Day 13: Of Magic Lanterns and Kinetoscopes

I have finally made it through the wonderful description of the magic lantern, which was put in the young Marcel's room to provide some degree of distraction from his nocturnal melancholy, and, although he tries to enjoy it, it has the unfortunate effect, through its phantasmagorical, iridescent shiftings of light, of rendering the familiarity of a bedroom which had just become endurable into an unrecognizable place, as uncomfortable and discomfiting to him as room in an unknown hotel at which one has just arrived at for the first time (how's that for a Proustian sentence?).

Although I never had a magic lantern, I do remember the eerie, dreamlike scene in Bergman's Fanny and Alexander,

a movie with its own Proustian kind of magic,  where, after being put to bed, Alexander lights up a magic lantern and starts to tell the tale of Arabella...The room is completely dark, and the images projected by the revolving lantern make the walls seem alive - it's a great scene!

It is quite amazing how such things do have the ability to transport us right back into the past; one author who read Proust (can't remember who right now) remarked that she had relived, not recalled, more of her life through reading Proust than she ever could have by just trying to evoke those memories on her own. Andre Gide said, "through the strange and powerful subtlety of your style I seem to be reading .. my own memories and my own most personal sensations." Even in the just the first 8 pages or so, I feel I am experiencing the same thing. 

I've not yet come to the famous "madeleine" episode, and, if you've not read it yourself, I will not spoil the experience by going into detail about it now. I was quite struck by it when I read it in English, and am savoring the moment when I reach it again, but this time in the original French!! Je suis impatient de le lire!!

As for the kinetoscope, it is another contraption which led eventually to the development of the moving picture and is another example of the richly inventive time in which Proust lived: Edison and his discoveries of the electric light, the telephone, and the phonograph; the automobile, the discovery of anesthesia, x-rays, Pasteur and the proof of germ theory, and on and on... How much of it he paid attention to, sequestered as he was in his cork-lined, soundproofed apartment, is a good question!

In other news, my copy of William C. Carter's biography of Proust, also called Marcel Proust: A life, arrived today - all 946 pages of it!! I am like a kid in a candy shop... and am beginning to think that I'm going to need more like TEN years to get through all this!

À bientôt,

Michel