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. Rather than enjoying the performance he has dreamt of, Marcel is nonplussed by her flat style and what he sees as the artlessness of her approach. This disjunction, as so many in the novel, is made tragic by the anticipation the narrator had invested in his first trip to the theater, and in seeing Berma in particular. It’s only after the show, when reading reviews and indeed talking to Norpois, that the narrator begins to understand that he has witnessed something impressive. But this is a complex moment in Proust, one not fully explored until later in this section, which reveals an equivocal and troubled approach to art.

The trip to the theater is limned by the obsessions of the narrator, who spends literally hours dreaming of the theater and ranking the leading actors and actresses of the day based on nothing but reviews and half-invented suppositions. In Place Names: The Name, we’ve seen the narrator describe how important this all is to him, not only informing but forming his school friendships. One of the Marcel’s activities is to read the Morris column that bears the announcements and posters of plays, a strange kind of remove from going to the theater but necessitated by his parent’s refusal to allow him to actually attend. The theater, then, becomes invested with not only the magical qualities of Art but with the lure of the forbidden. It’s not beside the point that it is Norpois, a man of the world whose experience is broad and practical, who convinces Marcel’s parents that seeing a play would not unduly injure his sensibilities.

By the time of his afternoon there, the theater has come to stand not only for some of the forbidden fruits of adulthood, but for a shared artistic experience the currency of which is also its general availability colored by the perspicacity to understand it. Marcel attends the theater in order to be admitted into the realm of the artistic, in order to leave behind the childish lack of understanding which has marred his most fervently imagined ambitions. Going to the theater will mark the moment when the narrator becomes an artistic adult, able to analyze, discuss, revisit and offer opinions about a shared world of artistic experience which until now his youth and inexperience have kept closed to him. If this seems like overstatement, compare the narrator’s discussions of attending the theater with his shockingly casual (shocking because so casual) revelations, in this same section of the novel, of beginning to frequent brothels.

But the apprehension of art is shown to be a distressingly complex process, and the narrator is more baffled than enlightened by his trip to the theater. “This first matinee was, alas, a great disappointment.”(17) The proximate problem, of course, is that he doesn’t really like Berma’s acting, which not only disappoints but also confuses him. In fact, it is the minor characters who enthrall him and convince him, each in turn, that they are Berma. When he finally sees the great actress he is not simply disappointed by his own expectations (although Proust’s novel always contains this paradoxical element of desire satisfied), he cannot even see the art in her delivery, he finds her gestures wooden, he fails to find beauty in her expressions. All of this is brilliantly set off by Proust, who shows Marcel enjoying every other aspect of attending the play. It’s against the background, then, of confirmed expectations and enjoymen that the exposure to Berma’s art stands.

Of course after this disappointment Marcel realizes that he has much to learn about the appreciation of fine acting, and by making Norpois his first teacher in this matter Proust passes a subtle and rather cruel judgement on the narrator. Marcel, who has previously prided himself on not only his abiding interest in art, but in the superiority of his feelings, is brought back to earth rather rudely by the banality of judgement represented by Norpois. This functionary, for as brilliant as his position might be, Norpois is a functionary, knows more about art than the sensitive narrator. He recognizes the greatness of Berma, even if he derides Bergotte and implicitly rejects Marcel’s own efforts. Marcel, who until now has thought that he has some special access, a direct connection, to Art, is left disabused and confused. If he’s unable to recognize the genius of Berma, why should his opinion of Bergotte be sound?

The trip to the theater establishes quite early in the volume the overriding theme of this section of the novel, apprenticeship. Throughout In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower Marcel is learning the ropes. This is obvious the scenes involving the young band and the flowering of Marcel’s passion for women. He is learning how to seduce, how to be seduced, what to notice and when. In even the wider realm of society, he is learning throughout the volume what to expect and when to expect it. From the start, with his trips to Mme. Swann’s, through his introduction to Mme. de Villeparisis, to his friendship with Robert, Marcel is learning the ways of social intercourse and flattery. He’s a relatively quick study.

Marcel is exposed to all types of art through this volume, by Norpois, Bergotte, Berma, Elstir, even St. Loup. His apprenticeship is not only in what to like and how to like it, but also in the much more delicate realm of talking and thinking about art. Much is written about Proust’s theories of art, his love for Ruskin, his disdain for the method of Saint-Beauve, but what’s clear from this section of his great novel is that Proust did not expect art to be transparently meaningful. The narrator is essentially made a fool of throughout this section, failing to have the transcendent artistic experiences that he craves, but then being corrected by men of higher understanding than his own. The disappointment of seeing Berma is only outdone by the indignity of being lectured about her brilliance by Norpois and then Bergotte. It hasn’t been that long since the narrator defined his very friends based on which actors (none of whom they had actually seen on stage) they liked, and when presented with the opportunity to not only fulfill his dream but to display his critical acumen, Marcel has a horrible time. Similarly at the church of Balbec, that church that turns out to be a double joke on the narrator, once because it isn’t actually located in the Balbec to which he has directed all his thoughts, and once because he cannot see the joy of its carvings despite (or because of) his fantasies about them, Marcel is disappointed. It is only later, in one of the most touching scenes in this volume, does Elstir explain to him why the carvings of the Balbec church must be cherished and loved. Indeed, on the last of the narrator’s visits to Elstir, when he is being taught the value of a good dressmaker, he remarks that his whole perception of nature has been changed by his conversations with Elstir, by looking at his canvases. Marcel no longer seeks to view nature uninterrupted by the figures and forms of civilization, for Elstir has taught him that it is looking through the interaction between the natural and the civilized that nature shines the most. By the end of In The Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, Marcel’s way of looking at the world has changed completely.

The other week someone on Ask Metafilter asked a question about reading Proust. I wrote a fairly detailed answer that might serve as a kind of brief introduction to reading Proust. (It’s posted under my username on that forum.) The comments by jdroth down the page are also quite good, and he includes links to several of his own writings on Proust posted to his site Folded Space. (If his site used tags, I’d link directly to his essays. As it is, you should take the time to click over from his comment here.)

I’m more excited, though, to get my hands on a copy of the Grieve translation of Swann’s Way which was published in 1982 by the Australian National University. I just picked up a copy obtained through ILL. (I couldn’t find one for sale anywhere on the web). Of course, it’s library bound, but when you open it the cover is the same heavy cardstock that wrap Black Sparrow Press books. It’s strangely titled A Search for Lost Time/translated by James Grieve/Swann’s Way. When I picked it up I put it on the seat beside me, and at the first stoplight I picked it up and read the dedication:

This new Proust in English I dedicate to all those who once read him in the belief that he was abstruse; and to those who, in the same belief, never read him. JG

After that, I cradled the book in my lap all the way home.

I found this attempt at translating Proust into English. It reminds me of the section of robotwisdom where Jorn Barger works at translating Madame Bovary into English. If my French were just a bit better I’d try it myself, but if I were really Proustian I’d just have someone else translate the works and spend the time polishing those translations. Regardless of my own ineptitude, I love this kind of effort because it shows both what’s possible and what’s so difficult about translation.

This Slate article, which I missed in March, discusses the hiccup in the American publication of the Penguin Proust translations. Aaron Matz also makes an argument for the importance of the Albertine cycle to the novel as a whole, suggesting that jealousy and inquiry are so closely linked throughout the novel that The Captive and The Fugitive form one of the most important overall sections. Compare this sentiment to Roger Shattuck’s suggestion that it’s alright to elide the entire The Fugitive in order to shorten the reading of Proust.

Levinas’s essay is short, only 5 pages, but by no means slight. It’s not at all surprising that in it Levinas recapitulates many of the themes so central to his philosophy, particularly the notions of alterity and the Other around which his phenomenology has been built, but there is also an interesting moment when he mentions the “moral rules [which] banished enchantments from the world more harshly than did the laws of nature. (101)” This reads like a section from one of his Talmudic readings.

At the start of his essay Levinas confronts the problem of Proust’s reception, particularly with regard to the generation which came of age between the Wars. Levinas makes the point that Proust’s reputation went into decline during this period in France: that his subject matter was not appreciated as it should have been (Levinas calls him “the new Saint-Simon of a nobility sans Versailles” (99)), that his novels were not stirringly heroic, and, most damningly, that his analyses were eventually seen to be without merit, in other words, that his psychology was flawed. Levinas responds to this final criticism by taking it further and scolding those for whom truth is the subject of art. “The theory of the scientist or philosopher” may be judged on its relation to the object it seeks to describe, but, according to Levinas, that of the artist cannot be, for the object described is in fact the object created. The reasoning of the artist, like anything else in their work, “like images or symbols, is meant to produce a certain rhythm in which the reality sought after will magically appear” (100). He clearly reads Proust’s novel as the exemplary reminder that the self and reality are separate from each other, that the pain and joy of living are always also reflected upon and refracted through other experience. Being human means being reflective and that each human is unique and mysterious because of differences in their reflections. “The power of being to be incomparably more than it is does not derive from I know not what symbolic function it would take on, nor from a dynamism that would unfold it into a becoming, but from its infinite sparkle under the reflective gaze. (101)”

But the bulk of “The Other in Proust” is spent making the argument that Proust manages to capture two essential aspects of the human condition, for out of the lack of correspondence between the object and the artist’s description of it which Levinas describes come conclusions about the impossiblity of the kind of fusion in connection that Proust also excludes from his universe. It’s easy to see, and criticize, in Proust’s novel the notion that love is reduced to jealousy, and jealousy of the most abject kind. Levinas sees something else, though. He sees a real love, and a recognition in Proust, that what keeps us alive for each other is our alterity, our mysterious difference. It is the Other we love, and Levinas argues that Proust captures the ways in which love is kept alive not by an impossible fusion, but by the reminder that fusion is impossible. “That is Eros in all its ontological purity,…direct relationship with what gives itself in withholding itself, with the other qua other, with mystery. (103)”

But of course the role of love in In Search of Lost Time is ultimately only to remind us of our relation to ourselves; our reflections upon our own thoughts and feelings are as jealously shepherded and questioned as are our lovers. Being alone with ourselves is like being alone with another (yet another reason why the structure of Proust’s novel, between autobiography and invention, is so brilliant). Here is the last paragraph from Levinas’s essay:

Thus the theme of solitude in Proust takes on a new meaning. Its event is in its conversion into communication. Its despair is an inexhaustible source of hope. A paradoxical conception, in a civilization that, despite the progress made since the Eleatics, sees in unity the very apotheosis of being. But Proust’s most profound teaching–if indeed poetry teaches–consists in situating the real in relation with what for ever remains other–with the other as absence and mystery. It consists in rediscovering this relation also within the very intimacy of the I and in inaugurating a dialectic that breaks definitively with Parmenides.

Proust started reading Ruskin in 1895, took several trips to visit places described in his books, and started work on translating him at the very end of the 1890s. He didn’t finish working on Sesame and Lilies until 1905, which means that he spent a decade immersed in Ruskin. Some of the essays he wrote during the period, several of which were condensced into the introduction to La Bible d’Amiens, were very influential for the reception of Ruskin in France. Of course, it is strange to translate work from a language that you do not know well; Tadie, however, suggests that Proust knew written English reasonably well, but could not speak it since he learned the language during one of the worst periods of his asthma. Still, he used his mother and Marie Nordlinger to produce the first drafts which he then polished.

Proust said this about his English: “I don’t claim to know English; I claim to know Ruskin.” But what I really like is this quote about our reponsiblity to authors we love: “You know what admiration I have for Ruskin. And since I believe that each of us is responsible for those souls that he particularly loves, a responsiblity for making them known and appreciated…you know with what a scrupulous hand-but a pious one too and as gentle as I was able-I approached it.” From a letter to Georges Goyau.

2) Raczymow’s book is wonderful because it’s a meditation on reading Proust that manages to respect the complexity of Proust’s novel. Raczymow’s reading of Proust brings up questions inevitable to him, questions not only about mortality and fame, but also much more personal and painful questions about shame and what it means to be a French jew. One of the most poignant moments in Le cygne de Proust occurs early in the bok when Raczymow is writing about Swann’s characteristic gesture, and then a gesture said to be characteristic of Haas. Raczymow admits to knowing someone who makes the same gesture described of Haas, and speculates that it’s a Jewish gesture. After discussing it further, almost in an embarrassed aside, Raczymow admits that the man he knows who makes Haas’ gesture is his own father. Within the context of his book, it’s perfectly clear why the admission is a difficult one, why the notion of a Jewish gesture in French society is fraught. What’s remarkable is that Raczymow explores these questions without reducing them to either pathos or, what is worse, identity politics.

On the other hand, the best book about Proust that I’ve read recently is certainly Swan’s Way [Le cygne de Proust] by Henri Raczymow, and it shares many of the same devices with Rose’s memoir. Raczymow’s book is essentially an exploration of Swann and the models for the Swann character, most specifically, Charles Haas. Haas was a French Jew, the first Jewish member of the Jockey Club, and a man whose reputation as a wit and a socialite was exceeded only by his pride in his own idleness and connections. There’s no doubt that Haas was the model for Swann. The memoirs of the day confirm it; Proust wrote as much in letters. From this fact, Raczymow constructs a brief biography of Haas, a dissection of Swann, and an extended meditation on some of what it meant to be a Jew in the Belle Époque.

Raczymow’s book is best when he’s writing from the close intersections between Proust’s biography, Haas’ biography, Swann’s character, and the confusion all three exert on each other. The short sections in which he talks about Proust’s obvious failure to remember who (Swann or Haas) is fictional are brilliant and provide more than a little insight into Proust’s attitude as he wrote. The kind of confusion engendered by the shifting differences between real life and his novel clearly became overwhelming at times, and Proust would write letters in which he used Swann’s name when he should have been talking about Haas. But these moments then lead to the set of questions that are obscured at the start of Raczymow’s book, questions about immortality and time, and ultimately, in a strange way, the place of Jews in French society.

It’s impossible to read In Search of Lost Time without wondering about the hatred Proust shows to Jews and homosexuals. It’s unavoidable, and although sometimes the sentiments are offered in the mouths of his characters, at other times it seems clear that the narrator (and then Proust) is offering his own opinions. Even if we resist, as we must, the urge to reduce the novel to autobiography, these sentiments are ones with which we have to come to terms with as we read. Swann is not only tremendously socially successful, he’s a Jew, as was Proust. Swann’s Jewishness is emphasized at crucial points in the novel, as he gets sick, as he loses power (in the social sphere), as Gilberte grows up after he has died. Raczymow catalogs these moments and never fails to delicately relate them to the biography of Haas, and indeed, of Proust. What becomes most clear over the course of his short book is that Raczymow’s conception of Haas and of Swann is one radical contingency, and we’re left wondering why Proust made such a contingent figure, someone whose position and glamor rested very much on a kind of sufferance, the hero to the narrator as he’s growing up.

Raczymow’s book is also about what immortality, literary or otherwise, means. It’s clear from almost the start of this book that Haas is a person whose brilliance in life produced nothing, aside from one daughter, and who consequently is not remembered for any reason aside from (sometimes) his friends. Proust was aware of saving Haas from oblivion, of writing a character who would keep his model alive. Proust was also obviously writing a novel that would keep his own name alive. But the effect of Raczymow’s meditation on Haas, his unearthing of obscure Haas relatives, his pursuit of his hare, is to highlight how ephemeral an individual life is, even one partially preserved in a masterpiece. Haas becomes a vehicle for Raczymow to consider his own mortality, a project any decent reading of Proust engenders.

This kind of book threatens to be the worst that Proust criticism has to offer. In Search of Lost Time is many things, least of which is a catalog of correspondence between actual people and their fictional equivalents. Part of what makes Proust’s novel so difficult to write about is precisely the artistry that Proust used to distort ‘reality.’ Certainly it’s worth exploring the ways in which Proust’s life and experience informed his writing, but the temptation of reducing his novel to its constituent parts not only makes of it less than it is, it obviates Proust’s initial impetus to write contra Sainte-Beuve. But Raczymow manages to easily walk the line that separates the banal from the useful.

After Moncrieff’s death, Terence Kilmartin published a revision of the Moncrieff translation, basing his work on a corrected French edition. Kilmartin excised emandations made by Moncrieff, tightened some of his prose, and generally cleaned up the translation. In 1992 after the 1987 publication of the definitive Pléiade edition of Proust overseen Jean-Yves Tadie, D. J. Enright further revised the Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation (and changed the name, for the better, from Remembrance of Things Past to In Search of Lost Time). Despite the revisions, however, the translation is essentially Moncrieff’s, and his work has formed the basis for the English language reception of most of Proust’s novel. (There was a translation of Swann’s Way published in 1982 by James Grieve, an Australian translator and the translator of In The Shadow of Young Girls in Flower in the present Viking edition, which is impressionistic and confined to Proust’s first volume.)

In the 1990s Penguin Press, aided by the entry of In Search of Lost Time into the public domain, made arrangements to have each volume translated by a different translator. The idea behind the project, overseen by Christopher Prendergast, was to present a wholly new translation of Proust that both acknowledged the latest Proust scholarship and avoided the English embellishments that had been introduced by Moncrieff. These new translations came out as a set in the United Kingdom in 2002, but were issued separately in the United States. It was only after several of the volumes had been issued in the US that it was acknowledged that due to the recent, inane, extensions of authorial copyright (sometimes known as the Mickey Mouse Law), the final two volumes would not be issued in the United States until substantially later in this decade. [See this Slate article from March 2005, which I just found (Sept 26, 05) for information on the problems with publication.]

For people interested in obtaining Proust’s entire novel in the new Penguin translations, the complete edition is available from the UK. If, as is my case, you bought the American hardcovers as they were issued, only to be left without the final volumes, you may be able to get copies of the British hardcovers from England. They will not be the same size as the American edition. Remainders have been available (I ordered mine at the end of August 2005, from PostScript Books. The catalog number for The Prisoner/The Fugitive (bound as one volume) is 30109, and for Finding Time Again the number is 30110. The books cost £4.99 each, and there is a reasonable charge for shipping. Thanks to Dan Ford’s Reading Proust site for the information.