Halfway. I know I shouldn't treat reading Proust as a task to be completed, but when reading something of such length it is heartening to know that you are out of the beginning, over the hump and everything's downhill now, the end in sight. And if I treat it as a task it is certainly an enjoyable task. I know the first time I read it I had several bumps on the road to completion. Putting the novel down, reading other novels and then steeling myself and returning to it. This time I am refraining from going away from In Search of Lost Time to reread Stendhal's The Red and the Black, which I was reminded of during my reading of Proust, and which I remember nothing of. I'm putting that off till the end of Proust though.
I am still enjoying the reading. No bumps this time, so far anyway. The beauty of the prose is keeping me going. Obviously I'm only reading the translation (I've gone the whole hog and am buying the newer version, rather than rereading my old copy) but the prose flows and the reading is surprisingly easy. I find myself comparing it to Henry James. With James I always find that the sentences are so complex that each one must be read and reread to fully get the meaning and it can become a tortuously slow process. A rewarding process, and James is certainly an amazing writer, one of the best, it's just such hard work. With Proust, despite the huge sentences and complex ideas (and again I should point out that this is the translation I'm refering to, how it reads in the original French I have no idea), their is always a flow. The words and ideas follow easily from one to another and so one feels embraced by the novel. It feels right. There is an occasional danger that such an embrace means that one's mind can wander during the reading, but it is a wandering along the ways of the novel's paths, rather than a wandering occasioned by boredom, by the desire for distraction.
It is odd that I have no real recollections of the first time I read Proust but I do remember the act of buying the first volume. I don't even remember why I chose to read it. I can only remember that one day, after finishing college I went and bought the first volume and got the bus home and began reading straight away. And it was a cloudy day, I remember that. It is also odd that reading it this time around it is all the small details of the novel that I seem to remember having read before, things that I never realised had stayed with me till now (As an aside, I recently began reading Don Delilo's Underworld, a book I could swear I have never read before. After about two hundred pages I began to read things I could have sworn I had read before. But I am absolutely sure I hadn't, I'd read a couple of Delilo novels but never Underworld. The feeling was so unsettling that I couldn't finish it). Perhaps it is indicative of the novel's evocative power, perhaps indicative of my trivial nature, remembering the small things rather than the grand ideas...
Yet isn't the novel nothing but a succession of small things? As the involuntary memory of which Proust speaks begins with some trivial thing which unleashes the power of recollection so what is recalled is not some generalized past, but a detailed past, a past where nothing seems forgotten. The past is nothing but this succession of small things built up into a bigger picture, recalling what Lacan says of a collection of matchboxes in relation to das Ding in Seminar VII:
Something that I find interesting, and yet something that could be dangerous to raise halfway through the novel, is the way the novel is structured to apparently reveal a depth which never occurs. The general pattern is that we start with a name (Guermantes, Balbec) and are lead to believe that we will get to the heart of the name, and yet what we find is that all the depth is in the name itself, the pictures which are conjured by the name. When we look deeper their is nothing but disappointment, we do not find what we are looking for. To borrow something else from Lacan, our enjoyment only comes on "looking awry". The first dinner party at the Guermantes is a great example of this, where the narrator says that all the talk at the table is dull compared to the conversation on the lineage of the names of the family, a conversation the socialites presume dull, but which, because of the images it evokes the narrator finds delightful.
This lack of depth applies to the people themselves as well. When the people, who were for so long merely names, become known, they do not reveal themselves with any notion of depth, but instead are found to be nothing but their surface. Which perhaps explains, or possibly is explained by, the emphasis on social etiquette, throughout the novel. It is only through such outward shows that one gets to know a person and no matter how far he delves, he returns constantly to the form of a person, rather than the content. And, as we can not know the essentials of other people, the only way forward for Proust is for a world view based on our own percerptions, so that everyone he meets becomes the sum of what Proust remembers or has read in mythology or novels or seen in art - there is no other way he can see to capture people but through his own perceptions.
What this leads to in Proust is a priviliging of the aesthetic over everything else, with no opportunity to get into the minds of other people we can only view them from the outside, as works of art; the form of the novel means that even feelings are viewed like this, even ones own feelings are viewed from a distance, an aesthetic distance. At the start of Volume 4 (I have continued reading so am now slightly over half way...) Swann says something that sums this up:
The question is: is that an attitude that is posited as desirable per se? Rather than as an attitude for old age, when one is "weary", is there not a sense that Proust desires this attitude of aesthetic detachment throughout his life. Of course given the form of the novel as a collection of memories it is a question that is difficult to approach, all attitudes from the earlier viewed through the lens of the older, "wearier" self. It must also be considered whether the older self retrospectively desires this detachment - considers it an attitude he should have had earlier in life - and thus puts it into his younger self, or whether he has remained consistent to this attitude throughout. We can see throughout the novel that the narrator considers everything but art a distraction. His friendship with Saint-Loup is presented as getting in the way of his writing. He puts this down to his laziness, prefering anything but sitting down and writing, a constant deferral. We see the egotism that runs throughout here, where Saint-Loup is always presented as being completely committed to the friendship whereas the narrator remains seemingly distant. This is the opposite side of the central importance that Proust gives to his own perceptions, where he becomes the centre of the universe with everyone one else spinning around him. See for instance the scenes with Saint-Loup's friends, where they are all falling over themselves to know and befriend the narrator. Whereas on the one hand this could be seen as simply a desire to present himself as a great, hugely likeable person, on the other hand it seems to be a necessary counterpart to the central importance he places in one's own perceptions.
As I'm only halfway thorugh I obviously can't make huge sweeping statements on the novel just yet, so I'll leave these thoughts here for the moment. Just one more thing I wanted to mention at this point, which is that I read somewhere that the internet would have been the perfect medium for Proust; the collection of memories would have been better suited to hyperlinking allowing the route through the novel to be more open, reflecting the nature of memory. This led me to think of certain aspects of the internet and social networking which would have possibly made such a novel a lot more unlikely to be written now. The whole idea of memory has changed, whereas Proust primarily has his own perceptions with which to summon the past, thus colouring his reflections, now, with online photo albums, photo-tagging, blogs, a whole raft of information available immediately via a single search, the need for such memory has been lost. This is an area which deserves a lot more space than I'm giving it here, so I'll leave that as a half finished thought.
I am still enjoying the reading. No bumps this time, so far anyway. The beauty of the prose is keeping me going. Obviously I'm only reading the translation (I've gone the whole hog and am buying the newer version, rather than rereading my old copy) but the prose flows and the reading is surprisingly easy. I find myself comparing it to Henry James. With James I always find that the sentences are so complex that each one must be read and reread to fully get the meaning and it can become a tortuously slow process. A rewarding process, and James is certainly an amazing writer, one of the best, it's just such hard work. With Proust, despite the huge sentences and complex ideas (and again I should point out that this is the translation I'm refering to, how it reads in the original French I have no idea), their is always a flow. The words and ideas follow easily from one to another and so one feels embraced by the novel. It feels right. There is an occasional danger that such an embrace means that one's mind can wander during the reading, but it is a wandering along the ways of the novel's paths, rather than a wandering occasioned by boredom, by the desire for distraction.
It is odd that I have no real recollections of the first time I read Proust but I do remember the act of buying the first volume. I don't even remember why I chose to read it. I can only remember that one day, after finishing college I went and bought the first volume and got the bus home and began reading straight away. And it was a cloudy day, I remember that. It is also odd that reading it this time around it is all the small details of the novel that I seem to remember having read before, things that I never realised had stayed with me till now (As an aside, I recently began reading Don Delilo's Underworld, a book I could swear I have never read before. After about two hundred pages I began to read things I could have sworn I had read before. But I am absolutely sure I hadn't, I'd read a couple of Delilo novels but never Underworld. The feeling was so unsettling that I couldn't finish it). Perhaps it is indicative of the novel's evocative power, perhaps indicative of my trivial nature, remembering the small things rather than the grand ideas...
Yet isn't the novel nothing but a succession of small things? As the involuntary memory of which Proust speaks begins with some trivial thing which unleashes the power of recollection so what is recalled is not some generalized past, but a detailed past, a past where nothing seems forgotten. The past is nothing but this succession of small things built up into a bigger picture, recalling what Lacan says of a collection of matchboxes in relation to das Ding in Seminar VII:
During that great period of penitence that our country went through under Pétain, in the time of "Work, Family, Homeland" and of belt-tightening, I once went to visit my friend Jacques Prévert in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. And I saw there a collection of match boxes. Why the image has suddenly resurfaced in my memory, I cannot tell.
It was the kind of collection that it was easy to afford at that time; it was perhaps the only kind of collection possible. Only the match boxes appeared as follows: they were all the same and were laid out in an extremely agreeable way that involved each being so close to the one next to it that the little drawer was slightly displaced. As a result, they were all threaded together so as to form a continuous ribbon that ran along the mantelpiece, climbed the wall, extended to the molding, and climbed down again next to a door. I don't say that it went on to infinity, but it was extremely satisfying from an ornamental point of view.
Yet I don't think that that was the be all and end all of what was surprising in the collectionism, nor the source of the satisfaction that the collector himself found there. I believe that the shock of novelty of the effect realized by this collection of empty match boxes--and this is the essential point--was to reveal something that we do not perhaps pay enough attention to, namely, that a box of matches is not simply an object, but that, in the form of an Erscheinung, as it appeared in its truly imposing multiplicity, it may be a Thing.
In other words, this arrangement demonstrated that a match box isn't simply something that has a certain utility, that it isn't even a type in the Platonic sense, an abstract match box, that the match box all by itself is a thing with all its coherence of being. The wholly gratuitous, proliferating, superfluous, and quasi absurd character of this collection pointed to its thingness as match box. Thus the collector found his motive in this form of apprehension that concerns less the match box than the Thing that subsists in a match box. (Seminar VII 113-14)
First off we can note the smallness, the triviality of the object in question. And isn't this what we find in Proust? The raising of the trivial social encounter (for Proust constantly reminds us of the triviality encountered at the social gatherings he attends)into such a great work of art. Here we find the second point: that of sublimation. The matchboxes are a great example of a Lacanian definition of Sublimation: "The raising of an object to the dignity of the thing". Something else that Lacan says of das Ding in Seminar VII can also be read in relation to Proust:
... das Ding is at the centre only in the sense that it is excluded. That is to say, in reality das Ding has to be posited as exterior, as the prehistoric Other that it is impossible to forget - the Other whose primacy of position Freud affirms in the form of something entfremdet, something strange to me, although it is at the heart of me, something that on the level of the unconcious only a representation can represent.Das Ding is impossible to forget but always excluded, inaccessible, thus Proust remembers everything else in an attempt to reach das Ding. And here we enter sublimation, the raising of the object to the dignity of the thing: these rememberings become great art, and here Alenka Zupančič's gloss on the Lacanian sublimation is useful:
sublimation ... creates socially recognized values ... [this] formulation ... is to be taken absolutely literally: what is at stake is the creation of values, not simply the act of adhering to already existing values to which our "plastic" drives then have to adapt themselves ... On the contrary, what is at stake is that all great sublimations ... create new values, transform certain things into values.The point being that in missing his object Proust creates something great, something wholly new. And isn't this figured throughout the novel as the narrator never sits down to work on his great piece of art, instead continuously socialises, and is constantly worrying about his inability to write, and yet the distraction becomes the centrepiece of the artwork: the trivial thing that prevented the artwork becomes the work itself.
Something that I find interesting, and yet something that could be dangerous to raise halfway through the novel, is the way the novel is structured to apparently reveal a depth which never occurs. The general pattern is that we start with a name (Guermantes, Balbec) and are lead to believe that we will get to the heart of the name, and yet what we find is that all the depth is in the name itself, the pictures which are conjured by the name. When we look deeper their is nothing but disappointment, we do not find what we are looking for. To borrow something else from Lacan, our enjoyment only comes on "looking awry". The first dinner party at the Guermantes is a great example of this, where the narrator says that all the talk at the table is dull compared to the conversation on the lineage of the names of the family, a conversation the socialites presume dull, but which, because of the images it evokes the narrator finds delightful.
This lack of depth applies to the people themselves as well. When the people, who were for so long merely names, become known, they do not reveal themselves with any notion of depth, but instead are found to be nothing but their surface. Which perhaps explains, or possibly is explained by, the emphasis on social etiquette, throughout the novel. It is only through such outward shows that one gets to know a person and no matter how far he delves, he returns constantly to the form of a person, rather than the content. And, as we can not know the essentials of other people, the only way forward for Proust is for a world view based on our own percerptions, so that everyone he meets becomes the sum of what Proust remembers or has read in mythology or novels or seen in art - there is no other way he can see to capture people but through his own perceptions.
What this leads to in Proust is a priviliging of the aesthetic over everything else, with no opportunity to get into the minds of other people we can only view them from the outside, as works of art; the form of the novel means that even feelings are viewed like this, even ones own feelings are viewed from a distance, an aesthetic distance. At the start of Volume 4 (I have continued reading so am now slightly over half way...) Swann says something that sums this up:
Even when one is no longer attached to things, it's still something to have been attached to them; because it was always for reasons which other people didn't grasp. The memory of those feelings is something that's to be found only in ourselves; we must go back into ourselves to look at it. You mustn't laugh at this idealistic jargon, but what I mean to say is that I've been very fond of life and very fond of art. Well, now that I'm a little too weary to live with other people, these old feelings, so personal and individual, that I had in the past, seem to me - it's the mania of all collectors- very precious. I open my heart to myself like a sort of showcase, and examine one by one all those love affairs of which the rest of the world can have known nothing.This aestheticism is made possible by the passing of time, by no longer feeling the emotions. In Volume 1 Swann is described as not wanting to get over his love for Odette because it would mean the death of himself:
Just as in the quote from Lacan above we see the reference to the collector, and again we see the looking back to incidents in the past. They are seen from the point of view of objects though, art objects, his heart opens to himself "like a sort of showcase", emotion no longer felt but viewed, studied, collected, examined
But the truth was that in the depths of his morbid condition he feared death itself no more than such a recovery, which would in fact amount to the death of all that he now was.So our previous emotional states can be viewed from this aesthetic distance because essentially they no longer concern ourselves, but the entirely different person we were at the time.
The question is: is that an attitude that is posited as desirable per se? Rather than as an attitude for old age, when one is "weary", is there not a sense that Proust desires this attitude of aesthetic detachment throughout his life. Of course given the form of the novel as a collection of memories it is a question that is difficult to approach, all attitudes from the earlier viewed through the lens of the older, "wearier" self. It must also be considered whether the older self retrospectively desires this detachment - considers it an attitude he should have had earlier in life - and thus puts it into his younger self, or whether he has remained consistent to this attitude throughout. We can see throughout the novel that the narrator considers everything but art a distraction. His friendship with Saint-Loup is presented as getting in the way of his writing. He puts this down to his laziness, prefering anything but sitting down and writing, a constant deferral. We see the egotism that runs throughout here, where Saint-Loup is always presented as being completely committed to the friendship whereas the narrator remains seemingly distant. This is the opposite side of the central importance that Proust gives to his own perceptions, where he becomes the centre of the universe with everyone one else spinning around him. See for instance the scenes with Saint-Loup's friends, where they are all falling over themselves to know and befriend the narrator. Whereas on the one hand this could be seen as simply a desire to present himself as a great, hugely likeable person, on the other hand it seems to be a necessary counterpart to the central importance he places in one's own perceptions.
As I'm only halfway thorugh I obviously can't make huge sweeping statements on the novel just yet, so I'll leave these thoughts here for the moment. Just one more thing I wanted to mention at this point, which is that I read somewhere that the internet would have been the perfect medium for Proust; the collection of memories would have been better suited to hyperlinking allowing the route through the novel to be more open, reflecting the nature of memory. This led me to think of certain aspects of the internet and social networking which would have possibly made such a novel a lot more unlikely to be written now. The whole idea of memory has changed, whereas Proust primarily has his own perceptions with which to summon the past, thus colouring his reflections, now, with online photo albums, photo-tagging, blogs, a whole raft of information available immediately via a single search, the need for such memory has been lost. This is an area which deserves a lot more space than I'm giving it here, so I'll leave that as a half finished thought.
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