87 of the Lydia Davis Penguin version) in which Proust says "thus our heart changes, in life, and it is the worst pain; but we know it only through reading, through our imagination: in reality it changes, as certain natural phenomena occur, slowly enough so that, if we are able to observe successively each of its different states, in return we are spared the actual sensation of change." This seems like such a wonderful justification for reading (although perhaps not at the expense of enjoying life, as others have noted), as reading can provide insight that we cannot obtain through life experience.
However, at age 25 I feel a bit young to read Proust. Perhaps I, like the narrator as a child, place more value in literature because I have yet to experience the type of change that could only be viewed through storytelling. Maybe I'll feel differently after I've been married, after I've grown older and lived more. But then again, maybe I won't.
Anyway, I've finished Combray, and after getting just a few pages into Swann in Love, I've placed an order for the second book (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower). I do hope that we read the second volume together, but, if not, I feel driven to finish the search.
The Principles of Psychology by William James was mentioned a bit upthread, and I urge anyone who hasn't read it to check it out. James was hugely influential, not just on Proust but on other modernist writers, such as Gertrude Stein (who conducted experiments with him) and Virigina Wolff. His work was certainly prescient, although the rise of behaviorism in psychological research caused many of his insights to go unnoticed until the cognitive revolution in the 50's and 60's. It's too bad that Freud has such a large legacy (despite the fact that his theories are, at best, blatantly unscientific), while James seems to be much more overlooked.
@158 Susan wrote: "As the Swann's Way moves to encounters with others the process of identity becomes more complex, but still reliant on the selective memory that endows meaning. ..."Susan -- thank you for this post. I just watched the movie of "Swan in Love", and your words are helpful.
Jim wrote: "Of course there's a difference. The popular image of Proust is commingled with his work. ..."Jim -- in rescanning the posts, I see you also wrote this @msg 179 "What I keep running up against is that the writing sounds so much like an autobiographical memoir it is sometimes difficult to see the art, if that makes sense. There is this kind of 'legend' of Proust that we all seem to know (before we read the book) of the invalid genius writing in his bed. I wish I knew nothing about Proust's life so I could read the story without trying to guess which parts are fiction and which parts might be autobiography."
I do sympathize with those concerns. I didn't intend to be excessively abrupt in my retort (more facetious than uncivil), but I do personally encounter similar problems of separating author and text when reading some of Woolf and particularly Joyce's Ulysses.
Lily wrote: "but I do personally encounter similar problems of separating author and text when reading some of Woolf and particularly Joyce's Ulysses. .."I can see that with Woolf, especially because of the popularity and power of her non-fiction. I haven't had that happen for Joyce, though, because I haven't spent any time researching his life. I'll be reading Ulysses this March/April, so maybe the issue will come up again.
The more I ponder the question, the less important it seems. Proust left us with a wonderful work of art that speaks to us about what it means to be a human being, what it means to experience family, friends, neighbors, and what it's like to remember the past no matter how challenging that might be.
And so, on to Swann in Love...
Casey wrote: "I've placed an order for the second book (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower). I do hope that we read the second volume together..."Then, you may want to be sure to vote in the run-off poll by Saturday, November 26 (poll closes 11/27, but that means vote at least the day before).
Casey wrote: "Even if we think that the narrator is Proust (which I don't, really, but it has been brought up quite a few times), he's not the real Proust, but the Proust that he wants us to see him as. So when the narrator is remembering his childhood, he's remembering it the way he wants to remember it, and presenting it to us in the way that he wants us to think that he remembered it."I think this is exactly right. Proust wants us to see Combray through the narrator's eyes, not Proust's (the author's) eyes. In a book in which very little actually happens, the observations about everyday things (and the unobserved things, which have been deliberately left out for a reason) become the story itself. I think where we get off track is when elements of the story lead us to the "image" or the biography of Marcel Proust. If this is art, and not biography or history, those elements should tell us something about the narrator of the story, not Proust himself.
Joyce says in the Portrait of the Artist that "the artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails." The great accomplishment of the artist is that the work speaks for itself. And it does!
Thomas wrote: "...Joyce says in the Portrait of the Artist that "the artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails." The great accomplishment of the artist is that the work speaks for itself. And it does!..."As so often, you cut to the chase, Thomas! Thank you! I hadn't recalled the quotation from Joyce, but it feels so apropos here, at least to me.
That's a theory, sometimes useful, sometimes not so much. I was trained to look only at the text, and not because of Joyce but because the dominant critical theory when I was in school.But I don't always think that's the useful approach. Sometimes moving beyond the text, even to the author's life, is illuminating. Of course, sometimes it can miss the point.
Classics and the Western Canon
Books mentioned in this topic
The Principles of Psychology (other topics)Days of Reading (other topics)
Swann’s Way (other topics)
The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust (other topics)
The Principles of Psychology (other topics)
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It leads me to wonder about the men in the novel in general. So far we have many powerful women characters and a boy narrator with a Mommy complex. It seems a little unbalanced. Perhaps Swann will help out in this regard?