One Year In Search of Lost Time ~ 2015 discussion

"'Wrap yourself up properly,' the others would not speak to the man with a cold for a fortnight, out of jealousy for the favour conferred on him" (~92.45%).

I just noticed this is actually week 9, i accidentally repeated the title week 7 last week. I already corrected the thread titles here.

Simon wrote: "I just noticed this is actually week 9, i acidentally repeated the title week 7 last week. I already corrected the thread titles here."

Thanks, Simon.

Hey, maybe to start a more informal and general chat, where are you all at with Proust?
I just caught up with this week's part.

As always, i found the saloon meeting a bit dreary, but i finally understood Marcel's now revealed interest in and enjoyment of the Guermantes and their saloon meetings. "I liked the mind of Madame Guermantes precisely by what it excluded (and what was the subject of my thinking) (...) the seductive robustness of elegant bodies that weren't disfigured by the work of thought"
Marcel is analyzing these noblemen, their socializing, gossiping, how they tick.
Then again, when Norpois talks about the army and politics, Marcel himself is bored and distracted, because these technical topics, poorly presented by Norpois, don't nourish his mind.
On the other hand, he is fascinated about all the old-fashioned talk of genealogy, how Monieur Guermantes tries to find relatedness to every person mentioned.
I liked the narrator's thought that it would be even more interesting for him to witness these saloon meetings without the influence of his presence, which changes what they talk about, eliminates the shared, secret insider topics.

I'm looking forward to switching to the english (Penguin) edition after this volume again, because i have to translate all my german passages here, and can't reference the english translation, which is quite a hassle.

I finished the book last night. What I remember most about this section (or maybe it was the previous week's) was my frustration with the lengthy examples of Duchess Guermantes' contrariness. I wanted our narrator to just say she was a contrarian and be done with it. (Not likely of course.) He finally used the word (at least it was used in the Moncrieff) and then moved on, just as I thought I couldn't take much more. ;)

Haha, nice to see that someone else is struggling with (part of) the Guermantes. But the end is well in sight.

The Duchess did go on....and on. As I said in a conversation with you, Teresa, I did wonder how self aware she is meant to be. Is her contrary nature reactive or is she acting to create effects in her followers. And her tag-team with her husband---that was odd, especially as it appeared primarily generated from his end.

Sue wrote: "The Duchess did go on....and on. As I said in a conversation with you, Teresa, I did wonder how self aware she is meant to be. Is her contrary nature reactive or is she acting to create effects in ..."

I actually didn't mind the Duchess going on and on; what I was struggling with at the time was the narrator's lengthy explanation of it all.

My guess is that it's a learned behavior. Proust would call it the 'familiar spirit' (Moncrieff translation) of the Guermantes, I think, which reminded me of Zola's idea of naturalism, as I was also reading Zola at the time.

I found the tag-team odd because the couple doesn't actually like one another, but appearances must be kept up, mustn't they. His wife's stature reflects on him as well.

True--appearances are all, as we see throughout this episode.

Just finished this section. If there weren't already enough new names in the salon the genealogy discussion had my head spinning trying to track who was the great-grandson of which aunt, etc. I had to give up and just read through.. Hoping there's not a quiz at the end!

I found it interesting that our narrator's etiquette missteps we noticed and covered by his hosts (like discreetly holding him back from leaving because it was unacceptable to leave before royalty). And how, while they are very welcoming to him, he is aware that they were likely not conversing the way they would be without his presence.

I guess I'm still trying to figure out what he really means to his new-found aristocratic friends. Are they grooming him for something? Is he a common play-thing at these parties? Part of an attempt by the Duchess to have a novel story to be told?
The comment made by the Turkish Ambassadress to the narrator of the Duke (Moncrieff, p385) '... he's a man to whom one could safely entrust one's daughter, but not one's son,' for a second had me thinking this was going to take a turn. It didn't, but I have no idea how these aristocrats entertain themselves...

The "entrusting one's daughter, but not one's son" i see as Marcel not being seen as a womanizer, but perhaps too much of an intellectual, who would fill one's son's head with radical ideas.

What the aristocrats find in Marcel, i think is mostly the fashionable presence of a writer, which raises the prestige of the saloon meeting, and attracts other fashionable guests. Imagine you had Marcel Proust, Stephen King or the Dalai Lama at your tea party, that would probably fill your house rather quick.

Lastly, i think noone can remember all the characters and genealogies in ISOLT on the first read, but maybe that's an interesting thing for further reads, and if you wanted you could of course study the genealogy of ISOLT and make those genealogy trees out of the characters. But maybe we don't need to understand the complete genealogy to see what it means to the characters, how it influences the discussion, and maybe Proust wants us to be confused about the genealogy, to show how specialized the discussion is, how much these characters care about and study their prestigious family history.

They are taking him at his word about being a writer though, aren't they? He hasn't actually published anything at this point, I don't believe. Or has he? Not that I think that would stop them from having him at the salon, even an aspiring writer would be a coup, I'm guessing.

That's a good point. Though he really didn't have an easy time getting into the Guermantes saloon. Marcel's witty conversation, that the narrator doesn't tell us much about, is probably also fashionable, and he has a way of making friends that quickly extends his connections.

Simon wrote: "Marcel's witty conversation, that the narrator doesn't tell us much about, is probably also fashio..."

I agree, and I'm wondering if it's also that he must be good looking and fashionably dressed. ;)

I did note that there was a single mention in TGW, just in passing, to an article he had published. It was a half a sentence and that was it. It's hard to tell if he's seen by the group as a 'real' writer or not.

I wish I'd noted it better, but a few sections back I seem to recall a section talking about what friendship meant. I think it was Saint-Loup's take on it vs. our narrators. (But don't quote me on that.) It seems to me the narrator is awfully hard on his friend's expecting a lot of them and I haven't been able to tel what he brings to the friendships. Wasn't there a lot of pushing on Saint-Loup to make introductions? His clever attempts to get into high society, to me, seem like him using his 'friends'

Steph wrote: "I did note that there was a single mention in TGW, just in passing, to an article he had published. It was a half a sentence and that was it..."

I believe you are right, Steph, and that's what was nagging at me when I asked the question above. Thanks.

I wasn't sure what to make of that long treatise on friendship either. And I too have wondered what the narrator does in reciprocation for what his friends do for him. It doesn't seem like much, or at least we don't hear of it.

Good discussion. There really isn't much discussion of friendship at all. So much seems to be concerned with the use of a person to one's present and future social and, possibly, political, success.

As for our narrator, he must have some attraction for these people who are so quick to expel the unacceptable and formerly wonderful. My guess is a combination of youthful promise as a writer, physical attraction and probably verbal wit. I imagine he also knows how and when to keep his mouth closed....for the most part, and learns social rules quickly.

Actually it does seem like Marcel is using his friendships to gain access to the higher social circles, one of his highest goals at this point, because it seems to him that that's where the excitement, the grandeur of life is found. Of course here he's already starting to realize that the Guermantes and their saloon people are mostly average and boring, beside snobistic.

Alain de Botton says in How Proust can change your Life that for Proust himself the value of friendship mostly consisted in exchanging affection, that there wasn't much intellectual or deeper inherent meaning of it, that you shouldn't discuss intelectually and risk conflict in it.

That's actually also stated similarly somewhere in this volume, and that at the same time with this view you can be a wonderful friend, because intellectual evaluation and behavior are two different things.
You don't have to agree with Proust's view, but you might understand the narrator better applying it.

Thanks for this Simon. I think I remember some words to that effect but not who spoke or thought them.

Looking through the references to friendship in TGW, I came across this:

"The friendship shewn me by her 'aunt Villeparisis' and Robert had perhaps made me, for Mme. de Guermantes and her friends, living always upon themselves and in the same little circle, the object of a curious interest of which I had no suspicion."

And here's the passage we've been wondering about:

I have already said (as a matter of fact, it was Robert himself who, at Balbec, had helped me, quite without meaning it, to arrive at this conclusion) what I think about friendship: to wit that it is so small a thing that I find it hard to understand how men with some claim to genius -Nietzsche, for instance—can have been such simpletons as to ascribe to it a certain intellectual value, and consequently to deny themselves friendships in which intellectual esteem would have no part. Yes, it has always been a surprise to me to find a man who carried sincerity towards himself to so high a pitch as to cut himself off, by a scruple of conscience, from Wagner's music, imagining that the truth could ever be attained by the mode of expression, naturally vague and inadequate, which our actions in general and acts of friendship in particular furnish, or that there could be any kind of
significance in the fact of one's leaving one's work to go and see a friend and shed tears with him on hearing the false report that the Louvre was burned. I had got so far, at Balbec, as to find that the pleasure of playing with a troop of girls is less destructive of the spiritual life, to which at least it remains alien, than friendship, the whole effort of which is directed towards making us sacrifice the one real and (save by the channel of art) incommunicable part of ourself to a superficial self which finds—not, like the other, any joy in itself, but rather a vague, sentimental attraction in the feeling that it is being supported by external props, hospitably entertained by a strange personality, through which, happy in the protection that is afforded it there, it makes its own comfort radiate
in warm approval, and marvels at qualities which it would denounce as faults and seek to correct in itself. Moreover the scorners of friendship can, without illusion and not without remorse, be the finest friends in the world, just as an artist carrying in his brain a masterpiece and feeling that his duty is rather to live and carry on his work, nevertheless, so as not to be thought or to run the risk of actually being selfish, gives his life for a vain cause, and gives it all the more gallantly in that the reasons for which he would have preferred not to give it were disinterested. But whatever might be my opinion of friendship, to mention only the pleasure that it procured me, of a quality so mediocre as to be like something halfway between physical exhaustion and mental boredom, there is no brew so deadly that it cannot at certain moments, become precious and invigorating by giving us just the stimulus that was necessary, the warmth that we cannot generate in ourselves.

Thank you, you seem to be great at finding quotes!

This verbose passage vaguely reminds me of a dialogue between Proust and maybe Henry James, where James said "Your long-winded sentences only become clear to me after re-reading them two or three times.", to which Proust replied "Oh, I'm glad they become clear to you so quickly, to me they are incomprehensible!"
Sadly, i don't remember where i found this quote, it was recent. Maybe on Alain de Botton's Proust video on Youtube that i also posted in the General chat:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mLdo...

Funny if it is James, as I could say the same of him.

Teresa wrote: "And here's the passage we've been wondering about:

I have already said (as a matter of fact, it was Robert himself who, at Balbec, had helped me, quite without meaning it...

"Yes, it has always been a surprise to me to find a man who carried sincerity towards himself to so high a pitch as to cut himself off, by a scruple of conscience, from Wagner's music,..."

Not one to read the novel as an autobiography, I do find "a slice of life" here and there.
Reynaldo Hahn and Proust disagreed on Wagner.
From William C. Carter's biography "Marcel Proust: A Life"
(https://books.google.com/books?id=SDZ...)