Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.

Reading Proust in Berkeley

This blog is for a group of parents from Ecole Bilingue, a French American school in Berkeley, California. We are engaged in reading Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, or In Search of Lost Time, over a three-year period (with summers off), keeping to a pace of about 200 pages per month.

Some members of our group are reading in French; some in English.

On this blog I will aim to provide brief summaries of the conversations that we have on the first Wednesday of every month, beginning on November 2, 2011, and ending... sometime in 2014.

But this will also be a space for reflecting on our experience of reading Proust together, outside of the monthly meetings. Members of the group -- and all those following this blog -- are encouraged to write guest posts about whatever is on their minds (just send them to me by email, and I'll put them up) and, of course, to carry on our conversations in the comments section below each post.

-- Tom Clyde

The In-Between Spaces

In How Proust Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton, drawing from Proust's life, raises the question of why we read fiction at all.

He offers four answers:

1. The sheer pleasure of escapism.

 2. Reading fiction gives us the opportunity to enter into an unfamiliar world and feel at home in it.

Penelope and Odysseus, some 3000 years removed from us.

3. Reading fiction gives us the opportunity to expand the range of what we think is possible for ourselves. 

Joseph K. in Kafka's The Trial, showing us the meaning of persistence.

4. Reading provokes us to notice details that we would otherwise overlook.

Have you ever noticed that when an American man accidentally bumps into someone else he says "Oop," not "Oops"? I had never noticed this before, and yet I do it myself. (The novelist Nicholson Baker drew my attention to this.) 

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To these reasons for reading fiction, I would add one more of my own...

5. Reading fiction increases our tolerance for ambiguity (what Keats called our "negative capability").

When I read fiction, I am forced to give over my preconceived notions to the imagination of the writer.

Reading Homer, I learned to look out over an ocean without assuming that it's blue (see Homer's "wine-dark sea").

Reading Kafka, I learned to admire a hero who is perpetually confused and indecisive (see Joseph K.).

In short, from reading I have come to appreciate that the world does not fit into neat categories. Reading opens my mind to the in-between spaces -- which, after all, are where we live our lives, aren't they?

 

The "Proust 6-pack"

If you search for In Search of Lost Time on Amazon.com you will find yourself directed to something called the "Proust 6-pack". Upon closer examination this turns out to be the Modern Library edition, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright.

Fine. Easy. I ordered it, along with Paintings in Proust, which Amazon offered at a discount (so long as I bought both -- who can resist a deal like that?).

Yet that odd juxtaposition of words -- "Proust 6-pack" -- stayed with me in the days and even weeks that followed. Like the proverbial rubbernecker on the road, I just couldn't help myself.  I kept turning back to the scene of the accident.

So I've been thinking about what it was about this whole "Proust 6-pack" thing that disturbed me. I mean, really, it's just a way to say six volumes... What's my problem? The answer, I suspect, has to do with neuroscience.

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I happened to read a great book this summer, called Brain Bugs, on the cognitive biases in the human brain.

In this book, the author, Dean Buonomano, gives a very clear explanation of the latest findings on how the brain creates meaning.

It turns out that our brains are not built like filing cabinets, as many of us grew up thinking. You can't simply insert a definition here, a name there, a memory here, an emotion there, and then retrieve them later as needed. What happens, on the contrary, is that, from our earliest encounters with the world on to the present moment, we have been and are forming neural networks, webs of connection between individual neurons in our brains.

So, for example, when you or I think of, say, Proust, a pulse of electricity moves across our respective, corresponding neural networks, branching out in many different directions.

What happened when we first encountered the words "Proust 6-pack"? Well, we had to create connections between very different neural networks. In my brain, for example, there was this "Proust" network, which linked to... James Joyce, to a dusty, gray, three-volume set of the Recherche my mother gave me in college, to France of course, to Modernism, to mustaches, to black-and-white portrait photographs, etc. And then, from that neural network, a new connection had to reach all the way over to "6-pack" which linked to...

Beer. In cans. Six of them. Held together with transparent plastic... Oh... and high school...

Need I go on?

 

Quite a reach. It continues to feel unnatural to me, even now, as if a careless urban planner in a back office somewhere in my brain approved a new overpass, without any concern for the neighborhoods it would draw together.

But what's done is done: a new neural link has been created, whether I like it or not. I suppose the only act of resistence left is to bury it with many more... In other words, to start reading!

VOLUME I -- SWANN'S WAY

Reading for Our First Meeting on November 2, 2011

In the Modern Library (Moncrieff / Kilmartin / Enright) translation there's a full line break in the text on page 186.

That's perfect, I think, since we have less than three weeks to go until our November 2 meeting.

This line break occurs just before the following sentence:

"We used always to return from our walks in good time to pay aunt Leonie a visit before dinner."

If anyone finds the page number in another edition, please be so kind as to add it to the comments section.

It was so wonderful to meet many of you at the launch party! For those who were not there, we look forward to meeting you next time.

See you all in November.

Life <----------> Literature

In a Russian 19th century literature class I took back in college, a professor, whose name I have since forgotten, drew this simple diagram up on the board:

Life <----------> Literature

When he was done, he turned to face the five or six of us seated around the table, fixed us with a good, long stare, and said:

"These two... are opposites."

That was it.

Opposites? I remember thinking at the time. What the hell?

Isn't all art, including literature, in some sense an attempt at the representation of life? When done well isn't a piece of art said to be a more accurate representation? Doesn't Shakespeare suggest, speaking through Hamlet, that the purpose of art is to hold "the mirror up to nature"? Are we supposed to think that Hamlet is naive when he says this? That Shakespeare was in writing it?

The memory of this experience of sitting in my Russian Lit class and wrestling with these questions came back to me during the past few weeks, as I began reading In Search of Lost Time for the first time.

The strange thing is that, reading Proust, my old professor's diagram is beginning to make sense to me.

Of course it's reductive. Of course it's simplistic. Yet I find that this thought, that life and literature are opposites, rings true to me now. And it comforts me. The imagination stands apart from the thousand natural shocks of experience.

Why did I fail to take comfort in this when I was 20 -- and instead felt troubled by it? Why don't I continue to feel troubled by this divergence between life and literature now?

Does our imagination play a different role for us as we grow older?

 

Waves and Tide

Does anyone else feel that the experience of reading Proust has two distinct phases to it?

First, as I read, I find myself captivated by the details -- the hawthorns, the "threads of golden silk" cast by the apple-trees, the steeples, the personal names (M. Legrandin... Mlle Vinteuil...), the sounds of bells... While reading I feel I am floating on an open sea, and the details are waves.

Second, after I put the book down, I think about what I have read. In this phase I find myself reflecting on the relationship between life and the imagination, on the nature of social commitments, on larger themes.

It turns out that, as I lay floating, I was being directed all along, by a tide beneath the waves.

Notes on the November 2, 2011 Meeting

These notes cover pp. 1 - 186 of Volume One, Swann's Way,  in the Modern Library edition (Moncrieff / Kilmartin / Enright).

Well, we had a very lively discussion on Wednesday night about the first half of the "Combray" chapter.

Here are a few of the topics we covered:

1. Proust's Shifting Narrative Voice

In her opening presentation, Barbara noted how Proust's narrative voice shifts between many different ages and perspectives. The writing moves seamlessly, for example, from capturing the anguish of a young boy, desperate for his mother's goodnight kiss, to the more considered reflections of a grown man, looking back on the incident, even making judgments about it.

Interestingly, we never know the exact age of the narrator as we read through the succession of scenes in this chapter, and the resulting fluidity (in French I gather this would be called "mobilité"?) gives us the sensation of experiencing the events for the first time, but over again, as strange as that sounds.

Already we see the theme of time and memory coming out, even in the very form of the novel. Due to this fluidity of narrative voice, everything we read in Proust is both immediate and removed. In this way Proust introduces us to the theme of lost time and its possible recovery, even before we are introduced to the events, the plot, the characters...

2. How We Read Proust

Don mentioned that he feels somewhat hemmed in, or controlled, by Proust's prose, even while he adores it. He declared that he had to learn early on "to read Proust on his terms, not mine."

I may have misunderstood the meaning of this assertion, but I spoke up to say that it didn't match my experience. Contrasting Proust with another writer, Nabokov, and his closed circle of beauty and perfection and tricks of tone and timing, I argued that I am finding Proust's narrative voice surprisingly generous and open to interpretation. It is true, of course, that there are enormous amounts of detail and plenty of digressions, but so far I have felt very free to make my own associations and discoveries along the way.

Don, would you consider explaining your position in the comments below? I suspect that I did not fully appreciate your sense of being "on Proust's terms" as you read.

3. On "Affectation" in Proust

As we talked more about Proust's tone, Heather pointed out that there are certain moments of affectation that cannot be ignored, such as the scene where the young Narrator, leaving Combray, bids a tearful farewell to his beloved white and pink hawthorns:

"Oh, my poor little hawthorns," I was assuring them through my sobs, "it isn't you who want to make me unhappy, to force me to leave you. You, you've never done me any harm. So I shall always love you" (SW, 204).

Some discussion followed about whether this was a knowing affectation, intended to be comical, or whether it might be a product of the translation, or whether it represented an act of emotional transference.

4.  Emotions, Passions, Pathos in Proust

Some in the group felt that the young Narrator's confusion about his identity in the opening pages, his feeling of being suspended above an "abyss of non-being," was, in a word... overwrought.

Yann, for one, was put off by it, as he read in a center seat on a United Airlines plane. Lea wanted to exclaim, while reading about the tears of the Narrator over the missed goodnight kiss: "Get over it!" Dirk, though gaining a new appreciation for his own son George's emotional state surrounding bedtime, agreed that the boy's concerns are really misplaced and need to be outgrown.

Once again, for some reason (lack of sleep the night before? general touchiness?) I found myself in the role of staking out a defensive position. I argued that this is too dismissive of the true emotional chaos and outright terror lurking beneath our daily lives. Rather than seeing the Narrator as overwrought emotionally, I see him as a truth-teller, unable to suppress what most of us have learned to suppress through habit and social convention.

My case: The abyss of non-being is there, all the time, whether we choose to face it or not. As we go about our days, we are inundated by sensations and exposed to the friction of other people's difference and different perspectives. Our identities, as a result, are constantly changing, and our separations are always serious.

Certainly, leaving the busyness of the day and heading off to "our room," alone, to bed, into darkness, with the anticipation of hours upon end of unconsciousness, makes us long for some comfort, any comfort. For many of us, now as parents, this may come in the form of the nightly ritual of tucking our kids in one last time before we brush our teeth. For Proust's Narrator it is a simple kiss from his Mamma. Is that too much to ask? And the rupture of that ritual casts him into the abysss.

This is not to say that his tears should be accomodated. Perhaps his mother was right to refuse these after-bedtime visits in most cases. We do need to confront and shape our fears, to learn to soothe ourselves, to become "independent" (one of EB's stated goals for our children). But neither is it overblown to have these feelings. 

Here was where I declared that one thing I love about this novel is that it rests in sadness. I took a moment to read aloud to the group Proust's line, referring to the sound of his sobs while he lay in his mother's arms: "In reality their echo has never ceased" (SW, 49).

5. A Memorable Reverie

Dirk, at this point, gave an eloquent description of his own experience of this ineradicable sadness in the state of the world, when he described laying in bed with a lover and knowing that morning would come soon and she would leave him. He talked about how he wanted to expand the moment, capture every sensual detail, hold the night and the woman close to him, but that he was also aware of how the hours, tender and fragrant, were steadily slipping away... 

As middle-aged parents of young children, many of us listened with a mixture of admiration and amazement at his reverie, wondering about the details of his life.

6. The Lesson of the Lady in Pink

Jeff noted how he saw Proust's Narrator as representing a kind of humanism, expressed by his non-judgmental view of people. With this in mind, he read aloud to us from the Narrator's description of his visit, as a young man, to his uncle's Paris apartment.

When the Narrator encounters there a lady in pink (who is scandalously unaccompanied, casually eating a tangerine), he comments on her ability to make beauty out of insults:

"She had taken some casual remark of my father's, had delicatedly fashioned it, given it a 'turn,' a precious title, and embellishing it with a gem-like glance from her sparkling eyes, tinged with humilty and gratitude, had given it back transformed into a jewel..." (SW, 107)

This got the group into a discussion of the theme of cruelty in this first chapter.

7. The Theme of Cruelty in Proust

Some examples of little cruelties we encounter in the Combray chapter: Aunt Léone teasing the grandmother about her husband's drinking... The Narrator's parents ending relations with his uncle after the pink lady incident... The snobbery of M. Legrandin, the treatment of M. Vinteuil, or for that matter, the Narrator's family's avoidance of M. Swann's wife... The banishment of the Narrator's friend Bloch because of his aesthetic commitments -- which the parents dismiss as madness and imbecility... The little digs and demands directed by Aunt Léone at Francoise the servent, and in turn by Francoise toward the kitchen maid...

Cruelty is subtle but unavoidable, whenever people meet and talk in Proust. Thus the high-mindedness of some of the Narrator's reflections -- his frequent state of aesthetic rapture, his sensitivity, his empathy for others -- is undercut from the beginning with this awareness of people's propensity towards meanness.

In my contrarian mode, provoked by his theme, I circled back ot challenge Lea on her dictum that a kid needs to "get over it" and go without the kiss. You may be right, I suggested, that it is best to have clear rules and not indulge, but can we be so sure that we don't do these things in a way that is partly a pattern of inflicting suffering on purpose? Don't our own wounds lead us, too often, to reproduce wounds on others? Lea was kind enough not to be offended (she knew my questions were directed as much at myself as at her).

Pascale made the point here that in French culture there is a high premium placed on children being "normal", a kind of right way to carry yourself, to eat, to converse, and that any deviation from this expectation is criticized. It's all in the best interests of the child -- so the thinking goes. But what if Rousseau was right, I wondered, when he argued that the state of nature -- the state of a child -- is the harmonious one? "Man was born free," Rousseau insisted, "and everywhere he is in chains." What if our "grown-up" rules are more problematic and conflicted -- more abnormal -- than we realize?

Heather observed that this is exactly the struggle, taking place every day within each of us: the motives behind our actions cannot be disentangled. Our needs, our impositions on others, our urges to lash out... as well as our genuine concern, our attempts to help, even our love for one another... they are all tied up together, in one big knot.

8. Back to the Question of Sadness

One of the more intriguing lines of conversation of the evening took off at the very end. Some French conversation was taking place in whispers, and I asked those speaking to share what they were saying with the rest of us. It turned out that the theme of sadness, discussed above, did not sit well with some.

They saw sadness, yes, but did not agree that the novel rests on it, as I had suggested earlier in the discussion. This got us talking about the American, can-do sensibility, and its rejection of sadness (think Disneyland). We speculated that perhaps Americans are, counterintuitively, more drawn to the sadness in Proust precisely because it is so absent from our usual discourse. The French have Babar le roi, and all the rest, with their many shocking, sad, events, from an early age.

We have, what... Curious George?

Everything works out in American fairy tales. Even in the classics. After all, Huck Finn makes it down the Mississippi and survives to tell the tale... True to Hollywood,  in Casablanca Rick does the right thing and sees Ilsa to the plane, sparking the "beginning of a beautiful friendship."

For the French, on the other hand, well, there's poor Madame Bovary swallowing arsenic... oh, and there's The Plague.

For a moment the group honored this dark strain in French culture uncritically. But I couldn't help myself. I had to jump in again. 

I argued that the French too are hiding from the chaos, trying to control it. Americans may try to sweep messy, tragic, ugly things out of sight, it is true, but the French try to explain it all away with Reason.

Think Descartes, trying to separate his mind from his body in a small room in the country and therefore work out the whole of philosophy. Think the whole Continental metaphysical philosophical tradition (Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Existentialism, Foucault, etc.), trying to give us true propositions, immutable laws. Even when saying that there is no meaning they do it definitively! 

Perhaps Proust's sensibility sits somewhere in between the French-Continental tradition and the Anglo-American one -- somewhere in the middle of the English Channel. (After all, he did gain his first following in the 1920s in Bloomsbury and the English-speaking world, and only later made his way back to critical acclaim in France...) In this view, Proust may be somewhere closer in spirit to the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers such as David Hume and Adam Smith, who knew that the primary source of all of our actions are our sensations and emotions ("Reason," wrote Hume, "is the slave of the Passions."). 

Anyway, we don't have to turn to philosophy to recognize that Proust does not seem so enamored, as are his so many of his fellow French even to this day, by the power of reason to order and stratify reality. He knows that at the heart of things there is pain and loss and disillusionment -- feelings before thought. 

Yet neither is he ready to brush these feelings all under, to keep a "stiff upper lip" to say that we must merely carry on in a hopeless, dogged British way. Or turn a blind eye to them in a pragmatic, business-only, count-it American kind of way. Based on our reading so far, it strikes me that Proust consistently refuses to let us subordinate sadness (the French way?) or dismiss it (the English and American way?). Instead, he asks us truly to look at it, confront it, open ourselves to it.

What do we do then? Can it be made tolerable? Can it be redeemed? Well, we'll have to keep reading to find out.

9. "Thicknesses" in Art

One last thing that was discussed that cannot be skipped: Florence talked about the actual words, the rhythm of the sentences. Renée talked about the music of the language.

We discussed how the ideas of the novel are always, thankfully, hidden, softened, reflected in the silvery stream of the sentences. Which is of course what makes it such an amazing work --makes it art.

As Proust's Narrator's grandmother insists, a photograph of Chartres Cathedral in the plain light of day is not an effective way to express its beauty.

You need something closer to an engraving... made after a painting of the Cathedral... on a foggy day... at twilight... -- several "thicknesses" added on -- before you get anywhere near the truth of a thing (SW, 54).

Whatever else one can say about it, I think we can all agree that In Search of Lost Time does not lack in "thicknesses" added on... 

It was a pleasure to discuss some of them together on Wednesday night!

Reading for Our Second Meeting on December 7, 2011

For our next meeting, we will read to page 410 (in the Modern Library edition).

There is a line break on that page which should be easy to find, and it seems to me that it's also a good place in the story to pause.

The sentence immediately following the break reads:

"And so that drawing-room which had brought Swann and Odette together became an obstacle in the way of their meeting."

If anyone can locate this sentence and the corresponding page number in another edition, please add it in the comments below.

See you in December!

Flowers Along the Way

In the second half of the "Combray" chapter, we are introduced to two walks leading from the Narrator's great aunt's house:

1) a shorter one, leaving from her front door, making its way along the white fence marking the boundary of Swann's property and crossing the plain -- named by Proust the The Méséglise Way (or "Swann's Way"); and

2) a longer one, leaving from her back door and winding its way along the river -- named by Proust The Guermantes Way.

I thought it might be helpful to look up images for the flowers he sees along these routes.

(I know, I know: these flowers are 2D, scentless, and each of them is confined to a small rectangle. But at least they give our imaginations a starting-point... from which to wander.)

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Flowers along the Méséglise Way

"We would leave the town by the road which ran along the white fence of M. Swann's park...

Before reaching it we would be met on our way by the scent of his lilac-trees, come out to welcome strangers. From amid the fresh little green hearts of their foliage they raised inquisitively over the fence of the park their plumes of white or mauve blossom, which glowed even in the shade, with the sunlight in which they had bathed."

"In front of us a path bordered with nasturtiums ascended in the full glare of the sun towards the house."

"And so it was that, at the foot of the path which led down to the artificial lake, there might be seen, in its two tiers woven of forget-me-nots..."

"...and periwinkle flowers, a natural, delicate, blue garland encircling the water's luminous and shadowy brow..."

"...while the iris, flouishing its sword-blades in regal profusion..."

"...stretched out over agrimony..."

"...and water-growing crowfoot..."

"...the tattered fleur-de-lis, violet and yellow, of its lacustrine sceptre."

"I found the whole path throbbing with the fragrance of hawthorn-blossom..."

"My eyes traveled up the bank which rose steeply to the fields beyond the hedge, alighting on a stray poppy..."

 

"...or a few laggard cornflowers which decorated the slope here and there like the border of a tapestry..."

"And it was indeed a hawthorn, but one whose blossom was pink, and lovelier even than the white."

"The hedge offered a glimpse, inside the park, of an alley bordered with jasmine..."

"...pansies..." 

"...and verbenas, among which the stocks held open their fresh plump purses, of a pink as fragrant and as faded as old Spanish leather..."

"I saw a breath of wind... finally come to rest, warm and rustling, among the clover..."

"...and sanfoin at my feet."

 

"It was on the Méséglise Way that I first noticed the circular shadow which apple trees cast upon the sunlit ground, and also those impalpable threads of golden silk which the setting sun weaves slantingly downwards from beneath their leaves..."

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Flowers along the Guremantes Way

"...the river flowing past, sky-blue already between banks still black and bare, its only companions a clump of premature daffodils..."

 

"...and early primroses..."

 

"...while here and there burned the blue flame of a violet, its stem drooping beneath the weight of the drop of perfume stored in its tiny horn."

 

"The Pont-Vieux led to a tow-path which at this point would be overhung in summer by the bluish foliage of a hazel tree..."

  

"...the remains, half-buried in the grass, of the castle of the old Counts of Combray... half-concealed beneath a spangled veil of buttercups."

 

"...the little ponds into which the Vivonne was here diverted were aflower with water-lilies."

"Elsewhere a corner seemed to be reserved for those commoner kinds of lily, of a neat pink or white like rocket-flowers, washed clean like porcelain with housewifely care..."

 

"...while, a little further again, others... suggested garden pansies that had settled here like butterflies and were fluttering their blue and burnished wings over the transparent depths of this water garden..."

 

"We would sit down among the irises at the water's edge."

 

"And then it happened that, along the Guermantes way, I sometimes passed beside well-watered little enclosures, over whose hedges rose clusters of dark blossom... red and purple spikes along the tops of the low walls..."

(These last flowers are never named. Ideas?)