The Unreadable Book Club Proust 2
Even websites and blogs devoted to Proust can be tedious and boring. But, trust me, there is something there. And the length of it is no detraction as fans of Game of Thrones will attest. If you did go to the website www.readingproust.com, you would see a bare bones synopsis of the plot. In the first book, the largest section, Swann in Love, is summarized:
"(T)he big news of this first volume is the love of Charles Swann for the courtesan Odette de Crécy, a story that takes place before Marcel’s birth. This section . . . is best summarized in Swann’s closing words: “To think that I wasted years of my life, that I wanted to die, that I felt my deepest love, for a woman who did not appeal to me, who was not my type!”
That’s 204 pages in the Penguin edition. Having read that book, I can attest to the fact that Swann was a complete boob who should have been made to watch the movie: (S)he’s Just Not That Into You, because that’s the real answer; Get over it buddy, stop and smell the roses, love the one you’re with! Most of the book is concerned with Swann’s imagination about Odette, what she is doing without him, how to leave town as if he didn’t care but at the same time make sure she knows it. Christ, I did that when I was 20! So you get the idea that Swann will wind down and move on, sadder but wiser.
Au contraire mon frère! The narrator spots a little red haired girl in the woods and falls for her like Charley Brown. In the second book, called, and I am not making this up, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, somehow prudishly yet more explicitly translated as In a Budding Grove. Oh, I get it, it’s one of those coming of age, rite of passage, first love, first sex kind of things. The Little Red Haired Girl turns out to be Gilberte, the daughter of Swann and Odette. Now, the website says this was revealed when he first saw her in the woods but I did not catch it, because the good parts are, I’m sorry, surrounded by boring parts, and that’s okay.
Anyway, I was blindsided by this. But, at the Champs-Élysées where their governesses take them to play and socialize, he gets in good with the governess and gets invited to spend a lot of time with Gilberte, who his parents may or may not approve of because Swann married below his station. But, remember this song? Children behave, that’s what they say when we’re together, Watch how you play. . . Little Marcel and Gilberte, indulge in a wrestling match which ends with Marcel having “spent my pleasure.” Christ, that happened to me when I was 14, albeit with less wrestling and a girl who must have paid attention in sex-ed taking the wheel, so to speak. (‘Put it where it goes!,” she said, her mom making dinner in the next room.) Anyway, this certainly surprised Marcel but when Gilberte wanted to wrestle more, he states that suddenly, inexplicably, he’s no longer interested. Get used to it Bertie.
The thing is, even though it sounds simple, all of the stages of love and loss, as they unfold in our interior imaginings, are hit like a nail on the head, and this is remarkably without drama and angst, no sorrowful suicide attempts over love, etc. The thing about Proust is that he does move on, and sometimes gets what he wants anyway. So the previous hundred pages devoted to interior thoughts, is blown away by one moment of shared imaginings, and that one moment, when the goddess steps off of the pedestal, drives a lifetime of subsequent imaginings. Before and after that moment we really have no idea what could be going on in her head.
We are aware of how much less disturbing these dreams of prompt but ever-deferred reunion are than a real encounter with her would be, with its likely resurgence of jealously, and so the knowledge that one is going to see her again could cause a recurrence of upsetting emotions. And what we keep postponing, day after day, is no longer an end to unbearable anguish of separation, but the dreaded renewal of futile feelings. How preferable the malleable of her seems: instead of the real meeting with, in your solitude you can dramatize a dream in which the girl who is not in love with you assures you that she is! This memory, which can become as sweet as possible, by being gradually flavored with what you most desire, is far better than the future encounter with a person whose words will be put into her mouth not by you, but by her foreseeable indifference and unforeseeable animosity.
In the history of literature, Proust plugs into the same stream of consciousness era as James Joyce but actually makes great detailed sense without hiding the ball (as Joyce does intentionally.) The ball might be tediously boring but the story telling is for the most part linear if impossibly detailed. Proust actually met Joyce once at a party and apparently didn’t like him much, while Joyce described the two of them as artistically peas in a pod: “James Joust and Marcel Proyce.” Now that’s a real knee slapper!
In later volumes, which I haven’t read yet, it turns out that gay and lesbian encounters are described with the same touching accuracy. Proust would never admit to being a homosexual, and as a general proposition, he was perhaps, bi-sexual. He didn’t really hide it either and so the straight narrator is perhaps Proust’s method of distancing himself from that issue. This happened to a friend of mine, not me. What is remarkable, I think, is that he treats all of these encounters as normal in the sense that the same human emotions and delusions are involved.
All in all, the beauty of work is bound in how it can reach over a hundred years and somehow describe what you are feeling right now, or what you remember feeling in that one small moment when love became real to you.
And then there’s this gem that is always true:
"Because you are now in love with someone who will someday mean nothing to you, you refuse out of hand to meet someone who means nothing to you now, but whom you will one day come to love, someone who you might have loved sooner if you had agreed to an earlier meeting, who might have curtailed your present sufferings"
(before replacing them, of course, with others.)
And if you never got that girl, and realized too late your mistake, this will create a lifetime of regret over the path not taken which, again of course, might have been worse. This is how we actually do live our interior lives. What saves Proust is that his subject is at the center of every romance novel as well as Anna Karenina, from Superbad to Gone With the Wind. This just means that anyone can find something they recognize in his work, not that they should, or must. It is a very long book after all.
But, hey, this awakening of awareness of what it means to deeply understand, or misunderstand, the thoughts, feelings and presence of another human being is rarely given the importance it deserves. We are expected to move on, grow up, put aside childish things. But we don’t put them aside, we wallow in them and continue to experience them with the same intensity. So, when a writer mirrors that hidden passion back to us, it is life affirming.
For example, Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak, (a great book, leave the movie alone, read the book.) provides a description of how Zhivago felt when first meeting Lara, both children:
"When you, a shadow in a schoolgirl's uniform, stepped out of the darkness of the hotel room's depths, I, a boy who knew nothing about you, understood with all the torment of a force that answered yours; this slight skinny girl is charged to the utmost, as with electricity, with all conceivable femininity in the world, If you go near her or touch her with your finger, a spark will light up the room and either kill you on the spot or electrify you for your whole life with magnetically attractive, plaintive craving and sorrow. I was all filled with wandering tears, all my insides glittered and wept. I felt a mortal pity for the boy I was, and still more pity for the girl you were. My whole being was astonished and asked: If it's so painful to love and absorb electricity, how much more painful is it to be a woman, to be the electricity, to inspire love."
Pretty heady stuff, and you want to believe that you felt that way as well, but Proust approaches the experience from a more pedestrian but no less enchanting perspective.
If you feel like reading Proust it is good to know that you have not made a seven volume commitment. If you read the only first section of the first volume, you will be able to make small talk about the petite madeline incident and the sensual awakening of the boy in nature with an authority that will leave most of your contemporaries in the dust. And for you guys, such sensitivity periodically comes into style, make the most of it.
The truth is, even saying you have read and appreciate Proust, will allow you to appear to be a puzzling, sensitive yet flawed contrarian. Try that at the next Super Bowl party, just don’t go too far. Nobody likes a wan, asthmatic, shut in in a bad suit.