From: The Curé had so much exhausted my aunt that…

To: …at the turning of avenue, at Versailles.

*

The noteworthy topics of the week are Françoise’s jealousy, Aunt Léonie’s nightmare and visions, and the Saturday routine.

Françoise’s jealousy

This week’s reading starts with Aunt Léonie giving her friend Eulalie a coin. Though she wouldn’t be jealous of such a gift if Léonie bestowed them to someone already wealthy, Françoise disapproves of the gift when given to Eulalie, less because she’s jealous than because she worries Eulalie might be “simulating affection” toward Léonie for the coins and because she imagines Eulalie has accumulated enough wealth from these small gifts to be able to purchase any farm in Combray. Françoise’s competition with those closer to her own rank, along with her acceptance of the upper class’s freedom and power, causes her to uphold the existing class order, even though it works against her interests, a tendency among working-class people that still exists today, and it complicates the class structure depicted in the novel. The more obvious dynamic would be for the lower-class character to be resentful of the upper class, or for the upper class to be dismissive of the lower, but between Léonie and Françoise there is real love, and often as not the powerful one is Françoise the employee, not Léonie the employer. They remain conscious of the disparity in their class, but while it outlines many aspects of their relationship, the women find plenty of idiosyncrasies and subtleties within their bond.

Aunt Léonie’s nightmare and visions

As has been established, Aunt Léonie has a routine, her “little jog-trot,” that’s respected by family members and neighbors alike but cannot be respected by nature’s necessities. When the pregnant kitchen-maid goes into labor, the wails disturb Aunt Léonie’s peace and Françoise is forced to abandon her to find a doctor to deliver the baby.

While Françoise is out, the narrator goes to check on his aunt and finds her sleeping (which, remember, she claims she never does). When she wakes, there is a “kind of horror” on her face from a nightmare she had, but it quickly turns to a look of joy and relief, and she mutters, "The Lord be praised! We have nothing to disturb us here but the kitchen-maid's baby. And I've been dreaming that my poor Octave had come back to life, and was trying to make me take a walk every day!" She then reaches for the rosary on her bedside table, but she falls asleep before grabbing it. The text doesn’t specify, but I picture her there, reaching but not grasping, asleep in a liminal position. Though she’s often bringing humor to these pages, and though it’s funny that her nightmare is about taking daily walks, in this moment, I feel for her. We’re reminded that her husband has died, she’s a lonely widow, and we’re left to wonder at all the parts of her history that might torment her and the possible reasons that she’s become an invalid.

Later in this reading, we see her strange mind occasionally envision an active and normal life, and we see her imagine a moment when catastrophe would strike and force her to prove herself, when all the family, save for her, would die in a house fire, and she would get to “taste the full savour of her affection for us in long years of mourning.” This is only one of her many fantasies that give her static life a sense of activity and that let her view her eccentricities as marks of distinction that would provide Françoise “with matter for a mental commentary as tense with passion and terror, as did the silence, the good humour or the arrogance of the King when a courtier, or even his greatest nobles, had presented a petition to him, at the turning of an avenue, at Versailles.”

Saturday routine

One of my favorite examples of the Combray routine is brought up this week when the narrator discusses the Saturday lunches, which is timed for an hour earlier than the lunches for the rest of the week. Since I first read the description of their Saturday routine, which in breaking with the daily routine helps form a weekly routine, it’s stuck in my head. The narrator says that the Saturday shift “was one of those petty occurrences, intra-mural, localised, almost civic, which, in uneventful lives and stable orders of society, create a kind of national unity, and become the favourite theme for conversation, for pleasantries, for anecdotes which can be embroidered as the narrator pleases; it would have provided a nucleus, ready-made, for a legendary cycle, if any of us had had the epic mind.” He goes on to describe the little comments people make surrounding the Saturday shift, how they go into hysterics when one forgets the Saturday shift, how they call a person unfamiliar with the Saturday custom a “barbarian,” and how the sun and day shift around the lunch time change, inverting the change the way geocentrists invert the revolving cosmic body, all the while making the line about the lack of an “epic mind” ironic because he clearly has one, able to spin out so much detail and spirit from a one-hour shift in lunchtime.

Another part of the Saturday routine is the weekly visit to church, where he falls in love with hawthorn-blossoms as they sit on the altar, “inseparable from the mysteries in whose celebration it was playing a part.” He looks at them only through his fingers, and he believes “Nature herself” has shaped the blossoms and made them “worthy of what was at once a public rejoicing and a solemn mystery,” personifying Nature, reading intent and emotions into its creations.

At these church visits, they run into M. Vinteuil, “who held very strict views on ‘the deplorable untidiness of young people, which seems to be encouraged in these days.’” He was a music teacher to the narrator’s great-aunts, and they visit him, but he doesn’t visit them because he doesn’t approve of Swann’s “unsuitable marriage” and doesn’t want to risk running into him. They have heard he’s composed music, and they ask him to play something, but he demurs. He’s so polite that he doesn’t wish to do what he desires, even if it seems to be what others around him want too. Vinteuil’s one passion is his daughter, who has a robust and boyish appearance, a “mannish face,” with a “thick, comfortable voice.” They are interesting characters here, but like with Swann their true significance isn’t apparent yet (though with Swann at least the book’s title foreshadows his importance). Seeing them now as humble, proper, doting father and boyish, well-behaved daughter will only serve later on to underscore the shifting, chimeric nature of man, a favorite theme for Proust.

After the church service, they walk home. The narrator’s dad serves as navigator while his mom loses her bearings. They return along the road lined with the most attractive villas, and they witness the gardens where in each of them “the moonlight, copying the art of Hubert Robert, had scattered its broken staircases of white marble, its fountains of water and gates temptingly ajar.” Again Proust has inverted a norm; the art of Hubert Robert isn’t copying the moonlit scenery. In this world, the moonlit scenery is copying the art; the art is the original.

I like to do immersive reading (listening to audiobook while also reading the physical book), but I'm finding that I'm getting annoyed with the audiobook narrators lately. With some of them, they do voices for the characters that have so much personality that within one page I already know if the character is going to be funny/evil/sassy etc.. I wish more narrators kept a neutral voice, but I understand why it makes the audiobook more fun, and I'm amazed at how they can do so much variations on a voice.

It's becoming a love-hate relationship

no more of it than this sort of luminous panel, sharply defined against a vague and shadowy background, like the panels which a Bengal fire or some electric sign will illuminate… the same evening hour, isolated from all its possible surroundings, detached and solitary against its shadowy background, the bare minimum of scenery necessary (like the setting one sees printed at the head of an old play, for its performance in the provinces) to the drama of my undressing, as though all Combray had consisted of but two floors joined by a slender staircase, and as though there had been no time there but seven o’clock at night.

Edit: This is Moncrieff's translation

From: One Sunday, while I was reading in the garden…

To: …up here on the top of Saint-Hilaire and down there at Jouy-le-Vicomte.”

*

The main topics of the week are Swann and his friendship with Bergotte and the Curé’s visits to Aunt Léonie.

Swann & Bergotte and More Swann

After discovering his love for Bergotte and viewing him as a literary deity, the narrator learns that the unassuming family friend Swann counts Bergotte as a pal. Swann goes so far as to offer to get a book signed for the narrator, an offer the narrator doesn’t have the courage to accept. Instead, he asks who Bergotte’s favorite actor is, and Swann tells him Bergotte puts Berma above everyone.

As they discuss Bergotte, Berma, and art, the narrator notices that Swann often speaks with “a special intonation, mechanical and ironic, as though he had put the phrase or word between inverted commas” to isolate and sterilize the strong opinion he might be giving, so as to “disclaim any personal responsibility for it.” As a child, the narrator contrasts Swann’s ironic detachment with the narrator’s grandmother’s “provincial dogmatism,” viewing the detachment as a cosmopolitan trait, but later on he will be shocked by Swann’s irony, the studious detachment suggestive of a man either incapable of passion or afraid of it.

The narrator speaks of how other people, like Swann, also don’t share the narrator’s love of Bergotte. He believes this is a result of a common trait across people:

We are very slow in recognising in the peculiar physiognomy of a new writer the type which is labelled 'great talent' in our museum of general ideas. Simply because that physiognomy is new and strange, we can find in it no resemblance to what we are accustomed to call talent. We say rather originality, charm, delicacy, strength; and then one day we add up the sum of these, and find that it amounts simply to talent.

This feels true and likely applicable to Proust’s own writing; his genius might take any reader a moment to absorb and months or years to appreciate.

Swann tells the narrator that Bergotte is friends with Swann’s daughter, and this leads the narrator to ponder Swann’s daughter and wife, who are shunned by the narrator’s family and who thus have taken on a romantic quality for him and who he imagines must view him as an “object of scorn.” He considers the daughter to be bathed in “a sea of privilege” and that she gets to hear the “two syllables, radiant with celestial light,”—Bergotte—as an answer for who’s coming to dinner only adds to her allure for the narrator. He reflects:

Once we believe that a fellow-creature has a share in some unknown existence to which that creature's love for ourselves can win us admission, that is, of all the preliminary conditions which Love exacts, the one to which he attaches most importance, the one which makes him generous or indifferent as to the rest.

He makes the very apt point that this occurs for women when they love a man in a uniform, a soldier or firefighter whose outfit suggests a distinct and admirable internal life. Again, people are not only themselves, they are representatives of a class, an idea, a work of art, a life. These connections add to our love for them, but they also shroud the true individual in easily misread symbols. You might accidentally love a girl simply because of the people she dines with.

Aunt Léonie and the Curé’s visits

Again we receive more comedy from Aunt Léonie. She admonishes the narrator for reading on days that aren’t Sunday because though all she does is lounge, she views reading as too leisurely for any day besides the day of rest. She wonders aloud with Françoise about the narrator’s grandmother, who goes for a walk in the rain. And she tolerates the Curé’s visits as he gives repetitive and endless explanations. She looks forward to Eulalie’s visits, and hates when the Curé’s visits overlap with Eulalie’s because she doesn’t dare send him away but also doesn’t want his visit to take away from her time with her friend.

With the Curé, she discusses the church, questions him on rumors of a painter painting the church’s windows, which strikes her as outlandish, and discusses saints. Used for comic relief, Aunt Leonie’s scenes continue to add color and life to the Combray world. Hers are frequently some of the more dialogue-heavy scenes in the early parts of the novel, and they are some of the earliest and most blatant signs of Proust’s taste and talent for comedy. When someone hears you’re reading Proust, they think of the dense prose and the weighty themes of love and loss, memory and aging, but it’s important to remember that the novel is often a fun comedy of manners.

Leonie’s scenes also come in handy for introducing us to more of the characters and the world. We meet the Curé, whom the narrator calls an “excellent man” for knowing many etymologies, and he discusses the Guermantes and the de Villeparisis and the decay of a region into “nothing more” than a parish of farmers after a golden era of importance for its trade. Through the discussion between Eulalie, Leonie, and the Curé, the history of the region and families begins to come into place, one that might seem trivial but which ties in with the novel’s ideas on class and its shifting nature. He gives a description of the church and declares that the belfry is the most remarkable part of the building but that it can only be fully appreciated when simultaneously seen from both the top of church, where you can see it up close, and from the town below Combray, Jouy-le-Vicomte. Of course, this is an impossible perspective, which means, in a very Proustian sense, that the ideal view of the belfry is unattainable, kept a distance, forever longed for and never reached.

Don’t rush these pages. Even in Leonie’s funny scenes, the Proust ideas live.

From: Then while the kitchen-maid…

To: …when a friend speaks to him of the other mistresses he will have in time to come.

*

The main topics of the week are the narrator’s habit of reading in the garden, his friendship with Bloch, and his love for the writings of Bergotte.

 

Reading in the Garden

This week’s reading starts with the narrator again alone and reflective. He discusses reading in the garden in the summer and expresses thoughts on art, this time on music and literature. The music he briefly mentions is the music of warm-weather flies whose “small concert” might be the “chamber music of summer.” Unlike human music, which can be produced at any time, music of the flies is bound to the warm season, so you can sit in a room, away from light and heat, hear their buzz, their song, and have a guarantee that sunny days “do really exist, that they are close around us, immediately accessible.” He doubts reality, and only the metonymic relationship of the flies to summer lets him believe its existence.

He reads in a dark room whose “dim freshness” is to the “broad daylight of the street what the shadow is to the sunbeam, that is to say, equally luminous, and presented to my imagination the entire panorama of summer, which my senses, if I had been out walking, could have tasted and enjoyed in fragments only; and so was quite in harmony with my state of repose, which (thanks to the adventures related in my books, which had just excited it) bore, like a hand reposing motionless in a stream of running water, the shock and animation of a torrent of activity and life.”

In this beautiful passage, Proustian ideas shine. The true, complete nature of summer, like that of seemingly all objects in his world, can only be accessed at a remove. Here, summer is complete only in the narrator’s mind. In reality, he can only experience it bit by bit. The experience, as with the experience of the theater or of a person, can only be whole when the mind is apart from it. And his musings bring up the question of what it means to experience something firsthand. You experience a river not by traversing its entire path but by sitting still and letting the current strike your hand.

On top of the piecemeal nature of actual experience, when he experiences something directly, he is analyzing his experience. Whereas his consciousness gives him access when apart, when with the object, the consciousness remains between him and the object, “enclosing it in a slender, incorporeal outline which prevented me from ever coming directly in contact with the material form… just as an incandescent body which is moved towards something wet never actually touches moisture, since it is always preceded, itself, by a zone of evaporation.”

The solitude of reading allows his mind to flit to such observations and also to consider the wonders of literature as he dives into the novel’s first extensive discussion of literature and its value. He speaks on the empathy developed in novels, explaining the reason fiction can stir emotions reality can’t:

the ingenuity of the first novelist lay in his understanding that, as the picture was the one essential element in the complicated structure of our emotions, so that simplification of it which consisted in the suppression, pure and simple, of 'real' people would be a decided improvement. A 'real' person, profoundly as we may sympathise with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, he remains opaque, offers a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift.

Summer now is the real person, the dim room is fiction. Distance again brings nearness. Reality is a poor substitute for its simulacrum. He’s previously enjoyed things only through memory or anticipation, but now the joy comes from wholly fictionalized accounts. We begin to see how the Proustian idea of memory ties in with the device of fiction, why a novel, maybe the most introspective art form, is the perfect medium for Proust’s themes.

 

Bloch

We meet one key character this week: Bloch. He’s the narrator’s Jewish friend and will become one of the more troubling depictions in the novel. Though half-Jewish himself (and a Dreyfusard), Proust isn’t above petty antisemitism, and Bloch will frequently be framed in a negative light: a vain, class-obsessed phony. In these early pages, it’s clear that the narrator’s family dislikes Bloch (in a funny aside, the narrator’s dad calls Bloch an imbecile for not caring about the weather), but the narrator claims the dislike isn’t simply because of his Jewishness, since Swann  is beloved by the family while being part Jewish. Bloch annoys the dad by not caring about the weather, annoys the grandma by being overly affected by her feeling poorly, and annoys the whole house by arriving late and muddy to lunch, improprieties that Christians would be judged for too. But ultimately in these early pages Bloch is a good and valuable friend because he introduces the narrator to the writings of Bergotte.

 

Bergotte

Bloch is the first to mention Bergotte, whose writing, he says, has the “supreme merit of meaning absolutely nothing.” The narrator reads Bergotte, and for the first few days what he will come to love in Bergotte isn’t yet clear to him. He can’t stop reading, and he thinks it’s the plot that causes this, but as he finds more and more passages of tremendous style, the passages stop being individual moments of glory and become representative of Bergotte’s writing, standing in for the “‘ideal passage’ of Bergotte, common to all his books, and to which all the earlier, similar passages, now becoming merged in it, had added a kind of density and volume, by which my own understanding seemed to be enlarged.” (Again, he maybe loves things most when they stand for something else.)

Bergotte would “break off his narrative, and in an invocation, an apostrophe, a lengthy prayer, would give a free outlet to that effluence” running through earlier parts. This description of “lengthy prayer” feels meta, as if Proust is talking about his own writing style, which makes sense since Bergotte is based on Anatole France, a writer Proust loved and who likely influenced him greatly. The narrator covets Bergotte’s style. He doubts his own thoughts have the same value, but then he comes upon similar thoughts in Bergotte’s writing and gains confidence from seeing them expressed by such a great writer:

And so, when I came suddenly upon similar phrases in the writings of another, that is to say stripped of their familiar accompaniment of scruples and repressions and self-tormentings, I was free to indulge to the full my own appetite for such things, just as a cook who, once in a while, has no dinner to prepare for other people, can then find time to gormandise himself.

He’s describing here the value he finds in literature; it returns his ideas to him, now polished with the value of the writer’s approval and style. Bergotte helps the narrator realize that his own “humble existence” and the “Realms of Truth” exist in contact. This feels true to me about reading great works. They give voice to thoughts we might not have paid attention to. They let us know we’re not alone with them. And they let us see the world through fresh eyes, opening up passages of beauty and pain.

In the end of this week’s reading, the narrator dedicates himself to Bergotte and says that were he told that the future “metaphysicians” he would follow would be nothing like Bergotte, he would be “struck down by the despair a young lover feels who has sworn lifelong fidelity, when a friend speaks to him of the other mistresses he will have in time to come,” again making a comparison to romantic love, which seems to be most capable of metamorphosing, an important attribute to note for the future, when romantic love takes center stage in the drama.

From: At this date I was a lover of the theatre…

To: …the face devoid of gentleness or sympathy, the sublime face of true goodness.

*

I haven’t been so happy with my latest Proust posts, so I’m trying a new format. Let’s see how it goes!

*

The main topics of the week are the narrator’s love of the theater, his visit to his uncle and the subsequent fallout, and his thoughts on the kitchen-maid.

His love of theater

The narrator calls himself a “Platonic” lover of the theater, Platonic because he has never entered a theater. He’s naive to the experience and believes that each person sees the stage as if through a stereoscope, an image that is similar to but unique from the images given to the other audience members. Since he’s never attended a show, he depends on posters and columns to experience the theater vicariously, determining through titles and colors the plays’ tones and themes.

In his love of theater, he’s particularly interested in the actors. As a keen observer of daily dramas, he believes that in the “trifling differences” between “one actor’s tricks of intonation and another” there will be a meaning of “incalculable importance.” And though he hasn’t seen them perform, he has ranked various famous actors, taking particular note of the actresses, many of whom know his uncle. Through a “futile and painful effort” he attempts “to form a picture” of the private lives of women whose faces he sees and who he imagines might be women from the stage. He is melding reality with fiction: The performers on the stage are meant to represent real people, and now to him the real people are representing actors on a stage.

His visit to his uncle and the subsequent fallout

The talk of theater is mainly used as an introduction to his uncle, who knows many actresses and thus has cache with the narrator. His uncle frequently entertains actresses and women of lower regard, and he’s run afoul of the family for introducing disgraced women to family members. The narrator is thrilled at his uncle’s connections and imagines that his uncle could introduce him to otherwise unapproachable women.

He goes to visit his uncle one day and meets a lady dressed in pink, a meeting that clearly worries the uncle, for reasons the young narrator can’t fathom. The lady in pink remarks on how the narrator looks like his mother. She admires him, and he studies her and wonders how a man could give her so many gifts when she has so “simple and respectable an appearance.”

She mentions that she met the narrator’s father once and that he was charming, which the narrator disbelieves. He absorbs her words and considers how she and women like her, disreputable women disowned by their families, “devote all their generosity, all their talent, their transferable dreams of sentimental beauty (for, like all artists, they never seek to realise the value of those dreams, or to enclose them in the four-square frame of everyday life), and their gold, which counts for little, to the fashioning of a fine and precious setting for the rubbed and scratched and ill-polished lives of men.” Again he transforms the women, typically objects of beauty, into artists who shape and beautify the world around them with their words and graces. The woman before him has taken “some casual remark” by his dad and “given it a ‘turn,’ a precious title, set in it the gem of a glance from her own eyes, a gem of the first water, blended of humility and gratitude; and so had given it back transformed into a jewel, a work of art, into something altogether charming.”

The narrator leaves quickly, and his uncle tells him not to mention the meeting, but he’s so thrilled and naive that he explains everything to his parents, which leads them to cut off ties with the uncle for having introduced the kid to a disgraced woman. Later on, the ashamed narrator runs into his uncle on the street and fights the urge to raise his hat to him because it would be inadequate to represent all the grief, gratitude, and remorse he feels toward his uncle, but in doing nothing, he appears to ignore his uncle, and his uncle takes it as a sign that the boy is following his parents’ orders. They never reconcile. The uncle dies many years later without ever seeing them again. The image of rebuke is in fact one of love and regret. Again the picture and reality don’t match, which will be underscored later when the lady in pink’s identity is revealed.

The kitchen-maid

Unlike Francoise, the kitchen-maid has no name because she’s not one person but a position, “an abstract personality, a permanent institution” where individual girls last for no more than 2 years. The one at this moment is a pregnant girl growing larger everyday, whose “ample smocks” evoke allegorical figures from Giotto paintings that Swann has given the narrator photographs of. Swann is also the one to point out the resemblance between the kitchen-maid and the paintings, appropriate for a man who, a predecessor to the adult narrator in many ways, is always connecting his daily life to high art, needing it for meaning.

This leads to an analysis of Giotto’s paintings, which the narrator only learns to appreciate later in life, when he can see that Giotto’s works shine through the symbols that are “actually felt or materially handled,” that they are concrete and real. Like the kitchen-maid’s large, pregnant stomach they don’t operate through abstractions but through physical practicalities, the inconvenience of the round belly, the pains in the abdomen. The allegorical paintings show real practicalities; the real girl becomes allegory.

He finishes by subverting common ideas on charity and goodness, on the true representations and says, “literally saintly examples of practical charity, they have generally had the brisk, decided, undisturbed, and slightly brutal air of a busy surgeon, the face in which one can discern no commiseration, no tenderness at the sight of suffering humanity, and no fear of hurting it, the face devoid of gentleness or sympathy, the sublime face of true goodness.” Within the face of a brute, the heart of an angel.

The unnamed kitchen-maid has stood in for a painting which has stood in for a concept. He’s been describing this for multiple pages, but now he admits that the image and what it represents don’t match. The disjunction stretches further, though, since In Search of Lost Time is often about living through the representation, about existing outside the moment, the event, the object, the emotion, and relying on symbols and stand-ins to fill the hole. But, really, what is he experiencing if the image is unreliable? And is it the real thing or the image of the real thing that he loves?

I just finished it yesterday. First on the ending, are we to understand that Howard and Kiki might reconcile?

More importantly, what was up with the Katie chapter? It was unique to the whole book, and I don't think it ties back in plot-wise with the book. I liked it when I read it, but I thought she would come back and never did. Any thoughts?

From: Combray at a distance, from a twenty-mile radius, as we used to see it from the railway when we arrived there every year in Holy Week, was no more than a church epitomising the town, representing it, speaking of it and for it to the horizon…

To: “Church! why, they must be there now; you’d better not lose any time. Go and look after your luncheon.”

*

After the revelries that brought Combray to life, “Combray” arrives and continues to establish three characters: Aunt Léonie, Francoise, and, to a lesser extent, the narrator’s mother.

First, we receive a description of the town, with a focus on the church that epitomizes it from a distance and that gathers around itself “as a shepherd gathers his sheep” the rest of the town’s buildings in an outline “as scrupulously circular as that of a little town in a primitive painting.” Much of the town has faded in the narrator’s memory and is more insubstantial than the projections from his magic-lantern, and this wispiness adds to its supernatural character and makes the quaint town marvelous, a place where a church can be like a shepherd and the town can be like a painting, existing more in the mind than in space.

The true stars in this week’s reading are Francoise and her employer, Aunt Léonie. Since the death of her husband, Aunt Léonie has become more and more agoraphobic. First, she never leaves Combray. Then she never leaves her house. Finally, she never leaves her bedroom, a recession into herself that is reminiscent of the stories told about Proust, who spent much of his later years in a cork-lined bedroom. Her isolation mirrors and amplifies the town’s, but it’s also one of her many eccentricities. She speaks only in “low tones” because she believes something is broken in her head and that talking too loudly might dislodge it, and she’s often simply talking to herself in an “unceasing monologue.” She claims to have extreme insomnia, though it seems she exaggerates the severity. And she believes it’s her “great claim to distinction,” but sometimes she slips up and says “what made me wake up” or “I dreamed that.” Naturally, she immediately corrects herself.

The narrator’s mother, on the other hand, is a very stable and sane woman. The little we see of her this week highlights her kindness and compassion. She instructs the narrator on appropriate behavior toward Francoise, telling him to give Francoise a five-franc note only once his mother has said good morning to her. Her empathy comes through when, as she did with Swann and his outcast wife, she asks Francoise about her daughter, nephews, and grandson. She’s conscientious enough to ask about Francoise’s recently deceased parents only when they’re alone together, “asking her endless little questions about them and their lives,” and she can make jokes about Francoise’s annoying son-in-law, sarcastically saying, “Tell me, Françoise, if Julien has had to go away, and you have Marguerite to yourself all day, you will be very sorry, but will make the best of it, won’t you?”

This gets Francoise to respond, somewhat embarrassed, “Madame is worse than the X-rays,” and we learn that “she pronounced ‘x’ with an affectation of difficulty and with a smile in deprecation of her, an unlettered woman’s, daring to employ a scientific term,” which gives us a small insight into class politics again, this time with its emphasis on the language differences, and lets us peer into Francoise’s psyche: she accepts her position. The small exchange is possibly enough to bring Francoise to tears because the narrator’s mom is “the first person who had given her the pleasure of feeling that her peasant existence, with its simple joys and sorrows, might offer some interest, might be a source of grief or pleasure to someone other than herself.”

The class relations come through more drastically in the relationship between Francoise and Aunt Léonie. For the time being, Aunt Léonie employs her (when she dies, Francoise will work for the narrator’s immediate family). Unlike how most people think of the employer-employee relationship, it’s Léonie who depends on Francoise more, who’s an excellent maid and, more importantly, understands Léonie, knows how to soothe her, and clear her mind of troubles.

When Léonie sees a strange face in town, she asks Francoise about this, and Francoise clears this up by mentioning who the person is (someone’s daughter) and why Léonie hasn’t seen her before. The town is so insular that an unfamiliar face is remarkable. Quickly, this scene repeats itself but now as a caricature. Léonie’s asking about an unfamiliar dog, and Francoise, again, has the answer (“That will be Mme. Sazerat’s dog.”) and knows how to ease Léonie by gossiping with details (“a most engaging animal…as clever as a Christian.”) and leaving her only because she must go make a meal for the family.

The weeks’ reading is more in-scene than the Overture ever was. As the novel progresses there will continue to be a swaying between the more introspective, lofty passages, and the more settled ones, where events actually play out in succession and dialogue develops character. We’re settling in now. It’s going. No rush. As Francoise says to Leonie this week, wise as usual: “my time is not so precious; whoever made our time didn’t sell it to us.”

Finished up the overture section and wrote about it on my blog. Full essay found below!

From: And so it was that, for a long time afterwards, when I lay awake at night and revived old memories of Combray, I saw no more of it than this sort of luminous panel…

To: … so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.

*

We’ve reached the madeleines. Very exciting stuff! I know… While it’s not my favorite Proust passage, it’s better than the best passages most writers ever write, and it’s easy to understand why a “madeleine moment” has come to stand for the whole Proust project: It’s an ecstatic piece of writing early enough in the novel that most people who make a go at Proust will reach it. It’s at the end of the Overture section, so it closes off the first section and has extra memorability. And since it’s about spontaneous memory in a book that people say is about spontaneous memory (though it’s about much more than that) people believe it can encapsulate the novel’s main themes. It also illustrates a universal experience with only a bit of Proustian hyperbole, letting readers relate to it without straining their imagination.

For Proust, there are two types of memory: willful, declarative memory, where you recall facts and events, and spontaneous memory, which can create and revive and not simply recall. The first floats up to our mind when someone asks what we had for dinner last week or where we went on vacation last year—something easily put into words. The second pierces through our consciousness unbridled—an act of recreation we give in to.

At the start of this week’s reading, the narrator says that when he looked back on Combray, he only saw a piece:

no more of it than this sort of luminous panel, sharply defined against a vague and shadowy background, like the panels which a Bengal fire or some electric sign will illuminate… the same evening hour, isolated from all its possible surroundings, detached and solitary against its shadowy background, the bare minimum of scenery necessary (like the setting one sees printed at the head of an old play, for its performance in the provinces) to the drama of my undressing, as though all Combray had consisted of but two floors joined by a slender staircase, and as though there had been no time there but seven o'clock at night.

To the adult narrator, the only piece still alive from his Combray past has been the anxious nights spent alone in his room. He admits that he can recall other scenes, but he admits that these would be through will, an “intellectual memory” that “preserves nothing of the past itself” and thus is dead.

This gets at a core tension underlying In Search of Lost Time: there is a difference between describing something and recreating it. Ultimately, a novel is a series of declarations, able to recreate literally only written correspondence. In a certain light, ISOLT’s maximalism is a byproduct of the anxiety felt when trying to recreate a feeling or scene. To describe a simple scene, the narrator must give as much detail and specificity as possible, must use similes and metaphors to open it to possible connections. He can’t describe moonlit night as simply being “like a map;” it must be a map in a precise moment, “a map which, after being folded up, is spread out upon the ground.”

This trouble stems from the mystical qualities that even the simplest objects can store. A tree or vase, a flower or dog, all can have the “souls of those whom we have lost.” The souls might sit captive in some inanimate object or plant or animal, lost to us until the day when “they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognised their voice the spell is broken. We have delivered them: they have overcome death and return to share our life.” Proust tries to reveal this quality, this spirit, through the winding sentences and layered descriptions, though it’s ineffable and untamable, like the desire and anxiety so often bursting from the narrator, and must be reckoned with.

This talk of souls and abortive memory is all prelude to the madeleine moment, when the taste of the tea-dipped pastry will bloom into the entirety of his Combray past. He’s tired after “a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow,” and his mom offers him tea with “the plump little cakes called ‘petites madeleines,’ which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim's shell.” (Moncrieff’s translation sings here: “fluted scallop of a pilgrim’s shell.”) The narrator dips and nibbles almost out of duty until he experiences the ecstasy of a revival:

a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal.

The “essence” is difficult to convey, hence the many words and seemingly convoluted structures. Paradox helps, since it suggests the impossibility of fully accurate descriptions. Metaphor and simile help by joining disparate objects and forming a tension between their minor similarities and vast differences. Metonymy and synecdoche help by expanding the object and reminding us that it can be representative. And here, in the above passage, there is a small backtracking, an adjustment—“this essence was not in me, it was myself”—which feels paradoxical but remains irrefutable.

Crucially, the memory arrives through physical senses, not intellectual meandering. This is key for when people are dead and the objects “broken and scattered” the “smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.”  The “drop” here can be the literal drop of tea moistening the madeleine, but it’s also the essence through which all details revive, details that build structure and without which the memory would be lifeless.

Finally, he recognizes the taste and memory and recalls the tea-soaked madeleine he used to have at his aunt’s, and with this realization the entire Combray world flourishes:

 immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated panel which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I was sent before luncheon, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.

Proust does less stream-of-consciousness than his fellow modernists, but at the start of the passage above the rush and abundance of detail mimic the scene’s rushing into memory. My favorite part, however, is the simile comparing the moist madeleine to the origami that blooms when wet. The physical actions match each other exquisitely—you dip a dry thing in a liquid—and the geometric blooming of the origami matches the gustatory blooming of the moist madeleine and the figurative blooming of the scene, which is also like the scenery in the theater. Thus, we end the Overture with the Combray past now fully alive to the narrator through a delicious treat and to us through a perfect analogy.

A Reader’s Personal Guide to Swann’s Way

From: In this particular instance, the article of her code which made it highly improbable that—barring an outbreak of fire—Françoise would go down and disturb Mamma

To: … albeit the coming event was in no way dependent upon the exercise of my will, and seemed not quite inevitable only because it was still separated from me by this short interval.

*

When I think of “Proustian” in terms of style, I think of sinuous sentences overflowing with figurative language: metaphor, simile, hyperbole, personification, paradox, metonymy, synecdoche, and more. When I think of “Proustian” in terms of theme, I think about memory, grief, obsession, art, love, class, and the tension between expectations and reality. In my rereading of Swann’s Way, I find the style and themes present from the get-go. Within the first 50 pages, you can see the structure and ideas that will flourish across the remaining thousands.

A typical passage, which is no less striking for being typical, comes this week when he describes the outdoor, nighttime landscape:

Things outside seemed also fixed in mute expectation, so as not to disturb the moonlight which, duplicating each of them and throwing it back by the extension, forwards, of a shadow denser and more concrete than its substance, had made the whole landscape seem at once thinner and longer, like a map which, after being folded up, is spread out upon the ground.

He personifies the landscape, “mute expectation,” presents a subtle paradox, “a shadow denser and more concrete than its substance,” which ties in with the idea that projections can be more potent than their source, and ends with a simile of remarkable specificity and detail, “like a map which, after being folded up, is spread out upon the ground.” This all works in concert with the narrator’s own emotions, as he’s silently waiting for his mother, so the landscape’s mood is a projection of his interiority, just as the shadows are projections of the objects, another Proust hallmark.

Last week’s reading left off with the narrator sent to bed. He wants his mom to join him. He needs to connect with her in some way, so he asks the maid, Francoise, to deliver a note, claiming his mom demanded he send it, but Francoise can see through the lie. (Here he makes an observation that rings of the “noble savage” stereotype, saying that “like those primitive men whose senses were so much keener than our own, she could immediately detect, by signs imperceptible by the rest of us, the truth or falsehood of anything that we might wish to conceal from her.”) He’s in agony, but the writing of the note and the belief that his mom will read it soothes him:

for that forbidden and unfriendly dining-room, where but a moment ago the ice itself—with burned nuts in it—and the finger-bowls seemed to me to be concealing pleasures that were mischievous and of a mortal sadness because Mamma was tasting of them and I was far away, had opened its doors to me and, like a ripe fruit which bursts through its skin, was going to pour out into my intoxicated heart the gushing sweetness of Mamma's attention while she was reading what I had written. Now I was no longer separated from her; the barriers were down; an exquisite thread was binding us. Besides, that was not all, for surely Mamma would come.

The style again comes through. The simile “like a ripe fruit” and the hyperbole “my intoxicated heart” pair with his obsession for his mother. The power the writing gives him to insert himself into her dinner, of joining her psychically if not physically, lets him bear the separation. The agony he feels for her will find echoes in romantic loves, and the narrator makes this plain already when he compares his waiting for an answer from his mom to a man waiting for an answer from a lover after sending a message through a third party.

He waits anxiously and listens as the dinner winds down and the family talks of Swann’s change and pity him for his “wretched wife” who’s involved with Monsieur de Charlus (one of Proust’s greatest creations who will have a spotlight in later volumes). When the narrator’s mom climbs the stairs, the narrator pounces on her, knowing that his father is close behind and that the fear of a scene might cause her to step into the room with the narrator, aware that he is using his father’s approach as “means of blackmail,” which fails because the father arrives before the boy can hide. But the narrator is surprised to find that his father tells her to go with him, because the father isn’t so rigid and maybe because he doesn’t love the narrator as much as the mother and grandmother do, because “they loved me enough to be unwilling to spare me that suffering, which they hoped to teach me to overcome, so as to reduce my nervous sensibility and to strengthen my will. As for my father, whose affection for me was of another kind, I doubt if he would have shewn so much courage, for as soon as he had grasped the fact that I was unhappy he had said to my mother: ‘Go and comfort him.’”

Amidst all this, we get a glimpse of time’s tragic passing:

Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase, up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb, was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which, I imagined, would last for ever, and new structures have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are difficult of comprehension. It is a long time, too, since my father has been able to tell Mamma to "Go with the child." Never again will such hours be possible for me. But of late I have been increasingly able to catch, if I listen attentively, the sound of the sobs which I had the strength to control in my father's presence, and which broke out only when I found myself alone with Mamma. Actually, their echo has never ceased: it is only because life is now growing more and more quiet round about me that I hear them afresh, like those convent bells which are so effectively drowned during the day by the noises of the streets that one would suppose them to have been stopped for ever, until they sound out again through the silent evening air.

Swiftly and briefly, the narrative opens to the future, we’re reminded that what we’ve been reading is in a distant past, and the child’s pain of missing his Mamma for the short dinner gives way to the adult’s grief for the extended separation that has come in adulthood, grief at the fact that while he can hear the echoes he can never return to their source. And the abstract loss of a moment, which we often might not feel because it happens all around and all the time, is replicated and embodied by the demolition of the staircase wall.

In the past, though, in the narrator’s childhood, he’s momentarily happy. He gets to possess his mother for an instant. She’ll read to him. There’s a fun drama to choosing the right books. His grandma has gifted him George Sand novels because she refuses to get him anything poorly written. His agony is soothed, but in the midst of this victory, he reminds himself that this night can’t be repeated, that his desire runs counter to “general requirements” and that the following night he would again be a “victim of anguish.” Time’s passing and its destruction of static bliss haunts him even when he’s a child. He sees his future self suffering; his future self remembers this past and finds little solace. Scenes echo through the grief.

 

I'm continuing my project of rereading and writing a little essay each week to serve as summary and analysis. This week it's approximately pgs. 24 to 36 in my copy. Enjoy!

From: And yet one day, when my grandmother had gone to ask some favour of a lady whom she had known at the Sacré Coeur…

To: …where old mansions still testify to their former courtly days, and chemical workers toil among delicately sculptured scenes of the Miracle of Theophilus or the Quatre Fils Aymon.

*

Last week Swann entered the scene. As an avatar for class mobility, whose ability to cross class ranks flabbergasts much of the narrator’s family, he served as a jumping-off point for discussion of the class system governing the novel’s world.

This week, we meet another character whom the novel frequently will use to discuss class: the great-aunt’s maid, Francoise. If the narrator’s family represents the bourgeoisie, distinct from both the aristocrats above and the working class below, and Swann represents the smudging of class boundaries, Francoise represents the lower classes. Through her humanity and idiosyncrasies, Francoise begins to complicate ideas on the working people. Even in these early pages, the novel uses her to confuse class boundaries, as it says of her “there was latent in her some past existence in the ancient history of France, noble and little understood, just as there is in those manufacturing towns where old mansions still testify to their former courtly days, and chemical workers toil among delicately sculptured scenes of the Miracle of Theophilus or the Quatre Fils Aymon,” thus suggesting that the features that define nobility and gentility can cross family lines and be as present in a working maid as in a prince’s daughter.

A character who might agree with this view is the narrator’s grandmother, the family iconoclast who will talk of a tailor’s charm and a gentleman’s commonness. With this more progressive view, she’s not taken aback by Swann’s impressive connections, unlike the great-aunt, who, upon discovering Swann’s relationship with Mme. De Villeparisis, lowers her opinion of Villeparisis for consorting with a person ranked below her, believing that if she were secure in her aristocratic status she wouldn’t deign to interact with Swann. The connection also degrades the great-aunt’s view of Swann, because she believes that to consort with those above you makes you a social climber, no better than “an upstart footman or stable-boys, to whom we read that queens have shewn their favours.” From both perspectives, the inter-class connection speaks to an unsavory insecurity.

This is one the great-aunt’s pretensions, and this week’s reading introduces two more characters full of pretensions: the grandmother’s sisters, Flora and Celine (to clarify, the character referred to as the great-aunt is his grandfather’s cousin, and all these relations are on the narrator’s mother’s side). Flora and Celine have pretensions to speak only on lofty topics and “were incapable of taking the least interest…in anything that was not directly associated with some object aesthetically precious.” They also have odd ideas on propriety. In a genius instance of comedy, they try to thank Swann for bottles of wine with oblique references to the gift, such as “M. Vinteuil is not the only one who has nice neighbours.” (This introduces Vinteuil, who will come to play an important off-page role in the novel.) With them, as with the great-aunt and many characters we’ll meet in the future, the narrator doles out the pretensions from the beginning, so then we can see the meaning behind the actions that follow. Ironically, these sisters’ pretensions for highfalutin talk are in opposition to Swann’s preference. He always wishes to remain modest and talk of common things, choosing to hide his expertise on art, philosophy, and music and entertain more trivial matters.

The early scene establishes the narrative’s style for many of the dinner scenes that will follow. It drifts across perspectives even as it stays in the narrator’s. It’s full of comedic ironies. And through hyperbole and analogy it brings out the characters’ distinctions. Here, it works to great effect to establish the early cast of characters. The grandmother is a strong-spirited iconoclast. The great-aunt is neurotic and settled in her opinions. The grandmother’s sisters are eccentric and aloof. The father is stern. The grandfather is respectable. The narrator’s mom is kind and conscientious. (She worries about Swann’s daughter—whose social position is brought low by the girl’s mother, whom Swann doesn’t bring around because she is considered a “fast woman” of ill repute—and says to Swann, about his daughter, “We can talk about her again when we are by ourselves…It is only a mother who can understand. I am sure that hers would agree with me.”)

And the narrator continues to be anxious. Now, he fears Swann’s visit will force him to bed early, and he prepares himself for the kiss goodnight from his mother at the table, so as to “consecrate the whole of the minute Mamma would allow me to the sensation of her cheek against my lips, as a painter who can have his subject for short sittings only prepares his palette, and from what he remembers and from rough notes does in advance everything which he possibly can do in the sitter's absence.” His planning is for naught because when he goes for a kiss, his father snaps and says it’s ridiculous and sends the narrator away before the boy’s lips meet his mother’s cheek.

It’s worth paying special attention to the simile in the above passage. The narrator is like a painter, and his mom is like a subject. This novel is the work of art. Using art as a lens through which to view the world is a key aspect of In Search of Lost Time, and in this short section, the mom is not only a model for art, when she must find a subtle way to show care for Swann’s daughter she does like the “great poets do when the tyranny of rhyme forces them into the discovery of their finest lines.” And, when the narrator wishes to send his mom a note from his room while she’s at dinner, he fears it would be just as inconceivable for Francoise to hand his mom the message “as it would be for the door-keeper of a theatre to hand a letter to an actor upon the stage,” transforming his mom into an actress, a fitting connection since in this world hosting a dinner, even a casual one, is a performance. All this heightens the novel’s scenes while blurring the lines between art and reality, a blurring that will intensify as the novel progresses.

I write fiction. My Substack is serial fiction plus literary analysis, and I've been wading my toes into the Substack world and reading more of the stuff on Substack. Today, I got this from one of the new publications I subscribed to.

The post started with:

"Done. I kept your structure and formatting intact, only cleaning grammar, punctuation, spacing, and obvious wording errors.

Three months..."

I immediately unsubscribed. This substack also used bad AI drawings for their stories. (A fault I could almost forgive.) Why bother reading something that the author used AI for and didn't bother to read carefully enough to read the AI conversation part and remove it. I'm tired of crap like this for writing. You shouldn't even use AI to fix grammar. That's part of the story!

I'd rather read crappy human stories than polished AI ones. It's like pottery. There is factory produced pottery that you can get at target, and there is handcrafted pottery. Target stuff is totally functional, and obviously, but it's not human. Writing written by AI is functional but not human. The difference is that the whole point of writing is the human part! I don't need functional stories. I need human ones.

There's enough great writing in the world so that I could read only books written by dead people and die without having read all the books worth reading. Please don't waste my time with stories that are, basically, shabby retellings of real human stories.

I’ve read In Search of Lost Time on three separate occasions. I’ve read Swann’s Way 5 times. Now I’m reading the whole thing again and writing something between a response and summary on a weekly basis, covering maybe 12 pages at a time. My challenge is to make a guide and summary of the text but in a way that also includes my own feelings and thoughts. I believe a well-written summary can communicate some of the novel’s power and bring some underlying pieces to the surface as I begin some authentic analysis of its genius. Mostly, I hope it’s fun to write and read!

*

Appropriately, Swann’s Way starts with the narrator out of place and time. It tells us not about a specific event in time but about a series of events merged as one (“For a long time…”). The narrator falls asleep accidentally and unwittingly. He believes he’s awake, experiencing reality, but he’s in his dreams, and his dreams are infected with the book he was reading when he fell asleep. This all occurs in the past, when he was a child (*edit, possibly not a child, as a reader pointed out, it's unclear, and probably unlikely that he's reading what he reads in the opening as a kid). He’s telling us this in retrospect. Fiction, dreams, and memory displace the present and the real. We’re in his mind, where we’ll be for the remaining million or so words.

For these opening pages, we stay in a diffuse moment. Nothing happens. He describes a habit. The phrase “I would” appears again and again, letting us know this happened frequently, that this is close to a nightly routine.

The narrator takes leaps of imagination. Distant sounds bring to mind far-away travelers. A light beneath the door is first the sun (“Oh, joy of joys it is morning.”), and then it’s extinguished. It was a gas lantern, put out by a servant going to bed. Rather than ending, the night is beginning. Like so much of the novel, the narrator’s confusion produces fears, hopes, and drama out of thin air.

He sleeps again and has anxious dreams. The narrator feels his uncle pull at curls the narrator cut off long ago. He finds a woman who, “just as Eve was created from a rib of Adam,” has been created in his dreams from some “strain in the position of my limbs.” Sometimes this dream woman resembles a real one, and, with his satisfaction incomplete, he decides to seek her out, “like people out on a journey to see with their own eyes some city that they have always longed to visit, and imagine that they can taste in reality what was charmed their fancy.” But the memory of this woman “would dissolve and vanish, until I had forgotten the maiden of my dreams.”

Unsatisfied desire. Unattainable love. A reality that can’t hold a candle to the dreams. It’s all here already.

In his dreams, the narrator goes on far away adventures, and when he wakes in different rooms, he has to “put together by degrees the component parts of my ego.” Even his own identity can shift beneath him. Even that must be composed. He must wonder: “perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them.” In his analysis of objects, we can see the future anxieties he’ll have about people.

In the dark room where he’s woken, he remembers rooms from the past. Maybe he’s recomposed himself. But when is this? Is he in his bedroom at his great-aunt’s house? Has Mamma only recently gone to bed? No, he is in Madame de Saint-Loup’s country home. Or is he? He’s not sure. For a few seconds, he is lost amidst the “shifting and confused gusts of memory.”

When he finally wakes fully, he reflects and thinks on the various places he’s known—Combray, Balbec, Paris, Doncieres, Venice, and more—and the many people he met.

The narrator remembers Combray and his room there and a gift he received, a magic lantern, which projects onto the walls an “impalpable iridescence, supernatural phenomena of many colours, in which legends were depicted, as on a shifting and transitory window.” The walls become a land of tales, but this only adds to his sorrows (his mind is fertile soil for sorrows, which sprout like crabgrass in spring). The room has been bearable only because it was stable, and though he loves stories and legends and fictions and fantasy, these projections have disturbed the room’s stability and the narrator already has enough instability to contend with: he has to recompose his own self when he wakes, after all, he loses tracks of dreams and reality, and time is easily placed out of joint.

In the span of a handful of dense, perambulating pages, the novel has established some primary concerns amidst confusion, dread, and dreams. Similes, metaphors, and metonyms abound. At certain times, they’re frightful and unwanted, and at other times they seem to be life’s animating source. Why must a distant train whistle be like “the note of a bird in a forest” and why must that bring to mind a traveler? Because to do otherwise would be to prune the world of the true reality, of the many layers and possibilities present in a dream woman, who can be Eve or a real woman or a city, or of those present in a streak of light, which can be the sun or a lamp. The “immobility” of these objects, their oneness and wholeness, is “forced upon them.” The novel’s figurative language and comparisons aren’t the work of an overly imaginative mind but rather the result of someone truly seeing the objects as their truly incomprehensible, uncircumscribable, fragmented selves.

It’s a perfect declaration for one of the great of imagination that mankind has ever produced. We’re in a world of abundance and pluripotentiality, where two things can be the same thing and neither can be only one thing. Appropriately, it is as if we, the readers, are emerging from a dream of our own.

*

A note on translation:

I first read In Search of Lost time through the Modern Library editions, the Moncrieff translation revised by Kilmartin and Enright. I then reread the same translation. I then read the new Penguin editions. For this project, I’m reading the unrevised Moncrieff translations while simultaneously listening to the audiobook of that version (a practice known as Immersive Reading, which I enjoy and recommend). I have a sentimental attachment to the Moncrieff/Kilmartin/Enright, but I think that regardless of individual flaws, you can read any translation and love the books. I would recommend you pick one set, and when it’s time to reread (if you love these books, you’ll want to reread), you pick a different set.

Cirie is vulnerable right now. There's no chance she wins a challenge. There's <50% that she wins at fire. What she needs is a challenge beast who will win the final challenge and take her with her, but only one person left might do that. What she needs is Joe.

Here's my thinking. Joe is an emotional player. Not in that he's bawling he's eyes out every episode, but that his emotions more than logic guide him (which is why I like him and think he adds good variety). He and Cirie (and lately he and Rizo) have had a soft alliance. I think he trusts Cirie, and Cirie has no reason to vote him out. He will especially trust her if she helps him vote out Devens in this coming tribal. This is the path I see...

At final 7, it's between Cirie and Devens, but people might fear Devens will find another idol, and he has a higher chance of winning a challenge than Cirie does. She gets Joe, herself, Tiffany, and one other to get him out.

At final 6, the biggest threats are Jonathan and Cirie. Again, Jonathan is a much bigger challenge threat, so others decide they'll get Cirie out at 5. They get him out.

At final 5, this is when it's trickiest, and maybe Cirie has found an idol at this point. I really don't know if she'll make it through this vote, but maybe Joe, herself, and Tiffany or something...

Then final 4, Joe wins the challenge. He takes her out of loyalty and respect.

I know this reads like fan fiction, but this just popped in my head at the gym, and I wanted to share it. I think this is her best chance.

Is her fearlessness. So many times people are worried about beating in final 3, they eliminate that person (who might be an ally), and then get taken out themselves before reaching final 3. Cirie knows that if she makes it to the final, no one is beating her, so she's playing an old-fashioned direct game. She has her strong allies and her weak allies (basically it seems like everyone) and then she's working to keep herself and her strong allies alive. She's not overthinking things.

Also, she's not trying to make big moves just to make big moves, which I think often annoys other players and can backfire with stupid risks. Do I think she'll make it to the finals? No...but she's already made it further than I would have thought given the target on her back.

Obviously not everyone can play like this. Many know they're weak, but they play out of fear and then end up not making it to the final anyway.

I'm making a longform fiction substack with weekly installments of what will be a very long narrative. I'm looking for similar substacks to read. I've seen ones that are publishign short stories, but what are good ones that are doing like a novel chapter by chapter?

Thank you!

I saw three movies yesterday, all about different forms of art and our relationship to its creation.

The Christophers is maybe my favorite Soderbergh in a decade. It's small (like most of his movie have been lately), tight, and slightly sterile. The two leads are contrasts in age, race, gender, and character. One of them is a youngish black woman who's planning to forge the works of the older white man. I like movies about crime and lies and art, and this one works to ask the question: What does it take to make a great work of art? And why can't we always do it?

Mother Mary has the same actress as The Christophers: Michael Coel. Again it's a movie centering on two people. This time she's paired with Anne Hathaway. It's kind of a horror movie. It's about relationships necessary to create art, and about the damage you can't undo, which The Christophers is slightly about too (all 3 movies are a bit about the pain of losing someone). It's gorgeous. I'm a big David Lowery fan, and I'm still trying to wrap my heads around this. It shows art as collaboration, and it's about the power of female friendship. It reminds me of Zadie Smith's Swing Time, which I've never read.

Blue Heron. Best movie of the day and the of the year. It follows a young girl and her family as they deal with her trouble older brother. Then there's a jump and a turn and not quite a twist, and it becomes about memory and loss and the value of filmmaking. There are gorgeous shots and beautiful speeches. It brings to mind The Souvenir and Aftersun. It made me weep, and I think more people should watch it.

I'm curious if people think more indie films are about art and artmaking than they used to be. Obviously that's always been a big theme, but is it even more popular now?