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In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower / À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs
352 Plays5 months ago
In the second episode of Proust Curious, hosts Emma Claussen and Hannah Weaver slog through the narrator’s first love on the Champs-Élysées and emerge onto the dazzling shore of Normandy, where he travels with his grandmother. We notice that Proust begins to introduce concepts critical to the project: the ongoing tussle between habit and novelty, the social kaleidoscope, the subject matter of art, and the essential perspectivalism of all human relations. We dissect a passage about toenails, classical statuary, and living nymphs. Plus, we’ll answer the question: “What is your favorite virtue?” Join us as we search for lost time and remember things Proust.
Produced by Michael Goldsmith in partnership with Public Books; visit publicbooks.org for transcripts and more information.
Resources:
- Proust Questionnaire
- In Search of Lost Time (trans. Moncrieff, Kilmartin, and Mayor; rev. Enright)
- Emma and Hannah discuss this volume further
- Logo image
- Madame de Sévigné (seventeenth-century French author)
- Céline Sciamma (dir.) Bande de filles (‘Girlhood’)
- Rubens, Marie de’ Medici Cycle
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Transcript
Introduction to Proust Curious Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to Priest Curious, a podcast in partnership with Public Books. I'm Emma Clawson, an Early Modernist at Trinity College, Cambridge. And I'm Hannah Weaver, an Assistant Professor of Medieval Literature at Columbia University, and currently a Fellow at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination.
Exploring Proust's Fascinating Work
00:00:18
Speaker
Proust's Curious is a podcast about the experience of reading ara ra shash juten page All Seven Volumes. Written between 1906 and 1922, published between 1913 and 1927, Marcel Proust's Cultural Touchstone is an object of enduring fascination and, let's face it, intimidation. We're not Proust experts, but we do study literature for a living, so we feel both under and overqualified to tackle this.
Narrator's Ambitions and Social World
00:00:48
Speaker
Join us as we search for lost time and remember things bruised.
00:01:14
Speaker
Today, we're talking about the second volume in the series, Alonbre des gens fiends fleurs, translated slightly obliquely by Scott Moncrief as within a budding grove, and by Christopher Prendergast as in the shadow of young girls in flower.
00:01:28
Speaker
In this volume, we see the narrator in later adolescence, maybe, realizing a number of the ambitions he held in volume one, namely going to the theater, meeting his favorite writer, and going on vacation to the seaside. He falls out of love with his first major crush, Gilbert, and meets his next one, Albert Cine.
00:01:49
Speaker
In between, he encounters social worlds beyond those of his childhood, and though he meets more artists and gains a greater understanding of culture, he continually fails to write anything himself. Or, put more simply, in this volume, the narrator gets obsessed with people and inches his way towards being with them, or being like them. This is really, really a volume of The Crush,
00:02:15
Speaker
so the book of the crush like of the crash the narrator crushes on it a lot of people and things he's crushing on the sea he's crushing on trees that he sees near the sea that's true he's he wants to crush on churches but they keep disappointing him I guess so do his crushes so actually maybe that's just yeah so we could call it the volume of having crushes and being crushed the volume of crushing but man yeah But Emma, before we talk in more detail about the volume, it's time for our question from the famous Proust questionnaire, which was answered by Proust twice at ages 13 and 20 and used as an interview device by Vanity Fair.
Insights from the Proust Questionnaire
00:03:00
Speaker
We'll put a link to the questionnaire in the show notes in case you want to see it. So our question this week is, what is your favorite virtue?
00:03:10
Speaker
and personally answered this one once when he was 13. And his answer was, tutel kus sum papaiciaha in a set le unva said ah which is to say, all those that are not particular to one set, the universal ones. Right, so... Emma, what do you think? What's your favorite virtue?
00:03:35
Speaker
My favorite virtue is going to make me sound a bit intense. And I don't exactly know how to phrase it, but my favorite virtue is like follow through. It's showing up. It's doing what you said you were going to do. Okay. So maybe it could be summed up as reliability. And I think as an Aristotelian might say, any virtue can tip into into vice if you take it too far. And that's definitely...
00:04:05
Speaker
ah continue yes erudition That's erudition.
00:04:11
Speaker
That's the P and C energy. Another another virtue that can become a vice. Reliability, if you really have a very narrow definition of it and you expect it in one way from all people at all times, then you just end up being a dick. You know you have to be flexible as well. yeah um Different people have different standards, different demands on their time. Also, by trying to be reliable, sometimes I really push myself into a deep pit of exhaustion. oh yes yeah So it's next, honestly.
00:04:47
Speaker
It's a good virtue, though. and The thing about virtues is you know I looked up a list of virtues to prepare for this assignment, and they're all it's like impossible to argue with any of them. It's like, ah, respect. I hate respect. so The only one on the list I found that is um Perhaps questionable is fear, which I can only assume means fear of God because otherwise it makes zero sense. But it's still an outlier. All the rest of them are like healthfulness. Hard to retarget with a lot of these. There's other ones that are mixed, like beauty.
00:05:24
Speaker
I guess it could be a virtue. Inner and outer and all that. Yeah, but overall I went for this one because I thought, you know, I would share with our listeners. Hi, if you're you're out there. have My character foibles. I think that's the whole point as our listeners feel like they know us. They can have parasocial relationships with us um as they're walking their dog or what have you. What is your favorite virtue, Hannah?
00:05:48
Speaker
My favorite virtue is perhaps equally telling and um also a foible, and it is humility because there's nothing more insufferable than self-aggrandizement. Yeah, I mean, that's inaudible. I'm just going to leave it there, apparently. Oh, I'll just add that, you know, in academia, I mean, maybe in lots of different walks of life, but in academia, it's really important to hold on to that one.
00:06:15
Speaker
Yeah, no, it's true. I think just in general, I think um I'm so much more impressed and charmed by someone who is accomplished yet humble than I am by someone who is accomplished yet shouting it from the rooftops. Not to mention those who are mediocre and yet proclaiming their accomplishments. But that is all making me sound rather judgmental, which is certainly not a virtue. um So perhaps we should stop there and turn to the real subject of the day.
Social Dynamics and Perception Shifts
00:06:47
Speaker
What happens in this second volume of A La Recherche du Tompardieu? Well, in brief, this volume is divided into two parts of roughly equal length. In the first, the narrator, still in Paris, finally infiltrates the family life of his big crush, Gilbert Swann, whose parents are Odette de Crécy and Swann. In the second part, the narrator goes with his grandmother to the Norman C. Cytane-Barbecque, where he meets a parade of characters central to the project as a whole.
00:07:18
Speaker
Emma, what did you think about volume two? What did you notice? So parts of it I completely loved, but in the interest of honesty, and because we have emphasized so much up to this point that we are doing this for pleasure, I have to say that some parts did drag for me as well. Here's a moment at near the beginning of the second part where the narrator is feeling a bit doleful and he says, oh, you know, those who love and those who experience pleasure are not the same people.
00:07:47
Speaker
And I think there were moments where I was like, well, I think overall I love this, but I'm not loving it. Especially part one, which I think it is worth saying that it was initially meant to be the end of volume one. This wall is kind of the completion of the story of odette and swan for in that phase um some of the internal reflections in that part there were parts of them that i found really brilliant and parts where i thought maybe you had to be there like when when he meets begot his favorite writer and there's a long extended
00:08:18
Speaker
analysis of but style and how how he how his style came to be his specific one yeah i'm sure that is incredibly studied it's really ripe for analysis but to read maybe you have to be a fan of the writer who this is muddled on to be or i ought to be thinking about this really as a literary critic to write about to be really encross in it no maybe that's me being a philistine maybe he else to do yeah with how and when i read the first part which was pretty slowly during and really busy and stressful time um i read most of the second part when i had flu but
00:08:50
Speaker
i enjoyed that kind a lot more yeah gosh poor emma taught me ask the narrator the as it did for him the move to the seaside did me a lot of good um i really loved the like the second part so yeah i do think thinking about pleasure means talking about things you don't like as well as those you do so how did you find it yeah i agree about pleasure and i agree with you about the volume as a whole that infinite paragraphs on the sensations produced by avoiding she be after he decides to never see her again
00:09:23
Speaker
after a baffling slight i revisited this today and it was no clearer on on yeah on a second reading yeah they haven't awkward tea in that went on a rainy day they have an awkward tea on a rainy day giette would have preferred to go dancing and she's retained by her mother and they have this awkward tea and it's it seems like the narrator realizes that she doesn't in fact
00:09:54
Speaker
love him in the same way that he loves her but that realization causes him to decide never to see her again which is very sudden because up until then there was no real there's no real warning sign and then he perseverates about it for a zillion pages i'm exaggerating but i just that's that's how it felt to me is very boggy bo is absolutely the right word ways he's waiting for her to call him back you know so he's doing a very the very human thing of feeling a bit
00:10:25
Speaker
wounded and wanting the other person to get in touch first but she with yeah yes is it it's revealed that she yeah the show and yeah and the modern term she's been texting but he really wanted like a long chatty phone call but it's just he's good he's going on and on about how they're not they don't talk to each other and then all of a sudden it's did get letters from her every day but but they were they were not the sort of emotional confessional letters that he wished for yeah he's an incredibly perverse anyway yes but i do that what was interesting for me is that this is this is
00:10:59
Speaker
one of the volumes that i've read i think several times this point and so certain things it felt like seeing an old friend they're especially vivid images these moments where when he gets to babe his bedroom has glassfronted bookcases and the sea is reflected on them in this really beautiful passage that and for some reason has have truly never forgotten that first night in bobback he's nervous that he wouldn't be able to get his grandmother in the middle of the night um
00:11:30
Speaker
get her attention and so they practice knocking on the wall to make sure they can hear each other his friend jobert song lu ah shows up and his first sight of song lu his mononacle is like flitting in front of him ah this little point of light that sort of bounces off of him and i also just side note i mean how old this sound do here like maybe twenty just the idea that a twenty year old is like marching around with a mononacle is just such a ah place and time i feel like when you see portraits e etc of people with monoccoles
00:12:01
Speaker
they tend to be older i just pick monocles to me seemed like something of middle age and older and so to picture a quite young man but monoled was very vivid yeah with such dynamism he's like striding in kind of following monocle leader yeah that's right even the mononacle is like in in front of him bouncing and
00:12:30
Speaker
did you notice in particular in this volume um in terms of themes or passages that really caught your eye yeah so i was thinking a lot about ritual and repetition and novelty when i was i was reading this i mean there's a number of moments when yeahterator spends the second volume and quite an ecstatic state he's happy and yeah towards end to keep saying yeah i'm living i lived a new life so there is this kind of interplay between repetitious
00:13:04
Speaker
kind of repeated variations on a theme and and of novelty novelty and discovery and that is to do with his kind of sense of self you know he's got kind of more marose passages where he talks about his self has died his self one version of himself dies with jud bets which is very melodramatic but okay kind of um but then you know starting again and that is not just about personal oneon-one relationships but it's about the world and society because he is
00:13:36
Speaker
learning how how things were and at one point there's a really interesting and quite dark passage about social ah social kaleidoscope so this is one of those moments where the narrative voice feels very much like ah older naator or kind of different different voice to the naive child or growing adolescent they will say sorry this is a digression but i love how proust is managing the tone
00:14:06
Speaker
because you can hear the voice of a older and an aging person across across these two parts but hear the voice is more about somebody reflecting on their past life i mean he's thinking about how the people in and so and it's all about hung hindsight really and and he's thinking about how the people who are obsessed with their social formations and habits actually and who think that they are unchanging don't realize that they will change and are subject to shocking change that they can't necessarily predict
00:14:38
Speaker
right and this is quite a threatening episode because it's kind of structured around a discussion of anti-semitism so the the naatorta says the people who lived in such an atmosphere imagined that the impossibility of ever inviting an opportunist and still more a horrid radical to their parties was something that would endure forever like oil lamps and horsedran omnibuses but like a kaleidoscope which is every now and then given a turn society arranges successively in different orders elements which one would have supposed to be immovable and composes a fresh pattern so then he talks about how
00:15:10
Speaker
and i hate this is he's saying that at the time that he's thinking about jewish people are quite integrated and powerful in society but then things change um with the dreyfus affair which was the prosecution of a jewish military officer supposedly for treason although he was but eventually exonerated and but it created a scandal and society kind of divided into pro and anti dreyfus people um so then he says the dreyfus case brought about another so another one of these changes at a period rather later than that in which i began to go to madam anwan's and the kaleidoscope scattered once again its little scraps of color
00:15:44
Speaker
found that very striking and i think that's a kind of motif of the ah across the two volumes so we talked about how they're quite separate think we see kind of kaleidoscopic shifts happening in different ways i mean i don't want to put you on the spot here hannah but i happened to hear hannah yes ah really brilliant account of kind of using the kaleidoscope herself as ah ah kind of heuristic for thinking about cultural change um so i wonder if you have anything more to say about this this volumeous kaleidoscope or if you notice any kind of similar similar things here
00:16:18
Speaker
i've been working on a project where i'm thinking about the kaleidoscope as sort of a almost an ah metaphor for literary history but what prousts is really talking about is the kaidis gopic way that inter personalsonal relationship can change and he's really clever in how he uses the kaleidoscope because the idea here is that something external twists the ah the optics and the crystals get shaken up and fallen and fall around and that that is what happens with a
00:16:49
Speaker
ah dreyfu a affair he's suggesting is that that sequence has shifted the crystals who then separate and recongregate in different motifs i think that although he doesn't use the word kaleidoscope throughout the novel in the same way that he does in this particular passage he's definitely thinking about element rearranging and um kind of through those are really crucial metaphors for him in this entire volume
00:17:20
Speaker
this happens with individuals for him and also ah with his crushes so when he is in the process of getting to know aba sin he reflects on the changeful nature of people and here is um the revised mon translation the good and bad qualities which a person presents to us exposed to view on the surface of his or her face rearrange themselves in a totally different order if we approach them from another angle
00:17:51
Speaker
just as in a town buildings that appear strung irregularly along a single line from another aspect retire into a graduated distance and the relative heights are altered he goes on a little bit but thus it can be only after one has recognized not without having had to feel one's way the optical illusions of one's first impression that one can arrive at an exact knowledge of another person supposing such knowledge to ever be possible but it is not
00:18:23
Speaker
for while our original impression of him undergoes correction the person himself not being an inanimate object changes in himself we think that we have caught him he moves and when we imagine that at last we are seeing him clearly it is only the old impressions which he had already formed of him that we have succeeded in making clearer when they no longer represent him and i think that this passage gets a they kind of develops the motif it's much later in the novel than your passage emma and brings into
00:18:54
Speaker
play that there are two sides of this process there's the side of reevaluation within oneself so in other words there's the side of to refer back to your passage there's the side of the salon deciding who they are going to include and there's the side of the object of there evaluation which itself is going through a process of internal yeah a continual process of internal reevaluation
Repetition and Habit in Narrator's Experiences
00:19:25
Speaker
in other words ah any human object of study is so mutable as to be unlearnable in a way unseazable and i love the idea that all of our perceptions of people are optical illusions i ah i just saying it's both disheartening and true yeah i love the way you've accounted for this i'm really struck by these like double movements of the social world the salon the border french society
00:19:57
Speaker
twisting like a kaleidoscopic image at the same time as the elements within it are also twisting and or or shifting a little a few times in this volume and i won't read any of the citations but another preferred image for him is that of the photographic negative that when you're experiencing something what you're doing is akin to what the camera does when it makes a negative but it's only later in developing that negative and then making a print
00:20:28
Speaker
that you can understand what it is that you experience because as you as anyway anyone our age knows looking at a photographic negative can be sort of baffling even though it does in fact contain all the visual information at the the photograph well it takes the time and process of development to have that come out um so that's obviously a different figure in that a negative is is fixed and it's just a matter of projecting light through it in such a way that it
00:20:59
Speaker
that it is transferred onto a different paper but there's still this idea of inversion that i think is shared between the figure of the negative and the figure of the kaleidoscope the idea of yeah that the first thing is not the last thing i don't know this is reminding me of a line from zergowan and the green night which says ah yeah yeahni f yeahnna and yell and navallika the form to the finishment fold is forelon and just for those of you who don't speak an obscure dialect of middle english i'll translate
00:21:32
Speaker
a year yearns or runs swiftly by and never yields the same the early part rarely promises the end beautiful it is really it's one and you read that most ah thank you it's one of the most striking images in the poem but it just goes to it's not like proust is the first one to say things don't turn out the way they start needless to say but the way he goes that these optical images for it i think are really striking yeah and i just want to add quickly that that's also one of the ways yeah he's he's constantly describing and redescribing love as well
00:22:05
Speaker
in this volume and i think probably throughout the whole of the thing whole of and the negative photo negativeative it was also a way that he describes love so the beloved when he's i think it's when he's thinking about why he likes albertine as opposed to andre who's the other girl in the group who he's actually much more similar to and just thinking about how um person that dramatic we that arrives in the notre no
00:22:37
Speaker
arrives in the and towards the end of the second half if we all having these experiences which i yeah lead de demand and from yeah yeah i think he says something like we um people finding their loved one a projection ah negative kind of the that other self which again is not ah totally original image either but it kind of becomes more original when you can think about it in light of the other ways that he's using that idea of the negative as this right and of deferred discovery yeah yeah that there's something really temporal about an a negative really i mean there's the moment of taking the photograph
00:23:12
Speaker
there's the moment of having the negative which is there's already a process between those two and then there's the moment of making the negative into the final image um which is ah that that that process itself is not a fixed process right like there's actually a lot of human choice that goes into making the final image at the time that you still today but at the time ahruus's writing in particular i found and towards the end i almost started to feel like there was a pattern like he would tell a little bit of a specific thing that happened the narrator would would process it very clearly from the narrator's voice
00:23:46
Speaker
and then it would zoom out and make some sort of globalization some sort of capacious statement about what that is all about or how we handle love etc etc yeah it was really this sort of recurring cycle of like actual events personal processing extrapolation that i i i found fascinating also once i noticed it then i couldn't kind of unsee it so even though i was enjoying it it it did also kind of turn into it felt started to feel like a bit of a tick
00:24:16
Speaker
i don't know what you thought emma that happens earlier in a way that i've been enjoying in a more impersonal way so there'll be some detail about the narrative and the characters and then i kind of step back about what people are like in general then yeah in not in the first person or not in the first person plural in that way no no that you're right the new is ah is a new the new is a new edition towards dan i'm so sorry it felt aggressive to me ah yeah but and factor of this whole like repetition repetition with a difference
00:24:49
Speaker
the sort of slow alteration of things that is sometimes possible and sometimes less possible times with the another major theme of this volume which is habit that this kind of tussle between habit and novelty and the narrator seeks novelty but then finds it quite challenging so when he arrives at bal deck initially he really he struggles he struggles with this disruption to his routine
00:25:19
Speaker
and his habit in volume one we found him in we we first encounter him in his conplay bedroom there's also quite a lot of thought about his butbe bedroom here and when he arrives in it it's like a kind of horror show base there was none for me in my bedroom mine in name only at belbeck it was full of things which did not know me which flung back at me the distrustful glance i cast at them and without taking any heed of my existence showed that i was interrupting the humdrum course of their
00:25:51
Speaker
so what i love about that is that the quite alive and that's something that we also see i'm starting to notice throughout this is great moment where a passes him or puts it over sits on somehow because i'm kind of footstool and it's kind of vibrating with with her kind of essence so i guess habit for proust is in is about object kind of becoming permeated with the every day of the characters right it's about the objects
00:26:21
Speaker
turning into some sort of assemblage with the character like working together with the character in concert and these new objects aren't ready to do that yet yeah yeah so habit is something that he's kind of trying to this comforting and yeah eventually he becomes very comfortable in the bedroom but also something that he needs to disrupt he's trying to escape it functions so interestingly i mean i was also noticing how habit is literally the word for clothing as well so it's kind of yeah
00:26:54
Speaker
way he way people kind of protect themselves or present themselves habit is referred to i think quite positively when he goes to visit lstr studio he talks about how he has worked so hard to become this great painter not only because he wanted to be known but also because he really worked hard he's kind of a laborious habit that has created these beautiful tableau because you know we talked about photography it's quite a nice running juxtaposition of photography and painting in yeah in this part as well so
00:27:28
Speaker
habit is about work most poignant moments where he talks about habit is also in this conversation that he has with his grandmother do you remember that bit where he says oh i could never live without you yeah yeah and then and theyre they both have this moment of mutual realization that it's indeed very probable that he will have to live without her yeah at some point and they have to sort of cool down from it yeah they they are having this love affair basically in be and first bit which is very sweet yeah but then he tries to comfort her by saying
00:27:59
Speaker
oh but you know what a creature of habit i am right i'm habituating to you now but once i'm habituated to another lie and i don't see you for months or even longer dot dot dot i'll be okay right but he tries to reassure her but it's obviously a very tragic moment the other thing about habit in terms of the project as a whole that i just want to mention briefly is that pruust is very clear that habit is the memory killer as it were that that things that happen many times that are part of your habit
00:28:30
Speaker
and this is this is true in my experience just sort of fade away you don't remember any of their contours with as much distinctness as you remember things that you have in fact somewhat forgotten and that end up getting recalled so things that it were outside of your habit that that you sort of excluded from your daily routine or from your from your reflections those are the things that end up being most vivid ah later on that feels true to me i feel like it's the
00:29:03
Speaker
it's ah it's not my daily tatra as ah as procet says the humdrum course of my daily life that feels most vivid and present to me even though it is most of the time indeed my present brucet guius is brought to you in partnership with public book an online magazine of ideas arts and scholarship you can find us at publicbooks dot org that's publicbooks dot or to donate to public books visit publicbooks dot org slash donate
00:29:37
Speaker
i wonder if the last passage that i wanted to talk about which comes right from the end of of the part of part two does some work to try and reconcile and of habit and singularity tell me more we've talked about how in this volume the narrator meets a lot of people the final meeting is with this group of girls this bondeddiy also the name of a film byyine shemmer um that he sees from a distance they kind
00:30:09
Speaker
but from the sea i mean they' all compared harry explicitly with the seanymphs and neri but they're also you know cycling and golfing and very like bicycling you kind of so very sporty yeah a composite of like the modern fana cacular women and these eternal nymph creatures he becomes obsessed with them it takes a long time for him to get to know them or it feels as though it does and eventually he makes friends with them
00:30:40
Speaker
it's probably his happiest time in bebe and that prompts a lot of reflection on kind of everyday banality of habitual interaction versus the kind of ecstatic imaginings that he was having prior to knowing them better about about these girls and he reflects on that right at the end just before this kind of peremptory ending where night says and the weather got bad and it was time to leave balbeck and off he went and he says the supernatural creatures which for a little time they had been to me still introduced
00:31:12
Speaker
even without any intention on my part a miraculous element into the most commonplace dealings that i might have with them or rather prevented such dealings from ever becoming commonplace at all my desire had so sought so ardently to learn the significance of the eyes which now knew and smiled to see me but whose glances on the first day had crossed mine like rays from another universe it had distributed so generously so carefully so minutely colour and fragrance over the carnation surfaces of these girls who now outstretched on the clifftop were simply offering me sandwiches or guessing riddles
00:31:44
Speaker
often in the afternoon while i lay there among them like those painters who seek to match the grandeur of antiquity in modern life give to a woman cutting her toeneel the nobility of the spinario or like rubens make goddesses out of women whom they know to people some mythological scene at those lovely forms dark and fair so dissimilar and type scattered around me in the grass i would gaze without emptying them perhaps of all the mediocre contents with which my everyday experience had filled them and at the same time without expressly recalling their heavenly origin
00:32:15
Speaker
as if like young hercules or young teleachus i had been set to play amid a band of nymph
Character Evaluations: Winners and Losers
00:32:21
Speaker
i know it' it's so much i like i mean spectacular it's a is an attempt to reconcile happy in the dream no i think you're right and what i just love about it as well is this layering of images so in volume one ade the main woman is one painting right she's boateelli that is her power what is interesting about albertine and the girls is they are kind of composite so many different images they photographs there
00:32:57
Speaker
ah kind of actually a watercololor of odette and is in the mix ah they're part of a landscape scene they ah you the way that he first meets alberrttin at the painter's studio she's painted she's kind of a creation that occurs it's so overlaid with different kind of artistic images and this kind of composite is working at that level in terms of the art image and the character but also in the or the various motifs that we've had about kind of encounters and habits and pleasure and boredom
00:33:30
Speaker
and i think there's this kind of attempt to marry the every day with the kind of enchanted aspect of the landscape at bebeck which is how these kind of nymph-like supernatural girls can also be kind of stretching out on a clifftop and ah with the kind of fidality of someone cutting that toenail right and that they're somehow full both of mediocrity and ah ah latent divinity e because he says that he thinks about their heavenly origin
00:34:01
Speaker
but without expressly recalling it so it it seems to be just sort of sa of oche yeah and yet since it's since it's there nevertheless a habit can't seem to form or it can't seem to do its work of making you for get what is around you and how it all works he also describes them really in a really painterly way in the citation you just read that so generously so carefully so minutely color and fragrance had been laid over the carnation surfaces of these girls
00:34:38
Speaker
ah laying color over something is a very obviously painterly gesture what's so fascinating here is there's um he clearly is interacting with them almost as an aesthetic object like the the painting of a woman cutting her toenails like the rubens medici portrait anyway so he he is he is treating them as an aesthetic experience akin to seeing one of elcier's paintings to use terms from the novel but he contrastes at another point with the demands placed upon him by
00:35:14
Speaker
male friendship that homoocial relationships because they're actual relationships as opposed to just a self having an asesthetic experience can be very draining to one's creativity um so that that that's he's talking about song lu and the difference between his relationship with song lu and the band of girls yeah yeah the reference to him not writing in the second volume i think is in relation to sal lu you' wondering whether it's right that he's spending so much time with his friend when he could be sitting down to write which obviously he's not going to do
00:35:46
Speaker
who sit down to write on their beach vacation i mean some people i'm sure some people do but i do think it's a sort of improbable setting for really getting down to business yeah yeah so extravagant objectification of women here and they you know they're not just art objects in the text they are and enough creatures and kind of zoologically describe yeah akin to flowers and plants say the kind of a botanical scattering as well as a color palette and a
00:36:18
Speaker
composite of images and marriage of the miraculous and the real you know this wondering more on a more prosaic level like and find this annoying
00:36:31
Speaker
no it's so it dinner is all it's all so hyperbolic really i mean and and usually that level of sustained hyperbole does get really quite tedious but i think for me i think white keeps it from being annoying but this is just me is how unexpected so much of it is right like the woman cutting her toenails is so that's just such an unexpected evocation that i'm i just it keeps me under its spell so i guess i'm saying actually that novelty the continued novelty is keeping my attention
00:37:03
Speaker
and if it if it were just a sustained sort of histrionic but not particularly vivid or not particularly novel description i think we would be annoyed and i don't think this would be a book that was still read yeah honestly i think it i think that's the difference between this being absolute just tedious long-windedness and being the book that is so beloved by so many today on that note we can come back to the title and the young girls in flower age and yourfe
00:37:34
Speaker
and that is such a call to cliche the association with flout between flowers and women in literature is and readably shop war sim when you try and think about it on its own and yet i do think that proust does something i think is's worth saying he does something really interesting with that in this because it's so specifically botanical we've got the names of flowers we've got the faces of the girls that are like flowers he's kind of set himself this literary challenge reminds me of some of the writers that i work on and in the sixteenth century who are working
00:38:05
Speaker
in this site of imitative tradition trying to create make it new really interesting variations on a theme and he absolutely does that but in other words like the kaleidoscope pray he's figuring the elements of literary tradition to make a new image right right and that's why it's so intellectually satisfying but you have the satisfaction of putting these moments together that are so far across the volume and seeing how things ah honestly seeing cruise
00:38:36
Speaker
architecture yeah and that is a premodern version of literary merit who in some respects i mean like i'm sure it's ah um a modern or modernist one postmodern as well in in different iterations again of that kind of literary kaidoscope that we're we're dealing with but it is through the slight variations in habit that you find kind of pleasure and beauty actually in early modern territory certainly ah yeah the final thing i would also say is that i think kind of wrestle with the question of how misogynistic i think this is or isn't
00:39:09
Speaker
this like extensive objectification ah of of of women for me i think at the end of the day i think they're all secretly men yeah i have a hardship yeah yeah definite topic episode yeah that's ah that's a topic for another episode but i mean their names are gil alber and that andrew like yeah
00:39:33
Speaker
so i just i have trouble thinking that um i'm not but that being said he does make the women he does he does literally objectify them to be able to contemplate them all that was true yes i guess i have not sort of put off no mini neither by it doesn't feel misogynist to me they are specific they have interiority there's a lot of humor to the way that he treats this process i think it's like and that kind of
00:40:04
Speaker
the narrator being both charming and silly right so leavens this situation yeah i think that's right
Preview of Next Volume Developments
00:40:23
Speaker
it's time to talk about the winners and losers of the volume ima what do you think oh yeah um excited for this part of it actually yeah who is your winner ah volume two of elo huhash and the winner difficult to pick but for the different reason then in volume one i felt like basically almost everyone was a loser that is not the case this time i felt like there were too many contenders for being the potential winner of this volume not least of whom as the narrator himself who really seems to have a great time
00:40:54
Speaker
in bob back and learn a lot and make good friends i don't know that all sound like so he says same but <unk> and now he's kind of yeah but right he's start he's starting to get in with um with the cool people but also developing his aesthetic sense which is a real heison thatre for him so that all seems great i think my my sincere but boring choices as st yeah the painter who just comes out on top like it just seems like
00:41:24
Speaker
he has sort of the full throatated admiration of the narrator and of the others whom he encounters he's still on the make he's not super famous yet but we're told that he's about to be and he offers a clear eyed evaluation of his own former silliness coin so he so he was previously a silly painter who who featured in the first volume under ah sort of nickname ah monsieur bi and he owns that and is like listen we all make mistakes we all have to cry i don't know
00:42:00
Speaker
who is your winner emma am i my winners not particularly exciting or convincing so i'd rather hear about yours no if i'm really happy that you spoke about that speech that he makes when the narrator outs him as monsieur b and he's like look part of life you have you can't regret it yeah that's right and this is description of his struggle between his like pride and his desire to be pedagogical with this young guy he's kind of mentoring right right great like look you know you don't have to be embarrassed by your embarrassing past i found it soothing
00:42:32
Speaker
yes yeah yeah yeah um yeah he's a great contender for winner and grandmother ah yes she's in the mix too go ahead why is she your winner well i'm judging on the same criteria but i just think she's so wonderfully drawn she comes across as such a perspicacious and interesting person but her as a potential winner in volume one because i just love the description of her relationship to the garden yes yeah
00:43:03
Speaker
in the house in commbrei and how she's really annoyed with all this fussy fussiness and she likes a natural garden and i think that has her aesthetic certainly seems to a kind of secret ah set it kind of manifesto for the for the novels themselves she's so lovely with the narrator they have some really really nice moments together like that knocking on the wall yeah entirely win in the sense that there's this point where the narrator starts to ditch her and he also ruins a moment where she's going to have her photo taken by san lu because he's jealous
00:43:35
Speaker
and that's a bit sad so she's not she's not a triumphant character necessarily but for me she's the undoubted winner because she she just comes across ah such an interesting mind as well as a nice character yeah so the scenes with her are very affecting but i love how she she has this obsession with seignier yeah and chance quoting so yeah she bonds with char over seven years letters yeah loves chardo and and sal lu she kind of she really
00:44:07
Speaker
comes into her own in belbeck as well she's having a kind of parallel journey to to the narrator they both have more freedom than they've had previously in paris or compplay because they're not so neither of them us so restrained by the parental generation think it's a really nice account of what our grandparent grandchild relationship can be but i also think that the way she comes across as a person is subtly drawn but yeah really evocative and so i i think she's my winner because i love her i think that's a great way to choose a winner um do you want to say you're loser
00:44:40
Speaker
since i took the first winner i've got much more conflict about my loser i' sure we have the same one i suspect we do i'm predicting we do but who's loser is' it lock it's black oh he's such a loser in this volume but i have a he really is emotional conflict about it because again it's so embedded in the anti-semitism of the moment so block is the only prominent jewish character at this point in the narrators generation he's really marginalised in society
00:45:10
Speaker
and because of that as well as because of his unfortunately terrible personality
00:45:17
Speaker
it's he's well and actually some of the the most um just sort of overtly like offensively anti-semitic moments in this volume come from block himself yeah who mimic ah quote unquote jewish speech in ah in a very offensive way and uses derogatory terms um and i think that that is just sort of an attempt to fit in on his part because he's sort of he sort of terminally doesn't fit and the scene that really cemented for me that he was the loser was when
00:45:49
Speaker
robertber ah deson lu has to go back to his regiment donciie which that's also like a whole that it's very jane austen right like what's the regiment up to like it's it's the sort of off anyway more about on lo future episodes because i do really like kim but just haven't had time to get into it same was sha ru i mean a lot of it in abertin i mean all the main characters we haven't gotten into yet but we we come back to them but ah san who invites him to come see him and doner at his regiment but he invites him as follows if you
00:46:21
Speaker
happen to be passing through doncia any afternoon when i'm off duty you might ask for me at the barracks but i hardly ever am off duty i mean this is an invitation that's not an invitation right and the narrator is like oh god san lu is so rude like that's such a it's not like black's feelings are going to be so hurt but instead block takes it as it takes it very literally and is like so lu wants me to come visit i must drop everything and in fact we should go in two days' time if only we could
00:46:52
Speaker
um and the narrator is just horribly embarrassed but it's true i mean this is a very obvious social cue that pla does not pick up on yeah what i had picked out is um ah found the scene where um the narrator and saal lu go to dinner block's house and meet his father and his sisters and uncles so so sad gi along narratively but it's so painful because it's so painful they' all really cringe
00:47:22
Speaker
this whole family partly because they're not comfortable because they've got these two people that they're trying to impress and then right right to people who are not jewish right right and they they're very conscious of ah of the situation so and san louis is ah is a marquis right yeah so so he they're dealing with and a noble person and then is and a friend who's definitely ah more cemented in society than they are yeah they they're not sure how to be they're not sure whether to to kind of use that kind of familiar
00:47:55
Speaker
tropes but then they have use a lot of them to love their kind of set pieces to try and and pray is just um it's unbearable anyway during that scene the narrator comments i think and then this is this feels also more like the kind of hindsight narrator saying says like unfortunately ah gas was very much far from from something that blocke would try and avoid yeah oh john all poor block he really is the loser of this volume he speaks in such a precious and absurd way as well she did in volume one but i think because the narrator is less sympathetic to him now so
00:48:29
Speaker
it just feels more awkward and sad yeah yeah like he said he'll say what it's like son lu with a shining helm or whatever he's always using homeric epithets for everyone which i mean that's like that's not i trying to think of what ah your homeric epithet would be is distracting me but um i think maybe we should it yes i'll tell you later i'll tell you next time ah time to wrap up are we now like if we zoom out where are we now and where are we going let's give our listeners a bit of a sense
00:49:01
Speaker
well not read any anymore of this after this volume so this this i mean this this really is going into untarted territory now but i think we've met a lot of the really important characters we've met shaus who met harlu met elti alberin there' quite a lot of foreshadowing about appearance and disappearance and a later volume is called al there in this value i think yes it is yeah so oh alphaine disappeared so and and we kind of got to the end of the naator childhood i think as well
00:49:31
Speaker
but yeah does feel like he's he's entering a new social life one that includes the nobility and and we've we learned yeah in the course of this volume that he is independently wealthy so it seems like that is one way to if you have the right connections and you have enough money you can fraternize with the nobility even if you are ah so i think we're we're getting the sense that he socially speaking as upwardly mobile and that that is going to be where yeah go
00:50:02
Speaker
and then next ah the next volume is called the gamon way the gaments are the noble family who ancestrally hold the land where commre is um and we've met several of them it via swan so far so it's it it seems clear that we're about to go into sort of a glittering social place but i these are now we're getting into the volumes that i've only read long ago and in translation and i have forgotten much of so i'm i'm really excited to keep to keep
00:50:33
Speaker
reading emma i'm really excited i actually started reading the first few pages last night of the next volume i this for you my copys upstairs in my office i'll take it home with me and i'll start this weekend i missed san lu because he he loses the narrator's attention at the end of music he' so nice that these girls so i wanted to check that we see we meet him again soon because i wanted more think for this episode of proust curious we hope we've piqued your curiosity proust curious is hosted by emmalawson and hannah weaver and produced by michael goldsmi
00:51:08
Speaker
you can reach us at proustcurious at gmail dot com we'd also like to thank our partner public but an online magazine of ideas arts and scholarship check it out publicbooks dot or you can reach us at proustcur at gmail dot com join us next time for volume three dakote de che germon the germonts