Proust okumak bambaşka bir tecrübe, başka bir şeye benzemiyor. Bazen ne işim var bu kadar ayrıntılarla vakit kaybediyorum diye sordurabiliyor. Şahsen okurken birkaç defa bıraksam mı acaba diye düşündüm, itiraf edeyim. Ama biraz sabredince de keyfine doyum olmuyor. İnsanı hayretlere düşüren bir gözlem ustasından insanın doğasına ilişkin çarpıcı tespitler. Hepsine katılmasanız da hayat hakkında düşündürmeye yetiyor. Ben daha 7 ciltlik serinin ilk iki kitabını devirebildim. Yenisine hemen başlar mıyım, hiç sanmıyorum. Biraz sindirmeye ihtiyacım olabilir. Ama bir gün bu seriyi tamamlama zevkine ereceğimden şüphe duymuyorum. Arada, Norveçli Proust olarak anılan Knausgard'a dalarım belki...

«آخرین چهره‌ای که از هر یک از دوستانم در گروه کوچک دیده بودم چگونه می‌توانست تنها چهره‌ای نباشد که از او به یاد می‌آوردم، چه ذهن ما از خاطره‌هایی که از کسی داریم آن‌هایی را که برای روابط هرروزی‌مان سودی آنی نداشته باشد حذف می‌کند؟ (حتی، و به‌ویژه، اگر این روابط با اندکی عشق آمیخته باشد که همواره ناخرسند است و در لحظهٔ آینده زندگی می‌کند). ذهن ما زنجیر روزهای گذشته را می‌گذارد که بگذرد، و تنها بر واپسین حلقه‌های آن چنگ می‌زند که اغلب از فلز دیگری غیر از حلقه‌هایی است که در تیرگی شب ناپدید شده است، و در سفر دراز زندگی تنها سرزمینی را واقعی می‌داند که اکنون در آنیم.»

پایان جلد دو، یکم مهر سال ۰۳

Upon checking into a hotel in Venice in the summer of 2006, the man behind the reception desk raised his eyes in surprise when he saw the length of our stay. “Four nights,” he commented. “Lovely. We rarely see people stay for more than a couple of nights. Most only stay for one.”

Neither my wife nor I had ever been to Venice prior to this trip, and like any other person vaguely familiar with the city, we had a rich imagination of the charms we would behold: the canal streets, stripe-shirted gondoliers, Piazza San Marco. On our first day we visited the famous spots, took great pictures, drank some delicious wine while watching tourists feed the pigeons in the Piazza. It wasn’t until the second and third day that we learned a deeper truth of the City…

In “Swann’s Way”, Proust’s narrator takes the reader through the byzantine world of memory. In “Within a Budding Grove”, our narrator shows both the power and limitations of imagination. “We must have imagination, awakened by the uncertainty of being able to attain our object, to create a goal which hides our other goal from us, and by substituting for sensual pleasures the idea of penetrating into a life prevents us from recognizing that pleasure, from tasting its true savor, from restricting it to its own range.”

Proust’s protagonist pours his imagination into many things through these episodes of his adolescence. It is the band of young girls by the French seaside that awakens his full power of imagination, invoking a range of emotive responses to the possible – and ultimately a fear of what will become once that imagined barrier is crossed. “But to strip our pleasures of imagination is to reduce them to their own dimensions, that is to say to nothing.”

When traveling, my wife and I much prefer the peripatetic experience to the caged mass of humanity in a torturous tour bus. It was on the second day of our Venice visit, following an hour’s leisurely walk wandering around the side streets of the island when we happened to mis-time our walk and came upon the Piazza just as a giant load of tourists were disgorged from a cruise ship. The lines for gondoliers went from non-existent to twenty people deep, all of the notable guidebook “must sees” were packed – the whole island felt as if it had just inhaled a huge breath of humanity; at the end of the day, it exhaled them out back to their cruise ship. That night the vibe and energy of the island was one of relief.

The following day we stopped in a small shop that sold beautiful murano glass creations. The store was empty, the proprietor shocked to see us. “Has the cruise ship landed already?” he asked in surprise. We told him that we were staying at the hotel on the island, not here on a cruise ship. “Why would you do that?” he asked incredulously. It was then that we learned so much about the real Venice.

The proprietor told us that he was a descendant of a long line of native Venetians. He lamented that he would be the last of his family name to live on the island – all of his children had moved to the mainland, bored of the complete lack of, well, anything to do that didn’t entail the catering to tourists. He said that his plight wasn’t unique; other multi-generational families were suffering the same end-of-line fate.

Venice, in reality, had become an adult tourist version of Disneyland. The reality of this place had been molded to my (and countless scores of others’) imagination of what Venice should be. By making the imagined the real, we had killed the soul of the city and turned it into a canalled museum. Thus the "harmonious cohesion" sought by Proust’s narrator between the imagination (whether it be in memory or forethought) and the reality.

Towards the end of the novel, Proust refers to the arbitrary simplicity of our memory. That bridge between the recalled, or the imagined, to the reality must be short and well constructed - or we will destroy it and build it anew. “It would require so immense an effort to reconstruct everything that has been imparted to us by things other than ourselves – were it only the taste of a fruit – that no sooner the impression received that we begin imperceptibly to descend the slope of memory and, without noticing anything, in a very short time, we have come a long way from what we actually felt.” Does Proust's narrator try to mold the actuality of the object of desire to the imagined? Do I? Of course I do.

Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof. - John Kenneth Galbraith

Omaggio a Madame Swann
"All'ombra delle fanciulle in fiore" , sfavillante nella traduzione di G. Raboni, è il Canto della Primavera nella grande opera proustiana.
Gilberte e Albertine ne sono le muse ispiratrici, creature lievi, per certi aspetti eteree.
Chi risalta particolarmente è però Odette, ora Madame Swann e madre di Gilberte, tant'è che in tutta la prima parte del libro m'è parsa lei la protagonista, quasi elevata a botticelliana Flora (L'altra parte è invece ambientata sulla costa di Normandia, a Balbec).

Il narratore stesso ne subisce il fascino. S'incanta a "sentir suonare Madame Swann. Il suo tocco mi sembrava far parte, come la sua vestaglia, come il profumo delle sue scale (...) di un tutto individuale e misterioso".
"All'improvviso, sulla sabbia del viale, lenta, calma e lussureggiante come il fiore più bello, (...) Madame Swann faceva sbocciare intorno a sé toilettes sempre diverse (...) ; e innalzava e dispiegava (...) la cupola serica d'un vasto ombrello identico per sfumatura alla cascata di petali del suo vestito".
"E' sopravvissuto il piacere che sempre provo (...) rivedendomi discorrere così con Madame Swann, sotto il suo parasole come sotto il riflesso d'un pergolato di glicini" .

sorry, david. this book is better than swann's way. to the extent that i may have to go back and give swann's way three stars so that when i give this book four stars it doesn't make them equals, and, having four books to go, i want to leave room for a five-star anticipation. the first half of swann's way had me understanding what people did not like about proust. there was a lot of me hating on the narrator and gacking over his precious daintiness. this one, though, phoar. it is true it took me a long time to read it, and it was partly because the lulling nature of his prose would cause me to drift off into my own batch of memories and i would realize that three subway stops had gone by, or ten minutes of my break had passed, or i was asleep (that happened a few times, not because it was boring, but because his style is so much like a gentle boat on a lazy stream and it's all memory and dreamy and suddenly i am actually dreaming. that's pretty powerful) and then, i realized my copy was defective, and eight pages were blank! that's like two proust-sentences - gone! so i had to get a new copy and transfer all my bookmarks, marking passages i liked, such as "In reality, there is in love a permanent strain of suffering which happiness neutralises, makes potential only, postpones, but which may at any moment become, what it would long since have been had we not obtained what we wanted, excruciating." which is just gorgeous. and there is so much like that in this book - so much delightfully neurotic stewing and examining every delicate memory of first, and second, love. marcel is a thinkier prufrock waiting and waiting and thinking and hesitating and eventually pouncing, but like my cat when she's just playing with me to please me; you can tell her heart is elsewhere. but everyone, not just you, david, said this book was a valley in between the literary heights of swann's way and guermantes way, but i thought it was stunning. i am taking a proust-break for a moment,maybe two or three books worth, because i can see myself getting wholly immersed in the proustiverse and becoming too introspective and examining the minutia of life and love and disappointments and that's something you really want to space out and not digest all at once, for the sanity's sake. but then i suspect i will not be able to stop until the bitter end. with brian's (deleted) aborted wedding scene.

come to my blog!

‘In the Shadows of Young Girls in Flower’, is the second volume of Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’. As a novel, it is in many ways split into two separate parts; the first part ‘At Madame Swann’s’ dispenses with the poetry of the earlier volume and decides to concentrate on the psychological themes which permeate Proust’s work; the second half, ‘Place Names: the place’ marks the return of Proust’s concerns with the natural world as he finally gets to visit Balbec, the seaside resort which he had spent most of his childhood fantasising about seeing and forms the best of Proust’s writing as he coalesces his psychological concerns with his ethereal observations on nature. They also introduce us to the three most important characters in the novel: the Baron de Charlus, Albertine and the Marquise de Saint-Loup, as well as the painter, Elstir
Indeed, it is via Elstir, who is a kind of composite of various naturalist painters, that Marcel begins to discover and create his aesthetic sense. Elstir teaches Marcel that beauty lies not in the object, but in the contemplation of the object and the translation of this into art-just as Monet was able to open our eyes to the ethereal and altogether ephemeral beauty of haystacks in the sunlight, so Elstir is able to open Marcel’s eyes to the gossamer like beauty of a sunset, glowing with an endless variety of harlequin colours, or even the altogether more quotidian beauty of a recently cleared dinner table;

“Since seeing such things in the water-colours of Elstir, I enjoyed noticing them in reality, glimpses of poetry as they seemed: knives lying askew in halted gestures; the bell-tent of a used napkin, within which the sun secreted its yellow velvet; the half-emptied glass showing better the noble widening of its lines, the undrunk wine darkening it, by glinting with lights, inside the translucent glaze seemingly made from condensed daylight; volumes displaced, and liquids transmuted, by angles of illumination; the deterioration of the plums, from green to blue, blue to gold…I tried to find beauty where I had never thought it might be found, in the most ordinary of things, in the profound ‘still of life’.”

Marcel’s mind is now ebullient with the beauty of the everyday, however Elstir has a more profound truth to teach Marcel; “Wisdom cannot be inherited-one must discover it for oneself, but only after following a course which no one can follow in your stead; no one can spare you that experience, for wisdom is only a point of view on things.” A constant theme throughout the novels is that Marcel is unable to realise his dream of becoming a great writer-both because he believes he lacks the talent to become one and also because he feels he lacks the proper subject. It is via Elstir that Marcel realises that the subject for his art is life itself and that the constant mistakes and pitfalls he falls into whilst creating his work of art have only served to enhance the profundity of his work, because they are wisdoms he has discovered himself. The utilitarian view of art propagated by Norpois, who is contemptuous both of Marcel’s favourite author, Bergotte and of Marcel’s delightful little vignette on the steeples of Combray, is ultimately sterile and worthless because it propagates platitudes discovered by others, rather than truths discovered by oneself.
Proust felt it was hard for people to process artistic originality because it contradicted what they believed (via art) life to be like. However, once a piece of art becomes accepted and mainstream, it ceases to be original and becomes part of the status quo; thus for Marcel great art is merely the translation of the endless amount of human experiences. The artistic movement known as impressionism, which for so long was ridiculed by the public and critics, had gained acceptance by the time Proust had become an adult (as reflected in the enhanced reputation of Elstir by the time Marcel had reached adulthood) and the principles of the movement play an important role within In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. The broad brush strokes of impressionism form Marcel’s view of the natural world, from its obsession with nature, to the play of light on a leaf or the bloom of a flower, the impressionists were concerned with how our brains process the fleeting beauty of the world; how our eyes see the sunset as red because that is how our brains have been trained to perceived sunset, when in fact a sunset contains all manner of fleeting and fabulous colours which our initial impressions may discern, but our “rational” senses eventually take over and transform the rainbow of sunset into a drab russet;

“The fact that it was Elstir’s intent, now to show things as he knew them to be, but in accordance with the optical illusions which our first sight of things is made of, had led him to isolate some of these laws of perspective, which were more striking in his day, art having been the first to uncover them.”
As a result, Proust’s prose picks up all the visual nuances of the world, the hidden images behind the “reality” of things, the secret of the world behind the integument created by our minds;
“Fancying that Baudelaire’s lines about ‘lounging on the esplanade’ or ‘in the boudoir’ applied to me, I was wondering whether his ‘sunbeams gleaming on the sea’-unlike the evening sunbeam, simple and shallow, a tremulous golden shaft-might not be those I could see at that very moment burnishing the surfaces of the waves to topaz, fermenting it to a pale, milky beer, frothing it like milk, while every now and again great blue shadows passed over parts of it, as though high above us a god was having fun moving a mirror about”
The trickery and mirages of nature and the way we perceive the world are not the only illusions, or disillusionments, which the narrator discovers within the novel. Marcel goes through repeated artistic disillusionments, firstly from him finally being able to see La Berma, to then meeting his literary hero, Bergotte and afterwards meeting the great artist, Elstir. In the case of La Berma and Bergotte, he realises that the reality didn’t live up to the pleasures he had imagined in finally seeing La Berma and meeting Bergotte; instead all he got was the disappointment in realising that La Berma’s performance in reality wasn’t the euphoric experience he imagine it to be and Bergotte wasn’t the man he imagined him to be-this conflict between reality and the imagination is central to Proust’s work, for Proust there would always be a disconnect between the two because our imagination is purely an internal process, whereas reality is something which exists externally to ourselves, but which we are always attempting to correlate with how we imagine the world to be-yet Proust’s solution to this is; 'If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less, but to dream more, to dream all the time.” This is coupled with the fact that now that the narrator has finally gained entry into an artistic milieu, he chooses to forgo the company of Elstir and Bergotte in the favour of Gilberte or the straggle of young girls, including Albertine, who so captivate his imagination. Although Bergotte and Elstir are able to open the door to the narrator’s aesthetic senses, it is the narrators’ experiences, no matter how banal or profound, which form the basis of his art.

And what an art the narrator is able to mould out of the raw materials of his life! Just as the painter is able to create something magical and beautiful out of paint and canvas, so the narrator is able to describe the world in wholly original ways;

“it was just a part of its surroundings, with an accidental look to it, as though it was a detail of a late afternoon in which the dome against the sky had the mellow swell of a fruit ripening its golden pink in the same sunshine as touched the chimneys of the houses.”
“At that late morning moment, when rays of sunlight came in form more than one aspect and seemingly from other times of the day, breaking the angles of the walls, setting side by side on the chest of draws a reflection from the beach and wayside altar of colours as variegated as flowers along a lane, alighting brightly on the wainscot with the tremble of folded wings ready to fly away, warming like bath-water a country mat by the little courtyard window, which the sunshine festooned like a vine, adding the charm and decorative complexity of the furnishings by seeming to peel away he flowered silks of armchairs and unpick their braidings, that room where I loitered for a moment before dressing for our outing was a prism in which the colours of the light from the outside were dispersed, a hive in which all the heady nectars of the day awaiting me were still separate and ungathered but already visible, a garden of hopes shimmering with silver and rose petals.”

The narrator’s theories and experience of love also develop-firstly the touching scenes between the narrator and his grandmother, the scene in which she awaits his knocking in the morning is truly beautiful-yet this being Proust, things are rarely what they seem and Proust’s nuanced characterisations demonstrate that although the narrator feels a deep love for his grandmother, it isn’t without an element of shallowness or cruelty, as when he mocks her for wanting to take a photo for Saint-Loup. Secondly comes the development of romantic love, in the first part of the book, the narrator realises that falling in love is more an act of self-gratification; all love is a form of self-love and every time we fall in love we are merely falling in love with the same image clothed in different people over and over again. So the narrator’s bizarre and obsessive love for Gilberte, is destined to be repeated over and over again; firstly via a set of incidental peasant girls and milk maids and then via a gaggle of young girls he encounters on the beach in Balbec and finally on Albertine. And what wonderful images and metaphors he is able to conjure up out of his bottomless hat in regards to Albertine;

“All the way back to Balbec, the image of Albertine, flooded by the glow form other girls, was not the only one I could see. But just as the moon, after spending the daylight hours in the guise of a white cloudlet, more shaped and more stable than others, begins to come into its own as daylight fades, so by the time I was back in the hotel, it was Albertine’s image which rose to shine unrivalled above the horizon of my heart.”
“Her cheeks often looked pale; but seen from the side, as I could see them now, they were suffused and brightened with blood which gave them the glow of those brisk winter mornings when, out for a walk, we see stone touched and ruddied by the sun, looking like pink granite and filling us with joy”
Imagine the artistic euphoria, when you first begin reading Proust, the sunshine of his prose lighting up your eyes and mind! Like the impressionists, Proust was an artist of euphoria; he was able to catch life from new and innovative perspectives like Manet, like Monet he captured the variance of light on different objects, like Renoir he painted intimate and inimitable portraits of beautiful women, he shared Cézanne’s obsession with depth and dimensions and Degas’s obsession with movement and, as we will see later on, his interest in the seedier elements of Parisian society. Proust is the ultimate literary impressionist.

À L'OMBRE de la REPRÉSENTATION

On my review of Du côté de chez Swann I had concentrated on the pre-eminence of the visual. The careful attention paid by Proust to light, to colour, to objects that add colour such as flowers, and to painting and the visual arts in general, led me to conceive of his art as painterly writing. All those elements continue in this second volume. I could easily select another rich sample of quotes that would illustrate this visual nature. Indeed, sight is explicitly designated in this book as the principal sense. It is through seeing that we make sense of our world.

Things, people…

n  …, ne sont portés sur nous que sur une plane et inconsistante superficie, parce que nous ne prenons conscience d’eux que par la perception visuelle réduite à elle-même ; mais c’est comme déléguée des autres sens qu’elle se dirige vers… (les autres sens) vont chercher...les diverses qualités odorantes, tactiles, savoureuses, qu’ils goûtent ainsi même sans le secours des mains et des lèvres (559)n

This extract then introduces another aspect which is the one on which I wish to focus this time.

n  ..et, capables, grâce aux arts de transposition, au génie de synthèse où excelle le désir, de restituer sous la couleur.., ... 559n

This review will examine the concept and activity of Transposition or Representation as the very core of what constitutes artistic creation.


FASHIONING the FASHIONS

In À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, we see the Narrator fascinated by the way people represent themselves. When he observes those who have awakened his imagination, he pays attention to the way they dress and cloak their presence. The choice of clothes is part of the way a person manifests the self.

And although the Narrator confesses that he is infatuated with Gilberte Swann, in reality his fascination is with the mother, with Odette, who has changed her life and made herself into Mme Swann. He notices how in her self-transformation Odette has moved from the rather theatrical Japonisme décor, outfits and somewhat garish choice of clothes,--that we saw from a close up in Un amour de Swann--to a more delicate style in which subtle pastel colours in silk crêpe reflect the tender and gentle manner seen in the depictions Watteau, the painter of the gallanterie, and which suit better the wife of Monsieur Swann.

But in this new style of clothes in which she has concocted herself there are traces of her past that the Narrator can sniff, as she lets her breasts be caressed by the silk and abandons herself to the enjoyment of the new luxury, (230, desquelles elle faisait le geste de caresser sus ses seins l’écume fleurie, et dans lesquelles elle se baignait, se prélassait, s’ébattait..). Similarly the decorative buttons are a quote of those more functional which in the past would have been an invitation to their being unbuttoned. (235 déceler une intention... une reminiscence indiscernable du passé).

Odette works relentlessly at transforming and creating her own image and is completely aware of the transcendence of her self-fashioning, for herself and for the world... (522 disciplinant ses traits avait fait de son visage et de sa taille cette création),. And also 234 On sentait qu’elle ne s’habillait pas seulement pour la commodité ou la parure de son corps, elle était entourée de sa toilette comme de l’appareil délicat et spiritualisé d’une civilisation.

Because with all this calculated impersonation, Odette is acting indeed as a creator. Rightfully, she feels satisfied with her art when she conceives her toilette (254... ayant l’air d’assurance et de calme du créateur qui a accompli son oeuvre et ne se soucie plus du reste)


SALONS and THEATRICALITY

But Odette’s transformation will reach its apex and she will be in full command of her new delicate and purified self, when she can also design her own setting, her own stage, her Salon. In that composition she can become, finally, a Grande Dame. Surrounded by white flowers, by white furniture, by white accoutrements, echoes of the Pre-Raphaelites, and of the original Primitives, will resonate. She can evoke images in which angels announce a miracle and designate the virginity in a woman, with all its inebriating effect. All of this thanks to the harmonies of a fully orchestrated (252 -- Symphonie en blanc majeur)

For it is through a Salon that a lady can best picture herself, fully. The emblematic surroundings situate one as the model to which one’s society can look. Salons are the dramatic setting in which something is created out of sheer theatricality. The guests form a frame around the Hostess who behaves as if she were the main guest, the main actress, the main sitter. So much so, that it becomes difficult for some people to be able to picture a lady, Odette, outside of her own Salon.

For the art of creating a Salon is the art of nothingness... (212 -- bien qu’ils ne fassent que nuancer l’inexistent, sculpter le vide, et soient à proprement parler les Arts du Néant: l’art... de savoir “réunir”, de s’entendre à grouper, de “mettre en valeur”, de “s’éffacer”, de servir de “trait d’union” (inverted commas in the original). And in this art we saw in the previous volume that Odette’s teacher had been Mme Verdurin who “était elle-même un Salon”.


REPRODUCTION or EYE LENSES

In a line of argument that Walter Benjamin may have picked up from Proust, the Narrator notices the other mode of visual representation, photography, with a similar view to his grandmother’s in the Combray section of the first novel. Industrial reproduction vulgarises that which art had filtered as beauty (495- il faut.. reconnaître que, dans la mesure où l’art met en lumière certaines lois, une fois qu’une industrie les a vulgarisées, l’art antérieur perd rétrospectivement un peu de son originalité).

But the Narrator is no reactionary. Photograhy has a value, since it stores images that have been lost (409 -- La photographie acquiert un peu de la dignité qui lui manque, quand elle cesse d’être une reproduction du réel et nous montre des choses qui n’existent plus). And more interestingly, it can also widen and enrich the capabilities of our eyes. “d’admirables” photographies de paysages et de villes... image différente de celles que nos avons l’habitude de voi…. telle de ces photographies “magnifiques” illustrera une loi de la perspective, nous montrera telle cathédrale que nos avons l’habitude de voir au milieu de la ville, prise au contraire d’un point choisi d’où elle aura l’air trente fois plus haute que les maisons et faisant éperon au bord du fleuve d’où elle est en réalité distante.

Futhermore, it is thanks to these reproduced images that the Narrator has constructed his mental and ideal picture of the church at Balbec before he can visit it. If sometimes his confrontation of reality leads him to disappointment, in this case representation is not at odds with its origin and has on the contrary aggrandized the significance of the original. The Narrator is conquered by awe when standing in front of the real object, the thing-in-itself (283 --maintenant c’est l’église elle-même, c’est la statue elle-même, elles, les uniques: c’est bien plus.


UNVEILING the CLOTHES

But if we saw that any one person will fashion her or his clothes with the idea of embodying the self in a particular desired way, here comes the artist, the painter, ready to disentangle that conception and model both the art of fashion designers and the projections of a sitter into yet another level of transformation.

For Elstir teaches the Narrator that the modistes are artists who with just one gesture they can convert simple matter into something sublime (571 their art “le geste delicat par lequel elles donnent un dernier chiffonement – aux noeuds et aux plumes d’un chapeau terminé). And yet, he will, with also a single gesture, unlock the camouflage set up by the fashion makers and the sitters and reveal their inner reality – (523 -- cette harmonie, le coup d’œil d’un grand peintre la détruit en une seconde,..

So the Narrator presents the duel between a sitter and her portraitist, in which they fight for different representation of her image. By the inclusion of a revealing element in the portrait of a cousin to the Princesse de Luxembourg, (523 - “un vaste décor incliné et violet qui faisait penser à la Place Pigalle) the painter leaves a trace that can lead to her dubious moral past. This is a signal which the sitter, however, may not detect – un grand artiste ne cherchera aucunement à donner satisfaction à...la femme …but the artist is not ready to compromise and he will désenchanter le spectateur vulgaire.

And it is in his portrait of Odette that the Elstir enthralls the Narrator by extracting from her that very quality which has fascinated our protagonist from early on but which Mme Swann had covered up. In her portrayal as Miss Sacripant, Elstir has rendered all her theatricality, fictitiousness and double-entendre. Not only is she dressed up in costume and figuring as someone else, but even her sex appeal is ambiguous and elusive.

n  506ff -- Odette – Miss Sacripant...le caractère ambigu de l’être dont j’avais le portrait sous les yeux tenait, sans que je le comprisse, à ce que c’était une jeune actrice d’autrefois en demi-travesti... en costume.. un être factice.n

Dismantling the construction of the mantle of purity in which Mme Swann had wrapped herself, the painter has unfolded the full fan inside the young Narrator’s imagination by expanding the two poles of Odette’s spectrum, the Grande Dame or the Cocotte.


PAINTERLY REPRESENTATION

Elstir as Eye Opener.

For it is in the painter Elstir that, so far, our Narrator finds the most pure inspiration. When he finally encountered Bergotte, the object of his fascination from an early age, our Narrator felt disappointed. Prior to the meeting he had already become very familiar with the writer’s exquisite prose so there was no discovery. And may be as a sign of his youth, he had fallen into the trap of expecting appearances to match substance, when Bergotte’s common physique did not match his stylized prose. So, even though Bergotte sits at the crest of writing, the art in which the Narrator dreams to excel, it is another art medium that will, literally, open the Narrator’s eyes.

There is no disappointment in his meeting the metamorphosed Monsieur Biche. And this Biche-turned-into-Elstir presents him with new and unknown wonders.

Pervasive Images.

But one wonders at what point in time this Narrator has opened up his eyes. As we read these memories we do not know when the painterly way of conceiving things entered his mind. The novel is full of terms related to surfaces and paintings and frames. There are many fenêtres, cadres, rideaux, peintures doubles, cloth covered paintings, hublots (portholes), vitraux and vitrines, écrins, études en verre, rétables or predellas, and a lot of glass and glass gallerias. Here is an extract loaded with them.

n  454 -- changea le tableau que j’y trouvais dans la fenêtre... dans le verre glauque et qu’elle boursouflait de ses vagues rondes.. sertie entre les montants de fer de ma croisée comme dans les plombs d’un vitrail.... un tableau religieux au-dessus du maître-autel.. parties différentes du couchant, exposées dans les glaces des bibliothèques basses en acajou.... couraient le long des murs... on exhibe à côté les uns des autres dans une salle de musée les volets séparés que l’imagination seule du visiteur remet à leur place sur les prédelles d’un retable.n

Observing Reality and Extracting Truth.

The Narrator comes to the realization that talent is neither inherited nor is it contagious. He had already admitted that by hanging out with Bergotte in social activities he would not absorb the writer’s mastery. Observing and talking with Elstir, he becomes mesmerized with the painter and tries to unlock the mystery of his artistic ability. He apprehends that it cannot be obtained by sheer effort of the conscious mind or l’intélligence. Time and memory are necessary to extract the truth out of the surrounding reality and these cannot be summoned by the pure and cold intellect. Perception tuned at its finest, together with a poetic eye, will bring the ability to dissolve one’s preconceived notions and 492--voir la nature telle qu’elle est, poétiquement”. One is to let free the whole array of immediate sensations and not let the intellect’s preconceptions.498 – L’effort que’Elstir faisait pour se dépouiller en présence de la réalité de toutes les notions de son intelligence.

Reality needs to be reflected, but the kind of mirror that is capable of reflecting beauty and truth is just not any mirror, it has to be the mirror of genius and it is in this mirroring activity that beauty is generated.

157 -- De même ceux qui produisent des oeuvres géniales sont... ceux qui ont le pouvoir, ... de rendre leur personnalité pareille à un miroir, de telle sorte que.... , le génie consistant dans le pouvoir réfléchissant et non dans la qualité intrinsèque du spectacle reflété.

Such is Elstir’s abiltiy at detecting hidden beauty, that the Narrator also learns from him that it can also be extracted out of common objects. This is a huge revelation for him, because he no longer needs to block obstacles and vulgar intrusions when he wants to admire his Balbec church. Elstir is capable of distilling beauty even out of Dead Nature, or Still Lives. 532 – “j’essayais de trouver la beauté là où je ne m’étais jamais figuré qu’elle fût, dans les choses les plus usuelles, dans la vie profonde des natures mortes.

Mental Transformation & Construction.

But registering sensations is not enough. As the Narrator tells us, the process that Leonardo called “cosa mentale” is necessary if one is to approach truth. The artist will arrange a new grouping of the constituent elements of the sensory experience and this new arrangement will reveal its deeper nature. 522 –- génie artistique – pouvoir de dissocier les combinaisons d’atomes et de grouper ceux-ci suivant d’un ordre absolu.

In the magic transformation in which beauty is distilled out of common elements, Elstir’s alchemy converts his atélier or studio into a Laboratory. Using his capabilities as Creator he will conjure up order out of chaos and will produce a new reality. 491 – L’atélier d’Elstir m’apparut comme le laboratoire d’une sorte de nouvelle création du monde, où, du chaos que sont toutes choses que nous voyons, il avait tiré.....

And in this he is comparable to the supreme creator because if He named things, Elstir renames them. 492 -- si Dieu le Père avait créé les choses en les nommant, c’est en leur ôtant le nom, ou en leur donnant un autre, qu’Elstir les recréait.


Art Becomes its own Force.

Depicted things enter a new realm of existence. They continue to be that which they may no longer are, but cease to be what they were by acquiring this new nature. 491 pris une dignité nouvelle du fait qu’ils continuaient à être, encore dépourvus de ce en quoi ils passaient pour consister…la vague ne pouvant plus mouiller ni le veston habiller personne.

With such a transformational ability, Art eventually is no longer just an outcome in a process. It will consolidate its own existence and become a new force. With this impulse it will act in a boomerang fashion and having emerged out of reality it will project itself back and change its nature. Similarly to the way Swann fell in love with Odette, by clothing her with Botticelli’s images, the Narrator begins to see a charm in Mme Elstir once he projects Titian onto her. These two artists, Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Fillipeppi (a.k.a. Botticelli) and Tiziano Vecellio are an example of how two individuals, before Elstir, were able to elicit beauty out of their sitters and surroundings, thanks to their sensibility and ability to transform and represent bequeathing to us their art and enriching our perceptions.


FINAL CURTAINS

In this volume we continue to accompany the Narrator in his Education Sentimentale, but as we join him in the exploration of his feelings, fascinations and obsessions, we witness the particular and wholehearted attention he pays to the phenomenon of artistic Representation. We see with his eyes how he discovers it through the visual arts and its aesthetics and participate in this Education Artistique.

And if the novel finishes with the opening of the curtains in the Narrators room, we shall now close them tightly until it is time to open them up again and let light stream in beautifully and poetically and enable us to continue to see.


And all of this we see through text.

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Page references are to the Gallimard-Folio edition.

FIFTEEN stars.

I like to read books about people’s fucked up relationships more than I like to read about how lovely the flowers smell along the French seaside (unless of course the flowers are a blatant euphemism for something else), so I did not end up rating Within a Budding Grove quite as highly as I rated Swann’s Way.

The first half of the book was great and made true my prediction that the narrator would experience a “Swann–Odette” type of relationship with Gilberte, replete with its ups and downs and its ins and outs. Here the narrator expounds on what his love for Gilberte feels like to him:

n  When we are in love, our love is too big a thing for us to be able altogether to contain it within ourselves. It radiates towards the loved one, finds there a surface which arrests it, forcing it to return to its starting-point, and it is this repercussion of our own feeling which we call the other’s feelings and which charms us more then than on its outward journey because we do not recognise it as having originated in ourselves.n  
n

Much of this section reiterates what the narrator talked a lot about in the first book, which is how the happiness we attain for ourselves is based more in the exhilaration of wanting something than it does in actually possessing it in the end.

The second half of this book finds the narrator on summer vacation with his grandmother in the fictional coastal town of Balbec, which I think is probably in Normandy or something. Until the end where things start getting interesting again with Albertine, a lot of this was flyover country for me. It isn’t that I don’t like reading about rich kids and their grandmother’s snobby friends but none of it had the bite of a good old-fashioned Mme. Verdurin parlor gathering, if you catch my drift.

But then Albertine and her band of friends do enter the picture during the final third of this novel and Proust soars anew, demonstrating his eminence at describing the concept of memory, flirting with our own understanding of it, and putting into words an experience we’ve all had recalling the facial features of a person no longer in our line of sight. Essentially, our memory of the particulars of a person’s face is known to be transient. We begin “forgetting” details the moment we can no longer see the person, our memory of them immediately undergoing distortion, after which only as the person reenters our presence does that memory once again assimilate into the “real thing.”

The same is true, in many ways, for other details which we accumulate by way of the senses. The taste of an orange, for example, is a taste that—for an orange lover—is known to be delicious, and one can be reminded of the fact that the orange is delicious but the actual taste of the orange eludes us until the moment at which we once again bite into one. Before that, and then again immediately after the flavor of it has left our palate, we are able only to rely on our untrustworthy memory of it which we know to morph and elude, and which supplies us with a superficial impression of deliciousness but without the details necessary to constitute what that deliciousness might taste like. With human beings, this cycle, repeating itself as it does, is further confounded by the idea that while our memory of a person fluctuates against the tide of reality, the reality itself is changing. A person in her late teenage years is no longer the same person we see before us in her twenties, and this additional dimension of change complicates our impression of a person to the extent that we have perhaps to admit that we can never really know a person.

Proust also excels with comedy. And I mention this because I think it’s funny to imagine someone finding Proust funny. I don’t know too many people who read Marcel Proust for his comic moments, and I certainly don’t read Marcel Proust for his comic moments, but those moments nevertheless are there. There is a passage in which the narrator is playing a game with Albertine similar to Monkey in the Middle, and he is so preoccupied with the idea of Albertine’s hands touching his that when they suddenly do touch his, he becomes over the moon with excitement and disbelief that this glorious moment is happening to him. Not even a beat later, however, the girl shatters his reveries with a comment like, “Dude, I’ve been trying to give you the ball. Why are you not taking it? Guys, we can’t invite this guy to play with us anymore. He’s a complete tool who doesn’t know how to take the ball when it is handed to him. Seriously, what is wrong with him?”

Reading this book took me a bit longer than I expected, and I will probably not start on Volume III until I have cleared enough time out of my schedule to enjoy it as much as I hope to. Until then, while I know I may begin forgetting the specifics of what I’ve enjoyed so far in In Search of Lost Time, I’m confident I’ll retain at least the impression of the enjoyment it has made on me, which—whether we like to believe so or not—has to be enough.

          Main Review Page for In Search of Lost Time

çiçek açmış genç kızların gölgesinde, birinci kitabın devamı sayılabilecek bir bölümle başlıyor ama daha ilk sayfalardan itibaren, bu kitabın daha rahat okuduğunu ve daha kolay "anlaşıldığını" görüyoruz: cümlelerin daha kısa olması gibi önemsiz farklar var ancak işimizi kolaylaştıran asıl sebep ilk kitapta kayıp zamanın izinde'nin yapısını öğrenmiş olmamız. biraz da şaşırarak farkına varıyoruz ki bu yapı basit: kahramanımız işte çaya batıralan madlenle, uykuyla uyanıklık arası hallerle, zaten bizim de deneyimlediğimiz biçimde geçmişe dönüyor, hatırlamaktan öte bir şey bu, adını da koyabiliyoruz br ölçüde, istemdışı bellekle-bilinçle geçmişi canlanıyor sanki kahramanımızın ve biz de o canlı geçmişi okuyoruz. bununla birlikte içerik olarak da kolayca sınıflandırılabileceğini anlıyoruz romanın. üç tema hakim romana, kahramanımızın üç meselesi: yüksek sosyete, aşk ve sanat. üç tema üzerinde döne dolaşa ilerliyoruz. zorluk, bu üç tema üzerinden ulaşılan yoğunlukta. akıl almaz bir gözlem gücü, müthiş bir zeka-hayal gücü birlikteliği, incelik, incelikler üzerinden hayatı kavrayışta.

ilerledikçe basit yapının sağlamlığı, kusursuzluğu ortaya çıkıyor. devasa yükü-içeriği taşıyan, ağırlığı arttıkça büyüyüp genişleyen, tüm görkemi bütünlüğü içinde eriten ve yükselten bu yapı adım adım algımızı, okur algısını da yönetiyor, şekillendiriyor. önce zaman anlayışının derinliğini hissediyoruz. çiçek açmış genç kızların gölgesinde, bir geçmiş zaman romanının içinde olmadığımızı, hatıra okumadığımızı fark ettiriyor bize. "kayıp zaman"ın ne olduğunu anlıyoruz, arayışı anlamlandırabiliyoruz. nihayet bu ikinci kitapla okur olarak konumumuz da netleşiyor-kesinleşiyor artık. kayıp zamanın izinde adlı romanın yazılışının tanığı olarak yerimizi alıyoruz.

After I finished the first volume of Proust’s masterpiece, I did what I always do when I finish a book: I wrote a review. And, in truth, I ended up being a bit harsh and hyperbolic in that review; but I soon came to second-guess myself. For, although I can’t say I exactly loved Swann’s Way (I liked it), that book had, without my being aware of it, completely undermined everything I thought I knew about fiction. Unconsciously, imperceptibly, my whole concept of the novel had changed.
tt
So it feels a bit dishonest of me to say anything negative about Proust; maybe all my negative sentiments are just a psychological defense mechanism, meant to shield myself from feeling overwhelmed by the influence Proust has exerted over me. Maybe I’m just feeling the literary equivalent of an Oedipus complex, and am striking out at the father who nurtured me. Still, even if we know we are deluding ourselves, we must, in the end, accept the delusions, for we have nothing to replace them with. So here are mine.
tt
I love Proust’s style, but I am bored by his subject—love. Perhaps you will think me odd, but I find love a very boring topic for art. I’ve heard too many love songs, read too many love poems, listened to too many lover’s complaints. It’s not that I’ve sought these out, mind you, but that they pervade our culture; and it’s a cultural obsession that I’ve always failed to understand. Love is, after all, an emotion—a very fine and very beautiful emotion, of course, but an emotion just the same. I don’t like reading odes to happiness or listening to songs about feeling lonely. Emotions are self-evident; they don’t need to be analyzed—they simply are. I don’t think many people will agree with me, but that’s how I’ve always felt—so that’s that.
tt
To be fair, this book is far from a sappy love song. In many ways, it’s precisely the reverse: it does not attempt to evoke the feeling of love, but to analyze it. In Proust’s hands, a pen becomes a scalpel. He anatomizes every instant; he conducts autopsies of every slight memory. This book can be read as an account of exploratory surgery on Love’s cadaver, performed with a steady hand and a cynical eye.
tt
But I must confess that even this bores me. Am I a philistine? Am I unfeeling? Perhaps. But, really, why is this phenomenon so fascinating to so many? I’d rather read a 500 page book analyzing our feelings of hunger. It wouldn’t be so different; a single trip through a supermarket could be as exciting as the trip to Balbec:

I saw, sitting on the shelf, a little band of apples; and these apples, which lay there so innocently, so playfully, so indistinguishable from one another, at once absorbed my total attention. I saw them there, sitting in the harsh light of the supermarket, their waxy skin gleaming attractively; and this gleam of light awakened in my stomach rumblings and stirrings, which, as I reflected, must have existed there all along, dormant, waiting to be awakened by the sight of some fruit. But as I reached out my hand, picking up the apple that most caught my fancy, my expectations were shattered; it felt so weightless in my hand, and its waxy skin felt so much like plastic, that my desire was immediately destroyed, my hunger abated, and I put back the apple—thrown back once more into that confusion of hunger, knowing that I wanted food, but not knowing what I wanted to eat.

(Alright, that’s probably a horrid parody, but you get my drift.)
tt
In short, I cannot say that I loved this book; but I can’t blame Proust for my particularities of taste. I did, however, very much like it; for, even if the subject bored me, it’s impossible not to be amazed by the depth of intelligence betrayed in every sentence, the brilliance lurking in every line. And, in my heart, I suspect that I will, once again, come to reproach myself for being harsh and hyperbolic in a review of Proust. My complaints are the complaints of a whining child, annoyed at his mother opening the blinds, letting the bright sunlight come streaming in. After all, it takes a long time for your eyes to adjust.

Now just past his adolescent years, our nameless little narrator friend spends time at the Balbec beach and basks in the ambit of some fine young lasses after chatting with a kindly ambassador and a famous (albeit brutishly dressed and mannered!) writer he admires. The bits with Bergotte, the great writer, were fun -- I love great writers as imagined by great writers (the only others I can think of are Arnheim in Musil's The Man Without Qualities, Vol. 1 and Benno von Archimboldi in Bolaño's 2666). I'm having trouble recapturing all that's covered in this one, particularly early on, since I somehow started it about six weeks ago. Good to see Swann and Odette years later, comparatively settled down, to feel like I'd experienced their most passionate episodes and now know them well, can see the world through their eyes and appreciate changes in character. Little narrator dude alludes to time spent in a brothel, just chatting of course, and in general seems a lot less wispily enthralled by pink hawthorns. Once he travels to the beach, he recognizes young yearning ladies but has a low estimation of his ill self and sort of holds his tail between his legs and talks not of sharing in their yearning but appreciating young ladies for how interesting they might be, something which at first seemed indicative of the author/narrator's sexuality but also nicely setup a change of tune (from bashful whistle to let's get it on) after hundreds of pages. Narrator hangs with some male folks his age, particularly Saint-Loup, who really stands out at first, erect as a silver bishop on the swirly shifting societal chess board, a kind kindred aristocratic kid for Marcel to marvel at and befriend. For the most part, over 730 pages, all that really happens (ie, in terms of a concentrated burst of action) is he tries to mack on a hot little lady who's asked him to come sit by her bedside after pressing on his hand, giving him meaningful looks, and speaking "the language of affection" with him, and so when he leans in to kiss her . . . I won't give it away since it's a relatively pleasurable payoff on page 701. This long second installment seems a little more solid as narrator comes into his own, essentially sides with writing over an ambassadorial career, and then develops his eye for beauty in art, nature, and pale little dark-haired ladies wired to please, all near the sea with its sets of waves as liquidy and luminously lapidary as the prose, as always. A cathedral is associated with rocky cliffs along the sea while talking to a cool painter guy who sees everything's intricacy and serves as role model and ambassador to the girls. Something continually of interest is the lack of Christian religious significance/influence and the suggestion that a sort of mystical artistic perception (all elements of life are embued with beauty!) transform the world into a cathedral. The end's very much about the first stirrings of adolescent eros, whose innocence is underscored by the hysterical tilt-a-whirl romance between Swann and Odette in the "Swann in Love" section of Swann's Way. This one ends with the recognition of his reserve of passion within, sort of how the first one ended with recognition of his reserve of divine love/artistic perception. It's not so much a "five star" book in itself -- some stretches really dragged and others soared -- but the overall project (its themes, characters, settings, execution, insight, and particularly its language of course) is without a doubt at least seven stars. Monumental without being monstrous at all.

راستش دلیل این همه تأخیر، گم شدنِ یادداشت‌هامه.
یادداشت‌هایی که در طول خوندن کتاب گاهی مفصل و گاهی در حد اشاره می‌نوشتم که بعدا اینجا منتقل کنم تا فراموشم نشن.
شاید الان بین کتاب، در قفسه‌های کتابخونه‌ی دانچگاه حبس شده باشه تا روزی یکی دوباره این کتاب رو امانت بگیره و به دست خطِ آشفته و جملات در هم من بخنده و اون رو دور بندازه.
شاید هم توی اتوبوس زیر پای آدم‌ها لِه شده. شاید هم همین نزدیکی‌ها بین چک‌نویس‌ها و یادداشت‌های دیگه‌م پنهان شده و روزی دوباره بهش بر خواهم خورد.
به هر حال وقتی که اُمیدم رو به پیدا کردن یادداشت‌هام از دست دادم، سعی کردم بر اساس چیزی که توی "کتابخونه‌ی ذهن"م دارم، ریویو رو بنویسم اما چون هم مدتی گذشته بود و کمی از فضای داستان دور شده بودم و هم چیزی که توی ذهنم بود ناقص‌تر از یادداشت‌هام بود، راضی نشدم و از خیر نوشتن این ریویو گذشتم و به معنای تسلیم شدن، مُهر پایان کتاب رو زدم.
ولی خب به جاش یه خاطره‌ی کتابی (هرچند دردناک) به جا موند =)))