Jessie Nace

In Search of Lost Time

April 25, 2015

Close Reading: Within a Budding Grove page. 604-606

Week 5

“It was along this train of thought silently ruminated over by Elstir’s side as I accompanied him to his door, that I was being led by the discovery that I had Just made of the identity of his model, when this first discovery caused me to make a second, more disturbing still, concerning the identity of the artist”.  He had painted the portrait of Odette de Crecy. Could it be possibly that this man of genius, this sage, this recluse, this philosopher with his marvelous flow of conversation, who towered over everyone and everything, was the ridiculous depraved painter who had at one time been adopted by the Verduins? I asked him if he had known them, and whether by any chance it was he that they used to call M. Biche. He answered me in the affirmative, with no trace of embarrassment, as if my question referred to a period in his life that was already somewhat remote and he had no suspicion of the extraordinary disillusionment he was causing me. But looking up, he read it on my face. His own assumed an expression of annoyance. And, as we were now almost to the gate of his house, a man of less distinction of heart and mind might simply have said good-bye to me a trifle dryly and taken care to avoid seeing me again.  This however was not Elstir’s way with me; like the master that he was-and it was, perhaps, from the point of view of pure creativity, his one fault that he was a master in that sense of the word, for an artist, if he alone, and not squander his ego, even upon disciples-from every circumstance, whether involving himself or other people, he sought to extract, for the better edification of the young, the element of truth that it contained. He chose therefore, instead of the words that might have avenged the injury to his pride, those that could prove instructive to me”.   Pg. 604-605

The narrator has figured out that Elstir is the painter from the Verduins, the painter who Swann had at one point not to anyone but to himself, in one of his many long mental arguments that he had with himself about his love for Odette and also her virtue. He had accused Odette of sleeping with.  The narrator who had only been told stories of the painter, and we can assume from his astonished reaction that these stories were not positive. What the narrator is also surprised about is how Elstir reacts to his recognition of him. Instead of being embarrassed or ashamed Elstir embraces his past, he sees the contempt and judgment on the narrators face and instead of being angry he is just mildly annoyed, and doesn’t send him away, he chooses to eloquently explain what his past is for him.

“There is not man,” he began, “however wise who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man-so far as it is possible for any of to be wise-unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnation by which that ultimate stage must be preceded. I know that there are young people, the sons and grandsons of distinguished men, whose master have instilled in them the nobility of mind and moral refinement from their schooldays. They may perhaps have nothing to retract from their past lives; they could publish a signed account of everything they have ever said or done; but they are poor creatures, feeble descendant of doctrinaires, and their wisdom is negative and sterile. We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you , have not been shaped by a paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have been sprung from very different beginning, having been influenced by everything evil or commonplace that prevailed round about them. They represent a struggle and a victory. I can see that the picture of what we were at an earlier stage may not be recognisable and cannot, certainly, be pleasing to contemplate in later life. But we must not repudiate it, for it is a proof that we have really lived, that it is in accordance with the laws of life and of the mind that we have, from the common elements of life, of the life of studio, of artistic groups-assuming one painter-extracted something that transcends them”.  Pg. 605-606

Elstir explains to the narrator that while his past is questionable, it made him who he is. The choices of all men are shaped not by just their upbringing but by their experiences. Elstir is saying that even the best men who are raised right, by society’s standards, make choices in their youth that can be distasteful.  Once made, one must learn from them and move on and use these choices as life lessons. I also believe that Elstir is helping the narrator see that as an artist he was able to use all of his experiences in his youth to be a better painter. To find yourself and who you are is a journey you cannot learn in a classroom, or by your parents, the path is for you alone. How you use the wisdom you gain will define the person you become.

Close Reading. Within a Budding Grove Pages 502-505. James McDowell 4/30/15

On the very first of the pages open for this close reading, 502-730, the reader re-encounters a theme that has been present to this point, and is introduced to a new character that will be important in the rest of the novel.

At Balbec, with his grandmother, and despite her loving and close attention, the narrator makes great adolescent strides with girls. He has already, and repeatedly, described his thoughts as including a somewhat indiscriminate appetite for females.

Andrea Allen, in her earlier close reading, has described the narrator at this stage to be “a hormone-driven teenage boy.” There is perhaps an allusion to this in the very title of this volume, L’Ombre des jeunes filles en fleures. An example, not the first, of this interest on the part of the narrator has been earlier on pages 396-397. He sees approaching “…one of those creatures—flowers of a fine day but unlike flowers of the field, for each of them secretes something that is not to be found in another and that will prevent us from gratifying with any of her peers the desire she has aroused in us—a farm girl…a shopkeeper’s daughter.” He goes on to recall on walks along the Méséglise way “…when I hoped some peasant girl might pass whom I could take in my arms…that all girls one met…were alike ready and willing to give heed to such yearnings.” And further, “As to the pretty girls who went past, from the day on which I had first known that their cheeks could be kissed,…the universe had appeared to me more interesting.” His interest in girls and women is overtly sensual. Later, on page 534, even music elicits a feminine comparison. “…these tunes, each as individual as a woman, did not reserve, as she would have done, …the voluptuous secret which they contained: they offered it to me, ogled me, came up to me with wayward or wanton movements, accosted me, caressed me, as if I had suddenly become more seductive…”

That day in Balbec, on page 502, these sorts of thoughts are present. While simply “hanging about” in front of the Grand Hotel, “I seemed to see charming women all around me…if I was soon to die I should have liked to know beforehand what the prettiest girls that life had to offer looked like at close quarters…”

Against the background of this omnivorous mindset, on page 503, the narrator first “saw five or six young girls,” a pregnant moment. This collection soon acquires the name “the little band” (506). This term, and its female components, figure in the story for the remainder of the novel, and, and for example, do still appear many pages later in Time Regained (Le Temps Retrouvé). At first the narrator does not single out any of the members of “the little band,” and he considered “them all so beautiful,” and importantly, “none of my suppositions embraced the possibility of their being virtuous.” (509) The narrator explicitly includes the little band as “an excerpt from the endless flight of passing women.” (514)

The little band therefore fits well with the frame of mind the narrator has brought to the encounter, as described above. In his initial encounter with the “little band,” he includes them all but soon singles out one. “Although each was of a type absolutely different from the others, they all had beauty…but I had not yet individualized any of them. Except for one, whose straight nose and dark complexion singled her out from the rest…”(505). He describes her further: “… with plump and rosy cheeks and green eyes; the one with the straight nose and dark complexion who stood out among the rest:…”(508).

He wants to identify the members of the little band, in particular the girl who he has picked out from the rest. He hears the name “Simonet,” and this is confirmed for him by the head waiter Aimé. His fantasies race ahead: “I did not know which of these girls was Mlle. Simonet…but I did know that I was loved by Mlle. Simonet” (528). It is through the artist Elstir that the narrator finally discovers the surname of his central interest in the little band. The name is Albertine Simonet, and on page 579 he indicates that by this time, “She certainly had no conception of what one day she was to mean to me.”

That he has chosen Albertine from a crowd is made clear. Will she disappoint him in the end? In the past, his anticipation had sometimes led to that end. That was eventually the case with Gilberte. That was true with Berma. When he finally saw her, he was disappointed. His meeting with Bergotte was not all that he had expected. Even the much-anticipated church at Balbec was not all that he had hoped for. Albertine, however complex she is, does not disappoint, and is to play a central role for five more volumes.

In our class reading, it will be some time before we discover the full significance of Albertine in the story. Suffice it to say that The Fugitive (The Sweet Cheat Gone) and The Captive, were at one point a single volume known as “Le Roman d’Albertine.” According to Trevor Speller, her name is to appear more than 800 times in the novel. Clearly this member of the “little band” the narrator has met on page 503, becomes hugely important to the story. (And, indeed, Albertine will turn out to be quite different than he at first imagined her to be.)

The narrator is attracted to females, in general, and his desires and fantasies are indiscriminate. From that approach, he does pick out individuals. To this point in the novel, it has been Gilberte, possibly Mme. Swann herself, Mlle. de Stermaria (from a distance in the restaurant) as described in an earlier close reading, and now Albertine. It is soon to be Mme. Guermantes, and who knows who is to follow. The scene on the beach in front of the Grand Hotel brings the narrator and his proclivities to a certain individual who will be hugely important to him for the rest of her life.

In the first few pages of the close reading for today, is the entry into Recherches of a very major character. This begins with the sighting by the narrator of “five or six young girls” on page 503, and singling her out by page 505. On these pages, out of the

random female fantasies of the young narrator, an obsessive, long-lasting love for one woman is born.

Michelle McGee
23 April 2015
P.402-404

Close Reading

“As I came away from the church I saw the by the old bridge a cluster of girls from the village who, probably because it was Sunday, were standing about in their best clothes, hailing the boys who went past. One of them, a tall girl not so well dressed as the others but seeming to enjoy some ascendancy over them-for she scarcely answered when they spoke to her- with a more serious and a more self-willed air, was sitting on the parapet of the bridge with her feet hanging down and holding on her lap a bowl full of fish which she had presumably just caught. She had a tanned complexion, soft eyes but with a look of disdain for her surroundings. and a small nose, delicately and attractively modelled.” P. 402

The narrator is coming from church when he sees a group of girl in their church clothes playing around with other young boys, yet one girl in particular catches the narrators attention. The young girl is not dressed in nice clothes compared the others and is quite when asked questions. The narrator has an oversight on others so he presumes that she has recently gone fishing because of the bowl of fish in her hand and the way she sits upon the parapet. The narrator continues to describe this girl in detail. He describes her eyes and their shape, he describes her nose and its delicacy on her face. The narrator starts to show increase interest in certain girls that intrigue his interest similarly to Gilberte.

“My eyes alighted upon her skin; and my lips, at a pinch, might have believed that they had followed my eyes. But it was not only her body that I should have like to attain; it was also the person that lived inside of it, and with which there is but one form of contact, namely to attract its attention, but one of sort penetration, to awaken an idea in it.” P. 402-3

Within the few moments of seeing the girl the narrator is having a sense of “love at first sight.” Being physically attracted to the girl, the narrator also senses more than just physical attraction, he wants to know more about the girl, about who she is inside and mentally. The narrator is at an age where he now understand people also have feelings that are not similar to his own and beings to understand that there is more to a person than what meets the eye.

“And this inner being of the handsome fisher-girl seemed to be still close to me; I was doubtful wether I had entered it, even after I had seen my own image furtively reflexed in the twin mirrors of her gaze, following an index of refraction that was as unknown to me as if I had been placed in the field of vision of a doe. But just as it would not have suffered that my lips should find pleasure in her without giving pleasure to them too, so I could have wished that the idea of me which entered this being and took hold in it should bring me not merely her attention but her admiration, her desire, and should compel her to keep me in her memory until the day when I should be able to meet her again.” P. 403

The narrators feeling towards the girl are different from what he has recently felt, he wonders wether the girl will remember him the way he will remember her. The narrator states that “the twin mirrors of her gaze, following an index of refraction” with this statement, the girl’s eyes and how fast the narrators eyes meet her’s are both a question to him. The narrator hopes the girl will remember what it feels like to see him similar to what it would feel like to remember a kiss between their lips, that the feeling should last until the next time the two see each other again. The narrator does not know this girl yet believes that if they meet again, he will remember exactly how he felt the moment he met her.

“Meanwhile I could see, within a stone’s-throwm the square in which Mme de Villeparisis’s carriage must be waiting for me. I had not a moment to lose; and already I could feel that the girls were beginning to laugh at the sight of me standing there before them. I had five-franc piece in my pocket. I drew it out, and before explaining to the girl errand on which proposed to send her, in order to have a better chance of her listening to me I held the coin for a moment before her eyes.” P. 403

The narrator wants the girl to remember him in any way possible and one of the most memorable things is money, so the narrater uses his mind and decided to ask her to do something for him. Within the narrators mindset, he believes that memories are made through specific moments and your feelings in those moments. He uses this ideal on the girl to trigger her feelings into remembering the narrator and her feelings towards him.

“‘Since you seem to belong to the place,’ I said to her, ‘I wonder if you would be so good as to take a message for me. I want you to go to a pastry-cook’s – which is apparently in a square, but I don’t know where that is – where there is a carriage waiting for me. One moment! To make sure, will you ask if the carriage belongs to the Marquise de Villeparisis? but you can;t miss is; it’s a carriage and a pair.’” P. 403

The narrator uses the girl for a memory and a feeling and by sending her to the pastry-cook’s he as well as she will remember this feeling and this moment. Proust comes out in this part of the novel because Proust perceived the remembrance of memories to be connected to the feeling you felt in the moment you are trying to remember.

“That was what I wished her to know, so that she should regard me as someone of importance. But when I had uttered the words “Marquise” and “carriage and pair,” suddenly I had a sense of enormous assuagement. I felt that the fisher-girl would remember me, and together with my fear of not being able to see her again, a part of my desire to do so evaporated too.” P. 404

The narrator is now relieved because he knows that the fisher-girl will remember him and the remarks he made and the question he asked. He fear of never seeing her again went away because he knew that he would see her again one day because she would reach for the same feeling she had the first time she met the narrator, this is all according to the narrator and his thought process.

“It seemed to me that I had succeeded in touching her person with invisible lips, and that I had pleased her. And this forcible appropriation of her mind, this immaterial possession had robbed her of mystery as much as physical possession would have done.” P. 404

In this final thought upon the matter, the narrator knows she will remember. He has touched her in a way that was not physical but felt as if it was. He now believes she feels as if the mystery was taken from her as if a possession would be taken. In this whole passage the narrator has one goal and that is for the fisher-girl to remember him and remember the feelings she felt when she first saw him. The narrator believes that she will remember him forever.

Vairea Houston
4/22/15
Pg. 357-361

The narrator has arrived at the hotel in Balbec. He is depressed to be away from his mother, and nothing is how he imagined it to be. Here the hotel is filled with “temporary or local celebrities” and he is constantly visualizing himself through their eyes as lower class (p.357). Although being insubstantial to all the guests upsets him, he is the most upset to have M. de Stermaria’s contempt. He fancies M. de Stermaria’s daughter. The way she walks, her pretty face, complexion, and her obvious aristocratic upbringing. “It made them more desirable also, advertising their inaccessibility as a high price enhances the value of a thing that has already taken our fancy”(p.358). He was infatuated with her for her beauty, status, and her unattainability.
The manager of the hotel spots Mme de Villeparisis and whispers such to the narrator’s grandmother. Here is his chance to become recognized and be able to speak to Mlle de Stermaria. Mme de Villeparisis has high status and is obviously recognized by people of the hotel. He then recounts the people he has seen at the hotel that remind him of people back home. He met Legrandin as a waiter and Mme Swann as a bathing superintendent. In Within a Budding Grove, Proust is constantly letting us know that what we imagine is entirely different than our reality. In this case, he has actually seen Mme de Villeparisis and she is not a “victim of a magic spell which had robbed her of her power” (p. 359). Mme de Villeparisis is able to give the narrator power to pass this social gulf he finds himself drowning in.
Unfortunately his grandmother lived in her own little world and did not notice the desperateness in her grandsons face. She just doesn’t understand that he attaches his feelings to how others perceive him. He should have told her to speak to Mme de Villeparisis if he was that emotional about it. He had heard Mme de Villeparisis’ name before in his home when he was a child. Her title was interesting to him, like uncommon Christian names, or street signs. He goes on to name the street names, defining them as common, lower class, even dirty. Despite this, her name and her social status gave her title and in gaining her friendship he could have a chance with Mlle de Stermaria.
His grandmother believed that when a person went on vacation, social interaction did not exist. There was all sorts of time for that in Paris, vacation was for interaction with nature. She feels that everyone has the same notion as she does when it comes to this. So both his grandmother and Mme de Villeparisis look away. With that quick exchange, the narrator has become heartbroken once again. He is a shipwrecked mariner, stuck at sea, depressed at having seen a glimmer of hope in the horizon. Mme de Stermaria was his horizon, which has now disappeared. The narrator is affected so much by the interactions he receives from others around him. He imagines the future while he’s in the present, and is discouraged every time it is not what he expected.

This close reading will focus on pages 333- 335, the reading begins at the end of the 332, the sentence begins:

“I should have like at least to lie down for a little while on the bed, but to what purpose, since I should  not have been able to procure any rest for that mass of sensations which is for each of us his conscious if not his physical body, and since the unfamiliar objects which encircled that body, forcing it to a place it’s perceptions on the permanent footing of a vigilant defensive, would have kept my sight, my hearing, all my senses in a position as cramped and uncomfortable (even if I had stretched out my legs) as that of a Cardinal La Balue in the cage in which he could neither stand nor sit?”

In this sentence, which is actually a question, Proust, through his narrator, M, begins to describe his initial response to his room in Balbec. M refers to himself, his body and /or mind, as a “mass of sensations” and being put on a permanent footing of vigilant defensive due to being encircled by unfamiliar objects. He also implies in this sentence that he knew as soon as he entered that he would be uncomfortable. Most people feel uncomfortable when they enter a new environment, one full of unknown factors. This sensation is felt before the conscious mind notices it, and then it tries to figure out why.

“It is our noticing them that puts things in a room, our growing used to them that takes them away again and clears a space for us.”

M now recognizes these objects not as real tangible things which continue to exist after we’ve stopped thinking of them, but as thought forms which exist only in the intangible and nebulous reality of his own consciousness. Proust reveals here, as he has throughout the series, that the story takes place entirely within the mind of the Narrator, M drifts back and forth through time as he puts together his story in streaming bursts of memory.

“Space there was none for me in my bedroom (mine in name only) at Balbec; it was full of things which did not know me, which flung back at me the distrustful glance I cast at them, and, without taking and heed of my existence, showed that I was interrupting the humdrum course of theirs.”

“The clock—whereas at home I heard mine tick only a few seconds in a week, when I was coming out of some profound meditation—continued without a moments interruption to utter, in and unknown tongue, a series of observations which, must have been most uncomplimentary to myself, for the violet curtains listened to them without replying, but in an attitude such as people adopt who shrug their shoulders to indicate that the sight of a third person irritates them.”

Now M begins to personify the thought forms of the objects in the room. He applies the social customs he has been raised with to the Clock and the Curtains. He takes from the Curtain’s silent listening to the Clock’s constant ticking to imply that the clock is criticizing him in an unknown language which the Curtains apparently understand and are too polite to translate. He is trying to retro rationalize his discomfort by imagining that he has committed the social faux pas of interrupting the lives of inanimate objects.

Andrea Allen
4/21/15
Pg. 504-506

The narrator at this time is a hormone driven teenage boy at this point in our reading and he has just stumbled upon a group of beautiful girls. Walking effortlessly with their “perfect suppleness,” perfect meaning entirely without any flaws, defects, or shortcomings and suppleness as being capable of or showing easy or graceful movement. The narrator then states that the girls had a sincere “contempt” for the rest of humanity. Which tells us that the narrator believed the girls considered themselves better than the rest of humanity and our narrator. He described their movements as being as polished as the waltz. Once they come closer to the narrator he starts to differentiate them apart. One girl in particular sticks out to our narrator, she has a straight nose, and dark complexion and reminds him of an “Arabian King in a Renaissance picture of the Epiphany” (p.505).
When one looks up the Renaissance picture of the Epiphany you can understand what the narrator was trying to explain. In each photo the Arabian King or “baby Jesus” is the focal point, normally surrounded by many wise men, his mother Mary, a glowing Halo encircles his head and brings your attention directly to him. The author always refers to art and music throughout his books in a way for his readers to have a visual example of what he is writing and it gives us a glimpse of how it relates personally to him. Proust was an art and music enthusiast it is through his love for art and music that he refers to paintings or music in almost every passage.
The Narrator goes on to say that the girl’s “obstinate and mocking eyes…or cheeks who’s pinkness had a coppery tint reminiscent of geraniums.” Is what made her stand out from the rest of the group and that he had not permanently or “dissolubly” attached to anyone of the other girls rather than the other as each one passed and caught his eye. He continues by saying, the most different aspects or appearances of the girls were “juxtaposed” which means connected because all the color scales were combined in it when he saw them coming towards him in order they all seemed to blend back together, which confused him like a piece of music in which he was unable to isolate or identify. Before he becomes too confused the oval black/green eyes emerge and once again catch his attention even though he is unsure if it is the same girl. He is unable to relate them or draw boundaries between them and they flow past him reforming into a “collective and mobile beauty.”
When the girls pass him, he can’t help but wonder if they choose such beautiful friends for a reason. These girls to him seem confident and sure of themselves, he thinks them shallow and unable to ever find companions their age who are sensitive, shy or pensive attractive. The narrator is clearly explaining all his personal traits and how these girls would never think to look twice at him. Throughout the last book “Swann’s Way”, the narrator, even as a child had self-esteem issues. He seemed to be extremely close to his mother and had very little friends. He mentioned numerous times that he does not think himself as attractive or a good writer. When he starts to grow up and becomes a teen his insecurities about being shy and awkward surface more and more.
He begins to have a short imaginary introduction to these girls but instead of them finding him intellectual and moral, the girls think he is antipathetic or barbaric and aloof or detached. He pictures them attaching themselves to a straightforward and attractive character who promises them hours of pleasure. Once the narrator’s imaginary scene has played out, He begins to think about the class in which these fascinating girls belong too.
However back in the late 18th and early 19th century capitalism, commodities and progress started to emerge and instead of your family name determining your worth, your wealth, career and character determined your worth, also at this time classless societies and physical culture started to evolve. The author goes into a detailed passage about how it was hard to distinguish what class the girls belonged too and how “physical culture which had not yet been added the culture of the mind, a social group comparable to the smooth and prolific schools of sculpture which have not yet gone in for tortured expression, produces naturally in abundance fine bodies, fine legs, fine hips, wholesome serene faces, with an air of agility and guile. Ending with the girls reminding him of calm models of human beauty outlined against the sea, like statues exposed to the sunlight on a Grecian shore.
What these passages mean to me is that as the narrator grows older and approaches his adolescence he is becoming more aware of his insecurities about love, romance and woman. He labels himself and invalid and someone who is not worthy of a beautiful lady or her love. He mentions numerous times throughout both books his illness and how it isolates him from society and having a “normal” life. He is no longer in the comforting arms of his mother or Combray and he is beginning to see the world around him change from class driven societies into capitalistic societies. He is excited yet terrified of this new place and these new people he is starting to encounter.

Close Reading
April 19th 2015

As we begin volume two part two Places-Names, Within A Budding Grove, we notice young Marcel has matured significantly. He is emerging from childhood and expressing his world of sexuality. In the beginning of Places-Names, Marcel is on his way to Balbec along side of his Grandmother. He seems to be reminiscing over his old love for Gilberte, he then begins to describe how his love for her is no longer fully intact, however that feeling of love he had for Gilberte before is still with him but no longer just for her, he can bestow that love on another girl (299).

Marcel goes on with how he is almost completely over Gilberte then he suddenly hears someone refer to “the head of the Ministry of Posts and his family (300),” which makes him remember a conversation Gilberte had with her father Swann. That memory reminded him of Gilberte which brought back the memory of his feelings for her. He mentions the laws of habit and how habit weakens everything because it can remind us of a person we had forgotten, (a habit of remembering Gilberte when he heard similar words from a conversation she had which stimulates his feelings) (300).

I would also like to focus on a similar passage when Marcel begins to understand the power of his sexuality on pages 317-320. Although he had loved Gilberte at one point he is now realizing his feelings for other girls. While he is on this train he spots a girl who is giving coffee and milk. He realizes he is attracted to this girl and begins to pay attention to every detail of her, like most people do when they become attracted to someone. He describes her face as being rosier than the sky (318), which in habit reminds him of the beautiful sunrise he had witnessed earlier through the window during his train ride. He begins to imagine being with her and all these emotions he had experienced before is all coming back for this different girl.

“When we feel the desire to live which is reborn in us whenever we discover a new beauty and happiness” (318). From my understandings he begins to use a metaphor explaining the qualities of beauty and happiness because we often forget that these are individual qualities (318). “A well-read man will begin to yawn with boredom when one speaks to him of a new “good book,” because the man will image all sorts of books that he has read, where a good book is something special, and not made up of all the previous books but is its own book” (318). This all meaning that Marcel should not think that this girl is going to be like his last love Gilberte but she will be different because she is not Gilberte. It is again habit that gives us this need of comparing one thing we have experienced to another which does conflict with decisions we make and sometimes the people around us. Like Marcels grandmother and her habit of carrying a volume of Mme De Sevigne and Memories De Madame De Beausergent because she then gave Marcel Sevigne to read and he began to admire the author (314).

Marcel seems to be obsessed with this amazing feeling he receives when he is in the presences of a beautiful women. He is in love with being in love. He does not know the girls name, or her life story, he just wants to dig deeper into these feelings. Marcel does miss his chance of meeting this girl but keeps this idea in the back of his head that one day he could possibly see her again until then she is just in his memories.

Close Readings of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time Volume II: Within a budding Grove

Place-Names – The Place pg. 316 – 321

David Bazzano

Proust lived and wrote during an exciting as well as tumultuous era for French and Western European cultures as the rise of modernism and industrialism socially interacted with the daily lives of the general public. Along with the introduction of new technologies also came new forms of thought and expression such as existentialism and idealism (traits and feelings the author as well as the narrator both share) which challenged not only the centrality of religious attitudes but also the ascribed status of individuals. As a result the era that Marcel is entering is a process of diffusion which has ultimately left himself (and in reality many others) confused about the relationship with the natural world. During his time traveling to Balbec the actuality of these events unfold before him as the time-space continuum is altered both mentally and physically by the experiences manifested from the locomotive, and also the confrontations with structure and agency as he witnesses the social order of things en route from Cosmopolitan Paris to the coast.

“…in the pale square of the window, above a small black wood, I saw some ragged clouds whose fleecy edges were of a fixed, dead pinkm not liable to change, like the colour that dyes the feathers of a wing that has assimilated it or a pastel on which it has been depositied by the artist’s whim. But I felt thatm unlike them, this colour was neither inertia nor caprice, but necessity and life. … for I felt that it was related somehow to the most intimate of life of Nature….If a person can be the product of a soil to the extent of embodying for us the quintessence of its peculiar charm, more even than the peasant girl whom I had so desperately longed to see appear when I wandered by myself along the Meseglise way, in the woods of Roussainville, such a person must have been the tall girl whom I now saw emerge from the house and, climbing a path lighted by the first slanting rays of the sun, come towards the station carrying a jar of milk.” -pg 316-17

In particular the entrance of the country woman who provides coffee and milk to the patrons on board manifests before him not only as a similarity to his fantasy of a peasant woman in Combray, but also as an exotic romance which forces him to recognize unforeseen emotions about ones destiny and furthermore, habit and its conflict with beauty or happiness.

One aspect of the narrator which relates to Proust is the fascination with impressionism and its emphasis on the depiction of reality and the passage of time. Exhibitions from artists such as Monet, Renoir, Manet, and Sisly captivated the author by their representations of landscapes which is clear in description throughout the novel, but on a more complicated level, a recipe for conjuration of the narrator’s mind.

What becomes clear after reading the beginning of this passage is the influences of the the Parisian impressionist mindset which continues to be repeated throughout the novel – especially the Monet influence of rooftops and lighting effects. These depictions however, also convey a romance or contemplation which reflects itself among individuals (particularly women) and repetitively is not just described but occurs before, during, and after these moments of epiphany or sense of clarity to the young narrator such as when the milk lady enters the train. From this point onward he is transfixed on this moment for the duration of its occurrence creating a memory as it is unfolding.

“Flushed with the glow of morning, her face was rosier than the sky. I felt on seeing her that desire to live which is reborn in us whenever we become conscious anew of beauty and of happiness. We invariably forget that these are individual qualities, and, mentally substituting for them a conventional type at which we arrive by striking a sort of mean among the different faces that have taken our fancy, among the pleasures we have known, we are left with mere abstract images which are lifeless and insipid because they lack precisely that element of novelty, which is peculiar to beauty and to happiness. And we deliver on life a pessimistic judgment which we suppose to be accurate, for we believed that we were taking happiness and beauty into account, whereas in fact we left them out and replaced them by syntheses in which there is not a single atom of either. So it is that a well-read man will at once begin to yawn with boredom when one speaks to him of a new ‘good book’ because he imagines a sort of composite of all the good books that he has read, whereas a good book is something special, something unforeseeable, and is made up not of the sum of all previous masterpieces but of something which the most thorough assimilation of every one of them would not enable him to discover, since it exists not in their sum but beyond it. Once he has become acquainted with this new work, the well-read man, however jaded his palate, feels his interest awaken in the reality which it depicts.” pg 318

Importantly, what many of us forget daily are the actual separations between beauty and happiness which all too often is conjoined together as a similar entity that has certainly taken young Marcel by surprise upon seeing something independent from his frame of references. Only from our memories, and prior convictions of the true state of particular emotions can we understand or make sense of the unknown. Arguably our judgment of newly introduced people or things in our lives are determined by previous encounters, or by assimilation of a personality, a face, voice, or kinesics can we replace the feeling of uncertainty with familiarity. The pessimistic nature of humanity is the fact that we often don’t realize it and take what we perceive to be as beauty and happiness as the limit of what has been already experienced, or for the yearning of an impossible paradise. Marcel understands this almost immediately when encountering the lady on the train as for a moment time has frozen and the realization that his assumptions of reality are disproved and he in a sense, becomes reawakened. Such as the stubborn well-read person rediscovering what a work of art is, so to is Marcel by observing a new world to explore through the woman in front of him.

“ As a rule it is with our being reduced to a minimum that we live; most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their serviced. But on this morning of travel, the interruption of the routine of my existence, the unfamiliar place and time, had made their presence indispensable. My habits, which were sedentary and not matutinal, for once were missing, and all my faculties cam hurrying to take their place, vying with one another in their zeal, rising each of them, like waves, to the same unaccustomed level, from the basest to the most exalted, from breath, appetite, the circulation of my blood to receptivity and imagination. I cannot say whether, in making me believe that this girl was unlike the rest of women, the rugged charm of the locality added to her own, but she was equal to it. Life would have seemed an exquisite thing to me if only I had been free to spend it, hour after hour, with her, to go with her to the stream, to the cow, to the train, to be always at her side, to feel that I was known to her, had my place in her thoughts. She would have initiated me into the delights of country life and of early hours of the day.” pg. 319

Habit creates the perimeters in which we find normalcy and regularity in the world which plays an important role in who we choose to participate in our lives as well as what we find enjoyable. However, habit can conflict with the predetermined structure and agency present among all societies but in relation to France in the 19^th century certainly included ones ascribed status and social doxa within. In other words, the capacity of individuals to make free choices juxtaposed to the influences or limitations set for an individuals societal role can conflict with what we choose to take for granted. When Marcel is faced with this woman his conceptions of normality are provoked by the lady’s difference in lifestyle being a farmhand in a rural setting. This is not only exotic but also challenging in that his role as a sophisticated Parisian who dares not work under the sun permits him to avoid such confrontations in a typical setting. These feelings ultimately grow and redevelop within minutes it seems as the train departs before his chance to speak with her and is obliged to view her again, as another memory.

“ I saw her leave the station and go down the hill to her home; it was broad daylight now; I was speeding away from the dawn. Whether my exaltation had been produced by this girl or had on the other hand been responsible for most of the pleasure that I had found in her presence, in either event she was so closely associated with it that my desire to see her again was above all a mental desire not to allow this state of excitement to perish utterly, not to be separated for ever from the person who, however unwittingly, had participated in it. It was not only that this state was a pleasant one. It was above all that (just as increased tension upon a string or the accelerated vibration of a nerve produces a different sound or colour) it gave another tonality to all that I saw, introduced me as an actor upon the stage of an unknown and infinitely more interesting universe; that handsome girl whom I still could see, as the train gathered speed, was like part of a life other than the life I knew, separated from it by a clear boundary, in which the sensations aroused in me by things were no longer the same, from which to emerge now would be, as it were, to die to myself.” pg 320

An aspect of this passage which struck as peculiar is the reference to “speeding away from the dawn” which has a similar demeanor to time travel. With the public access of locomotives (as well as the advancement of its own ingenuity) and vehicles, a sense of time speeding up, and breaking away from points of lightness or darkness became a profound realization for many turn of the century individuals whose reference to time and distance underwent drastic change with the new convenience of travel. As this form of time warp is happening to Marcel, the ideas of parallel worlds, and pre-destiny flood his thoughts as he sees the woman at the station in rear-view, making the memory occur faster than organically. This moment of contemplation has almost traumatized a part of his very soul into sticking with the woman he is departing from which rings true to popular resurrections of Greek and Roman mythology and philosophy. These feelings of dis-attachment, and the frustrations that agency has on individuals wanders his mind finally to the questioning of hierarchy where he says:

“But alas, she must be for ever absent from the other life towards which I was being borne with ever increasing speed, a life which I could resign myself to accept only by weaving plans that would enable me to take the same train again some day and to stop at the same station, a project which had the further advantage of providing food for the selfish, active, practical, mechanical, indolent, centrifugal tendency which is that of the human mind, for it turns all too readily aside from the effort which is required to analyse and probe, in a general and disinterested manner, an agreeable impression which we have received. And since at the same time, we wish to continue to think of that impression, the mind prefers to imagine it in the future tense, to continue to bring about the circumstances which may make it recur – which while giving us no clue as to the real nature of the thing, saves us the trouble of re-creating it within ourselves and allows us to hope that we may receive it afresh from without.” pg 321

His realization of classism is apparent in his awareness of his life expectations instilled by his surrounding kinship and social order, but this moment rings quite important to the character as for one of the first times his ability to perceive the life he was given, next to the life he can, could, or should lead in an alternate setting if not for the current order of things. Moments such as this are still familiar with the present as the lives we lead still carry core-values from how society has positioned us. Furthermore in conclusion, are memories just an image? A boring time stamp which become more eventful or important to us in the future than the actual event really had? Or is memory romantic and residual? A place for your mind to go wander and visit once in a while? Proust is keen on the assumption that without time, our memories have no holding or purpose and without feeling, our memories are but nothing except photographs from someone else family scrapbook.

Tara laChance

Close reading

April 18, 2015

After all of the games and assumptions that whirled around Odette and Swann’s relationship in Swann’s Way­, I was pleasantly surprised to read the more straight-forward and blatant text on pages 49-58 in the next book, Within a Budding Grove.  Swann seems to remain quite delusional about his relationship with Odette, not believing things that are laid out right before his eyes.  He succumbs to Odette’s manipulations and finally marries her, against the opinions of what everyone else seems to think about their union.

For my close reading, I am going to focus on the pages 51 and 52 of the Within a Budding Grove book.    On page 51, the sentence begins with “The marriage”.  In this section, it is stated very clearly the “truth” of the relationship between Swann and Odette.  In the very first sentence it states that the marriage, “was not well received” by Swann’s rich aunt and society in general.  This fact that this would be the response to their marriage could be safely assumed due to the many love games they played with each other, one of which was Odette not allowing Swann to speak of her to any of his friends when they were “dating”.  Also, the constant judgements by pretty much everyone in his circle were a constant topic of conversation at parties and in the community at large.  Swann’s very rich and powerful aunt goes as far as refusing to meet Odette but also makes a “campaign” for everyone she knows to follow suit.

The second sentence says, “There has been some talk of his wife’s having money, but that’s the grossest fallacy.”[1]  The part that struck me about this sentence were the words ‘grossest fallacy’.  This says to me that there were many fallacies, or lies, woven in to their relationship.  Not only about Odette, but within the relationship as a whole.  It goes on to say that, “the whole affair has been looked upon with disfavor.”  No one was happy about the two of them together.  The relationship has been the poster child for dysfunction from the start.

Further down page 51, the sentence begins with, “I, myself, who knew him in the old days,” the narrator is “astonished” by the person Swann has become.  How he has lowered himself to being with a woman like Odette and going as far as to marry her as well?  Swann even goes as far as to ask his politically powerful friends if his wife could “take the liberty” to call upon their wives.  This shows me that he is at least aware of this fact about Odette, that she is simply not in the same class and it would be a privilege for her to be able to be a part of the group.

Then they begin to talk about how Odette had blackmailed Swann for years by taking his daughter away any time Odette didn’t get what she wanted from him.  Still Swann proceeds to marry her and yet again, give her what she wants, much like giving a child the very object they have just thrown a temper tantrum about not getting.  On top of that, he is blind to what Odette is really doing by using their daughter as a pawn in their game.  If not blind to it, he is choosing, yet again to simple turn a blind eye to it because in some way the relationship is still serving a purpose for him.

On page 52 the narrator talks about how everyone thought that Odette would become horrible once Swann finally married her.  But, to everyone’s surprise, “her temper has actually become angelic”.  The use of the word angelic makes me think that they first viewed her as devilish.  Also the fact that people find it funny, and are all talking about the way that Swann talks about Odette.  Also, that they did not expect that he would be out proclaiming his love urbi et orbi, which means “To the city and to the world”[2] for her because of the fear of being a (Moliere’s word)[3] which means Turtuffe or hypocrite and they go as far as to say that, “people find it a little excessive the way that he talks about his wife.”  Excessive?  That is an interesting term to use when talking about a husbands vocal affection for his wife.  This just gives more credence to the fact that no one is buying that this is a happy marriage or even that it is a valid one.

I have experienced both sides of this coin:  being blinded by emotion to the truth of someone’s character and therefore ignoring all of the red flags and warnings by friends and family and I have also been the friend and family member trying to get someone to open their eyes to the truth of their partner’s intentions or character.  Either way, as these two pages I’ve been talking about have shown, there is a very valid reason for the phrase love is blind.

[1] Within a Budding Grove, page 51

[2] Wikipedia

[3] Google.com

Time alone changes our memories. It changes our perceptions of events. The particular objects or moments we pay attention to when an event is occurring, change focus. Long after the experience, memories develop new meanings. New information further distorts our memories and transforms them into new stories that we tell ourselves. Swann, in Proust’s Swann in Love, discovers that memories of his affair with Odette take on new meaning when he reexamines his time with her, after their affair comes to an end.He exclaims to himself as he completes his reflection: “To think that I’ve wasted years of my life, that I’ve longed to die, that I’ve experienced my greatest love, for a women who didn’t appeal to me, who wasn’t even my type!” ⁽⁵⁴³⁾

What defined Swann’s “type”, his desired woman and how did it differ from Odette’s “type”? Before falling in love with Odette, Swann would look for women who were beautiful and charming, women whose beauty was “common”, with physical qualities described as “healthy, abundant, rosy, human flesh”, women of a “distinctly vulgar type”. He did not desire a women with any depth of character or one who often had a gloomy expression ⁽²⁷¹⁾ yet, he did look for interesting conversation. He didn’t seek those who were of his own status, but enjoyed the women of the servant class, the cook, an unknown women on a train he took ⁽²⁷²⁾. Odette was described as quite opposite of this “type” of woman Swann desired. She had a sharp profile, features tightly drawn, and prominent cheekbones, in a face that made her appear unwell or in an “ill humor” most of the time. She is initially described as “an ignorant woman with a taste for beautiful things”. She was a woman who left Swann at the best indifferent if not physically repulsed ⁽²⁷⁶⁾.

Through his obsession with Odette, Swann slowly forgets his initial feeling of repulsion and indifference to her and began to construct, outside of reality, a woman he could love, who became the only “type” of woman he could desire ^(280-281).

The narrator of the story describes why Swann might adjust his memory and desires when he explains that “the feeling that he possesses a woman’s heart may be enough to make him fall in love with her…without any foundation in desire” ⁽²⁷⁷⁾. The narrator begins the adjustment to Swann’s memories of Odette when he describes falling in love: “We come to its aid, we falsify it by memory and by suggestion. Recognizing one of its symptoms, we remember and re-create the rest” ⁽²⁷⁷⁾.

An important influence in Swann’s changing perception of Odette is when he associates the sonata or “little phrase” with his intensifying love for her. Swann describes the sonata as a “source of keen pleasure… slender but robust, compact and commanding…entirely original and irreducible to any other kind” ⁽²⁹⁵⁾. He was enraptured, his soul expanded, it opened to him “ a world of inexpressible delights, of whose existence, before hearing it, he had never dreamed, into existence… and he had been filled with love for it, as with a new and strange desire” ⁽²⁹⁶⁾. As the association between this “little phrase” with Odette develops in Swanns mind, his feelings for her follow the same trajectory. She becomes enrapturing and a source of exquisite pleasure as he dreams her into existence. And just as Swann become obsessed with this piece of music, he becomes obsessed with his Odette.

Swann still struggled with his physical perceptions of Odette, which distressed him and “proved that the ideal is unattainable” ⁽³¹⁴⁾. This changes for a time with another significant moment in the revision of Swann’s perception that occurs when he discovers her resemblance to Zipporah in Botticelli’s painting ⁽³¹⁴⁾. “He no longer based his estimate of the merit of Odette’s face on the doubtful quality of her cheeks and the purely fleshy softness… but regarded it rather as a skein of beautiful, delicate lines which his eyes unraveled, following their curves and convolutions…The similarity enhanced her beauty also, and made her more precious” ⁽³¹⁶⁾. Swann associates Odette with a fine work of art, with a fine piece of music and his construction of her as a desirable “type” of woman is complete ⁽³¹⁷⁾ and his memories of her adjust to this new reality.

Swann’s love deepens, developing into obsessive jealously as he tries to maintain the constructed Odette. She is objectified, and he attempts to own her, an understandable response to something he had produced. Odette’s actions are either suspect or ignored when they do not quite fit in Swann’s construct.

When the true nature of Odette’s personality and life style became undeniable, Swann began to reflect on his memories of their time together, re-living his old anguish and jealousies, comparing them against the new knowledge he had gained, identifying himself as ignorant, and trustful.

“For all that he now knew- for all that, as time went on, he might even have partly forgotten and forgiven- whenever he repeated her words his old anguish refashioned him as he had been before Odette had spoken: ignorant, trustful; his merciless jealousy placed him once again, so that he might be pierced by Odette’s admission, in the position of a man who does not yet know;⁽⁵²³⁾

This process of reflection goes on for months and with each memory absorbed and adjusted, another one appears, bringing with it a new observation, a new torment, where he must alter his memory of Odette and his time with her. Swann finally understands that it is not just one point of time that torments him, but the whole affair:

“After several months this old story would still shatter him like a sudden revelation. He marveled at the terrible re-creative power of his memory. It was only by the weakening of that generative force, whose fecundity diminishes with age that he could hope for a realization of his torments. But, as soon as the power of any one of Odette’s remarks to make Swann suffer seemed to be nearly exhausted, lo and behold another one of those to which he had hitherto paid little attention, almost a new observation, came to reinforce the others and to strike at him with undiminished force… And on whatever point in it his memory sought to linger, it was the whole of that season, during which the Verdurins had so often gone to dine on the Island in the Bois that racked him”. ⁽⁵²³⁾

As Swann reviews his memories of Odette he becomes aware that he did know many things about her; details that he didn’t want to know, and so he had overlooked the comments she made that revealed her true nature and the activities of her life. Swann had purposely deluded himself that Odette let an innocent life, predominantly devoid of immoralities.

“But often enough the things that he did know, that he dreaded, now, to learn, were revealed to him by Odette herself, spontaneously and unwittingly; for the gap which her vices made between her actual life and the comparatively innocent life which Swann had believed, and often still believed his mistress to lead, was far wider then she knew.”⁽⁵²⁴⁾

             Swann’s concept of Odette as a beautiful, innocent, sweet yet unintelligent woman was necessary if he was to justify the obsession for her that he developed during their relationship. If he had fully acknowledged that Odette had a life other than the one he assembled, he would have had to acknowledge that she was not his “type” and that he being used for his money and ability to finance her lifestyle, and he would lose the love of the perfect woman he had created.

Thus, through Swann’s reflection of his time with Odette, memory assumes a terrible power to re-create his relationship with her into something other than what Swann believed it to be, he regrets the moments spent in seeing only his version of Odette and recognizes the terrible re-creative power of memory.

“How paradoxical it is to seek in the reality for the pictures that are stored in one’s memory, which must inevitably, lose the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being apprehended by the senses. The reality that I had known no longer existed…They were only a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment.” ⁽⁶⁰⁶⁾