h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

http://shutupproust.blogspot.com/2006_06_01_archive.html

http://twitter.com/proustlive

Funny.

Gif

Bloody hell. Proust on twitter...

And as for the link to that philistine blogger I had to laugh when I read,

' You can give me a stamen-by-stamen account of every goddamn flower you passed on the Meseglise Way,..'

Ohhhhhh the wondrous hawthorn stuff

As promised, I've finished Book 4 today.

The bad news is, there's still one hell of a lot of parties going on and, despite the narrator's protestations to the contrary, he really is only interested in the upper classes (I wonder if this is deliberate on Proust's part...?)

But this was *far* more interesting than Book 3. The theme of the book seems to be homosexuality (well, that and the etymology of place-names ). As well as some (slightly) amusing insights into the hypocritical M. de Charlus, I can't help but wonder how this plays out in terms of Proust's own sexuality. When he talks about 'inverts' and gay men being 'like women', presumably he is describing himself? So does that explain why the narrator seems to spend so much time with his mother, blubbing about his latest infatuation/obsession/jealousy/indifference?

Anyhow, after the interminable Book 3 and a few very long chapters in Book 4, I kind of feel I'm on the home strait now. Of course, I'm still hanging on for the bit where the aliens invade. It's gotta be soon. Watchmen kept it for the 12th and final chapter, but I can't see Proust holding out that long...

Gif

I'm getting towards mid-way through Book 5 now, and there are a couple of things that have caught my eye.

First was a bit about names. I've been constantly wondering just how autobiographical this is, something highlighted by the occasions when Proust points out that the narrator is avoiding mentioning his name. So then I read this bit: "As soon as she was able to speak she said: 'My ---' or 'My dearest ---' followed by my Christian name, which, if we give the narrator the same name as the author of this book, would be 'My Marcel', or 'My dearest Marcel'." Not quite sure what to make of that!

"When we have passed a certain age, the sould of the child that we were and the souls of the dead from where we spring come and bestow upon us in handfuls their treasures and their calamities, asking to be allowed to cooperate in the new sentiments which we are feeling and in which, obliterating their former image, we recast them in an original creation."

"We love only what we do not wholly possess." The whole book in a 9-word sentence. Not 3,000 pages...

There was also an extended passage where he's listening to the noises and cries of the fruit-sellers in the street below and he offers to buy Albertine food. He's going on about how musical the cries are, how like the sung masses. And Albertine refuses the fruit because then the beautiful song would become an inferior taste in her mouth. I remember you saying how when you read the book you were really taken with the synaesthesia, and I thought that captured it perfectly.

Gif

Yes it is interesting the way he plays with the idea of it being autobiographical or not. And I think that maybe that is exactly what he is doing, ie playing with that in order to create a work of art. Kind of like making a work of art of his life story. And maybe he is suggesting that that is what we always do to a degree, in the sense of both remembering and mis remembering the stories of our 'past'...which kind of makes sense of the English translation of 'In search of lost time', as 'Rememberance of Things Past'; but it's always just out of reach and we can never 'wholly possess it'.

And this also connects to the second quote you give, 'When we have passed a certain age....', we recast the stories of our family and our own story, as a new story.

Many years ago I watched a Melvyn Bragg series about great novels of the 20th century, and I think it was on the episode about ROTP, that he talks about the connection to Freudian thought, that we have an 'unconscious' built from our earliest memories, which constantly, informs and affects us, throughout life. But the unconscious, cannot be apprehended directly, but is always metamorphosed via processes like eg using metaphor or metonymy. This contrasts with the 'existentialism' of Satre, which suggests we can always know the truth of our past. And our present day actions are always through deliberate choice, not brought about through unconscious drives.

That's a bit of musing on what you posted. And thanks for that, because its interesting for me to 'remember' as best I can what occurred to me when I read the book, but of course I am only re-remembering, because I've had new experiences since then which affect my memory of what I originally thought. So I've built a fiction of them.

Whew! Finished!

Took me just under 2 years (yikes), but the last chapter - where he realises everyone has suddenly got old - was outstanding.

The last book was translated by someone different, and I was looking out for a change in style - didn't really notice anything, but there were a few sentences that I found confusing (even more so than Proust normally is!) - don't know whether that's down to the 'new guy'.

And he really seemed to go overboard on trying to confuse the reader about to what extent the book is autobiographical.

Gif

You are now a fully paid up member of the club Actually it's quite nice for me that you've joined it, because you appear, to me at least, to be relatively much saner than the others I knew; it's nice to have variety in any club..

What did you make of the bit when his foot touched the pavement..and one bit was slightly higher than the other, and all those previous similar experiences, starting with the madeleine, suddenly made a kind of sense? For me it was almost a kind of spiritual experience..but then that might have been because I had consumed the whole thing very intensively over 3 months. In fact I might go so far as to say I dedicated those 3 months to it.

I'm interested to get your opinion rather than say too much about my own at present.

But whoo hoo..good on yer

Hi Effers,

That bit kind of tied in with the realisation that everyone is aged in the last chapter. In a way, it doesn't say anything more than the incident with the madeleine in the first book, but it does say it very well (and at great length - which I guess describes the whole book really). It is the kind of thing that happens - hearing a piece of music or a scent has 'taken me back' to a book or a place from years previously, though I've never had the kind of revelation the narrator got from it.

It was interesting how much this second volume has concentrated on same-sex relationships; Gilberte, M. de Charlus, Robert de Saint-Loup, not to mention the Prince de Guermantes, Aimee, Jupien and Gilberte's verious GFs. Proust's sexuality is well-recorded, but I'm not sure what point (if any) he was making. He's certainly not positive in talking about M. de Charlus (an 'invert') - perhaps he just wanted to show that everyone's at it...?

Gif

Gif, I've just had a re-read of parts I marked in the last bit. I'm struck again how fascinating it is that he manages to convey a kind of spiritual feeling, he does actually use that word, to something entirely material. And he relates it to art, which of course is entirely of this world.

'And this method, which seemed to me the sole method, what was it but the creation of a work of art?'

He's talking about allowing impressions of the material world coming in on him.

And earlier,

''...since the true paradises are the paradises we have lost.'

It's very 'atheist' in terms of an experience of the 'numinous'.

I can so relate to it because of my own ambivalent experiences of a kind of 'spirituality' of the material world, that can only be expressed through art.

**

In terms of the amount of homosexulaity in the last part of the novel..I'm not sure..it maybe something quite mundane, such as getting older and wanting to shake off the hypocrisy of pretense...and that fitting with the development of the novel.

But I do think he's saying his novel is basically a work of art of his life, so it doesn't much matter how free or accurate he is with the truth of his own life. It's about whether it works for the journey of the novel, ie the truth of his own life or something distorted and 'untrue'..I mean for all we know the whole 'madeleine' type experience stuff maybe an entire fiction in terms of its literal intensity.

Just my take on it.

The other good news, of course, is that now I've got Proust out of the way, I can get round to all the free Romantic poetry booklets I got with the paper months back...

Gif