Prepping for Proust, Again

 

By ChatGPT.

[Read my 2018 Prepping for Proust post.]

I started reading the newest translation of Swann's Way (2004) the last week of December. By the end of February I finished the novel's longest section, the newest translation of The Guermantes Way, about halfway through the epic novel. Before this tour of Proust, as recently as 2019, I mostly read the Enright translation from 1992. When I first got in to the novel back in the early 2000's I read the still acceptable today 1982 Moncrieff and Kilmartin translation of Remembrance of Things Past. My second and third readings were of the Enright take on In Search of Lost Time, the more accurate rendering of the title in French, billed as an upgrade over previous translations.

So, with this reading I decided to read the newest translations. Read a new canvas, a blank slate, and highlight and notate the novel all anew. This rendering by Lydia Davis of Swann's Way was available when I first got in to Proust. But I did not select it because this series of translations had halted at the time. There was some sort of copyright issue with publishing the final three volumes of the novel. It was not until 2019 that new installments of these new translations resumed. Finding Time Again, the seventh volume as it is newly translated, was not printed in America until 2023.

Since the novel was incomplete, Enright remained the obvious choice in my past readings. But I am delighted with exploring this great novel in its newest English renderings now. Overall, I can say that these translations sharpen the intent of the original French, trimming some of the old-fashioned verbosity of Enright's version, a tweaking of the text with more contemporary expressions. Certainly Proust's great megalopolis of meandering sentences survives, tightened up a bit for today's readers. Each book features a different translator though the whole project was under the guidance of world renowned Proust scholar Christopher Pendergast as “general editor” of the series.

The trouble is the updated and doubtlessly accurate wording often comes at the expense of some of Enright's poetic quality of Proust's prose. For me, sometimes Proust just reads better with all those somewhat old-fashioned and expansive words. Often Enright phrases things that, for me, lose their punch in the newest effort. There are many instances where I prefer the older words to the newer. I guess it is a matter of taste over technical accuracy. Of course, they all mean the same thing, it's not like the story is substantially changed in any way.

Many years ago I did, in fact, buy part of this new translation effort. The title of Volume 2 is translated as Within a Budding Grove in both my previous editions. This is/was my favorite portion of the novel in all my readings. So, years ago, I decided to buy the translation In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, the far more accurate rendering of the title in French, simply because I thought it would be cool to of have newest take of my favorite part of the novel. It was only with this present reading that I bought the others. Truth be told, as I expressed just now, I was not that impressed with the second volume's wording the first time I scanned my favorite Enright passages in it. It remained unread all these years. Until now. I finished it in January.

At any rate, in early December I started a couple of very recent kindle books on Proust that I had not previously read. I had bought them both earlier when they were at bargain prices. This was my prepping for Proust this time, even though I finished the second book only after I started rereading the novel. The first book was Living and Dying with Marcel Proust by the same Christopher Prendergast who is general editor of my latest purchases (2022), the second The World According to Proust by Joshua Landy (2023). I found both to be interesting and informative.

According to Prendergast (who I did not realize was the general editor of my translations at the time I read him), “losing and finding you way” is a fundamental part of the long novel. He means this as a reader as well as in the story as told by the Narrator. His book begins with an interesting approach, the novel's length as a cure for readers with insomnia, like the Proust himself. Readers can literally lose and find their way through the endless infusions of poetic prose on an enormous variety of topics with hundreds of characters that never seems to let up at any point throughout the vast length of the novel.

Life is so rich and Proust is so detailed about its richness that it can sort of anesthetize the reader and render sleep possible. There are hundreds of pages devoted to various social gatherings. In fact, except for certain ruminations of the Narrator, very little in the novel happens privately. It is a social novel even when there aren't any parties being given. The point of these official gatherings is that they are pointless. Proust never says this directly but this is what is plainly on display for us to appreciate somewhat perpetually. Each social engagement is different but they tend to all become rather banal.

And part of the enjoyment of reading such a lengthy novel is that you have to surrender to the long meandering and sometimes tedious prose. Be willing to put up with the fact you can't remember the point of some sections of the novel because the digressions often insist that your mind focus on other things that are not, in fact, what is happening in the story. These things are actually sometimes more important than the story itself, often they are not.

As an example of Proust's all-encompassing perspective, Prendergast devotes a chapter to the aesthetics of Proust's appreciation for color in the novel. It is a small thing compared to the novel as a whole, but it does help set the proper tone.

“For vast stretches of the novel there is scarcely a page without a vibrant colour notation. The literary equivalent of the painter’s palette is rich in hue, tone and shade, and its various applications abundantly diverse, from the natural to the human world. There are several schools of thought whose cause is the identification of Proustian favourites. One vote goes to mauve (encouraged no doubt by the asparagus ‘stippled in mauve and azure,’ the ‘mauve tufts’ of the lilac blossoms, the ‘mauve silk’ of Oriane’s scarf, and the ‘round mauve eyes’ of the seductive Princesse de Nassau). Another goes to the series red, white and gold yellow, while I am aware of at least four voters rooting for pink. (The asparagus also has a tint of ‘rosy pink.’) This is where I myself shall pitch camp, while also stressing that it is not my purpose to adjudicate claims on the relative values of the colour world of the Recherche. The latter’s chromatic profuseness defies easy summary, and in the Favourites game there will inevitably be fierce competition over not only which wins, but where in the first place to draw the line on the list of eligible entrants.

“If mauve, red, white, yellow and pink are qualified to enter the race, what, for example, about blue? Proust’s blues warrant a book-length study in their own right. An indicative, if hopelessly thin, set of instances might start with a return to eyes—Gilberte’s (‘I was in love most particularly with her blue eyes’); the ‘periwinkle’ blue of Oriane de Guermantes’s eyes; Legrandin’s secreting ‘waves of azure’—before moving onto ‘the blazing azure of the Grand Canal’ in Venice, and from there into the painterly sphere: Giotto’s blue described as if the ‘radiant’ Paduan summer’s day has crossed the threshold into the Scrovegni Chapel, or Elstir’s blue: ‘a broad band of sky topped by a strip of the same blue as the sea, and which I thought was the sea, the difference in shade being due to an effect of the light.’ Perhaps the most touching, and certainly the most evocative, example of Proust’s blues is the one on the first page of the final volume. The narrator has returned to Tansonville to stay with Gilberte, and, as he looks out to a ‘vast verdant scene,’ he is also struck by ‘a contrasting deep blue [...] the steeple of the church at Combray.’” (pp. 75 – 76) Proust does this with everything, not just colors. Hence, the overwhelming (or, to some, excessive) effect of the novel.

Prendergast also points out something rather obvious that I had not noticed before. The Narrator's mother just sort of disappears from the story. Proust seems to suggest that she was attending a party elsewhere while the Narrator, as an older man, attends to a different one, which ends the novel. But the author does nothing to explain why the dear woman is no longer referenced by the Narrator at all. He just stops discussing her, fueling speculation as to whether or not Proust intended her dead.

It is a curious dilemma, though by no means the only such thing. It is easy to make the mistake of assuming that Proust is reliable and forthcoming in the narration since it is so expansively detailed. But there are simply more details in a given life than even Proust can account for, much less the reader, especially if this is your first time traversing the Proustian landscape. Proust makes a few errors in his telling, one of which, as an example, is that the character associated with the grand party at the end of the Volume 7 is supposed to have died in Volume 6. Of course, Proust died before either of these parts of the novel were 100% completed, so maybe he would have corrected that through further, seemingly endless editing.

Landy's book is short but packed full of insightful commentary, certainly the stuff one likes to read to whet one's appetite for another long trip through In Search of Lost Time. Landy asks a question that could easily go overlooked. Why a novel at all? We are told that Proust wanted to be a novelist but was well aware of the heavy philosophical undertones of his tome. To Landy's mind there is a reason he chose to write a novel. I has to do with how Proust seeks to engage the reader.

“We’re told that Swann falls for Odette because she’s affectionate, and certain to love him back; but we’re also told that Swann falls for Odette because she’s remote, and unlikely to love him back. Elsewhere we’re told that it’s because Odette’s face resembles a figure in a Botticelli painting; elsewhere again, because Vinteuil’s sonata made Swann susceptible to tender feelings. Why on earth would Proust set things up this way?

“Hervé Picherit offers an ingenious answer. Almost all of us, he says, will subliminally pick one of these options—painting, music, anxiety, recommendation, affection—and that choice should tell us something about ourselves. If you’re a romantic, you’ll be more likely to have zeroed in on the Botticelli or the sonata. If you’re a cynic, you’ll be more likely to have focused on the anxiety. If you said it’s because Odette makes a great cup of tea, chances are you’re a Brit like myself.

“So Proust’s novel, just like the narrator’s future book, works as an “optical instrument,” helping us to be “the readers of [our] own selves.” By setting a little interpretive trap, it offers us a way to learn things we didn’t necessarily know about our minds. If we spend enough time around Proust, we may well come to realize that Swann in Love was more complicated than we first assumed; this, in turn, may make us wonder why we assumed differently; and once we’re there, we’re in a position “to discern what, without this book, we would perhaps never have perceived in ourselves.” The book has done us the wonderful favor of acting like a Rorschach test—something a “traditional essay” could never have done.” (pp. 95 – 96)

It is curious that Prendergast, the supposed reigning expert, mentions Proust's theory of “involuntary memory” only seven times in passing throughout his work. He never really dives into it but uses aspects of it to flesh out other points he is making. By contrast, Landy uses the phrase 36 times and devotes an entire chapter to it. In that chapter he writes:

“Here’s how involuntary memory works, according to Proust’s narrator. First you have an experience, like making a fool of yourself at a party or spending time with your Aunt Léonie on Sunday morning. (As the second example shows, the experience can be a repeated one.) While you’re having the experience, something is going on in the sensory background: you are hearing a song, say, or tasting some tea and cake. Over time you forget the experience, because your conscious mind doesn’t need it for its practical purposes. (It’s something that “our intellect, having no use for it, had rejected.”) And you also stop listening to the song. So that memory gets sealed in a little jar, preserved intact until the day, perhaps many years later, when you happen to hear the music or eat the cake again—at which point it all comes flooding back. It returns in full force, revealing even more of itself than you noticed at the time, being too busy or preoccupied to take it in.

“But it’s not just that you remember your great-aunt, her room, and the town around them. You also remember being you—the you of twenty years ago. And you remember that you from within: you become your past self, wanting what you wanted then, fearing what you feared then, reddening with the shame of what you did then. You feel again, with pain, your love for a person who broke your heart, because it’s not just the dry summary you standardly give yourself (“we were together, then split up”) but instead the full feeling of the time. A voluntary memory is like a photograph; involuntary memories are like a time machine.

“And a third thing happens, more important than both of the others: “the true self . . . is awakened.” There’s a part of you that hasn’t changed in twenty years, a part that is “outside time.” (“Outside time” here means “consistent throughout a life,” not “immortal.”) Something in you experiences “Tangled Up in Blue,” or cake and tea, in exactly the same way at a distance of two decades. That something is your true self. This discovery is life-changing for the narrator...

“For now, let’s just say this: the really amazing thing about involuntary memory isn’t that it brings back scenes you’d long forgotten, or even that it brings back a version of you that’s been dead for years; it’s that it gives you . . . yourself.” (pp. 16 – 17)

So, in addition to what Proust has to say about beauty and art and disappointment and love and sexuality and jealousy and possession and light and color and everything else about the natural world and the world of society, involuntary memory is this overarching theme, not thrown in your face throughout the novel but used for punctuation now and then. These times usually feature a powerful moment in the course of the story, which is about many other things. Involuntary memory is perhaps the most fundamental aspect of Proust's philosophy and is certainly the cornerstone of its most famous scene, the Madeline cake dipped in tea. Landy wanted to devote space to it.

Prendergast takes it for granted, as elementary Proust and, therefore, assumes the reader is thoroughly familiar with the concept. Neither path is wrong, of course. To each his own. But pairing the two works side by side, as I did luckily, gave me the grander experience of both inspiring me to read Proust and each book completing the other as a full appetizer and subsequent courses up to the main meal and desserts.

As my quotes reveal, both of these books got me into the Proustian frame of mind again. Both reminded me of portions of the tale that I was not necessarily thinking about, which led to other thoughts about the novel. Both chose splendid quotes to illustrate their respective points, many of which I immediately checked in my Enright edition to make sure I had them highlighted and/or notated. I made new discoveries. In this way, the by the time I had finished them, I was already far into Swann's Way and primed for In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower and The Guermantes Way and so on and so forth as the marvelous experience unfolds.

But as I was reading the scattered early sections where Albertine is mentioned in passing and then eventually enters the story in Volume 2, I happened to ponder what Proust was up to with this young, somewhat athletic and educated, female character that eventually becomes the obsession of the Narrator. I knew from prior readings of Proust and of works about his life that the novel was originally planned as a two or three volume work and that Albertine was not in the story at all. It was only when World War One interrupted the printing of Volume 2 that Proust created Albertine and greatly expanded the novel and, hence, doubled the original size of the 1500+ page story. I wanted to know more.

So, I returned to two old friends, the fantastic biographies of Proust by Jeans-Ives Tadie (1996/2000) and William C. Carter (2000), both entitled Marcel Proust: A Life. My original Proust obsession drove me to buy both 15 – 20 years ago now. I read each of them eagerly, marked them up profusely, and have rescanned sections of them regularly for years. Even when I am not reading Proust it's nice to touch base with him through these biographies now and then. It satisfies my attention deficit of the moment sometimes. At any rate, the story of how Albertine exploded the size of Proust's novel is told in these two bios, which compliment one another as much as the two previous books I've discussed in this post.

A key point to know is given to us by Tadie (page 592). In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower was originally, before the war paused things, a single chapter that was to appear in Volume 3. Initially, this chapter became its own larger section. Then it was added to other material in the story and subsequently all woven into the new Volume 2 of the final novel. Albertine haunts the first part of the volume but we only meet her toward the end of it, as part of a group of lovely young, fit girls to become singularly attractive to the Narrator. The chapter was about a different female character entirely. Albertine took her place and became possibly the most important character in the novel, after the Narrator.

Simultaneously, in his personal life, Proust was jealously in the love with Alfred Agostinelli, who lived and worked with the author for a time as his “secretary,” typing his massive manuscript, accommodating his expansive additions to the text. I won't go into all the details that Tadie and, particularly, Carter supply. Suffice it to say there are multiple parallels between his relationship with Agostinelli and the Narrator's relationship with Albertine, including the fact both unexpectedly died after their relationship seemed to have fallen apart. Agostinelli fled Proust's apartment and was soon killed in an accident. This is what happens to Albertine in the novel.

So, it is suggested, that Albertine is the fictionalized version of Agostinelli. It is not as tidy as that, of course. Albertine has other people Proust knew in her character as well, both biographies support that there is not a neat, one-to-one relationship. But the fact remains that what actually happens to her in the narrative is about the same as what happened between Proust and Agostinelli in real life.

This allowed him to explore his actual sensual passion and attraction, his ultimate possessiveness and jealousy for another man in the acceptable context of a fictional heterosexual relationship. There is plenty about homosexuality, bisexuality and even BDSM in the novel, of course. But the Narrator is straight so he can express his love in a more culturally acceptable way. At any rate, the subsequent examination of sexuality and the strained relationship of the Narrator is primarily responsible for the explosive expansion of the novel from three volumes prior to WW1 to about 3,000 pages over seven books.

Carter points out that another effect of the novel's expansion was the exploration of sex between (usually bisexual) women. Of course, lesbianism was already, scandalously for the time, well-established in Swann's Way. But the extent to which Proust intended to take that was not the driving force that it became in the longer novel. Tadie emphasizes (page 607) that the “integration” of Albertine was not just long new sections regarding her character but writing her into the sections of the novel Proust thought he had finished.

In this manner, Albertine went from being a minor character (and different girl at the time) in what was supposed to be a chapter in the final book of a three-part trilogy into being a major character, more profound than even the Narrator's grandmother. Her story took up about 1,000 extra pages with another 500 or more devoted to expanding other aspects of the novel, particularly its exploration of homosexuality and its incorporation of World War One.

According to the biographies, it is important to recall that this topic was taboo, the act was illegal, and so Proust was worried that his more thorough examination of homoerotic characters would be edited out. Luckily, he was a Frenchman and they are far more tolerant of sexual variations than Americans. While not censored, Moncrieff's first English translation was careful to soften the language of these homoerotic parts and sexuality in general. Kilmartin corrected some of this in 1982.  Enright went a bit further in 1992. The newest translations (2004 – 2023) seem to bring it into much sharper view, more straightforward, slightly less poetic, so far.

Proust was the perfect author to turn to after I became so absorbed with Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground. Instead of a novella about a one-dimensional anti-social self-conflicted neurotic with no redeeming qualities, we have a multi-volume multi-dimensional neurotic party boy with great taste and plenty of interesting character traits accented by a few that aren't so attractive. Instead of a narrow vision of the world that Dostoevsky riles against, we have the most expansive expression, examination and embracing of human life and the world possible.

Proust really gives his readers the full depth and breadth of human experience sensually, aesthetically, and philosophically in a manner that rewards reading his large canvas depiction of our humanity as opposed to Dostoevsky's angry, anxiety-induced anti-rationalism. It was and is a most welcome change but, nevertheless, an interesting comparison, revealing what seems to me to be the simple fundamentalist naivety of Notes compared with the vast and enriching sophistication of In Search of Lost Time. 

 

(Written without AI assistance.)