Madeleines redux

I've always wondered why the madeleines are such stars when people talk about Proust. It's a memorable episode, I suppose, but hardly the most important. It happens so near the beginning in the first book...I tend to think it's a bit of a shibboleth...people who never finish the books talk about the episode...to suggest they've read the whole cycle?

But Proust's observations about others seem more interesting to me than his explorations of himself. (Although, I suppose, part of the point of the books is to show that observations outside ourselves lead unexpectedly inward.) Even though he's...THE most thoughtful writer, maybe, what he himself does is less captivating than his penetrations into the lives of others. His observations are so sharp. Obviously.

But back to the cookies. I've never had a madeleine. So I'm about to perform a little experiment. I found a package of three cookies, which turn out to be little cakes, in fact, genoise cakes, at Starbucks (which I just discovered omits the apostrophe) for $1.95. Proust's little cakes are an inadvertent gateway. But I'm here in San Jose on the penultimate day of a trip to visit my boyfriend who's just about to begin teaching fourth grade here and I want to remember the visit especially. So I'll use eating the cakes to, I hope, make some lasting memories.

Here I go: I'm about to eat them. I'm sitting in his backyard under an orange tree. The outsides of the cakes are tacky, perhaps because they've been in a plastic wrapper probably since about 2005...they're much softer than I imagined. I thought they'd be like sugar cookies, but they're more like sponge cakes. Bready. Not too sweet. The light wind in my arm hair. The faint smell of rotting fruit in the grass. Far away a weedwacker. An orange falls like a bomb, bursting open; hornets explore. The smell of California privet or jasmine---I'm not good with the local flora---a passing car's exhaust. Floating over the neighbor's fence is the head of a palm tree, its dead fronds hanging untrimmed like a grizzled beard. I come inside the cool house, sit on the leather couch, and smile at him as he answers his email.

Strategy

So I've decided to digest the book in more logical units than, as I said before, 10-page chunks. I'll look at one or two sections of the text that correspond to the summary sections in the back of the Penguin edition.

Retrospective

I suppose I should mention what stands out in retrospect to a reader who wasn't paying special attention until now...

Well, there is, of course, the madeleine:

I'm not sure how much fresh there is to say. What strikes (and disturbs) me most (about involuntary memory), which this episode points up, is the powerlessness we have over our experience of life. Proust experiences transport. He experiences nostalgia, which denotes a certain fondness. But there are involuntary memories that are disturbing.

I was once walking with a female friend through the central campus of University of Michigan (UM). It was summer, with its rich smell of pollen. We (the friend and I) had such fun together. We were unromantic roommates. I glanced to my right to see an ex-girlfriend appear from behind a trunk. She sat there unaware, typing on her computer. Our breakup had been awful for me, and seeing her was shocking: My gut plummeted, and I was silent with my friend for minutes. She must have thought me angry, sick, tired---who knows now? But I can no longer walk by the environment school on the west or even smell the pregnant odor of tree pollen without a terrible sinking feeling. The horrible cum-smell of lindens is the worst. A repulsed glance at that elm she leaned against....

I am powerless. In the sense that I cannot control my emotional response to the things I encounter. Only my subsequent physical behavior. This is (I think now) the most important sense of involuntary memory: The the convoluted brain complicates stimuli; but we choose our behavior (if we're sane enough, have enough self-control).

Elstir the painter and great art:

How quick and irrelevant is our judgment in terms of historical legacy. How irrelevant is the judgment of others, frankly: Eliot says that all meaning requires the key of interpretation. What if we don't have the key? What if only the artist has the key to his work? The most meaningful work can be rendered "meaningless"...

Girls--romances--and how they come and go:

Marcel the fictional young man is so taken by some young girls, their exquisite complexions. They're never mentioned again---the women, that is, in their current state. Only in his memory, as they once were, are they relevant to him. Some people are so meaningful to us. Some people who were once so meaningful to us are now so irrelevant.

How can I trust my own judgment...?

How I came to this book

Hmmm....I can't remember exactly. My memory's notoriously bad (ironic for a Proust reader?). So this reconstructed memory may be as much fabrication as recollection.

I've always been an avid reader. I stumbled into Dickens in middle school. Great Expectations led to some Austen which led to Austen-for-adults---i.e., George Eliot (another of my favorite writers) by the time I was a junior in high school. I read Daniel Deronda first, which was an oddly Zionist introduction to her work. Thence to Middlemarch. I don't know how I found my way from there to Joyce. But Ulysses led me (via Penguin's jacket's Time's book review's blurb's "overtopping the books of even such giants as Joyce and Mann") to La recherche. (And yes, Wallace has been on the brain.)

I picked it up now and again for my first two years in college, but made little progress.

After my sophomore year (as a math and physics major (!)), I read the first hundred pages or so of Swann's Way at the house of my roommate's girlfriend's parent's house on Old Mission Peninsula, MI, after a week of slimming backpacking in Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. I was hooked.

I've been working my way through the cycle as I can given my other academic reading obligations.

Searching

Hello.

The purpose of this blog is to document my understanding of Marcel Proust's best-known book, A la recherche du temps perdu.

I'll summarize my objectives:

1.) To read the book again and again (at a rate of about 10 pages per day) for the rest of my life. I've already come to love the book (see 'About me' below).

2.) To digest and analyze what I read: To keep my observations on the book and what I perceive to be its relevance to my life and modern life in an organized and searchable format for my own use and others'.

3.) To provide a read-along summary for those who wish to play.

About me:

I'm a bisexual white male, age 24, living in the midwest, a pianist, avid reader, thoughtful person. I'm on page 474 of the third volume, The Guermantes Way, of the paperback version of the new Penguin translation. I regret not beginning (blogging) at the beginning (of reading).