Proust Moment, May 3, 2003

No Turning Back

Marcel awaits Mamma knowing that he has taken a considerable turn, that in his desire for a kiss he has perhaps pushed things entirely too far.

“... I knew that what I had just done was in the same category as certain other sins for which I had been severely chastised, though infinitely more serious than they. When I went out to meet my mother as she herself came up to bed, and when she saw that I had remained up so as to say good night to her again in the passage, I should not be allowed to stay in the house a day longer, I should be packed off to school next morning; so much was certain. Very good: had I been obliged, the next moment, to hurl myself out of the window, I should still have preferred such a fate. For what I wanted now was Mamma, and to say good night to her. I had gone too far along the road which led to the realisation of this desire to be able to retrace my steps.”

--"Overture," Swann's Way

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.

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.

Proust Moment, May 1, 2003

Francoise as Backstage Bouncer

Crude title? Well, if Marcel is going to take this drama to extremes, there's no reason I shouldn't. He's now a little boy who can't crash to rear gate to see his ma, fancying himself this time less like Swann than some spoiled girl:

"My mother did not appear, but with no attempt to safeguard my self-respect (which depended upon her keeping up the fiction that she had asked me to let her know the result of my search for something or other) made Francoise tell me, in so many words `There is no answer'—words I have so often, since then, heard the hall-porters in 'mansions' and the flunkeys in gambling-clubs and the like, repeat to some poor girl, who replies in bewilderment: `What! he's said nothing? It's not possible. You did give him my letter, didn't you? Very well, I shall wait a little longer.' And just as she invariably protests that she does not need the extra gas which the porter offers to light for her, and sits on there, hearing nothing further, except an occasional remark on the weather which the porter exchanges with a messenger whom he will send off suddenly, when he notices the time, to put some customer's wine on the ice; so, having declined Francoise's offer to make me some tea or to stay beside me, I let her go off again to the servants' hall, and lay down and shut my eyes, and tried not to hear the voices of my family who were drinking their coffee in the garden."

--"Overture," Swann's Way

Proust Moment, April 30, 2003

Letter of Transit

Major literary characters tend to remember their good-hearted and unpretentious servants quite fondly, if they are lucky enough to have them: Hamlet and Yorick, David Copperfield and Peggoty, even Scarlett and Mammy. So, too, the case of Marcel, the hypersensitive, lonely little aesthete and Francoise the cook. On a personal level, Francoise is quite unlike the aunt or anyone else in the family -- but she knows and lives by a similar code, which would normally prevent her disturbing Mamma at a dinner party with a letter from Marcel. Marcel lies to her that the letter was Mamma’s wish, actually, that she “had begged me not to forget to send her an answer about something she had asked me to find, and that she would certainly be very angry if this note were not taken to her.” Francoise sees through the ruse; “like those primitive men whose senses were so much keener than our own, she could immediately detect, by signs imperceptible by the rest of us, the truth or falsehood of anything that we might wish to conceal from her.” Except in this case, where she accedes to Marcel’s demands and whisks the letter downstairs.

The letter serves as Marcel’s own emotional visa into the room he longs to enter; it “was going all the same to admit me, invisibly and by stealth, into the same room as herself, was going to whisper from me into her ear; for that forbidden and unfriendly dining-room, where but a moment ago the ice itself—with burned nuts in it—and the finger-bowls seemed to me to be concealing pleasures that were mischievous and of a mortal sadness because Mamma was tasting of them and I was far away, had opened its doors to me and, like a ripe fruit which bursts through its skin, was going to pour out into my intoxicated heart the gushing sweetness of Mamma's attention while she was reading what I had written. Now I was no longer separated from her; the barriers were down; an exquisite thread was binding us. Besides, that was not all, for surely Mamma would come.”

What Marcel would not learn until much later is that his relationship to his mother on this evening is not unlike that of Swann and the adulterous Odette; of one lover standing outside the other’s private world

“... that anguish which lies in knowing that the creature one adores is in some place of enjoyment where oneself is not and cannot follow—to him that anguish came through Love, to which it is in a sense predestined, by which it must be equipped and adapted; but when, as had befallen me, such an anguish possesses one's soul before Love has yet entered into one's life, then it must drift, awaiting Love's coming, vague and free, without precise attachment, at the disposal of one sentiment to-day, of another to-morrow, of filial piety or affection for a comrade. And the joy with which I first bound myself apprentice, when Francoise returned to tell me that my letter would be delivered; Swann, too, had known well that false joy which a friend can give us, or some relative of the woman we love, when on his arrival at the house or theatre where she is to be found, for some ball or party or 'first-night' at which he is to meet her, he sees us wandering outside, desperately awaiting some opportunity of communicating with her. He recognises us, greets us familiarly, and asks what we are doing there. And when we invent a story of having some urgent message to give to his relative or friend, he assures us that nothing could be more simple, takes us in at the door, and promises to send her down to us in five minutes. How much we love him—as at that moment I loved Francoise—the good-natured intermediary who by a single word has made supportable, human, almost propitious the inconceivable, infernal scene of gaiety in the thick of which we had been imagining swarms of enemies, perverse and seductive, beguiling away from us, even making laugh at us, the woman whom we love. If we are to judge of them by him, this relative who has accosted us and who is himself an initiate in those cruel mysteries, then the other guests cannot be so very demoniacal. Those inaccessible and torturing hours into which she had gone to taste of unknown pleasures—behold, a breach in the wall, and we are through it. Behold, one of the moments whose series will go to make up their sum, a moment as genuine as the rest, if not actually more important to ourself because our mistress is more intensely a part of it; we picture it to ourselves, we possess it, we intervene upon it, almost we have created it: namely, the moment in which he goes to tell her that we are waiting there below. And very probably the other moments of the party will not be essentially different, will contain nothing else so exquisite or so well able to make us suffer, since this kind friend has assured us that `Of course, she will be delighted to come down! It will be far more amusing for her to talk to you than to be bored up there.’ Alas! Swann had learned by experience that the good intentions of a third party are powerless to control a woman who is annoyed to find herself pursued even into a ball-room by a man whom she does not love. Too often, the kind friend comes down again alone.”

--"Overture," Swann's Way

Proust Moment, April 29, 2003

Order of Francoise

Condemnerd to his bedroom, Marcel seizes on the idea of sending a letter to Mamma, begging her to come upstairs "for an important reason which I could not put in writing." Unfortunately, the letter would have to be couried by Francoise, his aunt's cook, for whom such an act would violate her own code of conduct, which she pursues with Mosaic diligence.

"I had a suspicion that, in her eyes, to carry a message to my mother when there was a stranger in the room would appear flatly inconceivable, just as it would be for the door-keeper of a theatre to hand a letter to an actor upon the stage. For things which might or might not be done she possessed a code at once imperious, abundant, subtle, and uncompromising on points themselves imperceptible or irrelevant, which gave it a resemblance to those ancient laws which combine such cruel ordinances as the massacre of infants at the breast with prohibitions, of exaggerated refinement, against "seething the kid in his mother's milk," or "eating of the sinew which is upon the hollow of the thigh." This code, if one could judge it by the sudden obstinacy which she would put into her refusal to carry out certain of our instructions, seemed to have foreseen such social complications and refinements of fashion as nothing in Francoise's surroundings or in her career as a servant in a village household could have put into her head; and we were obliged to assume that there was latent in her some past existence in the ancient history of France, noble and little understood, just as there is in those manufacturing towns where old mansions still testify to their former courtly days, and chemical workers toil among delicately sculptured scenes of the Miracle of Theophilus or the Quatre Fils Aymon."

--"Overture," Swann's Way

Proust Moment, April 28, 2003

Art of the Kiss

With the intricate imagination of an artist, Marcel plans exactly how he will kiss his mother, only to have his plans scuttled by the grandfather:

"I never took my eyes off my mother. I knew that when they were at table I should not be permitted to stay there for the whole of dinner-time, and that Mamma, for fear of annoying my father, would not allow me to give her in public the series of kisses that she would have had in my room. And so I promised myself that in the dining-room, as they began to eat and drink and as I felt the hour approach, I would put beforehand into this kiss, which was bound to be so brief and stealthy in execution, everything that my own efforts could put into it: would look out very carefully first the exact spot on her cheek where I would imprint it, and would so prepare my thoughts that I might be able, thanks to these mental preliminaries, to consecrate the whole of the minute Mamma would allow me to the sensation of her cheek against my lips, as a painter who can have his subject for short sittings only prepares his palette, and from what he remembers and from rough notes does in advance everything which he possibly can do in the sitter's absence. But to-night, before the dinner-bell had sounded, my grandfather said with unconscious cruelty: `The little man looks tired; he'd better go up to bed. Besides, we are dining late to-night.'

"And my father, who was less scrupulous than my grandmother or mother in observing the letter of a treaty, went on: `Yes, run along; to bed with you.'

I would have kissed Mamma then and there, but at that moment the dinner-bell rang.

"`No, no, leave your mother alone. You've said good night quite enough. These exhibitions are absurd. Go on upstairs.'

"And so I must set forth without viaticum; must climb each step of the staircase 'against my heart,' as the saying is, climbing in opposition to my heart's desire, which was to return to my mother, since she had not, by her kiss, given my heart leave to accompany me forth. That hateful staircase, up which I always passed with such dismay, gave out a smell of varnish which had to some extent absorbed, made definite and fixed the special quality of sorrow that I felt each evening, and made it perhaps even more cruel to my sensibility because, when it assumed this olfactory guise, my intellect was powerless to resist it. When we have gone to sleep with a maddening toothache and are conscious of it only as a little girl whom we attempt, time after time, to pull out of the water, or as a line of Moliere which we repeat incessantly to ourselves, it is a great relief to wake up, so that our intelligence can disentangle the idea of toothache from any artificial semblance of heroism or rhythmic cadence. It was the precise converse of this relief which I felt when my anguish at having to go up to my room invaded my consciousness in a manner infinitely more rapid, instantaneous almost, a manner at once insidious and brutal as I breathed in—a far more poisonous thing than any moral penetration—the peculiar smell of the varnish upon that staircase."

--"Overture," Swann's Way

Proust Moment, April 27, 2003

The Temporary and the Immortal

Marcel's two great-aunts vie for Swann's attention with a lot of dull prattle; he, naturally, would rather talk with the grandfather about a travel book by the Duc de Saint-Simon -- reportedly one of Proust's own inspirations -- covering his mission to Spain. Swann reports that the book is not one of the author's best, but better than what you find in the local papers This leads to a brief comparison between journalism and art.

"`The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance. Suppose that, every morning, when we tore the wrapper off our paper with fevered hands, a transmutation were to take place, and we were to find inside it—oh! I don't know; shall we say Pascal's Pensees ?' He articulated the title with an ironic emphasis so as not to appear pedantic. `And then, in the gilt and tooled volumes which we open once in ten years,' he went on, shewing that contempt for the things of this world which some men of the world like to affect, `we should read that the Queen of the Hellenes had arrived at Cannes, or that the Princesse de Leon had given a fancy dress ball. In that way we should arrive at the right proportion between "information" and "publicity."'

--"Overture," Swann's Way

Leaving the admiring Proustian to wonder himself -- what if you picked up your own daily paper and found A la recherche du temps perdu?