Ecclesiastical Proust Archive

Hi Brian. Thanks very much for your comments.

You raise a very interesting question because in Proust there are many different types — and many different objects — of thought. How these can be classified in a viable narratological model is one of the questions that prompted me to begin making this archive in the first place.

The Recherche, told by a single narrating consciousness, performs several types of operations on various objects of thought. The narrator remembers events that actually happened (and sometimes dispels that actuality). He remembers emotions, thoughts, and fantasies that he had in the past — not that those are necessarily distinct from events. He contemplates in the narrative present hypothetical situations or other notions that have no grounding in past occurences. He imagines scenes that are purely fictive, or fantastic, or have no clear break from memory of a past reflection as opposed to a current reflection.

For example, if you run an associations search on the term Absorption (no clear connection here, but why not?) and opt to view associations and narrative context notes in the search results, one of the two passages recalled is 1 1 1 80-80:

Its memorial stones, beneath which the noble dust of the Abbots of Combray who lay buried there furnished the choir with a sort of spiritual pavement, were themselves no longer hard and lifeless matter, for time had softened them and made them flow like honey beyond their proper margins, here oozing out in a golden stream, washing from its place a florid Gothic capital, drowning the white violets of the marble floor, and elsewhere reabsorbed into their limits, contracting still further a crabbed Latin inscription, bringing a fresh touch of fantasy into the arrangement of its curtailed characters, closing together two letters of some word of which the rest were disproportionately distended.

This passage occurs within the long description in Swann’s Way of the church at Combray. Though the context of the passage as indicated by the narrative context note — “Lunchtime memory / Combray church choir” — is a memory of a conversation occuring at lunchtime between Francoise and Aunt Leonie, it immediately becomes unclear as to whether the narrator is reporting his past experience or past thoughts about the church at Combray, or is reflecting on that aspect of the church “now”. The passage itself suggests the interpermeability of past memory and current memory, or current memory of a past memory, in its emphasis on flow beyond “proper margins” and the “oozing” of a “golden stream.” It brings into it, too, the modalities and media of Gothic art as manifested in a church — the organic form and whimsicality of the architecture, the changing chromatics rendered by the flow of sunlight through a stained-glass window over time.

The image assigned to it is my own photograph depicting the chapel at the church of Illiers-Combray, the real-world model of the one described in this passage. The photo is underexposed and grainy but shows the stained-glass window and the effect of the bright exterior light in a dark environment as seen through that particular camera. Since it is difficult to make out much detail, what appears instead are the traces of the Gothic altar and shrine to the Virgin and some architectual details along the walls. Maybe it’s just because I took the photograph that it has a certain resonance with me as a reader of this passage, but something about its moodiness and indeterminacy rhymes with the aesthetic of the passage and gives a real analog to the murkiness embodied there. What is in that little cavity so Gothic, imposing, and small?

I think it might be the case in the Recherche that there often is no clear distinction between the objects and the types of thought because they naturally bleed into one another, like the elements of a Gothic church.

The centrality of the church motif and its frequently metaphorical (and, I think, synechdochal) relation to the construction of the novel itself is one aspect that makes it the viable subject of a tool such as this archive. As a reader, it’s nice to conduct a search based on some object of curiosity and be given a small, manageable vignette of reading along with an image that somehow relates. I guess this is an advantage offered by digital media.

# Posted by jdrouin 1311 days ago