blog#2 – Combray and Childhood Guilt —
While reading Proust’s Combray, I automatically and unconsciously tried to categorize it in my brain with themes of other texts and books I’ve read in the past. The result was somewhere between ‘intimacy-deprived only child soliloquy‘ and ‘anxiety fueled mommy issues‘.
Though Combray left with me with more questions than answers, after giving it some thought, I felt it was only right that it was this way. The protagonist himself was a labyrinth of ‘what-ifs’. In the end, he himself – though he has more context than the reader – was left with more questions than answers. Which in itself, is very reminiscent in real life; when in ‘real life’ do we get concrete answers that tie-up loose ends nicely? Almost never.
I found myself extremely empathetic towards the boy’s childlike schemes towards getting his mother to give him one last goodnight’s kiss. I felt it was a universal theme of a child’s understanding of priorities in life. (I mean “child’s understanding” not in a negative connotation but simply as priorities and wants not influenced by responsibilities). His extreme detail and thought-processes of how to get to point A and point B, and his subsequent sorrow when his plans fall through, feels like a story taken out of my own childhood. Replace mother’s kiss with a bedtime story and his father’s intimacy-dismissive attitude with grumpy older siblings… well then, its a story straight from my childhood. (Or as the book puts it: babyhood)
A thought that kept coming back to me while I was reading Combray was the importance of translation. The original text was written in French then translated to other languages such as English – but does this affect the reader’s interpretation of the text? Or does it alter Proust’s original words and meaning? This thought stemmed from the fact that I had to switch from reading the PDF on my screen to audiobook because my eyes were about to fall out out their sockets. Though the majority of the text was the same and all the same events happened, some words were exchanged for their synonyms, the order of sentences were mixed. I understand that a major theme of this class is the importance of ‘translation’ and ‘origin’ and the subsequent importance of completely disregarding that. For example, if the text was a poem originally written in French, then translated to English, surely there would be meaning lost in translation, but also some gained in translation. Nonetheless, it served as a great 20 minute thought-experiment rabbit-hole.