Proust Moment, May 2, 2003

A Tough Nut to Crack

One falls into a variety of rhythms reading Proust. There are periods -- many of them -- of sheer exhilaration, as he drills deep into the moment, absorbing all the psychological, metaphysical and aesthetic data at hand. (Did you know Peter Falk once said his compadre John Cassavetes had the "antennae of Proust"? That's not the kind of thing you think of with Cassavetes' films, although it's certainly true of him as an actor, especially in Mikey and Nicky.) And there are moments -- and as you know Proust moments can go on forever, because he puts them on freeze-frame, and examines them; he strolls back and forth in front of these scenes the way he surely did in real life when he first saw Vermeer's View of Delft -- when he downshifts into sheer glacial boredom, either because he's trying to stuff a vast hole with words, when the picture he's trying to paint has not yet yielded up its soul to him. Or maybe you are the problem; maybe you're just not seeing it yet, as is sometimes the case not only with Proust but with three-hour art films.

There's a certain kind of cinema we easily associate with Proust, the kind typified by both great and insufferable Antonioni films, and which you can also see in movies like Wim Wenders' Proustian masterpiece In the Course of Time or Rivette's Céline and Julie Go Boating or Todd Haynes' Safe or Kieslowski's Blue or just about anything by Tarkovsky. Call it a Cinema of Boredom, if you wish; depending on when you see it, that's exactly what it is: long, slow and "boring as a dog's ass," to quote Mel Gibson, unhappily stuck in Wenders World a few years back. There are movies and novels which suit a reflective mood.

There are, also, places in Proust where you just hit a snag, and you have to break down what he's saying into fragments.

Like now. I printed out the following at lunch and have been poring over it in off-moments ever since, trying to see what the hell he's talking about. It's not a long passage, but it does take a while to parse.

Marcel has resolved not to sleep until he has kissed Mamma, and this dogged duty to a nightly ritual brings him enxiety and, suddenly euphoria: "The tranquillity which followed my anguish made me extremely alert, no less than my sense of expectation, my thirst for and my fear of danger. "

The troublesome passage, troublesome to me anyway, comes next:

"Noiselessly I opened the window and sat down on the foot of my bed; hardly daring to move in case they should hear me from below. Things outside seemed also fixed in mute expectation, so as not to disturb the moonlight which, duplicating each of them and throwing it back by the extension, forwards, of a shadow denser and more concrete than its substance, had made the whole landscape seem at once thinner and longer, like a map which, after being folded up, is spread out upon the ground. What had to move—a leaf of the chestnut-tree, for instance—moved. But its minute shuddering, complete, finished to the least detail and with utmost delicacy of gesture, made no discord with the rest of the scene, and yet was not merged in it, remaining clearly outlined. Exposed upon this surface of silence, which absorbed nothing from them, the most distant sounds, those which must have come from gardens at the far end of the town, could be distinguished with such exact `finish' that the impression they gave of coming from a distance seemed due only to their 'pianissimo' execution, like those movements on muted strings so well performed by the orchestra of the Conservatoire that, although one does not lose a single note, one thinks all the same that they are being played somewhere outside, a long way from the concert hall, so that all the old subscribers, and my grandmother's sisters too, when Swann had given them his seats, used to strain their ears as if they had caught the distant approach of an army on the march, which had not yet rounded the corner of the Rue de Trevise."

--"Overture," Swann's Way

I'm sorry, this passage makes no sense to me. It's like one of those exceedingly dense, hyper-obscure Wallace Stevens poems. I get, or I think I do, the idea of him looking on a very still landscape with long shadows, but if the moonlight is duplicating the objects by making shadows, what, exactly, is being thrown back by extension and so forth? And how is a folded map spread on the ground? I won't, for now, even get into all the pianissimo business. Maybe this is a translation matter. Comments invited from any readers. Otherwise, let's move on.