January 17, 2006

In Flower

I’ve perhaps waited too long to write my impressions of In The Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, but with nothing but voluntray recollection to help me, I’ll have to post what I have. I read the Grieve translation of this volume, and I liked it. There are some problems with it, as I saw when I went to check the translation against the French, and found that in the theater scene preceding Marcel’s first vision of Berma, Grieve added the phrase “I enjoyed…” several times throughout two pages of text describing entering the theater, sitting down, watching the audience, etc. Proust, however, uses the phrase only once to introduce the entire section of description. Regardless, it was nice to read another translation of this novel, and the language Grieve uses admirably captures the feeling of anticipation throughout this second volume.

The movement throughout this section of In Search of Lost Time–from childhood to adulthood, from innocence to experience, from love to indifference, from the name to the thing–describe so many of the crucial parts of Marcel’s development. The theme throughout is apprenticeship, the flowering of Marcel, the growth of the young man from the boy. Development is described in that particular Proustian way, moving from general to specific, so that each scene grows out of the soil of its own type. Too, Proust’s method of retelling the same story but moving outward into the world from its previous setting puts us on familiar terrain. But, as readers, we’re also serving an apprenticeship in this volume, for we have to adjust ourselves to Proust’s startling way of introducing characters with whom we are already familiar in entirely new aspects. Proust’s characterizations are novel here because of what we’ve read before, and we have to find a way to account for them.

We start with the descriptions of a new Swann, a new Dr. Cottard (who, contre Sainte-Beuve, is revealed as a genius diagnostician despite being a social and intellectual dolt) and Ambassador Norpois. Norpois is the important one of the trio here, described in terms taht are belied by his appearance later in the first section. Proust again, in miniature, manages to draw the distinction that colors so much of his novel, that what we hear about something and what we allow ourselves to anticipate, ultimately has no relation to the thing itself. The name is different from the place, and reconciling the two is an act of will, understanding and time.

The narrator’s trip to the theater to see Berma play Phedre is another instance, though more complex, of this phenomenon. (more…)