Yesterday, while confronting my daily reading with a feeling of great dread after what was supposed to be a relaxing day spent at home reading but ended up a day spent at work for an unexpected nine hours, I was absolutely despairing writing about what I read. I then read today and found that, until the final 40 pages of yesterday's and today's combined 215 pages, Proust had focused on nothing aside from the Dreyfus Affair. Still. Hundreds of pages spent on the Dreyfus Affair and its impact on social dynamics, on its place in society. I understand now, more than ever before, just how important this business was during Proust's time in France. However, I would be lying entirely if I said that I was all that interested in it when compared to Proust's other, more lasting observations about...well...everything else in the world.
It took me a night to realize in an appreciable way what Proust did manage to say with all that talk of the Dreyfus Affair. Proust managed to illuminate, likely without this intention, how prone to being caught up in a feeling that our current events are without precedent and are wholly unique. In truth, our societal obsession with the birth origin of our president (stupid), social/commun/anarch/fasc-isms (overblown), and sexuality (unbelievable) is not so different from Proust's era and their absolute single-mindedness over a single man and his alleged activities.
I'm so glad to be done reading about that damn event.
Now, what I found most interesting in the past (what feels like) two million pages (see: 215 pages) is the unsettling juxtaposition Proust draws in chapter two of Guermantes Way. Spoiler alert for those that don't understand that a decades-spanning novel will see the death of a character who is elderly on page one of book one: the narrator's grandmother passes away. Shortly after, and I mean so short as to have me flipping back to ensure I had not missed some hidden bundle of pages and transitional events, Proust brings us to what is basically an evening of making out with a girl he has had some interest in since his time spent in Balbec. The young lady in question denied his advances in Balbec, only now to invite them. Cue making out in bed for a while, then Proust shoo-ing the poor girl home because everybody got what they wanted, didn't they.
There are tens of pages spent discussing the heavy reality of death. Where on page 324, Proust is discussing death's insidious arrival on an otherwise normal day, by page 380 he has his hands up a girl's dress. Granted, fifty pages of Proust pass between there, including the shift from chapter one to chapter two, (whereupon the death itself does occur after a fairly long interval of further pages and novel time), but the seemingly immediate thematic shift from death to, fundamentally, life is jarring and upon inspection, completely brilliant. Understandably, Proust used this change of chapters as a sort of "get out of jail free" pass for getting away from the theme of death to the theme of young romance, but in a work of this scale and sprawl, chapters appear to be lesser demarcations than in briefer, less spanning novels, making the transition quite stark.
It would be possible to bog down chapter two of Guermantes Way in pseudo-philosophical musings about death and how it "...may occur this very afternoon," (Proust, 325) since it can be argued that a good deal of books one, two, and three focused on the dynamic between the narrator and his now late grandmother. Instead, though, Proust illustrates the human necessity for moving on- the death of his grandmother was treated, albeit abruptly towards the end of that first chapter, in a fairly thorough fashion thematically and emotionally during book three. I simply cannot "get over" how quickly he transitions a reader from feelings of grief to that semi-voyeuristic feeling one gets reading an intimate scene of a novel.
To be fair, the death of a loved one is an extraordinarily intimate event, and in his genius, Proust has juxtaposed one type of intimacy with another. He has shared two extremely personal events in a span of under one hundred pages, delivering such strong emotional content so quickly that it shook me up. After hundreds of very dry, and at times dull, political discussions and arguments, Proust brings back the emotional heavy-lifting I have found him so capable of by slamming the death of a family member and a budding romance long desired into each other at high speed.
Anyone who says Proust is boring is missing the mark. The excitement of Proust requires patience and time. It is a "big picture" brand of excitement, much like the feeling one gets after a long term personal goal is reached or a project is completed. Proust is not a Michael Bay film. Rather, he is the sunrise viewed from the bottom of a canyon. Wait for it...wait for it...
And there it is. A moment, an insight you are powerless against, and which you can never forget.
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