We've had whistling trains, goodbyes under unfamiliar lamps echoing in the silence of the night, leading to infant cheeks and abandoned invalids, to kaleidoscopes of the dark; a beckoning dream-woman born of a mal-placed thigh... now a drowsing off in another more aberrant posture, possibly in an armchair after dinner... worlds hurling out of orbit, magic chairs careening through time and space... Rip van Winkle...dark, animal consciousness...and then, " I was more destitute than a cave-dweller; but then the memory - not yet of the place in which I was but of various other places where I had lived and might now very possibly be - would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being, from which I could never have escaped by myself: in a flash I would traverse centuries of civilization, and out of a blurred glimpse of oil-lamps, then of shirts with turned-down collars, would gradually piece together the original components of my ego." Whew!!
Now I begin to agree with Jacques Madeleine's assessment, feeling "drowned in unfathomable developments," and that "one doesn't have a single, but not a single clue of what this is about. What is the point of all this. What does it all mean? Where is it leading? Impossible to know! Impossible to say!"
But, bon courage - it is not time to give in yet! In his introduction to ISOLT, Joseph Wood Krutch has these words of encouragement for the first-time reader:
"Proust knew with uncommon exactness what it was he was about; he has a purpose in everything that he does, and even what appear to be digressions of inordinate length actually occupy a carefully proportioned and predetermined place in a structure whose architecture can only be understood when one stands off and regards it as a whole. The first rule for reading him, therefore, is complete submission to an author who will certainly take you where you ought to go and who will give you, not only vivid descriptions, subtle analyses, precise portraits and full participation in a strange new sensibility, but also compose all these things into a vast symphonic structure which is probably the most amazing thing of its kind in literature."Plus, with my own twilight-zone-ish experiences with sleep and dreams, I should be a bit more sympathetic! I find it discomfitting, however, to be reliving those dark days...
On the other hand, memory and dreaming are two of the most intriguing elements of the human mind, and also two of the things about which we know the least. How, for example, are memory and dreaming connected? And why do we so often not remember our dreams?
So, let us continue on...
-Michel
I like this disjunct between body and mind: his body wants sleep, he gets upset when he falls asleep "too quickly" (foreshadowing the devastation of his mother not saying goodnight on page 3).
ReplyDeleteI'm thinking this 'ouverture' about that half-life between wakefulness and sleep will lead to the book's bigger preoccupations with knowing: thinking we know (but do we really?) and believing what we see (aren't we just guessing a lot of the time?). Also, presuming things from what we see - how well do we know those around us?
I like too the parallel between the book's focus on gossip and the "half-knowing" of blogging.
Cordialement
Rod, en Australie
Hello again, Rod! I am finding this section of the book more and more fascinating as it goes along. It seems to be developing a kind of rhythm, and I find myself looking foward to his next description!
DeleteAlso, speaking of the limitation of our perceptions, I especially like one passage in which he says:
"Peut-être l'immobilité des choses autour de nous leur est-elle imposée par notre certitude que ce sont elles et non pas d'autres, par l'immobilité de notre pensée en face d'elles. (Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them)."
We are limited by our senses to what we consider "reality" and by the immobility of our conception of it. That is why we are threatened by such notions as ESP and anything that does not fall within the realm of our senses.
Proust and Toulouse-Lautrec could only have potentially met between 1890-1899 or so. I would have thought Proust far too haut-bourgeois to have spent time in the dives of Montmartre (from which Lautrec barely moved). But they did have a mutual friend, Maxime Dethomas (mentioned later in ISOLT): Proust loved Dethomas' landscape paintings and Lautrec painted Dethomas in 1896.
ReplyDeleteMonsieur Byatt!! Bienvenue et merci pour faire des remarques sur mon blog!
DeleteI thought there might be some possibility that the two might have met, considering his acquantance with so many of the artists of the day. However I am just beginning to delve into his life, and am looking forward to reading both William Carter's and Edmund White's biographies of Proust.
À bientôt!
Michael
Judging from Edmund White's biog (I'm half-way through) he seemed to be spending all his time focussed on goings-on at the salons and parties of titled ladies, but I hope to find out more about his interaction with visual artists of the period.
DeleteA bientot
Rod
I just got a hold of Eric Karpeles' "Paintings in Proust" and it looks amazing!! If you can get a hold of a copy of that book, I'm sure it will more than satisfy your curiosity!
DeleteI am also looking forward to reading White's biography - so much to read and so little time!!
Bon chance!!
Michael