The dim coolness of my room was to the broad daylight of the
street what the shadow is to the sunbeam, that is to say equally luminous, and presented
to my imagination the entire panorama of summer, which my senses, if I had been
out walking, could have tasted and enjoyed only piecemeal; and so it was quite
in harmony with my state of repose which ( thanks to the enlivening adventures
related in my books) sustained, like a hand reposing motionless in a stream of
running water, the shock and animation of a torrent of activity.
But my grandmother, even if the weather, after growing too
hot, had broken, and a storm, or just a shower, had burst over us, would come
up and beg me to go outside. And as I
did not wish to interrupt my reading, I would go on with it in the garden,
under the chestnut tree, in a hooded chair of wicker and canvas in the depths
of which I used to sit and feel that I was hidden from the eyes of anyone who
mighty be coming to call upon my family.
And then my thoughts, too, formed a similar sort of recess,
in the depths of which I felt I could bury myself and remain invisible even
while I looked at what went on outside. When I saw an external object, my
consciousness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it, surrounding
it with a thin spiritual border that prevented me from ever touching its
substance directly; for it would somehow evaporate before I could make contact
with it, just as an incandescent body that is brought into proximity with
something wet never actually touches its moisture, since it is always preceded
by a zone of evaporation.
Upon the sort of screen dappled with different states and
impressions which my consciousness would simultaneously unfold while I was
reading, and which ranged from the most deeply hidden aspirations of my heart
to the wholly external view of the horizon spread out before my eyes at the
bottom of the garden, what was my primary, my innermost impulse, the lever
whose incessant movements controlled everything else, was my belief in the
philosophical; richness and beauty of the book I was reading, and my desire to appropriate
them for myself, whatever the book might be.
For even if I had bought the book at Combray, having seen it
outside Borange’s – whose grocery lay too far from our house for Francoise to
be able to shop there, as she did at Camus’s, but was better stocked as a
stationer and bookseller –tied with string to keep it in its place in the
mosaic of monthly serials and pamphlets which adorned either side of his doorway,
a doorway more mysterious, more teeming with suggestion than that of a
cathedral, it was because I recognized it as a book which had been well spoken
of by the schoolmaster or the school friend who at that particular time seemed
to me to be entrusted with the secret of Truth and Beauty, things half-felt by
me, half-incomprehensible, the full understanding of which was the vague but
permanent object of my thoughts.
Next to this central belief which, while I was reading,
would be constantly reaching out from my inner self to the outer world, towards
the discovery of Truth, came emotions aroused in me by the action in which I
was taking part, for these afternoons were crammed with more dramatic events
than occur, often, in a whole lifetime.
These were the events taking place in the book I was reading.
It is true that the people concerned in them were not what
Francoise would have called “real people.” But none of the feelings which the
joys or misfortunes of a “real” person arouse in us can be awakened except
through a mental picture of those joys or misfortunes; the ingenuity of the
first novelist lay in his understanding that, as the image was the one
essential element in the complicated structure of our emotions, so that
simplification of it which consisted in the suppression, pure and simple, of “real”
people would be a decided improvement.
A “real” person, profoundly as we may sympathize with him,
is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say,
remains opaque, presents a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the
strength to lift. If some misfortune
comes to him, it is only in one small section of the complete idea he has of
himself that he is capable of feeling any emotion either. The novelists happy
discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable
to the human soul, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is,
which one’s soul can assimilate. After which it matters not that the actions,
the feelings of this new order of creatures appear to us in the guise of truth,
since we have made them our own, since it is in ourselves that they are happening,
that they are holding in thrall, as we feverishly turn over the pages of the
book, our quickened breath and staring eyes.
And once the novelist has brought us to this state, in
which, as in all purely mental states, every emotion is multiplied ten-fold,
into which his book comes to disturb us as might a dream, but a dream more
lucid and more abiding than those which come to us in sleep, why then, for the
space of an hour he sets free within us all the joys and sorrows in the world, a
few of which only we should have to spend years of our actual life in getting
to know, and the most intense of which would never be revealed to us because
the slow course of their development prevents us from perceiving them. It is
the same in life; the heart changes, and it is our worse sorrow; but we know it
only through reading, through our
imagination: in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena,
is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of
its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change.
Next to, but distinctly less intimate a part of myself than
this human element, would come the landscape, more or less projected before my
eyes, in which the plot of the story was taking place, and which made a
stronger impression on my mind than the other, the actual landscape which met
my eyes when I raised them from the book.
. .
. . .
. . . .
My counsels persuaded my love that the morrow would not be
different from all the days that had gone before; that Gilberte’s feeling for
me, too long established now to be capable of alteration, was indifference;
that in my friendship with Gilberte, it was I alone who loved. “It is true,” my
love answered, “there is nothing more to be made of that friendship. It will
not alter now.” And so, as from the very next day (or from the next public
holiday, if there was one in the offing, or an anniversary, or the New Year,
perhaps – one of those days which are not
like other days, on which time starts afresh, casting aside the heritage of the
past, declining the legacy of its sorrows) I would ask Gilberte to terminate
our old friendship and to join me in laying the foundations of a new one.
Swann’s Way by
Marcel Proust; translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terrence Kilmartin;
Vintage International, 1981
“Proust was intermittently unsure whether he was writing an essay or a novel. Here is a novel written by a critic and a literary theorist, both a novel in the form of an essay and an essay on the novel. Proust must not only show but tell, tell rather than show, tell at the expense of showing; he must make the reader, who may wish only to revel in the fiction, admit the truthfulness of its fictionality. Proust’s reflections, his enunciation of philosophical and psychological truths, his aesthetic theories, his opinions and system of thoughts are often more important to him than his verisimilitudes. His composition was often not linear; he wrote in bits and pieces; transitions from one scene to another are sometimes awkward, clumsy even. He can make heavy weather of simple movements: characters get roughly stood into position so that the next demonstration may take place; action must be performed perfunctorily, so that protracted analysis of it may ensue. . .
ReplyDeleteanother main uncertainty for the reader is Proust’s conflation within the text of two narrative viewpoints, first person and third take place . . . his indeterminate narratorial point of view and his use of the imperfect tense: though it it is normally reserved for repeated or continuing happenings, he will use it for events that appear single and preterite. This feature of the writing can be bothersome; the translator may be justifiably tempted to clarify what Proust has left ambiguous and unsatisfactory.
Such ubiquitous symptoms of the text, inseparable from major structural features of it, suggest that the latter were improvised rather than planned, then persevered with rather than revised. Jean-Francis Revel, though admiring Proust, says the writing is not improvised, only slipshod: ‘He makes endless additions, rewrites without rethinking, overwrites, forgets, repeats himself, muddles the design.”
Originally vanity published, Proust’s manuscripts never received the attention that Maxwell Perkins gave to Scott Fitzgerald’s or the devoted Bouilhet to Flaubert’s. It has been said that Proust’s contract with Grasset “rid him of all editorial constraints.” His novel is one of a few masterpieces never properly edited before publication and containing to this day infelicities which some may be surprised to find in a masterpiece. The translator wishing to make a seamless text for his reader is often thwarted by Proust’s seams, which tend to be rough. His paragraphing often seems idiosyncratic. His novel is one of the few masterpieces never properly edited before publication.”
-James Grieve, Introduction to “In The Shadows of Young Girls in Flower”