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Marcel Proust





I have really and truly read Proust day in, day out, first in French, later some also in Spanish and even in English, and I realize it ¡s not for everybody. -- Yet wasn´t it Borges who said that if he could remember all of yesterday, he would need rather more than a complete day to recall it?


Well, to Proust some riddles were of prime importance, when he wanted to find out the truth or proofs of something he knew or suspected. And that is what you can learn from him, how to tell a canard from a true story: by its details.

When Proust is great, he is the greatest of all. When he is bad, he is horrendous. Before I discovered him some years ago, I never read any novels at all. Ever since that discovery, I have read and re-read him up to Guermantes Way and beyond, but in French. I have read the rest, too, but just once. Now, reading on the computer, I can skip and scroll via keywords, and so I'll read the others again.

At any rate, I very much want to maintain some basic knowledge of French which to me has become useless in everyday life. And it is thanks to Proust that I can still more or less speak it.
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Why or how is Proust sometimes horrendous?

Proust was often depressed later in life and he would try and climb out of a depression by writing, which turned into a dull enumeration of happenstances, as if making notes for a CV.

This is no exaggeration.

The great work even starts out on a cliff hanger of the kind just mentioned. I can`t remember how long it takes to get through that beginning analysis of sleep, dream, and consciousness, and the last volumes are often flat, aimless, even without horizon. -- There, a typical feature is the  use of "besides", "as to", "apropos" referring erratically to future or past secondary incidents. -- The chronology governing his immense work, towards the end of Marcel's life, went awry. There wasn't yet any medication to help against asthma.


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And where can you read Proust at his best? Wonderful? Uniquely funny, too?

Scroll for conversations with Aunt Léonie or Françoise in the early books and in the later volumes search for "Charlus" talking.

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I have never read the famous biography by Painter, and so I must do without all the minutiae that are by now generally known about him.

Proust's best friend Bloch and his most extensively studied Swann are both Jewish, though not orthodox, and I would consider his wit Jewish, but Proust is the only human I have seen that gets by without religion and unbelievably without a trace of rancour towards any of them. His few references to Catholic priests are not nice, but I  may have spent several thousand hours on Proust without noticing anything tell-tale in that regard. And anyway, Proust finds faults with everyone except his grandmother; most people are snobs, all are false, vying for your position and your friends at your fiestas and four o'clock teas.


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And where can you read Proust at his worst?

Proust is very bad when he strays off his story sequence that sustains and fascinates both him and his reader. Without that, he often arrogantly, but also desperately pursues what  he once called l'art du néant, pages and pages of erudition classifying and analyzing  differences between this and that and everything else, atrocious and even sickening if you get caught or try to hold on.

A well known example, already mentioned, is right at the beginning of chapter 1, volume 1, an endless discourse on sleep, dream, and consciousness.

There is another one, even longer and more attritional, at the beginning of Sodom and Gomorrah concerning the variations of basic personal ties, but he is sorely off-putting when he writes as if he were only distantly acquainted with the subject, professorial, with a broad knowledge of zoology, botany, floriculture, and big bumblebees that you can watch from a staircase window.

But it is perfunctory writing, and the best you can do is to skip ahead 5 or 10 pages, and what do you get? It is still the same! Boring himself out of his mind.

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Was Proust a snob?

Of course. That is why he was so aware of snobisme which he considered a severe character defect. Now it is probably no longer used for serious disapproval. Basically, it means  high-class consciousness more or less openly displayed.

Formerly, "snob" was reputed to mean "sine nobilitate" "without rank" alluding to a badge which (according to legend?) commoners had to wear at some high class universities.
snob (n.) Look up snob at Dictionary.com

In Proust's novel nearly all are snobs, and many are related to each other. I am not sure he knew that he quoted even his mother and his grandmother as watching their acquaintances'  connections.

Proust asserted often enough that both these women were so far away from snobism that they could barely perceive it, but does he forget that in his conversations with his mother or his grandmother, both these women watch the rank of little Marcel's social whereabouts quickly, fluently, sure-footedly, with gusto?

(I have to quote from memory, but later I'll look it up.)

The Prousts received a death notice.
"Il me semble qu'il y avait du Guermantes là-dedans."
"It seems to me there was some Guermantes in it."
To be able to spot that name, his mother or his grandmother had to know the standing of many of the other great names listed, and "là-dedans" is a jokingly irreverent way of dismissing an obituary notice.

When hearing little Marcel telling about people he had met at a rich kids' party:
"Ah, the Johnsons! Now that the Johnsons have arrived there, the Fishers will soon follow."

And of course Marcel explaining how his grand'ma wanted him later to be received in the aristocracy rather than in his literary or maybe bohemian circles, though this may have been due to the boy's chronic breathing problems.



The connections among Proust's friends and acquaintances:
The dark lines are family ties, and the pink ones are love attachments, mostly unilateral.

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Asthma is a treacherous illness.
Proust's friends laughed at his frequent premonitions.
They had heard them for many years. They all thought he was fibbing.

But an attack of asthma strangling the airways like a cramp  can reach lethal levels within minutes, might last on that level who knows how long, only to abate within seconds leaving the patient so alleviated, overjoyed at the gift of existence, another lease on life.

This is why in the middle of the night, without even asking the maid Françoise for pardon (as she had to stay up with him), he would take his cane and his hat (and that coat he never took off -- maybe it was part of his pyjamas :-) and left straight for the Ritz where his friends would be waiting for him.




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I have noticed only now that I am mixing up various editions, since I began on French paperback editions and then changed over to internet to look for quotes in English, so that now, for references, I have to clean up my own folders. That is not so easy.

Added on Dec 19: the novel complete according to one publisher: Three volumes only!
I wonder whether in French they would admit so openly that Proust had planned a 3 volume work. (I have never seen that anywhere else, and it will take time to find out.)

Below is the 1947 French version:
Proust's brother, Dr Robert Proust, spent a few years assembling those additional volumes from manuscripts that looked like this:


Sometimes the corrections or additions are stuck in -- how? with glue?
At times Marcel was in fact looking for a secretary or maybe rather for a multi-purpose famulus.


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Postscript Nov 28

Of prime importance, however, is that nagging question about the literary quality of the later volumes.
As I remember them now, there is no longer any research, no more "remembrances of things past" nor of "temps perdu".

Possibly already in Guermantes Way, Proust no longer evokes the past, but instead deals in current events, gossip, and real people, chronicled under the spell of a moment.
These things can be highly entertaining to read like magazine articles, but à la longue depressing.


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Proust's writing explained as a palimpsest at
https://overland.org.au/2013/09/thirteen-years-of-proust/

Proust's stories cannot be read as if they were studies of real people.

On the portrait of Charlus, Proust worked with unceasing inspiration and never ending ideas, so that many readers including myself think Charlus is the picture of Marcel himself projected onto a giant screen including depravities and slander.


Those last volumes are gossip, not venomous, but mere pretexts linking distant incidents, as for instance in this series:

Who lost his Cross of Honour?
Saint-Loup.
Where was it found?
In a brothel.
Whose brothel was it?
Charlus'.
When was the Cross found?
After Saint-Loup got killed as a WW1 hero.

By sheer accident, Marcel had been at that same brothel to take cover during a bomb alarm, and this is why he knew who had lost his cross there. It all fits!


In the last volume called Le Temps Retrouvé there is a very long presentation of how writing and memory operate, but it was too long; so I kept it "for later".
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Added January 6, 2016 

Marcel Proust's "moral sense"

Proust says in the last volume that he has no moral sense.
De plus, le sentiment de la justice m’était inconnu jusqu’à une complète absence de sens moral.
What does he mean? I would have thought he had only that and nothing else.

Yet there was something odd in the lively way he writes about spying on other people or reading mail through an envelope, and I did find his repeated stories about picking up "little girls" in the street much too casual, negligent, thoughtless or silly in their presentation, as also his indolent way of mentioning them as milkmaids, laundresses, charwomen, but I thought the stories were sketches for later work and not ready for print.

For very young readers I must add that "moral" refers to the general principles of good and bad, in the West largely of Biblical origin. 
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 The Paris Ritz entry hall, now remodeled




http://cantueso1.blogspot.com.es/2013/06/marcel-proust-in-a-nutshell.html
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http://cantueso1.blogspot.com.es/2014/10/marcel-proust-swann-in-love.html 
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http://cantueso1.blogspot.com.es/2012/06/marcel-proust-m-de-norpois-to-dinner.html
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http://cantueso1.blogspot.com.es/2011/11/noahs-ark-seen-by-marcel-proust.html
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http://cantueso1.blogspot.com.es/2012/08/marcel-proust-on-subconscious.html

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David Wesley Richardson ...  Portraits of people in Proust's work.

Vicomtesse Alix de Stermaria: one of Proust's many intensely imagined might-have-beens .

http://www.davidwesleyrichardson.com/resemblance/


Added October 30, 2016

    

These portraits have been published as a book together with Proust quotes, but that book is nowhere to be seen. Strange! Impossible. Richardson may be living in France now. He may have had an accident leaving him dependent on a wheelchair, but I am not sure.


He writes fluently, easily; I landed on a blog that seemed to be his; got lost again following some link or other, must give it up at least for today.
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October 31

I got hooked again. I landed on a blog named and signed http://nuukunui.blogspot.com.es/

There are recent entries, and indeed there was an accident, and he may have lost mobility, maybe all of it. It is a long narrative, and I read too fast to understand clearly whether there had been a second accident due to some playful use of of his wheelchair, in fact enjoying a ride.

I also tried to find out what nuukunui means, and Google knew only of pukunui which, based on a children's story, may mean "big belly".







                       


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