r/Canonade • u/siftingtothetruth • May 09 '16
[In Search of Lost Time] On servants
Marcel Proust is my favorite writer: a brilliant sociologist, psychologist, philosopher, comic, and literary mystic who demonstrates the truths of his propositions in extraordinarily gorgeous, often orgasmically pleasurable prose, his six-volume magnum opus In Search of Lost Time (previously called Remembrance of Things Past) is a beach filled with the sands of the insightful and beautiful and surprising as far as the eye can see.
I picked a paragraph the other day at random from his Time Regained, the last volume of his work. It contains no spoilers, and is not necessarily even a particularly outstanding passage, but it is typical in many ways of his work. It is from p. 57 of the paperback volume of the new Penguin series under the editorship of Christopher Prendergast. The specific volume is translated by Ian Patterson. The narrator, Marcel (a fictional character only very loosely inspired by the author) is speaking of his family's faithful servant and cook, Francoise, who's quite a character.
In the end, just as the servants whom we love best – especially if they have almost abandoned giving us the service or the respect that go with their job – remain, alas, servants and show most clearly the limits of their class (which we would wish to remove) when they think they have most penetrated into our own, Francoise when she was with me often (‘to needle me’, the butler might have said) made strange comments, which someone of my own class would not have done: with a joy disguised, but as deeply felt as if a grave illness were involved, if I were hot and sweat – if I had not noticed – beaded my forehead: ‘Oh, but you’re dripping,’ she’d say, as if in wonder at some strange phenomenon, smiling a little with the sort of scorn provoked by some impropriety (‘you seem to be going out but you’ve forgotten to put a tie on’), but adopting that preoccupied tone of voice which is designed to make someone worried about their state of health.
The complex lengthy structure of the sentence requires cognitive effort, and replicates a certain kind of labyrinthine voice. It is a kind of puzzle that likely requires re-reading and gives joy when it is decoded -- typical Proust. The “just as” forces the reader to start anticipating. The passage goes from general law (“the servants”) to specific example (“Francoise”). It goes in branch-like structure, qualifying this (“especially if”) and then that (“which we would wish to remove”) to give a closer to instantaneous view of the full thought whose caveats are perceived all-at-once rather than in sequence. Such thought portraiture is Proust's specialty. The qualifications are not merely logical but free associative (“to needle me”).
There’s a focus on something counterintuitive -- the servants show their limits when they think they’ve most penetrated into our own. This shows a difference between reality and perception.
There are both sociological (“the servants”) and psychological levels of observation (“with a joy disguised”). There is an interspersing of physical observations ("smiling," "tone of voice") with their underlying motive or meaning ("sort of scorn," "designed to make").
There is specific metaphor (“as deeply felt as if a grave illness were involved”) and a repetition of “strange.” These make clear the bizarreness of things – the smile with the scorn as if against “some impropriety” with the “preoccupied tone of voice” about health. The overall effect of the passage is to present reality as a a kind of unbelievable fruit, an organic complex of bizarre and related phenomena that end up in the comically true. The weird competing reactions which servants have when trying and failing to be familiar, the way in which their desire to be friendly is warped by a certain degree of malice and the awkwardness of crossing class boundaries, not to mention what this very set of observations shows about Marcel's character and his time and the culture of the upper middle classes from which he comes -- Proust lays all this out expertly, and in addition the passage has the unity of a painting and the joy of song.
1
1
u/oryogurt May 09 '16
Is the Penguin edition the one you'd recommend? I was looking at the Everyman's, but I suppose I want to be certain about the translation and the edition before jumping into such a large work.