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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Sixty-five pages a day is a good goal. Devoting less than an hour every day to "In Search of Lost Time" hardly gets you in the mood, and devoting more than an hour and a half a day for over two months might interfere with your other responsibilities. At the very least, you have to build up some momentum, but not be tempted to skip. (I skipped four pages in the fifth volume when I felt he was being repetitious in his complaints about his captive, Albertine.) Since "In Search of Lost Time" is a story and an essay on what stories mean, skipping sections quickly turns into stopping altogether as you lose the thread of his argument and the relationship of his argument to his story. Besides, there is no way to imbibe his "strange and individual tone of voice," both the Proust-ness of it and the Frenchness of it, without prolonged exposure.
Proust's seven volumes ("Swann's Way," "Within a Budding Grove," "The Guermantes Way," "Sodom and Gomorrah," "The Captive," "The Fugitive," and "Time Regained") form a cycle. They are not, though they pretend to be, Proust's memoir. Many significant facts have been changed to enhance the effect of the novel, in order for it to seem, to the author and the reader, to actually recapture the past -- that is, Proust's childhood and the ambience of pre-World War I France. Here is where the madeleine comes in. Shortly after telling about his single night of bliss with his mother, he recounts how it was a family custom to visit his elderly great-aunt on Sunday afternoons. As refreshment, she often offered her visitors madeleines and cups of lime-flower tisane. When, as a young man, M. happens to enjoy this combination again, a sense memory of visits to the long dead great-aunt returns to him. As he gets older, and the volumes of the novel progress, he despairs of making anything of his life and his literary aspirations until several repeated instances of this effect show him how he might portray scenes and senses from his past with enough intensity to go beyond memory, and therefore beyond loss, grief and sadness. In the last volume, he tells how three sense memories in a short space of time motivate him to finally get started, and to produce the seven volumes you have beside your bed.
M. is a friendly fellow, and the past he wishes to recapture is a possibly unique period of European and French history -- the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As you progress through "Within a Budding Grove" you will certainly be able to picture it when you think of all the Matisse, Pissarro, Cezanne, Toulouse-Lautrec and Monet paintings you have ever seen. The light is bright, ocean and sky are everywhere, the human figures are beautifully dressed, and that astonishing combination of lush vegetation and stone buildings that is the French countryside is constantly in your mind. Here are the mirrored cafes and there is the flashily attired army on parade, and M. and his friend Albertine even see a hot-air balloon. But after all, M. is French, and closely related, in a literary sense, to the Marquis de Sade on one side and Honoré de Balzac on the other.
In Paris, there is society -- which M. investigates at length in Vol. 3, when he becomes something of a protégé to a very wealthy and aristocratic neighbor, Madame de Guermantes. By this time, M. is in his early 20s. At first he is fascinated with everything that Madame de Guermantes stands for in French society and French history. Her family is older and more aristocratic than that of the king, or, indeed, of any king. Kings and queens litter her get-togethers and she does them the favor of being kind to them, even though she prefers the company of M. She laughs at her own lineage and prides herself on being modern and ordinary, but M. does not let you forget the lands and the architecture that Madame de Guermantes is the human embodiment of. You feel a bit privileged to be at her parties, in fact.
And then there is love, which M. explores by imprisoning his beloved Albertine (who is based not on a girl but on a man Proust loved named Agostinelli) in his house in Paris (Vol. 5) and keeping her until she manages to escape and run away (Vol. 6). It is clear from the beginning that M. is ambivalent about Albertine. When he meets her, she is part of a larger group of girls who are breezy, active and liberated. They play tennis and ride bicycles, perhaps have lovers, and perhaps are each other's lovers (M. can never decide). He chooses Albertine out of the group almost by chance, but once he has chosen her, he becomes obsessed with her, while also doubting whether he can marry her, or, indeed, marry at all. He lures her to his Paris maison while his mother is away in the country and keeps her there, partly by promising her marriage and partly by giving her gifts. Whenever she acts trustworthy and affectionate, he is put off and grows bored. Only when she arouses his jealousy does he actually experience love (remember, this is a book about a very young man). During this section, you might want to take a break. I did, of about a week. I read "R Is for Ricochet," by Sue Grafton.
