Some weeks back I’d finally embarked on the long anticipated Du côté de chez Swann (Swann’s Way, as I’ve seen one translation call it), the first of the three-part À la recherche du temps perdu.
About sixty pages in I can tell you, incredibly dense. Comprehensive and philosophical goes without saying. Though far from necessarily every topic, Proust penetrates all sorts of food for thought over which the said involuntary memory stoops to conquer. From there we attain great depths to often forget where it was we even arrived.
Though early you might argue, I can’t resist drawing cheap parallels between Swann and Joyce’s Ulysses, my most revered twentieth century English language product par excellence. Like Ulysses, short time intervals span severe page counts. Long, sometimes arduous to parse sentences of half-a-page and in due time to probably surpass a page in length, abound.
Now although simpler syntactically and more consistent the syncopation, the French renders the endurance demands all the more rigorous. Some days I struggle to cover a page, obliged to distribute reading sessions across small time intervals, similar to Ulysses. Rarely squeeze out an hour in one; happy with even half.
To anyone reading this I might suggest not to needlessly obsess over continuity, for Proust’s staging so far appears to cover set pieces not of universal weight, as diverse as the philosophy of social station, art and literature reflections, a subliminal immersion into a tea infusion, a treatise on sleep and the unconscious mind, asparagus, a visually exhausting portrait of a church.
Like Joyce’s earlier Portrait of an artist as a young man, Swann covers the period of the narrator’s younger development. Unlike Joyce, Proust describes childhood memories not in an unrefined and evolving jargon paralleling that stage of consciousness, but with universal elegance attained by ways of retrospective arrangement, in Joyce’s very words: that is, a fully mature narrator remembering events through the imprecise workings of memory.
Thus so far admirable, engaging and damn challenging.
Questions, comments? Connect.