Moncrieff: 134-149; Grieve: 100-110
by Dennis Abrams
Marcel is now a regular at the Swanns, going out with them on outings of his choosing. Lunch at the Swanns. Waiting for the Swanns in a drawing room, “left alone there in the company of orchids, roses and violets, which, like people waiting beside you who do not know you, preserved a silence which their individuality as living things made all the more striking…” M. Swann’s patience at having an unpunctual wife. Swann shows Marcel his latest acquisitions, but “The Giaconda herself might have appeared there without giving me any more pleasure than one of Mme Swann’s indoor gowns, or her bottles of smelling salts.” Marcel’s affection for Swann because “he, his daughter’s master, was giving her to me, whereas she withheld herself at times…Besides, 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.” Mme Swann plays the section of Vinteuil’s sonata on the piano that contains the “little passage.” The difficulty of “hearing” music the first time. “And yet when, later on, this sonata had been played to me two or three times I found that I knew it perfectly well.” The role of memory in listening to music: impressions gradually accumulate in the mind as recollections. A work of genius creates its own posterity. “The reason why a work of genius is not easily admired from the first is that the man who has created it is so extraordinary, that few other men resemble him. It is his work itself that, by fertilising the rare minds capable of understanding it, will make them increase and multiply…What is called posterity is the posterity of the work of art.” Swann’s perception of the sonata has changed. The Swanns discuss Mme Blatin, and M. Swann compares her to the portrait of Savonarola by Fra Bartolommeo. Mme Blatin, the Singhalese, and the zoo.
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I love love love this section. Proust’s description of the act of listening to new music and the role of time in understanding new music strikes me as being absolutely correct, and is for me, one of those times when I am forced to ask myself “how does he KNOW that?”
Shattuck had this to say on the subject:
“…Proust {gave} serious attention to music, an art whose performance is entirely temporal, yet whose form may be spatialized by repetition and memory. In two closely related passages, one toward the beginning and the other toward the end of the novel, Proust describes that double experience. In the first, Marcel is listening to Odette play the piano.”
“It was one of those days that she happened to play for me the first part of Vinteiul’s sonata that contained the little phrase of which Swann had been so fond. But often, if it is a complicated piece of music to which one is listening for the first time, one listens and hears nothing…That gives rise to the melancholy that clings to the knowledge of such works, as of everything that takes place in time…Since I was able to enjoy the pleasure that this sonata gave me only in a succession of hearings, I never possessed in its entirety: it was like itself. But great works of art are less disappointing than life, for they do not begin by giving us the best of themselves.”
“The passage contains a tentative aesthetic. The experience of complex music is cumulative, subject to time, never exhaustive. It differs from life in that its greatest rewards come late and not early. The Search itself, we realize, observes this rhythm of delayed revelation. The time needed for gradual initiation to a work of art belongs to and forms part of its experience. An instant does not contain it, though art may contain exalted instants.”
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Let me repeat this line again: “But great works of art are less disappointing than life, for they do not begin by giving us the best of themselves.”
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I was going to say a few things about the changes in Swann’s perception of the sonata, but I think I’ll save those for tomorrow’s post. Instead, I’d like to give you this link to a lecture given by composer John Adams on November 12, 2009, at the Art Institute of Chicago, entitled “The Vinteuil Sonata — Where Music and Literature Collide. It’s about an hour in length, and well worth your while.
http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Content.aspx?audioID=38665
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Tuesday’s Reading:
Moncrieff: Page 149 “During those minutes in which Gilberte…” through Page 163 “…she said sharply, plucking her arm away.”
Grieve: Page 110 “While Gilberte had gone off…” through Page 120 “…snapping her arm away.”
Enjoy.
I love the notions of the artist existing in time, and his works creating the audience for them. Beethoven creates an audience for music like Beethoven’s — but it takes time for this to happen. The artist, being original and different from his less radical contemporaries, knows that he will not be understood in his time, but if his work does not go through a period of being misunderstood, it will never develop an audience.
So here we are, the present audience, four generations after Proust and eight after Beethoven, with little sense of how radical these artists were in their times. And their works exist comfortably in the world of what is familiar to us.
Swann’s thoughts about artists creating their own appreciative audiences over time made me wonder whether Proust was really talking about himself. Was he confident enough to know he was creating a masterpiece as he was writing? Did he feel unappreciated as a writer by his contemporaries, but, at the same time, certain of an appreciative audience in the future? It all seems rather arrogant, though the arrogance is certainly well-founded in this case.
Well, doesn’t it require a certain amount of arrogance to write a book (or books) such as “In Search of Lost Time,” to assume that readers will be willing to devote so much time to reading so long a work?
And just to toss this into the mix. The discussion of artists creating their own audiences over time brings to mind Jorge Luis Borge’s essay, “Kafka and His Precursors,” in which he argues that writers also create their own precursors. A sample: “The poem “Fears and Scruples” by Robert Browning prophesies the work of Kafka, but our reading of Kafka noticeably refines and diverts our reading of the poem. Browning did not read it as we read it now…The fact is that each writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.”
“The creator of the work of genius must make no compromises with, must take no account of, other geniuses, who may at the same period be following their own course toward creating for the future a more aware public, which will reward other geniuses but not himself; the work has to create its own posterity.” (Grieve, p.106)
Proust is always writing about himself.