Salon sulla notizia [LUNGO]
AleRoots
(http://www.salon.com/books/review/2005/08/28/proust/index.html).
After I finished "In Search of Lost Time," I called the real literary
types that I happen to know -- the ones who make their livings by being
famously well-read -- and I asked them if they had read the whole thing,
too. Mostly this was to introduce the idea that I had read the whole
thing -- but I thought it was a good idea to first show deference to
their superior reading programs before happening to mention this
accomplishment with which I had impressed myself. Mais non! as they say
in France. Yet all of them knew someone who had read all seven volumes;
that person was Richard Howard, who introduces the Modern Library
edition of the novel. I wondered: Could he be the only one other than me
and Alain de Botton, who wrote "How Proust Can Change Your Life"? If so,
I am here to tell you, we are a lucky group, and it is time for you to
begin, because reading all of Proust is not hard.
First, you buy all seven volumes in a uniform edition -- mine came in a
six-book set -- and you arrange them in a row next to your bed, the
bathtub or your favorite chair, wherever you are most comfortable
reading. For a few days, let's say no longer than a week, you glance at
them from time to time and pick them up and look at the covers. You can
even flip the pages -- but don't read anything. You are familiarizing
yourself with this new acquaintance. You are coming to recognize his
appeal. You are letting him impose upon you, because for the next 70
days or so, you are going to organize your free time around him.
You are going to find that he is both more friendly and more alien than
you ever imagined. You are going to be charmed and also offended,
sometimes disapproving, and occasionally bored. Quite often you are
going to be impressed -- his capacity for thinking things through is
going to seem almost infinitely great. Mostly, though, if you are like I
was, you are going to come to anticipate your daily what? -- Dose?
Encounter? Immersion? Meditation? -- with greater and greater eagerness
but also greater and greater languor. You are going to come, at least in
your own way, to feel French. When you have finished "In Search of Lost
Time," you will be convinced that you know something visceral about
Frenchness, and that that knowledge is important.
Of course everyone knows that "In Search of Lost Time" begins with a
madeleine dipped in tea, except that it doesn't. It begins with falling
asleep while reading a book. Someone, "I," a voice who occasionally
calls himself "M.," closes his eyes and wakes up a half-hour later,
thinking that his book is still in his hands, and by a process of
association, begins to think about all sorts of things: the time, an
imagined traveler, the comfort of his bed. He sleeps again and is
reminded of earlier nights and long ago dreams. The first event he
relates is one that happens to have been singular in what seems to be a
lonely childhood; unable to sleep and longing for his mother, he is
discovered on the stairs by his parents as they go up to bed after a
late evening of socializing with their neighbor, Swann. M. expects to be
disciplined ("Too late: my father was upon us. Instinctively, I
murmured, though no one heard me, 'I'm done for!'"), but he is not. The
normally strict father is sympathetic and merciful, and suggests that
M.'s beloved mother spend the night with the child.
In order to pass the time, she reads him a novel by George Sand; already
his literary sensibility is at work -- "Beneath the everyday incidents,
the ordinary objects and common words, I sensed a strange and individual
tone of voice." And so have you. Fifty-five pages in, and something has
happened. In 10 more pages, you will have done your first day's reading
without getting to the madeleine, but Proust's rhythm is well
established. It is, let's say, andante: measured, conversational, even
ordinary, but seductive and intimate. And that constitutes his promise
for all of the 4,200 pages left to go -- his seven volumes will be
seductive, intimate, measured and conversational in a way that was
unprecedented in the novel of his day and unmatched since.
Sixty-five pages a day is a good goal. Devoting less than an hour every
day to "In Search of Lost Time" hardly gets you in the mood, and
devoting more than an hour and a half a day for over two months might
interfere with your other responsibilities. At the very least, you have
to build up some momentum, but not be tempted to skip. (I skipped four
pages in the fifth volume when I felt he was being repetitious in his
complaints about his captive, Albertine.) Since "In Search of Lost Time"
is a story and an essay on what stories mean, skipping sections quickly
turns into stopping altogether as you lose the thread of his argument
and the relationship of his argument to his story. Besides, there is no
way to imbibe his "strange and individual tone of voice," both the
Proust-ness of it and the Frenchness of it, without prolonged exposure.
Proust's seven volumes ("Swann's Way," "Within a Budding Grove," "The
Guermantes Way," "Sodom and Gomorrah," "The Captive," "The Fugitive,"
and "Time Regained") form a cycle. They are not, though they pretend to
be, Proust's memoir. Many significant facts have been changed to enhance
the effect of the novel, in order for it to seem, to the author and the
reader, to actually recapture the past -- that is, Proust's childhood
and the ambience of pre-World War I France. Here is where the madeleine
comes in. Shortly after telling about his single night of bliss with his
mother, he recounts how it was a family custom to visit his elderly
great-aunt on Sunday afternoons. As refreshment, she often offered her
visitors madeleines and cups of lime-flower tisane. When, as a young
man, M. happens to enjoy this combination again, a sense memory of
visits to the long dead great-aunt returns to him. As he gets older, and
the volumes of the novel progress, he despairs of making anything of his
life and his literary aspirations until several repeated instances of
this effect show him how he might portray scenes and senses from his
past with enough intensity to go beyond memory, and therefore beyond
loss, grief and sadness. In the last volume, he tells how three sense
memories in a short space of time motivate him to finally get started,
and to produce the seven volumes you have beside your bed.
M. is a friendly fellow, and the past he wishes to recapture is a
possibly unique period of European and French history -- the late 19th
and early 20th centuries. As you progress through "Within a Budding
Grove" you will certainly be able to picture it when you think of all
the Matisse, Pissarro, Cezanne, Toulouse-Lautrec and Monet paintings you
have ever seen. The light is bright, ocean and sky are everywhere, the
human figures are beautifully dressed, and that astonishing combination
of lush vegetation and stone buildings that is the French countryside is
constantly in your mind. Here are the mirrored cafes and there is the
flashily attired army on parade, and M. and his friend Albertine even
see a hot-air balloon. But after all, M. is French, and closely related,
in a literary sense, to the Marquis de Sade on one side and Honoré de
Balzac on the other.
In Paris, there is society -- which M. investigates at length in Vol. 3,
when he becomes something of a protégé to a very wealthy and
aristocratic neighbor, Madame de Guermantes. By this time, M. is in his
early 20s. At first he is fascinated with everything that Madame de
Guermantes stands for in French society and French history. Her family
is older and more aristocratic than that of the king, or, indeed, of any
king. Kings and queens litter her get-togethers and she does them the
favor of being kind to them, even though she prefers the company of M.
She laughs at her own lineage and prides herself on being modern and
ordinary, but M. does not let you forget the lands and the architecture
that Madame de Guermantes is the human embodiment of. You feel a bit
privileged to be at her parties, in fact.
And then there is love, which M. explores by imprisoning his beloved
Albertine (who is based not on a girl but on a man Proust loved named
Agostinelli) in his house in Paris (Vol. 5) and keeping her until she
manages to escape and run away (Vol. 6). It is clear from the beginning
that M. is ambivalent about Albertine. When he meets her, she is part of
a larger group of girls who are breezy, active and liberated. They play
tennis and ride bicycles, perhaps have lovers, and perhaps are each
other's lovers (M. can never decide). He chooses Albertine out of the
group almost by chance, but once he has chosen her, he becomes obsessed
with her, while also doubting whether he can marry her, or, indeed,
marry at all. He lures her to his Paris maison while his mother is away
in the country and keeps her there, partly by promising her marriage and
partly by giving her gifts. Whenever she acts trustworthy and
affectionate, he is put off and grows bored. Only when she arouses his
jealousy does he actually experience love (remember, this is a book
about a very young man). During this section, you might want to take a
break. I did, of about a week. I read "R Is for Ricochet," by Sue Grafton.
M. also explores ideas of love by spying upon the homosexual encounters
of many of his male friends and discovering what he soon realizes is a
broad and deep underground of ruling-class homosexual connections
partially concealed by wealth, marriage, costume, parties and politics.
If "In Search of Lost Time" is undeniably about everything that passes
through the consciousness of M., one of those things is sex -- what he
feels about it, how he gets it, who else seems to be getting it, what it
means to individuals and to social networks, whether it is worth it,
what is more interesting and less interesting, and what it makes people
do that they otherwise might not do. He seems to agree with the opinion
that the Marquis de Sade expresses in the 18th century novel "Justine,"
that woman are for making economic, social and familial liasons; what
men really want is to be buggered, or whipped, by the lower orders.
But, as I say, M. is a narrator of great charm. By the time you get to
his "homosexual agenda," many days into your reading of the novel, it
will not seem that he is trying to persuade you of anything, only that
he is reporting what he sees and thinks and that his greatest desire is
to report faithfully and truthfully. As with all novels, you may take it
or leave it. Only those who take other people's private sexual choices
as personally threatening (and he portrays those types of boors from
time to time, the blind, narcissistic and truly self-centered who don't
have the capacity to hear or appreciate the nuances of the "strange and
individual tone of voice" that is the pleasure and fascination of great
literature) might want to quit reading at this point.
It is important that you go about your business while you pursue your
reading project. You have to take M. with you on planes and trains and
into hotels and to the dentist's office and into your child's piano
lesson. "In Search of Lost Time" will not have its full effect if you
sequester it. It must diffuse into your life, color every place you go
and every scene you look at with its own tints. When you lift your eyes
to glance into your own backyard, you want to do so with the sight of
Albertine in your mind, quiet in her own chamber, forbidden to awaken M.
too early in the morning; or the sight of M.'s friend, Saint-loup,
stepping athletically over the backs of banquettes in a mirrored
restaurant in Paris, making his way to M., who is sitting eating his
supper; or the sight of Madame de Guermantes in one of her elegant
turn-of-the-century Fortuny costumes and her red shoes. You want to
listen to M.'s quiet voice in your head even while the news is on or
while the dog is barking at the arrival of the UPS man. Seventy days in
a row to spend with one narrative sensibility is a long time, but after
you are finished, it will seem as though you were with him for years and
are with him still.
Biographies of Marcel Proust make him out to be an odd man, who lived in
a cork-lined room and worked by night for most of the latter part of his
life, but M., his narrator, goes on so eloquently and at such length
that it ceases after a while to be tempting to diagnose him. He almost
pronounces his own diagnosis at the very beginning, right after his
mother stays with him for that one night -- if she had stayed away, if
they had disciplined him, maybe the twin indulgences of love and
literature would not have come to have such a power over him. In the
course of his seven volumes, M. hints at efforts the family made, and he
made, too, to render him more productive and employable. He goes for
cures. He takes too much care of himself. He nearly goes bankrupt buying
things for Albertine. He knows he is, and in some sense has always been,
a disappointment to his parents. But M.'s sensibility is so fine and so
unfiltered that diagnosing him is forgotten in favor of observing him as
he observes himself observing everyone around him. His sense of
discrimination is robust; his eye is keen; his literary being is
abundance itself. He is a man too busy to mourn because he must
re-create what is no longer.
--
ale