Botticelli "The Trials of Moses" (1481-82) Sistine Chapel, Rome
"Her loosened hair flowing down her cheeks, bending one knee in a slightly balletic pose . . . her head on one side, with those great eyes of hers which seemed so tired and sullen when there was nothing to animate her, she struck Swann by her resemblance to the figure of Zipporah, Jethro's daughter." — Swann's Way
A little while ago, I suggested to fellow bloggers that we take up Proust's In Search of Lost Time as a shared reading experience. Space the seven (or six in some cases) volumes out over the course of a year or so. The ultimate chunkster challenge. Some 4,000 pages or thereabouts depending upon translation and edition you are reading. But as many maintain that Proust's masterpiece is one of the greatest novels ever written, it seems well worth the effort. A few kindred spirits are reading along with me, and I hope, will post on their own blog and/or weigh in here today. Next stop from here? Volume 2 - In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower formerly known as Within a Budding Grove - on Proust's birthday on July 10. Plenty of time to read the next or the first two if you are joining us late.
To read Proust for me is to be enveloped in the language, to surrender to the flow of word upon word that carries me from one time to another, from one memory to another. It is a near sensory experience as the narrative of first the young Proust-like Marcel is rooted in the novel, and then Swann's story is framed by his love of art. Many physical objects that surround the two protagonists inform this Belle Epoque time in France, but none more tellingly than the books that mold Marcel's impressionable young mind and the paintings that replace earthly realities for Swann.
The first portion of Swann's Way, Combray, is taken up with the young Marcel defining his young self as he struggles with both the possibilities of his life as he perceives them from novels and his own anxious sensibilities. He is defined for us early in the novel by M. Legrandin:
"You have a lovely soul, of a rare quality, an artist's nature, don't ever let it go without what it needs."
Marcel feeds those needs within the pages of his favorite novelist, Bergotte, a fictional author that is most likely an amalgam of author Anatole France and philosopher Henri Bergson. He sees the dramatic components of the life he lives among the well-heeled in the fin de siecle as well as the information he culls from his spying eyes as somehow indistinguishable from the dramas of the novels he reads. All are open to the re-write as well such as when the eyes of Gilberte become blue in his mind rather than black they actually are because the change serves his imagination well.
"These were the events taking place in the book I was reading; it is true that the people affected by them were not "real," as Francoise said. But all the feelings we are made to experience by the joy or misfortune of a real person are produced in us only through the intermediary of an image of that joy or that misfortune; the ingeniousness of the first novelist consisted in understanding that in the apparatus of our emotions, the image being the only essential element, the simplification that would consist in purely and simply abolishing real people would be a decisive improvement."
The young Marcel seeks not just to write novels, but to revise and script the nature of the real world around him.
Similarly, Swann, the occupation of the second portion of the novel views many of the people around him not as individuals self-defined but as subjects of artistic medium assigned roles within his near encyclopedic knowledge of the art world. As some of us have noted before while lusting after the book Paintings in Proust, In Search of Lost Time is full of references to famous works of art. Unfortunately, Swann's predilection delivers him into an unhappy marriage with Odette as referenced in the quote under the image above.
So difficult to narrow the content of a blog post on such an expansive work, but I chose this focus today because I believe that it is essential to define Proust's view of both novels and art as we begin our read thorough his magnum opus. It is these views that will inform his treatment of time, and distance the autobiographical possibilities from the essence of the text. This first volume of In Search of Lost Time unveils most of the characters that will appear in the complete story, introduces us to Proust's basic philosophical orientations, and bathes us in the most luxurious flood of words imaginable. I could not have wished for more. But still need a little reading breathing room before book two. For me, reading Proust is consuming and difficult to dodge my own anxieties as those of the protagonists emerge.
So tell me, how was this for you?
After as much of the beautiful outside as I can absorb today, on to Unaccustomed Earth (I still think it stands a chance tomorrow for the Pulitzer). What are you reading today for the Sunday Salon?