sexta-feira, 24 de maio de 2013
Reading Proust: The Recherche in an Extra-Moral Sense By CAROLINE WEBER
Reading Proust: The Recherche in an Extra-Moral Sense
By CAROLINE WEBER
Over the next week,
Sam Tanenhaus, Caroline Weber and John Williams are holding a conversation
about “In Search of Lost Time,” and welcome readers to join their discussion by
leaving comments on the right-hand side of the blog. Ms. Weber is reading
Proust in the original French. All translations — of Laclos, Flaubert, Proust,
Gide and Benjamin — are Ms. Weber's own.
Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times
French editions of “In Search of Lost Time,” recently
on display at the Morgan Library, including one, front left, from 1913 for
“Swann’s Way.”
Beckett is
absolutely right to stress the “shamelessness” of the Recherche (1913-1927),
though it was by no means the first French novel to evince this quality.
Already in “Dangerous Liaisons” (1782), Pierre Choderlos de Laclos had
subverted the genre’s morally edifying function by prefacing his
cool-as-a-cucumber tale of unabashed libertine depravity with a
mock-conciliatory note: “At very least, it seems to me a service to public
morality to unmask the means by which the wicked corrupt the good.” This proviso
did not deter the vice squad from forbidding Parisians to read Laclos's novel
in public places. Similarly, Gustave Flaubert stood trial for “offending public
morality” with “Madame Bovary” (1857), a meticulously observed portrait of a
vacuous, petite-bourgeoise adulteress.
Like these
antecedents, the Recherche offers an unvarnished, markedly non-judgmental
portrayal of sexual activities traditionally deplored as vices or even — in the
context of French Catholicism — as sins. As the title of his novel’s fourth
volume, “Sodom and Gommorah” (1921-1922), makes clear, male and female
homosexuality are essential to Proust’s worldview, generally surfacing
alongside other so-called perversions. While seducing her girlfriend, Mlle
Vinteuil desecrates her late father’s portrait; the Prince de Guermantes and
the Marquis de Saint-Loup both cheat on their wives with the
gigolo-cum-violinist Morel; another Morel paramour, the Baron de Charlus, also
indulges in whips-and-chains sex play at a tawdry gay brothel.
Yet no matter how
shocking the content of these vignettes (André Gide, Proust’s contemporary and
fellow “invert,” feared they would “set back the issue [of homosexuality] by 20
years”), their real import relates less to sex as such, as to the much
farther-reaching moral subversion that Proust effects by rigorously
investigating humanity’s most essential but elusive “enigmatic truths” — erotic
and otherwise. (In the Proustian cosmos, these truths provide the “scattered
lightning-flashes” to which Sam so eloquently alludes in his post.) As outlined
in “Time Regained” (1927), the seventh and final volume of the Recherche, the
novelist’s foremost task lies in “teasing out and illuminating our feelings,
our passions; which is to say, the passions and feelings of humanity as a
whole.” According to Proust, those passions and feelings operate according to
“general laws” that remain constant even when surface particularities are
different; for instance, even the seemingly unconscionable penchants of a
Charlus illustrate a truth with which we all, sooner or later, are forced to
reckon: that love can come to us in the most extravagantly improbable,
inexplicable and inconvenient forms. (Witness the eponymous hero of “Swann’s
Way,” declaring at what he mistakenly believes to be the end of his disastrous
affair with the faithless Odette: “To think that I wasted years of my
life,…[and] felt the greatest love I’ve ever known, for a woman whom I didn’t
even find attractive, who wasn’t my type!”)
In this light, the
writer’s work is important because it alone enables us to penetrate the thick
fog of perceptual laziness and distraction and delusion that otherwise blinds
us to the truth about ourselves and those around us. And it can only perform
that function if its vision is undistorted by the author’s own moral judgments,
whether favorable or condemnatory; what Beckett calls a “complete indifference
to moral values and human justices” is thus a, even the, necessary precondition
of the Proustian enterprise. In fact, Beckett’s observation echoes that of one
of Proust’s earliest German translators, Walter Benjamin, who notes in a 1929
essay that
[t]here is no individual suffering,
however revolting, and no social injustice, however glaring, against which
Proust would have protested with a candid “No” or an intrepid “But wait!” Quite
the opposite: we find in him a profound acceptance of the world just as it is,
even in its saddest and most bestial manifestations.
More often than
not, the world of the Recherche proves sad and bestial indeed. And yet the
writer himself cannot be faulted if its hard-won insights make it appear — to
borrow Proust’s own ironic epithet for Laclos’s “Dangerous Liaisons” — “the
most frighteningly perverse of books.” That perversity is simply the chaff from
which the novelist endeavors, fearlessly and tirelessly, to separate the wheat
of elemental human nature. Put another way, Proust explains:
It was not the goodness of his virtuous
heart, which happened to be considerable, that made Choderlos de Laclos write
“Les Liaisons dangereuses,” nor his fondness for the bourgeoisie, petite or
grande, that prompted Flaubert to choose Mme Bovary as his subject...
These authors
selected their material not because they were immoral, but because they sought
the truth; and so it is with Proust as well. For this reason, he concludes:
The vulgar reader is wrong to think the
author wicked, for in any given, ridiculous aspect [of human behavior], the
artist sees a beautiful generality; and he no more faults his subject for being
ridiculous than a surgeon looks down on a patient for being afflicted with
persistent circulation problems.
The son and the
brother of noted surgeons, Marcel Proust knew whereof he spoke: in literature,
as in medicine, there is no place for shame. Or as Flaubert — who was also a
doctor’s son, and whose exacting prose style, likened by at least one critic to
a scalpel, Proust brilliantly parodied in his 1919 volume of literary pastiches
— remarked just before his obscenity trial: “Writing well is its own kind of immorality.”
Ms. Weber is currently at work on a book titled “Proust’s Duchess: In
Search of the Exquisite in Belle Époque Paris,” to be published by Knopf in
2014.
Reading Proust: A First-Timer Dives In By JOHN WILLIAMS
Reading Proust: A First-Timer Dives In
By JOHN WILLIAMS
Over the next week, Sam Tanenhaus, Caroline
Weber and John Williams are holding a conversation about “In Search of Lost
Time,” and welcome readers to join their discussion by leaving comments on the
right-hand side of the blog. Mr. Williams is reading the translation by C. K.
Scott Moncrieff revised by Terence Kilmartin.
Sam and Caroline, it was my brilliant
idea to tackle “Swann’s Way” for the first time as part of this enterprise.
After reading your opening posts, you’ll understand if I feel like I decided to
take up basketball by playing a full-court pickup game with LeBron James and
Kevin Durant. My original goal was to complement your expertise with a set of
fresh, eager eyes. Now I’m just afraid of
getting dunked on.
I’m about 200 pages in, and hooked in a way I hadn’t expected. I thought gaining a foothold would take some doing. And it did. But as with any great work, it doesn’t take very long to acclimate to Proust’s rhythms and idiosyncrasies. This is not to say the reading experience picks up steam. A nearly extinct brand of patience is required. The pages don’t start turning any faster; I’m just more and more content to be immersed in them.
Like many who haven’t read the book, I
had pictured the madeleine moment as a moment, but it’s not; it’s an extended
scene that reads like a psychology textbook in miniature. It begins in a way
that recalls the “oceanic feeling” described by the French writer Romain
Rolland and discussed at length by Freud in “Civilization and Its Discontents.”
Freud criticized the sensation as a vague helplessness that serves as a shaky
foundation for religious belief, but in Proust the helplessness, stayed with,
resolves into clarity. First there is the sense of being overwhelmed. (“An
exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no
suggestion of its origin.” “I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent,
mortal.”) Then the narrator attempts, in vain, to recreate the moment through
his senses. (“I drink a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in
the first, then a third, which gives me rather less than the second. It is time
to stop; the potion is losing its magic.”) What follows is an inner
concentration that borders on meditation. (“I ask my mind to make one further
effort, to bring back once more the fleeting sensation. And so that nothing may
interrupt it in its course I shut out every obstacle, every extraneous idea, I stop
my ears and inhibit all attention against the sounds from the next room.”)
After several attempts at this deep diving, the narrator gives up, and it’s
only then that the memories so faintly summoned by the madeleine and tea fully
return.
Having known the madeleine scene as
shorthand for Proustian experience, I was surprised by the specificity of the
ensuing recollection of his youth. There’s a lot of oceanic feeling in the
book, but there’s a lot of inspecting individual grains of sand on the beach as
well.
I’m hesitant to address Beckett's
remarks without reading the whole of his slim book (and with, oh, 3,200 pages
to go in Proust), but “complete indifference to moral values and human
justices” seems an odd judgment. If he means Proust ignored taboos — well,
based on your descriptions of the later volumes, he clearly did. But I have the
sense that some amount of moral discernment is at work in the book, even if
it’s not of the hectoring variety, and even if the characters aren’t the most
empathetic lot. I think here of the great description of the servant Françoise:
“I came to recognize that, apart from her own kinsfolk, the sufferings of
humanity inspired in her a pity which increased in direct ratio to the distance
separating the sufferers from herself. The tears that flowed from her in
torrents when she read in a newspaper of the misfortunes of persons unknown to
her were quickly stemmed once she had been able to form a more precise mental
picture of the victims.” In this scene, Françoise is impatient with a
kitchen-maid suffering great pain right in front of her, but is found a short
time later “violently sobbing” while reading about the similar symptoms of a
faceless “prototype patient” in a medical dictionary.
And it’s true that the narrator writes:
“I imagined, like everyone else, that the brains of other people were lifeless
and submissive receptacles with no power of specific reaction to anything that
might be introduced into them…” (That “like everyone else” is quite a clause.)
This is not a statement of great moral attunement. But I’m not sure a conscious
effort at the “moral education of the reader” is always the top priority — or
effect — of fiction. If close observation is its own moral instruction, then
Proust (as far as I’ve gotten with him) is as conscientious an instructor as
any.
I’m reading the Moncrieff-Kilmartin
translation. Caroline, how close do any of the translations come to capturing
the feeling of the original? Are English readers doomed to have an inferior
encounter with Proust? And to both of you: Where do you see Proust’s influence
now? It may be impossible to measure up, but is anyone even trying? Of the
modernists, is Proust the least mimicked today? I have been sometimes reminded
while reading of certain David Foster Wallace sentences, which are less
lapidary but equally serpentine, and that also land on punch lines that are
subtly hilarious, if there is such a category. Like this, from “Infinite Jest”:
He’d kept
noticing mice scurrying around his room, mice as in rodents, vermin, and when
he lodged a complaint and demanded the room be fumigated at once and then began
running around hunched and pounding with the heel of a hand-held Florsheim at
the mice as they continued to ooze through the room’s electrical outlets and
scurry repulsively about, eventually a gentle-faced nurse flanked by large men
in custodial whites negotiated a trade of shoes for Librium, predicting that
the mild sedative would fumigate what really needed to be fumigated.
Who, if anyone, do you see as Proust’s progeny?
Mr. Williams is a senior staff editor
for The Times.
Proust's Influences By Anka Muhlstein
Proust's Influences
By Anka Muhlstein
Anka
Muhlstein is the author of many books, most recently “Monsieur Proust’s
Library.” Here she writes about the books that influenced Proust.
Proust’s
friends claimed that he had read everything and forgotten nothing. As though to
prove them right, he never created a character without putting a book in his
hands, and he quotes abundantly from and alludes often to his favorite writers.
It would help the reader of Proust to know the Balzac novels that pop up
throughout “In Search of Lost Time”: “Father Goriot,” “Lost Illusions,” “The
Girl With the Golden Eyes.” These are the novels that deal with the “uncommon
passions” so important to the understanding of Proust’s homosexual characters.
Saint-Simon’s
40 volumes of memoirs of the court of Louis XIV are not required reading, but
it is useful to read a few excerpts to get a taste of what the irritable French
duke considered his due, and of how desperate he was to conserve his
privileges. The Guermantes in “In Search of Lost Time,” who resent any ignoring
of their illustrious past and are convinced that they are still at the apex of
French society despite the changes brought about by the Revolution, owe a lot
to Proust’s knowledge of Saint-Simon.
To
seize the full flavor of the comical way Proust uses the playwright Jean
Racine’s tragedies in his conflation of Jews and homosexuals, one might also
read Racine’s biblical plays “Esther” and “Athalie.”
Proust’s
use of French writers is straightforward and easy to detect. This is not true
of his use of foreign writers: their significance is hidden, almost
subterranean, and often overlooked. Yet their presence is the clearest sign of
Proust’s amazing erudition. No writers had as firm a hold on Proust as English
or American essayists and novelists, but he could not use them as directly or
freely as French authors; he knew his French readers were most likely not as
familiar with works of English literature, and perhaps not familiar with them
at all.
One
of Proust’s favorite novelists, one whose books reduced him to tears, was
George Eliot. He read “Middlemarch” very carefully and absorbed the drama of
Mr. Casaubon, the unhappy clergyman who dedicates his whole life — sacrificing
on the way his young wife — to labors that produced absurd and trivial results.
Proust’s narrator is anxiously searching for his true vocation, and is very
much aware of the danger of losing his way in a desert of sterile and doomed
tasks.
One
may not think of Robert Louis Stevenson in connection with Proust, but Proust
loved his work, especially “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” The
curious transformation of a kind and intelligent physician who turns into a
psychopathic monster after imbibing a drug intended to separate the good from
the evil in a person is an extreme example of personality change, a theme that
runs through Proust’s novel. His characters never reveal their true
personalities at the outset, and as the novel progresses they do the contrary
of what one expects.
A careful reader, however, may avoid being taken by
surprise. As a young man, Proust loved detective stories. Although he never
wrote thrillers, he knew how to prepare his reader for a revelation by seeding
a clue beforehand. Alas the reader may lose track in the thousands of pages
separating the hint from the dénouement. The only remedy is to keep reading and
rereading Proust!
Reading Proust: Lost in Translation By Caroline Weber
Reading Proust: Lost in Translation
By Caroline Weber
Sam
Tanenhaus, Caroline Weber and John Williams are holding a conversation about
“In Search of Lost Time,” and welcome readers to join their discussion by
leaving comments on the right-hand side of the blog. Once again, all
translations in Ms. Weber’s post are her own.
As
far as translations go, John, I’m afraid I’m not the best judge because
whenever I reread the Recherche, I do so in French. That said, curiosity has on
occasion prompted me to dip into the various English renderings of Proust over
the years, from the classic translation by C.K. Scott Moncrieff (the first
volume of which appeared in 1922, shortly before Proust died) to the two
subsequent revisions of Moncrieff’s version (by Terence Kilmartin and D.J.
Enright for Random House and the Modern Library, respectively) to, most
recently, the new Penguin edition overseen by Christopher Prendergast (for
which seven different authors have translated each of the novel’s seven
volumes). And all these iterations seem to me to treat Proust’s original with
considerable intelligence and integrity, albeit with striking differences of
tone: Moncrieff is flowery where, say, Lydia Davis — the translator of the Penguin
edition of “Swann’s Way” (2003) — is elegantly spare. While I myself happen to
prefer Ms. Davis's version to the others — to me, her voice sounds the closest
to Proust's somehow — I don't think one can go wrong with any of them.
As,
however, to your question about whether one can fully appreciate the Recherche if one
doesn't read it in French, I have to say that I don't believe one can, for the
simple reason that the original version is so densely saturated with the
colorful tones of other French literary lions — from Racine and Sévigné to
Balzac and the brothers Goncourt — that the Anglophone reader is bound to miss
out on myriad pleasures of specifically literary allusion and nuance, which
Proust often deploys to tremendous comic effect.
To
take the shortest example I can think of (for although Proust may in fact be
the soul of wit, brevity is not his strong suit): in “Within a Budding Grove”
(1919), Françoise, the narrator’s family’s unschooled but fiercely opinionated
cook from the country, uses an antiquated expression of class snobbery, “sorti de la lie du peuple”
[“from the dregs of the populace”], to proclaim the relative social supremacy
of the “young man from a good family” with whom the daughter of the attendant
at the Champs-Élysées’ public bathrooms has recently become engaged. That this
young woman did not choose a fiancé “sorti de la lie du peuple” —
an epithet the great memoirist of Louis XIV’s court, the Duc de Saint-Simon,
notoriously applied to that king’s favorite architect, Mansart — confirms
Françoise in her staunch belief that the mother of the bride-to-be, who
presides over her toilet fiefdom with ludicrous hauteur, is a “marquise.” This
belief, however, is itself patently absurd, as the covert citation from
Saint-Simon ironically underscores. While Françoise proves as poor an arbiter
of class standing as Saint-Simon (whose endless nitpicking about the nuances of
caste hierarchy and protocol made his memoirs an invaluable resource for the
class-obsessed Proust) is a discerning one, the two are united in their
vehement disdain for perceived inferiors. Her use of “sorti de la lie du peuple,”
in other words, is funny because it underlines the ways in which she both is
and isn’t like Versailles’ most famous — and most famously imperious —
chronicler.
But
the joke doesn’t end there. The allusion to Saint-Simon also refers back to one
of the wittier passages in “Swann’s Way” (1913), where the narrator describes
Françoise, at that time in the employ of his elderly, “despotically” demanding
Aunt Léonie, as investing the old woman’s “most negligible utterances and
activities,” her “most insignificant occupations, her waking up [son lever], her lunch, her
rest,” with as much importance as Louis XIV’s noble retinue attached to “what
Saint-Simon called the mechanics [la
mécanique] of life at Versailles.” After this direct evocation of
the Sun King’s memoirist (and of the formal ceremony of the monarch’s daily
waking, his lever), the narrator
concludes:
[S]o it was that…an old lady from the
provinces, simply by giving into her own irresistible eccentricities, and into
a meanness that was born of laziness, could…without ever thinking of Louis
XIV,…believe that her very silences, the slightest hint of a good mood, or of
haughtiness, betrayed in her physiognomy, were, for Françoise, the object of a
commentary as impassioned, as fearful as the one the King’s good mood, or his
haughtiness, inspired in a courtier, or even in a great lord, who had presented
him with a petition, at the divergence of an allée, at Versailles.
Reconsidered
in light of this earlier passage (and indeed, the Recherche encourages nothing
so much as revisiting previous discoveries from a perspective refined by
subsequent experience), Françoise’s quip about a hypothetical, socially unqualified
suitor for a pretentious bathroom attendant’s daughter becomes a leitmotiv,
lending coherence and specificity to the grandiose provincial cook’s
inadvertently hilarious character. And because I promised to be brief, I'll
stop here for now. But tomorrow, I'll post another short piece about Proust's
regrettably untranslatable — but profoundly amusing — literary humor.
Ms. Weber is currently at work on a book titled
“Proust’s Duchess: In Search of the Exquisite in Belle Époque Paris,” to be
published by Knopf in 2014.
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