Marcelita’s Comments (group member since Dec 14, 2016)

Marcelita’s comments from the 2017: Our Year of Reading Proust group.

Marcelita wrote: "Elizabeth wrote:
message 14: by Elizabeth Feb 22, 2017 04:07AM

Combray church. Proust was raised a Catholic (altho by Talmudic law he was Jewish--"If your mother is a Jew, then you are a Jew"--an..."

For those gardeners, who enjoy finding "weeds:" ;)

"Zohar" mentions in Proust's notebooks.

1)
This from Carnet 1 (ends on 41v)

"To be added to my conception of art in the last part.
That which occurs however obscurely at the depths of consciousness, before being realized in a work, it is necessary before bringing it out into the open it is necessary to make it traverse an intermediary region between our subconscious and our exterior, our intelligence, but how to lead it there, how to apprehend it. One may spend hours trying to bring back the first impression, the ungraspable sign that gave that impression and which said: fathom my depths, without summoning it back, without forcing its return to us. And that is what all art is, it is the only art. The only thing worth expressing is that which has become visible in the depths and usually, except for when illuminated by light, or in moments of exceptional clarity and animation, these depths are obscure.This depth, this inaccessibility to us is the only token of their value - at the same time as a certain joy. It matters little what it is about. A church steeple that is imperceptible during the day has more value than a complete theory of the world.
Look in the large excercise book arrival in front of the Campanile. - and also Zohar."

Marcel Proust (found and translated by Chris Taylor)

-Cover (Tall Kirby), you can page through the carnet:
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1...
-Page 41v (half way down): http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1...

2)
Titre : Fonds Marcel Proust. II — À LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU. A — Manuscrits autographes. XXXI-XCII Soixante-deux cahiers de brouillons comportant des ébauches des différentes parties de la Recherche à divers stades de leur rédaction. XXXI-XXXVII Contre Sainte-Beuve. NAF 16645
Date d'édition : XIXe-XXe s.
Sujet : Dessins. Marcel Proust
Sujet : Moreau, Gustave
Type : manuscrit
Langue : français
Format : 114 f. (13, 19, 46-47, 55, 68-103 blancs ; 104v-115v tête-bêche.)
Description : Contient : Pastiche d'Henri de Régnier (début et fin) ; Gérard de Nerval ; Esquisses de Françoise ; Les Guermantes ; Notes sur Gustave Moreau ; Moreau, Gustave, membre de l'Institut, peintre. Note(s) le concernant ; Fragment sur Padoue et Vérone ; Journées ; Sommeils
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1...

Translation of page 53v: "Zohar" (Cahier 5 (NAF 16645) 53v)

"Zohar"
"This name has remained caught within my hopes of that time, it gathers [?] around itself the atmosphere of the time I lived then, wind brightened by sunshine as it was, the ideas that I was forming for myself about Ruskin and Italy. Italy holds fewer of my dreams than this name that dwelt within it. Here we have names, things are not names, things, as soon as we think them they become ideas, they take their place in the series of ideas from that time and blend themselves with them, and this is why Zohar has become something analogous to the idea I had of the place whilst gazing at the turbulent sky, thinking that I was going to see Venice."
Marcel Proust (Translated by Chris Taylor, Cahier 5 (NAF 16645, 53v.)
Page 53v : http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1...

Elizabeth wrote:
message 14: by Elizabeth Feb 22, 2017 04:07AM

Combray church. Proust was raised a Catholic (altho by Talmudic law he was Jewish--"If your mother is a Jew, then you are a Jew"--and he kept up w/ his mother's family all his life). However, he never seemed to evince the slightest interest in any religion...he kind of separates spirituality from architecture...

An excerpt from " THE GENIUS OF JUDAISM" by
BERNARD-HENRI LÉVY.

"Beyond the clues in the work and in the life, we know that he was a reader of the Zohar: 'See the Zohar,' he records in one of the note- books that are the diary of his creation; 'see the Zohar,' he writes, to learn how to 'break the spell that holds things prisoner,' to 'haul them close to us,' and 'keep them from falling back forever into nothingness.' One thinks, he is thinking, he cannot not be thinking, when writing that, of the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria, of his theory of the sparks bottled up in the earth’s crust and of their rise and redemption in the messianic light of intelligence, which is the only thing that can check the enchanted nothingness that is evil."
BHL
http://lithub.com/the-genius-of-judaism/

Elizabeth wrote: "Combray church. Proust was raised a Catholic (altho by Talmudic law he was Jewish--"If your mother is a Jew, then you are a Jew"--and he kept up w/ his mother's family all his life). However, he ne..."

Spinning over to the "Proust Prep" page, to share a related article. "https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/..."

Jacob wrote: "The only known film footage (believed to be) of Proust was recently discovered in Paris. The man briefly passes through at :34 in this video. He's wearing a light coat and bowler. It's not definiti..."

Although it would be thrilling for it to be Proust, circumstantial evidence points in the other direction.

The film is not congruent with the authentic photos within a year of the 1904 wedding, his health the month before (too ill to attend another friend's wedding), and his knowledge of clothing etiquette.
http://www.marcelproust.it/gallery/pr...

Could that healthy-looking young man, jauntily bounding down the steps, obviously underdressed for the aristocratic-society wedding of his dear friend, Armand, really be the fashion-conscious dandy and recently ill Marcel Proust?

Armand, Proust's dear friend, obviously would have seen this expensively filmed documentation of his own wedding, agreed?

Thus, it's curious that when the famous 1962 Proust documentary of Proust was being made, in which Armand, the duc de Gramont, was a contributor, he didnt alert the director that he had access to the only exclusive film footage of his dear friend, Marcel Proust.
https://poleproust.hypotheses.org/393

Elizabeth wrote: "Want to add a note re Odette. I'm reading a book about courtesans that mentions Laure Hayman; a courtesan (obviously), she had an affair w/ one of Proust's uncles, and it is thought is the main mod..."

From: "Marcel Proust: A Life" by William C. Carter:

(view spoiler)["Although Bourget’s most recent publication, 'Gladys Harvey', was not one of his most ambitious works, it soon attracted Marcel’s attention. The novel portrayed the life of a demimondaine, as kept women were called, and was based on Bourget’s current lover, Laure Hayman, who had been Uncle Louis Weil’s mistress. Adrien Proust was Laure’s doctor and, almost certainly, her lover. (102) In late fall Marcel met Laure at Auteuil, where she had come to call on his Uncle Louis. Louis, who maintained close ties with his former mistress, had been a great ladies’ man in his day and kept a collection of photographs, which Marcel would inherit, of the celebrated actresses and cocottes he had known. (103)"
WCC

Footnotes:
102. See Tadié, Marcel Proust, 35, where he compares Laure’s relationship with Adrien to Odette’s with Dr. Cottard in the Search. Adrien kept all such friendships and liaisons secret from his wife.

103. Cf. Search 1: 102, where the Narrator speaks about his uncle’s actress friends: “Now my uncle knew many of them personally, and also ladies of another class, not clearly distinguished from actresses in my mind.” See Tadié, Marcel Proust, 51, Corr. 1: 47; and Robert Soupault, Marcel Proust: Du côté de la médecine, Paris: Plon, 122–23."
WCC (hide spoiler)]

Elizabeth wrote: "Introduced very early; Charlus' intent stare at the Narrator when, as a child, he and his family are walking by Tansonville (thinking erroneously that no one is home)."

Yes!
"Gilberte, come along; what are you doing?” called out in a piercing tone of authority a lady in white whom I had not seen until that moment, while, a little way beyond her, a gentleman in a suit of linen “ducks,” whom I did not know either, stared at me with eyes which seemed to be starting from his head."
MP (ML-SW)

And later, the grandfather was appalled at the 'scandalous affair' between Madame Swann and "her Charlus"!

For a moment (as we moved away and my grandfather murmured: “Poor Swann, what a life they are leading him—sending him away so that she can be alone with her Charlus—for it was he, I recognised him at once! And the child, too; at her age, to be mixed up in all that!”) the impression left on me by the despotic tone in which Gilberte’s mother had spoken to her without her answering back, by exhibiting her to me as being obliged to obey someone else, as not being superior to the whole world, calmed my anguish.
MP (ML-SW)

Elizabeth wrote: "Literarty note: Proust wrote the last pages, the very last pages, of ISOLT first. Then spent, oh, 8 or 10 years leading up to it..."

“You will read me--more of me than you will want--for I’ve just begun—and finished--a whole long book.”
Marcel Proust, in a letter to Geneviève Straus, in August 1909.
Selected Letters, Vol. 2, pp 445-46.

More from "Proust's Deadline" by Christine M. Cano.
Page 12:
https://books.google.com/books?id=2mt...

Lori wrote: "interesting, in light of ...[[[what follows may be considered a SPOILER- not sure how to indicate that, sorry]]]... what is to surface later about whips and chains and Charlus etc? emotions of rage..."

Click on: (some html is ok)
Scroll down to: spoiler

Start: spoiler (with the < > )
End: /spoiler (with the < > )

Elizabeth wrote: "A point of discussion: M. et Mme. Narrator's parenting skills: what do you think of them?"

Hum...giving a sensitive child the "silent treatment" for days at a time?

From the novel:
I saw in the well of the stair a light coming upwards, from Mamma’s candle. Then I saw Mamma herself and I threw myself upon her. For an instant she looked at me in astonishment, not realising what could have happened. Then her face assumed an expression of anger. She said not a single word to me; and indeed I used to go for days on end without being spoken to, for far more venial offences than this. A single word from Mamma would have been an admission that further intercourse with me was within the bounds of possibility, and that might perhaps have appeared to me more terrible still, as indicating that, with such a punishment as was in store for me, mere silence and black looks would have been puerile. A word from her then would have implied the false calm with which one addresses a servant to whom one has just decided to give notice; the kiss one bestows on a son who is being packed off to enlist, which would have been denied him if it had merely been a matter of being angry with him for a few days.
MP (SW)

Homosexuality addressed in Oscar Wilde, Théophile Gautier's 1835 "Mademoiselle de Maupin," Algernon Charles Swinburne's "Poems and Ballads," and Balzac's "La Fille aux yeux d’or," and "Illusions perdues."
(Favorite Balzac website: https://balzacbooks.wordpress.com)

"Vautrin’s Cigar"
Susan Sontag, reply by Richard Ellmann (NYRB Oct. 27, 1977 issue)
In response to:
"A Late Victorian Love Affair" from the August 4, 1977 issue.

But there can be no doubt about the character of their relationship (Vautrin and Lucien de Rubempré) in the sequel to "Illusions perdues: Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes," known in English as "A Harlot High and Low."
[...]
That Proust may have been as much given to mourning for Lucien de Rubempré as was Wilde is suggested by a note to Proust from his mother written in late September 1896 (Correspondance de Marcel Proust, 1896-1901, Vol. II, edited by Philip Kolb, Paris: Plon, 1976, p. 133). Apparently getting in the last word in a conversation that mother and son have just had about 'Splendeurs et misères,' Madame Proust writes: “La mort de Rubempré m’a touchée moins que celle d’Esther.”

Susan Sontag ( New York)
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1977/...

Lori wrote: "regarding spoilers and reading the work through the first time 'innocently...' I'm not sure how one could avoid reading in this way- innocently. To me, the Proustian reading experience - unlike pag..."

Reading 'innocently?'
Some take the position that the novel is "a mystery!"
Thus, reading the last pages first, or knowing ahead of time what happens to the characters, will spoil the joy of experiencing Proust's brilliantly constructed masterpiece.

The surprises are stunning.

And although re-readers are continually finding new layers/perspectives (Bernard-Henri Lévy recently wrote about Proust referencing the 'Zohar' (view spoiler)[http://lithub.com/the-genius-of-judaism/ (hide spoiler)]), there is nothing that compares to the exhilaration of reading The Search for the first time.

Lori, had to smile at your motherhood references. You are correct; there are no words that could explain. When I see a woman pregnant for the first-time, I think to myself, "Life, as you know it, will never be the same."

Some readers have even had the identical experience, after reading Proust. ;)

Elizabeth wrote: "C.S. Lewis (genuflect here)...
And then there is Proust's famous passage (I have no idea where this is) about the famous archaeologist who is the museum's go-to guy about antiquities...(Assyrian? Possibly). But: if they put him in front of one, and he weeps, it's genuine!"

Good memory; it's in "The Guermantes Way:"

"The Kaiser is a man of astounding intelligence,” resumed the Prince, “he is passionately fond of the arts, he has for works of art a taste that is practically infallible, he never makes a mistake: if a thing is good he spots it at once and takes a dislike to it. If he detests anything, there can be no more doubt about it, the thing is excellent.”
Everyone smiled.
“You set my mind at rest,” said the Duchess.
“I should be inclined to compare the Kaiser,” went on the Prince, who, not knowing how to pronounce the word archaeologist (that is to say, as though it were spelt with a “k”), never missed an opportunity of using it, “to an old archaeologist” (but the Prince said “arsheologist”) “we have in Berlin. If you put him in front of a genuine Assyrian antique, he weeps. But if it is a modern fake, if it is not really old, he does not weep. And so, when they want to know whether an arsheological piece is really old, they take it to the old arsheologist. If he weeps, they buy the piece for the Museum. If his eyes remain dry, they send it back to the dealer, and prosecute him for fraud. Well, every time I dine at Potsdam, if the Kaiser says to me of a play: ‘Prince, you must see it, it’s a work of genius,’ I make a note not to go to it; and when I hear him fulminating against an exhibition, I rush to see it at the first possible opportunity."
Marcel Proust

Dan wrote: "I don't understand what I needed to not spoil. I didn't mention or allude to any character or event.

You have a different definition of "spoilers" than I do. As Ben mentioned above, Proust does ha..."

(view spoiler)[ Dan, I remember so clearly how surprised and unsettled I felt, when the characters I thought I knew in SW...suddenly began acting out of character in subsequent volumes.

Maybe, I want other first-time readers to discover, viscerally, the path Proust planned for us to take. (Or at least give them the option of discovering for themselves. However, we may graciously agree to disagree.)

As I have posted elsewhere, I am a strong advocate, like Antoine Compagnon, in reading Proust, for the first-time, "innocently."
Sadly, I am a purest, as I first read Proust as he intended. (See his words below.)

Proust described in a letter to René Blum, in 1913, his structure for the novel and that he expected his readers to experience this dramatic change in his characters.

This is from Carter's biography:

"On Sunday evening, February 23, Proust wrote a letter to Blum to thank him for his trouble. He mentioned the possibility of putting his novel up for the Prix Goncourt, if that would please Grasset. [...] In the postscript, as an afterthought, the novelist offered this description of the work he wanted to publish:

'I don’t know whether I told you that this book is a novel. At least it’s from the novel form that it departs least. There is a person who narrates and who says I; there are a great many characters; they are "prepared" in this first volume, in such a way that in the second they will do exactly the opposite of what one would have expected from the first. From the publisher’s point of view, unfortunately, the first volume is much less narrative than the second. And from the point of view of composition, it is so complex that it only becomes clear much later when all the "themes" have begun to coalesce.'"

William C. Carter's biography, "Marcel Proust: A Life"

Selected Letters, Vol 3 (pp. 157-159)
#94 To René Blum [Sunday evening, 23 February 1913]


Another letter, to Jacques Rivière, echoes Blum's.

[Friday, 6 February 1914]
#144 in Selected Letters, Vol. 3 (pp. 232-234)

Excerpts:
1. “…my book is a dogmatic work with a structure”

2. “I thought it more honourable and tactful as an artist not to let it be seen, not to proclaim that I was setting out precisely in search of the Truth nor to say what it consisted for me.”

3. “…only at the end of the book, when the lessons of life have been grasped, [will] my design will become clear.”

4. “Bois de Boulogne at end of volume one ‘as a sort of screen’…it is the opposite of my conclusion. It’s a stage, apparently subjective and dilettante, on the way towards the most objective and affirmative conclusion.”

5. “If anyone were to infer therefrom that my philosophy is a disenchanted skepticism, it would be [as if] a theatre-goer [misunderstands Wagner...] "

Marcel Proust

One theme: You can never know another person. (hide spoiler)]

Dan wrote: "But he also will show us, in great detail, characters in this volume, and then the same characters very differently in the next. Characters will "change" as he/we get to know them better, just as would happen in life. When we first meet someone, or see something, we see only a bit of what there is to see (or know) about a person, or a painting, etc. .."

Hum...would recommend placing any spoilers in brackets.
Spoiler: (view spoiler)[... (hide spoiler)]

The magic of Proust is in the discovery.

Prousty101 wrote: "For those able to follow French audio, I stumbled across this video a few months ago and found it wonderful. It follows ten or twelve French readers of Proust as they explain why they love reading ..."

Fateful stumble. ;)

Listen for one reader:
Nathalie Mauriac-Dyer, the great-great niece of Proust.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=v9jSJor...

Her mother, Marie Claude Mauriac, was a daughter of Robert Proust's only child, Adrienne or "Suzy."

Nathalie is a Proust scholar at ITEM: http://www.item.ens.fr/index.php?id=1...

Example of her brilliance...a must for Proust scholars:
http://books.openedition.org/editions...

Rather a rebel here....

I read The Search by myself...innocently...the way Proust intended, without spoilers.
Then, stunned during those last pages, I immediately began re-reading Swann's Way...and never stopped.

The novel is almost a mystery, so I am fiercely biased against knowing what happens to the characters.

However, for those who think differently...spoilers everywhere below! I

1) My favorite site for finding characters:
André Vincens' Proust, ses personnages
http://proust-personnages.fr/?page_id...

2) 182 days of Reading Proust: Day-by-Day by Charles Matthews
http://proustproject.blogspot.com/p/d...

3) The Cork-Lined Room by Dennis Abrams
https://thecorklinedroom.wordpress.co...

4) Reading Proust for Fun by Renee (in progress)
https://readproust.blogspot.com/2009_...

5) A classic on Swann's Way : Antoine Compagnon's 2013 lecture series, with English voice-over.
Collège de France~Antoine Compagnon's Proust 1913

Update:

6) BBC Radio program "Swann's Way: The Essay, Paris 1913"

1913 marks an extraordinary year in Paris. Momentous events occurred in literature, music and the visual arts. In the first of four essays looking at this annus mirabilis for French and European culture, Professor Michael G Wood of Princeton University explores the publication of Marcel Proust's "Swann's Way," a novel that marked a turning point in the relationship between a writer and his characters. BBC

Dramatic/major music and character spoilers discussed in this excellent radio essay: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01pmfj9

Mickey wrote: "I've read somewhere that the new Yale University Press edited version of Moncrieff (by William C. Carter) is also quite good—not sure how much I would trust that one."

We are currently reading Carter's edition in the Boston Athenaeum's Proust Reading Group. It's the only annotationed version and is a joy to read.
(The last cycle, we read the Modern Library-Enright.)

The Los Angeles Proust group also reads Carter's "Swann's Way."

So yes, you can trust (Proust's American biographer) William C. Carter's version....and Yale University Press' judgement. ;)
William C. Carter's "Swann's Way" (Yale University Press)
William C. Carter's "In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower" (Yale University Press)

Professor Carter's Online Course:
Proust Online — A Self-Paced Course