Reading Proust: The First 200 Pages
Addressing a New Year’s resolution, I began reading Marcel Proust’s wonderful, demanding, lengthy novel, In Search of Lost Time, on February 12. This is my third time negotiating Proust’s labyrinthine sentences, ample poetic prose, and philosophical explorations, my last journey was in 2008. By happy coincidence, a new literary article on the novel was published on February 8 entitled, “Reading Proust Is Like Climbing a Mountain – Prepare Accordingly.” It reemphasized the importance of my planning for Proust this past December.
The article states: “Proust doesn’t write day hikes, Proust is more like the Appalachian Trail.” Which is true enough. His sentences and paragraphs meander through all sorts of interrelated ideas, often presented in little more than stream of consciousness, though there is a clear narrative structure accentuated with a luxurious maze beautiful and eloquent phrases. The article suggests that a reader tackle the massive work in 20-30 page increments, taking every fourth day off.
Since I am a Proust veteran, my own pace is a bit faster than that, closer to 40-50 pages per sitting but I haven't had very many sittings yet. The rest of my life has consumed much of my time of late, but now I am ready to focus. So far I have read the first 200 pages as I finished up a couple of other books and dealt with work and family in the real world. When I started rereading the novel I was uncertain as to what my pace would be. Would I race through the book over a series of several weeks as I did in my first reading? Or would I move at a more leisurely pace and complete it over 8-9 months as with my second reading?
To date, I am leaning toward the later approach, perhaps taking even longer. I find that my third reading of the novel is opening up new insights into the work and some passages are worth reading 2-3 times before moving on, savoring the exquisite verbosity and the mindful investigations of the narrator. As with a long backpacking journey, I have found my first resting spot. The first 200 pages is a good stopping point to reflect on the novel’s journey and to blog about the multifaceted, if sometimes challenging, experience of reading it.
I am reading the 1992 revised translation of the novel by D. J. Enright, which is the translation I read my second time through the novel. Before that my first reading was a translation by the Terence Kilmartin, Remembrance of Things Past, updated in 1981 but loyal to the original English rendering by C.K. Scott Moncrieff from the 1920’s. Though I am reading Enright, I have Kilmartin handy. It is marked up from my first time reading the novel. I use the older version to scout out sections that were of interest to me as a novice and compare those with my second-time notations and new ones being made as I read it for the third time. Due to the difference in font size, 200 pages in Enright is equal to 155 pages in Kilmartin.
During these first 200 pages a great deal is happening for the reader to consider, though it may seem like nothing is happening at all to someone new to Proust. “For a long time I would go to bed early.” The novel’s first sentence is a statement by an overarching narrator about himself as a child being sent to bed by his parents. Then the scene almost continuously shifts through the child trying to fall asleep, and as an older man too, in all the many bedrooms of his life, battling the random, racing brain of insomnia.
Finally, the shifting narrator settles as the boy who is accustomed to having his mother kiss him and read to him before sleep. Only tonight there is a social party and his mother must remain with her guests. The boy is miserable. Ultimately, the mother ends up kissing him and reading to him after all. Many readers find these first 58 pages of the novel impossible to get through. Proust’s prose is eloquent though sprawled out at a snail’s pace of actual narrative momentum. He goes on and on and on and on and…until you sometimes forget what the subject of the sentence is even about. Instead you are enjoying (or being bogged down by) a multitude of mini-poetic prose essays about the details of the characters lives.
Then (so early yet!) comes the most famous passage in the whole novel. After many years of not giving it any thought, a mid-adult aged version of the narrator (Proust’s narration involves multiple levels of perspective which is part of the fascination about the work) is sitting and having a madeleine cake dipped in a cup of tea. Suddenly, when he tastes the cake, a flood of memory overwhelms him and he is back at Combray, Proust’s fictitious quaint upper-class town near the Normandy coast. The boy would go there in the summer’s to visit his aunt. The writing over these several pages is lyrical, a pleasure to read.
"No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shiver ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin." (page 60) The narrator struggles to grasp the significance of his feeling, but he can't pin it down until...
“And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray, when I used to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Leonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane….But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.” (pp. 63-64)
At 65 pages we come to Part II of the opening section entitled “Combray.” Whereas in the first section Combray is mentioned in passing as another place where he had trouble falling asleep as a boy, in the second section Combray comes alive with intricate details about the town’s street structure, its buildings with particular repeated reference to the church steeple in the middle of town, its people and street life; the boy’s home life staying at his aunt. He was a sickly child (like Proust) and he loved to read (like Proust).
At page 104 the boy happens to interrupt his uncle as the married older gentleman is hosting “the lady in pink,” a young woman who immediately captivates the boy. The narrator is too young to understand what is happening and is simply mystified by it all. His uncle tells the boy to not say anything about any of this but, of course, the boy tells his parents everything, not seeing how this would impact his uncle. The family banished him and the boy only saw him in passing after that.
Proust posits the philosophical question on the significance of involuntary memory with the madeleine cake moment. He becomes more deeply philosophical on page 115, a trait that will re-emerge through the rest of the novel, which features multiple philosophical themes. In this case we are dealing with the relationship of reading to the actual world.
In the actual world, everyone is “opaque” to me. I cannot be aware of them without being aware that I am aware of them, which means I can never know them directly. But through stories, the reader can know every feeling and opinion, every hope and fear of the characters. Though fictionalized, the fact is this transparency of knowing someone fully is relatable to the real world. We all share in the joys and tragedies of characters in literature. This allows us to relate on a level very rarely reached in an everyday face-to-face encounter. And it also allows us to assign to various people we know the insight gained from reading and experiencing these characters. Reading is a living part of the world. Fundamentally, it will be the boy’s experience of reading that will lead him to want to become a writer himself, to show others the reality of the world through fictionalized characters, as Proust does.
Life in Combray is rather routine. Everyone has their place and their duties and their schedule. The boy spends most of his time reading. To his delight, he discovers the fictitious author Bergotte. Proust creates special characters throughout his novel who represent and to celebrate the arts. Bergotte fulfills the role of artistic writer. It should be pointed out that the much of the naarative at this stage of the novel is told in words reflecting the boy's perspective. As he ages, the boy will become a teen who will become a young man and so on into old age. This maturation leads to more sophisticated modes of expression and feelings in the later books of the novel. At this point, Proust keeps his descriptions on the surface of things and uses phrases like “things half-felt by me, half-incomprehensible, the full understanding of which is the vague but permanent object of my thoughts.” (page 116) This is the experience of a curious but innocent child. Where needed, the overarching narrator, an older man we will meet near the end of the novel, chimes in to bring understanding beyond the boy’s narrative grasp.
When not reading, the boy takes part in walks with various adults. There are two main paths around the Vivonne river near Combray. The Guermantes Way is the longer path so most walks are taken along the Meseglise Way also known as Swann’s Way since it takes the hiker near the Swann estate, Tansonville. Swann is a wealthy man of leisure and a frequent visitor to boy’s summer house, enjoying the company of his parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. He always comes alone, however, due to his marriage to a woman of lesser reputation. She is not welcome and is, therefore, a mystery to the boy.
Proust takes us on a walk one fine summer day with the boy and his grandfather. Here the reader is treated to pages of detailed lyrical writing of the lilacs and, particularly, the hawthorns along the walk. The rich sense of nature consumes the boy’s experience of the walk. Just as he is admiring some particular pink, fragrant hawthorns the boy sees a girl.
“Suddenly I stood still, unable to move, as happens when we are faced with a vision that appeals not to our eyes only but requires a deeper kind perception and takes possession of the whole of our being.” (page 197) He explores every little detail his eyes can see of her until a lady calls “Gilberte, come along; what are you doing?”
“Thus was wafted to my ears the name Gilberte, bestowed on me like a talisman which might, perhaps, enable me to one day rediscover the girl that its syllables had just endowed with an identity, whereas a moment before she had merely an uncertain image.” (page 199) The lovely moment of the boy with the hawthorns is transformed into a powerful and captivating instant where the boy feels the first notions of attraction, perhaps initially stirred by the mystery he felt for the “lady in pink” earlier.
The boy doesn’t actually see Mademoiselle Swann to this point. She is rumored to be having an affair with a wealthy gentleman named Charlus. Having it, in fact, at Tansonville while sending Swann away to visit others – which only makes her shunned by the boy’s family all the more. How scandalous!
So it is that the novel is set up 200 pages in. Many of the important characters have been introduced along with the style and general tone of the novel. Proust has established that the boy has an affinity for reading, imagination, and the mystery of the opposite sex. The lyrical prose of each character, with places like Swann’s Way and Combray being no less characters in Proust’s treatment of them, makes for rich and inspiring reading. Proust has the uncanny ability to make the ordinary into the extraordinary with his joyous, exploding verbosity. And the theme of voluntary versus involuntary memory has been presented.
We’re just getting started on this very long hike, however. Onward!
The article states: “Proust doesn’t write day hikes, Proust is more like the Appalachian Trail.” Which is true enough. His sentences and paragraphs meander through all sorts of interrelated ideas, often presented in little more than stream of consciousness, though there is a clear narrative structure accentuated with a luxurious maze beautiful and eloquent phrases. The article suggests that a reader tackle the massive work in 20-30 page increments, taking every fourth day off.
Since I am a Proust veteran, my own pace is a bit faster than that, closer to 40-50 pages per sitting but I haven't had very many sittings yet. The rest of my life has consumed much of my time of late, but now I am ready to focus. So far I have read the first 200 pages as I finished up a couple of other books and dealt with work and family in the real world. When I started rereading the novel I was uncertain as to what my pace would be. Would I race through the book over a series of several weeks as I did in my first reading? Or would I move at a more leisurely pace and complete it over 8-9 months as with my second reading?
To date, I am leaning toward the later approach, perhaps taking even longer. I find that my third reading of the novel is opening up new insights into the work and some passages are worth reading 2-3 times before moving on, savoring the exquisite verbosity and the mindful investigations of the narrator. As with a long backpacking journey, I have found my first resting spot. The first 200 pages is a good stopping point to reflect on the novel’s journey and to blog about the multifaceted, if sometimes challenging, experience of reading it.
I am reading the 1992 revised translation of the novel by D. J. Enright, which is the translation I read my second time through the novel. Before that my first reading was a translation by the Terence Kilmartin, Remembrance of Things Past, updated in 1981 but loyal to the original English rendering by C.K. Scott Moncrieff from the 1920’s. Though I am reading Enright, I have Kilmartin handy. It is marked up from my first time reading the novel. I use the older version to scout out sections that were of interest to me as a novice and compare those with my second-time notations and new ones being made as I read it for the third time. Due to the difference in font size, 200 pages in Enright is equal to 155 pages in Kilmartin.
During these first 200 pages a great deal is happening for the reader to consider, though it may seem like nothing is happening at all to someone new to Proust. “For a long time I would go to bed early.” The novel’s first sentence is a statement by an overarching narrator about himself as a child being sent to bed by his parents. Then the scene almost continuously shifts through the child trying to fall asleep, and as an older man too, in all the many bedrooms of his life, battling the random, racing brain of insomnia.
Finally, the shifting narrator settles as the boy who is accustomed to having his mother kiss him and read to him before sleep. Only tonight there is a social party and his mother must remain with her guests. The boy is miserable. Ultimately, the mother ends up kissing him and reading to him after all. Many readers find these first 58 pages of the novel impossible to get through. Proust’s prose is eloquent though sprawled out at a snail’s pace of actual narrative momentum. He goes on and on and on and on and…until you sometimes forget what the subject of the sentence is even about. Instead you are enjoying (or being bogged down by) a multitude of mini-poetic prose essays about the details of the characters lives.
Then (so early yet!) comes the most famous passage in the whole novel. After many years of not giving it any thought, a mid-adult aged version of the narrator (Proust’s narration involves multiple levels of perspective which is part of the fascination about the work) is sitting and having a madeleine cake dipped in a cup of tea. Suddenly, when he tastes the cake, a flood of memory overwhelms him and he is back at Combray, Proust’s fictitious quaint upper-class town near the Normandy coast. The boy would go there in the summer’s to visit his aunt. The writing over these several pages is lyrical, a pleasure to read.
"No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shiver ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin." (page 60) The narrator struggles to grasp the significance of his feeling, but he can't pin it down until...
“And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray, when I used to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Leonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane….But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.” (pp. 63-64)
At 65 pages we come to Part II of the opening section entitled “Combray.” Whereas in the first section Combray is mentioned in passing as another place where he had trouble falling asleep as a boy, in the second section Combray comes alive with intricate details about the town’s street structure, its buildings with particular repeated reference to the church steeple in the middle of town, its people and street life; the boy’s home life staying at his aunt. He was a sickly child (like Proust) and he loved to read (like Proust).
At page 104 the boy happens to interrupt his uncle as the married older gentleman is hosting “the lady in pink,” a young woman who immediately captivates the boy. The narrator is too young to understand what is happening and is simply mystified by it all. His uncle tells the boy to not say anything about any of this but, of course, the boy tells his parents everything, not seeing how this would impact his uncle. The family banished him and the boy only saw him in passing after that.
Proust posits the philosophical question on the significance of involuntary memory with the madeleine cake moment. He becomes more deeply philosophical on page 115, a trait that will re-emerge through the rest of the novel, which features multiple philosophical themes. In this case we are dealing with the relationship of reading to the actual world.
In the actual world, everyone is “opaque” to me. I cannot be aware of them without being aware that I am aware of them, which means I can never know them directly. But through stories, the reader can know every feeling and opinion, every hope and fear of the characters. Though fictionalized, the fact is this transparency of knowing someone fully is relatable to the real world. We all share in the joys and tragedies of characters in literature. This allows us to relate on a level very rarely reached in an everyday face-to-face encounter. And it also allows us to assign to various people we know the insight gained from reading and experiencing these characters. Reading is a living part of the world. Fundamentally, it will be the boy’s experience of reading that will lead him to want to become a writer himself, to show others the reality of the world through fictionalized characters, as Proust does.
Life in Combray is rather routine. Everyone has their place and their duties and their schedule. The boy spends most of his time reading. To his delight, he discovers the fictitious author Bergotte. Proust creates special characters throughout his novel who represent and to celebrate the arts. Bergotte fulfills the role of artistic writer. It should be pointed out that the much of the naarative at this stage of the novel is told in words reflecting the boy's perspective. As he ages, the boy will become a teen who will become a young man and so on into old age. This maturation leads to more sophisticated modes of expression and feelings in the later books of the novel. At this point, Proust keeps his descriptions on the surface of things and uses phrases like “things half-felt by me, half-incomprehensible, the full understanding of which is the vague but permanent object of my thoughts.” (page 116) This is the experience of a curious but innocent child. Where needed, the overarching narrator, an older man we will meet near the end of the novel, chimes in to bring understanding beyond the boy’s narrative grasp.
When not reading, the boy takes part in walks with various adults. There are two main paths around the Vivonne river near Combray. The Guermantes Way is the longer path so most walks are taken along the Meseglise Way also known as Swann’s Way since it takes the hiker near the Swann estate, Tansonville. Swann is a wealthy man of leisure and a frequent visitor to boy’s summer house, enjoying the company of his parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. He always comes alone, however, due to his marriage to a woman of lesser reputation. She is not welcome and is, therefore, a mystery to the boy.
Proust takes us on a walk one fine summer day with the boy and his grandfather. Here the reader is treated to pages of detailed lyrical writing of the lilacs and, particularly, the hawthorns along the walk. The rich sense of nature consumes the boy’s experience of the walk. Just as he is admiring some particular pink, fragrant hawthorns the boy sees a girl.
“Suddenly I stood still, unable to move, as happens when we are faced with a vision that appeals not to our eyes only but requires a deeper kind perception and takes possession of the whole of our being.” (page 197) He explores every little detail his eyes can see of her until a lady calls “Gilberte, come along; what are you doing?”
“Thus was wafted to my ears the name Gilberte, bestowed on me like a talisman which might, perhaps, enable me to one day rediscover the girl that its syllables had just endowed with an identity, whereas a moment before she had merely an uncertain image.” (page 199) The lovely moment of the boy with the hawthorns is transformed into a powerful and captivating instant where the boy feels the first notions of attraction, perhaps initially stirred by the mystery he felt for the “lady in pink” earlier.
The boy doesn’t actually see Mademoiselle Swann to this point. She is rumored to be having an affair with a wealthy gentleman named Charlus. Having it, in fact, at Tansonville while sending Swann away to visit others – which only makes her shunned by the boy’s family all the more. How scandalous!
So it is that the novel is set up 200 pages in. Many of the important characters have been introduced along with the style and general tone of the novel. Proust has established that the boy has an affinity for reading, imagination, and the mystery of the opposite sex. The lyrical prose of each character, with places like Swann’s Way and Combray being no less characters in Proust’s treatment of them, makes for rich and inspiring reading. Proust has the uncanny ability to make the ordinary into the extraordinary with his joyous, exploding verbosity. And the theme of voluntary versus involuntary memory has been presented.
We’re just getting started on this very long hike, however. Onward!
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