Discordance

When I try to reckon up all that I owe to the Méséglise way, all the humble discoveries of which it was either the fortuitous setting or the direct inspiration and cause, I am reminded that it was in that same autumn, on one of those walks, near the bushy slope which overlooks Montjouvain, that I was struck for the first time by this discordance between our impressions and their habitual expression.


The Méséglise way is simply one of the regular walks the narrator would take while in Combray, first mentioned a couple of posts ago. Two things to note here. First, again we see his entirely elusive sense of time. He talks about "that same autumn," but we really don't know which autumn that was. The particular stands for the general, somehow. And then that resonant sentence about the "discordance between our impressions and their habitual expression." In Search Of Lost Time, among many many other things, is an effort by Proust to wrestle with the way habit dulls our senses, renders us careless and insensitive to Life itself. Here he points out that inside us it's a war we constantly lose, since we may well feel one thing but for any number of reasons learn to express the feeling in a way that does not do it justice or, even, communicate it at all.

To translate our innermost feelings

The walls of houses, the Tansonville hedge, the trees of Roussainville wood, the bushes adjoining Montjouvain, all must bear the blows of my walking-stick or umbrella, must hear my shouts of happiness, these being no more than expressions of the confused ideas which exhilarated me, and which had not achieved the repose of enlightenment, preferring the pleasures of a lazy drift towards an immediate outlet rather than submit to a slow and difficult course of elucidation. Thus it is that most of our attempts to translate our innermost feelings do no more than relieve us of them by drawing them out in a blurred form which does not help us to identify them.

Well there is a central conceit stumbled upon right here. On the one hand Proust the writer here affirms we human beings largely express our deeper feelings in a blurred, blurted out form, a form which more or less hides their true nature from us. One might agree or disagree with this, but typically his assertions come at the end of such thick sentences that the reader feels inclined to agree just to get on with it. But Proust the narrator is also hereby staking out his territory: this crazy-long book that you have merely one portion of in your hands is his effort to do otherwise--that is, to translate his innermost feelings in a more complete and persuasive way than "we" otherwise manage to effect. Many many pages from now, we will see how he has done.

For she had died at last

If the weather was bad all morning, my parents would abandon the idea of a walk, and I would remain at home. But, later on, I formed the habit of going out by myself on such days, and walking towards Méséglise-la-Vineuse, during that autumn when we had come to Combray to settle my aunt Léonie's estate; for she had died at last, vindicating at one and the same time those who had insisted that her debilitating regimen would ultimately kill her and those who had always maintained that she suffered from a disease that was not imaginary but organic...

At once one of the novel's characteristic achievements and its primary source of confusion is its slippery relationship with time. This may have been simultaneously intentional and unconscious. The novel is after all called In Search of Lost Time. But I'm not sure that Proust plotted out his narrative stream to describe events in time with quite the amount of befuddling fluidity as his natural writing style gravitates toward. This segment of a paragraph illustrates the enchanting craziness rather well. He begins in a way that speaks of how things generally were during childhood summers spent in Combray; the second sentence refers to somewhat more specific "later on"--namely, that one autumn when his family had to come to Combray after his aunt died. But this still exists in a vague, unspecified way--he is older than he was from his earlier Combray memories, but we don't know how old, and he is still not recalling specific events as much as general inclinations. The next number of pages he is now recalling that specific autumn in Combray but still, most often, in generalities. Even when he gets to one moment of specific memory, a few pages later, it is a memory of a particular awareness, completely having to do with internal feelings and recognitions, almost nothing to do with the actual concrete moment in time when he had the awareness.

Slippery stuff, but I think one's reading of the book is enhanced by trying to notice the way he slides in and around time and memories. That's really what he's up to here, not any kind of traditional narrative.

Derived not from books

The sculptor had also recorded certain anecdotes of Aristotle and Virgil, as precisely as Françoise in her kitchen was wont to hold forth about St. Louis as though she herself had known him, generally in order to depreciate, by contrast with him, my grandparents whom she considered less "righteous." One could see that the notions which the medieval artist and the medieval peasant (who had survived to cook for us in the nineteenth century) had of classical and of early Christian history, notions whose inaccuracy was atoned for by their honest simplicity, were derived not from books, but from a tradition at once ancient and direct, unbroken, oral, distorted, unrecognizable, and alive.

The narrator, in his elusive way, manages to put us inside a country church as he was just a moment earlier remembering a certain walk he and his family would take in the environs of Combray. We end up inside the church because he is remembering how they might take shelter there if it had begun raining while out on the walk. And there we are, both smoothly and abruptly, present with his memories about the church's interior. He recalls in particular the carved stone depictions of ancient saints and kings. The leaps he makes here are wonderful, and quite funny. Do not underestimate Proust's sense of humor.

We also see here one of the book's abiding, if subtle, themes: the disappearance of the remnants of feudal Europe, once and for all. Proust was on the scene as the ancient gave way to the modern, and noticed it, meditated on it, and commented on it. Maybe others were making similar comments at the time, but his are the ones with which we have largely been left.

Wholly Platonic satisfaction

It was an invitation which, two years earlier, would have incensed M. Vinteuil, but which now filled him with so much gratitude that he felt obliged to refrain from the indiscretion of accepting. Swann's friendly regard for his daughter seemed to him to be in itself so honourable, so precious a support that he felt it would perhaps be advisable not to make use of it, so as to have the wholly Platonic satisfaction of preserving it.


This is a very Proustian psychological wrinkle. I'm not sure how many people actually think like this--how much, that is to say, Proust continually and vigorously projected his own mini-neuroticisms onto his characters. But that may be besides the point. The mere process of his teasing out such observations--as here, with the composer Vinteuil, who was so moved by Swann's support that he preferred not to engage it--is itself the marvel. This long and winding book is full of such moments.

Powerless

The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them...


This is why you can't argue with a zealot.

The complexity of circumstances

There is probably no one, however rigid his virtue, who is not liable to find himself, by the complexity of circumstances, living at close quarters with the very vice which he himself has been most outspoken in condemning...


The irony comes with those who are not, shall we say, rigid in their own virtue at all, yet remain sanctimonious in their condemnation of some alleged vice or another. Because Proust's comment here relates to a character--M. Vinteuil--whose daughter is widely suspected of being a lesbian (the word of course is not uttered), a certain recent vice president (ah! "vice" president!) of the U.S. comes to mind.

Dispatch from a bygone world

They held that one ought to set before children, and that children showed their own innate good taste in admiring, only such books and pictures as they would continue to admire when their minds were developed and mature. No doubt they regarded aesthetic merits as material objects which an unclouded vision could not fail to discern, wiwthout one's needing to nurture equivalents of them and let them slowly ripen in one's own heart.


The narrator is talking about his grandmother's sisters. It is the kind of observation that reminds us just how long ago this book was written, and what a bygone world he is reporting from. It can be easy to forget that when so many of his psychological insights seem not just up to date but sometimes, still, ahead of us. But here he gives us a glimpse of a mindset that predates our modern view of childhood. It is as fascinating as it is at once laughable and poignant--the knowledge that children have always been raised by adults convinced they know what they're doing, and yet if the adult lacks entirely any sense that a child is a being in development, then the adult is blind and the child, often, damaged.

White as a cloud

Sometimes in the afternoon sky the moon would creep up, white as a cloud, furtive, lustreless, suggesting an actress who does not have to "come on" for a while, and watches the rest of the company for a moment from the auditorium in her ordinary clothes, keeping in the background, not wishing to attract attention to herself.


Proust is the master of the over-extended metaphor. He could have left this one early; the moon as an actress who doesn't have to come on for a while is effective in itself, it would seem. But one senses that Proust's metaphors unfold with so much detail in his own head that he can't help but reveal them to the depths that his brain has taken them, length and clarity of sentence be damned. It's almost like he doesn't trust our imaginations to be as rich as his. I can't say he's not justified in this opinion. While part of me is annoyed when he feels the need to spin his metaphors beyond normal bounds, part of me is ever fascinated by where he takes them, and by the greater spell they end up casting. Not only is his moon an actress who does not come on for a while, she sits in the auditorium, watching the play she is otherwise in "in her ordinary clothes." Will you look at a moon in the day sky the same way again?

Sick with longing

The name Swann had for me become almost mythological, and when I talked with my family I would grow sick with longing to hear them utter it; I dared not pronounce it myself, but I would draw them into the discussion of matters which led naturally to Gilberte and her family, in which she was involved, in speaking of which I would feel myself not too remotely exiled from her; and I would suddenly force my father (by pretending, for instance, to believe that my grandfather's appointment had been in our family before his day, or that the hedge with the pink hawthorn which my aunt Leonie wished to visit was on common land) to correct my assertions, to say, as though in opposition to me and of his own accord: "No, no, that appointment belonged to Swann's father, that hedge is part of Swann's park." And then I would be obliged to catch my breath, so suffocating was the pressure, upon that part of me where it was for ever inscribed, of that name which, at the moment I heard it, seemed to me fuller, more portentous than any other, because it was heavy with the weight of all the occasions on which I had secretly uttered it in my mind.


One thing that's tricky with Proust is how, in the first books, he describes childhood feelings and emotions with excessively grown-up words and phrases and sentences. It can create a kind of disconnect or strangeness for the reader until you get used to it. Surely the child that he was did not think in these precise terms, and yet at the same time, so potently does he describe his obsessions that it is only, clearly, a childhood state he is describing. I think, for instance, many of us can relate to that sort of "charged" feeling around a certain person, or even a fictional character, that we might have had as a kid in one instance or another. For most of us, it's easy to forget the nature of that half-embarrassed half-enthralled state of mind, and the extent of the obsession. Proust here connects it to one of his archetypal emotions--longing--and does an effective job at describing the literally altered state to which it brought him, for better or worse.

She wanted to want to

She would have liked to see Swann and Tansonville again; but the mere wish to do so sufficed for all that remained of her strength, which its fulfillment would have more than exhausted.


He is referring to his aunt, but more to the point, he is talking again about longing. Proust is an expert in longing, having examined its every facet under a most powerful metaphysical microscope. To Proust all longing is at root implacable. This particular twist is subtle and poignant, a particular kind of impossible longing, mobiusly turned back on itself, both existing and negating its existence at the same time. His aunt's desire to visit Swann at Tansonville could not be fulfilled, she had not strength for it. So she allowed herself to be satisfied merely wanting to go. More precisely, she wanted to want to, but didn't actually want to. And who among us doesn't know what that's like?

Meeting Gilberte, pt. 2

I loved her; I was sorry not to have had the time and the inspiration to insult her, to hurt her, to force her to keep some memory of me.


Our intrepid narrator, as yet unnamed, is a bit of a neurotic. To say the least. What becomes almost touching over time, however, is how little he makes an effort to hide his neuroses from his readers. And it's not because he is unaware of his audience. He writes rather directly to the audience most of the time. But he pulls no punches on himself. When he has thoughts or feelings that most of us might keep carefully to ourselves, he carefully exposes them. Think what you will of him, he is himself enough not to worry about that, or, simply, not to be able to be any other way.

Those bright eyes

Her black eyes gleamed, and since I did not at that time know, and indeed have never since learned, how to reduce a strong impression to its objective elements, since I had not, as they say, enough "power of observation" to isolate the notion of their color, for a long time afterwards, whenever I thought of her, the memory of those bright eyes would at once present itself to me as a vivid azure, since her complexion was fair; so much so that, perhaps if her eyes had not been quite so black--which was what struck one most forcibly on first seeing her--I should not have been, as I was, so especially enamored of their imagined blue.


Phew. A lot to unpack here. "I did not at that time know, and indeed have never since learned": what's going on with that? What an odd way to phrase that. Normally if you note that you didn't know something at some point in the past you are simultaneously acknowledging that you have since learned. Proust instead phrases it to accentuate his own perceived shortcoming. And yet as his reader, you feel compelled to disagree, sort of. That is, you have by now, 150 pages in, been bombarded with his efforts to describe things both in his outer and inner worlds. So it would seem obvious that he can do what he says he can't--that is, reduce a strong impression to its objective elements. Isn't that what the whole book is sort of about? But then again, he may not believe that he's doing that at all. He is lost in his own subjectivity--and by implication telling us all that we are lost in our own--and so despairs of ever making that translation from subjective to objective.

But, in any case, for him to accuse himself of lacking enough "power of observation" seems almost a purposeful joke. And yet at the same time he is here noting a powerful truth that is perhaps one of his gargantuan novel's most abiding themes: that we are ever prisoner to our own memories, which themselves are inescapably divorced--sometimes in small ways, sometimes in large ways--from what actually happened. His idea that the very blackness of Gilberte's eyes was itself what caused him to remember--and love--them as bright blue strikes me as an incredibly complex metaphor for something that I can't quite put my finger on.

Meeting Gilberte

Suddenly I stood still, unable to move, as happens when we are faced with a vision that appeals not to our eyes only but requires a deeper kind of perception and takes possession of the whole of our being.


This is when our intrepid narrator first lays eyes on the first (of a series) of girls/women about whom he will obsess, obsessively. Maybe it's just me, but I don't find Proust's descriptions of his emotional state regarding women to ring true. I find them fascinating, don't get me wrong. But he doesn't too often sound like a boy (or a man) in love with a girl (or a woman). And I'm not just talking about his homosexuality; it's more his strange outsider-ness at work. His was an idiosyncratic psyche. He saw and felt differently than the people around him. As became apparent in this book a long time ago, and we're only at page 153.

Mysterious longing

And then I returned to the hawthorns, and stood before them as one stands before those masterpieces which, one imagines, one will be better able to "take in" when one has looked away for a moment at something else; but in vain did I make a screen with my hands, the better to concentrate upon the flowers, the feeling they aroused in me remained obscure and vague, struggling and failing to free itself, to float across and become one with them. They themselves offered me no enlightenment, and I could not call upon any other flowers to satisfy this mysterious longing.


The man's on a roll. This is right on the heels of the last entry, and he's still trying to unpack the unearthly allure of those hawthorns. This passage may nearly serve as a microcosm of the entire 4,200-some-odd-page affair: the narrator observing, lacking quite the words to describe but trying (at great length) anyway, intermittently focusing on small episodes, but no, everything still floats away in a wordy blur of emotion, and he (and we) are left, in the end, with nothing more (or less) than Mysterious Longing.

Inexhaustible profusion

But it was in vain that I lingered beside the hawthorns--inhaling, trying to fix in my mind (which did not know what to do with it), losing and recapturing their invisible and unchanging odor, absorbing myself in the rhythm which disposed their flowers here and there with the lightheartedness of youth and at intervals as unexpected as certain intervals in music--they went on offering me the same charm in inexhaustible profusion, but without letting me delve any more deeply, like those melodies which one can play a hundred times in succession without coming any nearer to their secret.

More ultimate Proust: the narrator lingering over a pleasing aroma, trying to grab onto that which cannot be grabbed. He is left only with words.

Silence and immobility

Quartering the topmost branches of one of the tall trees, an invisible bird was striving to make the day seem shorter, exploring with a long-drawn note the solitude that pressed it on every side, but it received at once so unanimous an answer, so powerful a repercussion of silence and of immobility, that one felt it had arrested for all eternity the moment which it had been trying to make pass more quickly.


One can read In Search of Lost Time for a while before discovering that Proust has a sense of humor. And were I more Proust-like myself, I would invent the perfectly convoluted, almost-but-not-quite-incomprehensible metaphor to both describe and explain his softly ironic comic touch. But I surrender before even trying. I'll just note that he makes me smile sometimes, and usually by surprise.

Deep thoughts, pt. 2

...; certain places persist in remaining surrounded by the vassals of their own especial sovereignty, and will flaunt their immemorial insignia in the middle of a park, just as they would have done far from any human interference, in a solitude which must everywhere return to engulf them, springing up out of the necessities of their exposed position and superimposed on the work of man's hands.


This finishes the sentence begun in the previous post. And this is classic Proust: thick words, proceeding thickly, just as sure of their overarching sentiment as the reader, reading it, is unsure. Sometimes I have the patience to go back and re-read sentences like this in an effort to get at least a little closer to unlocking the essence of what he was trying to say. Other times I take a deep breath and say fuck it. Life is sometimes too short to be clear about every last one of Proust's crazy sentences.

Illumination

But in summer, when we came back to the house, the sun would not have set; and while we were upstairs paying our visit to aunt Léonie its rays, sinking until they lay along her window-sill, would be caught and held by the large inner curtains and the loops which tied them back to the wall, and then, split and ramified and filtered, encrusting with tiny flakes of gold the citronwood of the chest-of-drawers, would illuminate the room with a delicate, slanting, woodland glow.


Sometimes his descriptions are so expressive that the moment fills my inner space with a vividness that seems fully sensory. He is as captivated by quality of light as a painter is, using words instead of brushes to capture his impressions.

Landscape ethics

My father raised the subject again at our subsequent meetings, torturing him with questions, but it was labor in vain; like that scholarly swindler who devoted to the fabrication of forged palimpsests a wealth of skill and knowledge and industry the hundredth part of which would have sufficed to establish him in a more lucrative but honorable occupation, M. Legrandin, had we insisted further, would in the end have constructed a whole system of landscape ethics and a celestial geography of Lower Normandy sooner than admit to us that his own sister was living within a mile or two of Balbec...


Yes this sentence continues, but I'm cutting it off here; it's already too rich. I don't remember why M. Legrandin does not want to tell Marcel's father about his sister. But I love the analogy here, and how Proust never hesitates to veer off into an extended, involved comparison at once too crazily detailed to sound natural and yet, at the same time, all but perfect.