Beginning with "how often, after that day, in the course of my walks along the Guermantes Way"
These are the final pages in part I, Combray and they bring us almost full circle to the narrator's thoughts at the beginning of the work, as though backing out from the more focused view to the more general one at the beginning.
After seeing Mme Guermantes in the church M returns to lamenting his impotence as a writer. He is afraid that he has no talent for his chosen profession and can find nothing to write about. It isn't until a return trip from a walk along the Guermantes Way that his writers block is broken and he writes a snippet on steeples in his view (the steeples of which he writes, not of Combray, are a trio—originally just two, and then a third attempts joins them—bringing to my mind the social triangle). He is relieved to be able to write again. It is a writer's epiphany.
He finishes the description of the Guermantes Way by linking it to feelings of "melancholy" because on nights they take that route, being late after such a long walk his mother is not free to come put him to bed. This is a break in the night-time routine upon which his happiness is dependent. The Guremantes Way embodies the dichotomy between utter happiness and desperate melancholy.
Some meandering thoughts...
I see another difference between the walks now, too, the first (Méséglise or Swann's Way) being connected more with sensuality, the second (Guermantes) with his intellectual (and social?) pursuit, or at least that's how they were depicted in his descriptions. Méséglise is sensual, lower class, country, French, stormy. Guermantes is intellectual, upper class or nobility. So while the Méséglise Way is a confirmation of all that is French and home, the Guremantes Way is what separates him from home and mother and comfort.
And then we're out in his more vague memories and ideas again, with a reminder of the madeleine cake and tea, and a preface to the upcoming memory, "a story which, many years after I had left the little place, had been told me of a love affair in which Swann had been involved before I was born" (p.262).
And finally we leave his sleep walking mind through the same door by which we had entered it, only instead of his confusion over which room he is half asleep in, now the room's true features are coming into focus with day. He is awake and memory is dawning?
Showing posts with label mother. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mother. Show all posts
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Swann's Way, Combray II, pp.151-165: habit, hawthorns, M. Venteuil
Habits/routines. The household at Combray lives by strict routine, the breaking of which leads Léonie to become very upset. In the situation of the kitchen maid's confinement, her crying out during the night disrupted Léonie's rest and led to nightmares that terrified her. The household is so dependent on routine that neighbors ask before they do things that will break in on it.
The Combray routines are so intricate as to have regular variations that become part of a "uniform pattern upon the great uniformity of [Léonie's] life." (p.153). Saturdays are an example of this because, being a market day, lunch is served an hour earlier. The family is dependent upon the routine which is not just lived, but greeted and discussed like an active presence in their lives, and even has the ability to seemingly alter time:
But there's a softer side of habit that makes it attractive. M defines this for us, humanizing it further, upon returning home from a long walk with his family:
Hawthorns. MP falls in love with them at the Month of Mary (May) devotions, when they are used to decorate the church. This, and their white color, gives them almost a holy meaning, but MP also recognizes their origin in nature:
(p.156) a vision that, having read the volume once, I can say is foreshadowing of another young girl amongst the hawthorns.
M. Venteuil and daughter at church. M. Vinteuil is a piano teacher whose wife is now dead. He will not socialize with Swann because of Swann's "most unsuitable marriage" (p.156). His daughter is described as "boyish" and "robust" with a "mannish face" (p.156-157)
On their way home MP's father takes them on a detour. MP's mother has no sense of direction and relies entirely on his father to get them home. We have seen this before, her deference to his "superior mind" (on p.12).
On their walk M compares the gardens to the art of Hubert Robert (p.159). Perhaps I should have labeled this art and nature, but I'll file it under art in life.
And I see that Léonie is fueling the fire between Françoise and Eulalie by feeding each of them false fears about the other, which in turn goes to convince even her of Françoise's unfaithfulness. Although it would seem that it is all untrue, and that Léonie as a character is just full of a morbid quality that makes her imagine the death of her family so that she can morn them, and makes her imagine infidelity in her servants so that she can be cruel to them.
Cool stuff:
Hawthorn in flower (photo by David Hawgood on Geograph)
Hubert Robert (p.159) was an 18th century French artist. He painted "fashionably dilapidated gardens" for clients.
The Combray routines are so intricate as to have regular variations that become part of a "uniform pattern upon the great uniformity of [Léonie's] life." (p.153). Saturdays are an example of this because, being a market day, lunch is served an hour earlier. The family is dependent upon the routine which is not just lived, but greeted and discussed like an active presence in their lives, and even has the ability to seemingly alter time:
"The very face of the sky appeared to undergo a change. After lunch the sun, conscious that it was Saturday, would blaze an hour longer in the zenith, and when someone, thinking that we were late in starting for our walk, said, 'What, only two o'clock!' on registering the passage of the twin strokes from the steeple of Saint-Hilaire...the whole family would respond in chorus: 'Why, you're forgetting we had lunch an hour earlier; you know very well it's Saturday.'" (p.154)The Saturday change in routine has the effect of uniting the family against outsiders who know nothing of it. They refer to outsiders as "barbarians," speak to them with ridicule, make fun of them between themselves. This gives the characteristics of a group mentality, like a clique.
But there's a softer side of habit that makes it attractive. M defines this for us, humanizing it further, upon returning home from a long walk with his family:
"And from that instant I did not have to take another step; the ground moved forward under my feet in that garden where for so long my actions had ceased to require any control, or even attention, from my will. Habit had come to take me in her arms and carry me all the way up to my bed like a little child." (p.160)And still it is as though Léonie wishes to be rid of her need for habit. Every week she longs for the variety that Saturday brings, and even more than that M implies that she has "exceptional moments when one thirsts for something other than what is" (p.161) even though she does not have the energy to bring it about. She is a slave to her habits. In fact, it is her habit of illness that is weakening her:
"And I have no doubt that then...she would extract from the accumulation of these monotonous days which she treasured so much a keen expectation of some domestic cataclysm, momentary in its duration but violent enough to compel her to put into effect, once for all, one of those changes which she knew would be beneficial to her health but to which she could never make up her mind without some such stimulus." (p.161)
Hawthorns. MP falls in love with them at the Month of Mary (May) devotions, when they are used to decorate the church. This, and their white color, gives them almost a holy meaning, but MP also recognizes their origin in nature:
"I could sense that this formal scheme was composed of living things, and that it was Nature herself who, by trimming the shape of the foliage, and by adding the crowning ornament of those snowy buds, had made the decorations worthy of what was at once a public rejoicing and a solemn mystery." (p.156)And also sees in them "a swift and thoughtless movement of the head, with a provocative glance from her contracted pupils, by a young girl in white, insouciant and vivacious."
(p.156) a vision that, having read the volume once, I can say is foreshadowing of another young girl amongst the hawthorns.
M. Venteuil and daughter at church. M. Vinteuil is a piano teacher whose wife is now dead. He will not socialize with Swann because of Swann's "most unsuitable marriage" (p.156). His daughter is described as "boyish" and "robust" with a "mannish face" (p.156-157)
On their way home MP's father takes them on a detour. MP's mother has no sense of direction and relies entirely on his father to get them home. We have seen this before, her deference to his "superior mind" (on p.12).
On their walk M compares the gardens to the art of Hubert Robert (p.159). Perhaps I should have labeled this art and nature, but I'll file it under art in life.
And I see that Léonie is fueling the fire between Françoise and Eulalie by feeding each of them false fears about the other, which in turn goes to convince even her of Françoise's unfaithfulness. Although it would seem that it is all untrue, and that Léonie as a character is just full of a morbid quality that makes her imagine the death of her family so that she can morn them, and makes her imagine infidelity in her servants so that she can be cruel to them.
Cool stuff:
Hawthorn in flower (photo by David Hawgood on Geograph)
Hubert Robert (p.159) was an 18th century French artist. He painted "fashionably dilapidated gardens" for clients.
Friday, July 8, 2011
On George Sand, and incenst
"I was only too delighted, and Mamma went to fetch a parcel of books of which I could not distinguish, through the paper in which they were wrapped, any more than their short, wide format but which, even at this first glimpse, brief and obscure as it was, bade fair to eclipse already the paintbox of New Year's Day and the silkworms of the year before. The books were La Mare au Diable, Francois le Champi, La Petite Fadette and Les Maitres Sonneurs." (pp.52)
"La Mare au Diable", "Francois le Champi", "La Petite Fadette" and "Les Maitres Sonneurs" are all works of George Sand.
George Sand was the pseudonym of Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin (1804-1876) lived and wrote during the 1848 revolution that ultimately brought about the third republic. She started life in a pretty standard way for time period, married and had two children, then left her husband in 1831. From there she diverged from the customary; She wore mens clothing, she openly smoked tobacco, and she lived an independent life prolific in writing and love affairs. She was a contemporary and lover of Chopin and Musset, among others, and a close friend of Flaubert. I have not read any of her works, but understand from their synopses that she wrote often about romantic affairs and used her novels to paint a picture of French customs and class and gender discrepancies while paving the way for stronger female literary characters. Again, since I haven't read them this is speculation based on summaries I've read here and there.
Two Sand factoids interest me most with regard to Proust. First, that some of her works may have challenged traditional gender roles, the word lesbianism having been thrown around some. We'll see that in "Search" as well. Second, that she wrote strong female characters into her novels, including one, in "The Country Waif", that ends up having a love affair with, and marrying, her adopted son. The word incest comes to mind, and so does Proust's very strong attachment to his own mother. That The Country Waif is the exact novel his mother reads to him on the night she spends with him in his room should not be skipped over. Beginning on pg.16, in his book "Proust, Beckett, and Narration", James H. Reid discusses the narrator's mother and her reading on that night.
Stage 4, incest and silence... from "Proust and the Sense of Time", by Julia Kristeva
p. 16 of "Proust, Becket, and Narration", by James H. Reid,
George Sand on Wikipedia
George Sand on AMSAW
"La Mare au Diable", "Francois le Champi", "La Petite Fadette" and "Les Maitres Sonneurs" are all works of George Sand.
George Sand was the pseudonym of Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin (1804-1876) lived and wrote during the 1848 revolution that ultimately brought about the third republic. She started life in a pretty standard way for time period, married and had two children, then left her husband in 1831. From there she diverged from the customary; She wore mens clothing, she openly smoked tobacco, and she lived an independent life prolific in writing and love affairs. She was a contemporary and lover of Chopin and Musset, among others, and a close friend of Flaubert. I have not read any of her works, but understand from their synopses that she wrote often about romantic affairs and used her novels to paint a picture of French customs and class and gender discrepancies while paving the way for stronger female literary characters. Again, since I haven't read them this is speculation based on summaries I've read here and there.
Two Sand factoids interest me most with regard to Proust. First, that some of her works may have challenged traditional gender roles, the word lesbianism having been thrown around some. We'll see that in "Search" as well. Second, that she wrote strong female characters into her novels, including one, in "The Country Waif", that ends up having a love affair with, and marrying, her adopted son. The word incest comes to mind, and so does Proust's very strong attachment to his own mother. That The Country Waif is the exact novel his mother reads to him on the night she spends with him in his room should not be skipped over. Beginning on pg.16, in his book "Proust, Beckett, and Narration", James H. Reid discusses the narrator's mother and her reading on that night.
Stage 4, incest and silence... from "Proust and the Sense of Time", by Julia Kristeva
p. 16 of "Proust, Becket, and Narration", by James H. Reid,
George Sand on Wikipedia
George Sand on AMSAW
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Swann's Way, Combray I, pp.35-58
At a dinner party our young narrator is sent to bed without being able to say goodnight to his mother. Swann is the dinner guest, and we meet Francoise, a house maid, who is described as uncompromising and ancient and devoted to the family.
A connection made between narrator and Swann: "As for the agony through which I had just passed, I imagined that Swann would have laughed heartily at it if he had read my letter and had guessed its purpose; whereas, on the contrary, as I was to learn in due course, a similar anguish had been the bane of his life for many years, and no one perhaps could have understood my feelings at that moment so well as he ;" (p.39) Foreshadowing/social triangulation
Our narrator has a nervous nature. This is played out in his waiting anxiously for his mother to come to bed so he can ambush her, on the stairway outside his door, into kissing him goodnight, even at the risk of angering both her and his father. Here, as he waits in the hall, memory is linked with sense of smell, and again with the inflexibility of place—the staircase as a horrible location because it signified the separation from his mother.
When he meets his mother his father arrives soon after, but gives him no punishment. In general the narrator believed his father to be hasty or unfair, which left him somewhat afraid of his father, or uncertain ("Even at the moment when it manifested itself in this crowning mercy, my father's behaviour towards me still retained that arbitrary and unwarranted quality which was so characteristic of him..." [p.49-50]), but he does not doubt that his father loves him.
He is reunited with his mother, who spends the night reading (George Sand novels) to him in his room, but his victory at this moment is actually a loss of innocence, which he writes "brought me of a sudden to a sort of puberty of sorrow, a manumission of tears. I ought then to have been happy; I was not. It struck me that my mother had just made a first concession which must have been painful to her, that it was a first abdication on her part from the ideal she had formed for me..." (p.51)
In regard to the books we learn more about the grandmother, who is strongly connected to the past, to the old, to the un-useful.
She "could never permit herself to buy anything from which no intellectual profit was to be derived, above all the profit which fine things afford us by teaching us to seek our pleasures elsewhere than n the barren satisfaction of worldly wealth." (p.53) And when forced to buy something "useful" "would choose antiques, as though their long desuetude had effaced from them any semblance of utility and fitted them rather to instruct us in the lives of the men of other days than to serve the common requirements of our own." (p.53)
She prefers the antique to something more conventional and useful. Even in books she has chosen for him George Sand novels which he accuses of being "regular lumber-rooms full of expressions that have fallen out of use and become quaint and picturesque..", and she prefers ancient depictions of place as well, avoiding photographs in favor of prints (or photographs of prints) or artists' renderings.
Art in life
"...[I] would so prepare my thoughts as to be able, thanks to these mental preliminaries, to consecrate the whole of the minute Mamma would grant me to the sensation of her cheek against my lips, as a painter who can have his subject for short sittings only prepares his palette, and from what he remembers and from rough notes does in advance everything which he possibly can do in the sitter's absence." (p.35)
Art imitating life is not always accurate, as images of paintings of locations (Venice) do not always portray them accurately.
Time and memory
Perception is a part of reality. Is it immovable? Movement through the class system, for instance, breaks the concept of immobility in reality, but perception of class is maintained, as when we meet Francoise:
"refinements of etiquette which nothing in Francoise's background or in her career as a servant in a village household could have put into her head; and we were obliged to assume that there was latent in her some past existence in the ancient history of France, noble and little understood, as is in those manufacturing towns where old mansions still testify to their former courtly days, and chemical workers toil among delicately sculptured scenes of the Miracle of Theophilus or The Quatre Fils Aymon." (p.37-38)
Francoise may in reality have changed class status, but yet she holds onto her original status as immoveable. This way she is a blend of past and present.
The Miracle of Theophilus and the Quatre Fils Aymon are both French textual works from the middle ages, another blending of time periods like the references to Golo and Genevieve de Brabant.
And in reference to Swann, immobility of perception:
"said my great-aunt, 'what a change I find in Swann. He is quite antiquated!' She had grown so accustomed to seeing Swann always in the same stage of adolescence that it was a shock to her to find him suddenly less young than the age she still attributed to him." (p.45)
Compare this to the immobility of perception of a person's character or physical appearance mentioned on p.23 (always the same for one, never the same for any two people), and of physical space on p.5: "perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves and not anything else, by the immobility of our conception of them."
And the difference between the physical state of something, and its state in our memory is revisited often, like here in the staircase as he stands with his mother before his father arrives:
"Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase, up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb, was long ago demolished...It is a long time, too, since my father has been able to tell mamma to 'Go along with the child.' Never again will such moments be possible for me. But of late I have been increasingly able to catch, if I listen attentively, the sound of the sobs which I had the strength to control in my father's presence, and which broke out only when I found myself alone with Mamma. In reality their echo has never ceased;" (p.49)
Love as pain
Our narrator loves his mother so much that he suffers for the emotion. We spend the latter part of this section mired in his anguish over a missed goodnight kiss, and then suffer with him a loss of innocence even after he receives it. Love is pain and suffering, because even when achieved it cannot atone for the struggle, or it cannot live up to the desire.
Then Swann is "much less unhappy of late" because "he no longer loves that [his wife]." (p.45)
And the role of the social triangle:
"Alas! Swann had learned by experience that the good intentions of a third party are powerless to influence a woman who is annoyed to find herself pursued even into a ball-room by a man whom she does not love. Too often, the kind friend comes down again alone." (p.41)
Vocabulary, etc.:
viaticum (p.36, noun) 1. Communion as given to a dying person, 2. provisions for travel
desuetude (p.53, noun) 1. The state of being no longer used or practiced
Benozzo Gozzoli was an Italian Renaissance painter from the 15th century, but I was unable to find an image of the print or painting mentioned (of Abraham and Sarah, p.49)
A connection made between narrator and Swann: "As for the agony through which I had just passed, I imagined that Swann would have laughed heartily at it if he had read my letter and had guessed its purpose; whereas, on the contrary, as I was to learn in due course, a similar anguish had been the bane of his life for many years, and no one perhaps could have understood my feelings at that moment so well as he ;" (p.39) Foreshadowing/social triangulation
Our narrator has a nervous nature. This is played out in his waiting anxiously for his mother to come to bed so he can ambush her, on the stairway outside his door, into kissing him goodnight, even at the risk of angering both her and his father. Here, as he waits in the hall, memory is linked with sense of smell, and again with the inflexibility of place—the staircase as a horrible location because it signified the separation from his mother.
When he meets his mother his father arrives soon after, but gives him no punishment. In general the narrator believed his father to be hasty or unfair, which left him somewhat afraid of his father, or uncertain ("Even at the moment when it manifested itself in this crowning mercy, my father's behaviour towards me still retained that arbitrary and unwarranted quality which was so characteristic of him..." [p.49-50]), but he does not doubt that his father loves him.
He is reunited with his mother, who spends the night reading (George Sand novels) to him in his room, but his victory at this moment is actually a loss of innocence, which he writes "brought me of a sudden to a sort of puberty of sorrow, a manumission of tears. I ought then to have been happy; I was not. It struck me that my mother had just made a first concession which must have been painful to her, that it was a first abdication on her part from the ideal she had formed for me..." (p.51)
In regard to the books we learn more about the grandmother, who is strongly connected to the past, to the old, to the un-useful.
She "could never permit herself to buy anything from which no intellectual profit was to be derived, above all the profit which fine things afford us by teaching us to seek our pleasures elsewhere than n the barren satisfaction of worldly wealth." (p.53) And when forced to buy something "useful" "would choose antiques, as though their long desuetude had effaced from them any semblance of utility and fitted them rather to instruct us in the lives of the men of other days than to serve the common requirements of our own." (p.53)
She prefers the antique to something more conventional and useful. Even in books she has chosen for him George Sand novels which he accuses of being "regular lumber-rooms full of expressions that have fallen out of use and become quaint and picturesque..", and she prefers ancient depictions of place as well, avoiding photographs in favor of prints (or photographs of prints) or artists' renderings.
Art in life
"...[I] would so prepare my thoughts as to be able, thanks to these mental preliminaries, to consecrate the whole of the minute Mamma would grant me to the sensation of her cheek against my lips, as a painter who can have his subject for short sittings only prepares his palette, and from what he remembers and from rough notes does in advance everything which he possibly can do in the sitter's absence." (p.35)
Art imitating life is not always accurate, as images of paintings of locations (Venice) do not always portray them accurately.
Time and memory
Perception is a part of reality. Is it immovable? Movement through the class system, for instance, breaks the concept of immobility in reality, but perception of class is maintained, as when we meet Francoise:
"refinements of etiquette which nothing in Francoise's background or in her career as a servant in a village household could have put into her head; and we were obliged to assume that there was latent in her some past existence in the ancient history of France, noble and little understood, as is in those manufacturing towns where old mansions still testify to their former courtly days, and chemical workers toil among delicately sculptured scenes of the Miracle of Theophilus or The Quatre Fils Aymon." (p.37-38)
Francoise may in reality have changed class status, but yet she holds onto her original status as immoveable. This way she is a blend of past and present.
The Miracle of Theophilus and the Quatre Fils Aymon are both French textual works from the middle ages, another blending of time periods like the references to Golo and Genevieve de Brabant.
And in reference to Swann, immobility of perception:
"said my great-aunt, 'what a change I find in Swann. He is quite antiquated!' She had grown so accustomed to seeing Swann always in the same stage of adolescence that it was a shock to her to find him suddenly less young than the age she still attributed to him." (p.45)
Compare this to the immobility of perception of a person's character or physical appearance mentioned on p.23 (always the same for one, never the same for any two people), and of physical space on p.5: "perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves and not anything else, by the immobility of our conception of them."
And the difference between the physical state of something, and its state in our memory is revisited often, like here in the staircase as he stands with his mother before his father arrives:
"Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase, up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb, was long ago demolished...It is a long time, too, since my father has been able to tell mamma to 'Go along with the child.' Never again will such moments be possible for me. But of late I have been increasingly able to catch, if I listen attentively, the sound of the sobs which I had the strength to control in my father's presence, and which broke out only when I found myself alone with Mamma. In reality their echo has never ceased;" (p.49)
Love as pain
Our narrator loves his mother so much that he suffers for the emotion. We spend the latter part of this section mired in his anguish over a missed goodnight kiss, and then suffer with him a loss of innocence even after he receives it. Love is pain and suffering, because even when achieved it cannot atone for the struggle, or it cannot live up to the desire.
Then Swann is "much less unhappy of late" because "he no longer loves that [his wife]." (p.45)
And the role of the social triangle:
"Alas! Swann had learned by experience that the good intentions of a third party are powerless to influence a woman who is annoyed to find herself pursued even into a ball-room by a man whom she does not love. Too often, the kind friend comes down again alone." (p.41)
Vocabulary, etc.:
viaticum (p.36, noun) 1. Communion as given to a dying person, 2. provisions for travel
desuetude (p.53, noun) 1. The state of being no longer used or practiced
Benozzo Gozzoli was an Italian Renaissance painter from the 15th century, but I was unable to find an image of the print or painting mentioned (of Abraham and Sarah, p.49)
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Swann's Way, Combray I, pp. 1-15
An hour with the book and my computer and that's all the farther I got before it was time to make dinner.
Overview:
The state of memory, space and time fluidity. Where is the narrator, and when? Is he young? Old? An invalid? Is he remembering his fear of his uncle or is he remembering the instance of that fear? Or are these things the same? (Ahhh...waking up and thinking you are somewhere else. But he describes it so much more eloquently.)
Our narrator (our Proust) is searching for his memories, and the narration seems confused and wild, but it's actually following a very careful order. He begins by reaching wildly and time and space are confused, then he slowly settles on more distinct places, times, and people, and we see him go from vague memories to more specific stories (and finally he tastes the madeleine cakes, which trigger the next set of memories, and so on, but I'm not there yet on this second read).
From within this twilight state he mentions place names and people, possibly in foreshadowing or a roadmap: locations such as Combray and Tansonville, Balbec (Is it a hilarity or a commercial ploy that someone named their anti-aging cream Combray?), and people like Swann.
My own, possibly silly, thoughts:
His grandmother reminds me of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that great French philosopher who embraced nature and believed children should be allowed to run around in downpours and go barefooted in winter.
Some things to pay attention to?
Travel or the train station (pp 2, 10)
the mother/son relationship (pp 6, 15)
the magic lantern (pp 9-10)
Genevieve de Brabant and Golo (pp 10-12)
The social triangle
The magic lantern was a new one on me, and so was the story of Genevieve de Brabant and Golo. I don't know if we'll see a return of the lantern later in the book, but I found it interesting as a tool melding the distant past (Merovingian) to the present. And Genevieve is the wife and mother, falsely accused by Golo of infidelity with him against her husband, who is to be put to death but escapes and is aided by a roe deer in caring for her son. Later she is cleared and re-accepted by her husband. There is an obvious link here to the mother/son relationship, and possibly also to that between mother and father/husband and wife, and our first example of the social triangle.
Then there is his grandmother whose sister keeps tempting his grandfather with liqueurs he shouldn't have, thus creating unrest between the husband and wife (p.13-14), another social triangle.
And the narrator's familial relationship, the son insinuating himself between the mother and father, and sometimes additional guests taking a place as well (pp.15+), more social triangles.
Passages/quotes worth noting:
p.1-2 "I could hear the whistling of trains, which, now nearer and now farther off, punctuating the distance like the note of a bird in a forest, showed me in perspective the deserted countryside through which a traveler would be hurrying towards the nearby station; and the path he is taking will be engraved in his memory by the excitement induced by strange surroundings, by unaccustomed activities, by the conversation he has had and the farewells exchanged beneath an unfamiliar lamp that will still echo in his ears amid the silence of the night, and by the happy prospect of being home again."
p.8 "Habit! That skilful but slow-moving arrranger who begins by letting our minds suffer for weeks on end in temporary quarters, but whom our minds are none the less only too happy to discover at last, for without it, reduced to their own devices, they would be powerless to make any room seem habitable."
p.12 "...while my mother, keeping very quiet so as not to disturb [my father], looked at him with tender respect, but not too hard, not wishing to penetrate the mysteries of his superior mind."
p.15 "Sometimes when, after kissing me, [my mother] opened the door to go, I longed to call her back, to say to her 'Kiss me just once more,' but I knew that then she would at once look displeased, for the concession which she made to my wretchedness and agitation in coming up to give me this kiss of peace always annoyed my father, who thought such ceremonies absurd..."
Overview:
The state of memory, space and time fluidity. Where is the narrator, and when? Is he young? Old? An invalid? Is he remembering his fear of his uncle or is he remembering the instance of that fear? Or are these things the same? (Ahhh...waking up and thinking you are somewhere else. But he describes it so much more eloquently.)
Our narrator (our Proust) is searching for his memories, and the narration seems confused and wild, but it's actually following a very careful order. He begins by reaching wildly and time and space are confused, then he slowly settles on more distinct places, times, and people, and we see him go from vague memories to more specific stories (and finally he tastes the madeleine cakes, which trigger the next set of memories, and so on, but I'm not there yet on this second read).
From within this twilight state he mentions place names and people, possibly in foreshadowing or a roadmap: locations such as Combray and Tansonville, Balbec (Is it a hilarity or a commercial ploy that someone named their anti-aging cream Combray?), and people like Swann.
My own, possibly silly, thoughts:
His grandmother reminds me of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that great French philosopher who embraced nature and believed children should be allowed to run around in downpours and go barefooted in winter.
Some things to pay attention to?
Travel or the train station (pp 2, 10)
the mother/son relationship (pp 6, 15)
the magic lantern (pp 9-10)
Genevieve de Brabant and Golo (pp 10-12)
The social triangle
The magic lantern was a new one on me, and so was the story of Genevieve de Brabant and Golo. I don't know if we'll see a return of the lantern later in the book, but I found it interesting as a tool melding the distant past (Merovingian) to the present. And Genevieve is the wife and mother, falsely accused by Golo of infidelity with him against her husband, who is to be put to death but escapes and is aided by a roe deer in caring for her son. Later she is cleared and re-accepted by her husband. There is an obvious link here to the mother/son relationship, and possibly also to that between mother and father/husband and wife, and our first example of the social triangle.
Then there is his grandmother whose sister keeps tempting his grandfather with liqueurs he shouldn't have, thus creating unrest between the husband and wife (p.13-14), another social triangle.
And the narrator's familial relationship, the son insinuating himself between the mother and father, and sometimes additional guests taking a place as well (pp.15+), more social triangles.
Passages/quotes worth noting:
p.1-2 "I could hear the whistling of trains, which, now nearer and now farther off, punctuating the distance like the note of a bird in a forest, showed me in perspective the deserted countryside through which a traveler would be hurrying towards the nearby station; and the path he is taking will be engraved in his memory by the excitement induced by strange surroundings, by unaccustomed activities, by the conversation he has had and the farewells exchanged beneath an unfamiliar lamp that will still echo in his ears amid the silence of the night, and by the happy prospect of being home again."
p.8 "Habit! That skilful but slow-moving arrranger who begins by letting our minds suffer for weeks on end in temporary quarters, but whom our minds are none the less only too happy to discover at last, for without it, reduced to their own devices, they would be powerless to make any room seem habitable."
p.12 "...while my mother, keeping very quiet so as not to disturb [my father], looked at him with tender respect, but not too hard, not wishing to penetrate the mysteries of his superior mind."
p.15 "Sometimes when, after kissing me, [my mother] opened the door to go, I longed to call her back, to say to her 'Kiss me just once more,' but I knew that then she would at once look displeased, for the concession which she made to my wretchedness and agitation in coming up to give me this kiss of peace always annoyed my father, who thought such ceremonies absurd..."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)