Vladimir and Nicole Go Boating

I am happy to report that the moonlit passage has been addressed at some fascinating length by Nicole Hanset of Belgium and the late Professor Vladimir Nabokov of Cornell. The letter from one and the lecture from the other both yielded trouvailles, as I think they say in France. Lucky finds.

For reasons of coherence I'll start with Nicole, as she shares my map confusion, which Nabokov elucidates somewhat.

A. Translation by Lydia Davis (Penguin Books 2002) :

Outdoors, too, things seemed frozen in a silent intentness not to disturb the moonlight which, duplicating and distancing each thing by extending its shadow before it, denser and more concrete than itself, had at once thinned and enlarged the landscape like a map that had been folded and was now opened out.

B. "what exactly is is being thrown back by extension? - or distanced ? -as Lydia Davis translates"

To understand this I made a little experiment : I drew 3 trees without shadow, then, below, the same 3 trees WITH a shadow : you immediately can see that Proust alludes in fact to an optical phenomenon. The trees with shadows seem indeed optically "thrown back".

C. "how is a folded map spread on the ground ?"

I wouldn't know -- neither probably did Proust !

As you can see in Lydia's translation no "ground" is mentionned in the french text!

".... le clair de lune .... avait à la fois aminci et agrandi le paysage comme un plan replié jusque-là qu'on développe. "

[Editor's note -- Confession worth making at this point: I don't know French at all, so in these matters I can only trust others.]

It seems to me that the simile here implies that a folded map being thicker and also shorter than an unfolded one, once it has been unfolded ... it becomes thinner but also larger !!!

I have to confess that, with all respect due to our dear Proust, I do find the simile a bit far-fetched!

Speaking of similes, Nabokov sees them blossoming throughout the passage, and deserves to be quoted at length. Keep in mind that Nabokov was a famous non-enthusiast where the translations of C.K. Scott-Montcrieff -- or Constance Garnett or Aylmer Maude, or just about anyone but Bernard Guerney -- were concerned. The translation here is his own, and in at least one instance proves a revelation.

From Lectures in Literature:

The boy opens his window and sits on the foot of his bed, hardly daring to move lest he be heard by those below. (1) "Things outside seemed also fixed in mute expectation." (2) They seemed not to wish "to disturb the moonlight." (3) Now what was the moonlight doing? The moonlight duplicated every object and seemed to push it back owing to the forward extension of a shadow. What kind of a shadow? A shadow that seemed "denser and more concrete than the object" itself. (4) By doing all the the moonlight "made the whole landscape at once leaner and larger like [additional simile] a map which is unfolded and spread out" flat.

Note: this was one of my, and Nicole's, problems with the passage, as translated by C.K. S.-M.: "like a map which, after being folded up, is spread out upon the ground." Nabokov's version does at least make more sense. To continue:

(5)There was some movement: "What had to move -- the leafage of some chesnut-tree, for instance -- moved. But its punctilious shiver [what kind of shiver?] complete, finished to the least shade, to the least delicate detail [this fastidious shiver] did not encroach upon the rest of the scene, did not grade into it, remaining clearly limited" -- since it happened to be illumined by the moon and all the rest was in shadow. (6) The silence and the distant sounds. Distant sounds behaved in relation to the surface of silence in the same way as the patch of moonlit leafage in relation to the velvet of the shade.

Ponder that last sentence many times -- maybe even jot it down on the book's margin so your most literate granchildren will think you much brighter than you are. As I'm sure Nabokov's character from Pale Fire, that infamous academic nut case Charles Kinbote, would agree, there are moments when a critic can be more resonant than his subject.

Onward:

The most distant sound, coming from "gardens at the far end of the town, could be distinguished with such exact `finish,' that the impression they gave of remoteness [an additional simle follows] seemed due only to their `pianissimo' execution [again a simile follows] like those movements on muted strings" at the Conservatory. Now those muted strings are described: "although one does not lose one single note," they come from "outside, a long way from the concert hall so that [and now we are in that concert hall] all the old subscribers, and my grandmother's sisters too, when Swann gave them his seats, used to strain their ears as if [final simile] they had caught the distant approach of an army on the march, which had not yet rounded the corner" of the street.

Nabokov then takes this matter a step further, and finds that Proust's Vermeer-esque observance of moonlight on the landscape had at least one esteemed literary predecessor:

In part six, chapter 2, of Tolstoy's War and Peace, (1864-1869) Prince Andrey stays at the country manor of an acquaintance, Count Rostov. He cannot sleep. I have slightly revised Garnett: "Prince Andrey left his bed and went up to the window to open it. As soon as he had unfolded its shutters, the moonlight broke into the room as if it had been waiting a long time outside on the watch for such a chance. He opened the window. The night was cool and motionlessly luminous. The trimmed trees that stood in a row just in front of the window were black on one side and silvery bright on the other. ... Beyond them was [some kind of] a roof all shining wirth dew. On the right stood a great thick-leaved tree, its bole and branches a brilliant white, and overhead an almost full moon was riding the starless spring sky.

"Presently at the window of the floor above him he hears two young feminine voices -- one of them belongs to Natasha Rostov -- singing and repeating a musical phrase. ... A little later Natasha leans out of that window above and he hears the rustle of her dress and the sound of her breathing," and "The sounds became still like the moon and the shadows."

Three things are to be noted in Tolstoy as foreglimpses of Proust:

1. The expediency of the moonlight lying in wait (a pathetic fallacy). Beauty ready to rush in. A fawning and dear creature at the moment it is perceived by the human mind.

Another pause to reflect, if you wish.

2. The clearcut quality of the description, a landscape firmly etched in silver and black, with no conventional phrases and with no borrowed moons. It is all real, authentic, sensuously seen.

3. The close association of the visible and the heard, of shadow light and shadow sound, of ear and eye.

Compare these to the evolution of the image in Proust. Notice the elaboration of the moonlight in Proust, the shadows that come out of the light like the drawers of a chest, and the remoteness and the music.

My thanks to both the living and the dead for help on this most sticky passage.