proust thread

It's only his second long visit after In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, I think (?). I do like the repetitions, it gives structure to what could easily be seen as thousands of pages of dinners and vacations. Also, I'd just recommend the Deleuze book on Proust and the Signs. That one is pretty brilliant, really gave me a lot to focus on as I read.

Benjamin's "Image of Proust" essay is also essential, although that probably goes without saying. I think the ending of The Guermantes Way, with the Guermantes' willful refusal to recognize death recapitulating the narrator's inability (yet) to mourn his grandmother, was probably the place in the cycle where I started to appreciate Proust's unexpectedly forceful command of narrative structure beyond the paragraph level.

(I don't really know what constitutes spoilers in this thread, or whether they're even that relevant to reading Proust, but maybe I should be more circumspect about talking about plot here.)

Beckett's book also essential.

Yes! In my teaching days, when I taught Endgame a few times, I would usually start one of the classes with Beckett's analysis of habit, "the ballast that chains the dog to its vomit."

i dont think we need to avoid spoilers on the proust thread, i think if ur contemplating reading proust you have high level developed reading skills that enable u 2 do things like read a sentence starting "I think the ending of The Guermantes Way..." and think 2 urself, i do not need 2 rd the rest of this sentence

i sort of recognise myself in proust's thing about sons who are rude to their mothers /:

how do ppl reconcile themselves with the antisemitism and homophobia and misogyny in this then

is reconciling necessary?

I didn't mean to write "themselves with"

man the first reference to the war reminds me of the clunking 'this is the 50s!' stuff that tv show mad men used to do

On the other hand, in light of what Proust's contemporary readers had recently experienced, in the first volume of The Guermantes Way the irony of Saint-Loup's protracted praise of the aesthetic beauty of military planning is handled exquisitely.

(I shake my head at having written "aesthetic beauty" in place of "beauty," though.)

how does he go from that to "if we had another war not that we will have another war it will be like the Götterdämmerung and the great flood rolled into one" though? dude needs an editor

"Standing in the tunnel before a match against Liverpool at Anfield, I had a brush with something that Marcel Proust describes as 'a remembrance of things past'" - from I Am The Secret Footballer, pg. 19

I'm three quarters through my rereading of S&G. Charlus has said he prefers strawberry lemonade, leading the narrator to think, "Aha! He's given himself away as an invert!"

charlus is totally my favourite aspect of this, in retrospect

hey alfred this one-liner is from the next volume turn away to avoid spoilers. everyone else, isn't this grand:

“For the American woman dinner-parties and fashionable entertainments were a sort of Berlitz School. She heard the names and she repeated them, without having first learnt their precise value and significance.”

btw in re how do ppl reconcile the antisemitism and homophobia and misogyny in this then i arrived at a reading, i have decided everyone else is wrong about proust

except people who say things like "volumes five and six fall off a little," i didn't want them to be but these people are right about proust

so what's the best translation of this shit

english translation

ck scott moncrieff forever and all time accept no imitations

^^^

these editions? http://www.amazon.com/Remembrance-Things-Past-Budding-Vintage/dp/0394711823/

or? http://www.amazon.com/In-Search-Lost-Time-Complete/dp/0812969642/

:-/

i read & love the former (moncrieff & kilmartin), not familiar with enright's revision

sorry can't be more helpful. if/when i read again in translation (still have crazy ambition to read it in french someday) may try enright (revising moncrieff & kilmartin).

many recommend new davis translation (of first volume); i've only read a few excerpts. comparing davis & m&k, without comparing either to the french, i find m&k more beautifully written. totally subjective (really, subjective): just love m&k's sentences more.

if i intended to read whole thing (all volumes), think i'd want to read same "voice" throughout-- which would be arg for m&k (or m&k&e) over davis, even if one preferred davis's translation of swann's way.

so don't take this as rec but just my subjective pref.

i read the first volume in lydia davis because i'd read the moncrieff version before. moncrieff is a more enjoyable reading experience, which helps

― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Friday, September 5, 2014 1:06 PM (7 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he's a bit cheesecakey though, or like having a giant cadbury bar, in places

― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Friday, September 5, 2014 1:07 PM (7 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

enright's revisions of kilmartin's revisions aren't that big of a deal imo -- those two are trying to abolish howlers and make a style a little more consistent, but hardly changing the book's basic deal in english. i can't read french though so take this w a grain of salt!! -- there's a really good i think lrb article about the changes?

davis is fun to read and wonder about whether her studied affectlessnesslessness is more of a mesh w proust than one had ever realised, but i think it's better to start triangulating what proust is like from the version we had around for decades than to go to the scorched-earth penguin one

Love how often this question comes around (boo on me for noticing).

There are only two translations. try one - then if you don't like try he other one.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n13/christopher-prendergast/english-proust

This is the LRB piece i think (came up randomly on my twitter feed just now).

reminds me of this podcast (feat. Prendergast). don't like Matthew Sweet and Prendergast was know-it-all iirc but worth a listen if you'd like to be annoyed.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04lpxj2

Why would anyone take a dog to a dentistry exhibition?

dogs love smiling so

These are Parisian dogs though, theirs is a look of raffishness mixed with contempt.

Wasn't this strange?

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n14/perry-anderson/different-speeds-same-furies

I liked the fact that it was critical of Proust - something that no one of authority ever is in print. Proust has been untouchable for as long as I can remember. I literally don't remember seeing anyone contemporary ever writing a sentence critical of him.

yeah, it's refreshing I guess to see someone have a go at Proust, but the pro-Powell stuff didn't work for me at all - didn't feel like the close readings were persuasive, just assertions of value/quality. The stuff about specific historicity of A Dance was decent.

Passionate defences of Powell often seem to have this 'I know this milieu/these people' thing hanging behind them - reductive, but I suspect Anderson as Eton + Oxford might feel that acutely.

Tariq Ali a big Powell fan too iirc but I don't know enough about the New Left to come up with an entertaining hypothesis about why Powell should do it for them so.

I agree. I would separate the Proust element (very refreshing) from the Powell element where I don't have the knowledge to judge the claims.

I think I tend to agree that the reading of Powell wasn't terrifically convincing re: his value.

And I think it must be true about knowing Powell's milieu, as a big factor.

Ali seems as self-indulgent a writer as almost any of his generation. His recent LRB interview woeful - rather confirming the recent ILB point about space in the paper being wasted.

I get that Proust (and everyone bar idk Shakespeare, Milton and Dante) needs ppl having a go at and some of the criticisms are decent - but attacking Proust for his focus in on one particular class wasn't exactly mind-blowing. That's reasonable and true but it so doesn't matter. Or that he might be weird on relationships (I need to re-read those bits again)

Its been a while since I've read something that I think its quite good yet also a colossal folly. Just a sinking feeling - if you want to talk Powell up then don't place this albatross around him. Their mode of expression is so different anyway.

I had a lovely summer reading ADTTMOT eleven years ago but only its length is comparable to Proust.

my take (which shd perhaps go on the perry anderson thread we seem not to have started) is that there's an element of a bet here (if only with himself): that PA can punt powell up into the upper-layer blessed euro-criticosphere that he probably does actually belong in

also and more importantly he shd have written a *three*-part piece (=half as long again) comparing proust, powell and robert jordan's the wheel of time

lol, iirc Pound has a small go at Shakespeare and a big go at Milton

I thought PA's criticism of Proust's odd, perhaps distorted approach to sexuality was bold and interesting.

Likewise his argument re: Proust's solipsism and lack of real interest in other minds and people.

I happen not to like Proust, which combines unhappily with the fact that everyone else does, so this critique was a once in a lifetime gift for me.

Mark, would the PA thread be on ILB? I think so.

iirc Harold Bloom and Roger Shattuck have also analyzed the novel's queer-in-every-sense sexuality

Yes. I expect they said it was great.

not really, more like, to use a phrase I loathe, "it is what it is"

I Love Amphibology

xxxxxxxpost pinefox, you are not alone; I read In Search last year and thought it could be even better if half as long, though maybe that's too harsh. But def. appreciated one of the (Penguin Deluxe) translators passing reference to the Guermantes sector of high society as "a desert," although a geographical desert would be more consistently interesting to me than to the narrator. But he's into reading about science, and making his own observations etc., and the strata of society (as well as seeming liked massed figures/materials on diff planes, with individual elements and subsets brought through diff degrees of lighting, also thinking of orchestral and other boilerplate processing, with themes and plants and rocks and birds and things apparent for a while, 'til the cue/factory whistle/office nurse gives the signal---"The only constant in life is change," and so it grinds on); the strata can be of most interest to geologists or their fans though. Of course he's also preceded by Zola, and some of his characters pump each other for hot gossip with "Balzacian reasons" as alibi ho-ho.
He is interested in other minds, and different strata/shadings of class, incl. the nanny from childhood right through the time the narrator does with Albertine in the family apartment, and beyond. And the guy who spends all those aeons with Charlus.

Yet this simple situation suffices to demonstrate that even that universally decried thing, which would nowhere find anyone to defend it, "gossip," has, whether we are ourselves its object, so that it then becomes particularly disagreeable, or whether it teaches us something we did not know about a third person, its psychological value. It prevents the mind from falling asleep over the factitious view that it takes of what it believes things to be like, which is only their outward appearance. It turns this inside out with the magical dexterity of an idealist philosopher and quickly offers us an unsuspected corner of the reverse side of the fabric. Could M. de Charlus have imagined these words spoken by a certain fond female relative: "How can you expect Mémé to be in love with me? You're forgetting I'm a woman!" Yet she had a genuine, deep attachment to M. de Charlus. Why be surprised, then, that in the case of the Verdurins, on whose affection and kindness he had no right to rely, the remarks that they made when far away from him (and it was not only remarks, as we shall see) should have been so unlike what he imagined them to be, that is to say the simple echo of those that he heard when he was there? These last alone decorated with fond inscriptions the little ideal pavilion into which M. de Charlus sometimes went in order to dream on his own, when he would introduce his imagination for a moment into the idea that the Verdurins had of him. The atmosphere there was so sympathetic, so cordial, the respite so comforting, that, when M. de Charlus, before going to sleep, had come there for a moment to relax from his cares, he never re-emerged without a smile. But for each of us a pavilion of this kind is double: facing what we think is the only one, there is the other, customarily invisible to us, the real one, symmetrical with the one that we know yet very different, whose decoration, where we would recognize nothing of what we were expecting to see, would alarm us as being formed of the odious symbols of an unsuspected hostility. How aghast M. de Charlus would have been had he found his way into one of these adverse pavilions, by virtue of some piece of gossip, as if by one of those servants' staircases where obscene graffiti have been chalked on the doors of the apartments by disgruntled tradesmen or dismissed domestics!... Thus M. de Charlus lived deluded, like the fish that believes the water in which he is swimming extends beyond the glass of his tank, which offers him his reflection, whereas he does not see beside him, in the shadows, the amused passerby who is following his antics, or the all-powerful pisciculturalist who, at the unforseen and fatal moment... will pull him ruthlessly out from the medium in which he had liked living, to toss him into another one. Whole nations, what is more, insofar as they are simply collections of individuals, can provide examples, vaster yet identical in each of their parts, of this profound, obstinate, and disconcerting blindness.

This is how he died: after a mild uremic attack he had been ordered to rest. But a critic having written that in Vermeer's View of Delft (lent by the museum at The Hague for an exhibition of Dutch painting), a painting he adored and thought he knew perfectly, a little patch of yellow wall (which he could not remember) was so well painted that it was, if one looked at it in isolation, like a precious work of Chinese art, of an entirely self-sufficient beauty, Bergotte ate a few potatoes and went out to the exhibition. As he climbed the first set of steps, his head began to spin. He passed several paintings and had an impression of the sterility and uselessness of such an artificial form, and how inferior it was to the outdoor breezes and sunlight of a palazzo in Venice, or even an ordinary house at the seaside. Finally he stood in front of the Vermeer, which he remembered as having been more brilliant, more different from everything else he knew, but in which, thanks to the critic's article, he now noticed for the first time little figures in blue, the pinkness of the sand, and finally the precious substance of the tiny area of wall. His head spun faster; he fixed his gaze, as a child does on a yellow butterfly he wants to catch, on the precious little patch of wall. "That is how I should have written," he said to himself. "My last books are too dry, I should have applied several layers of color, made my sentences precious in themselves, like that little patch of yellow wall." He knew how serious his dizziness was. In a heavenly scales he could see, weighing down one of the pans, his own life, while the other contained the little patch of wall so beautifully painted in yellow. He could feel that he had rashly given the first for the second. "I would really rather not," he thought, "be the human interest item in this exhibition for the evening papers." He was repeating to himself, "Little patch of yellow wall with a canopy, little patch of yellow wall." While saying this he collapsed onto a circular sofa; then suddenly, he stopped thinking that his life was in danger and said to himself, "It's just indigestion; those potatoes were undercooked." He had a further stroke, rolled off the sofa onto the ground as all the visitors and guards came running up. He was dead. Dead forever? Who can say? Certainly spiritualist experiments provide no more proof than religious dogma of the soul's survival. What we can say is that everything in our life happens as if we entered it bearing a burden of obligations contracted in an earlier life; there is nothing in the conditions of our life on this earth to make us feel any obligation to do good, to be scrupulous, even to be polite, nor to make the unbelieving artist feel compelled to paint a single passage twenty times over, when the admiration it will excite will be of little importance to his body when it is eaten by the worms, like the little piece of yellow wall painted with such knowledge and such refinement by the never-to-be-known artist whom we have barely identified by the name of Vermeer.

He was dead. Dead forever? Who can say?

ha, I think Bergotte is one of a few characters who have a habit of dying and coming back to life in the unfinished novel

"Ah! The Hague! What a gallery!" cried by M. de Guermantes. I said to him that he had doubtless admired Vermeer's Street in Delft. But the Duke was less erudite than arrogant. Accordingly he contented himself with replying in a tone of sufficiency, as was his habit whenever anyone spoke to him of a picture in a gallery, or in the Salon, which he did not remember having seen. "If it's to be seen, I saw it!"

Reminds me that I got an alert about a new book by Benjamin Moser about the Dutch Masters that looks good.

Bergotte is one of a few characters who have a habit of dying and coming back to life in the unfinished novel

the slippage caused by proust's geographical+chronological+historical errors and accidental retcons, even in the published volumes, rly suits the book

(feel the same way about the polyphonic translation tbh but how would i know)

Yes, totally. That along with the fact that it's basically impossible to hold more than a fraction of the story in your memory at any given time, and the way that the narrator constantly multiplies the hypothetical explanations and motivations for any given event - the book has all these distorting layers which make it endlessly perplexing. Even though in another sense Proust is a very clear writer.

the book has all these distorting layers

He was mistaken. He did see her again, one more time, a few weeks later. It was while he was asleep, in the twilight of a dream. He was walking with Mme. Verdurin, Dr. Cottard, a young man in a fez whom he could not identify, the painter, Odette, Napoleon III, and my grandfather, along a path that followed the sea and overhung it steeply sometimes very high up, sometimes by a few yards only, so that one climbed and descended again constantly; those who were descending again were already no longer visible to those who were still climbing, what little daylight remained was failing, and it seemed then as though a profound darkness was going to sweep over them at any moment.... Odette turned her wrist, looked at a little watch, and said: "I have to go..." After one second, it was many hours ago that she had left them. The painter remarked to Swann that Napoleon III had vanished an instant after she had. "They certainly must have arranged it together," he added. "They must have met at the bottom of the hill, but they didn't want to say good-bye at the same time for the sake of appearances. She's obviously his mistress." The unknown young man began to cry. Swann tried to comfort him. "Really, she's doing the right thing," he told him, drying his eyes and taking off his fez so that he would be more comfortable. "I told her a dozen times she should do it. Why be sad about it? He above all would understand her." Thus did Swann talk to himself, for the young man he had not been able to identify at first was also himself; like certain novelists, he had divided his personality between two characters, the one having the dream, and another he saw before him wearing a fez.

The lie, the perfect lie, about people we know, about the relations we have had with them, about our motive for some action, formulated in totally different terms, the lie as to what we are, whom we love, what we feel with regard to people who love us and believe that they have fashioned us in their own image because they keep on kissing us morning, noon and night — that lie is one of the few things in the world that can open windows for us on to what is new and unknown, that can awaken in us sleeping senses for the contemplation of universes that otherwise we should never have known.

Have y’all seen the doc about the Buenos Aires reading group, have I mentioned it before?

Haven't seen it yet. I want to find a group like that.

"Ah! The Hague! What a gallery!"

otm

But you don't even know what The Hague is.

Meh

Mlle Vinteuil acted as she did simply out of sadism, which does not excuse her, but comforted me a little when I thought about it afterward. She must have understood, I would say to myself, that all this was just an illness, a form of madness, and not the true delight in wickedness that she wanted it to be. But if she was able, later, to think of this for herself, it must have eased her suffering as it had formerly spoiled her pleasure. "That wasn't me," she must have said, "I was out of my mind. I can still pray for my father, and not despair of his goodness." However, it is possible that this idea, which must have come to her during her pleasure, did not occur to her during her suffering. I wished I could have put it into her mind.

lol "le roman d'albertine" is so diseased (slyly acknowledged by long woody allen style pontification to albertine about dostoevsky). get a grip marcel!! write the book already!!

Bergotte is one of a few characters who have a habit of dying and coming back to life in the unfinished novel... the narrator constantly multiplies the hypothetical explanations and motivations for any given event... the book has all these distorting layers

gasped at this (another de fourcheville dream!):

Two days later I was delighted to think that Bergotte must have greatly admired my article, which he could not have read without jealousy. Yet after a while my joy subsided. In fact Bergotte had not written me a word. I had simply wondered whether he would have liked the article, fearing that he had not. The question that I had asked myself was answered by Mme de Forcheville, who had replied that he admired it greatly, finding it worthy of a great writer. But she told me this while I was asleep: it was a dream. Almost all our dreams answer the questions that we have asked ourselves with complex affirmations and scenarios involving several characters, but they fade with the dawn.

irl lol @ all the tenses here:

I then came back to a Paris very different from the one to which I had already returned on an earlier occasion, as we shall see shortly,

Found this essay to be pretty terrible.

If you had the time and there was nothing stopping you would you read this book?

https://libertiesjournal.com/articles/reading-and-time/

that's paywalled but this line is very funny:

Thanks to a few features of Proust’s distinctive style, reading In Search of Lost Time inevitably takes at least twice or even three times as long as this.

"this" is three days. yes, nine days, that's about how long it takes to read Proust

i think the concept of "time poverty" is useful and important as a materialist element in cultural commentary and orientation: "time famine" less so tbh

however this essay tackles this area quite poorly -- not least by being far far longer than it needs to be for the various ideas it does little more than touch on, it could honestly have been a fifth the length without loss

i didn't know that marx and proust were distant cousins, so that's one small thing i guess (not consequential, but funny)

also it's extremely annoying stylistically

"that's paywalled but this line is very funny"

You can sign up to two free articles a month.

I think this essay (from an earlier issue of the same mag) on as a yet untranslated Dutch novel from the 90s (as big as Proust) tackles some of the issues of life spent in the office. Those modern drudgeries.

Anyone who can read German should do themselves the favor of getting this book. One of the great reading experiences of my life. Get a @readliberties account and you can read my essay on it: https://t.co/kKk2fr1vJw https://t.co/L7qwEYyxu5

— Adrian Nathan West (@a_nathanwest) December 26, 2023

iirc (maybe not so correctly) it compares it with Proust, makes args around how those eight hours in the office sap your strength.

In the end though people read Proust (I read a lot of Proust on the bus commute and lunch break when I was working the most dreary dead end job in my life) so work partitioned my time so I could engage with it. Not saying my experience would be richer if I didn't have to work but people manage. The question is: do you want to read it?

to me the relevant orientation is not so much office time vs empty time vs leisure time but how you parcel up reading time when available reading content is so colossally super-abundant

Read an interview with this philosopher on Hegel. Touched on Kant, Spinoza, various philosophers and systems.

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/hegel-stephen-houlgate/

At the end there is this:

"Not everyone is going to have the time to read Hegel and that’s a shame. It’s a shame, too, that most people won’t have the time or perhaps the energy to study Aristotle, Kant or Heidegger. Philosophers such as Kant and Hegel are hugely rewarding, but not everyone is going to be able to read them. You can’t just pick up Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason or Hegel’s Logic in an evening after having spent all day at the office and think you’re going to make much headway with it. It’s hard. But if you have the time and are willing to make the effort, studying these works can be hugely rewarding."

I think certain works of philosophy suffer from the lack of time an office worker has to be able to give it.

But then again I have read very little philosophy and don't really know.

xp - yes that is an issue too. So I don't perhaps pick up philosophy because I can't quite see how that could be more rewarding than a novel. That's me making stuff up to parcel as the lack of time is an issue, but not in the way that essay talks about it

That essay also values finishing far too much. It's ok not to finish things even if you are enjoying it. I've seen three series of The Sopranos years ago abd stopped it. I read about the last scene last year and went on YT. Watched and enjoyed it. That's fine.

We should normalise picking things up and putting them down.

guardedly prepared to tone down my lifelong animus against jameson* if that's what he was getting at here: "the ‘mid-cult pride’, in the words of fredric jameson, felt by those who finish it"

*another author who invariably delivers at greater length than necessary

how you parcel up reading time when available reading content is so colossally super-abundant

I'm really grateful when I find a long work which seems so worth tackling that it kinda resolves this issue for me.

Proust has always done this for me. I think I'm getting a similar feeling from The Tale of Genji. Works that force me to read slowly, where I know I'm not going to be finishing any time soon, and where I just stop thinking about what else I might be reading.

Sunrise is a necessary concomitant of long railway journeys, just as are hard-boiled eggs, illustrated papers, packs of cards, rivers upon which boats strain but make no progress. At a certain moment,— when I was counting over the thoughts that had filled my mind, in the preceding minutes, so as to discover whether I had just been asleep or not (and when the very uncertainty which made me ask myself the question was to furnish me with an affirmative answer), in the pale square of the window, over a small black wood I saw some ragged clouds whose fleecy edges were of a fixed, dead pink, not liable to change, like the colour that dyes the wing which has grown to wear it, or the sketch upon which the artist’s fancy has washed it. But I felt that, unlike them, this colour was due neither to inertia nor to caprice but to necessity and life. Presently there gathered behind it reserves of light. It brightened; the sky turned to a crimson which I strove, gluing my eyes to the window, to see more clearly, for I felt that it was related somehow to the most intimate life of Nature, but, the course of the line altering, the train turned, the morning scene gave place in the frame of the window to a nocturnal village, its roofs still blue with moonlight, its pond encrusted with the opalescent nacre of night, beneath a firmament still powdered with all its stars, and I was lamenting the loss of my strip of pink sky when I caught sight of it afresh, but red this time, in the opposite window which it left at a second bend in the line, so that I spent my time running from one window to the other to reassemble, to collect oh a single canvas the intermittent, antipodean fragments of my fine, scarlet, ever-changing morning, and to obtain a comprehensive view of it and a continuous picture.

Elaine Scarry drills down on this passage here (this title could not be more perfectly pitched for me).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMAYbYWS3jM

I find it tempting to think that the passage is anticipating something about the aesthetics of colour film.