What do you think?
Rate this book
À la recherche du temps perdu #4
Sodom and Gomorrah
Sodom and Gomorrah – now in a superb translation by John Sturrock – takes up the theme of homosexual love, male and female, and dwells on how destructive sexual jealousy can be for those who suffer it. Proust's novel is also an unforgiving analysis of both the decadent high society of Paris, and the rise of a philistine bourgeoisie that is on the way to supplanting it. Characters who had lesser roles in earlier volumes now reappear in a different light and take center stage, notably Albertine, with whom the narrator believes he is in love, and also the insanely haughty Baron de Charlus.
557 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1922
About the author
Marcel Proust
1,955 books6,489 followersMarcel Proust was a French novelist, best known for his 3000 page masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time), a pseudo-autobiographical novel told mostly in a stream-of-consciousness style.
Born in the first year of the Third Republic, the young Marcel, like his narrator, was a delicate child from a bourgeois family. He was active in Parisian high society during the 80s and 90s, welcomed in the most fashionable and exclusive salons of his day. However, his position there was also one of an outsider, due to his Jewishness and homosexuality. Towards the end of 1890s Proust began to withdraw more and more from society, and although he was never entirely reclusive, as is sometimes made out, he lapsed more completely into his lifelong tendency to sleep during the day and work at night. He was also plagued with severe asthma, which had troubled him intermittently since childhood, and a terror of his own death, especially in case it should come before his novel had been completed. The first volume, after some difficulty finding a publisher, came out in 1913, and Proust continued to work with an almost inhuman dedication on his masterpiece right up until his death in 1922, at the age of 51.
Today he is widely recognized as one of the greatest authors of the 20th Century, and À la recherche du temps perdu as one of the most dazzling and significant works of literature to be written in modern times.
Born in the first year of the Third Republic, the young Marcel, like his narrator, was a delicate child from a bourgeois family. He was active in Parisian high society during the 80s and 90s, welcomed in the most fashionable and exclusive salons of his day. However, his position there was also one of an outsider, due to his Jewishness and homosexuality. Towards the end of 1890s Proust began to withdraw more and more from society, and although he was never entirely reclusive, as is sometimes made out, he lapsed more completely into his lifelong tendency to sleep during the day and work at night. He was also plagued with severe asthma, which had troubled him intermittently since childhood, and a terror of his own death, especially in case it should come before his novel had been completed. The first volume, after some difficulty finding a publisher, came out in 1913, and Proust continued to work with an almost inhuman dedication on his masterpiece right up until his death in 1922, at the age of 51.
Today he is widely recognized as one of the greatest authors of the 20th Century, and À la recherche du temps perdu as one of the most dazzling and significant works of literature to be written in modern times.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 778 reviews
January 13, 2024
Vices of high society… High society cherishes its vices no less than its virtues… Perhaps even more…
Haughtiness and ambitiousness… Secrets and intrigues… Perversion and lust… Gentry, socialites, crème de la crème shamelessly roam in all the labyrinths of passion.
The narrator spends time with his paramour but he selfishly dreams to encounter a beautiful maiden… He keeps chasing apparitions…
Time flies… And leaves us behind.
Let us leave aside for the time being those who, led by the exceptional nature of their inclination to believe themselves superior to women, despise them, who make of homosexuality the privilege of great geniuses and of glorious epochs, and who, when they seek to share their taste with others, do so less with those who seem predisposed to it, as a morphinomaniac does with morphine, than with those who seem to them worthy of it, out of an apostolic zeal, just as others preach Zionism, conscientious objection, Saint-Simonism, vegetarianism, or anarchy.
Haughtiness and ambitiousness… Secrets and intrigues… Perversion and lust… Gentry, socialites, crème de la crème shamelessly roam in all the labyrinths of passion.
The narrator spends time with his paramour but he selfishly dreams to encounter a beautiful maiden… He keeps chasing apparitions…
It often happens that when I am thinking of her I am seized by a wild longing. But these recurrences of desire force us to reflect that, if we wanted to meet these girls again with the same pleasure, we should have also to go back to the year in question, which has since been followed by ten others, in the course of which the girl has faded. We can sometimes find a person again, but not abolish time. All this up until that unforeseen day, sad as a winter’s night, when we are no longer seeking that particular girl, or any other, and when to find one would alarm us even. For we no longer feel we have sufficient attractions to please, or the strength to love.
Time flies… And leaves us behind.
June 10, 2022
HAPPY PRIDE MONTH!!!
this is the volume of ISOLT that michael bay will turn into a big budget summer blockbuster, mark my words. there are action verbs!! verbs, i tells ya!
and picture this on the big screen: we open with our hero, crouching behind some flower bushes, unmoving - waiting, just waiting for a bee to come around and assist in the pollination of the flowers.(pshow, whoosh - many michael-bayish essplosions) and although not strictly supported by textual evidence, i expect his little sticky hand was at the ready to relieve his straining trousers should this act of hot plant sexx occur. however - his hopes are dashed by something even sexier happening right in front of the bushes: (pshow - in the distance, an essplosion) two men begin their courtship with birdlike posturing and an involved dance of invert attraction, which they consummate nearby, to the complicated emotions of our watcher. (assplosion) WHO IS ACTUALLY A TRANSFORMER!!! zooooom! (aerosmith song)
and after that, it is like a sexy veil is lifted from the world around him and he sees that there are same-sex relations being pursued everywhere!! france is suddenly super-gay, who would have thunk it? and that is volume 4.
(also, for those of you who were concerned after the cliffhanger at the end of volume 3, where he was fretting for about 75 pages about whether he was actually invited to the party he was planning to attend regardless - spoiler alert - he WAS!!) phew. (essplosion)
it is definitely the most readable volume thus far, unless my proust-vaccine has just finally taken effect. and i think this volume works just fine as a stand-alone novel, whereas some of the others feel broken-off. this one has the humor and the bitterness for which proust is known, with fewer daydream-y bits that make you want to shake him a little, like when the concussed try to take a nap.plus, this book does not end with a whisper, like some of the other ones, but with the bang of a firm, declarative statement - ZING!!
these reviews always sound as though i am not enjoying my proust experience, which isn't true, because i assure you, i am. sometimes it feels like my brain is passing through glue, but there are so many rewarding passages - in this volume primarily about the nature of jealousy and the way we perceive ourselves (and the way we perceive how other people perceive us ) through different "stages" of our lives that are incredibly delicate and superfine in their language.
but seriously, you people don't need me to be reviewing proust. my function on this site is that of a literary piglet, snuffling up the truffle-books; finding the unknown and the forgotten and nudging them to the surface. having said that, i am about to start twilight, so that's one you people might want to keep on your radar.
promises were made.
come to my blog!
this is the volume of ISOLT that michael bay will turn into a big budget summer blockbuster, mark my words. there are action verbs!! verbs, i tells ya!
and picture this on the big screen: we open with our hero, crouching behind some flower bushes, unmoving - waiting, just waiting for a bee to come around and assist in the pollination of the flowers.(pshow, whoosh - many michael-bayish essplosions) and although not strictly supported by textual evidence, i expect his little sticky hand was at the ready to relieve his straining trousers should this act of hot plant sexx occur. however - his hopes are dashed by something even sexier happening right in front of the bushes: (pshow - in the distance, an essplosion) two men begin their courtship with birdlike posturing and an involved dance of invert attraction, which they consummate nearby, to the complicated emotions of our watcher. (assplosion) WHO IS ACTUALLY A TRANSFORMER!!! zooooom! (aerosmith song)
and after that, it is like a sexy veil is lifted from the world around him and he sees that there are same-sex relations being pursued everywhere!! france is suddenly super-gay, who would have thunk it? and that is volume 4.
(also, for those of you who were concerned after the cliffhanger at the end of volume 3, where he was fretting for about 75 pages about whether he was actually invited to the party he was planning to attend regardless - spoiler alert - he WAS!!) phew. (essplosion)
it is definitely the most readable volume thus far, unless my proust-vaccine has just finally taken effect. and i think this volume works just fine as a stand-alone novel, whereas some of the others feel broken-off. this one has the humor and the bitterness for which proust is known, with fewer daydream-y bits that make you want to shake him a little, like when the concussed try to take a nap.plus, this book does not end with a whisper, like some of the other ones, but with the bang of a firm, declarative statement - ZING!!
these reviews always sound as though i am not enjoying my proust experience, which isn't true, because i assure you, i am. sometimes it feels like my brain is passing through glue, but there are so many rewarding passages - in this volume primarily about the nature of jealousy and the way we perceive ourselves (and the way we perceive how other people perceive us ) through different "stages" of our lives that are incredibly delicate and superfine in their language.
but seriously, you people don't need me to be reviewing proust. my function on this site is that of a literary piglet, snuffling up the truffle-books; finding the unknown and the forgotten and nudging them to the surface. having said that, i am about to start twilight, so that's one you people might want to keep on your radar.
promises were made.
come to my blog!
May 13, 2022
(Book 685 from 1001 books) À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (Sodome et Gomorrhe) = Remembrance of Things Past = In Search of Lost Time (Sodom and Gomorrah #4), Marcel Proust
In Search of Lost Time, previously also translated as Remembrance of Things Past, is a novel in seven volumes, written by Marcel Proust (1871–1922).
Sodom and Gomorrah (sometimes translated as: Cities of the Plain) (1921/1922), was originally published in two volumes. The first forty pages of Sodom and Gomorrah initially appeared at the end of The side of Guermantes II, the remainder appearing as Sodom and Gomorrah I (1921) and Sodom and Gomorrah II (1922). It was the last volume over which Proust supervised publication before his death in November 1922. The publication of the remaining volumes was carried out by his brother, Robert Proust, and Jacques Rivière.
تاریخ نخستین خوانش: ماه نوامبر سال2007میلادی
عنوان: در جستجوی زمان از دسترفته: سدوم و عموره، جلد پنج از ترجمه فارسی و جلد چهار از نسخه ی اصلی؛ نویسنده: مارسل پروست؛ مترجم مهدی سحابی؛ تهران، نشر مرکز، سال1369؛ در668ص؛ موضوع: داستانهای نویسندگان فرانسه - سده20م
سدوم و عموره، جلد چهارم از سری «در جستجوی زمان از دست رفته»، نوشته: «مارسل پروست» است، که جلد نخست آن در سال1921میلادی، و سپس دومین بخش آن در سال1922میلادی، از سوی انتشارات گالیمار، به چاپ رسید؛ در این جلد، راوی از همجنسگرا بودن «شارلوس» آگاه میشود؛
کتاب «سدوم و عموره» گزارش یکی از مهمترین مراحل سلوک «راوی»، به سوی اوجهای رستگاری و جاودانگی است؛ در کتابهای پیشین، راوی دوره های گوناگون شناخت خویشتن و جهان پیرامون را پشت سر بگذاشت، و اینک به منزلی رسیده است که در سلوک و آگاهی، شاید از هر منزل دیگری برتر باشد: شناختن بدی و پلشتی، برای رهیابی به نیکی و پاکی؛ راوی «در جستجوی زمان از دست رفته»، همانند سالک و رهرو «کمدی الهی» اثر «دانته»، در راهیابی به بلندیهای ملکوتی نخست، باید از ورطههای دوزخی دیدن کند؛ این کتاب چهارم در جستجوی زمان از دست رفته همچون «دوزخ دانته»، نمایشگاهی از چهره هایی است، که هر کدامشان نماینده ی نقص و گناهی هستند، و رهرو با پشت سر گذاشتن آنها، به تعبیری کنایی آنها را میراند و طرد میکند، تا سرانجام به رستگاری نهایی برسد: تا به امید و آفرینش دست یابد
نقل نمونه متن: (دلباختگی سبب زیر و رو شدن بستر خاکی اندیشه میشود؛ در اندیشه آقای «شارلوس» که، چند روز پیش، به دشتی بسیار هموار و یکدست میمانست، و او در دوردستهایش هم، از فرود تا فراز، اندک گمانی را نمیتوانست به چشم ببیند، ناگهان رشته کوههای بلند و استواری به سختی سنگ، و از سنگی تراش خورده، سر بر داشته بود، چنانکه گویا پیکرتراشی، به جای بردن سنگ مرمر از کوه، آنرا در جا تراشیده، و پیکره های بسیار بزرگی تنگانگ در کنار هم ایستاده از ترس، رشک بری، کنجکاوی، هوس، بیزاری، رنج، غرور، ترسناکی، و دلباختگی بر جای گذاشته باشد)؛ پایان نقل
واژه های پارسایی این برگردان جناب «سحابی» برایم بسیار دل انگیز بودند و هستند
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 28/04/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 22/02/1401هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی
In Search of Lost Time, previously also translated as Remembrance of Things Past, is a novel in seven volumes, written by Marcel Proust (1871–1922).
Sodom and Gomorrah (sometimes translated as: Cities of the Plain) (1921/1922), was originally published in two volumes. The first forty pages of Sodom and Gomorrah initially appeared at the end of The side of Guermantes II, the remainder appearing as Sodom and Gomorrah I (1921) and Sodom and Gomorrah II (1922). It was the last volume over which Proust supervised publication before his death in November 1922. The publication of the remaining volumes was carried out by his brother, Robert Proust, and Jacques Rivière.
تاریخ نخستین خوانش: ماه نوامبر سال2007میلادی
عنوان: در جستجوی زمان از دسترفته: سدوم و عموره، جلد پنج از ترجمه فارسی و جلد چهار از نسخه ی اصلی؛ نویسنده: مارسل پروست؛ مترجم مهدی سحابی؛ تهران، نشر مرکز، سال1369؛ در668ص؛ موضوع: داستانهای نویسندگان فرانسه - سده20م
سدوم و عموره، جلد چهارم از سری «در جستجوی زمان از دست رفته»، نوشته: «مارسل پروست» است، که جلد نخست آن در سال1921میلادی، و سپس دومین بخش آن در سال1922میلادی، از سوی انتشارات گالیمار، به چاپ رسید؛ در این جلد، راوی از همجنسگرا بودن «شارلوس» آگاه میشود؛
کتاب «سدوم و عموره» گزارش یکی از مهمترین مراحل سلوک «راوی»، به سوی اوجهای رستگاری و جاودانگی است؛ در کتابهای پیشین، راوی دوره های گوناگون شناخت خویشتن و جهان پیرامون را پشت سر بگذاشت، و اینک به منزلی رسیده است که در سلوک و آگاهی، شاید از هر منزل دیگری برتر باشد: شناختن بدی و پلشتی، برای رهیابی به نیکی و پاکی؛ راوی «در جستجوی زمان از دست رفته»، همانند سالک و رهرو «کمدی الهی» اثر «دانته»، در راهیابی به بلندیهای ملکوتی نخست، باید از ورطههای دوزخی دیدن کند؛ این کتاب چهارم در جستجوی زمان از دست رفته همچون «دوزخ دانته»، نمایشگاهی از چهره هایی است، که هر کدامشان نماینده ی نقص و گناهی هستند، و رهرو با پشت سر گذاشتن آنها، به تعبیری کنایی آنها را میراند و طرد میکند، تا سرانجام به رستگاری نهایی برسد: تا به امید و آفرینش دست یابد
نقل نمونه متن: (دلباختگی سبب زیر و رو شدن بستر خاکی اندیشه میشود؛ در اندیشه آقای «شارلوس» که، چند روز پیش، به دشتی بسیار هموار و یکدست میمانست، و او در دوردستهایش هم، از فرود تا فراز، اندک گمانی را نمیتوانست به چشم ببیند، ناگهان رشته کوههای بلند و استواری به سختی سنگ، و از سنگی تراش خورده، سر بر داشته بود، چنانکه گویا پیکرتراشی، به جای بردن سنگ مرمر از کوه، آنرا در جا تراشیده، و پیکره های بسیار بزرگی تنگانگ در کنار هم ایستاده از ترس، رشک بری، کنجکاوی، هوس، بیزاری، رنج، غرور، ترسناکی، و دلباختگی بر جای گذاشته باشد)؛ پایان نقل
واژه های پارسایی این برگردان جناب «سحابی» برایم بسیار دل انگیز بودند و هستند
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 28/04/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 22/02/1401هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی
August 20, 2022
Sodome et Gomorrhe is the 4th Tome of La Recherche and the last published during Marcel Proust's lifetime. This tome is the final chapter of his great work that he has re-knitted and retouched with the help of his beautiful collages that only his faithful Celestial could accompany. His writing is ambitious, sometimes funny, and radiant in precise descriptions of characters. In this volume, we find almost all the significant figures of Research. The author is more mature, less naive and sees beyond appearances. As he wrote, the central theme is an inversion (today, he would use homosexuality unvarnished). It occupies the author's thoughts like an echo of his sensitivity. His words resonate like catharsis. This volume interweaves nostalgic moments of all grace where the narrator remembers his lost grandmother and the question of loss, and acidity is inviting. Those are the regrets and the beauty of memories. This Proustian dive is a time suspended in grace.
We find the Grand Hotel on the banks of the English Channel, in the shade of young women in bloom who are also growing up, in memory of the friendship that jealousy can spoil, where portraits intersect where descriptions were sometimes nourishing by harsh sarcasm. Read Marcel Proust is a journey where cabs and crinolines greet the tuxedos dethroning the toppers. The moustache is shiny, the manners liberated but under beautiful ointments, the spirits cultivated, the women lively and intuitive. This incomplete list à la Prevert au Past Simple nourishes us with elegance.
We find the Grand Hotel on the banks of the English Channel, in the shade of young women in bloom who are also growing up, in memory of the friendship that jealousy can spoil, where portraits intersect where descriptions were sometimes nourishing by harsh sarcasm. Read Marcel Proust is a journey where cabs and crinolines greet the tuxedos dethroning the toppers. The moustache is shiny, the manners liberated but under beautiful ointments, the spirits cultivated, the women lively and intuitive. This incomplete list à la Prevert au Past Simple nourishes us with elegance.
April 21, 2021
« Tout le malheur des hommes vient d'une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos, dans une chambre. » Voilà une maxime éloquente, en un temps d’épidémie et de confinement. Ici cependant, dans un contexte de frivolité Belle Époque bien différent, Proust apporte une réponse spécifique à cette formule pascalienne.
Quatrième volume de la Recherche, donc, et le temps perdu semble s’approfondir encore davantage que dans Le côté de Guermantes. Les dîners mondains s’allongent : garden-party parisienne chez la princesse de Guermantes, puis à Balbec, dans le petit clan des Verdurin, conversations interminables à la Raspelière ou dans le petit train, dont le Narrateur est désormais l’un des hôtes de marque.
Celui-ci, à ce stade du roman, semble engourdi, étourdi, ébloui par le petit monde insulaire et bling-bling de l’aristocratie et de la haute bourgeoisie parisienne, les bavardages, les potins de salon, le champagne, les étymologies latines, les mots d’esprit, les distractions, les gesticulations, l’agitation. Bref, le divertissement. En filigranes, ce moment le plus intérieur, le plus profond (et en même temps le plus superficiel) de la Recherche est le récit d’une fuite en avant, d’une dégradation, presque d’une perversion et d’un épuisement.
S’ajoutent à cela les séries amoureuses et la jalousie qui, fatalement, les accompagne. Après Swann et Odette (vol. 1), après Gilberte et Albertine (vol. 2) après Saint-Loup et « Rachel quand du Seigneur » (vol. 3), c’est au divin baron de Charlus que revient, à travers l’affection qu’il porte au beau mufle Morel, la partition amoureuse, en contrepoint de celle d’Albertine et du Narrateur. Il n’échappera d’ailleurs à personne que l’homosexualité est au cœur de Sodome et Gomorrhe. Celle de Charlus (le sodomite) et celle, présumée, d’Albertine (la gomorrhéenne). Curieusement, le héros lui-même est absolument hétérosexuel, voire pétrifié à l’idée qu’Albertine puisse aimer les femmes. Il diverge en cela des orientations de l’auteur de la Recherche qui, non sans quelque ironie, compare la parade amoureuse « invertie » au mode de fécondation des orchidées… (Comparaison pénétrante — amusante — ridicule, comme dirait Mme de Cambremer.)
Ainsi, à travers les mondanités stériles et les tortures amoureuses, ce que le Narrateur finit par perdre de vue, c’est sa vocation première d’écrivain. Ironie et subtilité suprême, l’écriture même de Proust, par le scintillement de sa prose, ses intarissables pointes d’humour et, disons-le, ses longueurs accablantes, finit par nous le faire oublier aussi, à nous lecteurs et, au contraire, nous faire ressentir cette même fuite, ce même épuisement apathique vécu par le héros de la Recherche.
Et pourtant, nous tenons son livre entre les mains ! Il faudra donc que tout cela cesse et qu’ait lieu quelque chose comme une conversion augustinienne. Et déjà, de loin en loin, un morceau de ciel s’ouvre au-dessus de la vie du Narrateur. De brefs instants de clarté surviennent de manière fortuite et inespérée, comme pour la madeleine de Combray. L’épisode de la bottine, par exemple, qui soudain ouvre la plaie, jusque-là anesthésiée, de la mort de la grand-mère — celle-ci revue en rêve, comme en un rappel des descentes d’Ulysse et d’Énée aux enfers. C’est là qu’émerge le souvenir, l’angoisse ou la prise de conscience fondamentale. Celle de la finitude et de la mort prochaine. Celle de l’urgence de « demeurer en repos » et, enfin, produire une œuvre avant de disparaître.
> Vol. précédent : Le côté de Guermantes
> Vol. suivant : La Prisonnière
Quatrième volume de la Recherche, donc, et le temps perdu semble s’approfondir encore davantage que dans Le côté de Guermantes. Les dîners mondains s’allongent : garden-party parisienne chez la princesse de Guermantes, puis à Balbec, dans le petit clan des Verdurin, conversations interminables à la Raspelière ou dans le petit train, dont le Narrateur est désormais l’un des hôtes de marque.
Celui-ci, à ce stade du roman, semble engourdi, étourdi, ébloui par le petit monde insulaire et bling-bling de l’aristocratie et de la haute bourgeoisie parisienne, les bavardages, les potins de salon, le champagne, les étymologies latines, les mots d’esprit, les distractions, les gesticulations, l’agitation. Bref, le divertissement. En filigranes, ce moment le plus intérieur, le plus profond (et en même temps le plus superficiel) de la Recherche est le récit d’une fuite en avant, d’une dégradation, presque d’une perversion et d’un épuisement.
S’ajoutent à cela les séries amoureuses et la jalousie qui, fatalement, les accompagne. Après Swann et Odette (vol. 1), après Gilberte et Albertine (vol. 2) après Saint-Loup et « Rachel quand du Seigneur » (vol. 3), c’est au divin baron de Charlus que revient, à travers l’affection qu’il porte au beau mufle Morel, la partition amoureuse, en contrepoint de celle d’Albertine et du Narrateur. Il n’échappera d’ailleurs à personne que l’homosexualité est au cœur de Sodome et Gomorrhe. Celle de Charlus (le sodomite) et celle, présumée, d’Albertine (la gomorrhéenne). Curieusement, le héros lui-même est absolument hétérosexuel, voire pétrifié à l’idée qu’Albertine puisse aimer les femmes. Il diverge en cela des orientations de l’auteur de la Recherche qui, non sans quelque ironie, compare la parade amoureuse « invertie » au mode de fécondation des orchidées… (Comparaison pénétrante — amusante — ridicule, comme dirait Mme de Cambremer.)
Ainsi, à travers les mondanités stériles et les tortures amoureuses, ce que le Narrateur finit par perdre de vue, c’est sa vocation première d’écrivain. Ironie et subtilité suprême, l’écriture même de Proust, par le scintillement de sa prose, ses intarissables pointes d’humour et, disons-le, ses longueurs accablantes, finit par nous le faire oublier aussi, à nous lecteurs et, au contraire, nous faire ressentir cette même fuite, ce même épuisement apathique vécu par le héros de la Recherche.
Et pourtant, nous tenons son livre entre les mains ! Il faudra donc que tout cela cesse et qu’ait lieu quelque chose comme une conversion augustinienne. Et déjà, de loin en loin, un morceau de ciel s’ouvre au-dessus de la vie du Narrateur. De brefs instants de clarté surviennent de manière fortuite et inespérée, comme pour la madeleine de Combray. L’épisode de la bottine, par exemple, qui soudain ouvre la plaie, jusque-là anesthésiée, de la mort de la grand-mère — celle-ci revue en rêve, comme en un rappel des descentes d’Ulysse et d’Énée aux enfers. C’est là qu’émerge le souvenir, l’angoisse ou la prise de conscience fondamentale. Celle de la finitude et de la mort prochaine. Celle de l’urgence de « demeurer en repos » et, enfin, produire une œuvre avant de disparaître.
> Vol. précédent : Le côté de Guermantes
> Vol. suivant : La Prisonnière
June 29, 2021
Amorphous Notes
1. This is the first volume of Proust’s novel I have been able to read with enjoyment. The first two volumes with their prolonged stories of children’s escapades held no interest for me. So I decided to start reading the volumes out of sequence. In other words, to overleap the barrier that had stopped me cold. It has thus far worked.
2. M. de Charlus shows us why we live in a better world today in this respect: he spends all his time countering a presumption about his homosexuality he anticipates in others, though as the narrator tells us, he’s often wrong. Sadly though his every reflex is meant to send a message often counter to his true feelings. Perhaps this accounts for his class snobbery and hideous cruelty to those of lesser rank. Class snobbery which goes out the window if a beautiful boy turns his head.
3. One gets this Leo Tolstoy and elsewhere, this astonishing idea of class punctilio. All the old civilizations were cursed with it. In America, historically, it’s simply been a function money and race. The zealousness for social status seems utterly foreign to me. I understand materialist ambition, but the yearning here for rank, and the asses individuals are willing to make of themselves in pursuit of a proximity to it, astonishes. The joke seems to be that everybody’s perception of high society is wrong; therefore, the pleasure taken in society is generally delusive.
“People in society are mistaken when they suppose that everybody has the same idea of the social importance of their name as they themselves and the other people of their circle.” (p. 410)
4. The narrator’s fascination with homosexuality seems inconsistent. While he’s able to view the casual sex of Jupien, the tailor, and M. de Charlus, the Baron, uncritically—comparing their brief shag with the unshameful pollination of flowers—when he discovers the bisexuality of Albertine, the woman he loves, he is filled with moral indignation. And he’s naive enough to think he can manage Albertine away from her same sex trysts.
“If Mme Putbus was there, I will contrive to see her maid [an insatiable seducer of girls], ascertain whether there was any danger of her coming to Balbec, and if so find out when, so as to take Albertine out of reach on that day.”
(p 345).
5. The description of driving in a hired car, pp. 545-548 in this edition, is without parallel in all the other books I’ve read with scenes of driving, Lolita not excepted. Though I can’t quite put my finger on why this is so. There’s an amazement by Marcel and an arresting digression about how the car changes our perception of space-time. Einstein’s theories were published in 1905.
6. Because it’s so common today I have to remind myself that the nonlinear scenes narrated here by way of a sonorous, unifying voice was at publication in 1921 (for this particular volume) a distinct novelty.
7. M. de Charlus—the Baron, the Duke et al—is one of the grandest characters ever concieved in western literature. Though he is in many ways a prude, a snob, and an antisemite—this was the period of the Dreyfuss Affair—Proust manages to humanize him with regard to his affair with the violinist (and bit of rough trade) Morel.
1. This is the first volume of Proust’s novel I have been able to read with enjoyment. The first two volumes with their prolonged stories of children’s escapades held no interest for me. So I decided to start reading the volumes out of sequence. In other words, to overleap the barrier that had stopped me cold. It has thus far worked.
2. M. de Charlus shows us why we live in a better world today in this respect: he spends all his time countering a presumption about his homosexuality he anticipates in others, though as the narrator tells us, he’s often wrong. Sadly though his every reflex is meant to send a message often counter to his true feelings. Perhaps this accounts for his class snobbery and hideous cruelty to those of lesser rank. Class snobbery which goes out the window if a beautiful boy turns his head.
3. One gets this Leo Tolstoy and elsewhere, this astonishing idea of class punctilio. All the old civilizations were cursed with it. In America, historically, it’s simply been a function money and race. The zealousness for social status seems utterly foreign to me. I understand materialist ambition, but the yearning here for rank, and the asses individuals are willing to make of themselves in pursuit of a proximity to it, astonishes. The joke seems to be that everybody’s perception of high society is wrong; therefore, the pleasure taken in society is generally delusive.
“People in society are mistaken when they suppose that everybody has the same idea of the social importance of their name as they themselves and the other people of their circle.” (p. 410)
4. The narrator’s fascination with homosexuality seems inconsistent. While he’s able to view the casual sex of Jupien, the tailor, and M. de Charlus, the Baron, uncritically—comparing their brief shag with the unshameful pollination of flowers—when he discovers the bisexuality of Albertine, the woman he loves, he is filled with moral indignation. And he’s naive enough to think he can manage Albertine away from her same sex trysts.
“If Mme Putbus was there, I will contrive to see her maid [an insatiable seducer of girls], ascertain whether there was any danger of her coming to Balbec, and if so find out when, so as to take Albertine out of reach on that day.”
(p 345).
5. The description of driving in a hired car, pp. 545-548 in this edition, is without parallel in all the other books I’ve read with scenes of driving, Lolita not excepted. Though I can’t quite put my finger on why this is so. There’s an amazement by Marcel and an arresting digression about how the car changes our perception of space-time. Einstein’s theories were published in 1905.
6. Because it’s so common today I have to remind myself that the nonlinear scenes narrated here by way of a sonorous, unifying voice was at publication in 1921 (for this particular volume) a distinct novelty.
7. M. de Charlus—the Baron, the Duke et al—is one of the grandest characters ever concieved in western literature. Though he is in many ways a prude, a snob, and an antisemite—this was the period of the Dreyfuss Affair—Proust manages to humanize him with regard to his affair with the violinist (and bit of rough trade) Morel.
March 2, 2021
One summer in Florence I caught pneumonia. Florence completely shuts down in August. Nothing is open, no one is there. I was alone and the only books I hadn't read in the apartment where I was staying were the complete works of Carl Jung. So they were what I read. Not all of them but about four or five. I mention this because Proust and Jung have a few things in common. They were both pioneering geniuses who have had a profound influence in their respective fields; they both gave birth to ideas which have become part of our common currency and in both there's a great deal of painstaking investigation (boredom) between the exciting revelations. You might also say both were ahead of their time but also very much of it.
In this part (my least favourite part so far) the theme of homosexuality looms large. Not that Marcel comes clean; he's still pretending to be heterosexual and because of this he gives us, perhaps inadvertently, an insight into the young male who isn't the slightest bit interested in the identity of the girl he's seeing, only what she makes him feel. Which makes him, emotionally, resemble some totalitarian dictator - pathological controlling every detail of their relationship. If he was sometimes irritating as a mummy's boy earlier on, he now comes close to being obnoxious as a self-pleasuring bully. The sexual scavenger Charlus is Proust's envoy into the gay world. Charlus, besides Marcel himself, is the only compelling character in this part. And there are no relationships of much interest. This part sees Marcel stepping out into society and is largely dedicated to exposing the war games of social prestige and social climbing. But how absurd social jockeying for position is was dramatized much more creatively in another book I recently read - Brett Easton Ellis' Glamorama. Proust's take seemed standard fare and dated by comparison. To be honest, I missed Swann and Odette. It's a shame Proust wasted so much of his time swanning around in salons. I couldn't help wishing at times he had better material for his genius or he actually went to Venice instead of fantasising about it.
In this part (my least favourite part so far) the theme of homosexuality looms large. Not that Marcel comes clean; he's still pretending to be heterosexual and because of this he gives us, perhaps inadvertently, an insight into the young male who isn't the slightest bit interested in the identity of the girl he's seeing, only what she makes him feel. Which makes him, emotionally, resemble some totalitarian dictator - pathological controlling every detail of their relationship. If he was sometimes irritating as a mummy's boy earlier on, he now comes close to being obnoxious as a self-pleasuring bully. The sexual scavenger Charlus is Proust's envoy into the gay world. Charlus, besides Marcel himself, is the only compelling character in this part. And there are no relationships of much interest. This part sees Marcel stepping out into society and is largely dedicated to exposing the war games of social prestige and social climbing. But how absurd social jockeying for position is was dramatized much more creatively in another book I recently read - Brett Easton Ellis' Glamorama. Proust's take seemed standard fare and dated by comparison. To be honest, I missed Swann and Odette. It's a shame Proust wasted so much of his time swanning around in salons. I couldn't help wishing at times he had better material for his genius or he actually went to Venice instead of fantasising about it.
Read
September 7, 2015
Palimpsest.
Image via urbanisme.org
When I dig around in my mind for a few thoughts on the books I’ve read, I think about the people who may attempt to interpret the shards and fragments I come up with.
What does the reader of a review need to discover?
Perhaps only this simple inscription: Skip the review and read the book instead.
Or perhaps what the reader needs is a link to a page containing an in-depth excavation of the book by some scholar or professional reviewer.
But those options wouldn’t satisfy my need to revisit this book - I read it six months ago - and assemble a collection of images which will transform the experience of reading it into something I own, something etched in my brain forever. It is as if, in the library of my mind, I absolutely need to place a suitably illustrated volume entitled, My version of Sodome et Gomorrhe beside its comrades, leaving room, of course, for my thoughts on the remaining volumes of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.
Because so many months have gone by since I’ve read the book, and I’ve read the rest of the Recherche in the meantime, I’m curious to see what stands out in my memory about this volume.
I often think in visual terms and I imagine Sodome et Gomorrhe, which is the fourth book of the seven volumes of Proust’s Recherche, as the apex of an isosceles triangle, or like the gable of the house in the foreground of the image above.
Sodome et Gomorrhe is the middle volume, pivotal in many ways, and Proust has been working towards this point from the first volume, laying down his themes layer by layer until he reached this twin chimney stack of Sodome and Gomorrhe. After he had completed this volume, he began the process of scraping away the layers of the palimpsest he had so carefully written over, finally revealing the original message, burnished by time, in the seventh book, Le Temps Retrouvé.
The symmetry of this entire work really appeals to me - I’m in awe of Proust’s original vision in conceiving such an architecturally sound construction, and knowing a little of the health constraints he worked under, I can appreciate the discipline with which he steadily laboured until he finally reached the end, a position he had carefully mapped out well before he built the middle sections.
Sodome and Gomorrhe. Two place names because Proust loved place names. In fact, this volume is layered with place name lore so it isn't surprising that he uses place names in the title. But Sodome and Gomorrhe are more than just place names; they are the twin cities of the plain of Jordan which were destroyed by a wrathful God according to the book of Genesis. I imagine Sodome and Gomorrhe like the two semi-ruined constructions in the background of the ever useful image above. Out of the ruins of the two cities, and inspired by the words of a de Vigny poem, La Femme aura Gomorrhe et l'Homme aura Sodome, Proust imagines a race of men/women, women/men marching forth to take their place in the foreground of the world. And since his quest from the beginning has been to examine the passions which drive us all, he sets out in his own unique and idiosyncratic way to examine homosexuality and lesbianism using the landscape he created for his Narrator as the testing ground for his theories. One of those relates to sleep and dreams, a frequent theme in his writing; Proust describes sleep as that other, alternative apartment we go to when we are no longer awake, a place with its own special sounds, its own logic. In his dreams, the people are frequently androgynous.
The detailed drawing above has quite a lot of blank space and this book also has its blank spaces, its absences. A major theme is the gaps left in our lives when those we love leave us. But those gaps, those blank spaces are eloquent; the narrator’s grandmother, who died in the previous volume, and whom he worries about having forgotten completely, is yet more present than ever. When a fragment of memory relating to his life with her gets pushed to the surface of his consciousness, he suffers what he calls les intermittences du coeur or intermittences of the heart, a kind of dysphoria or anxiety which leaves him troubled but which will also eventually unlock his creativity; the blank spaces are all destined to be filled.
Charles Swann is another character whose absence in the second part of this volume is as powerful as his presence. Like the barely distinguishable lines along the edges of the image above, his spirit is more eloquent than most of the living, breathing population of the Narrator’s world. That world is constructed using all of the tropes found in the previous volumes; trains, theatres, music, mirrors, obsession, jealousy, enmity and strife. At times, we the readers feel we are the audience at a very entertaining play full of dramatic moments and witty asides. And for the first time so far in the Recherche, Proust addresses us, acknowledging our presence in an almost playful way.
But this volume isn't all theatre, it is also about retracing footsteps; the Narrator returns to Balbec, the place name which most inspired his child’s imagination. He returns to the very same hotel room he’d stayed in years before, a room facing the horizon, lined with bookshelves, the glass panels of which reflect every nuance of colour in the sea and sky, a view which never fails to inspire wonderful words full of colour and music, où maintenant, le soleil ronde et rouge était déjà descendu au milieu de la glace oblique, et comme quelque feu grégeois, incendiait la mer dans les vitres de mes bibliothèques.
March 1, 2019
Was ever grief more seductively expressed?
“I knew that now I could knock, more loudly even, that nothing could again wake her, that I would not hear any response, that my grandmother would never again come. And I asked nothing more of God, if there is a paradise, than to be able to give there the three little taps on that partition that my grandmother would recognize anywhere, and to which she would respond with those other taps that meant, "Don't fret yourself, little mouse, I realize you're impatient, but I'm just coming," and that he should let me remain with her for all eternity, which would not be too long for the two of us”
«Σόδομα και Γόμορρα», το τέταρτο μέρος της αναζήτησης του χαμένου χρόνου, αποδίδεται με έναν εξαιρετικά υποβλητικό τρόπο γραφής και έκφρασης, ώστε η ανάγνωση είναι αμιγώς μια σημαντική εμπειρία, όχι ανάλυση λέξεων,προτάσεων, σκέψεων, συλλογισμών.
Ο συγκεκριμένος τόμος είναι ένα εκπληκτικό πορτραίτο, απεικονίζει με όλα τα χρώματα της παραφύσης και της κρυφής ανθρώπινης κλίσης, το τί σήμαινε να είσαι ομοφυλόφιλος στις αρχές του 20ου αιώνα, στην πλημμυρισμένη απο υπονόμους με ηδυπάθεια, Γαλλία.
Ωστόσο ο Προύστ δείχνει να μην έχει αντιληφθεί εως τώρα τις ισχυρές και βυθισμένες δυνάμεις πάθους που κρύβονται μέσα σε κάθε άνθρωπο.
Κρύβονται κάτω απο το χάος των κοινωνικών προτύπων και των ασήμαντων ηθών και εθίμων που πληρούν τις αρχές της κοινωνικής οργάνωσης.
Εδώ με όλεθριο συναισθηματισμό και τραγικές ταπεινώσεις η ομοφυλοφιλία -κυρίως ανάμεσα σε άνδρες- αποκτά μία μονιμότητα.
Μια σταθερή κατάσταση που ξεχωρίζει ανάμεσα στην αποξένωση των ανθρώπων και τη συναισθηματικής τους ανεπάρκεια.
Αν και γράφει εξακολουθητικά με τρόπο αδυσώπητα κυριαρχικό, τρυφερά επιθετικό, θλιβερά χαρούμενο, αποκαλυπτικά αποτρόπαιο, σκάβοντας μέσα στον πόνο και την απελπισία τους τάφους για τα ερείπια της κρυμμένης «ανώμαλης» αγάπης, καταφέρνει να επιδεικνύει τον άνθρωπο ως κοινό παρονομαστή, ως υποκείμενο με θεμελιώδη χαρακτήρα, όχι ως προσωρινή ιδιοτροπία, μα ως αναφορά που ισχύει απο καταβολής κόσμου, για την βαθύτερη φύση του ατόμου.
Το κοινωνικό παιχνίδι της συνομοσίας των ομοφυλόφιλων αφενός και αφετέρου η ανακάλυψη αυτής της μυστικής κοινωνίας, βρίσκονται κάπου μεταξύ των στερεοτύπων που διέπουν τη ζωή και οδηγούν σε δυστυχισμένες υπάρξεις σεξουαλικών επιδιώξεων, υπαρκτών μα απαράδεκτων στο πλαίσιο ταξινόμησης των ειδών στο ανθρώπινο βασίλειο.
Το πάθος και η αγάπη για ηδονές και οδύνες ερωτικής απόλαυσης και φυσικής ολοκλήρωσης σε όποια ταυτότητα μπορούμε να τα δηλώσουμε, θεμελιώνουν προσωπικότητες και συμπεριφορές που ίσως για τον Προύστ να χωρίζονται σε ένα άλλο είδος.
Ένα είδος που θα είχε πρωτεύοντα ρόλο εξέλιξης και ανθρωπιάς ως αρχή της κοινωνικής τάξης.
🖤🖤🖤🖤
Καλή ανάγνωση!
Πολλούς ασπασμούς.!
“I knew that now I could knock, more loudly even, that nothing could again wake her, that I would not hear any response, that my grandmother would never again come. And I asked nothing more of God, if there is a paradise, than to be able to give there the three little taps on that partition that my grandmother would recognize anywhere, and to which she would respond with those other taps that meant, "Don't fret yourself, little mouse, I realize you're impatient, but I'm just coming," and that he should let me remain with her for all eternity, which would not be too long for the two of us”
«Σόδομα και Γόμορρα», το τέταρτο μέρος της αναζήτησης του χαμένου χρόνου, αποδίδεται με έναν εξαιρετικά υποβλητικό τρόπο γραφής και έκφρασης, ώστε η ανάγνωση είναι αμιγώς μια σημαντική εμπειρία, όχι ανάλυση λέξεων,προτάσεων, σκέψεων, συλλογισμών.
Ο συγκεκριμένος τόμος είναι ένα εκπληκτικό πορτραίτο, απεικονίζει με όλα τα χρώματα της παραφύσης και της κρυφής ανθρώπινης κλίσης, το τί σήμαινε να είσαι ομοφυλόφιλος στις αρχές του 20ου αιώνα, στην πλημμυρισμένη απο υπονόμους με ηδυπάθεια, Γαλλία.
Ωστόσο ο Προύστ δείχνει να μην έχει αντιληφθεί εως τώρα τις ισχυρές και βυθισμένες δυνάμεις πάθους που κρύβονται μέσα σε κάθε άνθρωπο.
Κρύβονται κάτω απο το χάος των κοινωνικών προτύπων και των ασήμαντων ηθών και εθίμων που πληρούν τις αρχές της κοινωνικής οργάνωσης.
Εδώ με όλεθριο συναισθηματισμό και τραγικές ταπεινώσεις η ομοφυλοφιλία -κυρίως ανάμεσα σε άνδρες- αποκτά μία μονιμότητα.
Μια σταθερή κατάσταση που ξεχωρίζει ανάμεσα στην αποξένωση των ανθρώπων και τη συναισθηματικής τους ανεπάρκεια.
Αν και γράφει εξακολουθητικά με τρόπο αδυσώπητα κυριαρχικό, τρυφερά επιθετικό, θλιβερά χαρούμενο, αποκαλυπτικά αποτρόπαιο, σκάβοντας μέσα στον πόνο και την απελπισία τους τάφους για τα ερείπια της κρυμμένης «ανώμαλης» αγάπης, καταφέρνει να επιδεικνύει τον άνθρωπο ως κοινό παρονομαστή, ως υποκείμενο με θεμελιώδη χαρακτήρα, όχι ως προσωρινή ιδιοτροπία, μα ως αναφορά που ισχύει απο καταβολής κόσμου, για την βαθύτερη φύση του ατόμου.
Το κοινωνικό παιχνίδι της συνομοσίας των ομοφυλόφιλων αφενός και αφετέρου η ανακάλυψη αυτής της μυστικής κοινωνίας, βρίσκονται κάπου μεταξύ των στερεοτύπων που διέπουν τη ζωή και οδηγούν σε δυστυχισμένες υπάρξεις σεξουαλικών επιδιώξεων, υπαρκτών μα απαράδεκτων στο πλαίσιο ταξινόμησης των ειδών στο ανθρώπινο βασίλειο.
Το πάθος και η αγάπη για ηδονές και οδύνες ερωτικής απόλαυσης και φυσικής ολοκλήρωσης σε όποια ταυτότητα μπορούμε να τα δηλώσουμε, θεμελιώνουν προσωπικότητες και συμπεριφορές που ίσως για τον Προύστ να χωρίζονται σε ένα άλλο είδος.
Ένα είδος που θα είχε πρωτεύοντα ρόλο εξέλιξης και ανθρωπιάς ως αρχή της κοινωνικής τάξης.
🖤🖤🖤🖤
Καλή ανάγνωση!
Πολλούς ασπασμούς.!
March 8, 2023
It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying.
Sodom and Gomorrah ~~ Marcel Proust
Early on in Sodom and Gomorrah our hero, Marcel, spies on a sexual encounter between the Baron de Charlus and a tailor named Jupien. I imagine this piece of writing to have been quite shocking to the average reader in the 1920s. It is here where Proust outs as homosexual one of the key characters of the novel, Baron de Charlus. Marcel is both attracted to and repelled by this discovery. It strikes me as odd that Marcel, the narrator, views himself with superiority for being straight when he discovers Baron de Charlus in flagrante delicto while Marcel, the writer, is himself a homosexual.
As this scene unfolds, young Marcel suddenly makes sense of questionable and confusing behaviors from his past, Unexpected asides, unexpected invitations, unexpected offence, unexpected pain, all the encounters he’d had with Baron de Charlus and men who he rapidly connects to the aristocratic gay circle he’s become aware of flood into his mind; yes there is gayness around him.
As you can guess from it's title, Sodom and Gomorrah, is all about homosexuality, both male and female.
As I stated, Proust, himself was both gay and part-Jewish, and yet, he creates distinctly unflattering portraits of both groups; it is apparent that both Marcels have some serious issues over their sexuality. Young Marcel has an unnatural fascination with the Baron and his affairs .
As young Marcel matures in his 20s, he is at the crossroads of his young life, between youthful naivete and a brazen understanding of the world. This too is explored in Sodom and Gomorrah.
Sodom and Gomorrah is a novel of both society and intimacy, with Proust describing in minute detail the way people act in public. In the glittering soirée at the royal Guermantes’ palace, we see the cream of society, observing the upper classes as they go about what seems to be a strange mix between duty and pleasure, the tension of preserving a hard-fought rank barely concealed beneath charming smiles. However, later on we see a rather different style of soirée when the Verdurins return, and hold their own daily gatherings on the coast, more lively affairs, perhaps, but populated by a slightly lower class of guest.
The brilliance of Sodom and Gomorrah lies in Proust's skill of writing the way these public facades are compared with how the characters act in private. Perhaps the best example of that here is to be found in the character of the Baron, a lion of society who snubs people as a matter of course. Once we get behind closed doors, though, it can be a different story, with his latest conquest, the musician Morel, having a growing hold over him. It’s isn’t only the gay characters who have to reconcile the two parts of their life, with several of the noblemen acting as good husbands in public while smiling in the direction of their latest lovers, discretely seated in a far corner.
What ties all of this together is our narrator. He is a delight, an arrogant, chauvinistic, jealous mamma's boy who, for some reason, is loved by all ~~ surely it must be more than he’s very rich and incredibly good-looking. Marcel is arrogant to the point of rudeness, & places unfair demands upon friends. The worst of Marcel is shown in the way he treats Albertine, demanding she be at his beck and call, and jealous of anything concerning her. Marcel does everything he can to cut off her from the outside world.
The writing here is beautiful, especially when Proust allows us to peak behind the veil and see Marcel's emotions. The return to the seaside town of Balbec has Marcel reflecting on changes in his life ~~ and the memories of his trips to Balbec with his grandmother.
I know I haven't made this sound like the appealing story. So why should you read Sodom and Gomorrah? Because young Marcel and the world he inhabits are fucking fascinating.
Sodom and Gomorrah ~~ Marcel Proust
Early on in Sodom and Gomorrah our hero, Marcel, spies on a sexual encounter between the Baron de Charlus and a tailor named Jupien. I imagine this piece of writing to have been quite shocking to the average reader in the 1920s. It is here where Proust outs as homosexual one of the key characters of the novel, Baron de Charlus. Marcel is both attracted to and repelled by this discovery. It strikes me as odd that Marcel, the narrator, views himself with superiority for being straight when he discovers Baron de Charlus in flagrante delicto while Marcel, the writer, is himself a homosexual.
As this scene unfolds, young Marcel suddenly makes sense of questionable and confusing behaviors from his past, Unexpected asides, unexpected invitations, unexpected offence, unexpected pain, all the encounters he’d had with Baron de Charlus and men who he rapidly connects to the aristocratic gay circle he’s become aware of flood into his mind; yes there is gayness around him.
As you can guess from it's title, Sodom and Gomorrah, is all about homosexuality, both male and female.
As I stated, Proust, himself was both gay and part-Jewish, and yet, he creates distinctly unflattering portraits of both groups; it is apparent that both Marcels have some serious issues over their sexuality. Young Marcel has an unnatural fascination with the Baron and his affairs .
As young Marcel matures in his 20s, he is at the crossroads of his young life, between youthful naivete and a brazen understanding of the world. This too is explored in Sodom and Gomorrah.
Sodom and Gomorrah is a novel of both society and intimacy, with Proust describing in minute detail the way people act in public. In the glittering soirée at the royal Guermantes’ palace, we see the cream of society, observing the upper classes as they go about what seems to be a strange mix between duty and pleasure, the tension of preserving a hard-fought rank barely concealed beneath charming smiles. However, later on we see a rather different style of soirée when the Verdurins return, and hold their own daily gatherings on the coast, more lively affairs, perhaps, but populated by a slightly lower class of guest.
The brilliance of Sodom and Gomorrah lies in Proust's skill of writing the way these public facades are compared with how the characters act in private. Perhaps the best example of that here is to be found in the character of the Baron, a lion of society who snubs people as a matter of course. Once we get behind closed doors, though, it can be a different story, with his latest conquest, the musician Morel, having a growing hold over him. It’s isn’t only the gay characters who have to reconcile the two parts of their life, with several of the noblemen acting as good husbands in public while smiling in the direction of their latest lovers, discretely seated in a far corner.
What ties all of this together is our narrator. He is a delight, an arrogant, chauvinistic, jealous mamma's boy who, for some reason, is loved by all ~~ surely it must be more than he’s very rich and incredibly good-looking. Marcel is arrogant to the point of rudeness, & places unfair demands upon friends. The worst of Marcel is shown in the way he treats Albertine, demanding she be at his beck and call, and jealous of anything concerning her. Marcel does everything he can to cut off her from the outside world.
The writing here is beautiful, especially when Proust allows us to peak behind the veil and see Marcel's emotions. The return to the seaside town of Balbec has Marcel reflecting on changes in his life ~~ and the memories of his trips to Balbec with his grandmother.
I know I haven't made this sound like the appealing story. So why should you read Sodom and Gomorrah? Because young Marcel and the world he inhabits are fucking fascinating.
September 9, 2020
Viene de…
Cuando empecé a leer “En busca del tiempo perdido”, por lo que había oído de la obra y por la famosa anécdota de la magdalena, creí, como seguro que les pasó a muchos de ustedes, que el título hacía referencia a esa experiencia, no siempre grata, por la cual un tiempo ya casi olvidado nos asalta, nos inunda la mente trayendo consigo toda una cadena recuerdos que parece no tener fin. Y en esta idea me mantuve durante los dos primeros tomos. Sin embargo, con el tercero surge un nuevo sentido para el título, y este, sin sustituir al otro, se establece definitivamente en esta cuarta entrega.
Según esta nueva interpretación, Marcel nos muestra su profundo arrepentimiento por todo el tiempo perdido en perseguir y asistir a todas esas tediosas reuniones sociales en las que «la cuestión no es, como para Hamlet, la de ser o no ser, sino la de estar o no estar», nos hace ver su pesar por el acatamiento de sus ceremoniales y formulismos, por mantener tanta conversación intrascendente, cuando no simplemente maliciosa, por interesarse por todas aquellas pequeñas y miserables rencillas, en pasar por alto los grandes y desagradables horrores. Cuántas veces, pasado el tiempo, no se habrá apesadumbrado con aquel consejo que le dio alguien una vez.
Y pese a todos estos puntos interesantísimos y otros muchos, entre los que no se quedan atrás los momentos jocosos, como los protagonizados por los empleados del hotel o los comentarios a ellos dirigidos, Proust puede ser tremendamente divertido cuando se lo propone, he de decir también que es la primera de las cuatro novelas que llevo leídas en las que he pasado en diagonal por un buen puñado de páginas, y eso que ya había asistido a unas cuantas de las interminables veladas de los Guermantes y compañía. En definitiva, que esta es la que menos me ha gustado hasta ahora, lo que, sin embargo, no me ha quitado en lo más mínimo las ganas de seguir leyendo esta monumental y maravillosa obra.
Continuará…
Cuando empecé a leer “En busca del tiempo perdido”, por lo que había oído de la obra y por la famosa anécdota de la magdalena, creí, como seguro que les pasó a muchos de ustedes, que el título hacía referencia a esa experiencia, no siempre grata, por la cual un tiempo ya casi olvidado nos asalta, nos inunda la mente trayendo consigo toda una cadena recuerdos que parece no tener fin. Y en esta idea me mantuve durante los dos primeros tomos. Sin embargo, con el tercero surge un nuevo sentido para el título, y este, sin sustituir al otro, se establece definitivamente en esta cuarta entrega.
Según esta nueva interpretación, Marcel nos muestra su profundo arrepentimiento por todo el tiempo perdido en perseguir y asistir a todas esas tediosas reuniones sociales en las que «la cuestión no es, como para Hamlet, la de ser o no ser, sino la de estar o no estar», nos hace ver su pesar por el acatamiento de sus ceremoniales y formulismos, por mantener tanta conversación intrascendente, cuando no simplemente maliciosa, por interesarse por todas aquellas pequeñas y miserables rencillas, en pasar por alto los grandes y desagradables horrores. Cuántas veces, pasado el tiempo, no se habrá apesadumbrado con aquel consejo que le dio alguien una vez.
“Cuando tenga usted mi edad, verá que es muy poca cosa, la alta sociedad, y lamentará haber atribuido tanta importancia a esas naderías.”Marcel se reconcome por el tiempo gastado en perseguir a «las majestuosas doncellas de casas de alcurnia», «vulgares y magníficas», o a aquellas de las que se enamoraba con la mera lectura de su nombre en una crónica de baile, cuando era del amor y solo del amor del que siempre estuvo enamorado. Cuantas veces no se habrá repetido así mismo este mismo pensamiento:
“…después de las grandes fatigas carnales, la mujer cuya imagen obsesiona nuestra momentánea senilidad es una a la que casi no haríamos otra cosa que besar en la frente”.En cualquier caso y por mucho que se arrepintiera años después, no me cabe duda de que no dejó ni un momento de disfrutar de la decadencia de ese mundo, del aristócrata que se apagaba y del burgués que lo iba sustituyendo a su imagen y semejanza, de ese teatro en el que los actores se esforzaban por poner «la mirada perdida del modo que, a su juicio, mejor hacía resaltar la belleza de sus pupilas», en el que se alababa a las personas discretas, esas «a las que encontramos cuando vamos a buscarlas y el resto del tiempo se dejan olvidar», un mundo en el que lo que se aprende no interesa, en el que las personas agradables le dejaban frío, en el que si uno se moría era como si nunca hubiera existido, en el que se mofaban de los ocupados por su trabajo, en el que la ociosidad les iba haciendo más y más crueles. Una crueldad y una maledicencia, es cierto, de la que ahora disfrutamos nosotros.
“Aquella nariz del Sr. de Cambremer no era fea, más bien demasiado hermosa, demasiado grande, demasiado orgullosa de su importancia. Aguileña, bruñida, reluciente, nuevecita, estaba del todo dispuesta a compensar la insuficiencia mental de la mirada; por desgracia, sin bien los ojos son a veces el órgano en que se revela la inteligencia, la nariz -sea cual fuere, por lo demás, la solidaridad íntima y la repercusión insospechada de las facciones una en las otras- suele ser el órgano en que se despliega más fácilmente la tontería.”Y entre esos grandes y desagradables horrores que comentaba antes, uno que centra buena parte de esta nueva entrega y que hasta le da título es el de la homosexualidad, tanto masculina como femenina.
“Se trata de una raza sobre la que pesa una maldición y que debe vivir con la mentira y el perjurio, puesto que su deseo, lo que representa para toda persona la mayor dulzura de la vida, está considerado, como sabe, punible y vergonzoso, inconfesable.”Y junto a este, otro horror, una enfermedad que sin duda le atormentó a lo largo de toda su vida, los celos. Un mundo cerrado, una atmósfera cargada en la que «La persona amada es sucesivamente el mal y el remedio que suspende y agrava el mal», en el que su espíritu creador solo sirvió para exacerbar sus miedos y tormentos, en el que el atisbo de cualquier indicio le provocó tanto dolor por saber como alegría por corroborar lo rumiado tanto tiempo. El celoso lo sacrifica todo en la persecución de fantasmas, se emborracha de sospecha, cae una y otra vez en el «error de considerar una posición más cierta que las otras sólo porque fuera la más dolorosa». Y lo que es más grave, hiere y denigra a su pareja por ser la fuente de su dolor haciendo de Albertine una mujer utilizada y maltratada.
Y pese a todos estos puntos interesantísimos y otros muchos, entre los que no se quedan atrás los momentos jocosos, como los protagonizados por los empleados del hotel o los comentarios a ellos dirigidos, Proust puede ser tremendamente divertido cuando se lo propone, he de decir también que es la primera de las cuatro novelas que llevo leídas en las que he pasado en diagonal por un buen puñado de páginas, y eso que ya había asistido a unas cuantas de las interminables veladas de los Guermantes y compañía. En definitiva, que esta es la que menos me ha gustado hasta ahora, lo que, sin embargo, no me ha quitado en lo más mínimo las ganas de seguir leyendo esta monumental y maravillosa obra.
Continuará…
June 4, 2019
Finally, finally, 3000 pages in, the structure of this novel is fully in sight. For the first time, Proust's world becomes contained - the majority of characters and places here are ones we have already seen (Balbec, the surprise (and welcome) return of "the little clan," Albertine and Charlus, Saint-Loup and the Duchess de Guermantes). And Proust allows these repetitions to complicate, often flashing back to seemingly insignificant moments from the first two volumes (most importantly, with his grandmother, and with his eavesdropping on Vientieul's daughter) and causes the scenes to broaden in depth and meaning. I'm beginning to see that not much of this work was wasted, as much of the long-windedness of the start now seems like part of some grand plan. And for all that, he never makes it difficult to remember who's who, frequently reminding us of the earlier appearances of one of his many characters. It's more Balzac and less Modernist in these moments.
As for the subject of this volume, homosexuality, the work is at once homophobic and remarkably insightful, which I suspect mirrors the experience of the author. There are moments of extreme sensitivity and there are also crude reductions (and a regrettable tendency toward transphobia). It reminds me a bit of the fabulous scene in ROOM WITH A VIEW when the reverend Beebe bathes with two handsome men, and one can feel Forester fall in love with the scene almost despite himself. And so, while individual responses may vary, I found this volume an effective look at queerness - it gave real insight on the period.
And most strangely - this segment ends with a cliffhanger, a real one, that is shocking and exciting. Who would have believed it?
As for the subject of this volume, homosexuality, the work is at once homophobic and remarkably insightful, which I suspect mirrors the experience of the author. There are moments of extreme sensitivity and there are also crude reductions (and a regrettable tendency toward transphobia). It reminds me a bit of the fabulous scene in ROOM WITH A VIEW when the reverend Beebe bathes with two handsome men, and one can feel Forester fall in love with the scene almost despite himself. And so, while individual responses may vary, I found this volume an effective look at queerness - it gave real insight on the period.
And most strangely - this segment ends with a cliffhanger, a real one, that is shocking and exciting. Who would have believed it?
October 23, 2018
بخشی از یادداشت هام از جلسۀ اول درسگفتار «پروست و نشانه ها» عادل مشایخی
هفت جلد «در جستجوی» با چه رشته ای به هم مرتبط می شوند؟ مسئله ای که به این هفت جلد وحدت می دهد چیست؟
خلاصه ای از پاسخ ژیل دولوز
معمولاً درونمایۀ اصلی «در جستجوی» را «تداعی» می دانند: یک محرک بیرونی، بخشی از گذشته را زنده می کند. این تداعی با یادآوری آگاهانه و عقلانی متفاوت است.
دولوز می گوید: بر خلاف باور ��موم مسئلۀ اصلی رمان تداعی نیست، بلکه تداعی ابزاری است برای «جستجو»ی موجود در عنوان رمان، که فقط جستجو برای یک زمان گذشته نیست، بلکه جستجو برای «حقیقت» و پاسخی به «هیچ انگاری» است.
در این جستجو برای حقیقت، «سوان» نمونه ای از شکست در این جستجو است، و «راوی» نمونه ای از موفقیت در این جستجو. دو شخصیت کلیدی رمان.
دولوز معتقد است که حرف اصلی «در جستجوی» این است که این جستجو برای حقیقت، فقط با هنر به نتیجه می رسد.
جستجو برای حقیقت
سوان دو خصوصیت دارد:
کلبی مسلکی
طفره رفتن از اظهار عقیدۀ شخصی و همیشه به بیان جزئیات واقعی اکتفا کردن. و هر گاه هم می خواهد عقیده اش را اظهار کند، آن را با لحنی اظهار می کند که انگار آن را داخل گیومه گذاشته و با تمسخری از سر خجالت، آن عقیده را به «کسانی که به این جور مسائل اعتقاد دارند» نسبت می دهد، نه خودش.
اپیکوری مسلکی
که در نتیجۀ کلبی مسلکی پدید می آید: زندگی ای که تقلیل پیدا کرده به خوشی های روز به روز که می پندارد تا دم مرگ تغییر نخواهد کرد:
این دو امر (کلبی مسلکی، اپیکوری مسلکی) معلول درکی عقلانی از زمان است که در آن زمان چیزی نیست جز اکنون های متوالی که می آیند و از بین می روند، و گذشته چیزی مرده و از دست رفته است. (راوی در ص ۱۱۰ جلد اول وضعیت گذشتۀ خود را این چنین توصیف می کند. او می گوید که گذشته اش را با حافظۀ عقلانی و آگاهانه به یاد می آورد، یعنی می داند که به مدرسه رفته، غذا خورده، دوستانی داشته و... اما حس «زندگی کردن» در آن وضعیت را با حافظۀ عقلانی نمی توان به دست آورد، در نتیجه گذشته اش چیزی بی رنگ و مرده است.) در چنین وضعیتی، زندگی تنها متشکل است از لحظات گذرای اکنون، بدون هیچ هویت و معنایی. و این منجر به اپیکور مسلکی (خوشی های روز به روز) و کلبی مسلکی (اجتناب از عقیده داشتن راجع به کُنه چیزها) می شود. از آن جایی که جایی برای حقیقت در این شکل از زمان وجود ندارد، این درک عقلانی از زمان منجر به هیچ انگاری می شود.
این هیچ انگاری، با شنیدن موسیقی ونتوی (برای سوان) و خوردن شیرینی مادلن (برای راوی) ناگهان دستخوش زلزله ای شگرف می شود: گذشته زنده می شود، از نیستی بیرون می آید، از برداشتی صرفاً انتزاعی و عقلانی دور می شود و رنگ می گیرد، و چیزها معنا می یابد. و راوی امید می یابد که با تجربۀ این چنینی زمان (در مقابل تجربۀ عقلانی زمان به مثابه توالی اکنون های نیست شونده) بتواند از هیچ انگاری (کلبی مسلکی، اپیکوری مسلکی) بگریزد، و بتواند کُنه چیزها را بهتر درک کند.
این تلقی از زمان را می توان نوعی جاودانگی نامید، اما نه جاودانگی متعالی از زمان، بلکه جاودانگی زمانمند، جاودانگی در دل زمان.
هفت جلد «در جستجوی» با چه رشته ای به هم مرتبط می شوند؟ مسئله ای که به این هفت جلد وحدت می دهد چیست؟
خلاصه ای از پاسخ ژیل دولوز
معمولاً درونمایۀ اصلی «در جستجوی» را «تداعی» می دانند: یک محرک بیرونی، بخشی از گذشته را زنده می کند. این تداعی با یادآوری آگاهانه و عقلانی متفاوت است.
دولوز می گوید: بر خلاف باور ��موم مسئلۀ اصلی رمان تداعی نیست، بلکه تداعی ابزاری است برای «جستجو»ی موجود در عنوان رمان، که فقط جستجو برای یک زمان گذشته نیست، بلکه جستجو برای «حقیقت» و پاسخی به «هیچ انگاری» است.
در این جستجو برای حقیقت، «سوان» نمونه ای از شکست در این جستجو است، و «راوی» نمونه ای از موفقیت در این جستجو. دو شخصیت کلیدی رمان.
دولوز معتقد است که حرف اصلی «در جستجوی» این است که این جستجو برای حقیقت، فقط با هنر به نتیجه می رسد.
جستجو برای حقیقت
سوان دو خصوصیت دارد:
کلبی مسلکی
طفره رفتن از اظهار عقیدۀ شخصی و همیشه به بیان جزئیات واقعی اکتفا کردن. و هر گاه هم می خواهد عقیده اش را اظهار کند، آن را با لحنی اظهار می کند که انگار آن را داخل گیومه گذاشته و با تمسخری از سر خجالت، آن عقیده را به «کسانی که به این جور مسائل اعتقاد دارند» نسبت می دهد، نه خودش.
اپیکوری مسلکی
که در نتیجۀ کلبی مسلکی پدید می آید: زندگی ای که تقلیل پیدا کرده به خوشی های روز به روز که می پندارد تا دم مرگ تغییر نخواهد کرد:
چنان دراز زمانی از جستن هدفی آرمانی برای زندگی دست شسته و آن را به خوشی های روز به روز محدود کرده بود که – بی آن که رسماً به خود بگوید – می پنداشت زندگی اش دیگر تا دم مرگ دگرگون نخواهد شد. از این هم بالاتر، از آن جا که دیگر هیچ اندیشۀ والایی در ذهن خود سراغ نمی کرد، وجود چنین اندیشه هایی را هم باور نداشت. از این رو عادت کرده بود به اندیشه های بی اهمیتی پناه ببرد که به او امکان می داد به کُنه چیزها [«حقیقت» چیزها] پی نبرد - ص ۳۰۱ جلد اول.
این دو امر (کلبی مسلکی، اپیکوری مسلکی) معلول درکی عقلانی از زمان است که در آن زمان چیزی نیست جز اکنون های متوالی که می آیند و از بین می روند، و گذشته چیزی مرده و از دست رفته است. (راوی در ص ۱۱۰ جلد اول وضعیت گذشتۀ خود را این چنین توصیف می کند. او می گوید که گذشته اش را با حافظۀ عقلانی و آگاهانه به یاد می آورد، یعنی می داند که به مدرسه رفته، غذا خورده، دوستانی داشته و... اما حس «زندگی کردن» در آن وضعیت را با حافظۀ عقلانی نمی توان به دست آورد، در نتیجه گذشته اش چیزی بی رنگ و مرده است.) در چنین وضعیتی، زندگی تنها متشکل است از لحظات گذرای اکنون، بدون هیچ هویت و معنایی. و این منجر به اپیکور مسلکی (خوشی های روز به روز) و کلبی مسلکی (اجتناب از عقیده داشتن راجع به کُنه چیزها) می شود. از آن جایی که جایی برای حقیقت در این شکل از زمان وجود ندارد، این درک عقلانی از زمان منجر به هیچ انگاری می شود.
این هیچ انگاری، با شنیدن موسیقی ونتوی (برای سوان) و خوردن شیرینی مادلن (برای راوی) ناگهان دستخوش زلزله ای شگرف می شود: گذشته زنده می شود، از نیستی بیرون می آید، از برداشتی صرفاً انتزاعی و عقلانی دور می شود و رنگ می گیرد، و چیزها معنا می یابد. و راوی امید می یابد که با تجربۀ این چنینی زمان (در مقابل تجربۀ عقلانی زمان به مثابه توالی اکنون های نیست شونده) بتواند از هیچ انگاری (کلبی مسلکی، اپیکوری مسلکی) بگریزد، و بتواند کُنه چیزها را بهتر درک کند.
این تلقی از زمان را می توان نوعی جاودانگی نامید، اما نه جاودانگی متعالی از زمان، بلکه جاودانگی زمانمند، جاودانگی در دل زمان.
January 29, 2022
"We dream much of a paradise, or rather of a number of successive paradises, but each of them is, long before we die, a paradise lost, in which we should feel ourselves lost too.”
Marcel Proust's Sodom and Gomorrah, the fourth installment of his masterpiece In Search of Lost Time/Remembrance of Things Past, while it continues with a deep immersion in the fashionable salons of the Fauborg Saint-Germain, is known for its explicit focus on homosexual love as well as its sort of longish 958-word sentence. While ironically Marcel/the narrator's amorous attachment is still to Albertine, heterosexual love no longer seems the norm in upper class Parisian society. Proust's portrait of sexual jealousy in these homosexual liaisons has all the trappings of love affairs explored in earlier volumes. In this case, the narrator's attention shifts to Baron de Charlus, who we met in previous volumes.
It's strange to think about the length of Proust's sentences as well as the over 3,000-page book because it feels like he writes in pictures that move before your eyes as you read. Not what I usually think when I hear that something is wordy. Another fantastic, beautifully written and immersive read!
“I felt that I did not really remember her except through the pain, and I longed for the nails that riveted her to my consciousness to be driven yet deeper.”
Marcel Proust's Sodom and Gomorrah, the fourth installment of his masterpiece In Search of Lost Time/Remembrance of Things Past, while it continues with a deep immersion in the fashionable salons of the Fauborg Saint-Germain, is known for its explicit focus on homosexual love as well as its sort of longish 958-word sentence. While ironically Marcel/the narrator's amorous attachment is still to Albertine, heterosexual love no longer seems the norm in upper class Parisian society. Proust's portrait of sexual jealousy in these homosexual liaisons has all the trappings of love affairs explored in earlier volumes. In this case, the narrator's attention shifts to Baron de Charlus, who we met in previous volumes.
It's strange to think about the length of Proust's sentences as well as the over 3,000-page book because it feels like he writes in pictures that move before your eyes as you read. Not what I usually think when I hear that something is wordy. Another fantastic, beautifully written and immersive read!
“I felt that I did not really remember her except through the pain, and I longed for the nails that riveted her to my consciousness to be driven yet deeper.”
May 20, 2020
Ah, it's only with the hindsight of having finished this volume that I can see why I struggled so much with the previous one (The Guermantes Way): in that one the narrator had himself become a part of the superficial, though outwardly enticing, world of the salons and, consequently, his style of recall was itself essentially superficial, lacking in the meditative analysis and interiority that characterises this work. It's a clever and bold move on Proust's part, an outward performance of inner closing down, as the narrator's consciousness dwells on the surface glamour of 'society', though one that I, at least, didn't 'get' until this volume marks, in part, its passing.
The key theme of this volume for me is instability: the book foregrounds a chaotic flux of switches from the open emergence of queer relationships, frequently in people we've already met, to the hairpin bends of the narrator's own emotions. Without being heavy-handed, the narrative flags its modernity in the crumpling of stabilities, not least in the narrator's own inner equilibrium.
Midway through the work as a whole, this volume looks both backwards and forwards: we return to Balbec and there the narrator accesses the suppressed grief for his grandmother that was so conspicuously missing from the previous volume. He also revives his relationship with Albertine that has been simmering quietly in the background and we can now understand that the relationship between Swann and Odette, so vividly recounted in volume 1, is a motif that has coloured the narrator's whole understanding of erotic love, of sexual desire, even of women - or, at least, of his objects of desire (it's well recognised that all the narrator's beloveds have feminine versions of masculine names: Gilberte, Albertine, Andrée). The Swann/Odette narrative is like a form of imprinting that shades the narrator's perceptions and comprehensions - a fine example of contingency that, I'm assuming with three volumes to go, will also shape the narrator's life - at least in this memorialised reconstruction which, let's not forget, is what this is.
So this is an important volume for me, and the one where, I think, Proust's larger design comes into clearer focus. And just when we're admiring all the modernist abandonment of coherency when it comes to plot or characterisation, Proust mischievously throws in a well-worn trope of the novel - he ends on a cliff-hanger!
The key theme of this volume for me is instability: the book foregrounds a chaotic flux of switches from the open emergence of queer relationships, frequently in people we've already met, to the hairpin bends of the narrator's own emotions. Without being heavy-handed, the narrative flags its modernity in the crumpling of stabilities, not least in the narrator's own inner equilibrium.
Midway through the work as a whole, this volume looks both backwards and forwards: we return to Balbec and there the narrator accesses the suppressed grief for his grandmother that was so conspicuously missing from the previous volume. He also revives his relationship with Albertine that has been simmering quietly in the background and we can now understand that the relationship between Swann and Odette, so vividly recounted in volume 1, is a motif that has coloured the narrator's whole understanding of erotic love, of sexual desire, even of women - or, at least, of his objects of desire (it's well recognised that all the narrator's beloveds have feminine versions of masculine names: Gilberte, Albertine, Andrée). The Swann/Odette narrative is like a form of imprinting that shades the narrator's perceptions and comprehensions - a fine example of contingency that, I'm assuming with three volumes to go, will also shape the narrator's life - at least in this memorialised reconstruction which, let's not forget, is what this is.
So this is an important volume for me, and the one where, I think, Proust's larger design comes into clearer focus. And just when we're admiring all the modernist abandonment of coherency when it comes to plot or characterisation, Proust mischievously throws in a well-worn trope of the novel - he ends on a cliff-hanger!
July 23, 2021
As the train left Adelaide Central Station, I resumed my reading of Sodome et Gomorrhe, its interruption by the meeting with Mme de Maizonniaux having given me so many unexpected insights into the beauties of the Iaai language that for a moment I had almost imagined ourselves seated peacefully together on New Caledonia's vermillion sands watching the sun set over the wind-flecked waters of la baie de Koutio Kouéta while discussing the relationship between, as she referred to it, l'enfant Kaori and the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac; and having taken my leave of Melanesia's charming apologist, I prepared to reenter Proust's world, which by the mysterious force of experience had been transformed into a landscape so familiar that only through an effort of will was it possible to recall I had once found equally alien and forbidding an, as I now knew even without pausing to reflect, Kaurna locative like Noarlunga or Onkaparinga and a two hundred word sentence with nine subordinate clauses, the magical prose acting as a balm on my senses, again momentarily distracting me from the question which now lurked constantly behind my every thought: was Not a lesbian?
November 14, 2023
When they are happy, calm, satisfied with their surroundings, we marvel at their precious gifts; it is the truth, literally, that speaks through their lips. A touch of headache, the slightest prick to their self-esteem, is enough to alter everything. The luminous intelligence, become brusque, convulsive and shrunken, no longer reflects anything but an irritable, suspicious, teasing self, doing everything possible to displease.This book was both the easiest and the most tedious of the series to date, in that the pages flowed faster under my Proust-accustomed gaze, but only on the days that I didn’t pass over it in favor of other works. It also didn’t help that, unlike the previous installations in the series, I finished the last twenty or so pages in a state of aggravated fury brought upon not by incomprehension, but the clearest understanding one could possibly hope for. As I can’t do anything unusual, especially in matters relating to literature, without my mind immediately latching onto the issue and needling the reason out it, I will explain myself here.
It was indeed the corrupting effect, as it was also the charm, of this country round Balbec, to have become for me a land of familiar acquaintances; if its territorial distribution, its extensive cultivation, along the entire length of the coast, with different forms of agriculture, gave of necessity to the visits which I paid to these different friends the aspect of a journey, they also reduced that journey to the agreeable proportions of a series of visits.
I am a great believer in the powers of empathy when it comes to literature, to the point that if a disagreeable character appears, I immediately keep an especial eye on them and their circumstances in the hopes of finding something to improve my favorable understanding of them. In previous works Proust has been a consummate master at this, delving as deeply as he does into the human psyche at every turn and rendering nearly every action of seeming insipidness and stupidity into something I recognize as being capable of myself, the insufferable human condition rendered sufferable and as a result granting valuable learning. The difficulty of his prose simply made the journey a slow and contemplative one, whose culminations bloomed as grandly and as gorgeously as if one had spent a lifetime watching a single seed languorously shoot and spread into the most awe inspiring of cathedrals. Simply put, the effort was well worth it.
The problem, of course, is when the beauty and thoughtful meanderings can no longer excuse the idiocy, and one becomes frustrated not only with the actions, but even moreso with the attempts of the book to cloak the actions with the same softening colors that previously delighted the reader, attempts that fail again and again.
I have to mention here that I am a very reserved person, in the effect that while I feel as rapidly and as strongly as Proust so often describes, I do not act on it. As a result, I have an extremely low tolerance for ridiculous heights of selfish idiocy, something that I have observed in the narrator as well as other characters in ISOLT but was able to forgive when offered with wonderful passages of crystalline insight. There is also my extreme dislike of stereotyping, especially with regards to multitudes of varied souls that populate humanity in seemingly discriminate bunches. In effect, these two aspects of my personality lessened my compatibility with this book, something that saddens me but cannot be helped.
For the book is called Sodom and Gomorrah, and when it comes to the quote of Beckett that proclaims that in the book, Homosexuality…is as devoid of moral implications… as the sexual patterns of flowers, I have to disagree, and instead find favor with the quote of André Gide, Will you never portray this form of Eros for us in the aspect of youth and beauty?, for while Proust never outright condemns it, he does everything but. There is no contemplative empathy, no beautifying of another form of love, nothing but ridiculous theories on the ways homosexuals act and come into contact with another, mockeries of those who are severely mistaken in their belief that their secret is safe, little skits of insipid jealousy with none of the compassion that Swann’s own efforts were treated. No, instead the narrator glorifies his own labors of love in all their hypersensitive irrationality, and resigns himself to a lifetime of torment not when .
I won’t deny that many of the society events were amusing, and that every so often a sentence full with inherent truth would crop up, or that the pages detailing grief were as heartrending as one of Proust’s skill could make them. However, all this together wasn't enough, and ultimately the frustrating misconceptions in regards to homosexuality, the aggravating viciousness of many of the shallower characters, and finally the repulsive selfishness of the narrator himself all sounded the death knell for that fifth star.
Perhaps I have grown too used to Proust’s prose, or maybe his own tools of immense perception backfired on him when he concerned himself with this particular subject that impacted his life no matter how much he denied it to himself. All I know is this time, it didn’t work out nearly as well as previous times when I and the book ended our journey together with a joyous skipping off into the sunset. I hope that results prove better with the succeeding works.
September 16, 2015
به ياد می آورم که يک ساعتی پيش از زمانی که مادربزرگم با پيرهن خانه خم شد تا چکمه هايم در درآورد،در گرمای کشنده در خيابانها پرسه ميزدم و،در برابر مغازه قنادی، احساسم اين بود که با همه نيازم به بوسيدن مادربزرگم،به هيچ رو طاقت تحمل يک ساعتی را که هنوز بايد بی او بگزرانم ندارم.و اکنون که همين نياز دوباره سر بر می آورد،می دانستم که اگر ساعتها و ساعتها منتظر بمانم او را هرگز دوباره در کنارم نخواهم ديد،و اين را تازه می فهميدم چون حال که برای نخستين بار آن چنان زنده و حقيقی حسش می کردم که دلم را می ترکانيد،حال که سرنجام بازش يافته بودم،تازه می فهميدم که برای هميشه از دستش داده ام.از دست داده،تا ابد.تناقضی را نمی تواستم بفهمم و خود را برای تحمل رنجش آماده می کردم. و اين است آن تناقض:از يک سو وجودی و مهری که در درونم به همان گونه که می شناختم،يعنی ساخته شده برای من،باقی مانده بود،مهری که چنان همه اجزايش و هدفش و جهت هميشگی اش در من خلاصه می شد که در نظر مادربزرگم همه نبوغ مردان بزرگ،همه نوابغی که از ازل در جهان وجود داشته بودند،به اندازه يکی از عيب های من ارزش نداشت.و از ديگر سو،درست در زمانی که اين خوشبختی را،دوباره حس می کردم انگار که در زمان حال باشد،اين خوشبختی را يقينی،تند و نافذ چون دردی جسمانی که پياپی تکرار شودد در می نورديد.يقين نيستی ای که تصور من از آن مهربانی را مهو کرده بود،آن وجود را نابود کرده بود،حتميت پيوند من و او در گذشته را نيست کرده بود،مادربزرگم را در لحظه ای که دوباره،چنان که در آينه اي بازش،می يافتم آدم غريبی اي کرده بود که تصادفا چند سالی را کنار من بود همچنان که می توانست کنار هر کس ديگری باشد و پيش از اين دوره من برايش هيچ بودم و هيچ شدم.
همچون جريانی الکتريکی که آدمی را تکان بدهد،آن عشقها تکانم داد،با آنها زندگی کردم،حسشان کردم.هرگز به آنجا نرسيدم که ببينمشان يا فکرشان کنم.حتی به اين باور گرايش دارم که در اين عشقها(جدا از لذت جسمانی که معمولا همراهشان است اما برای شکل دادن به آنها کافی نيست)،در ورای ظاهر زن،نظر ما به نيروهايی نامريی است که زن را همراهی می کنند و ما به آنها چنان که به خدايانی ناشناخته روی می کنيم.نياز ما به نظر مساعد اين الهگان است،تماس با ايشان را می جوييم بی آن که به لذتی عملی دست يابيم.زن،در وقت ديدار،فقط ما را با اين الهگان در رابطه قرار می دهد و کار ديگری نمی کند.به عنوان پيشکش قول جواهر و سفر داده ايم،وردهايی خوانده ايم يعنی که پرستنده ايم و وردهايی مخالف آنها يعنی که اعتنايی نداريم.هم قدرت خود را برای وعده ديدار ديگری به کار گرفته ايم،اما ديداری که هيچ مشکلی نداشته باشد.اگر اين نيروهای ناشناخته زن را کامل نمی کرد،آيا برای خود او اين همه سختی می کشيديم در حالی که پس از رفتنش حتی نمی دانيم چگونه جامه ای به تن داشت و متوجه می شويم که حتی نگاهش نکرديم.
همچون جريانی الکتريکی که آدمی را تکان بدهد،آن عشقها تکانم داد،با آنها زندگی کردم،حسشان کردم.هرگز به آنجا نرسيدم که ببينمشان يا فکرشان کنم.حتی به اين باور گرايش دارم که در اين عشقها(جدا از لذت جسمانی که معمولا همراهشان است اما برای شکل دادن به آنها کافی نيست)،در ورای ظاهر زن،نظر ما به نيروهايی نامريی است که زن را همراهی می کنند و ما به آنها چنان که به خدايانی ناشناخته روی می کنيم.نياز ما به نظر مساعد اين الهگان است،تماس با ايشان را می جوييم بی آن که به لذتی عملی دست يابيم.زن،در وقت ديدار،فقط ما را با اين الهگان در رابطه قرار می دهد و کار ديگری نمی کند.به عنوان پيشکش قول جواهر و سفر داده ايم،وردهايی خوانده ايم يعنی که پرستنده ايم و وردهايی مخالف آنها يعنی که اعتنايی نداريم.هم قدرت خود را برای وعده ديدار ديگری به کار گرفته ايم،اما ديداری که هيچ مشکلی نداشته باشد.اگر اين نيروهای ناشناخته زن را کامل نمی کرد،آيا برای خود او اين همه سختی می کشيديم در حالی که پس از رفتنش حتی نمی دانيم چگونه جامه ای به تن داشت و متوجه می شويم که حتی نگاهش نکرديم.
February 27, 2020
با فکر کردن به جنس خاص رابطهمان، خاص و بسیار دلپذیر، و خالص از نوعی کمتر آمیخته شده به هوس، هر لحظه او را در کنار خود تصور میکردم. او را با لباسی راحت و ساده، از همان نوع که معمولا در آنها دیده بودمش، در کنار خودم ایستاده یا در حال قدم زدن، در حالیکه دستهای نرم و سفیدش را که کمتر به دست مردان سیساله شباهت داشت در دست داشتم و انگشتان لطیف و حساسش را در میان انگشتانم میفشردم، تصور میکردم. از این خیال گذرا، شور و شعفی سراسر وجودم را در بر می گرفت که ساعتها برای سرخوشی ام کافی بود، اما باز هم میخواستمش و از این خیالپردازی آمیخته به شرم دست برنمیداشتم و پیدرپی، خود را همچو نوزادی که انقدر از پستان مادر شیر مکیده که زیادی اش از گوشهی دهانش بروی گونهها و گردن سرریز شده، اما دست از مکیدن برنمی دارد و اینکار را نه از روی حس گرسنگی که برای کسب لذت میکند، به دامانش میافکندم. بعد از آن بود که وسوسهی فرستادن پیغامی مهرآمیز به سراغم میآمد و دلتنگیاش، دلتنگی برای شنیدن صدای اثیری و شوخیهایش که هیچوقت رنگ یاوه و زیادهگویی نمیگرفت، و مرا تا انجا میخنداند که دهانم تا اخرین حد ممکن کشیده میشد و بعد چند دقیقه استخوانهای فکم را به درد میآورد، تمام جانم را میفشرد و قلبم را میآماسید.
اما درست در لحظهی حساس آخر، عقلم با آن منطق سخت و خالی از احساسش مچم را می گرفت و گویی برای جلوگیری از فاجعهای عظیم، سیلی محکمی به گوشم مینواخت، همچو زمانیکه بیمار مبتلا به غش را سیلی میزنند یا شانههایش را به شدت، بدون در نظر گرفتن درد احتمالی، تکان میدهند تا از مرگ بازش گردانند، تا به خودم بیایم و هوشیار شوم.
.......
اگر متن بالا رو خوندید و متوجه شدید چی گفتم، برنده جایزه یک میلیون دلاری گروه آناکارنینا میشید😊
پروست عزیزم همینجوری تقریبا داستان تعریف میکنه و من در پایان هر جملهی بلند ده خطی ، برگام می ریزه از شدت تسلط مهدی سحابی به زبان نویسنده و سبکش
به راستی شگفتا!
......
بهترین جلد تا الان و من همچنان شیفته ام و ادامه خواهم داد
اما درست در لحظهی حساس آخر، عقلم با آن منطق سخت و خالی از احساسش مچم را می گرفت و گویی برای جلوگیری از فاجعهای عظیم، سیلی محکمی به گوشم مینواخت، همچو زمانیکه بیمار مبتلا به غش را سیلی میزنند یا شانههایش را به شدت، بدون در نظر گرفتن درد احتمالی، تکان میدهند تا از مرگ بازش گردانند، تا به خودم بیایم و هوشیار شوم.
.......
اگر متن بالا رو خوندید و متوجه شدید چی گفتم، برنده جایزه یک میلیون دلاری گروه آناکارنینا میشید😊
پروست عزیزم همینجوری تقریبا داستان تعریف میکنه و من در پایان هر جملهی بلند ده خطی ، برگام می ریزه از شدت تسلط مهدی سحابی به زبان نویسنده و سبکش
به راستی شگفتا!
......
بهترین جلد تا الان و من همچنان شیفته ام و ادامه خواهم داد
March 17, 2023
Update: Finished; completely rewritten 5/1/2023
“Proust explains way too much for my taste—300 pages to make us understand that Tutur [i.e., Arthur] is buggering Tatave [i.e., Gustave] is really too much.” —Louis-Ferdinand Céline
“Meanwhile Jupien, shedding at once the humble, kindly expression which I had always associated with him, had—in perfect symmetry with the Baron—thrown back his head, given a becoming tilt to his body, placed his hand with grotesque effrontery on his hip, stuck out his behind, struck poses with the coquetry that the orchid might have adopted on the providential arrival of the bee.”
For the past several months, Proust and I have been locked in a vicious cycle of infatuation and resentment, breaking up, making up, and breaking up again and again. He comes into my life like a tornado and leaves it like a hurricane, leaving me little time in between to sift through the emotional wreckage. The only way I can think to save myself is to see this through to the bitter end. I must read this novel, literally, to death—if it doesn’t kill me first.
I’d originally written pages and pages trying to explain why I’d had so much trouble reading this volume. But a quick glance at the Proust-ometer told me that I’d lapsed into a general appraisal of the work, not of this particular volume. It’s probably best to wait until I’ve finished the entire novel before dealing with it comprehensively (and I wouldn’t want to subject anyone to pages and pages of amateur criticism anyway). So, against the spirit of Proust, I’m going to try to keep this short.
Maybe the biggest problem I have with Proust is that, the overwhelming majority of the time, I don’t find his brand of comedy very funny. (Usually, I find it incredibly boring.) And even if I did find it funny, I’d still find “comedy of manners” Proust (who has actually taken up, let’s say, three-quarters of the past two volumes) disjunctive with “excavation of the self” Proust. I find the constant oscillation between soirées and dinners and Bergsonian metaphysics exasperating, and it makes it impossible for me to take the novel as seriously as it wants to be taken. It’s not that I want a book unconcerned with the outside; I’m just not convinced that drawing rooms and seaside resorts are the proper theater for opening the fan of memory, as Walter Benjamin would say. That, I think, would be the alleys, the streets, the avenues, the boulevards, the squares… Among the crowd, if only to slip into it incognito—“a thing among things, a man among men,” to quote Sartre. The city. Or at least, not drawing rooms and seaside resorts. If you plunge into these four thousand pages expecting a panorama of French society, you’ll be unpleasantly surprised. We only get a “keyhole view”—like Proust spying on men being chained and whipped at gay brothels, he he—a keyhole view of aristocratic characters who practically cry out that they’re not worth looking at, even as Proust presses our eye against the peephole and yells at us to look. I guess Proust’s psychogenic asthma has to be taken into account here, but if the thought “Who the hell would be interested in this?” had popped into Proust’s head at any moment… Please, someone hand me a tissue!
Pansies, by Joe Brainard.
Another problem I have with Proust is that I’m growing tired of the way he writes. It’s not his hypotactic sentences—like Russian dolls, one clause enclosing the next enclosing the next ad nauseam (although that gets annoying, too)—but the fact that I’m starting to find him self-indulgent, and this isn’t a reaction I have very often. After reading Kawabata and watching Ozu a few months ago, I started looking into Japanese aesthetics, and I have to say that there’s something beautiful (I’m beginning to hate that word!) about the unobtrusive sentence—the sentence that’s more concerned with fixing an image in memory than adorning or embellishing it. Proust’s style for me is like rococo, a sensual assault of mirrors, marble, and crystal chandeliers. This is harsh, but much of the time, it sickens me (this is compounded by the aristocratic focus and the fact that I find the narrator contemptible, hiding behind his overwrought style as with a cloak). (Yes, I see the hypocrisy in the way this very review is written. I guess it’s because I’ve spent so much time in Proust’s company that I can’t help reflecting his influence… He’s pollinated me.) Kilmartin, who revised the editions I’m reading, leaves a note at the beginning that Moncrieff clothes Proust in purple prose (which Kilmartin doesn’t completely strip away) and that Proust is essentially “unaffected” in the original despite his complicated syntactic structures. I have trouble believing that, but I’m willing to cut Proust some slack anyway. You’re probably thinking that I’m just not a Proust reader, which I guess is fair enough.
I did like reading about the Baron de Charlus and Morel’s sugar daddy/boy toy relationship in the last third of the book. Whenever those two characters appeared on the page, they infused it with a vitality I’d long forgotten existed. I say sugar daddy/boy toy relationship, but (contrary to that Céline quote) Proust notes that the two of them probably aren’t even having sex (“the probable chastity of [Charlus’s] relations with Morel”)—as is probably true for most of the gay relationships in this novel (what a disappointment—where is the promised sodomy?). The way Proust writes it, Morel doesn’t seem to be all that into guys and certainly isn’t into Charlus, and is no doubt thankful that the subject of sex never comes up. Proust is even more bitter about gay love than he is about straight love, and he’s quite bitter about straight love.
Maybe my favorite passage from this volume:
“Suddenly, my horse reared; he had heard a strange sound; it was all I could do to hold him and remain in the saddle; then I raised my tear-filled eyes in the direction from which the sound seemed to come and saw, not two hundred feet above my head, against the sun, between two great wings of flashing metal which were bearing him aloft, a creature whose indistinct face appeared to me to resemble that of a man. I was as deeply moved as an ancient Greek on seeing for the first time a demi-god. I wept—for I had been ready to weep the moment I realised that the sound came from above my head (aeroplanes were still rare in those days), at the thought that what I was going to see for the first time was an aeroplane. Then, just as when in a newspaper one senses that one is coming to a moving passage, the mere sight of the machine was enough to make me burst into tears. Meanwhile the airman seemed to be uncertain of his course; I felt that there lay open before him—before me, had not habit made me a prisoner—all the routes in space, in life itself; he flew on, let himself glide for a few moments over the sea, then quickly making up his mind, seeming to yield to some attraction that was the reverse of gravity, as though returning to his native element, with a slight adjustment of his golden wings he headed straight up into the sky.”
“Proust explains way too much for my taste—300 pages to make us understand that Tutur [i.e., Arthur] is buggering Tatave [i.e., Gustave] is really too much.” —Louis-Ferdinand Céline
“Meanwhile Jupien, shedding at once the humble, kindly expression which I had always associated with him, had—in perfect symmetry with the Baron—thrown back his head, given a becoming tilt to his body, placed his hand with grotesque effrontery on his hip, stuck out his behind, struck poses with the coquetry that the orchid might have adopted on the providential arrival of the bee.”
For the past several months, Proust and I have been locked in a vicious cycle of infatuation and resentment, breaking up, making up, and breaking up again and again. He comes into my life like a tornado and leaves it like a hurricane, leaving me little time in between to sift through the emotional wreckage. The only way I can think to save myself is to see this through to the bitter end. I must read this novel, literally, to death—if it doesn’t kill me first.
I’d originally written pages and pages trying to explain why I’d had so much trouble reading this volume. But a quick glance at the Proust-ometer told me that I’d lapsed into a general appraisal of the work, not of this particular volume. It’s probably best to wait until I’ve finished the entire novel before dealing with it comprehensively (and I wouldn’t want to subject anyone to pages and pages of amateur criticism anyway). So, against the spirit of Proust, I’m going to try to keep this short.
Maybe the biggest problem I have with Proust is that, the overwhelming majority of the time, I don’t find his brand of comedy very funny. (Usually, I find it incredibly boring.) And even if I did find it funny, I’d still find “comedy of manners” Proust (who has actually taken up, let’s say, three-quarters of the past two volumes) disjunctive with “excavation of the self” Proust. I find the constant oscillation between soirées and dinners and Bergsonian metaphysics exasperating, and it makes it impossible for me to take the novel as seriously as it wants to be taken. It’s not that I want a book unconcerned with the outside; I’m just not convinced that drawing rooms and seaside resorts are the proper theater for opening the fan of memory, as Walter Benjamin would say. That, I think, would be the alleys, the streets, the avenues, the boulevards, the squares… Among the crowd, if only to slip into it incognito—“a thing among things, a man among men,” to quote Sartre. The city. Or at least, not drawing rooms and seaside resorts. If you plunge into these four thousand pages expecting a panorama of French society, you’ll be unpleasantly surprised. We only get a “keyhole view”—like Proust spying on men being chained and whipped at gay brothels, he he—a keyhole view of aristocratic characters who practically cry out that they’re not worth looking at, even as Proust presses our eye against the peephole and yells at us to look. I guess Proust’s psychogenic asthma has to be taken into account here, but if the thought “Who the hell would be interested in this?” had popped into Proust’s head at any moment… Please, someone hand me a tissue!
Pansies, by Joe Brainard.
Another problem I have with Proust is that I’m growing tired of the way he writes. It’s not his hypotactic sentences—like Russian dolls, one clause enclosing the next enclosing the next ad nauseam (although that gets annoying, too)—but the fact that I’m starting to find him self-indulgent, and this isn’t a reaction I have very often. After reading Kawabata and watching Ozu a few months ago, I started looking into Japanese aesthetics, and I have to say that there’s something beautiful (I’m beginning to hate that word!) about the unobtrusive sentence—the sentence that’s more concerned with fixing an image in memory than adorning or embellishing it. Proust’s style for me is like rococo, a sensual assault of mirrors, marble, and crystal chandeliers. This is harsh, but much of the time, it sickens me (this is compounded by the aristocratic focus and the fact that I find the narrator contemptible, hiding behind his overwrought style as with a cloak). (Yes, I see the hypocrisy in the way this very review is written. I guess it’s because I’ve spent so much time in Proust’s company that I can’t help reflecting his influence… He’s pollinated me.) Kilmartin, who revised the editions I’m reading, leaves a note at the beginning that Moncrieff clothes Proust in purple prose (which Kilmartin doesn’t completely strip away) and that Proust is essentially “unaffected” in the original despite his complicated syntactic structures. I have trouble believing that, but I’m willing to cut Proust some slack anyway. You’re probably thinking that I’m just not a Proust reader, which I guess is fair enough.
I did like reading about the Baron de Charlus and Morel’s sugar daddy/boy toy relationship in the last third of the book. Whenever those two characters appeared on the page, they infused it with a vitality I’d long forgotten existed. I say sugar daddy/boy toy relationship, but (contrary to that Céline quote) Proust notes that the two of them probably aren’t even having sex (“the probable chastity of [Charlus’s] relations with Morel”)—as is probably true for most of the gay relationships in this novel (what a disappointment—where is the promised sodomy?). The way Proust writes it, Morel doesn’t seem to be all that into guys and certainly isn’t into Charlus, and is no doubt thankful that the subject of sex never comes up. Proust is even more bitter about gay love than he is about straight love, and he’s quite bitter about straight love.
Maybe my favorite passage from this volume:
“Suddenly, my horse reared; he had heard a strange sound; it was all I could do to hold him and remain in the saddle; then I raised my tear-filled eyes in the direction from which the sound seemed to come and saw, not two hundred feet above my head, against the sun, between two great wings of flashing metal which were bearing him aloft, a creature whose indistinct face appeared to me to resemble that of a man. I was as deeply moved as an ancient Greek on seeing for the first time a demi-god. I wept—for I had been ready to weep the moment I realised that the sound came from above my head (aeroplanes were still rare in those days), at the thought that what I was going to see for the first time was an aeroplane. Then, just as when in a newspaper one senses that one is coming to a moving passage, the mere sight of the machine was enough to make me burst into tears. Meanwhile the airman seemed to be uncertain of his course; I felt that there lay open before him—before me, had not habit made me a prisoner—all the routes in space, in life itself; he flew on, let himself glide for a few moments over the sea, then quickly making up his mind, seeming to yield to some attraction that was the reverse of gravity, as though returning to his native element, with a slight adjustment of his golden wings he headed straight up into the sky.”
June 21, 2022
Virginia Woolf on Proust....
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7013...
============
“Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to kindness and wisdom we make promises only; pain we obey.”
― Marcel Proust
===========
The return to Balbec by the sea....
As in that first year, the seas were rarely the same from one day to the next. But they scarcely resembled those of that first year, on the other hand, either because now it was spring, with its storms, or because, even if I had come on the same date as the first occasion, the different, more changeable weather might not have recommended this coast to certain indolent, vaporous, and fragile seas that I had seen on days of burning heat, sleeping on the beach, lifting their blue bosom imperceptibly with a soft palpitation, or above all because my eyes, educated by Elstir [Monet] to retain precisely those elements that I had once willfully discarded, dwelt at length on what that first year they had not known how to see. The opposition that had so struck me then, between the rustic excursions I took with Mme de Villeparisis and this fluid, inaccessible, mythological vicinity of the everlasting Ocean, no longer existed for me. On certain days, the sea itself now seemed to me, on the contrary, almost rural. On the quite rare days of truly fine weather, the heat had traced on the water, as if across the countryside, a white and dusty road, behind which there protruded, like a village steeple, the delicate tip of a fishing boat. A tugboat, of which only the funnel was visible, would be smoking in the distance like a secluded factory, while, alone on the horizon, a bellying white square, painted no doubt by a sail but which appeared compact and as if made of chalk, put you in mind of the sunlit corner of some isolated building, a hospital or a school. And the clouds and the wind, on the days when they were added to the sunshine, completed, if not the error of judgment, at least the illusion of a first glance, the suggestion it awakens in the imagination. For, on stormy days, the alternation between sharply defined areas of color, like those resulting in the countryside from the contiguity of different crops, the harsh, yellow, as if muddy irregularities of the sea’s surface, the embankments and slopes that hid from view a boat on which a crew of agile sailors seemed to be harvesting, all this made of the ocean something as varied, as consistent, as uneven, as populous, as civilized, as the land that was navigable, where I would before long be driving again.
====
THE INTERMITTENCES OF THE HEART
"The disturbances of memory are linked to the intermittences of the heart."
The return to Balbec triggers memories of his time there with his grandmother years before; a grandmother he has belatedly mourned....
On the very first night, as I was suffering from an attack of cardiac fatigue, trying to overcome the pain, I bent down slowly and cautiously to remove my boots. But hardly had I touched the first button of my ankle boot when my chest swelled, filled with an unknown, divine presence, I was shaken by sobs, tears streamed from my eyes. The person who had come to my assistance, who was rescuing me from my aridity of soul, was the one who, several years before, at an identical moment of distress and loneliness, a moment when I no longer had anything of myself, had entered, and who had restored me to myself, for it was both me and more than me (the container which is more than the content, and had brought it to me). I had just glimpsed, in my memory, bent over my fatigue, the tender, concerned, disappointed face of my grandmother, such as she had been on that first evening of our arrival; the face of my grandmother who had nothing of her but her name, but of my true grandmother, the living reality of whom, for the first time since the Champs-Élysées, where she had suffered her stroke, I had rediscovered in a complete and involuntary memory.
This reality does not exist for us until such time as it has been re-created in our minds (otherwise, the men who have been involved in some titanic battle would all be great epic poets); thus, in a wild desire to hurl myself into her arms, it was only at this instant— more than a year after her funeral, on account of the anachronism which so often prevents the calendar of facts from coinciding with that of our feelings— that I had just learned she was dead. I had spoken of her often since that time and thought of her also, but beneath the words and thoughts of an ungrateful, selfish, and cruel young man there had never been anything that might resemble my grandmother, for, in my frivolity, my love of pleasure, and accustomed as I was to seeing her as an invalid, I contained within me the memory of what she had been only in a virtual state.
For the disturbances of memory are linked to the intermittences of the heart. It is no doubt the existence of our body, similar for us to a vase in which our spirituality is enclosed, that induces us to suppose that all our inner goods, our past joys, all our sorrows, are perpetually in our possession.
Now, since the self that I had suddenly re-become had not existed since that far-off evening when my grandmother had undressed me on my arrival in Balbec, it was, quite naturally, not after the day we were living, of which that self knew nothing, but— as if there were, in time, different and parallel series— without any break in continuity, immediately after that first evening in the past, that I adhered to the moment when my grandmother had leaned toward me. The self that I was then and which had vanished all that time ago, was once again so close to me that I seemed to hear still the words that had come immediately before, yet which were no more than a dream, just as a man not properly awake thinks he can perceive close beside him the sounds of his receding dream. I was nothing more than the being who had sought refuge in his grandmother’s arms, to erase the traces of her sorrows by giving her kisses, the being I would have had as great difficulty in imagining to myself.
I recalled how, an hour before the moment when my grandmother had thus leaned over, in her dressing gown, toward my boots, wandering in the stiflingly hot street, in front of the pâtissier, I had thought I could never, such was the need I had to embrace her, wait for the hour I had still to spend without her. And now that this same need was reborn, I knew that I could wait for hour upon hour, that never again would she be beside me, I had made the discovery only now because I had just, on being aware of her for the first time, alive, real, swelling my heart to bursting, on meeting her again, that is, realized that I had lost her forever.
============
The moment I reached the road, what bedazzlement. There, where in August, with my grandmother, I had seen only the leaves and as it were the emplacement of the apple trees, they were in full flower for as far as the eye could see, unimaginably luxuriant, their feet in the mud but wearing their ballgowns, not taking any precautions so as not to spoil the most marvelous pink satin that you ever set eyes on, made to shine by the sunlight; the far-off horizon of the sea provided the apple trees with what was in effect a background from a Japanese print; if I raised my head to look at the sky between the flowers, which made its blue appear the more cloudless, almost violent, they seemed to draw aside so as to display the depth of that paradise. Beneath this azure, a slight but fresh breeze was causing the reddening bouquets to shiver slightly. Blue tits were coming to settle on the branches and were leaping about among the indulgent flowers, as if it were some lover of exoticism and of colors who had artificially created this living beauty. But it moved one almost to tears, because, however excessive these effects of a refined artifice, you felt that it was natural, that these apple trees were there, in the heart of the countryside, like peasants, on one of the highways of France. Then to the rays of sunlight there suddenly succeeded those of the rain; they striped the entire horizon, drawing their gray mesh tight around the line of apple trees. But these continued to raise aloft their pink, flowering beauty, in a wind now become icy beneath the shower of rain that was falling: it was a day in spring.
=====
The Seduction of the Waiter, a Proust original
https://proustmatters.com/2014/09/24/...
=======
About halfway through this volume we return to the salon of the pretentious Madame Verdurin, a poseur who rises in society through inheritance and marriage. She is surrounded by the usual pretentious and pompous parasites that Proust enjoys exposing. Although I am glad he moved on to other scenarios well before the book ended.
========
A common thread in the four books so far is the author's crushes, his fixations, his obsessions, with a female figure. In the first two books it's Gilberte, the daughter of the Swanns. He discovers her when he and she are young children in Combray. They reunite in later years in Paris. He eventually befriends the Swanns. The other is Albertine who he encounters in Balbec. She seems less pretty and definitely not as smart or literate as Gilberte, but his obsession is still as strong. He acts possessive and jealous with the girls, which is understandably off-putting to them and to the reader, as well.
=============
In this volume we are introduced to Céleste Albaret, who would become a very important person in Proust's life. Proust is once again staying in the Grand Hotel at a seaside resort in Balbec. Celeste and her sister, Marie Gineste, were staying next door in the hotel serving as lady's maids to an elderly guest.
Proust struck up a lively friendship with them and they'd come to visit him in his room, often while he was still in bed. They enjoyed mocking his fussiness and aristocratic pretensions, which he took with good humor. He came to regard Céleste as a "strange genius." She was uneducated, but astute and spoke in a way that was almost literary, for example as follows addressing Proust....
“Oh, brow that looks so pure yet hides so many things, cool and friendly cheeks like the inside of an almond, little satin hands all plush, nails like claws, and so on. Say, Marie, look at him drinking his milk, so composedly it makes me want to say my prayers. How serious he looks! Now’s when they should do his portrait, really. He’s the complete child. Is it drinking milk like them that’s kept you their clear complexion? Oh, youth, oh, what pretty skin!"
She was a country girl who moved to Paris in 1913 when she married the taxi driver Odilon Albaret. She was far from perfect....
"Céleste sometimes reproached her husband for not understanding her, and I was astonished, for my part, that he was able to put up with her. For there were certain moments when, quivering, furious, all-destroying, she was hateful. They claim that the saline liquid which is our blood is only what survives within us of our original element, the sea. In the same way, I believe that Céleste, not only in her rages but also in her moments of depression, had preserved the rhythm of her native streams. When she was exhausted, it was after their fashion; she had truly run dry. Nothing then could have brought her back to life. Then, all of a sudden, the circulation would resume in her tall, slender, magnificent body. The water flowed in the opaline transparency of her bluish skin. It smiled in the sunlight and became bluer still. At such moments she was truly celestial."
Lonely and bored in Paris, at her husband's suggestion, Céleste began to run errands for Proust, who was her husband's most regular client. Before very long she became his secretary and housekeeper. During the final decade of Proust's life, when his health declined and he became progressively more withdrawn, even while working with continuing intensity on his writing, she became his nurse and the writer’s most trusted conduit to the world beyond his reclusive, cork-lined bedroom.
Céleste lived on to be ninety-two and kept her memories to herself for most of that period in spite of many requests for intimate details of her life with Marcel Proust. When she was 82, she finally agreed to share those memories. This became the book, Monsieur Proust...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...
=====
Sodom and Gomorrah is, as its title suggests, unabashedly about forbidden passions.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/boo...
========
"We desire passionately that there should be another life in which we would be similar to what we are here below. But we do not reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, but in this one, after a few years we are unfaithful to what we have been, to what we had wanted to remain immortally. Even without supposing that death might modify us more than the changes that occur in the course of a lifetime, if in that other life we were to meet the self that we have been, we would turn away from ourselves as from those people to whom we have been close but whom we have not seen for a long time."
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7013...
============
“Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to kindness and wisdom we make promises only; pain we obey.”
― Marcel Proust
===========
The return to Balbec by the sea....
As in that first year, the seas were rarely the same from one day to the next. But they scarcely resembled those of that first year, on the other hand, either because now it was spring, with its storms, or because, even if I had come on the same date as the first occasion, the different, more changeable weather might not have recommended this coast to certain indolent, vaporous, and fragile seas that I had seen on days of burning heat, sleeping on the beach, lifting their blue bosom imperceptibly with a soft palpitation, or above all because my eyes, educated by Elstir [Monet] to retain precisely those elements that I had once willfully discarded, dwelt at length on what that first year they had not known how to see. The opposition that had so struck me then, between the rustic excursions I took with Mme de Villeparisis and this fluid, inaccessible, mythological vicinity of the everlasting Ocean, no longer existed for me. On certain days, the sea itself now seemed to me, on the contrary, almost rural. On the quite rare days of truly fine weather, the heat had traced on the water, as if across the countryside, a white and dusty road, behind which there protruded, like a village steeple, the delicate tip of a fishing boat. A tugboat, of which only the funnel was visible, would be smoking in the distance like a secluded factory, while, alone on the horizon, a bellying white square, painted no doubt by a sail but which appeared compact and as if made of chalk, put you in mind of the sunlit corner of some isolated building, a hospital or a school. And the clouds and the wind, on the days when they were added to the sunshine, completed, if not the error of judgment, at least the illusion of a first glance, the suggestion it awakens in the imagination. For, on stormy days, the alternation between sharply defined areas of color, like those resulting in the countryside from the contiguity of different crops, the harsh, yellow, as if muddy irregularities of the sea’s surface, the embankments and slopes that hid from view a boat on which a crew of agile sailors seemed to be harvesting, all this made of the ocean something as varied, as consistent, as uneven, as populous, as civilized, as the land that was navigable, where I would before long be driving again.
====
THE INTERMITTENCES OF THE HEART
"The disturbances of memory are linked to the intermittences of the heart."
The return to Balbec triggers memories of his time there with his grandmother years before; a grandmother he has belatedly mourned....
On the very first night, as I was suffering from an attack of cardiac fatigue, trying to overcome the pain, I bent down slowly and cautiously to remove my boots. But hardly had I touched the first button of my ankle boot when my chest swelled, filled with an unknown, divine presence, I was shaken by sobs, tears streamed from my eyes. The person who had come to my assistance, who was rescuing me from my aridity of soul, was the one who, several years before, at an identical moment of distress and loneliness, a moment when I no longer had anything of myself, had entered, and who had restored me to myself, for it was both me and more than me (the container which is more than the content, and had brought it to me). I had just glimpsed, in my memory, bent over my fatigue, the tender, concerned, disappointed face of my grandmother, such as she had been on that first evening of our arrival; the face of my grandmother who had nothing of her but her name, but of my true grandmother, the living reality of whom, for the first time since the Champs-Élysées, where she had suffered her stroke, I had rediscovered in a complete and involuntary memory.
This reality does not exist for us until such time as it has been re-created in our minds (otherwise, the men who have been involved in some titanic battle would all be great epic poets); thus, in a wild desire to hurl myself into her arms, it was only at this instant— more than a year after her funeral, on account of the anachronism which so often prevents the calendar of facts from coinciding with that of our feelings— that I had just learned she was dead. I had spoken of her often since that time and thought of her also, but beneath the words and thoughts of an ungrateful, selfish, and cruel young man there had never been anything that might resemble my grandmother, for, in my frivolity, my love of pleasure, and accustomed as I was to seeing her as an invalid, I contained within me the memory of what she had been only in a virtual state.
For the disturbances of memory are linked to the intermittences of the heart. It is no doubt the existence of our body, similar for us to a vase in which our spirituality is enclosed, that induces us to suppose that all our inner goods, our past joys, all our sorrows, are perpetually in our possession.
Now, since the self that I had suddenly re-become had not existed since that far-off evening when my grandmother had undressed me on my arrival in Balbec, it was, quite naturally, not after the day we were living, of which that self knew nothing, but— as if there were, in time, different and parallel series— without any break in continuity, immediately after that first evening in the past, that I adhered to the moment when my grandmother had leaned toward me. The self that I was then and which had vanished all that time ago, was once again so close to me that I seemed to hear still the words that had come immediately before, yet which were no more than a dream, just as a man not properly awake thinks he can perceive close beside him the sounds of his receding dream. I was nothing more than the being who had sought refuge in his grandmother’s arms, to erase the traces of her sorrows by giving her kisses, the being I would have had as great difficulty in imagining to myself.
I recalled how, an hour before the moment when my grandmother had thus leaned over, in her dressing gown, toward my boots, wandering in the stiflingly hot street, in front of the pâtissier, I had thought I could never, such was the need I had to embrace her, wait for the hour I had still to spend without her. And now that this same need was reborn, I knew that I could wait for hour upon hour, that never again would she be beside me, I had made the discovery only now because I had just, on being aware of her for the first time, alive, real, swelling my heart to bursting, on meeting her again, that is, realized that I had lost her forever.
============
The moment I reached the road, what bedazzlement. There, where in August, with my grandmother, I had seen only the leaves and as it were the emplacement of the apple trees, they were in full flower for as far as the eye could see, unimaginably luxuriant, their feet in the mud but wearing their ballgowns, not taking any precautions so as not to spoil the most marvelous pink satin that you ever set eyes on, made to shine by the sunlight; the far-off horizon of the sea provided the apple trees with what was in effect a background from a Japanese print; if I raised my head to look at the sky between the flowers, which made its blue appear the more cloudless, almost violent, they seemed to draw aside so as to display the depth of that paradise. Beneath this azure, a slight but fresh breeze was causing the reddening bouquets to shiver slightly. Blue tits were coming to settle on the branches and were leaping about among the indulgent flowers, as if it were some lover of exoticism and of colors who had artificially created this living beauty. But it moved one almost to tears, because, however excessive these effects of a refined artifice, you felt that it was natural, that these apple trees were there, in the heart of the countryside, like peasants, on one of the highways of France. Then to the rays of sunlight there suddenly succeeded those of the rain; they striped the entire horizon, drawing their gray mesh tight around the line of apple trees. But these continued to raise aloft their pink, flowering beauty, in a wind now become icy beneath the shower of rain that was falling: it was a day in spring.
=====
The Seduction of the Waiter, a Proust original
https://proustmatters.com/2014/09/24/...
=======
About halfway through this volume we return to the salon of the pretentious Madame Verdurin, a poseur who rises in society through inheritance and marriage. She is surrounded by the usual pretentious and pompous parasites that Proust enjoys exposing. Although I am glad he moved on to other scenarios well before the book ended.
========
A common thread in the four books so far is the author's crushes, his fixations, his obsessions, with a female figure. In the first two books it's Gilberte, the daughter of the Swanns. He discovers her when he and she are young children in Combray. They reunite in later years in Paris. He eventually befriends the Swanns. The other is Albertine who he encounters in Balbec. She seems less pretty and definitely not as smart or literate as Gilberte, but his obsession is still as strong. He acts possessive and jealous with the girls, which is understandably off-putting to them and to the reader, as well.
=============
In this volume we are introduced to Céleste Albaret, who would become a very important person in Proust's life. Proust is once again staying in the Grand Hotel at a seaside resort in Balbec. Celeste and her sister, Marie Gineste, were staying next door in the hotel serving as lady's maids to an elderly guest.
Proust struck up a lively friendship with them and they'd come to visit him in his room, often while he was still in bed. They enjoyed mocking his fussiness and aristocratic pretensions, which he took with good humor. He came to regard Céleste as a "strange genius." She was uneducated, but astute and spoke in a way that was almost literary, for example as follows addressing Proust....
“Oh, brow that looks so pure yet hides so many things, cool and friendly cheeks like the inside of an almond, little satin hands all plush, nails like claws, and so on. Say, Marie, look at him drinking his milk, so composedly it makes me want to say my prayers. How serious he looks! Now’s when they should do his portrait, really. He’s the complete child. Is it drinking milk like them that’s kept you their clear complexion? Oh, youth, oh, what pretty skin!"
She was a country girl who moved to Paris in 1913 when she married the taxi driver Odilon Albaret. She was far from perfect....
"Céleste sometimes reproached her husband for not understanding her, and I was astonished, for my part, that he was able to put up with her. For there were certain moments when, quivering, furious, all-destroying, she was hateful. They claim that the saline liquid which is our blood is only what survives within us of our original element, the sea. In the same way, I believe that Céleste, not only in her rages but also in her moments of depression, had preserved the rhythm of her native streams. When she was exhausted, it was after their fashion; she had truly run dry. Nothing then could have brought her back to life. Then, all of a sudden, the circulation would resume in her tall, slender, magnificent body. The water flowed in the opaline transparency of her bluish skin. It smiled in the sunlight and became bluer still. At such moments she was truly celestial."
Lonely and bored in Paris, at her husband's suggestion, Céleste began to run errands for Proust, who was her husband's most regular client. Before very long she became his secretary and housekeeper. During the final decade of Proust's life, when his health declined and he became progressively more withdrawn, even while working with continuing intensity on his writing, she became his nurse and the writer’s most trusted conduit to the world beyond his reclusive, cork-lined bedroom.
Céleste lived on to be ninety-two and kept her memories to herself for most of that period in spite of many requests for intimate details of her life with Marcel Proust. When she was 82, she finally agreed to share those memories. This became the book, Monsieur Proust...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...
=====
Sodom and Gomorrah is, as its title suggests, unabashedly about forbidden passions.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/boo...
========
"We desire passionately that there should be another life in which we would be similar to what we are here below. But we do not reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, but in this one, after a few years we are unfaithful to what we have been, to what we had wanted to remain immortally. Even without supposing that death might modify us more than the changes that occur in the course of a lifetime, if in that other life we were to meet the self that we have been, we would turn away from ourselves as from those people to whom we have been close but whom we have not seen for a long time."
September 24, 2023
This book is rather like all those Letterboxd reviews where Gen-Zers judge the merits of classic movies with variations of the comment, ‘would have been better if they were all gay’. Proust seems to have looked at the first three volumes of his work and concluded much the same thing. Remember her? Yeah, she's gay now. Him? Massive gay.
This is more than just a new focus on homosexuality (which for Proust is mainly seen under the old model of ‘inversion’); it's part of what we'd now call a general ‘queering’ of the entire narrative, where gender identities and the polarities of sexual attraction all dissolve into a haze of unspecific frustration and misdirected arousal. Everything, not just sex, is slipping out of kilter: the Duc de Guermantes goes from a committed nationalist to a fervent Dreyfusard, while Saint-Loup goes the other way; an excursus on toponymy shows that even behind the familiarity of place-names lurk unexpected meanings, mysterious identities. A flower is really a port and – because the -homme in Norman villages is really holm ‘islet’ – every man, as Donne suggested, really is an island. The narrator’s mother morphs into his grandmother, and in the hotel manager's pronunciation, a fish (sole) becomes a tree (saule).
Sexual desire and sexual identity are at the heart of all this – Proust's and his characters'. There's a running theory in Proustian criticism that his women are basically men in drag, and their names do make this a tempting idea: perhaps Gilberte, Albertine and Andrée are ‘really’ Gilbert, Albert and André, and Albertine's secret lesbianism is some reflection, in reality, of Proust's insecurity over his boyfriends' dalliances with women.
It sounds plausible, but the concept doesn't survive impact with the text. True, there is a comment near the end where he talks of the ‘invisible forces’ and ‘obscure divinities’ which are being cultivated during a love affair, and which merely take the appearance of a woman. This could be his way of hinting that they might just as easily be men. (‘Inverts’, Proust says elsewhere, must learn ‘to change the gender of many adjectives in their vocabulary’.) And yet for most of the time, Odette, Albertine and the rest are much more than just stand-ins: the focus is absolutely on the femaleness of them as characters, their femininity, their clothes, their hair, their bodies. It all sets up a curious tension in the work; it's hard not to think, for instance, that À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs is a strange book to have written if you don't have any sexual interest in women, since that book is obsessed with them to an almost pathological degree. Proust may have been entirely gay, but his book is deeply bisexual, and that fluidity inheres not wholly in the text, but in the space between it, us as readers, and our knowledge of the author. Le désir, he prompts, est parfois contagieux.
Does this really matter, and does anyone care? It does, and they do. This is the volume where Proust argues (almost too fervently) that sexual attraction is vital, is a keystone of your character. The long rhapsody on homosexuality which opens Sodome et Gomorrhe has to be one of the most extraordinary passages of its kind: he first sets out the conservative position that ‘what they call love’ comes ‘not from an ideal of beauty that they have chosen, but from an incurable sickness’, and then takes a historical view: l'opprobre seul fait le crime. But then, having adopted this vaguely liberal stance of distasteful tolerance, he describes the underworld of gay people around Europe in impossibly romantic terms, as though they're all spies with secret identities or international men of mystery – together comprising, as he says,
Sign me up!
Now it has to be said, after this thundering opening, things do slow down a bit, as we're plunged back into the round of tedious upper-class dinner parties – this time in Balbec. But even here there is an attention to the fluidity, the mutability of things that connects his themes together. The section in the middle titled Les intermittences du cœur (for which perhaps ‘discontinuities of the heart’ is the best attempt at a translation) is especially interesting. This long passage starts as a reflection on the death of the narrator's grandmother, and then gradually turns into a sort of poetic essay on our inability to be consistent in what we feel – he's indifferent, then he's suddenly distraught; he loves Albertine, then he finds her boring; we're alive, then suddenly we're gone.
I particularly loved the description of waking up from a dream, where the narrator finds himself saying a string of nonsensical words (cerfs, cerfs, Francis Jammes, fourchette) which a moment ago made perfect sense but suddenly, as he emerges into consciousness, lose their connection with the underlying sense, and become meaningless. This particular discontinuity (between sleep and wakefulness, language and meaning) feels like a crucial metaphor for Proust's whole project.
If it's an effort to drag myself away from the intellectual ideas in here to think about the actual plot and characters, that's because they are much less compelling. ‘Over the furtive pleasures of the imagination continually tower those of sociability, which are so soothing, so soporific,’ as Proust says himself. But in this volume the narrator is especially dickish, and behaves extremely badly towards Albertine. He's infuriated with jealousy at the slightest thing she does, but happy to get off with at least a dozen of her friends when she's not around. Indeed it's becoming clear that jealousy and guilt are an indivisible part of the ‘love’ he thinks he feels towards her. He describes this heated state very well; but we are on her side, and basically want her to dump him and go find a nice girl to get off with.
Proust's sense of metaphor is as acute as ever, as is his overwriting. A drop of sweat falling from a farm labourer's brow makes him think of ripe fruit falling from a tree, and he can pursue a thought like this until it feel really profound; but he can also overexplain what should be a simple joke (like one character's confusion between the name Cambremer and the cheese Camembert) until he kills it dead. This is nevertheless the funniest volume of the Recherche so far, from the delicious social comedy to the scene where Dr Cottard, watching Albertine and Andrée dancing, says with confidently bad biology, ‘Not enough people know that women mainly reach climax through their breasts, and theirs are touching completely.’
Perhaps this is one reason why this has been my favourite Proust so far – a dreamy swirl of hidden sexual impulses, social sparring and snatches of conversation, which all serves, as Proust says in a different context, to ‘add perversity to pleasure’.
This is more than just a new focus on homosexuality (which for Proust is mainly seen under the old model of ‘inversion’); it's part of what we'd now call a general ‘queering’ of the entire narrative, where gender identities and the polarities of sexual attraction all dissolve into a haze of unspecific frustration and misdirected arousal. Everything, not just sex, is slipping out of kilter: the Duc de Guermantes goes from a committed nationalist to a fervent Dreyfusard, while Saint-Loup goes the other way; an excursus on toponymy shows that even behind the familiarity of place-names lurk unexpected meanings, mysterious identities. A flower is really a port and – because the -homme in Norman villages is really holm ‘islet’ – every man, as Donne suggested, really is an island. The narrator’s mother morphs into his grandmother, and in the hotel manager's pronunciation, a fish (sole) becomes a tree (saule).
Sexual desire and sexual identity are at the heart of all this – Proust's and his characters'. There's a running theory in Proustian criticism that his women are basically men in drag, and their names do make this a tempting idea: perhaps Gilberte, Albertine and Andrée are ‘really’ Gilbert, Albert and André, and Albertine's secret lesbianism is some reflection, in reality, of Proust's insecurity over his boyfriends' dalliances with women.
It sounds plausible, but the concept doesn't survive impact with the text. True, there is a comment near the end where he talks of the ‘invisible forces’ and ‘obscure divinities’ which are being cultivated during a love affair, and which merely take the appearance of a woman. This could be his way of hinting that they might just as easily be men. (‘Inverts’, Proust says elsewhere, must learn ‘to change the gender of many adjectives in their vocabulary’.) And yet for most of the time, Odette, Albertine and the rest are much more than just stand-ins: the focus is absolutely on the femaleness of them as characters, their femininity, their clothes, their hair, their bodies. It all sets up a curious tension in the work; it's hard not to think, for instance, that À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs is a strange book to have written if you don't have any sexual interest in women, since that book is obsessed with them to an almost pathological degree. Proust may have been entirely gay, but his book is deeply bisexual, and that fluidity inheres not wholly in the text, but in the space between it, us as readers, and our knowledge of the author. Le désir, he prompts, est parfois contagieux.
Does this really matter, and does anyone care? It does, and they do. This is the volume where Proust argues (almost too fervently) that sexual attraction is vital, is a keystone of your character. The long rhapsody on homosexuality which opens Sodome et Gomorrhe has to be one of the most extraordinary passages of its kind: he first sets out the conservative position that ‘what they call love’ comes ‘not from an ideal of beauty that they have chosen, but from an incurable sickness’, and then takes a historical view: l'opprobre seul fait le crime. But then, having adopted this vaguely liberal stance of distasteful tolerance, he describes the underworld of gay people around Europe in impossibly romantic terms, as though they're all spies with secret identities or international men of mystery – together comprising, as he says,
une franc-maçonnerie bien plus étendue, plus efficace et moins soupçonnée que celle des loges, car elle repose sur une identité de goûts, de besoins, d'habitudes, de dangers, d'apprentissage, de savoir, de trafic, de glossaire […] dans cette vie romanesque, anachronique, l'ambassadeur est ami du forçat, le prince […] s'en va conférer avec l'apache. […] Certes ils forment dans tous les pays une colonie orientale, cultivée, musicienne, médisante, qui a des qualités charmantes et d'insupportables défauts.
a Freemasonry even more widely dispersed, more efficient and less under suspicion than that of the Lodges, for it relies on an identity of tastes, needs, habits, dangers, apprenticeships, knowledge, traffic, jargon. In this quixotic and anachronistic life, the ambassador is friends with the convict, the prince confers with the outlaw. There's no doubt that in every country they form an oriental colony – cultivated, musical, bitchy – which has its charming qualities as well as its insupportable flaws.
Sign me up!
Now it has to be said, after this thundering opening, things do slow down a bit, as we're plunged back into the round of tedious upper-class dinner parties – this time in Balbec. But even here there is an attention to the fluidity, the mutability of things that connects his themes together. The section in the middle titled Les intermittences du cœur (for which perhaps ‘discontinuities of the heart’ is the best attempt at a translation) is especially interesting. This long passage starts as a reflection on the death of the narrator's grandmother, and then gradually turns into a sort of poetic essay on our inability to be consistent in what we feel – he's indifferent, then he's suddenly distraught; he loves Albertine, then he finds her boring; we're alive, then suddenly we're gone.
I particularly loved the description of waking up from a dream, where the narrator finds himself saying a string of nonsensical words (cerfs, cerfs, Francis Jammes, fourchette) which a moment ago made perfect sense but suddenly, as he emerges into consciousness, lose their connection with the underlying sense, and become meaningless. This particular discontinuity (between sleep and wakefulness, language and meaning) feels like a crucial metaphor for Proust's whole project.
If it's an effort to drag myself away from the intellectual ideas in here to think about the actual plot and characters, that's because they are much less compelling. ‘Over the furtive pleasures of the imagination continually tower those of sociability, which are so soothing, so soporific,’ as Proust says himself. But in this volume the narrator is especially dickish, and behaves extremely badly towards Albertine. He's infuriated with jealousy at the slightest thing she does, but happy to get off with at least a dozen of her friends when she's not around. Indeed it's becoming clear that jealousy and guilt are an indivisible part of the ‘love’ he thinks he feels towards her. He describes this heated state very well; but we are on her side, and basically want her to dump him and go find a nice girl to get off with.
Proust's sense of metaphor is as acute as ever, as is his overwriting. A drop of sweat falling from a farm labourer's brow makes him think of ripe fruit falling from a tree, and he can pursue a thought like this until it feel really profound; but he can also overexplain what should be a simple joke (like one character's confusion between the name Cambremer and the cheese Camembert) until he kills it dead. This is nevertheless the funniest volume of the Recherche so far, from the delicious social comedy to the scene where Dr Cottard, watching Albertine and Andrée dancing, says with confidently bad biology, ‘Not enough people know that women mainly reach climax through their breasts, and theirs are touching completely.’
Perhaps this is one reason why this has been my favourite Proust so far – a dreamy swirl of hidden sexual impulses, social sparring and snatches of conversation, which all serves, as Proust says in a different context, to ‘add perversity to pleasure’.
June 7, 2016
As our vision is a deceiving sense, a human body, even when it is loved as Albertine’s was, seems to us to be a few yards’ at a few inches’ distance from us. And similarly with the soul that inhabits it.
A good case can be made that these books should be read one after the other, so as not to lose the narrative thread or to forget the many characters involved. But I am finding that an equally good case can be made for spacing them out. Memory is crucial to this novel; the remembrance of things past, the search for lost time. The length of the series itself makes the passing of time almost palpable; and likewise, all of Proust's sentences are microcosms of the novel as a whole, each one stretching across the page, forcing you to hold the beginning in mind as you slowly make your way to the end. It is arguably this experience itself, feeling your mind being pulled both forward and back across time, that is the essence of Proust’s style.
This time around, the experience of time took on an additional aspect for me. Over and over during this volume I had flashbacks of my time in Manhattan, where I read the first three volumes. I remembered the chilling December days, the brooding, cloudy sky over the Hudson, the aftertaste of vinegar in my mouth as I walked along the High Line during my lunch breaks, the banging sounds of construction work and the wailing of fire truck sirens, the visceral boredom of work, the geometrical beauty of the New York skyline, the way the sun glistened off the glass façades of the skyscrapers. Here in Madrid, as I walked to work in the pre-dawn darkness, with the tall office buildings towering over me, the past and present were woven together by the continued narrative of this novel.
I haven’t yet read Harold Bloom, but I am somewhat familiar with his idea of the ‘anxiety of influence’. Well, I think I have this anxiety with respect to Proust. In my writing and my thinking, I have been so strongly influenced by him that it’s hard for me to see his novel clearly or evaluate it fairly. And I think this acknowledgement of my debt to him sometimes turns into resentment. I feel as though I have to find his weaknesses, what he left out, what he did wrong, to justify myself. In short, when I criticize him I suspect my own motives.
But I can’t help thinking that Proust does have serious weaknesses as a writer. First he has several bad habits—in English translation, at least—that rubbed off on me, and from which I am still trying to rid myself. Most superficially, one of these habits is his tendency to use the royal ‘we’ in his general pronouncements (see the opening quote for an example of this). He also tends to say how people “would” behave and how things “would” happen, instead of keeping to the simple past and describing how things did happen.
Of course I’m not saying that his prose isn’t superbly beautiful; very often, it is. Even so, the endless barrage of lengthy sentences and the monotonous tone—and say what you will, he is not a versatile writer—can really wear you out. Sometime’s he’s just plain frustrating. Proust can spill gallons of ink and take up twenty pages just to make you understand that Character X is sexually involved with Character Y, or that Character Z is a bit of a bore.
Another thing that really grates on me is the subject matter. People accuse Jane Austen of being pinched and narrow in her focus; but Austen is a Tolstoy compared to Proust. Soirée after soirée after soirée; all of these snobbish, strange, and unsympathetic aristocrats. Granted, this novel is certainly a fascinating historical document, being a sort of ethnography of a moribund form of European society (although Proust is a much worse ethnographer than Austen). But very often I cannot feel bad about the disappearance of this way of life. That these supposedly cultured people could get so absorbed in such trifles; that four volumes could go by without the narrator so much as contemplating getting a job; that the same tired references to Molière, Racine, Hugo, Balzac, Debussy, and Chopin keep getting recycled over and over; that in the land of the French Revolution the most politically controversial thing is the Dreyfus affair—it’s maddening, really. Everything is just so disconnected from life as I know it that it’s hard to find parallels or even analogs with my experience.
Philosophically, my main objection to Proust’s method is his ruthless Cartesianism. By this I mean his tendency to see human action through a hyper subjective lense; to see the mind as its own place, disconnected from the world around it, and people as inhabiting their own mental worlds. John Donne said:
No man is an island,
Entire of himself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
But Proust is enamored of the opposite idea, that people are islands. For him, all communication is in fact just miscommunication. He makes much ado about how one person misinterprets something said by another; he spends pages on the agonies that his narrator goes through as he puzzles over a chance remark or a small gesture. Often Proust can be a philosophical one-trick pony. Here is his trick: The narrator misinterprets something, acts accordingly, and then collides with the external reality; then he retreats back into himself to come up with another interpretation. Proust occupies this space, the space between perception and reality, and probes it so insistently that you question whether perception can ever be accurate.
Two or three times it occurred to me, for a moment, that the world in which this room and these bookshelves were situated and in which Albertine counted for so little, was perhaps an intellectual world, which was the sole reality, and my grief something like what feel when we read a novel, of thing of which only a madman would make a lasting and permanent grief that prolonged itself through his life; that a tiny movement of my will would suffice, perhaps, to attain to that real world, to re-enter it, passing through my grief, as one breaks through a paper hoop, and to think no more about what Albertine had done than about the actions of the imaginary heroine of a novel after we have finished reading it.
Well there’s no denying that Proust often brings up good points in this regard. Nevertheless, I think this Cartesianism limited him, both as a thinker and as a novelist. With connection to Proust, I often think of something a sociology professor said to me. The subject was intimate relations; he said:
There are many methods, using personality tests and demographics, of determining whether two people are likely to have a good relationship. But there is this extra quality, what some people call ‘chemistry’—the unexpected ways that two people’s personalities interact with one another. Some people have good chemistry, some people have bad chemistry. There’s no way to tell beforehand what will happen when two people start talking.
Now I’m neither a psychologist nor a sociologist, and I don’t know whether there is any evidence for that view. But it certainly seems true to my experience. And for me, some of the most talented novelists are so wonderful partially because they can capture this phenomenon of chemistry. Consider two great writers I mentioned above, Tolstoy and Austen. Both of them, so different in many ways, are similar in their ability to describe how people change in the presence of other people; how one character brings out snobbishness in the protagonist, another coquettishness, and a third joviality.
In both fiction and in life, I love to see how personalities interact. Why? Because it is this experience that makes me most strongly feel that I am not an island; that I am part of the world of everyone around me, and they are a part of mine. And it is this that I most sorely miss from Proust’s perspective, because to portray this you need to give up the idea that you are just a mind, and embrace the idea that you are a social creature, with as many ‘selves’ as social worlds you inhabit.
Whew, that felt good. I needed to get all that off my chest. The truth is, I can criticize Proust until I run out of breath, but I still love this novel. And this volume is, I think, one of the stronger ones. For a long time I had been hoping that he’d do more with the Baron de Charlus, and in this volume he does just that. The introduction of homosexuality into the novel added a badly needed touch of spice. And believe it or not, a real story is starting to take shape; this volume even ends on a cliffhanger!
I will allow more time to pass before moving on to the next volume. I definitely need a break from Proust, if only to push away his influence once again and regain my own voice. Until then, I will dwell on my memories.
May 30, 2010
I finished Sodom and Gomorrah over a week ago, and since then I've been mulling over whether to write a proper "review" of it or not. It was the most amorphous of any of the volumes yet, and thus it is slightly more difficult to speak about, or really wrap my thoughts around. Also, at this point, considering any of the volumes of A la recherche... to be distinct entities starts to become a bit silly. Certainly, Swann's Way, up through the "novel within the novel" Swann in Love (volume one), could be considered, if read only on their own, without venturing any deeper into the novel, as distinct chunks of prose, seemingly existing without necessary reference to the rest. But once you step forward, beginning with "Place-Names, The Name" at the end of volume one, there really is no separation to the story; the further you read, the more you realize how significant and interwoven all those earlier, almost slight incidents of the first few volumes have become, and one is resigned, albeit a blissful resignation, to 4,000 pages of Proust. One is then tempted to keep their mouth shut until the whole of In Search of Lost Time is read and digested, and give the novel its proper treatment, that of a single, though immense, narrative. But Proust himself created the divisions within the novel, gave them their titles, and undoubtedly wanted the reader to consider them distinctly, but volume four especially felt like a link in the chain that was quite dependent on what came before and what follows, that is to say it felt transitional, and indeed transformational, because I am sure that after the revelation that closes Sodom and Gomorrah (one that sent me rushing to start volume 5), Marcel will never be the same. To name it would be to spoil too much for the casual reader of these thoughts; it would be a disservice to someone going into the novel to reveal too much, as Proust's revelations are best discovered in his own particular oceanic depths and rhythms. So I will speak generally of a few things that struck me in volume four:
1.
By the end of Sodom and Gomorrah the structure of In Search of Lost Time really begins to bare its teeth. Events from the earlier volumes begin to resurface, repeat, gain in significance (the butterfly beating its wings that causes a hurricane on the other side of the Earth), and the attentive reader stands in awe of the power of Proust the novelist, and it is further impressed upon one that to do justice to the experience of reading A la recherche du temps perdu , it is best to read these volumes back to back; a great separation in time between them would only cause one to lose the thread, to break that stream of consciousness that is ever flowing backwards, retrieving treasures and casting them forward again through the years. As in life itself, events from the distant past do not lose their force, they are only submerged in the glacial flow of what follows, and when one reflects, it is perhaps the minor incidents, those barely considered at the moment they are experienced, that vibrate subtly in the body of the instrument and are retained in a lingering overtone, almost too quiet for our ears to capture, but that later shakes us to the core nonetheless, in that sort of strangely preserving bodily memory which is almost out of the reach of conscious attempts at recollection.
2.
One of the great achievements of Proust the artist is his portrayal of the contradictions and variety of character within a single person. In Sodom and Gomorrah it is M. de Charlus who is the prime example of this, but it is ubiquitous in the people who populate Proust's world. No one is who they are on the surface, and if they are presenting themselves in a certain way you can be sure that they are hiding either opposite inclinations, or gross deficiencies, or if they boast of talent or knowledge they are covering for what they are actually inept at or ignorant of, or if they are generous or kindly it is from some socially trained gesture and they are sure to later spit venom at the former subject of their pleasantries, or if they are overtly cruel at one moment they will show themselves later to be capable of indulgent tenderness. In other words, what Proust understands and sets down so perfectly is the infinite complexity of the human personality, the multitude of motives behind our social, and even personal interactions, or, to use Shelley's words, that "Nought may endure but Mutability". This is extended even to the physiognomic descriptions of characters such as Albertine and Mme. de Guermantes, who are seen by Marcel as revealing such differing features at different instances that they are sometimes unrecognizable to him. This is one of the great themes of the novel, the subjectivity of perception.
3.
The need for possession is seldom triggered by love, and most often triggered by jealousy. This especially is the case for Marcel, who shows frankly psychotic jealous tendencies. I mean, we are supposed to know that this young man has a sometimes debilitating nervous disorder, and physical ailments such as asthma that often restrict his activity (and allow him long bed-bound hours of introverted contemplation), but his jealousy over Albertine (which, I can say, is a hundred times more pronounced so far in volume five), is unsettling. It is not only his relationship with Albertine that is seemingly ignited by jealousy alone, but also in the case of Charlus and Morel, and in perhaps all of the social gatherings, it is a need for possession (or in the social case, domination), provoked by a kind of covetous resentfulness, that motivates these people. And while Marcel is superior to them (because of his brilliant artistic aptitude, true talent for observation, "the painterly-poetic eye") he still suffers from the same malady. More on this later.
4.
In Search of Lost Time, while always tinged with melancholy (and I fear, tragedy), is essentially comedic. The drawing rooms of the upper-echelon resound with sardonic, parodic laughter. Marcel is making fun of these people, amplifying their defects, mocking their arbitrary tastes, making use of the one tool that always subverts and destroys a power structure: laughter.
5.
The Verdurins return in volume four, seeking Marcel out to show off how artistic and "forward" their salon is, and thank god for this. They are hilariously cruel, utterly contemptuous of anyone outside their "little clan", on the whole not very bright, but entertaining as hell. The train rides along the Norman coast with Brichot's etymological digressions on French place-names are some of the highlights of this volume. Marcel's return to Balbec is quite different from his first sojourn to the shore. Now he is a connected, sought after man of society. The staff of the Grand Hotel go out of their way to accommodate him, he has inherited a large fortune and can therefore spoil Albertine with trips in a motor car (as he points out, still quite rare in those days) and fine clothes and dinners, but he is pursued, emotionally, by recent events which cloud his disposition, including his grandmother's death, the full grief of which is provoked only on his return to Balbec by an onslaught of mémoire involontaire similar to the famous "incident of the madelaine" that plunged him into the original depths of remembrance of Combray in Swann's Way. The exorcising of this grief is detailed in the strongest section of volume four, entitled "The Intermittencies of the Heart", a powerful exposition on dealing with the death of a loved one. His grief is assuaged in one of those miracle landscape descriptions that Proust so excels at:
"Where I had seen with my grandmother in the month of August only green leaves and, so to speak, the disposition of the apple-trees, as far as the eye could reach they were in full bloom, unbelievably luxurious, their feet in the mire beneath their ball-dresses, heedless of spoiling the most marvellous pink satin that was ever seen, which glittered in the sunlight; the distant horizon of the sea gave the trees the background of a Japanese print; if I raised my head to gaze at the sky through the flowers, which made its serene blue appear almost violent, they seemed to draw apart to reveal the immensity of their paradise. Beneath the azure a faint but cold breeze set the blushing bouquets gently trembling. Blue-tits came and perched upon the branches and fluttered among the indulgent flowers, as though it had been an amateur of exotic art and colours who had artificially created this living beauty. But it moved one to tears because, to whatever lengths it went in its effects of refined artifice, one felt that it was natural, that these apple-trees were there in the heart of the country, like peasants on one of the high roads of France. Then the rays of the sun gave place suddenly to those of the rain; they streaked the whole horizon, enclosing the line of apple-trees in their grey net. But these continued to hold aloft their pink and blossoming beauty, in the wind that had turned icy beneath the drenching rain: it was a spring day."
6.
There is a deep loneliness at the heart of In Search of Lost Time. This has its roots in Marcel's keen awareness of the aforementioned subjectivity of perception (thus our inability to truly know another person), the unreliability of memory, the fact that only our past experiences shape the human being we become, that we are subject and slave to what we retain of their lessons, and yet these experiences are held in a faulty vessel. In the final summation, one is deceived as much by one's perception of one's self as that of the outside world, and though we would like to believe that the choices we make are generated from the intellect, it is indeed emotions, things stirring in the vague realms of consciousness, the invisible influences of our personal history that dictate our fates, things so often hidden or alien to our daily lives that it is almost as if our choices were made by another. That is what lies behind the ridiculous, fateful choice Marcel is brought to in the closing lines of Sodom and Gomorrah- the reverberations of the past, specifically that kiss- the maternal kiss, the one that initiated this whole novel, that kiss (the one forced into being by a slight of hand, by a deception), whose tenderness was so enhanced by being deprived of it; that comforting, calming kiss from mother that reassured a sickly, nervous child that he was loved and protected, and perhaps most of all, that he was possessed by someone, and that he in turn could possess her; that kiss that at once liberates and imprisons, calms and destroys. Marcel, I'm worried for you. You are not heeding the lessons of Swann in Love (oh so many thousands of pages ago!), in fact, you are recreating Swann's sorrows in your own life. What is that great Bob Dylan line, "You can always come back, but you can't come back all the way"? I see dark days ahead for you, Marcel.
1.
By the end of Sodom and Gomorrah the structure of In Search of Lost Time really begins to bare its teeth. Events from the earlier volumes begin to resurface, repeat, gain in significance (the butterfly beating its wings that causes a hurricane on the other side of the Earth), and the attentive reader stands in awe of the power of Proust the novelist, and it is further impressed upon one that to do justice to the experience of reading A la recherche du temps perdu , it is best to read these volumes back to back; a great separation in time between them would only cause one to lose the thread, to break that stream of consciousness that is ever flowing backwards, retrieving treasures and casting them forward again through the years. As in life itself, events from the distant past do not lose their force, they are only submerged in the glacial flow of what follows, and when one reflects, it is perhaps the minor incidents, those barely considered at the moment they are experienced, that vibrate subtly in the body of the instrument and are retained in a lingering overtone, almost too quiet for our ears to capture, but that later shakes us to the core nonetheless, in that sort of strangely preserving bodily memory which is almost out of the reach of conscious attempts at recollection.
2.
One of the great achievements of Proust the artist is his portrayal of the contradictions and variety of character within a single person. In Sodom and Gomorrah it is M. de Charlus who is the prime example of this, but it is ubiquitous in the people who populate Proust's world. No one is who they are on the surface, and if they are presenting themselves in a certain way you can be sure that they are hiding either opposite inclinations, or gross deficiencies, or if they boast of talent or knowledge they are covering for what they are actually inept at or ignorant of, or if they are generous or kindly it is from some socially trained gesture and they are sure to later spit venom at the former subject of their pleasantries, or if they are overtly cruel at one moment they will show themselves later to be capable of indulgent tenderness. In other words, what Proust understands and sets down so perfectly is the infinite complexity of the human personality, the multitude of motives behind our social, and even personal interactions, or, to use Shelley's words, that "Nought may endure but Mutability". This is extended even to the physiognomic descriptions of characters such as Albertine and Mme. de Guermantes, who are seen by Marcel as revealing such differing features at different instances that they are sometimes unrecognizable to him. This is one of the great themes of the novel, the subjectivity of perception.
3.
The need for possession is seldom triggered by love, and most often triggered by jealousy. This especially is the case for Marcel, who shows frankly psychotic jealous tendencies. I mean, we are supposed to know that this young man has a sometimes debilitating nervous disorder, and physical ailments such as asthma that often restrict his activity (and allow him long bed-bound hours of introverted contemplation), but his jealousy over Albertine (which, I can say, is a hundred times more pronounced so far in volume five), is unsettling. It is not only his relationship with Albertine that is seemingly ignited by jealousy alone, but also in the case of Charlus and Morel, and in perhaps all of the social gatherings, it is a need for possession (or in the social case, domination), provoked by a kind of covetous resentfulness, that motivates these people. And while Marcel is superior to them (because of his brilliant artistic aptitude, true talent for observation, "the painterly-poetic eye") he still suffers from the same malady. More on this later.
4.
In Search of Lost Time, while always tinged with melancholy (and I fear, tragedy), is essentially comedic. The drawing rooms of the upper-echelon resound with sardonic, parodic laughter. Marcel is making fun of these people, amplifying their defects, mocking their arbitrary tastes, making use of the one tool that always subverts and destroys a power structure: laughter.
5.
The Verdurins return in volume four, seeking Marcel out to show off how artistic and "forward" their salon is, and thank god for this. They are hilariously cruel, utterly contemptuous of anyone outside their "little clan", on the whole not very bright, but entertaining as hell. The train rides along the Norman coast with Brichot's etymological digressions on French place-names are some of the highlights of this volume. Marcel's return to Balbec is quite different from his first sojourn to the shore. Now he is a connected, sought after man of society. The staff of the Grand Hotel go out of their way to accommodate him, he has inherited a large fortune and can therefore spoil Albertine with trips in a motor car (as he points out, still quite rare in those days) and fine clothes and dinners, but he is pursued, emotionally, by recent events which cloud his disposition, including his grandmother's death, the full grief of which is provoked only on his return to Balbec by an onslaught of mémoire involontaire similar to the famous "incident of the madelaine" that plunged him into the original depths of remembrance of Combray in Swann's Way. The exorcising of this grief is detailed in the strongest section of volume four, entitled "The Intermittencies of the Heart", a powerful exposition on dealing with the death of a loved one. His grief is assuaged in one of those miracle landscape descriptions that Proust so excels at:
"Where I had seen with my grandmother in the month of August only green leaves and, so to speak, the disposition of the apple-trees, as far as the eye could reach they were in full bloom, unbelievably luxurious, their feet in the mire beneath their ball-dresses, heedless of spoiling the most marvellous pink satin that was ever seen, which glittered in the sunlight; the distant horizon of the sea gave the trees the background of a Japanese print; if I raised my head to gaze at the sky through the flowers, which made its serene blue appear almost violent, they seemed to draw apart to reveal the immensity of their paradise. Beneath the azure a faint but cold breeze set the blushing bouquets gently trembling. Blue-tits came and perched upon the branches and fluttered among the indulgent flowers, as though it had been an amateur of exotic art and colours who had artificially created this living beauty. But it moved one to tears because, to whatever lengths it went in its effects of refined artifice, one felt that it was natural, that these apple-trees were there in the heart of the country, like peasants on one of the high roads of France. Then the rays of the sun gave place suddenly to those of the rain; they streaked the whole horizon, enclosing the line of apple-trees in their grey net. But these continued to hold aloft their pink and blossoming beauty, in the wind that had turned icy beneath the drenching rain: it was a spring day."
6.
There is a deep loneliness at the heart of In Search of Lost Time. This has its roots in Marcel's keen awareness of the aforementioned subjectivity of perception (thus our inability to truly know another person), the unreliability of memory, the fact that only our past experiences shape the human being we become, that we are subject and slave to what we retain of their lessons, and yet these experiences are held in a faulty vessel. In the final summation, one is deceived as much by one's perception of one's self as that of the outside world, and though we would like to believe that the choices we make are generated from the intellect, it is indeed emotions, things stirring in the vague realms of consciousness, the invisible influences of our personal history that dictate our fates, things so often hidden or alien to our daily lives that it is almost as if our choices were made by another. That is what lies behind the ridiculous, fateful choice Marcel is brought to in the closing lines of Sodom and Gomorrah- the reverberations of the past, specifically that kiss- the maternal kiss, the one that initiated this whole novel, that kiss (the one forced into being by a slight of hand, by a deception), whose tenderness was so enhanced by being deprived of it; that comforting, calming kiss from mother that reassured a sickly, nervous child that he was loved and protected, and perhaps most of all, that he was possessed by someone, and that he in turn could possess her; that kiss that at once liberates and imprisons, calms and destroys. Marcel, I'm worried for you. You are not heeding the lessons of Swann in Love (oh so many thousands of pages ago!), in fact, you are recreating Swann's sorrows in your own life. What is that great Bob Dylan line, "You can always come back, but you can't come back all the way"? I see dark days ahead for you, Marcel.
September 4, 2013
As Sodom and Gomorrah began, our Narrator was struggling to understand the nature of homosexuals while I was alternating between reading his early-twentieth-century musings and poring over sweetly triumphant images of same-sex couples rushing to "legitimize" their long-running relationships with celebratory midnight marriages. As the strange continent of "inverts" draws horticultural allusions and comparisons to covert societies in Proust's time, the LGBTQ community is finally being recognized in a way that signals the slow unravelling of ignorance and inequality in mine.
For the first three volumes, it was easy to lose any sense of cultural or chronological divide when faced with so many universal constants of humanity that all but waltzed off their pages and pages of lyrical metaphors; in S&G, we have a Narrator who recalls how the first time he saw an airplane overhead filled him with childlike wonder and lives in a time when it is apparently totally normal for a man to pick out his female companion's evening attire, which are but a few examples that, like unchecked homophobia, for the first time in my journey with Proust heralded a struggle to bridge the gap between when these volumes were written and when I'm reading them, bringing into stark reality just how much separates modernism from modern times, regardless of how well the common ground of so many other shared human experiences minimized the inevitable differences in eras and epochs. I finally felt the full extent of the distance -- literal and figurative, in time and physical distance, of the real and fictionally polished -- between the richly depicted, intricately crafted images Proust used to construct his Narrator's winding halls of memory and the world to which I belong. It was a jarring transition, for sure, but it was also a rather well-timed one: As the Narrator become increasingly aware of adult life's complicated emotions stirring inside and the societal politics constantly changing around him (not to mention the slow encroachment of technology, which does cast a shroud of smoky modernization on a world previously draped in pristine laces and cloud-soft velvets), I, too, got a taste of that irrevocable shift from a reasonably expected understanding to desperate reconsideration of an ever-shifting world.
This installment, sadly, is one I read in staccato bursts of precious free time. It is unfortunate because Proust is best savored like good wine rather than chugged like cheap beer, and I fear I spent more time drunk on his beautiful words than intoxicated by his narrative insight. In those exhausted but relieved hours at home, in those stolen wedges of at-work bookwormery, in whatever few minutes were spent in quiet solitude, I clung to Proust with the desperation of a booklover in the throes of both work-related burnout and the dreaded reader's slump. And while a frantic heart may not be the best way to approach words that are ideally enjoyed at a leisurely stroll, I do believe the Narrator's burgeoning sense of humor and need to slowly drink in his surroundings kept me grounded during chaotic times. While S&G may not have been my favorite installment, it is the one that affected me the deepest.
Among the revolving door of social obligations and self-indulgent observations that seem to occupy the majority of Fictional Marcel's abundant free time, I found myself most invested in his delayed reaction to his grandmother's death. Having never known the magnitude of a transgenerational love like that which Narrator shared with his maternal grandmother, I felt his palpable grief just as keenly as the slow-arriving but no less heartrending clarity of permanent absence that hit him upon revisiting a place that once played such an important role in demonstrating the fondness and compassion that can exist between a grandmother and her grandson. As the Narrator contemplates how different Balbec is without his beloved grandmother, as he muses on how much his own once-young mother has taken on the visage of her own mother now that the elder woman's death has left a role unfulfilled, as he retraces rooms that once were filled with his grandmother's presence, the concrete reality of past time being truly lost time came thundering down against a mostly familiar landscape that derives most of its changes from the players inhabiting it. It is odd that the grief is intense but short-lived, yes, but I couldn't help but write it off as the Narrator's decision to forge ahead with his life rather than mawkishly wallow in grief -- such are the intermittences of the heart, no?
I continue to find the romantic entanglements of these characters to be a high-school level of ridiculous. It seems like so few of the relationships presented thus far in ISOLT -- Swann and Odette; the Narrator and Gilberte (and also Albertine); Saint-Loup and Rachel -- are healthy, mutually affectionate ones, but it could also be that I have little patience for romances, even fictional ones, that are built on a foundation of obsession and possession rather than respect and genuine fondness. And, really, the affair between Morel and Charlus isn't anything laudable, I know, but I can't help but find it one of the most believable examples of heady lust in terms of its execution and its players' emotionally fueled behaviors. There is little else but pure attraction drawing Charlus helplessly toward Morel, who can't help but take advantage of (or be manipulated by, depending on your vantage point) the older gentleman's affections and gifts. Still, the greed with which Charlus tries to keep Morel to himself while all but undressing him in public, the satisfaction he derives just from coaxing the younger musician into his presence is…. okay, a bit much, yes, but also keenly evocative of an irrationally all-consuming, unrealistically intense first crush and the reluctant empathy of understanding such memories drag along in their wake.
Sodom and Gomorrah struck me as proof that the memories of our past can't help but be intertwined with memories of others, a reminder that there are always multiple perspectives at play -- and that, as the ending scenes with Bloch reinforce, not everyone's assessment of a situation will always be reliable or anything more than actions born of misunderstanding a sticky situation that was handled badly because there are no do-over options in real life and things only make sense when hindsight lays down the rest of the puzzle. ISOLT might be fictional, sure, but it is written as an account of life, and sometimes learning life's lessons means that truths can be as ugly as our lesser selves.
For the first three volumes, it was easy to lose any sense of cultural or chronological divide when faced with so many universal constants of humanity that all but waltzed off their pages and pages of lyrical metaphors; in S&G, we have a Narrator who recalls how the first time he saw an airplane overhead filled him with childlike wonder and lives in a time when it is apparently totally normal for a man to pick out his female companion's evening attire, which are but a few examples that, like unchecked homophobia, for the first time in my journey with Proust heralded a struggle to bridge the gap between when these volumes were written and when I'm reading them, bringing into stark reality just how much separates modernism from modern times, regardless of how well the common ground of so many other shared human experiences minimized the inevitable differences in eras and epochs. I finally felt the full extent of the distance -- literal and figurative, in time and physical distance, of the real and fictionally polished -- between the richly depicted, intricately crafted images Proust used to construct his Narrator's winding halls of memory and the world to which I belong. It was a jarring transition, for sure, but it was also a rather well-timed one: As the Narrator become increasingly aware of adult life's complicated emotions stirring inside and the societal politics constantly changing around him (not to mention the slow encroachment of technology, which does cast a shroud of smoky modernization on a world previously draped in pristine laces and cloud-soft velvets), I, too, got a taste of that irrevocable shift from a reasonably expected understanding to desperate reconsideration of an ever-shifting world.
This installment, sadly, is one I read in staccato bursts of precious free time. It is unfortunate because Proust is best savored like good wine rather than chugged like cheap beer, and I fear I spent more time drunk on his beautiful words than intoxicated by his narrative insight. In those exhausted but relieved hours at home, in those stolen wedges of at-work bookwormery, in whatever few minutes were spent in quiet solitude, I clung to Proust with the desperation of a booklover in the throes of both work-related burnout and the dreaded reader's slump. And while a frantic heart may not be the best way to approach words that are ideally enjoyed at a leisurely stroll, I do believe the Narrator's burgeoning sense of humor and need to slowly drink in his surroundings kept me grounded during chaotic times. While S&G may not have been my favorite installment, it is the one that affected me the deepest.
Among the revolving door of social obligations and self-indulgent observations that seem to occupy the majority of Fictional Marcel's abundant free time, I found myself most invested in his delayed reaction to his grandmother's death. Having never known the magnitude of a transgenerational love like that which Narrator shared with his maternal grandmother, I felt his palpable grief just as keenly as the slow-arriving but no less heartrending clarity of permanent absence that hit him upon revisiting a place that once played such an important role in demonstrating the fondness and compassion that can exist between a grandmother and her grandson. As the Narrator contemplates how different Balbec is without his beloved grandmother, as he muses on how much his own once-young mother has taken on the visage of her own mother now that the elder woman's death has left a role unfulfilled, as he retraces rooms that once were filled with his grandmother's presence, the concrete reality of past time being truly lost time came thundering down against a mostly familiar landscape that derives most of its changes from the players inhabiting it. It is odd that the grief is intense but short-lived, yes, but I couldn't help but write it off as the Narrator's decision to forge ahead with his life rather than mawkishly wallow in grief -- such are the intermittences of the heart, no?
I continue to find the romantic entanglements of these characters to be a high-school level of ridiculous. It seems like so few of the relationships presented thus far in ISOLT -- Swann and Odette; the Narrator and Gilberte (and also Albertine); Saint-Loup and Rachel -- are healthy, mutually affectionate ones, but it could also be that I have little patience for romances, even fictional ones, that are built on a foundation of obsession and possession rather than respect and genuine fondness. And, really, the affair between Morel and Charlus isn't anything laudable, I know, but I can't help but find it one of the most believable examples of heady lust in terms of its execution and its players' emotionally fueled behaviors. There is little else but pure attraction drawing Charlus helplessly toward Morel, who can't help but take advantage of (or be manipulated by, depending on your vantage point) the older gentleman's affections and gifts. Still, the greed with which Charlus tries to keep Morel to himself while all but undressing him in public, the satisfaction he derives just from coaxing the younger musician into his presence is…. okay, a bit much, yes, but also keenly evocative of an irrationally all-consuming, unrealistically intense first crush and the reluctant empathy of understanding such memories drag along in their wake.
Sodom and Gomorrah struck me as proof that the memories of our past can't help but be intertwined with memories of others, a reminder that there are always multiple perspectives at play -- and that, as the ending scenes with Bloch reinforce, not everyone's assessment of a situation will always be reliable or anything more than actions born of misunderstanding a sticky situation that was handled badly because there are no do-over options in real life and things only make sense when hindsight lays down the rest of the puzzle. ISOLT might be fictional, sure, but it is written as an account of life, and sometimes learning life's lessons means that truths can be as ugly as our lesser selves.
August 26, 2013
Fluid becomes solid and then fluid again. Changing states, crossovers, transformations. Words produce pictures that turn back into words, black marks on a white page; dots, accents, commas, shapes of letters, enter through the cornea, the retina, the optic nerve, are processed into......... into what? Images, characters, narrative, scenes, landscapes, weather, tableaux, dialogue, spectacle, sensation. Reactions.
The cities of the plain:Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboim, Bela.
But Proust takes his title from one of his favourite poets, Alfred de Vigny (Baudelaire was the other, according to the famous questionnaire):
Bientôt se retirant dans un hideux royaume,
La Femme aura Gomorrhe et l'Homme aura Sodome,
Et, se jetant, de loin, un regard irrité,
Les deux sexes mourront chacun de son côté
From: La Colére de Samson
Piquant: de Vigny wrote this poem when his mistress, Marie Dorval became the intimate friend of George Sand. Just how physical the two women's intimacy was is a matter of some debate, but salacious rumours flew around Paris anyway. The poem treats of Samson's infatuation with Delilah, and how he was brought down by her seductive ways and ultimate betrayal. Samson's weakness was to love she who cannot love in return: "Elle se fait aimer sans aimer elle-même."
Thus it echoes the constant dynamic of love affairs in À La Recherche. There is always one who loves, one who accepts love. One who appears strong, but is made weak by their obsessive love. Swann and Odette, Charlus and Morel, the narrator and Albertine, Saint-Loup and Rachel, the narrator and the circles he would like to become part of.
De Vigny's poem sees the conflict between the male and the female as an eternal battle between virtue and treachery, between steadfast strength and supple seduction, between honesty and ruse. The woman on whose soothing breast he sought comfort and salvation has betrayed him for a few gold pieces. Women are as evil as men, each will inhabit their own sordid hell, women in Gomorrah and men in Sodom, with nothing but distant exasperated glances between them, the two sexes separate until death.
Proust's genius is to dissolve that dichotomy into a fluid continuum. Men who are passive until they become aggressively active, women who are sporty, strong, decisive. He plays with gender roles. Transformations, crossovers. Metamorphoses.
Book cover love: A portrait of a portrait painter.
Jacques-Émile Blanche painted Robert de Montesquieu, one of the models for the Baron de Charlus (my favourite character):
He also painted Proust himself:
But on the cover of my edition he stands with a wide legged swagger as model for Jean Louis Forain. I think of him as M. Verdurin:
The cities of the plain:Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboim, Bela.
But Proust takes his title from one of his favourite poets, Alfred de Vigny (Baudelaire was the other, according to the famous questionnaire):
Bientôt se retirant dans un hideux royaume,
La Femme aura Gomorrhe et l'Homme aura Sodome,
Et, se jetant, de loin, un regard irrité,
Les deux sexes mourront chacun de son côté
From: La Colére de Samson
Piquant: de Vigny wrote this poem when his mistress, Marie Dorval became the intimate friend of George Sand. Just how physical the two women's intimacy was is a matter of some debate, but salacious rumours flew around Paris anyway. The poem treats of Samson's infatuation with Delilah, and how he was brought down by her seductive ways and ultimate betrayal. Samson's weakness was to love she who cannot love in return: "Elle se fait aimer sans aimer elle-même."
Thus it echoes the constant dynamic of love affairs in À La Recherche. There is always one who loves, one who accepts love. One who appears strong, but is made weak by their obsessive love. Swann and Odette, Charlus and Morel, the narrator and Albertine, Saint-Loup and Rachel, the narrator and the circles he would like to become part of.
De Vigny's poem sees the conflict between the male and the female as an eternal battle between virtue and treachery, between steadfast strength and supple seduction, between honesty and ruse. The woman on whose soothing breast he sought comfort and salvation has betrayed him for a few gold pieces. Women are as evil as men, each will inhabit their own sordid hell, women in Gomorrah and men in Sodom, with nothing but distant exasperated glances between them, the two sexes separate until death.
Proust's genius is to dissolve that dichotomy into a fluid continuum. Men who are passive until they become aggressively active, women who are sporty, strong, decisive. He plays with gender roles. Transformations, crossovers. Metamorphoses.
Book cover love: A portrait of a portrait painter.
Jacques-Émile Blanche painted Robert de Montesquieu, one of the models for the Baron de Charlus (my favourite character):
He also painted Proust himself:
But on the cover of my edition he stands with a wide legged swagger as model for Jean Louis Forain. I think of him as M. Verdurin:
August 28, 2015
This translator (Moncrieff) was too circumspect to call this volume Sodom and Gomorrah, the original title; nevertheless, Proust's theories on "Sodom and Gomorrah" come through loud and clear. Reading Proust's introduction, I was immediately struck by the timeliness and timelessness of its theme: to a certain extent, he could be writing of today. The beginning of the introduction is also very funny; our narrator continues his snooping ways even while he's on tenterhooks over his own obsessive love, as usual.
Again, as usual, reading this volume of ISoLT was a back-and-forth experience: love over the prose and insights, and exasperation at, once again, the tiresome salon talk. Especially with this volume, I was so happy (relieved?) when the focus turned away from the latter. There was one new exasperation: the narrator's making fun of both the hotel-manager's and then the lift-boy's ways of speaking. Even if I found that kind of thing funny, I would still think there was too much of it during the former's section (I get it!) and with the latter it was definite overkill. The "too much-ness" of it caused it to feel mean-spirited, and I wondered if it was casual snobbery on Proust's part or a character trait of the narrator. Thankfully, this was basically confined to one section.
And, then, as with the beginning and other sections throughout, the work is elevated, again, by the exquisite, gorgeous final fourth, a reflecting back to a scene seen through a window in the first volume (narrator-as-voyeur again) and a beautiful passage of the train that at each stop holds an image of a friend, no longer strangers in a strange land, originally felt as such during our sensitive boy's first visit to Balbec.
Again, as usual, reading this volume of ISoLT was a back-and-forth experience: love over the prose and insights, and exasperation at, once again, the tiresome salon talk. Especially with this volume, I was so happy (relieved?) when the focus turned away from the latter. There was one new exasperation: the narrator's making fun of both the hotel-manager's and then the lift-boy's ways of speaking. Even if I found that kind of thing funny, I would still think there was too much of it during the former's section (I get it!) and with the latter it was definite overkill. The "too much-ness" of it caused it to feel mean-spirited, and I wondered if it was casual snobbery on Proust's part or a character trait of the narrator. Thankfully, this was basically confined to one section.
And, then, as with the beginning and other sections throughout, the work is elevated, again, by the exquisite, gorgeous final fourth, a reflecting back to a scene seen through a window in the first volume (narrator-as-voyeur again) and a beautiful passage of the train that at each stop holds an image of a friend, no longer strangers in a strange land, originally felt as such during our sensitive boy's first visit to Balbec.
October 1, 2020
در جست جو آنچنان تبدیل به اثری شخصی برای من شده که اکنون که پس از یک ماه بدان بازمیگردم,گویی تغییر من در زندگی و راوی در داستان هماهنگ با یکدیگر رخ میدهد و این معجزه درجست و جو برای من است,اکنون که هر دو در حال عبور و رهایی از ورطه دوزخ هستیم..احساسی شگفت انگیز که شاید هرگز نتوانم به درستی توصیفش کنم..در جست جو در نهایت اثری ست که تنها خوانده نمی شود,بلکه با آن زندگی میکنیم..کتاب-زندگی در جست جو,شگفت انگیز ترین تجربه زندگی..
September 13, 2022
YouTube kanalımda Marcel Proust'un hayatı, bütün kitapları ve kronolojik okuma sırası hakkında bilgi edinebilirsiniz:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5e0i...
BİR İNSANA MI AİTSİNİZ YOKSA ZAMANA MI?
"Hiç kimse şimdiye dek yok olan şehirler Sodom ve Gomorra'yı bulamadı." Ernest Wright, National Geographic
Eski Ahit'in Tekvin Kitabı'nda sözü edilen günâhkâr kentler, Sodom ve Gomorra. Lut Kavmi'nin yaşadığı ve helak olduğu yerler. Peki yok olan ve kimsenin bulamadığı bu şehirleri biz nasıl bulabiliriz? Kayıp Zamanın İzinde serisi işte tam da bu noktada devreye girer.
İnsan, daima başkalarının anlayamadığı nedenlerle sever. Sevdiğiniz insanın size elini kaldırıp mütevazı bir selam vermesi, dudaklarındaki en ufak bir oynamanın bile yanaklarındaki yumuşak çizgiyi değiştirmesi, salon ve sosyete hayatındaki gösteriş silüetiyle başkalaşmış bulutların hep üzerinizde gezmesi aslında sizin sevginizin de meteorolojik durumunu belirler. Bunu en iyi kendimden bilirim. Çünkü bilsek de bilmesek de bizler de Sodom ve Gomorra'nın misafirleriyizdir.
Hayatımız boyunca çeşitli erkeklere ve kadınlara gerek sempati gerekse de antipati duyarız. Bunların dozunu ise samimiyet doktoru belirler. Etrafınızdakilerin sahte ve yapay düşüncelerine ne kadar bağışıklık kazanırsanız doktorunuz da sizi o kadar kolay tedavi eder. Duygusal tezatlıklar arasında ne kadar gidip gelirsek, bir tren yolculuğunun birbirini anca ufukta görebilen iki şehir arasında mekik dokuduğu kadar da insanların içindeki saf aşkı trenin içindeki sohbetlerin maneviyatlarıyla değil, trenin fiziksel hareketinin bize cinsel mekanizmaları hatırlatmasıyla yorumlama isteği duyarız. Hiç kimse şimdiye dek yok olan bu şehirleri bulamamış olabilir. Fakat sevgi de kimin kesin olarak bulduğunu bilemediğimiz sonsuz bir olgudur.
İçinizdeki manevi acıyı, özlemi, sevgi tohumlarını bir anatomi uzmanıymışcasına vücuduna haşretmek istediğiniz insan, girmek için zar zor izin alabildiğiniz bir heykel müzesinde anlamsız gözüken ama pek çok sanatçıya ilham olmuş bir heykel gibi durur. Bu heykele pek çok kişi sadece bakıp geçmektedir. Siz ise sadece ona odaklanmışsınızdır, yontulmuş bütün detaylarına, çukurlaşmasına sebep olmuş bütün yaşanmışlıklarına, hormonlarının salgıladığı bütün stimülasyonlara hayatınız boyunca maruz kalmak istersiniz. Ona yazgılı olmak istersiniz. Yazgının skalası, cinsiyettir. Homoseksüel, heteroseksüel, transeksüel gibi etiketlerle doğmayı seçemediğiniz hayatta seçmeye zorlandığınız tercihlerle başbaşa bırakılmışsınızdır. Bir zamanlar Lut Kavmi'nin tam ortasında helak olma ihtimaliniz varken, siz, duyduğunuz sevginin cinsiyetsizliğiyle helak olmayı çoktan göze almışsınızdır. Aşk da zaten başlı başına bir helak olmadır.
Sevginin konuştuğu dil kıskançlıktır. Fakat tam da bu noktada Yunan mitolojisindeki "Arkana bakma!" tabusu önünüze kocamaaan bir duvar gibi çıkar. Çünkü Orpheus'a Eurydike'yi kovalarken "Arkana bakmayacaksın, asla bakmayacaksın arkana Orpheus. Dönüp bakarsan, Eurydike'yi bir daha hiçbir zaman kavuşamayacak şekilde kaybedersin." denmiştir. Oysaki geçmiş, insanın şimdiki zaman tarlasını süren en iyi arkadaştır. Duygular zaman çiftçisiyle nadasa bırakılır. Kendimden örnek veriyorum, geçmişimizdeki kadınlarla yaşadığımız duygulanımlar aslında bir Doğu dininde yüzleri bambaşka biçimlere bürünebilen Tanrıların aldığı yüz ifadeleri gibidir.
Durmayan şimdiki zamanınızda aradığınız kayıp kadınlar, kayıp yaşanmışlıklar, kayıp duygulanımlar sizin önünüze beceriksiz bir eskizmişcesine çıkarılır. Geçmiş, şimdiki zamanken size pek çok şey vaat eden manevi ihtiyaçlarınız, sanal olmayan şimdide sadece birer kuklaya dönüşmüştür. Kukla ustasının adı ise bilinçaltıdır. Önünüze sürekli buruşturup atmalık eskiz kağıtları atılır. Kıskançlık öyle bir şeydir ki, kendinizi bu yırtıp attığınız düşünce eskizlerinin bile yanyana gelip sevgi bağı kurmasından işkillendiğiniz bir girdabın içerisinde buluverirsiniz.
Göz bebekleriniz anneleri için ağlar, maruz kaldığınız anlık hayat kesitleri, kimya deneylerindeki tüplerin içinde bilinmeyen ve her an patlamaya hazır bekleyen reaksiyonların ruhunuzun kıskançlık haznelerini doldurmasıyla birlikte adımlarınıza karışır. Onlarla birlikte alnınızın yerçekimine yenildiği nafile secdelerde, inandığınız Tanrı'ya yakarırsınız, onlarla birlikte gece kulübünde günahı dost edinirsiniz, onlarla birlikte rulet masasında Hegel'in diyalektiği üzerine kırmızı-siyah renklerle kanka olursunuz. Fakat hayat da zamanın alışkanlıklarla dolup taştığı kadar vardır ya, işte hayata hologram ellerinizle dokunmak istediğiniz her düşünce parçacığında karşınıza pek çok kez çıkacak olan 0 sizin esas sentezinizdir. Bu yüzden O ile 0 arasında bu kadar benzerlik olmasına da şaşılmaması gerekir. 0, O’nun çocuksu yanaklarından biraz sıkılmış versiyonudur. Biz, O’nu ne kadar seversek, 1’e değil daha çok 0’a ulaşırız.
İnsan, arkasına bakmadan duramaz. Çünkü insan bilmediğine bakmayı sever. Bir daha hiçbir zaman kavuşamayacak şekilde kaybedeceğini bilmesine rağmen arkasına bakmaya devam eder. Çünkü insan Tanrı değildir. İnsanın önünde ve arkasında ne varsa hepsini bilen bir Tanrı varken, insanın cüzi bakışları Proust'un zaman hiyerarşisine -yani boşa geçirilen zaman, kaybedilen zaman, ele geçirilen zaman ve yakalanan zaman- takılır. Engelli bir koşu gibidir zaman, her engelde insan bir dahaki engeli nasıl aşacağını daha iyi öğrenir. Gözyaşlarıyla doğmuştur, gözyaşlarıyla ölecektir. Yediğim çiğköftelere bile avucumun içi kadar acı koyulurken, 25 yıllık acısız hayatımda en sevdiğim kitap olan Robert Musil'in Niteliksiz Adam 1'inde
"Modern insan klinikte doğuyor ve klinikte ölüyordu: O halde aynı zamanda bir klinikte yaşamalıydı!" şeklinde bir alıntı vardır. İşte, modern insanın kliniği de aşk çıkmazıdır. Aşk çıkmazında doğup aşk çıkmazında ölüyor, aynı zamanda da aşk çıkmazında yaşıyordu insan. Herkese göre bir aşk vardı ortada fakat insan önüne bakmayı bilemediği için arkasından da kurtulamıyordu. Kayıp zamanın izinde tamlamasına kayıp aşkın izinde, kayıp paranın izinde, kayıp günahın izinde, kayıp başarının izinde koyduğu için insan, insanlığından çıkıyordu. Birileri için yaşıyor, başka birilerine zeki görünüyordu. Kendisini ararken zamandan oluyordu. Cenneti arzularken cehennemi giyiyordu. Yozlaşıyor, izole oluyor, sahteleşiyordu.
Yıllarca birbirini göremeyecek olan insanlar, anılarının ortaklığından ötürü birbirinden vazgeçemez. Beraber gezilmiştir deniz kıyıları, beraber bakılmıştır tablolara, beraber doğa yürüyüşleri yapılmıştır. Artık ellerdeki epiteller dost olmuştur. Parmak çizgileri, aşıklara göre, tez ile antitez, adenin ile timin, siyah ile beyaz gibidir. Anlamı birbirlerini tamamlamakta ve senteze ulaşmakta arayan fakat birbirlerini tamamlamadan da çelişkili bir anlam arayışına sürüklenen de yine, nitelikli dış uyaranların niteliksizleştirdiği insanların boş ve hayal kırıklığıyla sonuçlanacak olan heveslerinden başka bir duygulanım değildir. Beyhude olduğu aşikardır. Zaten insan, zamanını boşa geçirdiği kadar da onu yakalamak ister. Kederlerin için ne kadar derin bir kuyu açarsan sevgi susuzluğuna ilaç olabilecek derin bir potansiyel su kuyusu sahibi olman da o kadar kolay olur. Her şey senin için be insan. Sadece acı çekmen yeterli, çünkü Proust da acıya karşı boynunu heybetli bir Yunan Tanrısı'na eğermiş gibi sunmuştu:
"Sözü en çok dinlenen hekim hastalıktır; iyiliğe, bilgiye söz veririz sadece; acıya ise boyun eğeriz." (s. 145)
"İnsanların sevgisinden ne kadar az şey beklenebileceğini görüyordu, buna boyun eğmişti. Bundan ötürü acı çektiği oluyordu tabii." (s. 346)
"Hayata hala bağlıydım, ama hayattan artık acıdan başka şey bekleyemeyeceğimi biliyordum." (s. 510)
Biliriz ki Marcel Proust da bir zamanlar kendi ruhunun epitellerine uyabilecek bir kadın arayışındadır. Ama isteklerine bir türlü cevap alamadığı için latent eşcinselliğe kadar giden bunalımlar yaşamıştır. Nedendir bilmem fakat atan bir kalbi, düşünen bir beyni, seven bir mizacı olan herkesin Proust okuması gerektiğini düşünürüm. Çünkü Proust da zamanınızı boş geçirmenizi istemez. Kendi gözlerinizle Proust'un dünyasına değil, Proust'un gözleriyle kendi dünyanıza bakabildiğiniz sürece siz de geçmişinizde o unutamadığınız ve uğruna kıskançlıklar yaşayıp ortamlarda sevginizi sakındığınız, birilerine yaranmaya çalıştığınız, Eurydike için Orpheuslaştığınız kadar "zaman" olursunuz. Seçim ise size ait, bir insana mı ait yoksa zamana mı ait olmak istiyorsunuz?
Kim bilir... Sodom ve Gomorra'yı bulduk mu bilinmez. Fakat belki Proust da aşkının sarhoşluğuyla helak olmak isteyen bir adamdı. Olabildiğince cinsiyetsiz, olabildiğince sahtelikten uzak, bir elektrik akımı gibi ani ve gerçek bir sanatın karşısında olduğunuzu bildiğiniz zaman hissettiğiniz, hayatınız boyunca etkisinin geçmeyeceğini düşündüğünüz kısmi bir manevi felç gibi:
"İnsanı çarpan bir elektrik akımı gibi aşklarım da beni çarptı; onları yaşadım, hissettim, fakat görmeyi ya da düşünmeyi asla başaramadım." (s. 519)
Eğer bu klibi de izlerseniz Sodom ve Gomorra'nın ne anlatmaya çalıştığını anlayabilirsiniz:
https://youtu.be/UBDjTtLdgkg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5e0i...
BİR İNSANA MI AİTSİNİZ YOKSA ZAMANA MI?
"Hiç kimse şimdiye dek yok olan şehirler Sodom ve Gomorra'yı bulamadı." Ernest Wright, National Geographic
Eski Ahit'in Tekvin Kitabı'nda sözü edilen günâhkâr kentler, Sodom ve Gomorra. Lut Kavmi'nin yaşadığı ve helak olduğu yerler. Peki yok olan ve kimsenin bulamadığı bu şehirleri biz nasıl bulabiliriz? Kayıp Zamanın İzinde serisi işte tam da bu noktada devreye girer.
İnsan, daima başkalarının anlayamadığı nedenlerle sever. Sevdiğiniz insanın size elini kaldırıp mütevazı bir selam vermesi, dudaklarındaki en ufak bir oynamanın bile yanaklarındaki yumuşak çizgiyi değiştirmesi, salon ve sosyete hayatındaki gösteriş silüetiyle başkalaşmış bulutların hep üzerinizde gezmesi aslında sizin sevginizin de meteorolojik durumunu belirler. Bunu en iyi kendimden bilirim. Çünkü bilsek de bilmesek de bizler de Sodom ve Gomorra'nın misafirleriyizdir.
Hayatımız boyunca çeşitli erkeklere ve kadınlara gerek sempati gerekse de antipati duyarız. Bunların dozunu ise samimiyet doktoru belirler. Etrafınızdakilerin sahte ve yapay düşüncelerine ne kadar bağışıklık kazanırsanız doktorunuz da sizi o kadar kolay tedavi eder. Duygusal tezatlıklar arasında ne kadar gidip gelirsek, bir tren yolculuğunun birbirini anca ufukta görebilen iki şehir arasında mekik dokuduğu kadar da insanların içindeki saf aşkı trenin içindeki sohbetlerin maneviyatlarıyla değil, trenin fiziksel hareketinin bize cinsel mekanizmaları hatırlatmasıyla yorumlama isteği duyarız. Hiç kimse şimdiye dek yok olan bu şehirleri bulamamış olabilir. Fakat sevgi de kimin kesin olarak bulduğunu bilemediğimiz sonsuz bir olgudur.
İçinizdeki manevi acıyı, özlemi, sevgi tohumlarını bir anatomi uzmanıymışcasına vücuduna haşretmek istediğiniz insan, girmek için zar zor izin alabildiğiniz bir heykel müzesinde anlamsız gözüken ama pek çok sanatçıya ilham olmuş bir heykel gibi durur. Bu heykele pek çok kişi sadece bakıp geçmektedir. Siz ise sadece ona odaklanmışsınızdır, yontulmuş bütün detaylarına, çukurlaşmasına sebep olmuş bütün yaşanmışlıklarına, hormonlarının salgıladığı bütün stimülasyonlara hayatınız boyunca maruz kalmak istersiniz. Ona yazgılı olmak istersiniz. Yazgının skalası, cinsiyettir. Homoseksüel, heteroseksüel, transeksüel gibi etiketlerle doğmayı seçemediğiniz hayatta seçmeye zorlandığınız tercihlerle başbaşa bırakılmışsınızdır. Bir zamanlar Lut Kavmi'nin tam ortasında helak olma ihtimaliniz varken, siz, duyduğunuz sevginin cinsiyetsizliğiyle helak olmayı çoktan göze almışsınızdır. Aşk da zaten başlı başına bir helak olmadır.
Sevginin konuştuğu dil kıskançlıktır. Fakat tam da bu noktada Yunan mitolojisindeki "Arkana bakma!" tabusu önünüze kocamaaan bir duvar gibi çıkar. Çünkü Orpheus'a Eurydike'yi kovalarken "Arkana bakmayacaksın, asla bakmayacaksın arkana Orpheus. Dönüp bakarsan, Eurydike'yi bir daha hiçbir zaman kavuşamayacak şekilde kaybedersin." denmiştir. Oysaki geçmiş, insanın şimdiki zaman tarlasını süren en iyi arkadaştır. Duygular zaman çiftçisiyle nadasa bırakılır. Kendimden örnek veriyorum, geçmişimizdeki kadınlarla yaşadığımız duygulanımlar aslında bir Doğu dininde yüzleri bambaşka biçimlere bürünebilen Tanrıların aldığı yüz ifadeleri gibidir.
Durmayan şimdiki zamanınızda aradığınız kayıp kadınlar, kayıp yaşanmışlıklar, kayıp duygulanımlar sizin önünüze beceriksiz bir eskizmişcesine çıkarılır. Geçmiş, şimdiki zamanken size pek çok şey vaat eden manevi ihtiyaçlarınız, sanal olmayan şimdide sadece birer kuklaya dönüşmüştür. Kukla ustasının adı ise bilinçaltıdır. Önünüze sürekli buruşturup atmalık eskiz kağıtları atılır. Kıskançlık öyle bir şeydir ki, kendinizi bu yırtıp attığınız düşünce eskizlerinin bile yanyana gelip sevgi bağı kurmasından işkillendiğiniz bir girdabın içerisinde buluverirsiniz.
Göz bebekleriniz anneleri için ağlar, maruz kaldığınız anlık hayat kesitleri, kimya deneylerindeki tüplerin içinde bilinmeyen ve her an patlamaya hazır bekleyen reaksiyonların ruhunuzun kıskançlık haznelerini doldurmasıyla birlikte adımlarınıza karışır. Onlarla birlikte alnınızın yerçekimine yenildiği nafile secdelerde, inandığınız Tanrı'ya yakarırsınız, onlarla birlikte gece kulübünde günahı dost edinirsiniz, onlarla birlikte rulet masasında Hegel'in diyalektiği üzerine kırmızı-siyah renklerle kanka olursunuz. Fakat hayat da zamanın alışkanlıklarla dolup taştığı kadar vardır ya, işte hayata hologram ellerinizle dokunmak istediğiniz her düşünce parçacığında karşınıza pek çok kez çıkacak olan 0 sizin esas sentezinizdir. Bu yüzden O ile 0 arasında bu kadar benzerlik olmasına da şaşılmaması gerekir. 0, O’nun çocuksu yanaklarından biraz sıkılmış versiyonudur. Biz, O’nu ne kadar seversek, 1’e değil daha çok 0’a ulaşırız.
İnsan, arkasına bakmadan duramaz. Çünkü insan bilmediğine bakmayı sever. Bir daha hiçbir zaman kavuşamayacak şekilde kaybedeceğini bilmesine rağmen arkasına bakmaya devam eder. Çünkü insan Tanrı değildir. İnsanın önünde ve arkasında ne varsa hepsini bilen bir Tanrı varken, insanın cüzi bakışları Proust'un zaman hiyerarşisine -yani boşa geçirilen zaman, kaybedilen zaman, ele geçirilen zaman ve yakalanan zaman- takılır. Engelli bir koşu gibidir zaman, her engelde insan bir dahaki engeli nasıl aşacağını daha iyi öğrenir. Gözyaşlarıyla doğmuştur, gözyaşlarıyla ölecektir. Yediğim çiğköftelere bile avucumun içi kadar acı koyulurken, 25 yıllık acısız hayatımda en sevdiğim kitap olan Robert Musil'in Niteliksiz Adam 1'inde
"Modern insan klinikte doğuyor ve klinikte ölüyordu: O halde aynı zamanda bir klinikte yaşamalıydı!" şeklinde bir alıntı vardır. İşte, modern insanın kliniği de aşk çıkmazıdır. Aşk çıkmazında doğup aşk çıkmazında ölüyor, aynı zamanda da aşk çıkmazında yaşıyordu insan. Herkese göre bir aşk vardı ortada fakat insan önüne bakmayı bilemediği için arkasından da kurtulamıyordu. Kayıp zamanın izinde tamlamasına kayıp aşkın izinde, kayıp paranın izinde, kayıp günahın izinde, kayıp başarının izinde koyduğu için insan, insanlığından çıkıyordu. Birileri için yaşıyor, başka birilerine zeki görünüyordu. Kendisini ararken zamandan oluyordu. Cenneti arzularken cehennemi giyiyordu. Yozlaşıyor, izole oluyor, sahteleşiyordu.
Yıllarca birbirini göremeyecek olan insanlar, anılarının ortaklığından ötürü birbirinden vazgeçemez. Beraber gezilmiştir deniz kıyıları, beraber bakılmıştır tablolara, beraber doğa yürüyüşleri yapılmıştır. Artık ellerdeki epiteller dost olmuştur. Parmak çizgileri, aşıklara göre, tez ile antitez, adenin ile timin, siyah ile beyaz gibidir. Anlamı birbirlerini tamamlamakta ve senteze ulaşmakta arayan fakat birbirlerini tamamlamadan da çelişkili bir anlam arayışına sürüklenen de yine, nitelikli dış uyaranların niteliksizleştirdiği insanların boş ve hayal kırıklığıyla sonuçlanacak olan heveslerinden başka bir duygulanım değildir. Beyhude olduğu aşikardır. Zaten insan, zamanını boşa geçirdiği kadar da onu yakalamak ister. Kederlerin için ne kadar derin bir kuyu açarsan sevgi susuzluğuna ilaç olabilecek derin bir potansiyel su kuyusu sahibi olman da o kadar kolay olur. Her şey senin için be insan. Sadece acı çekmen yeterli, çünkü Proust da acıya karşı boynunu heybetli bir Yunan Tanrısı'na eğermiş gibi sunmuştu:
"Sözü en çok dinlenen hekim hastalıktır; iyiliğe, bilgiye söz veririz sadece; acıya ise boyun eğeriz." (s. 145)
"İnsanların sevgisinden ne kadar az şey beklenebileceğini görüyordu, buna boyun eğmişti. Bundan ötürü acı çektiği oluyordu tabii." (s. 346)
"Hayata hala bağlıydım, ama hayattan artık acıdan başka şey bekleyemeyeceğimi biliyordum." (s. 510)
Biliriz ki Marcel Proust da bir zamanlar kendi ruhunun epitellerine uyabilecek bir kadın arayışındadır. Ama isteklerine bir türlü cevap alamadığı için latent eşcinselliğe kadar giden bunalımlar yaşamıştır. Nedendir bilmem fakat atan bir kalbi, düşünen bir beyni, seven bir mizacı olan herkesin Proust okuması gerektiğini düşünürüm. Çünkü Proust da zamanınızı boş geçirmenizi istemez. Kendi gözlerinizle Proust'un dünyasına değil, Proust'un gözleriyle kendi dünyanıza bakabildiğiniz sürece siz de geçmişinizde o unutamadığınız ve uğruna kıskançlıklar yaşayıp ortamlarda sevginizi sakındığınız, birilerine yaranmaya çalıştığınız, Eurydike için Orpheuslaştığınız kadar "zaman" olursunuz. Seçim ise size ait, bir insana mı ait yoksa zamana mı ait olmak istiyorsunuz?
Kim bilir... Sodom ve Gomorra'yı bulduk mu bilinmez. Fakat belki Proust da aşkının sarhoşluğuyla helak olmak isteyen bir adamdı. Olabildiğince cinsiyetsiz, olabildiğince sahtelikten uzak, bir elektrik akımı gibi ani ve gerçek bir sanatın karşısında olduğunuzu bildiğiniz zaman hissettiğiniz, hayatınız boyunca etkisinin geçmeyeceğini düşündüğünüz kısmi bir manevi felç gibi:
"İnsanı çarpan bir elektrik akımı gibi aşklarım da beni çarptı; onları yaşadım, hissettim, fakat görmeyi ya da düşünmeyi asla başaramadım." (s. 519)
Eğer bu klibi de izlerseniz Sodom ve Gomorra'nın ne anlatmaya çalıştığını anlayabilirsiniz:
https://youtu.be/UBDjTtLdgkg
February 14, 2020
Llegados a este cuarto libro no hay nada que te pueda sorprender respecto a lo que se va a encontrar en la lectura, siguen las descripciones largas y minuciosas de las reuniones aristocráticas que tanto especifica Proust, las cuales sigo sin entender su afán y su importancia en la historia, pero en este libro encontraremos partes hermosamente escritas, reflexiones y pensamientos que hacen a Proust uno de los mejores escritores del siglo XX, y aunque son la menor parte de lo que ocupa todo el libro, nos las encontramos de manera más abundante que en los dos libros anteriores y solo estas pequeñas partes hacen que valga la pena la lectura completa del libro.
Es bien sabido que las descripciones eternas de personalidades y de escenarios es de lo más característico del autor, y mientras lo lees muchas veces resulta muy pesado, aburrido y cansino, pero al llegar a este cuarto libro y revivir a muchos personajes y escenarios de libros anteriores, sientes esa viveza de haber estado ahí tiempo atrás, todas esas horas que le invertimos a la lectura de los escenarios ahora valen mucho la pena, los sientes tan reales y lo que permite que estos libros fluyan con mayor facilidad ya que no tenemos que detenernos a contemplar nuevamente lo que ya se nos dijo anteriormente y lo que hace grande la escritura de Proust es que no lo olvidas, por más hartazgo que llegue a provocar en ocasiones, sin duda todo lo hace para tener una mejor experiencia de lectura y en este libro fue muy placentero revivir y reencontrarme con el pasado del protagonista y con el pasado de mis lecturas, una sensación que solo Proust puede provocar.
y la manera de terminar este libro es sumamente maravillosa, los últimos 10 renglones del texto hacen estremecer, sin duda el mejor final de lo que va hasta ahora.
Es bien sabido que las descripciones eternas de personalidades y de escenarios es de lo más característico del autor, y mientras lo lees muchas veces resulta muy pesado, aburrido y cansino, pero al llegar a este cuarto libro y revivir a muchos personajes y escenarios de libros anteriores, sientes esa viveza de haber estado ahí tiempo atrás, todas esas horas que le invertimos a la lectura de los escenarios ahora valen mucho la pena, los sientes tan reales y lo que permite que estos libros fluyan con mayor facilidad ya que no tenemos que detenernos a contemplar nuevamente lo que ya se nos dijo anteriormente y lo que hace grande la escritura de Proust es que no lo olvidas, por más hartazgo que llegue a provocar en ocasiones, sin duda todo lo hace para tener una mejor experiencia de lectura y en este libro fue muy placentero revivir y reencontrarme con el pasado del protagonista y con el pasado de mis lecturas, una sensación que solo Proust puede provocar.
y la manera de terminar este libro es sumamente maravillosa, los últimos 10 renglones del texto hacen estremecer, sin duda el mejor final de lo que va hasta ahora.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 778 reviews