On Part I
Having read the introduction by Davis, I mentally prepared myself to be thoroughly confused and worked up my capacity for patience. To my surprise, for how long Proust’s sentences and descriptions are, they flow extremely well and are very lovely to read. That being said, I am impressed by how much can be said about so little actually happening within the story. Sometimes it feels like my own thought process bouncing between analogy and all kinds of ideas and tangents. Below I will list some of my impressions after reading through the passage.
A central theme of this part seems to be the narrator’s relationship with his memories at Combray. In our dreams, we sometimes explore the places and times we have been in, but without complete clarity. It is once the narrator is pulled into the waking world that he recalls his experiences. His relationship with his family is an interesting one. There is an almost Oedipal obsession with his mother, and a cold sternness from his father, and yet, this seems to flip by the end of the chapter, for it is his mother who shows the sternness and his father who grants him the comfort he seeks (sort of; it is clear that his father does not express his love (?) outwardly). He is portrayed with a nervous disposition and desires the fleeting comfort of his mother at night, which is often denied because of his nervousness. However, perhaps paradoxically, his anxiety seems to give him the courage to be “rebellious” and seek the comfort he is kept from. This seems to bring truer expressions of love between him and his parents. Love thus appears to be another recurring theme in the story. And of course, there is the scene with the tea and madeleine. This scene was wonderfully poetic and lyrical, but also very confusing. The madeleine evokes something within the narrator. I believe this is the peculiarity of memory. In dreams we see fragments, and in our awoken minds we recall, but sometimes it takes something as simple as the taste of a madeleine to make us relive. It’s like a gateway into lost time, or perhaps an anchor? Back in high school, I studied literature for a bit, and this reminds me of the poetry of an author, Boey Kim Cheng, who often wrote about the power of food to bind us to memory and love and family, allowing us to rediscover memories from the past.
Those are just some of my musings and I haven’t really thought too hard about their applicability. So, what about Swann? I do not fully understand the class politics in play with regard to Swann, or why some of the family members treat him with such disdain. I also do not really understand his place in the story yet. I understand him to be a man with friends in high places and he maintains his relationship with the narrator’s family through a connection to the grandfather, but not much more than that. Perhaps more will become clear once I proceed to Part II. Will update this post when/if I get there!
Oh yes, and a question to pose: What is the value of remembering the past? Is it better to remember, or to forget?
EDIT: Some other thoughts that occurred as I read other posts.
- It is beautiful the way the chapter ends as the memory of Combray is rebuilt “from (his) cup of tea”. It’s like it is immortalised.
- The narrator describes how there is something more enduring and more immaterial even as people die and things are destroyed by time. He says smell and taste remain for a long time, but perhaps it is not smell and taste per se. After all, the feeling evoked within him was not the tea or the madeleine, but something deeper within. Those memories deep inside will always withstand the test of time. (but maybe I’m misreading this!)