Authors

    It may be due to my habit of trying to read Charles Dickens’ books and then always giving up after a few pages but any fancy-seeming literature always makes me nervous because half the time it’s written in a way that I have to re-read it five times before I can tell what’s going on. Do not ask me what fancy-seeming entails, I have no idea but seeing the name Combray definitely made it fit into this category. As expected, I did find myself quite confused throughout reading and had difficulties following the plot. That said I found some things quite intriguing. 

    The story starts with Proust’s first descriptions of his childhood struggle trying to sleep each night. I felt incredibly lost reading it, not sure what was memories and what was dreams but I realized this was likely the point. Having experienced living life in a dream-like state I must say that the way Proust described the feeling of coming in and out of sleep with memories and dreams seeming to overlap is very similar. While I found it difficult to read, the long sentences and the ample imagery, added to the feeling of confusion and drew me into reading further. 

    I am curious about the relationship he has with his parents. Why does his father, who apparently found his son’s desire for a mother’s love to be unacceptable usually, make an exception once and tell her to sleep in his room? What caused the narrator to be scared that he would be sent away if he was caught doing something so simple as asking for his mother to say goodnight to him? I feel as though I may have missed something or perhaps I am meant to speculate on these things. Then there is Swann, who he despised as a child for keeping his mother away on nights he visited. I really liked the addition of him later finding out that Swann had suffered through something similar to him. It made me remember that these are childhood memories, often filled with assumptions and odd associations between people or places with certain emotions. The puzzling timeline of the story also is similar to how I remember my own childhood, I don’t really know what happened when either. I would love to know if Proust did this intentionally, or if it was just a side effect of me not understanding what was happening. 

    I really want to like this book. I find it genuinely interesting but it has taken me so long to read even this first part and I still honestly don’t understand the plot of the story. If I have time in the future to read pages three times over, I will definitely be continuing this.

That’s all I have to say for now bye! 😀 

I find reading digitally really challenging sometimes and tend to read but not actually absorb all the themes the narrator is trying to convey. I kept that in mind as I started to read this, I put away all other distractions and just read which was a really nice change. I found the beginning a …

Continue reading “Combray by Marcel Proust”

Proust’s “Combray” section of In Search of Lost Time, and the book as a whole deals heavily with memory and time, and I was particularily drawn to few passages which explore this theme.

“When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly bodies…”

In some senses time is a construct invented by conscious humans. Here, Proust explores this idea, especially in our unconscious state, focusing on the timelessness of sleep, and the lack of a temporal reality when we are asleep. He continues the passage to focus on our need to cement ourselves when we wake and discover exactly where we are in time. I think that this can be expanded beyond the idea of time, and zeroes in on the human need to define and delineate life, where uncertainty, whether it be temporal confusion or other, is rejected in favour of defining our circumstance.

“That hateful staircase, up which I always went so sadly, gave out a smell of varnish which had, as it were, absorbed and crystallised the special quality of sorrow that I felt each evening…”

Here, Proust analyzes the permanence of objects amidst a shifting temporal landscape. Every night, the staircase is the same, and “absorbs” his nightly sorrow as he is sent to bed. As time changes, the staircase stays permanent, but it’s symbolism increases, as a mountain of sad memories are built into it’s existence. 

“…to think merely of the worries of today and my hopes for tomorrow…”

This passage was interesting to me because it related to an idea in another novel I’m currently reading: The Almanack of Naval Ravikant. Ravikant believes that any future ambition or desire is a stressor, and that the act of desire causes worries in the present. Proust is touching on a similar idea in this sentence, contrasting emotions by their temporal placement, present worry and future hopes. Ultimately, these two emotions are paired, and only divided by time–as any ambition for the future is the cause of an immediate stress to satisfy this desire.

Questions

1. Is time and it’s measurements as accurate as we believe it to be, or can we define spaces and moments in different and creative ways to understand our memories better as humans?

2. If our memories deceive us, would we rather have an unbiased view of our past, or is the natural way which we view ourselves protective of our mental stability?

 I noticed that in “Combray” by Marcel Proust there is a lot of descriptive language used. This leads me to the find the text a bit confusing and hard to read. For the first few pages it was very difficult for me to piece together a storyline or just to figure out what was happening in general. The text seemed to show a lot of very deep thinking and perspective from the narrator when it comes to life and the other people that are in his life and family. The way that the narrator speaks about relying on a goodnight kiss from his mother in order to calm his anxiety so that he can sleep seems like something that is extremely important to him and something that he can not go without. The narrator seems to be very reliant on his mother and not being able to receive a goodnight kiss from his mother will cause his anxiety to rise and he would not be able to sleep. The attention to detail and the focus on the need for the attention from his mother shows that he may be struggling with a separation anxiety from her or potentially other mental health issues or disorders. 

My question is: “What do we think may have led to the narrator’s need to be strongly connected to his mother?

Another thing in the text that has led me to be confused, is when the narrator believes that his father would be mad at him for wanting this attention or love from his mother. This leads me to question whether the father would be upset at the narrator due to being too old to be needing his mother or if it is something based on gender. The father might think that because he is a male he needs to toughen up and not act upset or show emotions. The narrator is also very informed on the way the other family members act towards and think about M. Swann. He notices their infatuation with him and how he is a known person in society. The narrator sees the way that his family members had prepared for their meal with M. Swann. He noticed how they put a lot of a care into how they acted around him and how they talked about him and questioned if they were polite enough after M. Swann had left their home. This shows that M. Swann holds significance to the family as well as the narrator. I am confused on how this relates to the narrator and his situation. I am led to thinking that this impacts the narrator in a way that makes hm feel insecure of attention from his family members, predominantly his mother. 

Proust’s novel “Swann’s Way” was a bit difficult to follow at first. Though I was able to pick up on a few main themes through the first and second sections, I often found myself lost in the text – and not in the form of fantasizing or escapism, but rather in confusion. I felt like […]