I love Proust very much. In my opinion reading the "Recherche" can substitute a whole study of psychology.
All you need is time and patience.
If one prefers books with a real plot, Proust will probably be the wrong choice. He concentrates on the feelings and reactions and pulls them to pieces - the plot itself is more subordinate.
Greetings
I can't believe I did not enjoy it. I simply can't put the book down; it is absolutely magnificent. "Good writing" pretty much defined. I'm only nearing the end of the Combray section, but am actually glad it is so long. What amazes me most is that Proust is never pedantic; he is concerned with such apparently minor details that at the same time manage to reveal so much. His characterization is supreme, rivals Tolstoy and Shakespeare, for his characters have an individual consciousness, and there's always something beneath the surface and action seems almost secondary to thought. Colorful, varied, able to articulate the most intimate feelings with an uncanny ability. It seems like, in contrast to 19th century prophets, he reveals what we all actually know but dare not or can not tell. In this, I think, the effect his work has on the reader is indeed closer to poetry. Plus, the fact he's gay: I separate author and work, but he manages to understand both sexes very well and not afraid of feelings. Simply can't praise this work enough; I only hope it's not too episodic, which is possible given its autobiographical elements.
I just finished reading Swann's Way this morning, and I also didn't like the book. My main complaint would have to be like Oomoo's OP that there isn't enough plot to sustain a full length novel no matter how wonderful Proust's narrative style is. I freely admit that he does that part as well as anybody I could name: Hemingway, Kerouac, Nabokov, Tolstoy, but all of their books had things happening in them. I read Swann's Way and the first forty pages are about how he couldn't sleep without seeing his mother as a child. Then about a hundred pages go by while he eats a cookie. Another two hundred pages go by where Swann falls in love with a girl for no other reason than because she cheats on him. Then there's this quick wrap up and return to the first protagonist, who remembers Swann's daughter. I'm just glad that I keep a bookmark handy these days, because if I had to remember what happened from one page to the next I couldn't tell you. Was I on the page where nothing happened or the page where nothing happened?
That was my first impression of the book. I wanted very badly to enjoy this one, so I took breaks from reading it to study the criticism at my local library. There I found out that Swann's jealousy was really an obsession with lost time, and where his love was when she wasn't with him. From that point, I began to see the jealousy angle less as a boring and foolish obsession, which was written to much better effect in Maugham's Of Human Bondage, and more as a meditation on mortality. This intrigued me, I must admit, and it helped me enjoy the book much more than I would have.
The problem, as I see it, is not even that Proust is stretching his material out over seven books like I originally thought. His pacing is fine, and it would be a pleasure to stick with that pleasant rhythm, diction, and tone for three thousand pages regardless. The problem is that he doesn't vary his material enough. He's so caught up with memories and abstracts, but if every couple of pages he'd come back to earth and leave a short passage of solid concrete description or dialogue I could have followed him a lot better.
He spends so much time remembering how one thing is like another, and this thing reminds him of that, he jumps from one time to the next and never establishes the NOW or the setting of his book. I couldn't clearly picture his characters by the end of the novel because he doesn't deal with concrete details. He doesn't say, "She wore a green dress." "The car was blue." Or "The woman was short." When he describes something in his setting he goes on in endless sentences and overloads the description with too many details to be helpful; so you never get a clear picture of what he's describing. Proust's descriptions are like Rabelais' long lists of adjectives, which cover so much ground as to become generalizations instead of helpful particulars. And the way he describes an object is often not with any sense of the utility or nature of the object itself but as it relates to his own aesthetic sense.
Then there's the problem of Swann's character. He doesn't do any work in this book. He doesn't have any friends or hobbies that don't relate to Odette. Where is his family in all of this? He is completely defined by his obsession for Odette, and I think that is a mistake. He doesn't go anywhere, except to see Odette. What were his views on the Dreyfus Affair, or the Franco-Prussian War? He doesn't seem to have any life or opinions outside of the cage of his own mind. At least the narrator has his family to give his life shape and background, a little bit of structure, but with Swann there is this vacuum. When the narrator interacted with his family, I found the story much easier to follow. I could also picture the narrator sliding on ice and playing in the park at the end of the book, which suggests to me that his own memories will be treated with more lucidity than the second hand accounts of other characters. (I was just reading a little something while I wrote, and it appears Swann does form an opinion on the Dreyfus Affair later on. Good for him.)
It really wouldn't take much to make this book everything people say it is. Let's set aside the errors of plot. Just because Sophocles, Boccaccio, or Balzac could have written Proust's story for him on the back of a postcard doesn't mean that he was necessarily doing things wrong. It's not so much a matter of proportions either, and how Search suffers from elephantitus of the prose, or how he occasionally slips into florid passages of rapture over plays of light and color. I think that if he'd just varied his narrative a little more, and written a few simple declarative sentences, I could have forgiven him his never ending stream of musings. Heck, I would have enjoyed them.
When in doubt I always remind myself of New Hampshire's motto: Live free or die.
If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly.
--Shakespeare
You know what, Kafka's Crow,
Maybe it's also a thing with the language itself. Maybe an English re-rendering will never create the vivacity that the French A la recherche creates.
We would like to sort of live in this made up illusion that with the help of english vocabulary and syntax we could have insight into every kind of literary observation...but maybe...no. maybe the french has a certain music innate that keeps a francophone reader intrigued despite the meandering plot.
I know that years ago I had a go at A la recherche, and worked my way (toiled) through the first three volumes. They did have an impact, but it wasn't ever really re-creational.
Now last week I picked up the first volume again...that translation you were referring to...and I again try to enjoy the genius mind.
My experience is the opposite. From the onset I put the book in the fin de siecle florid French tradition. I expected it to be detailed, like an intricate art nouveau work, hazy and slightly off-focused like an impressionistic work of art. These were my preconception and they all came true. I had expected it to be romantic, the book is almost love-sick, I expected to be very very feminine and it is. Finished reading The Sun Also Rises the other day. First three quarters of the book are nothing- nada. In Paris and during the journey to Spain nothing happens. The book is about the bullfighters and they arrive well late. On the other hand, I have pictures from Proust's book that are etched on my imagination for the rest of my life. Swann is a stock-broker who inherited a lot of money from his stock-broker father. I imagine him slightly balding, almost middle-aged, well-dressed and soft-spoken, taciturn but knowing. I find him almost alive, can touch him, can see him in his monocle. He is the ultimate turn of the century middle class gentleman. His bicycle, the garden gate, the flowers (almost out of Renoir), the madeleine (I ate this type of cake in my early childhood and found it very mundane. Now when I see it, I think 'if there could be something called 'a bad cake' it would be a madeleine', the reminder of a mundane childhood!). This ability to explore and explain reader's own thoughts is what attracts me to Proust. I love all types of cakes except the mundane madeleine! It has associations that go back long time. I once fell in love with a married colleague of mine just because her face and hair reminded me of Ginevra de' Benci (this happened 13 years ago when I had not read Proust at all because I could not work out the sequence of the seven books.) Then there is the inevitability of Swann's love. It is so bad for him that he is condemned to marry this woman. Yes the beginning is slow and Swann's Way is slow in general still once you complete this part, the rest becomes easier. Just read it as a part-florid, part hazy turn of the century novel. I find more things that I can recall easily in this book than any other book. Maybe I am more Proustian! To me it explained many things in my own life and many motives, thoughts, hidden agendas, desires and repulsions were made clear by the first part alone. I am reading Within the Budding Grove now and am finding it equally illuminating.Originally Posted by mortalterror
"The farther he goes the more good it does me. I don’t want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, ways out, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the sh1t the more I am grateful to him..."
-- Harold Pinter on Samuel Beckett
I am reading Swan's Way. It is very interesting. It has a few philosophies that are close to eastern thought, like magnum sensation from environment, and never to try too hard on anything. I love the beginning though; very descriptive and gives me a visual image.
I know, it's weird how some people think that's Hemingway's best book. He's my favorite author and I didn't even like it the first time I read it. Then when I read For Whom the Bell Tolls I came to it with all sorts of expectations about what a war story should be. I kept expecting plot twists, spies, and betrayal but those are just genre conventions and tricks Hemingway wasn't interested in. What you see is what you get and everything is as it appears.
With Proust, I didn't know what to expect. I'd never read anything like it, with the possible exception of other French novels. I'd just expected it to be great like I heard it would be. There's definitely a culture gap in the philosophy and themes. Sometimes this can be a little jarring. For instance, American's and the French have fundamental differences in our crime movie conventions. In America, the hero is the policeman. In France, the hero is the criminal. In France, there's a philosophy grown out of Catholicism, but in America there's an overwhelming puritan Protestant ethic. I don't know how much that contributes to my disconnect because I love Dumas, Hugo, Flaubert, Racine, La Rochefoucauld, Montaigne, Camus, Sartre, Baudelaire, and Maupassant. I'm not crazy about Gide, Moliere, Corneille, or Stendhal though, so maybe it's just a matter of personal taste.
I will say however, that I heard all this stuff about how good Proust's characters were supposed to be and they didn't impress me. Euripides, Chaucer, and Tolstoy really impressed me with how true to life their characters felt. Now Tolstoy wrote rich European aristocrats well, with a real sense of psychological depth. I like his much better. They don't seem quite as neurotic and obsessive compulsive. Tolstoy's, and to a greater extent Chaucer's characters remind me of people I know or parts of myself, but in Proust I didn't see anyone I knew. Proust's narrator was convincing, but he ascribes his own motives to other characters in the novel, and I don't quite buy that.
It was nice to see how Proust would dissect events in minute detail but after a while that sometimes got repetitive. I started wondering how many times we would revisit Swann's compulsion, or Odette's infidelity. I got it the first time Proust mentioned it and I was ready to move on after that. I drew the parallel between the narrator's obsession with his mother, Swann's obsession with Odette, and then the narrator's later obsession with Swann's daughter. After a certain point, I felt like the examination stopped being an inventory of love and became a type of dwelling.
It just occurred to me why you mentioned that Sun has so little action. It's because I complained that Swann's Way had very little action. One of the appeals about Hemingway, for me at least, is that even when there isn't a lot going on you pick up things about fishing, boxing, bull fighting, good food, good wine. But the only subject Proust seems to know or talk about at any length is art, which has the effect of making his book somewhat self reflexive and self conscious. I really don't like reading about writers and artists in my literature. I don't like songs about musicians, or movies about people making movies either. I like my art to imitate life not other art.
Last edited by mortalterror; 04-14-2008 at 12:34 PM. Reason: addition
In Search of Lost Time is about memory. That is why characters appear and disappear only to re-appear without much predictability. This is realism taken to extreme, past relived almost in 'real time'. The association of things to memories and sensations, from concrete to the abstract, the 'objective co-relative' reversed. All these things are there to be seen in this one text. It is not about life, it is about life through the medium of memory and remembrance. Realists claimed to have recreated life, Proust lays this claim to rest once and for all. We never 'recreate' anything, we only remember. We can only look 'through the glass darkly', or what Frost called 'remembering what I never knew I had known all the time' (or something like that). I like my books to show the internal workings of literature, the nuts and bolts etc and Proust's book fits the bill! "What oft was thought but never so well expressed" indeed.
"The farther he goes the more good it does me. I don’t want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, ways out, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the sh1t the more I am grateful to him..."
-- Harold Pinter on Samuel Beckett
Howard Nemerov, The Oak and the Acorn:
"On being bored by Proust. It can happen, and doubtless will. This author no less than other great men has his longueurs in some plenty. But to be now and then impatient with his excesses, for instance of description and analysis, is one thing; to realize that this author is simply not for you, or not for you at the present moment in your lives, is quite another."
[QUOTEI will say however, that I heard all this stuff about how good Proust's characters were supposed to be and they didn't impress me. Euripides, Chaucer, and Tolstoy really impressed me with how true to life their characters felt. Now Tolstoy wrote rich European aristocrats well, with a real sense of psychological depth. I like his much better. They don't seem quite as neurotic and obsessive compulsive][/QUOTE]
The problem with the concept "true to life" is that there is no such thing-and this is the point that Proust is trying to make, our opinions of other people are based on our own entirely arbitrary and subjective opinions, or on the second-hand-opinions of other people. Realism is all a big sham-as Camus said, in terms of literature there is no such thing as reality as reality is distorted by the writer’s pen, by the writer’s style and by the writer’s subjectivity. I do not understand what you mean my "psychological depth" and "they don't seem quite as neurotic and obsessive compulsive"-just because some (by no means all, there are a lot of 'sane, normal' characters in Proust's novels) of the character are a tad weird doesn't make them any less interesting psychologically. Just because a character is 'normal' doesn't make them any less 'real'-most of us a are a little bit insane if you look close enough, though insanity and strange behaviour are by no means endemic in Proust, or more common in Proust than say Tolstoi.
Besides, Proust was a product of his times, and most of the literary and aristocratic figures around both prior, during and after Proust's lifetime were a tad wacky-Baudelaire, Gide, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Breton, Cocteau, Genet and Huysmans for example, plus a lot of people who Proust supposedly based his characters on (i.e. Charlus and the aristocrat de Montesquiou) were pretty true to life.
Actually there is a lot of action in Proust's novel-and I am not just talking sexual action either, though there is a lot of that too, it is just differently described from (say) Hemingway's action.But the only subject Proust seems to know or talk about at any length is art, which has the effect of making his book somewhat self reflexive and self conscious. I really don't like reading about writers and artists in my literature. I don't like songs about musicians, or movies about people making movies either. I like my art to imitate life not other art.
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.-Vladimir Nabokov
human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars-Flaubert
In regards to how to read Proust, I believe you should read all the volumes back to back. I think that is how it is intended to be read and it makes the most sense that way.
I agree about his books being largely about memory not only about his own recollections but written in the style of one actaully in the act of physically remembering....For example, major plot points such as the deaths of characters who played large parts earlier in the series and influenced the narrator greatly are mentioned briefly in passing which has a very jarring effect....A lot of people criticize this fact about Proust's writing including the fellow who wrote the forward in the version I read but I think if you look at it from the aspect of total immersion in memory, it makes sense!.....People's physical appearances and age and even personality seem to change from meeting to meeting as if the product of unsure memory....That makes it seem real not as something dry ,lifeless ,stale.
I still think it's an amazing work despite Proust's sexual hang-ups and obsessions....I prefer the IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME translation....I found that version easier to follow.
The publisher Ollendorff, who rejected Proust's manuscript in 1912, summed up my feelings on the book when he returned the manuscript to Proust with this comment:
"I don't see why a man should take thirty pages to describe how he turns over in bed before he goes to sleep."
The publisher Ollendorff, who rejected Proust's manuscript in 1912, summed up my feelings on the book when he returned the manuscript to Proust with this comment:
"I don't see why a man should take thirty pages to describe how he turns over in bed before he goes to sleep."
Of course how many publishers and critics have made equally inane comments while rejecting the greatest artists, poets, novelists, composers, etc? One might note that Proust's achievement survives... while Ollen-who?
Beware of the man with just one book. -Ovid
The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.- Mark Twain
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You know I actually liked that part, but I see what he means, and can't help but tentatively concur.
"So-Crates: The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing." "That's us, dude!"- Bill and Ted
"This ain't over."- Charles Bronson
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