On the occasion of the centenary of the author of In Search of Lost Time, an extensive epistolary anthology of the author that marked a turning point in modern narrative appears, as well as a set of conferences on his work that is already a reference. And other recent volumes that we discuss here.
THE POWER OF EPISTOLAR MEMORY
TONI MONTESINOS
In the town of Illiers-Combray, pastry chefs market the madeleine Marcel Proust talks about in the famous passage in which its protagonist evokes the memory of the taste of a "shell" that he dunked in the tea that his aunt Léonie offered him. This is the most famous passage from Swann's Along the Way (1913). Today, it is possible to go to the narrative Combray by stepping on the real Combray, and to do it from a distance on these dates, especially thanks to a whole series of books that commemorate the hundred years since the author's death.
Among them, we have the work of Estela Ocampo, who has prepared some Selected Letters that, ordered according to their theme ("The sentimental world of Proust" or "Proust on his work"), bring us to the most intimate Proust, which happened hours writing to relatives, friends or lovers. An example of this is the Venezuelan composer Reynaldo Hahn, with whom she had a loving relationship and whose letters "are encoded, written in an invented language, clues and assumptions."
This university professor had already taken charge of the author in Five Proustian Love Lessons (Siruela, 2006), which revolved around love, desire, jealousy, heartbreak and homosexual love, hence it is not surprising that she now addresses on several occasions, in the introduction, such a personal plot from Proust regarding his letters.
A material this (selected from his six thousand letters) that, above all, can change an impression that is too stereotyped: "The image of Proust isolated in an ivory tower (or should we say cork, as in his last period in the that his bedroom had literally been lined with cork to prevent outside noise), unaware of everything that happens around him, has little to do with the reality that his letters reveal”.
And indeed, beyond seeing that his mother was the center of his family life, we see a tremendously social Proust, who related to the best of Paris of his time while he conceived In Search of Lost Time and turned his inner world , the power of memory, in literary excellence. A voluminous Proust, in short, who enjoyed a kind of epistolary appetizer through Letters to his neighbor, published by Elba last year.
It was about the discovery of twenty-three letters sent to Marie Williams, the wife of an American dentist who, one bad day for Proust, set up her practice on the second floor of where she lived: 102 Boulevard Haussmann. They were pages that, in particular, affected how much the writer was annoyed by the noise that came from above, both from the works that the Williamses had done in the house and from the harp that the neighbor was playing. But the most charming thing was to see how the seductive capacity of the author slipped into a correspondence with a lady who admired him and who, in the end, as in these Selected Letters, offered us a man isolated in the dark but eager for sociability .
Marcel Proust
Selected Letters (1888-1922)
Cliff
Edited by Estela Ocampo Translated by J.R. Monreal
496 pages
28 euros
WAITING FOR THE READER HIMSELF
BASILIO BALTASAR
Perhaps with the intention of consoling his critics, Proust said that "in a hundred years our books will have ceased to exist." However, a century after the publication of his work, we can confirm the magnetic presence of the Recherche and the actuality of that "psychic telescope" Deleuze spoke of.
Although out of prudence, and instead of wasting time with idle entertainment -often so hateful!-, it will be advisable to sit down and read the Recherche before the bad omen of its author is fatally fulfilled. Just in case.
Whoever does so must take into account what Proust expected from his readers: that through the slow and penetrating soliloquy of his work, each reader manages to be the most shrewd and lucid reader of himself.
The French professor and publisher Bernard de Fallois (1926-2018) contributes to this with "lectures" designed for an attentive, sensitive and cultivated audience. A public oblivious to the excitement of contemporary banality and willing to understand the master ideas that Proust displayed in his great work.
The idea of "two selves" suggests appreciating the differences between the personality of the writer and the voice of the narrator. In order to avoid the biographical temptation to disturb the meaning of the work of art with the domestic trivialities of vulgar life, the intimate disorders and the author's willful complexes.
The idea of the "two memories" distinguishes between deliberate recollection, which leads us to believe in the chronological order of events, and the imagery of accidental recollection, which by suddenly rescuing unexpected symmetries between distant moments reveals the true meaning of a fleeting moment
The idea of the omnipotence of Time denies that the temporary is something that passes. Time, the cornerstone of Proust's work, is the invisible substance in which we live submerged, the one that modulates and transforms "the intermittencies of the heart." His writing follows the undulating flow of meanders that, in the image of Time, configure his course of thought.
The idea of love is presented as a phenomenon devoid of tangible reality, fragilely linked to the person who by chance will reflect its powerful emotion. Love understood as "sacred evil" precedes the appearance of the loved one and survives and migrates despite it. What entails "the most frightful of tortures": jealousy.
Proust's master ideas make In Search of Lost Time a narrative treatise on the human mind, a novel composed of characters of extraordinary vivacity and tens of thousands of impressions, notes on the character of men, the disguise of their customs, the throb of his dark suspicion, and the beauty of the aromas, colors and flashes that illuminate the moral rooms. The intelligence of the writer who has culminated this immense literary tapestry, woven with the most subtle sensations, encompasses the entirety of existence.
One hundred years ago Proust lamented that literature was placed at the mercy of mundane celebration and at the service of every cause that receives social applause. Already then, Fallois tells us, Proust endured the insults of various publishers, who understood nothing of his book, refused to read it or returned it to him with offensive comments! According to Proust himself, there is nothing unusual in this, since "the true artist, being original, cannot be immediately recognized by his contemporaries".
Bernard of Fallois
Seven lectures on Marcel Proust
Translation by Lluís Maria Todó
Underground Editions
256 pages
19 euros
