Proust For Beginners
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Proust For Beginners
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Overview
Proust For Beginners is a compelling biography of French novelist Marcel Proust and a vivid portrait of his times. It also serves as a concise guide and critical review of In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu, 7 volumes, 1913–1927), one of the most difficult—yet widely taught—works of French literature.
With extensive passages from In Search of Lost Time and other essential works, Proust For Beginners highlights the defining themes and unique literary style of a modern master whom many have heard about but few fully fathom. It portrays Proust and the milieu in which he wrote in vivid detail, bringing to life the “Proustian moments” at the heart of his greatest work—and our own everyday experience.
Proust’s masterpiece “begins in a series of rooms in which he unlocks themes, styles, references, and foreshadows,” writes Harold Augenbraum in the foreword. Proust For Beginners will provide the key.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781939994455 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | For Beginners |
| Publication date: | 05/17/2016 |
| Series: | For Beginners |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 176 |
| File size: | 23 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Van Howell is a political cartoonist, caricaturist, and book illustrator (Derrida For Beginners).
Read an Excerpt
Proust for Beginners
By STEVE BACHMANN, VAN HOWELL
For Beginners LLC
Copyright © 2016 Steve BachmannAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-939994-45-5
CHAPTER 1
PART ONE
Proust and History
Three Topics from French history help to understand Proust and his background: Communes, Jews, and the State.
Communes
In the Middle Ages, bishops and lords in France held a lot of power. As towns grew, the residents began wanting some of that power for themselves. They resisted their rulers and organized what they called communes. Here is what some of the "press agents" for the rich and powerful wrote about communes around 1100 ...
ca. 1075, in Le Mans ...
Yet when [Geoffrey of Mayenne] sought to raise certain taxes against the citizens of Le Mans, and when he attempted to oppress them with certain new exactions, they gathered together to consider how they might resist his improper inclinations and how they might arrange it so that they were not unjustly oppressed by him or any other person. And when they had formed a conspiracy, which they called a commune, they all swore oaths to bind each other equally under a common obligation. Then they compelled Geoffrey himself and the other nobles of the same region, most of whom were unwilling, to be bound by the oaths of their agreement.
— Acts of the Bishops Living in the City of Le Mans
and 1115, in Laon ...
Now Commune is a new and a bad name of an arrangement for all the poorest classes to pay their usual due of servitude to their lords once only in the year, and to make good any breach of the laws they have committed by the payment fixed by law, and to be entirely free from all other exactions usually imposed on serfs. ... Having therefore summoned the nobles and certain of the clergy on the last day of Lent in the holy days of the Passion of our Lord, ... [the Bishop] determined to urge the annulment of the Commune, to which he had sworn. ... The compact of the Commune being broken, such rage, such amazement seized the citizens that all the officials abandoned their duties and the stalls of the craftsmen and cobblers were closed and nothing was exposed for sale by the innkeepers and hucksters, who expected to have nothing left when the lords began plundering. ... Behold there arose a disorderly noise throughout the city, men shouting "Commune." ... There citizens now entered the Bishop's court with swords, battle-axes, bows and hatchets, and carrying clubs and spears, a very great company. As soon as this sudden attack was discovered, the nobles rallied from all sides to the Bishop, having sworn to give him aid against such an onset, if it should occur.
— Guibert de Nogent, Benedictine monk and historian
Jews
IF ANY GROUP WAS WORSE OFF THAN SERFS and town dwellers oppressed by lords and bishops, it was Jews. French Christians hated them because they were not Christian. When they were not burning them, robbing them, extorting them, forcing them to convert, or sending them into exile, Christians tolerated Jews only because they had money that could be taxed, confiscated, or loaned out at interest (which the Church prohibited Christians from doing).
In the late 1700s, as the rationalist ideals of the Enlightenment began to spread, life for French Jews began to improve somewhat. By the 1780s, France abolished the special taxes on Jews and allowed them to do business in many enterprises from which they previously had been prohibited. The Royal Society of Science and Arts of Metz offered a prize for the best essay in answer to the question: "What are the best means to make the Jews happier and more useful in France?"
During the French Revolution, on September 27, 1791, the National Constituent Assembly voted full rights of citizenship for French Jews.
The State
France's King
reigned 1643–1715) is said to have declared l'etait c'est moi ("the State is ME").
He ruled as an absolute monarch with support from the nobles and clergy. He did not even bother to convene France's parliament, or Estates General, which had not met since 1614.
The Estates General was divided into three groups: the First Estate (clergy, about 10,000 people); the Second Estate (aristocracy, about 400,000 people); and Third Estate (everybody else, about 25 million people). Each group had one vote. Members of the Third Estate had reason to think this was unfair, since they paid most of the taxes.
The French government lent assistance to the American Revolution from 1776 to 1783, which did not help the French treasury. By 1787, the king's government was asking the clergy and nobles to pay some taxes to help out, and they refused. In desperation, a parliament was convened. In short order (that June), the Third Estate declared that it really represented the French people and designated itself the National Assembly; the First and Second Estates promptly joined with them.
The Bastille prison fell in July; feudal rights and privileges were abolished in August; and the monarchy fell in October. By year's end the new government was taking over church property, consisting of about one fifth of all the land in France.
In 1792, aristocratic Austria and Prussia threatened to invade France if it didn't protect its king and nobility. Paris responded with a Commune, and the revolutionaries raised a people's army. The king was executed with a lot of nobles and politicians, peasants, clerics, and others. In the wars that followed, an officer named Napoleon Bonaparte became general, dictator, and emperor. He took on the rest of Europe until his final defeat in 1815 at Waterloo by an alliance of Austrians, English, Prussians, and Russians, who wanted to see France returned to its older order.
During the next 100 years (which will bring us back to Proust!), issues associated with the French Revolution played out in various forms. For the First Estate, would the Catholic Church ever recover its privileges, or would France become more secular? For the Second Estate, would the aristocrats recover their power, or would France become more egalitarian? And for the Third Estate, how would the sometimes conflicting interests of peasants, artisans, financiers, factory owners, and factory workers — each with their own notions of democracy — be worked out?
The years 1815–1830 ("the Bourbon Restoration") saw an attempt by the aristocracy and clergy to reassert their powers. In 1830, they overreached by attempting to cut back on press freedom and an already limited electorate.
The revolution of July 1830 replaced these reactionaries with a constitutional monarch in the person of Louis-Philippe d'Orléans, who became responsible to an "expanded electorate" of 0.75% of the total population. Not surprisingly, it was a government of, by, and for the rich.
In February 1848, Louis-Philippe tried to restrict freedom of association and was toppled from power in an outburst of popular protest and street fighting. The republic that replaced him could not reconcile differences among nobles, the rich, peasants, and workers. That June, national workshops that had been set up to employ workers were shut down. The national army took care of anyone who objected, killing over 3,000, imprisoning 12,000, and deporting 4,000. In 1849, Louis Napoleon (nephew of the original) was elected to the office of president. Conservatives such as Adolphe Thiers thought they could manage "that cretin," and in 1850 attempted to cut "the vile multitude" from the voting franchise by one third (mainly workers). The factional fighting ended when Napoleon III used the army to carry out a coup d'etat in 1851. He justified it with a plebiscite in 1852, based on universal suffrage, which declared him emperor. Napoleon III ruled in authoritarian manner with the backing of his family, the army, the bureaucracy, and officially sanctioned candidates for the legislature — mainly landowners, bankers, merchants and industrialists.
It was against this background that Proust's parents were born and met each other.
Proust's Parents
Proust's father, Adrien, was born in 1834 to a shopkeeper in Illiers, France. The Proust family had been respectable middle-class administrators for centuries. Instead of the priesthood, Adrien determined to go to Paris to study medicine. He proved a success. By the 1860s, he was becoming an international expert on cholera. In 1869 he travelled to Russia, Persia, and Egypt to trace the course of a cholera epidemic. Upon his return to France, he was awarded the ribbon of the Legion of Honor. Around that time, as a bachelor in his mid-thirties, he encountered a young woman 15 years his junior named Jeanne Weil.
Jeanne Weil was born in Paris in 1849. A number of Weil's family members had taken advantage of the opportunities opening up for French Jews of the era. Her father, Nathé, was a wealthy stockbroker, and his father, Baruch, had been a wealthy manufacturer. Her mother, Adèle Berncastel, came not only from money, but also from political connections and cultural sophistication.
Adèle's aunt, Amélie Crémieux, was married to Adolphe Crémieux, one of the first Jews to sit in France's Chamber of Deputies. Highly influential in national affairs, Crémieux litigated against an oath imposed on French Jews; defended the opposition press during the 1830s; participated in 1848 Revolution; served as Minister of Justice in the provisional government; abolished the death penalty for political crimes, imprisonment for indebtedness, and any use of the pillary; made it possible for Algerian Jews to obtain citizenship; and abolished slavery in the colonies.
"The day I'm carried to my grave," he once declared, "there's something I want said about me as I'm placed in my final resting place. I want it said, 'He was good.'" He was, and France honored Crémieux with a state funeral in 1880.
In Amélie's salon, niece Adèle met such cultural icons as Victor Hugo, Alphonse de Lamartine, Alfred de Musset, Gioachino Rossini, and George Sand. Niece Adèle absorbed everything and conveyed it to her daughter Jeanne. Aunt Amélie eventually converted to Catholicism, taking her children with her.
Politics and the Birth of Proust
Both Adrien Proust and Jeanne Weil were ambitious, progressive, and secular. Adrien had social standing and a future; Jeanne had culture and money. The couple signed a marriage contract on August 27, 1870, and sealed the bond with a civil ceremony in Paris on September 3. Jeanne agreed to raise her children Catholic, but declined to renounce her Judaism.
Religious controversy in France would not interfere with the marriage of Jeanne Weil and Adrien Proust. The former believed only in reason; the latter refused to take an oath in court under a crucifix.
Politics, however, both internationally and within France, proved more problematic. The following timeline puts Proust's family history (marked in bold) — including his own conception and birth — in historical context:
May 8, 1870: Napoleon III wins plebiscite, affirming his "liberal reforms."
July 2, 1870: Spain announces it will accept Prince Leopold, a relative of Wilhem I of Prussia, as its king.
July 6, 1870: France objects to the prospect of being surrounded by German kingdoms. The French Foreign Minister threatens war, declaring: "We shall know how to fulfill our duty without hesitation and without weakness."
July 7: French police informer writes: "This war will generate wide enthusiasm and rally the whole of France behind the Napoleonic dynasty; this war will deal the final blow to the republican cause in France."
July 11: French ambassador asks Prussian King Wilhelm I to withhold consent from Leopold's accession. Wilhelm agrees.
July 12: Napoleon commiserates to his Prime Minister: "The country will be disappointed, but what can we do?"
July 13: French ambassador asks Wilhelm to promise he will never consent to a relative being a candidate for the Spanish throne. Wilhelm refuses. Opportunistic Prussian Chancellor Bismarck releases a provocative version of the events in the "Ems Telegram."
July 14: Ems Telegram widely published in France on Bastille Day. French public explodes.
July 19: France declares war on Prussia.
August 1870: Following his research on cholera, Dr. Adrien Proust does medical inspections at entry points into France.
August 27: Adrien Proust and Jeanne Weil sign marriage contract.
September 1, 1870: Prussians crush French Army at Battle of Sedan.
September 1: Adrien Proust takes residence in the heart of Paris.
September 2: Napoleon III surrenders himself and his army to the Prussians, then dissolves his Second Empire.
September 3: Adrien Proust and Jeanne Weill marry in civil ceremony.
September 4: France declares the Third Republic.
September 19: Prussians begin Siege of Paris.
October 10, 1870 (est.): Adrien and Jeanne conceive Marcel Proust
(below)
November 30, 1870: Parisians fail attempt to break Prussian siege.
December 1870: Early cold, severe winter. Poor eat dogs and cats to survive, rich get camel hump and zoo elephants.
December 27: Prussians bombard Paris outskirts.
January 5, 1871: Prussians bomb Paris proper.
January 19: Another attempt to break the siege fails. Bread rationing begins in Paris.
January 26-28: France agrees to an armistice, Siege of Paris ends.
February 8, 11, 1871: French elect National Assembly which in turn elects Adolphe Thiers (the guy who had done so well managing "that cretin" Napoleon III) as head.
March 1-3, 1871: Prussians march into Paris, march out after armistice ratification.
March 18: Thiers attempts to disarm Paris National Guard and take its artillery. Parisians resist, Paris Commune begins.
April 2, 1871: Thiers begins bombing Paris.
April 2 (approx.): Sniper shoots at Adrien Proust; he moves with his family to the Parisian suburb of Auteuil.
May 10, 1871: Prussians and French sign Treaty of Frankfurt, allowing release of French prisoners and doubling of Thiers' army from 55,000 to 120,000.
May 21–28: Thiers' troops break into Paris; 20,000 Parisians are killed and/or executed.
June 10, 1871: "The smell of bodies disgusts me less than the miasmas of egoism breathed from every mouth." — Gustave Flaubert to George Sand.
July 10, 1871: Marcel Proust is born.
* * *
Contemporary medicine suggests that a fetus gestating under stressful conditions is vulnerable to further health issues after birth. Certainly the fetus of Marcel Proust was subjected to stress, and the life of Marcel Proust was marked by compromised health (asthma, insomnia, fevers) and behavior considered unusual. Concerning Marcel and his younger brother Robert, Proust scholar William Carter has written: "Robert, like many second children, experienced none of the difficulties and traumas of the first. The family always believed that the younger brother had the advantage of being conceived and born in a stable time."
Destabilization and the Modern
IF Marcel Proust came into the WORLD under conditions of stress, the world he entered was itself destabilizing. Some called it modernization. Various artists reacted to the tenor of the times with their own destabilized and destabilizing works. Here are some of the things happening in Western culture and technology during Proust's formative years:
1871: Eugène Pottier and Pierre De Geyter compose the socialist anthem, "L'Internationale."
1872: James McNeill Whistler paints The Artist's Mother.
1873: Typewriter invented (Remington & Sons); Arthur Rimbaud's A Season in Hell published.
1874: First Impressionist exhibition.
1875: George Bizet's opera Carmen debuts.
1876: Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone.
1877: Thomas Edison invents the phonograph.
1879: Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House premieres; Thomas Edison patents his electric lightbulb.
1880: Fyodor Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov completed (left).
1881: Le Chat Noir, the first modern cabaret, opens in Paris.
1882: World's first hydroelectric power plant opens in Wisconsin; Hiram Maxim invents the first portable, automatic machine gun. Death of Charles Darwin (below left).
1883: Friedrich Nietzsche (below right) publishes Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
1884: Odilon Redon, Georges Seurat, and Paul Signac found the neo-impressionist Society of Independent Artists.
1885: Karl Benz invents the single-cylinder motor car engine.
1886: Last Impressionist exhibition; Jean Moréas publishes the Symbolist Manifesto.
1887: Hannibal Goodwin invents celluloid film.
* * *
Proust was perfectly unfit for a world unfitting itself.
Young Proust
It would be both melodramatic and inaccurate to say that Proust had a miserable childhood. He loved and was loved by his mother, grandmother, and brother. He enjoyed family vacations in the suburbs of Paris, his father's hometown (Illiers), and the coast of Brittany. He did well in school, made friends, and founded literary journals with them.
1884 YOUNG PROUST WRITES AN ESSAY:
Literary studies allow us to disdain death, they lift us above earthly things by speaking to us about spiritual matters.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Proust for Beginners by STEVE BACHMANN, VAN HOWELL. Copyright © 2016 Steve Bachmann. Excerpted by permission of For Beginners LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword by Harold Augenbraum,Introduction,
Part One: Proust and History,
Communes,
Jews,
The State,
Proust's Parents,
Politics and the Birth of Proust,
Destabilization and the Modern,
Young Proust,
Teenage Proust and the Late 1880s,
Early 1890s,
Mid-1890s: First Book,
Mid-1890s: Anti-Semitism and the Dreyfus Affair,
Jean Santeuil,
Late 1890s: John Ruskin,
Early 1900s,
Thoreau,
Sainte-Beuve,
Late 1900s,
Thomas Hardy,
The Cork-Lined Room,
Against Sainte-Beuve,
Working Toward Swann,
War Interruptus,
Finis,
Part Two: Recherche,
What, Who, Where, When, How,
Swann's Way,
Within a Budding Grove,
The Guermantes Way,
Sodom and Gomorrah,
The Captive and the Fugitive,
Time Regained,
Part Three: Evaluations,
Flux as Content,
Flux as Form,
Those Long Sentences,
Those Structured Sentences,
Proust and Plato,
Ultimate Worth,
Labeling the Madeleine Moment,
The Madeleine Paragraph,
The Title and its Translation — A Point for the Cocktail Party,
Resurrection — Summary and Samples,
Can Proust Change Your Life?,
Conclusion Against Sainte-Beuve, Preface,
Post-Conclusion: Proust for Fun and Family,
Credit Where Credit is Due,
Further Reading,