by Dennis Abrams
Davis: 82-92; Moncrieff: 110-124
“The Virtues and Vices of Padua.” Marcel’s afternoon of reading. Francoise and the gardener discuss soldiers and war.
The scene describing Marcel’s summertime reading in the garden strikes me as crucial. I love this passage:
“And once the novelist has put us in that state, in which, as in all purely internal states, every emotion is multiplied tenfold, in which his book will disturb us as might a dream but a dream more lucid than those we have while sleeping and whose memory will last longer, then see how he provokes in us within one hour all possible happinesses and all possible unhappinesess just a few of which we would spend years of our lives coming to know and the most intense of which would never be revealed to us because the slowness with which they occur prevents us from perceiving them (thus our heart changes, in life, and it is the worst pain; but we know it only through reading, through our imagination: in reality it changes, as certain natural phenomena occur, slowly enough so that, if we are able to observe successively each of its different states, in return we are spared the actual sensation of change.)” Davis, pg. 87
Roger Shattuck in Proust’s Way writes:
“The Combray world that displays convincing color and strong personality dims temporarily when seen from another perspective. The shift occurs when Marcel is reading in the garden. This carefully reasoned yet poetic passage places us suddenly inside his world looking out. Marcel’s faith in the special world of childhood weakens briefly in the face of a competing faith — the reality of a book. Art makes the challenge. Marcel describes his long Sunday afternoons of reading as forming a single consciousness ‘dappled with different states of mind.’ (Davis) He has become only marginally aware of the world around him. ‘…before my eyes, what was first in me, innermost, the constantly moving handle that controled the rest, was my belief in the philsophical richness and the beauty of the book I was reading, and my desire to appropriate them for myself…’ (Davis) And we are told why. Being not opaque flesh-and-blood people, but images made out of words, the characters of such a story can be transparent and can reveal their feelings and motives to us. As images, they can also concentrate the actions of a lifetime into a few hours’ reading, thus making perceptible what we cannot observe at the slow pace of living. The transparent image of fiction is doubly revealing compared to life, and hence more alluring than life…These six pages on reading offer a superb example of how Proust’s prose interweaves a narrative sequence of Marcel taking his book out into the garden, a double description of both a topographical and mental landscape, and a careful step-by-step philsophical argument about the nature of reading — a full-fledged epistemology of reading.”
What did you respond to in this section, and why? Do we recognize our own pain only because our reading teaches us to do so? Also…is there anything you’d like me to be discussing in this blog that I’m not? Or, is there anything I’m discussing on this blog that you’d rather I not?
Today’s reading:
Davis: Page 92 “I had heard Bergotte mentioned…” through page 102 “…that would perhaps be indispensible to a stockbroker.”
Moncrieff: Page 124 “I had heard Bergotte spoken of…” through page 139 “…I dar say, for a stockbroker.”
I’m still wondering about the distinctions between Proust, Marcel and Narrator. It’s no doubt important to keep these in mind, but the novel itself endlessly questions it.
1. Proust chooses ‘Marcel’ as his character’s name. He’s not insisting on difference.
2. The affectionate description of Aunt Leonie sounds so similar to what I understand Proust’s own life to have been like – especially the looking out to the world outside – I find it impossible to read that without imagining Proust imagining the world outside his room, with news brought in from the outside, but from which he is safely cocooned.
3. The long passage on reading from which you quote above includes this (I’m just quoting enough to recall it):
“On the sort of screen dappled with different states and impressions….which ranged from the most deeply hidden aspiration of my being to the wholly external view of the horizon..my belief in the philosophic richness and beauty of the book I was reading..”
This seems to me so exactly the book that Proust was creating, while the Narrator tells us that Marcel is reading it, that I can’t think of them as entirely separate.
Still the separation is important too. Greer’s comment about homosexuality is a case in point – I think the usual argument is that Proust was homosexual therefore the Narrator should be too, and what’s more homosexuality should be presented in a positive light.
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Re: Pace of reading. Sometimes I think a page a day would be enough! At best, Proust is so wonderful, there is so much richness in a paragraph, it seems a shame to continue rather than just linger and wonder.
You’re right, I think. The lines are sometimes hard to discern. We will, as we progress, discuss in much greater detail how Proust used his life and the people he knew in his novel, and whether or not that is important to our understanding of his work. If we know, for example, that M. Swann is partially based on this person or that person, does it matter?
Hello Dennis and fellow readers
Dennis, I love reading your blog posts. I don’t have much to contribute yet because I’m a beginner but I will try not to lurk for too long.
I’m reading and rereading pages working my way into the novel. As a beginning reader of Proust this is a very interesting exercise. Sometimes I’m captured by a beautiful image, sometimes my eye slides from the page. I love the humorous characterisation. I think I’m becoming used to the rhythm. I’m usually a fast reader, but with Proust I need to take my time.
My copies of Shattuck’s Proust’s Way and Karpeles’ Paintings in Proust arrived today and I am dipping into them with delight.
I read the article by Germaine Greer with interest and the comments with much appreciation. I think my favourite was the quote from Molesworth.
Cyrille, Shattuck mentions “the laminated I” which would suggest that the Narrator and the Marcel of the moment entwine, and perhaps Proust the author will join them for philosophical exposition. Not having studied arts or humanities, this is going to be a real challenge for me.
Now I must go and look up some background information. A definition of epistemology for starters.
I’ve never been much of a fiction reader. I’ll read the occasional novel, usually the middlebrow sort you get at the airport, but for the most part I’ve been sticking to nonfiction, because there’s just too much to learn about the world: history, music, science, economics, politics.
Proust is showing me how much fiction has to teach me — about myself, and other people, and memory, and love, and the pleasures of food, and on and on. I’m not giving up nonfiction, but now I understand what people mean when they talk about novel of ideas.
In a word: wow. So much has gone on in the last thirty pages, the last twenty, the last page–how to even summarize or say. Is there a better description of reading than this? Is there a better argument for fiction as a perfect tutor of ethics and aesthetics? And how deeply Proust has drunk from Descartes’ fountain and become a phenomenologist. There are some excellent hints (eddies) here: a woman–a Jungian archetype, the opener of a “gate of an unknown world”–of Marcel’s imagination and expectation; the reduction of experience like the flow water–in a slowing of time–to single drops in “an undeviating, irresistible outrush”; the domination of real time and events by psychic time in the loss of a few church bell’s chiming. One comes away as one comes away after sitting through an hour’s performance of a well-loved symphony: ears satiated and soul glowing.
The steeple being the focal point of the Combray area had a familiar feel to me. And then I suddenly realized that here in Marin County Mt. Tamalpais plays that role. You can see it from almost anywhere, and your eye is always drawn to the mountain and its moods. I suppose the Eiffel Tower or Mt. Fuji would do the same.
On this reading I am finding Proust always very ambiguous — whether it is a matter of religion, sexuality or class. I’m trying to not think of the author as being gay or having Jewish ancestry or being obsessed with aristocracy, but the real person is never completely in the background. It somehow feels more autobiographical than most great literature.
Mike, I agree with your statement about this novel feeling “autobiographical.” I don’t know much about Proust’s life, but I just can’t shake the feeling that I’m reading something that’s at least half-memoir. Maybe it’s the close first-person POV along with the fact that an older narrator is remembering and narrating his past (much as a memoirist would). Also, the story is contemporaneous (in time and setting) with Proust’s own life, and I think all this makes the novel feel like a memoir.
Bergotte (perhaps I’m thinking of what is coming later too much here) represents a lot of different aspects of Marcel. First, his immature taste in literature at this point in his life, and his uncertainty about it. And Bergotte is, as someone pointed out, a writer like Marcel will become. And there is irony, because perhaps Bergotte is a great writer, and perhaps he isn’t — almost as if Proust is saying, maybe I’m a great writer, and maybe I’m not. And Proust is staking out his territory as a digressive writer like Bergotte, but which Marcel recognizes is a matter of taste, and that there is more than one opinion as to whether this is good writing or outdated blather. But since we’re devoting all this time to reading Proust, I guess we have taken the digressive side.
On this reading, now as a writer myself, I appreciate how many chances Proust takes in his flights. He is willing to take an experience, thought or impression to an extreme, usually it works, but sometimes he falls flat on his face and it doesn’t really make sense. But he is fearless in his writing.