When John Updike read À la recherche du temps perdu after having read Scott-Moncrieff's translation, he was surprised to find Proust less Proustian, the epithet we associate with flowery prose blossoming over prodigious sentences proliferating clause within clause. While I cannot read French, this was also my experience of reading the new translations, first The Swann Way by Brian Nelson and now In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom by Charlotte Mandell. In the glow of remembering the experience of reading Within a Budding Grove, the prose of the new translation is less ornate, one might say more colloquial, at least no longer at arm's length from the decadence of fin de siècle France, an impression created perhaps by Scott-Moncrieff's grandiloquence. This worried me, as I've often described Proust to those who haven't read the novel as mind-expanding; one begins to follow thoughts into their depths of variation and reversal, suggesting that the recognition and interpretation of the signs of the world offers more to life than a novel's notable events, and I wondered if the overripe vocabulary and unusually generous size of the original typeface had something to do with this. With the new translations, one is sobered up enough from Scott-Moncrieff-intoxication to draw alongside Marcel the man himself, realising only too painfully one has failed to heed the lessons in love he presents with such eloquence and precision. With some shame, the reader comes to identify with Swann and Marcel.
In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom is a novel written in shade and sunlight. In the first part, Marcel's frustrated love for Swann's daughter Gilberte is given a long post-mortem, much as The Swann Way is a post-mortem for Swann's jealous love for Gilberte's mother Odette, while in the second Marcel has moved on from Gilberte and is spending Summer in a high-end hotel in Balbec on the Normandy coast. There he becomes infatuated with a "little band" of teenage girls he sees cycling around the resort, getting up to minor mischief. He describes their clothes and features lit by sunlight brightened by the sea, trying to discern their secrets, longing to get closer. Each day is charged by the thrill of catching a glimpse. The evocation of teenage kicks is hard to beat, provoking memories and melancholy shared by the reader.
It comes so quickly, the time when you have nothing left to look forward to, when your body is fixed in a state of immobility that promises no more surprises, when you lose all hope at the sight of faces that are still young framed by hair that's falling out or growing grey, like a tree in full summer with leaves that are already dead; it is so short, this radiant morning, that one comes to love only very young girls, the ones in whom the flesh, like a precious dough, is still rising. They are nothing but a pliable flow of matter, constantly moulded by whatever passing impression dominates them at the time.
Back at the hotel, the family becomes acquainted with the painter Elstir who, impressed by Marcel, invites him to his studio, but Marcel keeps putting it off because he cannot bear to miss an opportunity to spot the little band. This proves to be an error.
It is decades since my reading of Terence Kilmartin's revision of Scott-Moncrieff's Remembrance of Things Past and then Penguin's retitled re-translation, and I was alarmed by how much detail was unfamiliar; I had forgotten entirely Madame Swann's little salon and images of train journeys, visits to Elstir's studio and sightings of the little band were only vague. What I do remember very clearly is fresh air and brilliant light, as if the novel itself is a holiday in the sun. While this exposes dilettantish tendencies, it may be fairer to compare the condition to the narrator's experience of enchantment with the group of girls. Likewise, we are enchanted by certain books and, like Marcel, we can be "profoundly surprised" each time we are in their presence, which in his case he puts down to "the multiplicity of each individual" compared to when "we are left alone with the arbitrary simplicity of our memory". Our relationship to a book can also follow the via dolorosa of disenchantment and Marcel's post-mortem commentary bulks out that path, accessorising what is otherwise an unremarkable story, so perhaps I had become jaded over the decades. Except, commentary does not constitute forgotten detail, as the winding sentences unconsciously nourish the growth of the reader's quality of perception, acting at a crude level like a prose exposition of a poem or to the summary of a dream minus the purity of its experience. Purity shines like the Balbec sun.
Seeking to recover the dream, to give the purity of the experience a presence we might hold and share, we turn to plot summaries, biographies, scholarly monographs, documentaries, film adaptations, even blog posts, leaving us in a state of literary insomnia comparable to a night in the hotel in which an exhausted Marcel tosses and turns in bed, kept awake by the dread of sleeplessness.
All of a sudden I did fall asleep; I fell into that deep sleep that opens up for us a return to childhood, the rediscovery of years past and emotions once felt, disincarnation, the transmigration of souls, the recollection of the dead, the illusions of madness, regression to the most primitive forms of nature (for it's said we often see animals in our dreams, but we forget that, almost always when we dream, we ourselves are animals deprived of the rationality that projects the light of certainty onto things; on the contrary, all we can direct at the spectacle of life is an uncertain gaze constantly being obliterated by forgetfulness, each reality vanishing before the next takes its place like the ever-shifting projection of a magic lantern as the slides are changed) all these mysteries we think we don't know but into which we are actually initiated almost every night, just as we're introduced to the other great mystery of annihilation and resurrection.
The places to which we are taken in this passage and the music in Charlotte Mandell's beautifully invisible translation is reminiscent of the unrelenting procession of the dreams of which it speaks, and in this we might recognise that literature is, like dream, in excess of the world. We cannot access its mysteries by day.
Blanchot notes that modern literature has "a preoccupation with a profoundly continuous speech" giving rise "with Lautréamont, with Proust, then with surrealism, then with Joyce...to works that were manifestly scandalous". Scandalous not because of the content but because an "excess of continuity unsettles the reader, and unsettles the reader's habits of regular comprehension". Again, like dreaming. The excess of continuity draws us close to what is discontinuous of habitual life, to what remains stubbornly unfamiliar and yet into which we are initiated in certain books, the axe-books Kafka said we needed. This may in turn explain why novelists like Beckett and Bernhard, as different from Proust as one can imagine, are nevertheless closer companions than those who write regular novels of time and memory. If we compare this to Heidegger's claim that the measure of a great poet is to the extent they are able to commit to "one single poetic statement", a statement that is not explicit, we can appreciate that such continuousness is the outpouring of what cannot be stated and that our attachment to a particular book is not something we can properly articulate without becoming novelists ourselves. Marcel recognises this once he is initiated into friendship with the little band:
It was on them that my thoughts contentedly dwelled when I thought I was thinking of something else, or of nothing. But when, even without realizing it, I thought of them, at an even deeper level of unconsciousness they were the hilly blue undulations of the sea, a procession silhouetted against the sea. It was the sea I was hoping to find again, if I went to some town where they might be. The most exclusive love for a person is always love for something else.
To discover something else, our truest love, we might ask: how can we sleep? This may be the question for the literature of our time.
Note
In Proust Regained, I wrote about Brian Nelson's translation The Swann Way and included links to other posts of mine on Proust and In Search of Lost Time.
Posts
