Posts filed under 'churches / cathedrals'
In searching for suitable work in progress for the IPRH seminar, I came across this beginning to a meditative essay that I composed nearly eight years ago. I thought I would include it here as an example of the kind of writing I intend to do in correlation to this digital humanities project. The visualization and mapping tools could be used to enhance some of the issues that come up regarding the frequency of certain themes with particular places or place names.
In the final pages of In Search of Lost Time the narrator says of his intended book that he would “build it up like a church” (VI.507). He would also stitch it simply like a dress, regroup his forces like a general conducting an offensive, endure it like a medical regime (VI.507-9). But the book that he has written over the six volumes leading to this point features the church motif more prominently than the others mentioned in these self reflexive pages. In fact, the connection between self reflection and churches is prefigured on page one, where the narrator begins the story by explaining his nightly shift between waking and sleep.
And half an hour later the thought that it was time to look for sleep would awaken me; I would make as if to put away the book which I imagined was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been reading, but these thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was the immediate subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V. (I.1)
The apparent blending of subject and object “did not offend [his] reason” (I.1) and, we later learn, became the major motivation for his search of lost time. One critical aspect of this passage is that it establishes the conflict between [illusory?] perception and imperceptible reality, of which the narrator’s other conflicts are types (for example the questions of Albertine’s sexuality and fidelity). The church and quartet are significant here in that they embody and document time itself. Time and harmonics are the essential elements of the art of music, the bringing to life of a continual emotional present that can be re-performed but never duplicated. An old church brings to life the presence of the past and is a supreme exemplar of the general in the particular. It also features many arts—architecture, sculpture, stained glass, painting, tapestry, music, narrative, fashion, even food and drink—that bring together their special effects to express the whole of human experience. It is therefore not surprising that the narrator concludes that books of the magnitude he will undertake are never complete: “How many great cathedrals remain unfinished!” (VI.508).
Defined briefly, a motif is a recurring thematic or structural element in any art, but especially in music, architecture, painting, and literature. In addition to manifestation through plot and character, motifs can be embodied in place or time. Churches in In Search of Lost Time comprise one motif among many. The recurring elements that unify Proust’s novel—the Madeleine, the Japanese paper game, the little phrase, the parish church at Combray, to name a few—allow for the modulation of themes and function like motifs in a piece of music, but also like the synaesthetic motifs of a church. Churches fulfill several functions in the novel ranging from an element of setting to the object of discourse. Churches are therefore highly appropriate as a motif because they embody both place and time. Considering the narrator’s comparison of his book to a great unfinished cathedral, the notion of a church motif, and possibly the motif itself, might be incomplete.
This paper will perform a meditation on the church motif of In Search of Lost Time, focusing on significant as well as seemingly insignificant moments. The goal is to define the import and function of the church motif, volume by volume, as a mean to developing a theory of narrative and further to illuminate Proust’s work. Questions raised along the way will be varied and speculative because this piece will attempt to discover the ground upon which a more formal study will be based. For that reason, the paper might seem in places to be disjointed, incomplete, incoherent, or sketchy. Since my orals lists will focus on modernism, realism/naturalism, and narrative theory, I will also attempt to begin fleshing out questions and issues to address while reading for the exam. This paper will also make use of and address issues pertaining to the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive, a beta version of which is at http://web.gc.cuny.edu/provost/apit/itech/proustarchive/search.asp.
I
Volume I features a lengthy meditation on the parish church of Combray along with numerous references to it and other churches. The meditation on Saint-Hilaire constitutes twelve pages of exquisite description of the parts of the church, its content, and what it meant to the narrator as a young boy. Saint-Hilaire is a shaping influence on Combray and its citizens’ activities. It is also an icon that represents their place, their essence. For the narrator, it is a point of origin and guidance in his geographical, temporal, and biological (biographical?) movement as well as in his vocation; it is later in this volume the setting for several formative events, notably his first observation of the Duchesse de Guermantes at the wedding of Dr. Percepied’s daughter. Other churches, visited or imagined, figure prominently in his walks along the Méséglise and Guermantes ways, which form the “deepest layer of [his] mental soil” (I.260). And Saint-Hilaire always manages to show itself from afar as he returns to Combray.
The passage quoted in the initial paragraph of this essay (I/I.1) underscores the extent to which the narrator is as much a reader as the writer of his book—both the book held in childhood and the one we ourselves read—as much its subject as all the other themes. Likewise, its readers will be furnished with “the means of reading what lay inside themselves” (VI.508). One question raised here pertains to realism—whether reality lies in things themselves or in the experience or memory of them. The passage could possibly be linked to memory, for the narrator claims later that memories reside not in the mind but in things. However, since memory is not reality but a reproduction of it, the novel probably has more of a non-realist aesthetic despite the meticulous realism of external description. How can we relate these issues to modernist aesthetics such as surrealism? Whatever is happening aesthetically, Proust seems to be questioning traditional epistemologies based on the subject/object dichotomy, especially when the subject becomes its own object of inquiry. How does this fit with modernist trends? What are the relationships of reality and epistemology in (non-)realist aesthetics?
Epistemic and aesthetic issues also appear in the next church passage, which deals with layers of representation and authenticity. Similar to the first passage’s blending of reading and dreaming, this one occurs during bedtime reading, when the narrator’s grandmother gives him photographs of paintings to calm his nerves.
She attempted by a subterfuge, if not to eliminate altogether this commercial banality, at least to minimise it, to supplant it to a certain extent with what was still art, to introduce, as it were, several “thicknesses” of art: instead of photographs of Chartres Cathedral, of the Fountains of Saint-Cloud, or of Vesuvius, she would inquire of Swann whether some great painter had not depicted them, and preferred to give me photographs of “Chartres Cathedral” after Corot, of the “Fountains of Saint-Cloud” after Hubert Robert, and of “Vesuvius” after Turner, which were a stage higher in the scale of art. (I.I/53-4)
The narrator’s sardonic tone highlights the…
realism, different valuations of art object, layer of closeness not necessarily relevant to that of representation (photograph or painting of the original vs. photograph of a painting of the original). Proust archive images—digital simulacra of simulacra; what matter the color + lighting differences? For example the Corot Chartres Cathedral painting images: one is significantly darker than the other.
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Does the file manipulator/editor’s hand or intent matter? Relationship of narrator to grandmother—irony is she wants to give him something of a higher or better aesthetic value, whereas photographs themselves can be valuable aesthetic objects (not to mention the aesthetic value of the cathedral itself, which is the ultimate referent here). To her mind painting is the higher art, though is mediating the boy further from the original beauty of the cathedral. However, if you consider the painting itself is beautiful and an art object, you are still only a step away from the painting, which puts you two steps away from the original. It all depends on where you wish to stop/stand, which is part of the point of the novel. The narrator later comes to realize that mediation is all there is and that the truth, or reality, is always in it (page ref?). This scene also prefigures the repeating mediation of experience and memory through memories of both, with the church figuring as the point of origin. Church is appropriate because it surrounds entirely when you’re in it, and is always present outside the self when in its area/town. Church is itself a memory vault, the memory of history, providing experience of external and internal memories in all their dimensions. Photographs of paintings of churches help to convey/expose this epistemic structure/cycle and prefigure what narrator’s primary mission will be throughout the novel.
August 23rd, 2010
A post by Valter at a blog called Surreal Documents: Doctrines, Fine Arts, Ethnography, Variety got me thinking about Proust in the context of modernist novels in general:
[Proust] thus likened the work of a writer to a architect, organizing the least parts of the text into an interdependent whole. Both Proust’s text and the cathedral are the products of a synthetic spirit, binding together diverse domains of knowledge into a coherent edifice. Panofsky: “The classical cathedral, in its imagery, seeks to embody the totality of Christian knowledge, theological, natural, and historical, by putting everything in its place and by suppressing whatever no longer found a place“. For Proust, the cathedrals of France were not only the most beautiful monuments of French art, but also the only works of art which still lived a life of completeness (”…leur vie intégrale…“).
What Proust’s novel shares with many others of its generation is precisely what Valter calls a “synthetic spirit.” Modernist prose is often fragmentary in style, which might give the surface impression of an analytic spirit. But the poetic structuring of those fragments forms a new kind of synthesis that many modernist writers were trying to discover.
Interestingly, so many novels of the early 20th Century, especially during and after the Great War, contain Edenic imagery as a cry for unity and integrity in the face of the anxieties and upheavals of the time. Virginia Woolf’s The Waves features the house at Elvedon where the children grow up, disperse into the world, and to which they long to return. William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury tells the tragic history of the Compson family after the downfall of the Old South; only their African-American maid, Dilsey, is able to transcend the vanity of modernity through singing at church, an activity that connects her to the Old South. Many similar elements can be pointed out in Joyce, namely the close relationship of the Eden and Einstein motif clusters (i.e. the synthesis of time/space in the eventual unity of Shaun/Shem, tree/stone) of Finnegans Wake.
Proust’s composing the Recherche like a cathedral fits with the general conception of the novel genre as a synthetic whole — one whose poetic structure connects disparate parts such as personal/historical past/present in one experience. And it uses all the media available to the novelistic imagination to do so, which correspond to those presented in churches: pictorial images, sculptural images, narrative, music, interior and exterior emplacements, even food.
A search in the archive on the Novel association recalls a passage that metaphorically compares the notions of architecture, churches, the novel, and the sources of modern European life.
It was, this “Guermantes,” like the setting of a novel, an imaginary landscape which I could with difficulty picture to myself and longed all the more to discover, set in the midst of real lands and roads which all of a sudden would become alive with heraldic details, within a few miles of a railway station; I recalled the names of the places round it as if they had been situated at the foot of Parnassus or of Helicon, and they seemed precious to me as the physical conditionsâ€â€in the realm of topographical scienceâ€â€required for the production of an unaccountable phenomenon. I saw again the escutcheons blazoned beneath the windows of Combray church; their quarters filled, century after century, with all the fiefs which, by marriage or conquest, this illustrious house had appropriated to itself from all the corners of Germany, Italy and France; vast territories in the North, powerful cities in the South, assembled there to group themselves in Guermantes, and, losing their material quality, to inscribe allegorically their sinople keep or castle triple-towered argent upon its azure field. (3 1 1 7-8)
Unfortunately, I don’t have time to expand on this further so I will have to return to it soon.
July 31st, 2007
Two Fridays ago I went out to celebrate my friend Terry’s dissertation defense. It was a night of great conversation, and among the new acquaintances I made was Marsha Fulton, an art historian currently teaching gothic and romanesque architecture (among other things) at SUNY New Paltz.
Our discussion caused me completely to reread a couple of major sections of the Recherche.
Apocalypse
Marsha explained that the flourishing of romanesque architecture in France during the 10th and 11th Centuries was characterized by two different climactic events. During the 10th Century there was widespread fear that the world would end, so romanesque churches were built in expectation of the apocalypse. When that didn’t happen, in order to thank God more and more churches were built during the 11th Century on a larger scale and with greater ornamentation. They began in the romanesque style and later evolved into the gothic.
The fact that churches were sites where people mapped apocalyptic associations reminded me of the same during the WWI section of the Recherche. At least that’s what I thought it reminded me of. But when I did a few searches in the archive to find some passages to write about, I discovered that Marcel the narrator and his contemporaries are somewhat indifferent to the destruction of cathedrals. They are more concerned with the destruction of what cathedrals represent, which differs for various constituencies.
A search on the War association brought up the best apocalyptic results.
Mme Verdurin had visited Venice during the war, butâ€â€like those people who cannot bear sad talk or display of personal feelingsâ€â€when she said that “it” was “marvellous” she was referring not to Venice, or St Mark’s, or the palaces, all that I had so loved and she thought so unimportant, but to the effect of the searchlights in the sky, of which searchlights she could give you a detailed account supported by statistics. So from age to age is reborn a certain realism which reacts against what the previous age has admired.) (6 1 1 51)
[Painting: Searchlights, WWI, Venice; by Giulio Aristide Sartorio; original here.]
This passage I remembered well for its expression of a modern(ist) attitude toward cathedrals and monuments of the past. The experience of Mme Verdurin, the avante-garde salon-keeper, is anaesthetic, much in contrast to the intoxication of Marcel’s reveries about St. Mark’s and the church of Combray. However, even the passages I thought would contain a more cataclysmic sense of what was lost with the destruction of great cathedrals are actually somewhat muted.
For example, during a conversation between Marcel and Charlus, the Baron compares the destruction of the church at Combray — which literally embodies his family history — with the destruction of Rheims and Amiens. He says that if the statue of St. Firmin at Amiens has been broken, then “the loftiest affirmation of faith and energy ever made has disappeared from this world.” Marcel quicky chastizes him for confusing real faith with a symbol of faith.
“And I adore certain symbols no less than you do. But it would be absurd to sacrifice to the symbol the reality that it symbolises. Cathedrals are to be adored until the day when, to preserve them, it would be necessary to deny the truths which they teach. The raised arm of St Firmin said, with an almost military gesture of command: ‘Let us be broken, if honour requires.’ Do not sacrifice men to stones whose beauty comes precisely from their having for a moment given fixed form to human truths.” (6 1 1 154)
[Photo: statue of St. Firmin, left porch, Cathédrale Notre-Dame d'Amiens; by Deborah Fulton, November 2003; original here.]
I’m struck here by the unease with which Marcel greets Charlus’ admiration of the art instead of the men who fought and died to preserve the French nation. The importance of the cathedral here is not its status as priceless art-object but the real people it “stands for”. In the archive, the passage is paired with the famous, iconic image of the woman with a sword, using the destruction of Rheims to rally the public. The emotional rendering of the burning cathedral and its protector is like the “loftiest affirmation of faith and energy” that Charlus admires in the statue of St. Firmin. Obviously the medieval statue and the early 20th Century poster are both propaganda. But what’s interesting is the repurposing of the iconic image for the new context.
Juxtaposing the government poster of Rheims with a documentary photograph of its porch during the same period can illustrate the cognitive divide between Marcel and aristocratic and upper-class characters like Mme Verdurin and Charlus. Both images here are from the Library of Congress online archive.
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No image is free of political influence or effect, but the more realistic photograph on the right is a matter-of-fact presentation of the same familiar ediface that represents France. Marcel’s patriotism seems a little less grounded in idealism and more in realism. When reflecting on the character of different social groups during the War, he excoriates the “vile shirkers like the arrogant young man in a dinner-jacket” he saw at Jupien’s brothel, who are “redeemed by the innumerable throng of all the Frenchmen of Saint-André-des-Champs, by all the sublime soldiers and by those whom I rank as their equals, the Larivières,” Françoise’s rich but low-class cousins (6 1 1 226). There is a profound — almost apocalyptic — sense of the failure of the governing classes, of “the sky falling”.
An even more “truly” apocalyptic effect is conveyed by a photograph of Rheims that, rather than focusing on the iconic cathedral, presents a panorama of the town that includes the ruined towers. The photo is also from the Library of Congress.
Pilgrimage
Marsha also explained to me that the flourishing of romanesque architecture in the 11th century coincided with a boom in pilgrimages. A vibrant tourist industry brought travelers on long walking trips where the effect of visiting churches in towns along the way reached a crescendo at the large cathedral that was the end point. This was done (as far as I can remember) largely to thank God for not destroying the world at the turn of the century, but also for a host of other reasons. She made me want to reread the Canterbury Tales.
As she talked about this, I was immediately reminded of the scenes at Balbec in which Marcel and Albertine cruise the Normandy roads in his new car visiting (and painting) old romanesque churches (roughly 4 2 3 535-70). This series of events is a kind of pilgrimage that stops at churches but is really about exploring the mysteries of love, absence, Albertine, beauty, technology, modernity, and other motifs.
As often as not I went no further than the great plain which overlooks Gourville, and as it resembles slightly the plain that begins above Combray, in the direction of Méséglise, even at a considerable distance from Albertine I had the joy of thinking that, even if my eyes could not reach her, the powerful, soft sea breeze that was flowing past me, carrying further than they, must sweep down, with nothing to arrest it, as far as Quetteholme, until it stirred the branches of the trees that bury Saint-Jean-de-la-Haise in their foliage, caressing my beloved’s face, and thus create a double link between us in this retreat indefinitely enlarged but free of dangers, as in those games in which two children find themselves momentarily out of sight and earshot of one another, and yet while far apart remain together. I returned by those roads from which there is a view of the sea, and where in the past, before it appeared among the branches, I used to shut my eyes to reflect that what I was about to see was indeed the plaintive ancestress of the earth, pursuing, as in the days when no living creature yet existed, her insane and immemorial agitation. (4 2 3 558-9)
The new experience of automobile travel is a search for origin and purity, though marked by the apparent aimlessness and whimsy of modernity. Interestingly, the only direct references pilgrimage (in the archive) come from aristocratic characters, Orianne and Charlus. They speak impatiently of making pilgrimages to Paray-le-Monial and other tourist destinations. The impression they give is that visiting old churches is done for bland relaxation and art appreciation.
Contrasted with the profane attitude of the modern elite, however, is that of intellectual/creative characters like Marcel, Swann, and Elstir. It is Swann who in the appropriately titled Swann’s Way sets Marcel’s imagination on the path toward the Persian-influenced church at Balbec and St. Mark’s in Venice. Those two churches, mixed with his early reveries in the église Saint-Hilaire and his contemplation-in-motion of the twin steeples of Martinville, awaken his vocation as a writer and set the reference points that shape his life and the changing modality of his meditations (and re-meditations). Observations of churches at different points of the narrative form a network of events that bear a synecdochic relationship to the Recherche as a whole. The pilgrimage ends on the final page when he sees the eighty-three-year-old Duc de Guermantes as one of those men who “never cease to grow until sometimes they become taller than church steeples, making it in the end both difficult and perilous for them to walk and raising them to an eminence from which suddenly they fall” (6 1 1 532).
Thus the plot-device of the pilgrimage, alternately implicit and explicit, has a wide-ranging valence within the narrative. It bears upon it the church motif, which acts as a lightning rod to highlight disparate characters’ reponses to the Great War, to modernity, to homosexuality and decadence, to the cognitive faculties as they negotiate subject and object, and much more. It is also one of the main reflexive metaphors of the Recherche. It embodies the journey with its endpoints in the past and future, and changes as the nature of the journey changes at its different stages.
And it ends, as the West ends, with an apocalypse. The images presented here attest to the great “cataclysm from above”: the search-lights over WWI Venice, St. Firmin’s upraised arm, the government-produced fire and brimstone above Rheims, the artillery-produced fire and brimstone around and below it. The end of Marcel’s journey, however, is not a revelation of ultimate or divine purpose — far from it — but of the processes of history and human purpose.
March 8th, 2007
In the final pages of In Search of Lost Time Marcel the narrator says of his intended book that he would “build it up like a church†(VI.507). He would also stitch it simply like a dress, regroup his forces like a general conducting an offensive, endure it like a medical regime (VI.507-9). But the book that he has written over the six volumes leading to this point features the church motif more prominently than the others mentioned in these ending pages. In fact, the connection between self reflection and churches is prefigured on page one, where Marcel begins the story by explaining his nightly shift between waking and sleep.
And half an hour later the thought that it was time to look for sleep would awaken me; I would make as if to put away the book which I imagined was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been reading, but these thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was the immediate subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V. (I.1)
The apparent blending of subject and object “did not offend [his] reason†(I.1) and became the major motivation for his search of Lost Time. One critical aspect of this passage is that it establishes the conflict between perception and imperceptible reality, of which Marcel’s other conflicts are types (i.e. questions of Albertine’s fidelity and sexual orientation, the nature of Time, the relation of self to nation). The church and quartet are significant here in that they embody and document time itself. Time and harmonics are the essential elements of the art of music, the bringing to life of a continual emotional present that can be re-performed but never duplicated. An old church brings to life the presence of the past and is a supreme exemplar of the general in the particular. It also incorporates many arts — architecture, sculpture, stained glass, painting, tapestry, music, narrative, fashion, even food and drink — and combines their special effects to express the whole of human experience. It is therefore not surprising that the narrator concludes that books of the magnitude he will undertake are never complete: “How many great cathedrals remain unfinished!†(VI.508).
There are many motifs that contribute to the rich texture of the Recherche, yet the church is probably the most frequent and consistent throughout. A motif is a recurring thematic or structural element in any art, especially music, architecture, painting, and literature. In addition to manifestation through plot and character, motifs can be embodied in place or time. The recurring elements that unify Proust’s novel — the Madeleine, the Japanese paper game, the little phrase of Vinteuil’s sonata, the parish church at Combray, to name a few — allow for the modulation of themes and function like motifs in a piece of music but also like the pan-aesthetic motifs of a church. Churches fulfill several functions in the novel ranging from elements of setting to objects of discourse, and they embody both place and time. Just consider the import of the first time Marcel sees Mme de Guermantes in the church at Combray, his meditation on the twin steeples of Martinville, or all the love fantasies he has before the commencement of his relationship with Gilberte. For these reasons the church motif seems a sufficient subject for a large-scale study.
The current mission of this archive is to provide textual and visual material to enhance analysis of the Recherche and the study of the nature of narrative. The relation of some of the materials might not be clear, but the purpose here is not so much to track down original references (though there is a lot of that) as it is to provide thought-provoking experiences. Anyone who is seriously interested in working with Proust or the topics pertinent to this archive (see the categories list in the sidebar), or on the archive itself, is encouraged to contact me at jdrouin@gc.cuny.edu.
February 8th, 2007
This archive is the culmination of work begun in three seminars during my first year in the English Ph.D. Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. At the beginning of Prof. Eve Sedgwick’s year-long Proust seminar in 2002-03 I found that the passages having to do with churches were electric to me. I’ve always had a profound fascination with Gothic cathedrals, but beyond that and my being a lapsed Catholic I couldn’t say exactly why I was having such an intense experience. What was happening in these particular narrative and textual situations, what was consistent within and accross them, that was resonating so strongly within me? Since the main goal of the course was to read the Recherche closely, I decided my term papers would constitute an extended meditation on the church motif with an eye toward writing a book-length study in the future.
When I began working on the paper near the end of the first semester I had an impulse to document each occurrence of the motif along with some interpretive information. Spreadsheet applications were not able to handle the formatting that I needed, so I devised in OpenOffice.org for Linux a horizontally oriented document with a table. Across the page, from left to right, I included the pagination information (volume, part, chapter, page numbers); the passage itself; what I thought were themes, concepts, motifs, or other structural features of the passage (together, what I call Associations); plus a note on the narrative context in order to keep in mind the larger picture. The idea was that this document would help me recall passages for whatever I ended up writing about. Aside from some general impressions on the motif and a statement of purpose, that was about all I completed during that semester.
During the January intersession I took the Program’s required course in research and critical methodology with Prof. David Greetham. Our readings on textual theory and criticism piqued my interest in the Proust project even more. When we got to the readings on archives I realized that I had been putting one together all this time. What did it mean textuallyâ€â€and therefore in terms of readingâ€â€that I was containing and documenting this particular category of experience? What would happen if I turned this spreadsheet into a searchable document whose content could be displayed and rearranged according to particular words or the abstractions I was teasing out of the passages? I raised these issues with Prof. Greetham and asked whether I could make a database as part of my final project for the course. He agreed and went one step further by suggesting that I add images or other multimedia elements. So I took his advice and began searching the Web for pictures of the churches mentioned in Proust’s novel.
I quickly realized that the database skills needed to make such a thing were well beyond what I already possessed and had time to acquire, so I asked my friend Jonathan for help. He very generously designed a database in Microsoft Access that allowed me to record all of the information and generate reports. I put all this together with the information already garnered from the novel and the images from the Web, wrote a rationale (which forms the basis of the Rationale page of this site), and submitted it to Prof. Greetham as my term project.
After the January course I worked on the archive intermittently. One productive stint came during a trip to France and Switzerland in July 2004 for my friend Anthony’s wedding. Before leaving for France I had it in mind that I would try to make it out to Illiers-Combray, the town in Eure-et-Loire that was the original of Combray in the Recherche (the name was hyphenated in 1970 in honor of Proust), and packed two cameras for the occasion, one for color film, the other for black and white. I managed to get some photos of Notre Dame and other parts of Paris. During a day trip to Chartres, where I took many photos of the exterior and interior, I learned that Illiers-Combray was an easy 30-minute train ride from there. I decided to go the next day and, when morning came, persisted in this despite having just finished a very late night out in Paris. I made it to Illiers-Combray barely awake and in desperate need of coffee, headed toward the center of town, wandered into a café and, while sitting at the counter, realized that what I was staring at across the street was the little porch I had seen in so many pictures before. I had walked right past the church without even noticing it.
I finished my coffee and began photographing the porch and façade of the church, first in black and white. Unfortunately, on the fifth or sixth shot my camera, a Canon FTb manufactured in 1974, decided to stop cooperating and the shutter froze. From then on I could only use my Olympus Zoom2000 snapshot camera. I went round the outside of the church and found the apse to be exactly as described in Volume 1 of the Recherche:
It was so crude, so devoid of artistic beauty, even of religious feeling. From the outside, since the street crossing which it commanded was on a lower level, its great wall was thrust upwards from a basement of unfaced ashlar, jagged with flints, in which there was nothing particularly ecclesiastical, the windows seemed to have been pierced at an abnormal height, and its whole appearance was that of a prison wall rather than of a church. (1 1 1 84)
I then went inside to photograph the chapel, altar, windows, and other objects, and was delighted to find so much color. The walls of the nave were deep red with a golden diamond pattern, the ceiling of the chapel a vibrant royal blue, the arch leading into it painted with religious scenes, and the beams below the boat-hull ceiling painted with multi-colored patterns and coats of arms. Each panel of the ceiling had a nearly life-sized portrait of a saint, which can be seen at this page on the website of ASEPIC (Association Pour la Sauvegarde de l’Église et du Patrimoine d’Illiers-Combray).
The stained-glass windows, too, were beautiful, and I was surprised to find one with women in yellow, much like the window in the Recherche depicting St Hilaire, “a lady in a yellow robe” (1 1 1 145). My overall impression of the church was that it felt like a well-worn and well-loved home.
After taking pictures of the interior I went out to the parking lot to get some distance shots and then headed into the tourism office. I spoke there with a very nice woman about the various books they had concerning Proust and came away with several. A book on the history of the Parish, written in the 19th Century by the Abbey J. Marquis and the original of the one written by the Curé of Combray, is a fount of information with great photographsâ€â€very easy to become immersed in. I also picked up a cartoon book by Stéphane Heuet, which is an adaptation of the Combray portions of the Recherche, and two books by P.-L. Larcher on the relation of Illiers to Proust’s Combray, Le Parfum de Combray and Le Temps Retrouvé d’Illiers.
As our conversation caused me to miss the noon train back to Chartres, I now had nearly two hours to spare before the next one. So I began heading back toward an inn I had noticed near the station and was just past the church when it began to pour. Wearing all linen, I ran to the inn as fast as I could in flip-flops, burst through the door, shook the water off my glasses, and asked to be seated for lunch. My hope was to have a sandwich and maybe fix my camera but I instead found myself seated with five men who worked together and under the obligation to order a four course meal. It was a cozy, turn-of-the-century dining room with beautiful wainscoting and patterned wallpaper. Since I was very tiredâ€â€which the sausage plate, cuisse de canard, rich mashed potatoes, cheese and wine did not alleviateâ€â€I found it difficult to hold up my end of the conversation. But my companions were gracious enough and we had an interesting talk about family names in the region. I left Illiers-Combray thinking I would return under better weather in order to explore the town and its environs a little more.
Development of the archive really didn’t pick up again until December 2004 when it came time to complete the independent study for the Certificate in Instructional Technology and Pedagogy (ITP). The ITP program requires an independent study of a teaching activity involving interactive technologyâ€â€in a real classroomâ€â€followed by a written assessment of its success. Since I had already committed to building the Proust archive, I decided to write a proposal incorporating it into a lesson. It was unlikely, however, that an undergraduate literature course would contain enough of Proust to make the archive a viable tool. I therefore decided to conduct the activity in our graduate research and methodology course, the very same in which I began to develope it. If few people in the course had read Proust, at least they would have been reading the theory on which the archive was based and the activity could have a variety of approaches. Prof. Greetham agreed to let me conduct the study in his January section of the course.
Now I had to make the archive available on the web in time for the independent study activity. This had been a goal since the beginning, but though I had some web development skills they were not up to the task of integrating a site with a database. So I asked my friend John, a professional web developer, for help in this. I made a page showing how I wanted the search results to look, and he wrote the ASP pages that implemented the text search. With that working, I had to transcribe the rest of the church passages into the OpenOffice document and then enter them in the database. This was a very intense week, during which my girlfriendâ€â€now my fiancéeâ€â€helped by transcribing passages I had marked in two whole volumes (how could I not marry her after that?). The initial site was finally finished and uploaded to our web server for private use by the class.
At the time of the independent studyâ€â€January 2005â€â€I put in a request with Random House to use the text in a public, fully developed version of the site. This process took about a year and three months in which there were many questions and answers given back and forth, and in which I was referred also to Éditions Gallimard.
With the text usage permission finally granted in March 2006, I put off work on my dissertation prospectus to finish the archive. My friend John worked very hard to implement four more search functions and made them integratable. In the meantime, I scanned all the negatives I had taken at Paris, Chartres, and Illiers-Combray, optimized them for the website, and did much more specialized image research to enhance the variety and accuracy of the pictures.
With much of that finished, the final step was to get permission to use the many hundreds of images in the archive that are not my own. This started as an epic, multi-lingual nightmare that ended up putting me in touch with some of the strangest, nicest, and most generous people I’ve ever had fun with. Be sure to find them in the image credits and Links pages.
I hope you enjoy this archive and find it helpful for your studies, whatever they might be. There are many people who contributed to this resource, so please do read the Contributors page and the Copyright section of the About page.
November 30th, 2006
