r/Proust

I’m a French filmmaker and for the last two years I’ve been making picture books of great classics for 4-7 year olds. Monte Cristo, War and Peace, Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet… around ten in English now.

My rule is basically: if the book seems easy to adapt, I’m not interested.

And now I’ve arrived at Proust.

I thought War and Peace was the hard one. I was wrong.

The problem is simple: all the others have a story a five year old can follow. Proust… not really. The real subject is memory, lost time, the past coming back. And a five year old doesn’t have much of a past yet. They have yesterday.

There is Combray, waiting for the mother’s kiss, the madeleine obviously has to be there… but I always end up with a cute little story that doesn’t really feel like Proust and, worse than all, that is quite boring. I know because I tried telling it to my kids and they never asked for it again.

So: how the hell would you do it?

Has anyone ever tried adapting À la recherche du temps perdu for very small children, in any language? Even a bad version would interest me at this point.

(Not selling anything, I genuinely need ideas!)

I'm thinking about getting a french edition of isolt, and i have some questions:

1. how necessary are the footnotes? Which edition would you say has the best ones?

2. is the pleiade (either 1954 or 1989) edition a good pick for a first time reader of proust?

I wonder if a nice slow reading of isolt while staring at nature might wind up being a good therapy for digital overload disease. You can do Thomas Mann, Tolstoy, but basically, once you've gained enough attention span to do that, you're definitely cured.

I am concerned that the current waterfall of junk data might cause the degree of psychological debility commensurate with the physical debility caused by Industrial Revolution.

We should consider preparedness measures. Maybe sponsor few extra study groups.

not novels that just feel Proustian in style/structure, but where the author is clearly hinting at something specific from the Recherche. EDIT: Not looking for name dropping either

a scene that mirrors a particular episode, a passage that echoes proust's words, a reference to one of his characters, etc.

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.

Reading Proust led me to John Ruskin and his writings. Initially, I knew of Ruskin only as a political economist and that held no interest for me. But I discovered the artistic side of Ruskin through Proust. Proust’s engagement with Ruskin was substantial—he translated his works and wrote about him extensively. I did try reading some Balzac, but haven’t found a grip yet.

I’m curious which books or authors Proust led you to—books that you would not have picked up if not for Proust.

Rather than reading Remembrance as a novel, I am reading it as a way of recalling memories, maybe memories that have been previously lost.

I might read one paragraph at a reading and see what, if anything, comes to mind. Maybe I'll write something about what comes to me though I hesitate to call it a memory because memories are funny things. Often I remember myself in the third person, which in itself is quite interesting.

Here's to recollections, whatever they may bring, and to our own personal artistry. I think Proust would approve.