Looks Like Carelessness
Okay, this morning I found out that I’m a complete fool, that I’ve wasted my life, that I’ve been walking around with blinders on, that I’ve done what amounts to going to a five-star French restaurant and eating a peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich on Wonder bread, or going to the Grand Canyon or the Monterey Peninsula or the Lake District or the Bernese Oberland or the fjords or Umbria and spending the whole time indoors doing crossword puzzles.
I haven’t read Proust.
Think of it. I could have been run over by a skateboard at any moment and died without ever reading Proust. I’m a fool, I tell you, a fool, a fool, a fool! This kind of thing shouldn’t be allowed. A well-governed state ought to prevent it. Someone should have told me – and by ‘told’ I don’t mean just mentioned it in passing, I mean grabbed me by the throat and shaken until I swore to drop everything and begin. I did that to myself with Shakespeare back in the late ’80s, and a good thing too. I also did it with a good many other people, but somehow I didn’t get to Proust. Until this morning. I was re-reading* a section of Martha Nussbaum’s Upheavals of Thought, which gives extended quotations from Proust which I liked so much I went and found the first volume of the three-volume version, which I’ve had for awhile, in preparation for that vague day when I would get around to it. Found it and found the right page and read and
and was struck all of a heap. Why didn’t you tell me?! You bastards! You’ve all read Proust, right? I know you have. Of course you have; you’re all more sensible than I am, and you’ve read Proust, and yet you didn’t bother to make sure that I had. Well really! Some friends you are.
I knew, though, actually. Hitchens was going on about it last summer, at the Hay festival and other places he talked about the new book (Love, Poverty and War), and the fact that Proust is someone you need to be somewhat old to appreciate but that once you are, you’re staggered. I should have gotten busy then. I did think of it. And in fact people have done the grabbing by the throat thing. People have sat me down, and put a hand on each shoulder, and looked fiercely into my face, and said very slowly and distinctly, you have to read Proust. But I just pushed their hands off and jumped up and ran outside to play with my hoop. I’m a fool.
I’ve never read anything like it. It’s the most amazing stuff…
Here’s part of one bit that Nussbaum quoted and that I typed out earlier today…
If we thought that the eyes of such a girl were merely two glittering
sequins of mica, we should not be athirst to know her and to unite her life
to ours. But we sense that what shines in those reflecting discs is not due
solely to their material composition; that it is, unknown to us, the dark
shadows of ideas that that person cherishes about the people and places she
knows [..] and above all that it is she, with her desires, her sympathies,
her revulsions, her obscure and incessant will. I knew that I should never
possess this young cyclist if I did not possess also what was in her eyes.
And it was consequently her whole life that filled me with desire; a
sorrowful desire because I felt that it was not to be fulfilled, but
exhilarating because, what had hitherto been my life having ceased of a
sudden to be my whole life, being no more now than a small part of the space
stretching out before me which I was burning to cover and which was composed
of the lives of these girls, it offered me that prolongation, that possible
multiplication of oneself which is happiness.
Isn’t that amazing?
I get to read more. Life is good.
*So, in fact, I had been told, since I’d read that section before.
Alright, I’ll be the first to ‘fess up. I haven’t read Proust. What do you suggest I do about this situation?
“You bastards! You’ve all read Proust, right? I know you have. Of course you have; you’re all more sensible than I am, and you’ve read Proust, and yet you didn’t bother to make sure that I had. Well really! Some friends you are.”
Why is it that I have this image of John Cleese screaming these words at his fellow Pythons?
I thought about reading Proust in my youth and decided to wait until I was older. This was for two reasons. First, memory plays an important role in Proust’s work, or so I am told. I wanted to be older to appreciate first hand what it is like to dwell on memories. Secondly, I wanted to wait until I knew French well enough to read it in the original. I am still waiting, but if I get run over while skateboarding and find myself on my death bed, I will be sorry I waited. Then again, if I live to the age of retirement and become fluent enough in French, the wait will have made the experience all the sweeter.
So, my assignment is to read Proust. At 48, I am, I hope, old enough?
What translation?
proust = zzzzz. made it halfway through a budding grove. no desire to come out the other side.
ps. i do like Literature. just not proust.
dk has raised an interesting question: do I like literature? Does the word “Literature” have any content at all, or is it just so much empty aflatus, an offence to my somewhat nominalist sensibilities?
I could name you dozens of books that I like, books that I return to regularly, but the whole body of something called “Literature”?
It is arguable that I am wholly illiterate, knowing no “Theory” at all.
Well that’s a clever attitude, GT – haven’t and won’t.
“What translation?”
I think there’s only one available, and I gather it’s not altogether satisfactory. Come to think of it, that is one reason for my previous lack of urgency – there’s another one in the works, or something – or so I’ve been told.
“I could name you dozens of books that I like, books that I return to regularly, but the whole body of something called “Literature”?”
I’ve gone off that word a good deal myself. If it means that, say, Trollope is in some way more Special or glorified or something than, say, Thucydides or Herodotus or Gibbon – then I say it’s spinach and I say the hell with it. If mediocre ‘literary’ novels (with which the bookstore shelves groan) are Literature while books by, say, Appiah or Damasio or Dawkins are not – then the air of sanctity the word has needs to be torn away. That’s my view.
Found it! (The words you’ve all been dreading . . .)
London Review of Books,Vol. 27,
No. 1, 6 January 2005, page 18, “The Thing”, by Michael Wood.
A new sset of translations was published by Penguin in October 2003, under the editorship of Christopher Prendergast. The title is now given as In Search of Lost Time, Which is more literal, if less literary, less Shakesperian, than Scott Moncrieff’s Remembrance of Things Past.
I can order on line from amazon.ca and buy the complete set at a savings of $37.40 Cdn, and free shipping.
Is it the Moncrieff edited by Terence Kilmartin, Elliott? Or is it a newer one than that. Probably newer.
What a good thing I only have one volume of the old one. Well, off to the used bookshops or the library…
A completely new translation, made by several translators so that the whole set may be published at once, rather than waiting for one person to complete her/his life’s work.
Vol. I: Lydia Davis
Vol. II: James Grieve
Vol. III: Mark Traharne
Vol. IV: John Sturrock
Vol. V: Carol Clark & Peter Collier
Vol. VI: Ian Patterson
Wood’s review also mentions a book called The Proust Project edited by André Aciman,and published November 2004 by Farrar, Strauss. (Wot’s another $25, then?)
Ah, I see! I was wondering about that – surely it would take one translator forever. (Of course I could have just looked it up, but I’d rather get people to tell me.)
One of the problems with Proust and his translations is that the French themselves don’t seem to have hit on a definitive text yet. As Michael Wood says:
‘The whole [Moncrieff-Mayor] work was substantially revised by Terrence Kilmartin for an edition of 1981 (in relation to the Pléiade text of 1954), and again by D.J.Enright in 1993 (in response to what Prendergast calls ‘the curiously monstrous 1987 Pléiade edition’).’
Come on, GT – you don’t get to say it’s bullshit without reading it. Of course there are other, really profound insights to be made in liteature; who said there weren’t? Why is that a reason to dismiss other writers sight unseen?
“the French themselves don’t seem to have hit on a definitive text yet”
Ya, and no wonder – apparently Proust had really bad handwriting. Editors are still changing words – ‘oh wait, that’s not “really”, it’s “fully”.’
I didn’t say you had to read all of Proust ‘before determining that it’s all shit’. But you said (I take it) that you hadn’t read *any* – and made a virtue of it.
Of course there are other things to do and read; who said there weren’t? But if I say I’ve just very belatedly realized that Proust is worth reading, just sticking your fingers in your ears and screaming WON’T WON’T WON’T is not an interesting or intelligent contribution to the discussion.
GT, what a pleasant surprise!
New keyboard?
New glasses?
Mittens off for Spring?
Profound enough?
;)
I think this would be an excellent time for B&W to start sponsoring an annual “Summarise Proust” competition…
But How, Stewart?
A sonnet?
A limerick?
A clerihew?
Marcel Proust
Wrote something entirely new
That had nothing to do with church;
It was Lost Time Research.
Hmmm . . . might be more productive to start a Marcel Proust Book Club as a sidebar to B & W.
How about if I start a book group called ‘Fun With Dead White Guys’?
The great English comedienne had a nice line: “I was reading my Margaret Drabble waiting for something to happen..”
Some of us find it hard to stay awake when reading books like that.
Then there’s the little Oscar Wilde story: in his time books came with the pages stuck together. A visitor noticed he had just cut the first few pages of some new book and asked his opinion. Wilde dismissed the whole work, to which the visitor rejoined that he had read very little of it. Wilde replied that it is only necessary to have a single taste of an egg to know that it is all bad.
Oh now that hurts. Early Margaret Drabble is one of my favourite novelists. The later, post-Ox Companion novels I don’t like as much, but the ones up to then include some really good ones, I think.
I omitted the identity of the comedienne: Victoria Wood.
Sorry to hurt your feelings Ophelia.
Imagine – one day this thread could become known as the “Rubber Bible Sketch”.
OK, Stewart, finally checked my Monty Python scripts . . .
No madirgal singers need apply, RIGHT?
The ‘new’ translation being put out by Penguin is being comprehensively demolished by the NYRB. IMHO, the Kilmartin upgrade of Montcrieff is a good bet – and yes I have read both.
My reaction to Proust was close to yours Ophelia – but, and I hate to tell you this, it gets better every time you read it.
Phil Z – don’t wait for your French to catch up. After all are you missing out on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Herodotus, Tacitus, Goethe, Dante as well?
Weird! I was just reading Nussbaum quoting Proust today too… (in _Love’s Knowledge_). Okay you’ve inspired me. I’ll buy volume one tomorrow.
(Geez… I really COULD have been run over by a car before reading Proust!)
We all could, Casey! Let that be a lesson to us.
No, Chris, it’s good that it gets better every time. If it doesn’t it’s not worth reading the first time.
About the translation – interesting. I just read Hitchens on the translation of Swann’s Way, yesterday, and he too thinks the Kilmartin/Moncrieff is better – and the extracts he quotes convinced me.