Proust je bio i ostaje velika tema.

Za mene je on jedan od velike četvorke- Shakespeare, Tolstoj, Dostojevski i Proust, koji su stvorili najveći broj nezaboravnih ljudi (drugi velikani, kao Dante, nemaju ljude nego je više poezija i sl.)

Proust je imao um metafizičara, no on je prvenstveno pisac, nije filozof kao Aristotel ili Hegel; njega zanimaju ljudi i ljudski život. Nije ni religijski nastrojen, nego je duboki svjetovni znalac ljudske prirode. Interesantno je da je toliko znao, spoznao i artikulirao, a nije puno čitao ni učio- bio je rođeni kreativni genij. Homo crta mi izgleda vidljiva u nekim stvarima- npr. njegovi detaljni opisi ženskih haljina i sl., što većina normalnih muškaraca ne bi ni primijetila.

Zadivljujuće je što je uz tako loše zdravlje napisao ne samo vrhunsko djelo, nego što je išta napisao.

Mora se isto reći da imao širinu duha- iako je bio napol Židov, održao je prijateljstvo s raznim antisemitima i nakon Dreyfusove afere. Joyce pak, kao neki kozmopolit, kad je bio nekoliko mjeseci u Londonu, izbjegavao je Engleze kao kugu- iako su ga oni obožavali- i družio se skoro isključivo s Ircima.

Proust mi izgleda kao tema za nostalgiju. Njegovi raskošni opisi senzibilnosti nemaju baš puno šanse u sadašnjici. I minimalisti kao Kafka i Beckett su teško prihvatljivi, a kamoli on, koji je kao podsjetnik na bogata stara vremena nijansi, ...

U Traganju njegovi markizi, vojvode... na domijencima imaju glumce da im recitiraju Hugoa, Baudelairea, Vignyja, Nervala, Pascala..

Tko od modernih bogatuna (Gates i sl.) priređuje domijenke gdje bi se, recimo, recitirao Keats, Wordsworth, Shelley, Yeats? Nema, literarna je kultura u visokim krugovima-propala.

Proust će ostati za malen, vrlo malen broj ljudi koje će moći obogatiti.

Ja sam ga uzeo pred kojih pola godine i samo napreskokce prešao manji dio Pronađenog vremena- i valjao se od smijeha njegovim ironičnim opaskama.

Retro, zamjerke Proustu bi bile:

* previše analize. Kao da postoji neka granica koju mudrosno-analitički pisac ne bi trebao prijeći, i tu je George Eliot našla pravu mjeru. Proust je pretjerao u "Zatočenici" (no nadoknadio je u "Bjegunici", posebno u slavnom odlomku kad Marcel prima, tobože, Albertinino pismo i vidi da mu je svejedno, da ju više ne voli.)

* nedostatak životne radosti. Ovo može zvučati kao Staljinovo ideološko pranje mozga, no činjenica je da je uza sav sjajni humor "Traganje" turobna knjiga. Kao da se vidi da ju je pisala osoba koja nije tjelesno zdrava, a ni psihički vitalna.

* uistinu previše homoseksualizma. Koliko god Proust majstorski ludovao (vidjeti uvod u "Sodomu i Gomoru")- ipak je nemoguće da tolik broj likova ispadnu topla braća. Posljedica autorova homoseksualizma i astme je i neka zagušljiva atmosfera- kod Prousta nema istinske duhovne slobode, nema životnih ritmova vezanih za biološke izmjene rađanja i umiranja (kao kod Tolstoja). Nekako se osjeća da je pisac samac, bez djece i da nema potrebu da se bori za materijalnu egzistenciju.

Uza sve to, Proust ostaje vjerojatno najveći imaginativni auktor 20. stoljeća.

Nu, kad već gunđam:

* pretjeruje i ponekad s umjetničkim analizama koje-nije samo moje mišljenje- baš i ne stoje, recimo brdo stranica o Wagneru. A Wagner je "zdošel", daleko od toga da je kulturna figura kakav je bio. I pričanja likova o Dostojevskom su uglavnom bez veze, ne pridonose nešto spoznaju o FMD-u i njegovu djelu.

* ponovo- djelo odiše tim što mu je auktor muškarac koji se nije ženio, cijeli je život proveo s mamom (do njezine smrti), i nije imao djece. Plus to da je bio topli brat, no da i nije, to je knjiga histerično preosjetljivoga esteta. Drugačije bi bilo da je autor živio sa ženom, morao se prilagođavati, trenirati živce na ženina zvocanja, mijenjati pelene i učiti dijete hodanju i čitanju. Nema kod Prousta tog ritma života, zdravih- baš zdravih- ljudi koji nalaze ispunjenje u radu, u religiji, u obitelji, u ... Razlika između zdravog i bolesnoga ironista vidljiva je usporedimo li ga s njegovim parcijalnim predhodnikom (obojica su imali židovske majke) Montaigneom.

* budući da je diskurz memoarski, stalno osjećamo kako je sve nekako svršeno, gotovo,... a likovi- svejedno koje dobe- ne zriju, nego stare i postaju nemoćni i kilavi. Ne vidim nigdje zrelu mušku snagu i radost postojanja (kao kod Whitmana, koji je bio unekoliko homić, ali ne previše, a i imao je šire životno iskustvo). Dok ovaj astmatičar davi li ga davi. Jednostranost Prousta vidi se i u hiperbolama kojima je obasuo umjetnički poziv- kao da je jedino to put životnoga ispunjenja, dok to ne mogu biti fizički rad, znanost, medicina, politika, pravo, ...

No on ostaje, što bi rekla mlađarija u nedostatku vokabulara- zakon.

Ultrasenzitivna gejpederska ispičutura, danas se to zove “emo”.

Natjerali su me čitati ga za lektiru, zaspao sam kod 3 stranice opisivanja kako se keks otapa u žlici čaja.

Al dobro, možda opet dam šanse, pročitati par stranica. Ali vjerujem da ću opet zaspati.

Jedno od najvećih smorova od djela. Naporno cmoljenje vječnog maminog sina. Jedva sam nekako izdura knjigu do kraja jer je bila za lektiru. Nikad više nešto njegovo ne bi pipnio. Iz svake stranice isijava njegova životna luzerština, al ne da je on neki romantični gubitnik koji pada za neki cilj, on je naprosto jado. Francuska kniževnost je prevelika da bi se tom maminom sinu i smoru davala tolika pozornost.

Moja napomena.

Roman se sastoji od 7 romana:

1. Put k Swannu- Jedna Swannova ljubav
2. U sjeni procvalih djevojaka
3. Vojvotkinja de Guermantes
4. Sodoma i Gomora
5.Zatočenica
6. Bjegunica
7. Pronađeno vrijeme

Za lektiru se stavlja knjiga 1. koja dalje ekspoziciju za sve ostalo, no meni je bila dosadana i pročitao sam ju zadnju, tek kad sam sve znao. Počeo sam s 2. bio odmah očaran sanjarenjem i analozom; onda slijedi prirodno ostalo, s vrhuncima analize i paranoje u 5. i 6. No, početak, Put k Swannu uistinu jest dosadan.
100 ljudi, 100 ćudi..

"Inconceivable boredom associated with the most extreme ecstasy which it is possible to imagine."
H. James

"An enormous and yet singularly light and translucent work . . . the best novel of its era.”
Nabokov

"There are many pages of Proust that are as tedious as life itself."
Borges

"The greatest novelist of the twentieth century.”
Greene

"A hermaphrodite, toadlike creature spooning his own tepid juice over his face and body."
A. Huxley

"Proust's great work has the simplicity and majesty of a cathedral."
A. Maurois

“Life is too short, and Proust is too long.”
A. France

“Reading Proust isn't just reading a book, it's an experience and you can't reject an experience.”
Gaddis

"The greatest fiction to date."
Maugham

"The clumsy centipedalian crawling of the interminable sentences . . ."
A. Bennett

“One reads Proust and thinks him very accomplished.”
Pound

"I don't understand [Proust]. To me, that's not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange."
Cormac M.

"A great writer . . . it cannot be estimated yet what these books have opened out for us and for the future; they are loaded with a wealth of discovery."
Rilke

"In a half-whispered voice [Proust] relates the most long-winded and boring dream of a fruitless and bloodless man -- a man who lives outside of reality."
Gorky

"There are, I suppose, faults to be found, but I am in a state of amazement; as if a miracle were being done before my eyes. . . . The pleasure becomes physical: like sun and wine and grapes and perfect serenity and intense vitality combined."
Woolf

"There is no special truth in him; he writes a careless self-indulgent prose, doesn't he? . . . Epithet follows epithet like tea cakes in flutes of paper."
Gass

"I wish I had written it myself."
Faulkner

"Proust shows life as analytical and immobile. The reader finishes his sentences before he does.”
Joyce

"It is a tiring style, but it does not tire the mind. One's fatigue is a fatigue of the heart, a blood fatigue. One is exhausted and angry after an hour, submerged, dominated by the crest and break of metaphor after metaphor."
Beckett

Na goodreads, meni je dobra psohedelična revcenzija neke ženske:

I took today off work because I need to put everything I own into boxes so I can move tomorrow, but obviously I can't begin doing that until I get some of these obsessive thoughts about Proust out of my system. I mean, can I? Nope. I can't! After all, this house is where I read Proust -- wait, I read Swann's Way before I moved here, which is pretty nuts to think about -- and so how can I move without reviewing the whole thing?

I do feel pretty traumatized after finishing this book. Sort of shellshocked and confused with all these half-formed thoughts and intense inexplicable feelings bouncing around in me, and I don't know what to do with them or myself. Yesterday I wound up sitting in my friend's bar explaining Proust's aesthetic theories, but that kind of behavior'll get you kicked out of most places, and is not really becoming a young lady. And obviously that's where this website comes in.... what is it for, if not to unload just this kind of mental baggage?

Reading Proust made me wish I were more of a scholar, so I could try to puzzle out some kind of literary context for what this book is. I feel like people think of Proust as being stuffy and old-fashioned and all crusty and ancient, but I think a lot of that has to do with the subject matter (a lost time with superficial resemblance to Jane Austen's milieu), so it's kind of shocking to remember what else was going on while he was writing this. I know this is dumb and there're much better comparisons, but I kept thinking while reading this that it was like thinking your whole life that New York punk in the seventies was all about the Ramones and imagining you really got what was going on then from just listening to that.... but then when you're in your mid-twenties someone suddenly plays you Television for the first time, and you're like what? Like you think you know what modernism is, it's like Ulysses or whatever, but then you find out it's got this completely insane cousin across the river who's just doing all these things that appear at first to have no relationship at all to everything you ignorantly thought you kind of understood at least a little bit before. Again, I'm not much of a scholar and what I'm saying probably doesn't make any sense. To be honest, I don't even know what "modernism" means, I just know it sounds literary.... I think what I'm trying to get at is that the relevance of Proust's concerns to his time aren't immediately obvious because his approach to them initially seems so weird and unfamiliar. But then you realize, while you're in it, that Proust is actually so much of his time it's incredible, and that what he's saying and doing was hugely innovative and exciting at the beginning of the last century, and actually, I'd say, remains as much so today. And I just kind of wish that I knew more about art and literature and whatnot so I could tie it all in better, since I sense there're all these fascinating connections and reference points, but I don't know what they are. I'd sort of like to sneak into some college class or something where they're reading Proust, and listen in, or at least steal their syllabus.... do they even read Proust in college? I feel like they don't. I mean, I never heard of him when I was in college, or after. I really hadn't. I honestly had no idea who Proust was until I started hanging out on this website.

Anyway, for me the most relevant contemporary writer I thought of while reading this wasn't a novelist. A little background: I always really loathed the discipline of psychology and thought it was stupid. When I unwittingly enrolled in social work school, I was dismayed to discover that getting my MSW involved reading pages and pages of precisely this stuff I'd always looked down on.... My happy discovery was that Freud, at least, was actually a fabulous writer, and a lot of his ideas are totally fascinating and very beautiful. What I realized finally is that I just resented psychology for its pretension of pretending it's a science. But actually psychology's concerns and sometimes even their expression are hugely significant -- among the most significant -- and kind of wonderful. In fact, I decided, I love psychology, as long as it knows its place and realizes it's an art, not a science.... Freud said he wanted his case histories to read like short stories, so I think he understood this. Proust, of course, took this to an extreme, by exploring essentially the same territory, not in a short story, but in an extraordinarily long and in some ways kind of ridiculous novel. In Search of Lost Time is about the development of the mind, the experience of consciousness, the influence of past events and relationships on one's emotions and behavior.... all the same stuff Freud cared about, only it made more sense to me here, presented this way.

I completely lost my shit reading the last couple pages of this book, and broke down on some fundamental level in a way I imagine was akin to what you can get from really top-shelf psychotherapy. Towards the end of the book, Proust explains everything he's been trying to do, and just did, in writing this novel. It's his theory of art and specifically of literature, and it's pretty hard to argue with since you've watched him just do it. One of the things that Proust says is that readers of his book "would not be my readers but readers of themselves, my book serving merely as a sort of magnifying glass, such as the optician of Combray used to offer to a customer, so that through my book I would give them the means of reading in their own selves" (p. 384). I guess that could sound unexciting, ripped out of context, but he really does do this, and it truly is astounding. I felt throughly convinced by Proust's theory of what art is for, and as far as I'm concerned he was totally successful in accomplishing his aims. Like psychotherapy, ISoLT attempts to dive into the murk of the unconscious past to retrieve experiences and cognitions that have become inaccessible. Proust dives in and swims down to the bottom, and he finds them, and he grabs them, and he brings them back up and then hands them to you.... Which is pretty nuts. I mean, it's intense. I feel fucked up from it.

Hm. I thought I wanted to talk about this book, but maybe I just want to pack up my shit after all. I really do want to review this book, but maybe it's too soon? It's a really insane novel, and there's tons of stuff in it I'd really love to dork out about on here.... but yeah, maybe too soon. I might come back and say something more coherent later on, when it's all settled down a bit.

I guess the only thing I need to add right at this moment is that I really felt like Proust gave me this particular combination of the things I need most. I really can't read anything too difficult or serious, and to anyone who's considering giving Proust a try -- I can't emphasize this enough -- forget what you heard: this book is anything but a ponderous drag. It's silly and hilarious and smart and bizarre, and there's tons of fashion and sex and depravity and satire and insane plot twists that don't make any sense. I personally have a very short attention span and I cannot and do not read anything that isn't vastly entertaining. In Search of Lost Time is VASTLY ENTERTAINING!! (Except for The Captive, which is only somewhat entertaining.) This is not to say that it's for everyone, and I can see how lots of people would totally hate this. HOWEVER: it's definitely worth a shot, because this book could change your life. I mean that. It could. I'm a completely different person now than I was when I started. So what if this means I'm now an obsessively jealous, elitist, antisemitic, agoraphobic pervert who speaks exclusively in run-on sentences? I think I'm better for it, and you might be too.

Ah , neš ti vadit citate:

James Joyce, in a 1920 letter to Frank Budgen:

I have read some pages of his. I cannot see any special talent.


Anatole France, famously (but probably apocryphally):

Life is too short, and Proust is too long.


Kazuo Ishiguro, in an interview with HuffPo:

To be absolutely honest, apart from the opening volume of Proust, I find him crushingly dull. The trouble with Proust is that sometimes you go through an absolutely wonderful passage, but then you have to go about 200 pages of intense French snobbery, high-society maneuverings and pure self-indulgence. It goes on and on and on and on. But every now and again, I suppose around memory, he can be beautiful.



Šta nam to govori? Ništa.

100 ljudi, 100 ćudi.

Kao i pohvale Woolfove, Faulknera i Becketta, te niza osalih.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes ... roust.html

In England not long ago a survey of writers and critics revealed that the twentieth-century novelist they most admired--and who they thought would have the most enduring influence on the next century--was Marcel Proust. Certainly the madeleine moistened by herbal tea has become the most famous symbol in French literature; everyone refers to sudden gusts of memory as "Proustian experiences." Snobs like to point out that if the Prousts had been better-mannered and not given to dunking, world literature would have been the poorer for it. Even those who haven't read Proust speak of him freely and often.

Studying him, of course, can have a disastrous effect on a young writer, who either comes under the influence of Proust's dangerously idiosyncratic and contagious style or who feels that Proust has already done everything possible in the novel form. Even Walter Benjamin, who became Proust's German translator, wrote the philosopher Theodor Adorno that he did not want to read one more word by Proust than was actually necessary for him to translate because otherwise he would become addictively dependent, which would be an obstacle to his own production.

Graham Greene once wrote: "Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth.... For those who began to write at the end of the twenties or the beginning of the thirties, there were two great inescapable influences: Proust and Freud, who are mutually complementary." Certainly Proust's fame and prestige have eclipsed those of Joyce, Beckett, Virginia Woolf and Faulkner, of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, of Gide and Valery and Genet, of Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht, for if some of these writers are more celebrated than Proust in their own country, Proust is the only one to have a uniformly international reputation. The young Andrew Holleran, who would go on to publish the most important American gay novel of the seventies, Dancer from the Dance, wrote a friend eight years earlier: "Robert, much has happened: That is, I finally finished Remembrance of Things Past and I don't know what to say--the idea that Joyce ended the novel is so absurd; it's Proust who ended the novel, simply by doing something so complete, monumental, perfect, that what the fuck can you do afterwards?"

Potpisujem, sto ljudi sto ćudi.

Tko voli takvu takvu apoteozu luzerštine i jada, uživat će. Moj problem s Proustom je prije svega ta beživotnost, negativnost lišena duha. Dajem ruku u vatru da je malo ko u zadnjih 50 godina to išao ozbljno udubljeno čitat van nekih školaraca koji su dovoljno ludi da pročitaju svu lektiru (među njima ja, sigurno u njegovoj Francuskoj dosta njih).

A detaljno opisivanje su rabili realisti prije nego se Proust i rodio, Balzac to radi bolje i životnije.

Nije to-to.

Kao što je striko Bloom napisao sažeto, veličina Prousta je u nečem drugom:

Neman ja problema s njegovom osobom nego s "zadahom" koji se širi iz njegovog djela. Ko voli nek izvoli.

Hrobats jest mator i ogorcen, pun mrznje neke i srdzbe, i obicno mi se gade njegovi stavovi, ali je jedan od intelektualaca foruma (nacitan i obrazovan) - kojih zaista nema mnogo.

Prousta mi je jaran bivsi volio iz dna duse. Cak se slikao na njegovom grobu, stavivsi glavu svoju na nj, pa mu je to bila profilna na fejsu.

Moram priznati da nisam procitao jos uvijek nista.

Hrobatose, ima li nesto od Prousta sto bi preporucio za pocetnika a da mi ne dosadi odmah?

Evo muje o književnosti, biži od toga to su nevjerničke vradžbine, ima ti kuran i to je to.