Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.

A Letter from M. Proust

by Marie-José

In our last meeting we discussed the strange sense of disenchantment at the end of "Du Côté de Chez Swann" (Swann's Way). I mentioned a note that suggested that Proust did not initially intend this to be way that the first volume concluded.

 

 

Below is the translation of the note I mentioned. It is found in the French paperback edition Folio Classique Gallimard of "Du Côté de Chez Swann", 1988. This note refers to the last paragraph from "Du Côté de Chez Swann" (Swann's Way). 

 

 

I have translated it into English as follows:

 

*

 

Proust makes the following comments about the conclusion of this first volume in a letter to Jacques Rivière from February 1914:

 

 

"It is only at the end of the book, and only once life lessons are understood, that my thinking (philosophical, aesthetic) will unveil itself. The thinking I express at the end of the first volume, in this parenthesis about the Bois de Boulogne (Boulogne Woods), which I put there only as a screen to finish and enclose a book that could not for materialistic reasons exceed 500 pages, is to the contrary of my conclusion. It is a step, in appearance subjective and dilettantish, towards the most objective and committed (I think in the sense of engaged) of conclusions. If one deduced from it that my thinking is sort of a disenchanted skepticism, it would be as if a spectator  having seen... the first act of Parsifal... supposed that Wagner had meant that the simplicity of the heart lead nowhere." (Corr., t. XIII, p. 99 ; document XI, p. 624) 

 

*

 

And here is the same note as it appears in its original French:

 

 

Proust commente ainsi la conclusion de Swann dans une lettre à Jacques RIvière de février 1914:

 

 

"Ce n'est qu'à la fin du livre, et une fois les leçons de la vie comprises, que ma pensée se dévoilera. Celle que j'exprime à la fin du premier volume, dans cette parenthèse sur le Bois de Boulogne que j'ai dressée là comme un simple paravent pour finir et clôturer un livre qui ne pouvait pas pour des raisons matérielles excéder cinq cent pages, est le contraire de ma conclusion. Elle est une étape, d'apparence subjective et dilettante, vers la plus objective et croyante des conclusions. Si on en déduisait que ma pensée est un scepticisme désenchanté, ce serait aboslument comme si un spectateur ayant vu à la fin du premier acte de Parsifal, ce personnage ne rien comprendre à la cérémonie et être chassé par Gurnemantz, supposait que Wagner a voulu dire que la simplicité du coeur ne conduit à rien." (Corr., t. XIII, p. 99 ; document XI, p. 624) 

 

*

 

In this same edition of Proust, in a preface written by Antoine Compagnon, we are reminded of how the war in 1914 disrupted the publication of the initial novel that Proust had been writing since 1909.

 

 

Initially he had planned it completely differently: the third part "Nom de Pays" was much larger and included then his love for Gilberte and the stay in Balbec. It stopped when the young girls appear on the sea side. So the first 2/3 of "Les jeunes filles en fleurs" ended the first novel as composed in 1912-1913.

 

 

But that made too large a book, and the publisher, Grasset, demanded that the novel be cut into three volumes rather than the original two Proust had planned. The Parisian and Balbec episodes were then going to belong to the second book, which would have been titled "Le Côté de Guermantes" and which included: At Mme Swann; Noms de pays : le pays; Premiers crayons du baron de Charlus et de Robert de Saint-Loup; Noms de personnes: la duchesse de Guermantes; Le salon de Mme de Villeparisis. The third and final volume, "Le Temps Retrouvé" would have kept on exploring the Guermantes's way in its first chapter “A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs” (that did not include Albertine), followed by a chapter entitled "Mr de Charlus et les Verdurin", then the death of the grand-mother and the hero mourning, a trip to Venice, the wedding of Saint-Loup and Gilberte Swann as last step before his aesthetic revelation.

 

 

Since the war delayed the publication of the second volume, Proust invented Albertine’s character and used the next four years to amplify and keep altering the remainder of the novel.

 

 

Photos of the manuscripts and first “epreuves” (printer’s layouts) show his fierce re-writings at all stages of the process, which must have driven his publisher and printer quite insane.

Notes on the March 7, 2012 Meeting

These notes cover pp. 134 - 298 of Volume Two, Within a Budding Grove, to the end of the "Madame Swann at Home chapter, in the Modern Library edition (Moncrieff / Kilmartin / Enright).

There was a comfortable, cozy feeling in the room as we settled down for our meeting last night. It was great to see everybody.

But we weren't there just to talk and catch up. We were there because of a certain sensitive, neurasthenic, supremely gifted M. Proust, and because of the words he wrote down in his cork-lined room nearly a century ago...

So at 8:30 pm we got down to the business at hand...

1. Don's Presentation on the Importance of Editing

Don began by reminding us of Proust's atypical status, as the rare writer who wrote without an editor.

He mentioned a number of celebrated writer-editor relationships from the 20th century (Eliot-Pound, Wolfe-Perkins, Carver-Lish, among them) and emphasized his conviction that "few would argue" that Proust couldn't have benefited from some close editing.

He urged us, further, not to be intimidated by those stray sentences, or even whole sections, of In Search of Lost Time which confound us or fail to capture our interest. On the contrary, Don argued, we should read with a pencil in hand, not only to underline passages which provoke or inspire us but also to circle those which we would cut if given a chance. 

What Proust really needed, Don suggested, was for someone to grab him by the shoulders and say to him: "Hey buddy, wait a minute there...."

I couldn't help myself, and I interrupted at this point -- to ask one of our French readers to translate this "Hey buddy" line word for word, so we could get the full sense of the awkward scene that Don wished had taken place in some publishing house's back office in Paris, circa 1918...

Yann gladly enacted the French equivalent, which I have forgotten (will someone reproduce it in the comments below?). I do remember, though, that it sounded appropriately dismissive and brutal. We all laughed, including Don.

Having made this provocative assertion as to the importance of editing -- and the lack of it in Proust's case -- Don then turned to a related aspect of his experience while reading Proust: namely, that he finds the inconsistencies and oddities in the novel, as they accumulate, create for him a deepening mystery as to the various motivations and inclinations of the characters in it. 

"Just like life, isn't it?" Don added. "You know, there's a phrase I have used often over the years..." He spoke slowly now, transfixing the room.

"We are born strangers, and then we become stranger and stranger."

On this somewhat bleak note, Don brought his presentation to an end. The group looked around in a kind of stunned silence, which, finally, Heather broke, but very gently, as if a bird taking flight had sent a ripple across the surface of a pond...

"I don't agree," she said.

"With what?" asked Don, smiling broadly, eager to have the discussion begin.

"Well," said Heather, "Proust might agree with you, but I don't. I think that we do get to know other people over time... And that we do grow more intimate, sometimes, despite our inconsistencies and even despite the sense of mystery surrounding each of us."

I concurred with Heather. I confessed that my experience of reading Proust is quite different from Don's. Whereas he sees strangers, I constantly sense the writer's generosity towards the characters in the novel -- as if he is taking them into an increasingly wide embrace as we encounter them in a variety of settings. In fact, their inconsistencies and oddities, rather than putting me off, make me feel that I know them better and better (I recognize their changeability as my own! I see my friends and family in them!).

When Proust's Narrator meets the writer Bergotte, for example, this encounter with the actual man, his "snail-shell" nose, his goatee, his fatuousness, far from leading to disillusionment (as Don saw it), seemed to me to lead the Narrator to a more detailed, and even more loving, portrait of the artist. Sure, Bergotte is physically off-putting, vain, and catty. But the two of them also engage in a respectful debate about Berma in Phèdre, and on numerous occasions Bergotte goes out of his way to encourage the Narrator's intellectual curiosity. It is a multifaceted relationship that we witness springing to life. And by the time I had finished that part of the chapter I had the impression of much learned and much still left unsaid (which is quite a amazing feat, actually, considering how much Proust does say). 

In speaking of Bergotte, I felt compelled to share with the group one moment in particular that stayed with me. Just before he parts ways with the great writer, the Narrator observes how, unlike, say, his great aunt Léonie, Bergotte is careful not to offend in a social setting, but cutting and cruel in private. Whereas Aunt Léonie is the opposite: she will say anything to someone face-to-face but will not repeat it to anyone else. Two different models of virtue, each to be admired on its own terms. (ML, 199-200) I thought that was interesting.

Renée commented that she found the wide cast of characters in "Madame Swann at Home" to be fascinating, particularly in the way that Proust manages to transition rapidly and seamlessly between many different points of view -- often in the same section of dialogue or even in the same sentence. Would this be something a colleague from the Iowa Writers' Workshop would try to correct?

Don, at this point, agreed that many of the inconsistencies and redundancies in Proust are an inextricable part of his genius. He clarified that, personally, his editing of Proust would be more limited to inconsistencies of place and time -- for example if a character is supposed to have disappeared into a house but then reappears out on the street again. Even in such a case, however, in my mind I kept hearing the voice of Walt Whitman crying out in defiance:

"Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes."

(Some of my favorite moments in novels are those in which things never add up, where the impossible happens, or the plot gets tangled. That's probably why I enjoy Kafka so much -- particularly his great unfinished novels, The Castle and Amerika. Or Bulgakov. Or Bela Tarr  or Apichatpong Weerasethakul films. What? You don't know Apichatpong Weerasethakul? You have to watch him.)

Dirk spoke up at this point. He related with warmth and passion how the passages with Bergotte and the Narrator, and this chapter as a whole, struck him as full of piercing observations and great wisdom. Far from having the urge to edit Proust, he finds himself reading and rereading passages and marveling at the insights that he encounters there. Paging through his book (which, having numerous yellow Post-It notes fanning out from three of its sides, had the appearance of a weathered, blocky, yellow-feathered bird -- a cockatoo?), he shared with us this insight from Proust on the emergence of a creative artist:

"The men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or their culture the most extensive, but those who have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live only for themselves, to transform their personality into a sort of mirror, in such a way that their life, however mediocre it may be socially and even, in a sense, intellectually, is reflected by it, genius consisting in reflecting power and not in the intrinsic quality of the scene reflected" (WBG, 175-176).

Don, madly scrolling down the screen of his laptop with the same energy that Dirk had paged through his book, mentioned that he had this same passage in his notes...

Weathered Proust-cockatoo meet glowing Proust-robot!

             

  

To think that Proust's writing can have so many media, so many delivery systems, take so many physical forms, and still his words manage to make the leap from his mind to our own!

But I wanted to steer us back to the fundamental premise of Don's presentation, however: that we should approach our reading of Proust as editors, finding fault or, at the very least, finding problems, with the writing as we go. I mentioned that, lurking in this premise were, I thought, very relevant questions for our group to address, questions that in fact had lurked underneath our discussions ever since we began this reading group, like so many dark, glistening snakes at the bottom of a swimming hole.

(Well, perhaps not that worrying! Everybody out of the water, NOW!)

I commented that there seem to be two modes available to us when we encounter the world: sometimes we want to critique our luck, our circumstances, the tools or technology available to us, the work of art we have watched, or the people in our lives. And sometimes we simply want to note the qualities and capabilities of what we experience, taking it all in as is.

I explained that for me there is always a threshold question of which mode I am in. Moreover, this question is, in my experience, a surprisingly binary one: it's rather like flipping a switch on or off. Either I embrace something as it is, without aiming to change it, or I go in aggressively and find criticisms everywhere.

Maybe I am extreme in this way, but when it comes to a close friend or indeed, a classic work of art (which, as I said, I think of as a "gift," handed down by others before us through the centuries), I generally stay in the first, uncritical mode, or at least that's the default until proved otherwise. When I encounter something untested, though, like a new acquaintance, or a more contemporary work of art or trend, or, I don't know, something like Twitter, I flip the switch and enter the second mode: I become a critic, an editor. Why should I use this, or like this? Where does it meet my approval -- or disapproval? I fold my arms across my chest, narrow my eyes and turn my head sideways.

For me, reading Proust is more like interacting with a close friend. There are passages which are slow. There are sections where my interest flags. But I am not reading to question the pace or the subject-matter. I am reading to encounter and observe this experience as closely as I can; to be true to it, if you will, as one would to a friend who has asked you to give him or her an opinion.

Renée took this opportunity to defend Don's approach. As a writer, she remarked, it is perfectly sensible that Don would be looking critically at Proust's craft -- and indeed, quite naturally, finding fault with it at times. We should not let our appreciation for his gifts overwhelm our capacity for independent judgment.

Jeff spoke up to say that he really enjoys, as he reads, having a very personal, idiosyncratic response to this novel, and knowing at the same time that others are underlining and gasping at very different passages than he is. He analogized the experience of reading In Search of Lost Time to embarking on a journey with an expert guide. You sign on for the adventure, and you let him or her take you wherever, with whatever diversions and back-roads you may find along the way.

I borrowed Jeff's analogy to say that I think of Proust as a wonderful guide for artists... Give it exactly the form that you want to see! he seems to urge us all. And if you want to add yet another qualifying phrase or parenthetical to your sentence, don't worry that it already spans half a page, stick it in! The result may be sharp and succinct like a line from Samuel Beckett ("I can't go on, I'll go on.") or you may be all-inclusive like Proust, but either way you will be expressing your response to the world more accurately then if you censor yourself.

Of course in social situations we have to constrain ourselves; otherwise we would be insane and disruptive. But in art, why should we constrain ourselves at all? Surely the only reason would be to meet the demands of... editors. And beyond them, publishers, and beyond them, readers, and beyond them -- dare I say it -- the yawning, fetid, rotten-toothed maw of the Market (or beyond that, I suppose, in an authoritarian state, the iron fist of the State). Short of these concerns, which after all are not usually the sources of art (are they ever?), why shouldn't we write and paint and sing and play just the way we want?

2. Dealing with the External World

Heather brought us away from these questions of judgment and criticism and acceptance by asking a more direct question about "Madame Swann at Home": why does Proust include all that stuff about fashion, and all of those off-beat conversations at Mme Swann's parties? What is going on with all this extra stuff?

Excitedly, I carted out my conceptual framework -- which had helped me as I read this chapter and stumbled through all this stuff. (Creak, creak went the wheels as I rolled it out.) My idea, I explained, is that this chapter "Madame Swann at Home" is a story of Proust's Narrator's confrontation with the external world. If "Combray" focused on his internal world, the ecstasies that he creates, through a process akin to alchemy, in his mind, and if "Swann in Love" presented a cautionary tale about the way that such ecstasies can rot and infect us, and if "Place-Names, the Name" described a state of post-ecstatic disenchantment (after the wrestling match, as it were), then this next chapter is the natural next step. The world is full of surfaces, of fabrics, of shimmer, of temperatures and textures, of smells and sensations. And sometimes these surfaces are all you get: as in a house of mirrors, in which you see multiple images of a friend but can never find him in the flesh; whichever way you turn there's only another surface.

Often Odette is described by way of smell, the most primitive of our senses. Proust writes:

"Thus at length I came to know that house from which was wafted even on to the staircase the scent that Mme Swann used..." (WBG, 103)

and

"...when Madame Swann received me for a moment in her bedroom... I would make my way along the tortuous path of a corridor perfumed for the whole length with the precious essences which ceaselessly wafted from her dressing room their fragrant exhalations" (WBG, 113).

But then comes this description, putting, it seems to me, a barrier up to our attempts to achieve an understanding beyond the surface, that is, beyond Odette's smells and appearances and voice and mannerisms:

"Her lovely hands emerging from the pink, or white, or, often, vividly coloured sleeves of her crêpe-de-Chine housecoat, drooped over the keys [of the piano] with that same melancholy which was in her eyes but was not in her heart" (WBG, 139).

So what is in her heart, then? If we cannot read it in her eyes, is it to be found somewhere else?

A woman in a crêpe-de-Chine housecoat, though, it should be noted, not Mme Swann and not at home.

Renée provided an additional image of Mme Swann that reinforced this impression of her smooth exteriority (that sounds naughtier than I mean it). She noted that, as we have discussed before, Swann keeps a Botticelli portrait on his desk because it reminds him of Odette's particular beauty.

This is the image from Botticelli's The Trials of Moses that reminded Swann of Odette.

But as Renée pointed out, Botticelli's beauties have a kind of eerie vacancy in their eyes; they are entrancing and yet frustratingly impenetrable (perhaps that too is the wrong word? Where is my mind today?).

The point is: Who is Odette? Do we have any better understanding of her at the end of this chapter than we did at the beginning? As she strolls down the sidewalk with her parasol, "as though in the coloured shade of a wisteria bower" (WBG, 298), surrounded by Swann and her other gesticulating, bowing, scurrying escorts, do we know anything at all about her inner life?

I don't think we do. And Proust's Narrator doesn't either, despite their friendship. Which is why, I would suggest, he lurks under the Arc-de-Triomphe, waiting to catch a glimpse of her, Sunday after Sunday, hoping for a hint of what he can never know.

3. Last Comments

A few last comments that come to me as I wind up. Pascale made the interesting observation that Swann's new tendency to boast of his connections to bourgeois functionaries (as opposed to his former modesty about connections to the Prince of Wales) may be a result of his efforts to ingratiate himself to his new friends. He has fallen in social status and is gamely trying to play by new rules, but he is bad at it. Pascale then compared Swann to Mitt Romney, in his attempts at pretending to be an average guy ("My wife's got... two Cadillacs!"). This was a difficult leap for many of us to take, though the point was well taken.

Rachel observed that one way to think of the slack parts of In Search of Lost Time is to recognize that this novel was written over many years; it represents Proust's entire oeuvre, in a sense. "Woody Allen had some weak films!" she exclaimed. I mentioned Bob Dylan's low point for me: Under the Red Sky, with songs like "Wiggle Wiggle" and Slash of Guns n' Roses adding overproduced guitar licks.

Florence looked at Don and asked energetically: "Is there one page that you would remove? Is there one sentence that you would rather not have?" To which Don answered: no. (If you find that example you mentioned though, Don, where someone disappears into a house and then reappears in conversation on the street moments later, I would be amused to read it. Please include it in the comments!)

*

Another wonderful evening. Thank you Don for provoking us, thank you everybody for caring so deeply and for sharing so much of your hearts and minds. Until next time.

Please, as always, post corrections and amendments in the comments section below. 

Proust on Love and Happiness

There are a few passages in "Madame Swann at Home" on the nature of love and happiness that I wanted to share with the group.

"...with every occurrence in life and its contrasting situations that relates to love, it is best to make no attempt to understand, since in so far as these are as inexorable as they are unlooked-for, they appear to be governed by magic rather than by rational laws" (WBG, 100).

"...it was she whom I loved and whom I could not therefore see without that anxiety, without that desire for something more, which destroys in us, in the presence of the person we love, the sensation of loving" (WBG, 139).

"Swann was one of those men who, having lived for long time amid the illusions of love, have seen the blessings they have brought to a number of women increase the happiness of those women without exciting in them any gratitude, any tenderness towards their benefactors; but who believe that in their children they can feel an affection which, being incarnate in their own name, will enable them to survive after their death" (WBG, 192).

"We are, when we love, in an abnormal state, capable of giving at once to the most apparently simple accident, an accident which may at any moment occur, a seriousness which in itself it would not entail. What makes us so happy is the presence in our hearts of an unstable element which we contrive perpetually to maintain and of which we cease almost to be aware so long as it is not displaced. In reality, there is in love a permanent strain of suffering which happiness neutralises, makes potential only, postpones, but which may at any moment become, what it would long since have been had we not obtained what we wanted, excruciating" (WBG, 214).

"...when we are not in love, if we resign ourselves philosophically to love's inconsistencies and contradictions, it is because we do not at that moment feel the love which we speak about so freely, and hence do not know it, knowledge in these matters being intermittent and not outlasting the actual presence of the sentiment" (WBG, 256).

"My words would have come to her only in a distorted form, as though they had had to pass through the moving curtain of a waterfall before they reached my beloved, unrecognisable, sounding false and absurd, having no longer any kind of meaning. The truth which one puts into one's words does not carve out a direct path for itself, is not irresistibly self-evident" (WBG, 257).

"For in this respect love is not like war; after each battle we renew the fight with keener ardour, which we never cease to intensify the more thoroughly we are defeated, provided always that we are still in a position to give battle" (WBG, 275).

"...we can never be certain that the happiness which comes to us too late, when we can no longer enjoy it, when we are no longer in love, is altogether the same as that same happiness the lack of which made us at one time so unhappy. There is only one person who could decide this -- our then self; it is no longer with us, and were it to reappear, no doubt our happiness -- identical or not -- would vanish" (WBG, 281).

*

It strikes me as significant that Proust never had the opportunity to experience a long-term committed love (and of course never married).

Perhaps he was able to grasp this experience imaginatively, and we will encounter it later in the novel. But to this point in our reading, Proust, the writer, seems to be limited to reflections on love affairs that are tormented and brief in duration. Certainly, long-term relationships sometimes fall, rightly, under the term "love" as well, yet they have very different dynamics and challenges, highs and lows. Sadly, much to our loss, Proust does not address these.

The only scene that comes to mind as illustrative of long-term love in "Madame Swann at Home" is the dialogue (it begins on page 146 of the Modern Library edition) between Swann and Odette, which begins after she plays the "little phrase" from Vinteuil's sonata one afternoon in their home:

*

"It's rather a charming thought, don't you think," Swann continued, "that sound can reflect, like water, like a mirror. And it's curious, too, that Vinteuil's phrase now shows me only the things to which I paid no attention then. Of my troubles, my loves of those days, it recalls nothing, it has swapped things around."

"Charles, I don't think that's very polite to me, what you're saying."

"Not polite? Really, you women are superb! I was simply trying to explain to this young man that what the music shows -- to me, at least -- is not 'the triumph of the Will' or 'In Tune with the Infinite,' but shall we say old Verdurin in his frock-coat in the palmhouse in the Zoological Gardens. Hundreds of times, without my leaving this room, the little phrase has carried me off to dine with it at Armenonville. Good God, it's less boring, anyhow, than having to go there with Mme de Cambremer."

"Madame Swann laughed. "That is a lady who's supposed to have been very much in love with Charles," she explained, in the same tone in which, shortly before, when we were speaking of Vermeer of Delft... she had replied to me: "I ought to explain that Monsieur Swann was very much taken with that painter at the time he was courting me. Isn't that so, dear?"

"You're not to start saying things about Mme de Cambremer," Swann checked her, secretly flattered.

"But I'm only repeating what I've been told. Besides, it seems that she's extremely clever; I don't know her myself. I belive she's very pushing, which surprises me rather in a clever woman. But everyone says that she was quite mad about you; there's nothing hurful in that."

Swann remained silent as a deaf-mute, which was sort of confirmation, and a proof of his self-complacency.

"Since what I'm playing reminds you of the Zoo," his wife went on, with a playful pretence of being offended, "we might drive this boy there this afternoon if it would amuse him. The weather's lovely now, and you can recapture your fond impressions!"

*

In the playfulness and specificity and things unsaid of this dialogue I see something, perhaps surprisingly given the history of Swann and Odette, of the gratifying nature of long-term, stable love. They can't help but get a kick out of each other, even as they are getting digs in and touching on resentments. The past is all mixed up with the present, it seems to me, in a way that creates more ground for love rather than less.

Reading for Our Sixth Meeting on April 4, 2012

For our next meeting we will read halfway into the "Place-Names, the Place" chapter of Within a Budding Grove, which takes us all the way to the full line break on page 502 of the Modern Library (Moncrieff / Kilmartin / Enright) edition.

The sentence before the break reads:

"At length I would go to bed, a little resentful of her for depriving me, with an indifference so new and strange in her, of a joy on which I had counted so much, and I would lie there for a while, my heart throbbing as in my childhood, listening to the wall which remained silent, until I cried myself to sleep."

After the line break Proust continues:

"That day, as for some days, Saint-Loup had been obliged to go to Doncières, where, until he returned there for good, he would be on duty now until late every afternoon."

See you on April 4!

Proust, the Open Sea, and an Invitation

So I started thinking about my presentation for April 4's meeting, and I had a moment of inspiration -- all of which prompted this invitation to all of you.

Here's what happened:

I was reading along in the "Place-Names, the Place" chapter. Then I came to this:

"What a joy it was to me," Proust writes,

"...to see in the window... the open sea, naked, unshadowed, and yet with half of its expanse in shadow, bounded by a thin, fluctuating line, and to follow with my eyes the waves that leapt up one behind another like jumpers on a trampoline. Every other moment, holding in my hand the stiff starched towel with the name of the hotel printed upon it, with which I was making futile efforts to dry myself, I returned to the window to have another look at that vast, dazzling, mountainous amphitheatre, and at the snowy crests of its emerald waves, here and there polished and translucent, which with a placid violence and a leonine frown, to which the sun added a faceless smile, allowed their crumbling slopes to topple down at last" (WBG, 342).

I don't know about you, but I was stunned when I read this. And it got me to thinking about how much I would like to give a non-verbal response to this novel in my presentation on April 4.

A painting? I'm not a painter. But still... why not try...?

Then it occurred to me that I would very much like to see paintings, collages, crayon drawings, sculptures, ceramics, in short non-verbal creations of all kinds, provoked by this novel, from all of you as well!

Hence the invitation part.

I hereby formally invite you to join me in creating a tangible object of some kind, a painting or anything else you may imagine, as a response to Proust's descriptions of the sea at Balbec (or any other part of the "Place-Names, the Place" chapter). My presentation will be to lead a guided tour of our collection at the beginning of our April 4 meeting.

I counted them, and I found that Proust gives us at least seven different descriptions of the sea at Balbec. The first one is above. Here are the other six, in order of appearance:

2. "It was at this window that I was later to take up my position every morning... to see... those hills of the sea which, before they came dancing back towards us, are apt to withdraw so far that often it was only at the end of a long, sandy plain that I would distinguish, far off, their first undulations in a transparent, vaporous, bluish distance, like the glaciers that one sees in the backgrounds of the Tuscan Primitives" (WBG, 342).

3. "On other mornings it was quite close at hand that the sun laughed upon those waters of a green as tender as that preserved in Alpine pastures (among mountains on which the sun displays himself here and there like a giant who may at any moment come leaping gaily down their craggy sides) less by the moisture of the soil than by the liquid mobility of the light" (WBG, 342).

4. "When in the morning the sun came from behind the hotel, disclosing to me the sands bathed in light as far as the first bastions of the sea, it seemed to be showing me another side of the picture, and to be inviting me to pursue, along the winding path of its rays, a motionless but varied journey amid all the fairest scenes of the diversified landscape of the hours. And on this first morning, it pointed out to me far off, with a jovial finger, those blue peaks of the sea which bear no name on any map, until, dizzy with its sublime excursion over the thundering and chaotic surface of their crests and avalanches, it came to take shelter from the wind in my bedroom, lolling across the unmade bed and scattering its riches over the splashed surface of the basin-stand and into my open trunk, where, by its very splendour and misplaced luxury, it added still further to the general impression of disorder" (WBG, 343).

5. "... I wondered whether [Baudelaire's] 'sun's rays upon the sea' were not -- a very different thing than the evening ray, simple and superficial as a tremulous golden shaft -- just what at that moment was scorching the sea topaz-yellow, fermenting it, turning it pale and milky like beer, frothy like milk, while now and then there hovered over it great blue shadows which, for their own amusement, some god seemed to be shifting to and fro by moving a mirror in the sky" (WBG, 344).

6. "By what privilege, on  one morning rather than another, did the window on being uncurtained disclose to my wondering eyes the nymph Glauconome, whose lazy beauty, gently breathing, had the transparency of a vaporous emerald through which I could see teeming the ponderable elements that colored it? She made the sun join in her play, with a smile attenuated  by an invisible haze which was no more than a space kept vacant about her translucent surface, which, thus curtailed, was rendered more striking, like those goddesses whom the sculptor carves in relief upon a block of marble the rest of which he leaves unchiselled. So, in her matchless colour, she invited us out over those rough terrestrial roads, from which, sitting with Mme de Villeparisis in her barouche, we should glimpse, all day long and without ever reaching it, the coolness of her soft palpitation" (WBG, 387).

7. "One afternoon of scorching heat I was in the dining room of the hotel, plunged in semi-darkness to shield it from the sun, which gilded the drawn curtains through the gaps between twinkled the blue of the sea..." (WBG, 420).

Now let's get messy!

Photographs of Proust's "Balbec"

Rebecca Valette sent along this wonderful link to the seaside town of Cabourg, Proust's "Balbec":

http://www.cabourg.net/spip.php?rubrique45

Painting with Words

by Rebecca Valette

Proust's Narrator paints with words. For him, the "remembrance of things past" seems to be primarily visual. The taste of madeleine awakens memories of Combray, but subsequently the narrator recalls visual scenes: the blooming hawthorne bushes, the reflections in the pond, the perceived "dance" of the distant church steeples as observed from the slow-moving horse-drawn carriage.

The French title of the work, "A la recherche de temps perdu," recognizes that the past is lost — perdu — and will never return. (Proust would agree with the refrain of the American folksong: "Thou art gone and lost forever, Dreadful sorry, Clementine.")

In the last pages of "Swann's Way" which are probably set in 1913, the Narrator revisits the Bois de Boulogne and regrets what he sees: the fashions of the 1890s have vanished. Women's tunics lack the elegance of the beautiful dresses Madame Swann would wear on her daily promenade. The men are hatless. The automobiles lack the panache of the elegant carriages with their matched teams of horses. The present is so disappointing that the Narrator finds consolation in recreating in great detail the beauty of past scenes as he remembers them.

This same focus on the visual is evident in "Place-Names, the Place" where, as Tom points out, the narrator seems transfixed by the changing view of the ocean as seen from his window in the hotel at Balbec. Lacking a still camera, Proust's narrator uses words to describe the nuances of the scenes that hold his attention. Lacking movie film, he uses words to describe the movements of the young group of girls on the beach. And with the magic of his verbal paintbrush, he makes these scenes come alive for us here in America a century later.