{"id":4378,"date":"2014-08-10T12:46:38","date_gmt":"2014-08-10T10:46:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wpethzprd.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/?p=4378"},"modified":"2024-02-20T13:40:33","modified_gmt":"2024-02-20T11:40:33","slug":"impressions-de-la-recherche","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/2014\/08\/10\/impressions-de-la-recherche\/","title":{"rendered":"Impressions de la recherche"},"content":{"rendered":"

Although my knowledge of French literature is rather shamefully fragmentary, I’ve at least, this year, managed to close one gap: I read \u00c0 la recherche du temps perdu<\/i> between January and last week-end. This was where I found a very funny allusion<\/a> to esoteric monographs (it’s in the second book, \u00c0 l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs<\/i>).<\/p>\n

Did I like the book? This is probably far from the right question to ask in any case, but it’s therefore worth investigating in a post-modern spirit. Since I finished the whole of the seven volumes in about seven months, during which time I had to take care of many other activities, and also started (and often stopped) reading a fair number of other books, I was certainly finding something in Proust that kept me engaged in his work.<\/p>\n

One technical aspect of Proust’s style that struck me was how he manages to capture the way that crucial events or characters will first appear informally and casually in life. Here’s for example the first time the narrator meets Gilberte while playing at the Champs-\u00c9lys\u00e9es:<\/p>\n


\nRetournerait-elle seulement aux Champs-\u00c9lys\u00e9es? Le lendemain elle n’y \u00e9tait pas; mais je l’y vis, les jours suivants; je tournais tout le temps autour de l’endroit o\u00f9 elle jouait avec ses amies, si bien qu’une fois o\u00f9 elles ne se trouv\u00e8rent pas en nombre pour leur partie de barres, elle me fit demander si je voulais compl\u00e9ter leur camp, et je jouai d\u00e9sormais avec elle chaque fois qu’elle \u00e9tait l\u00e0.
\n<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And here is the first appearance of the jeunes filles<\/i>, among whome is Albertine:<\/p>\n


\nJ’aurais os\u00e9 entrer dans la salle de balle, si Saint-Loup avait \u00e9t\u00e9 avec moi. Seul je restai simplement devant le Grand-H\u00f2tel \u00e0 attendre le moment d’aller retrouver ma grand-m\u00e8re, quand, presque encore \u00e0 l’extr\u00e9mit\u00e9 de la digue o\u00f9 elles faisaient mouvoir une t\u00e2che singuli\u00e8re, je vis s’avancer cinq ou six fillettes, aussi diff\u00e9rentes, par l’aspect et par les fa\u00e7ons, de toutes les personnes auxquelles on \u00e9tait accoutum\u00e9 \u00e0 Balbec, qu’aurait pu l’\u00eatre, d\u00e9barqu\u00e9e on ne sait d’o\u00f9, une bande de mouettes qui ex\u00e9cute \u00e0 pas compt\u00e9s sur la plage — les retardataires rattrapant les autres en voletant — une promenade dont le but semble aussi obscur aux baigneurs qu’elles ne paraissent pas voir, que clairement d\u00e9termin\u00e9 dans leur esprit d’oiseaux.
\n<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This comes with no warning or no articifial build-up of something is going to happen, drumroll, drumroll<\/i>.<\/p>\n

I was also very touched by the last pages, which certainly affected my overall impression and reaction in a way that I’ve only felt before when finishing Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom<\/i> (after which I went into a rather intense faulknerian phase during my PhD years). It seems that to understand Proust (as much as I can…), I would have to re-read the whole text, in the light of these last pages. Is that the expected reaction? It could well be… Will I do it? Who knows…<\/p>\n

On a different note, I was amused to see that while the first Pl\u00e9iade edition is a rather straightforward edition of the novel with short notes and biographical information (rather like the Library of America editions of Faulkner, for instance), the second edition succombs<\/p>\n

\"Proust,<\/a>
Proust, compared<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

to editorial inflation on a magnificent scale: the variants, esquisses<\/i>, notes and notes on the esquisses<\/i>, take up more space than the actual text! <\/p>\n

Here is the first volume of the old edition:<\/p>\n

\"First\"<\/a>
First<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

compared with the second of the new edition:<\/p>\n

\"Second\"<\/a>
Second<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This can of course be helpful, as are certainly useful the 125 pages of Liste des personnages cit\u00e9s<\/i> which allow you to quickly locate all the places where Rembrandt, or the Marquis de Norpois, or Saint Simon, or any other character, real or imagined, makes an appearance in the whole text. <\/p>\n

\"Characters\"<\/a>
Characters<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

(There is a similar list for names of places and names of works of arts, again real or imagined).<\/p>\n

Another thing I noticed is that the first edition doesn’t use accented letters as capitals at the beginning of sentences, while the second does:<\/p>\n

\"No<\/a>
No accent<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

compared with<\/p>\n

\"Second,<\/a>
Second, accented<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Although my knowledge of French literature is rather shamefully fragmentary, I’ve at least, this year, managed to close one gap: I read \u00c0 la recherche du temps perdu between January and last week-end. This was where I found a very funny allusion to esoteric monographs (it’s in the second book, \u00c0 l’ombre des jeunes filles … Continue reading Impressions de la recherche<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":625,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[313,362,1185],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-france","category-language","category-literature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/625"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4378"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4378\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}