4chan archive /lit/ (index)
similar threads
2013-08-06 02:23 4003734 Anonymous (Marcel Proust.jpg 215x321 13kB)
Has anyone here read Marcel Proust's work, specifically his seven-volume novel "In Search of Lost Time"? If so, did you like it? Was it difficult?

1 min later 4003738 Anonymous
Best lit ever and I'm not joking.

2 min later 4003742 Celebes
>>4003734 Yes. Not really, I really liked Swann's Way but in my opinion the novel starts to go downhill after that. Keep in mind this was just my experience, and a lot of other people have fallen in love with it. Not difficult. Difficult to continuously catch myself from dozing, yes, but not difficult, unless you can't handle run-on sentences and verbosity.

3 min later 4003745 Celebes (proust.jpg 1102x409 206kB)
>>4003742 And how could I have forgotten the picture?

3 min later 4003746 Anonymous
>>4003738 Feel free to elaborate , anon... how so? I haven't read it, and I thought about picking up the first volume some time soon...

5 min later 4003752 Anonymous
>>4003742 I see.... hmm. Well, I still think I'll give it a shot. And yeah, I've heard the same things regarding the sentences and the use of excessive amount of words in general, in his work.

8 min later 4003761 Celebes
>>4003752 They are the defining characteristics of his writing. Some people love that; I thought it was pretty but it (both the prose and the overall 'story'/work) got very tiring. Brevity, ironically, would have done it wonders. At least a couple thousand thousand pages shorter.

13 min later 4003771 Anonymous
>>4003761 Lel, true that. Okay, lemme ask you this... how about the plot, his life? Was that... interesting, at least? like, the story itself, if we look past the writing style itself.

13 min later 4003772 Anonymous
>>4003742 >Onward my posts run so I can post-ironically satirize run-on sentences

16 min later 4003779 Anonymous
I've read it once and was amazed I got through it. Ever since then, I've studied a little bit of generative grammar, generative syntax, and I've read some parts again and enjoyed them much more. I've also read a commentary Proust made on Flaubert, but I don't think it's available in english. It really gave you an idea of just how much mastery you have to have in order to appreciate the link that exists between form and content. I believe what Proust was trying to accomplish is beyond most people today.

18 min later 4003784 Anonymous
>>4003779 I see... now I feel a bit more reluctant to it. But thank you for your advice.

18 min later 4003788 Anonymous
It's pretty great but it's also extremely long and tiring. Volume 4 is the best. Go ahead and read Proust if you want to, but I'd say read Flaubert's Sentimental Education first.

23 min later 4003809 Anonymous
>>4003788 > Flaubert's Sentimental Education Is that an easy read in your opinion? I know very little about Flaubert's or his work, only know that he wrote Madame Bovary.

28 min later 4003827 Anonymous
>>4003809 I thought L'Education Sentimentale was pretty boss, even thought it's somewhat mondaine. It encouraged me to read La Tentation de Saint-Antoine afterward.

31 min later 4003838 Celebes
>>4003771 >plot Lol... if you're looking for plot, this is literally the worst place to go looking. >his life? Was that... interesting, at least? Not really... unless you find cakes and French aristocracy chatting interesting. >like, the story itself, if we look past the writing style itself. The work draws its power from its (apparent, I didn't see it) capturing of the psychological; its harnessing of memory, childhood, sexuality, love. Not story; the happenings in the book are mere scenarios to allow Marcel to reflect his philosophical ideas onto it. All I found were snippets of psychology/philosophy wedged between hundreds and hundreds of pages detailing a sheltered French boy be a homosexual and his journeys through drawing rooms and gardens galore. >>4003772 And, like a restless daisy fighting in the wind - chancing to rebel every so often - like sprinkles on a delectable madeleine, balancing crispness and moistness, resting on grandma's cupboard - but, ultimately, like yin's yang, succumbing to its natural state of impotence; that is, the state of all of us, every child chained to their mother's rub, or every pup yielding to their master's ring - I wandered in between Swann's house and my own, that is, Swann's way, very different to the way to the Mme de Guermantes, that is, the Guermantes way, so different that it chokes you to your basest feelings and sensations, the root of your knowledge, like a trumpeted angel playing a madrigal written by a demon; it was in this patch of grass that I first learned, many years ago, - only available to me because of the internal affects this cup of tea has caused me, many years in the future in my mother's home - that I was able to love another; it was, in addition, the place where, like a cradle for a baby ox, I uncovered the idea that I could display the traits of a man, that I was, indeed, not to be forever a child, but that, one day, far in the future, I would follow in the footsteps of my own father, or our family friend Swann, and become, like them, even though they were once small boys like myself on that day, many years ago, a man, full of energy and will, drifting between levels of space and time, breathing in the products of nature, relinquishing the souls of acquaintances and lovers, but, ultimately, just as the daisy, fall to the greater control of the world's mind's eye....

49 min later 4003900 Anonymous
>>4003838 You wrote what I meant. Look, English isn't my first language; I just meant to ask: How do you consider the book itself minus the writing style - which you just answered now. So thank you.

57 min later 4003924 Celebes
>>4003900 Oh okay. Well you are welcome.

14 hours later 4005510 Anonymous
>>4003809 Flaubert and Proust have the same level of french. None is more difficult to understand linguistically or grammatically. They don't ever approach Joyce or Pynchon level difficulty. But Proust is probably the greatest psychologist of all time. He will make you wiser and sadder in equal parts.

15 hours later 4005539 Anonymous
>>4003742 In The shadow of young girls I'm flower is much better than swann's way.

15 hours later 4005542 Celebes
>>4005539 That was the most boring book in the whole thing in my opinion.

15 hours later 4005560 Anonymous
>>4005510 It's interesting you should mention Joyce, as when I was reading Proust I found it interesting to note all the influence he had upon Joyce. Aside from the obvious structural similarities, you'll come across little descriptions and episodes that Joyce expands and homages in portrait of the artist and Ulysses. I know how much this board ( and me, if I'm honest) fawns over Joyce, so if you love his work it's worth checking Proust out (along with Ibsen and all the other standard influences of Joyce of course).

15 hours later 4005570 Anonymous
>>4003742 Were you reading the Moncrieff translation?

15 hours later 4005585 Celebes
>>4005560 Someone on here also mentioned that Joyce (and Beckett) said Proust was just way too long and tiring so he couldn't have had too much influence (I have very happy hearing that because I thought I was pleb for not liking Proust). >>4005570 Oui.

15 hours later 4005597 Anonymous
>>4005585 Joyce got snubbed by Proust at a party once (Proust said he hadn't heard of Ulysses or something and you know how egotistical Joyce could be),so denied he liked his work. IIRC Joyce definitely read Swann's Way, but he probably lost interest pretty quickly after that -due to its constant focus on the tittle-tattle of the aristocracy (Joyce famously said after the party at which he met Proust something along the lines of 'he wanted to talk about Duchesses, while I wanted to talk about chamber maids'). Beckett makes sense. In his phase as Joyce's protege would probably have agreed with his stated opinions and if Beckett said that in his later career, Proust is definitely is the antithesis of all he stood for.

15 hours later 4005598 Anonymous
>>4005585 >>4005597 I've found an article on it http://flavorwire.com/318990/when-m arcel-proust-met-james-joyce

15 hours later 4005607 Anonymous
>>4005560 >as when I was reading Proust I found it interesting to note all the influence he had upon Joyce. Aside from the obvious structural similarities, you'll come across little descriptions and episodes that Joyce expands and homages in portrait of the artist and Ulysses you're making shit up, and I can tell becuase I checked the index of Don Gifford's very thorough Ulysses Annotated and not once does it mention Proust. pls take your pretension elsewhere, thanks

15 hours later 4005609 Anonymous
>>4005607 Don Gifford isn't the be all and end all of Joyce criticism. I suggest you read the epigraph of Ulysses annotated.

15 hours later 4005618 Celebes
>>4005597 The only thing I had heard about their meeting was that Joyce claimed there was nothing to say to each other, because for Joyce his day was ending, and for Proust his day was just beginning (they met at night and Proust was a night owl/shut in).

15 hours later 4005631 Anonymous
>>4005560 Joyce was never influenced by Proust. Proust never read Joyce. >>4005585 Joyce admired Proust as a psychologist but said he was too long. Beckett said that Proust is tiring but what he meant was Proust was challenging. I think he said something like Proust is tiring but never mentally tiring. Beckett really admired Proust but I think he meant to say that Proust was challenging.

15 hours later 4005642 Celebes
>>4005598 I wanted to quote some of that but there is just to much to quote. Good read. I'm happy Joyce was the one that came to be remembered.

16 hours later 4005691 Anonymous
>>4005631 >>4005607 You can't prove he influenced Joyce, but here's a couple of examples of the top of my head. Proteas: 'Madeleine la mare' - reference to the Madeleine biscuit - Proust wrote about involuntary memory prodded by something physical, as is Joyce here. It's also a pun about Madeleine Lemire who illustrated Proust and was the inspiration for several of his characters in 'a la recherche du temps perdu'. Of course as it's Joyce it could also be a pun about 50 other things e.g.'la mer' (as stephen is by the sea). Once again the epigraph to Ulysses Annotated is relevant - we have no way of knowing if this is the case. Hades: Bloom is thinking about the ground of graveyards being like Honeycomb. Proust says something similar about the Combray church in Swann's Way. Once again, they're probably referencing something that's a precursor to both of them,but there's a case to be made, or an argument to be had. Joyce undoubtedly read some of Proust's work, but there is little evidence to say whether this influence is or isn't definitively present in Ulysses.

16 hours later 4005706 Anonymous
>>4005691 I think there's a difference between an allusion and being influenced. Beckett was influenced by both Joyce and Proust. Joyce was not influenced by Proust. I just don't see it anywhere in Joyce and I'm pretty sure Joyce did not read all of In Search... At first he didn't like Proust but then he grew to admiring him a bit. Nov1922 10.42 "Proust - max text - min action Cine [vice versa]" Apr1923 A-Oxen 47 "Proust reader ends sentence before him" Jun1923 A-Scylla 35 "Proust, analytic still life" "Our goal is.. also to enlarge our vocabulary of the subconscious as Proust has done." (AP74) "He is the most important French author of our day... the best of the modern French writers, and certainly no one has taken modern psychology so far, or to such a fine point. I myself think, however, that he would have done better if he had continued to write in his earlier style, for I remember reading once some early sketches in a book of his entitled Les plaisirs et les jours, studies of Parisian society in the '90s, and there was one in it, 'Mélancolique Villégiature de Mme de Breyves' which impressed me greatly. [Spanish?] If he had continued in that early style, in my opinion he would have written the best novels of our generation. But instead he launched into À la recherche du temps perdu, which suffers from over-elaboration... He is a special writer, I admit, yet in spite of the fact that he writes about decaying aristocrats, I rank him with Balzac and Thackeray... It was not experimentation, his innovations were necessary to express modern life as he saw it. As life changes, the style to express it must change also.... Proust's style conveys that almost imperceptible but relentless erosion of time which... is the motive of his work. [attitude towards noble blood compared to Saint Simon]" (AP78-79) Proust spoke of nothing but duchesses "while I was far more interested in their maids" (WP227)

18 hours later 4006092 Anonymous
>>4005539 Agree so much with this. >>4005597 Um, yeah I havent read it, but Beckett wrote a book on Proust and his work. To do that, you gotta have some interest or admiration for the guy, I think.

19 hours later 4006098 Anonymous
If you haven't read Proust by the age of 18 then you're pretty much a lost cause. If you don't know Proust you simply don't know literature and I doubt I'd even bother conversing with you if you revealed that to me.

19 hours later 4006133 Anonymous
>>4003734 Got a used copy of Swann in Love, part of Swann's way. It was good, certainly wasn't difficult to read. The involuntary memory stuff didn't impress me that much. Most of it was, "Oh someone mentioned a town that my girl and I once went to, now I'm sad."

19 hours later 4006142 Anonymous
>>4006098 >conversing with you Who speaks like this? Edgy neckbeards, that's who.

19 hours later 4006147 Anonymous
>>4005631 >Beckett really admired Proust but I think he meant to say that Proust was challenging. why do plebs think "challenge" is a good thing in the arts? aesthetics has little to do with being "challenging", if it did then video games would be art. If the best art is the art that requires the most knowledge and skill to derive beauty from it then that stupid blank canvas postmodern "art" is the greatest masterpiece the world has ever seen. >>4005631 >Beckett really admired Proust but I think he meant to say that Proust was challenging. what is "challenging" about Proust? His prose? Proust's prose is elegant, it's not "difficult" to read, and even if it were it would not necessarily be a compliment, and if it were a compliment then German philosophers like Hegel would be called "master prose stylists". Are his metaphors "challenging"? But the point of a metaphor is to create a clear image in the reader's mind, if it's obscure then it is a shitty metaphor. Are the themes he deals with difficult to grasp? But a theme cannot be "difficult", it can only be obscure, and if it's an obscure theme it's only because a narrow group of people have experience with it. For example, existential angst might only be experienced by a minority of the population and as such only those people will be able to grasp the theme, but themes that great poets like Homer cover such as heroism and adventure and brotherhood are themes that many can relate to and grasp.

19 hours later 4006155 Celebes
>>4006098 woah so literary and erudite can we be penpals (promise only to write in verbose run-ons)

19 hours later 4006157 Anonymous
>>4006098 le euphoric fedora tipping leddit doge spotted man the harpoons, bend your backs to the oars!

19 hours later 4006212 Catholic
>>4006155 >>4006157 I tip my 5 dollar replica miter to both of you for destroying this pig-faced atheist piece of moose shit.

21 hours later 4006525 Anonymous
i'm going to a bookshop tomorrow and i'm hopefully picking up volumes 1-3. Who does the best translation for "In Search Of Lost Time"?

21 hours later 4006537 Celebes
>>4006525 >Who does the best translation You sure English is your first language? I am really fond of the Modern Library's translation (it's been revised like 4 times and don't really want to type it all again, google it). Penguin has a different person for each book which sounds like a shit idea.

21 hours later 4006551 Anonymous
>>4006537 It is, sorry if I phrased that wrong since i'm pretty tired at the moment. I will look into the Modern Library's translation. i've never been fond of Penguin's translation but i've been forced to use them with some books I own.

21 hours later 4006556 Anonymous
>>4006525 Moncrieff/Kilmartin/Enright if you're reading more than the first volume. Lydia Davis if you only intend to read Swann's Way.

21 hours later 4006560 Anonymous
>>4005642 Ugh, why would you be this retarded in public?

21 hours later 4006562 Celebes
>>4006551 >sorry if I phrased that wrong Just a lil' joke >>4006560 Do elaborate

21 hours later 4006564 Anonymous
Davis does a pretty good 'modern' translation of Swann's Way, but the second part of the penguin series (by a different author) got mixed reviews. If you're planning on consistency, you'd better get used to Moncrieff's (which is apparently slightly archaic in comparison to Proust's style in the original). There are some good German and Spanish translations though.

21 hours later 4006575 Anonymous
>>4006564 I think the main problem with Penguin using seven different translators is that its quite jarring going from one volume to the next as it ruins the continuity.

21 hours later 4006580 Anonymous
>>4006562 >Do elaborate Considering that this entire thread is about Proust, it's fair to say that Joyce isn't the only one who is remembered.

21 hours later 4006585 Celebes
>>4006580 I meant in the general public's eye, of course. Ask anyone who James Joyce is and they are bound to give you at least a vague answer. Proust is a little more obscure, and for good reason he's no where near Joyce's level

21 hours later 4006596 Anonymous
>>4006585 Ask a French grade school classroom who Proust is. Are you really that dense to not realize that more English speakers know Joyce because he wrote in English?

21 hours later 4006597 Anonymous
>>4006585 >Ask anyone who James Joyce is and they are bound to give you at least a vague answer. You're giving people way too much credit. >Proust is a little more obscure, and for good reason [he's no where near Joyce's level] Well, there's no accounting for taste.

21 hours later 4006608 Anonymous
>>4006575 It's a shame that translations these days can't be done by people like the old classicists - over-educated aristocrats with time on his hands and a passion for the source material. Whereas now, academics are the only ones with the ability to do Proust justice and they don't have the means to support themselves or the economic imperative for a 10 year project like this.

21 hours later 4006611 Anonymous
>>4006596 I thought Joyce was pretty famous?

21 hours later 4006613 Celebes
>>4006596 ? Is this hypocrisy just a ruse or...? Of course French people know Proust; you just fed into the same fallacy you were calling me out on. However, people all over know who Joyce is, not just English speaking countries, but that was an alright attempt buddy. >>4006597 >You're giving people way too much credit. I probably am but in my experience it has been that way. >Well, there's no accounting for taste. The entirety of ISOLT < The Dead objectively

21 hours later 4006622 Anonymous
>>4006596 Ulysses was first published in France, yo.

21 hours later 4006623 Anonymous
>>4006613 Who are these people, "All over"? Ulysses and Finnegan's wake are unreadable translated, Portrait of an Artist would be so-so.

21 hours later 4006630 Anonymous
Daily reminder that Walter Benjamin thought Proust was the greatest.

22 hours later 4006654 Anonymous
>>4006630 Is that supposed to be a bad thing because of muh Marx or something?

22 hours later 4006659 Celebes (Untitled.png 1190x426 67kB)
>>4006623 http://www.theguardian.com/books/20 13/feb/05/finnegans-wake-china-jame s-joyce-hit I'm being generous with the picture too, comparing Ulysses with only the first volume: In Search of Lost Time has below 4,000 ratings. >>4006630 Daily reminder that "[if] aesthetic merit were ever again to center the canon [Finnegans Wake] would be as close as our chaos could come to the heights of Shakespeare and Dante." - Harold Bloom

22 hours later 4006695 Anonymous
>>4006623 >>4006659 #rekt

22 hours later 4006704 Anonymous
>>4006659 Did you really just cite an English website and the American version of Google to show the international popularity of Joyce? And you top it off with an article that indicates only 0.0001% of China has read Finnegan's Wake? Could you BE more retarded?

22 hours later 4006705 Anonymous
>>4006659 So the consensus is more people read and dislike Joyce, while Proust is read by less people and appreciated more? It seems more people write about Joyce also. I'm not sure how you're being generous to Joyce here.

22 hours later 4006714 Anonymous
>>4006659 Nice job googling, I saw the same article. If you think Chinese readers are at all relevant you're out of your gourd. The few thousand a month they sell just go to readers desperately wanting to be western, just instead of buying some gaudy name brand hand bag they buy a ridiculous novel.

22 hours later 4006716 Celebes
>>4006704 >implying the number of foreign and english readers of ISOLT combined matches Joyce's english readers My point in posting the China article was to show people indeed read Joyce "all over." >>4006705 The more ratings someone has on Goodreads = the lower their score will be, no matter how classic (on average). I'm not trying to do Joyce justice, I'm simply refuting the crazy idea that Proust and Joyce received equal fame.

22 hours later 4006726 Celebes
Also I don't understand how there isn't more of a backlash against the claim that Joyce ISN'T remembered more than Proust. Like could a falser statement about modernist authors be uttered?

22 hours later 4006727 Anonymous
>>4006705 Also, I'd say China is influenced to a greater extent by Anglophone culture. Hong Kong, the business ties with the USA and English as the lingua franca in business, the universities based on British models,the fact they often adopt English forenames etc

22 hours later 4006731 Anonymous
>>4006716 >My point in posting the China article was to show people indeed read Joyce "all over." Was that ever in dispute? The point is he's much more popular in English speaking countries and not very well known elsewhere, something the article does nothing to disprove. Also, good job not addressing my other point.

22 hours later 4006742 Anonymous
>>4006726 I mean, you're right, it's just that you sound like a douche and you argue like you have brain damage, so people are giving you shit. If you came off as less dumb the last ten posts wouldn't have happened.

22 hours later 4006750 Anonymous
Joyce fans are the retards who get in heated arguments over how great some fraud like Jackson Pollock, E.E. Cummings, or David Lynch is, but never actually say anything about the content. It's never about the content. It's about waiting until you make a positive criticism of something whose worth was never demonstrated by any metric to begin with, and then >implying and calling you a retard until you get bored, so they can go back and suck more fashionable pomo cock.

22 hours later 4006752 Celebes
>>4006731 >Was that ever in dispute? >Who are these people, "All over"? Why does it matter is Joyce is more popular in English speaking countries? More people in the world know James Joyce, less know Marcel Proust. This shouldn't be an argument. >Also, good job not addressing my other point. What? That he's unreadable translated? French people (who you seem to be so fond of) read English translations of Ulysses all the time.

22 hours later 4006758 Celebes
>>4006742 ad hom nigga >>4006750 >anyone who likes things I don't like is pretending! God you gotta love plebeian logic.

22 hours later 4006765 Anonymous
>>4006758 1. Liberal middle class eclipses upper class in importance 2. Upper class study of classics and Latin/Greek literacy die, because the bourgeoisie can't or doesn't want to learn that shit 3. Vernacular literature goes from being a cultural pastime for the upper class to being an academic study for the middle class 4. New field needs legitimacy to justify itself in comparison to the venerable classics 5. Predictably chooses obscurantism and the dilettantish modernist glorification of folk culture (itself a result of its lack of classical education) 6. Searches the most 2deep4u pleb author it can 7. Finds a scion in Joyce, a naturally talented artificer of plot structure and a massive dilettante himself 8. Encourages him to write intertextual literature, which totally misinterprets the breadth of knowledge of the old renaissance men as categorical memorization of a point-form list of approved deep'n'edgy authors 9. He creates Finnegans Wake, a worthy Bible for a new cultural era of inert bourgeois "intellectuals", with no sense of their history, whose idea of edification is confirming through their literature professor that they indeed got all 13 of the references to Oscar Wilde (Approved Literary Author #83) on page 294 10. Standards of academia decline as the humanist ideal of education transforms into the modern public school system, the tip of which pyramid is circular "critical analysis" through arbitrary metrics cloaked in obscurantism 11. Dawn of Megalopolitan Civilization. Extinction of spiritual creative force. Life itself becomes problematical. Ethical-practical tendencies of an irreligious and unmetaphysical cosmopolitanism. Materialistic world-outlook. Cult of science, utility and prosperity. Degradation of abstract thinking into professional lecture-room philosophy. Compendium literature. Spread of a final world-sentiment.

22 hours later 4006766 Anonymous
>>4006716 >My point in posting the China article was to show people indeed read Joyce "all over." That would only work if Proust hasn't be translated to Chinese. Which it has. >The more ratings someone has on Goodreads = the lower their score will be, no matter how classic (on average). I'm not sure you get how sample size is relevant To be honest, I get the impression you like Joyce so much because you don't understand him rather than you do. You seem to have bought the "patrician" marketing for Joyce, and despite your own results, figure that the fame is not a result of such and therefore a valuable measure. I mean, if you point was more people got trolled by Joyce and therefore give him attention, then fine. But I doubt you see yourself as such.

22 hours later 4006782 Anonymous
>>4006758 > plebeian logic >>4006765 > this fucking post TRIPFAG WRECKED FOREVER.

22 hours later 4006821 Celebes
>>4006765 >>4006782 So much samefag it hurts + You created a wall of bullshit reasoning in the line of French Marxism to tell people who like Joyce they're pretending? You do realize upper class people from everywhere love Joyce correct? Just because you only talk about literature to anons on /lit/ doesn't mean every Joyce fan does it to "suck more fashionable pomo cock."

22 hours later 4006856 Anonymous
>>4006765 good posting and celebes, jesus christ, ur fucking annoying. go to sleep

22 hours later 4006865 Celebes
>>4006856 I was helping OP & friends for the entire thread. It only got turned around when faggot over here >>4006560 decided to ruin the thread with his vendetta against English readers.

26 hours later 4007423 Anonymous
>>4006750 Cummings' quality was inconsistent but he was hardly a fraud.

26 hours later 4007439 Anonymous
>>4006716 >I'm simply refuting the crazy idea that Proust and Joyce received equal fame. The crazy idea here is that fame is precisely quantifiable and worth debating. You might as well argue about whether Dostoevsky is more famous than Tolstoy, because it doesn't actually matter.

26 hours later 4007455 Celebes
>>4007439 Don't bump this thread unless you want to un-derail it. The answer would be Tolstoy of course

549.961 0.280