Why we read Proust: In Search of Lost Time/The Guermantes Way

Have resumed the great and totally enjoyable journey back into lost time - now reading Vol. 3 of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (penguin ed.), The Guermantes Way, and have to say after a few pages of acclimatization to the unique style of Proust and his exceptionally complex and nuanced sentence structure - even more so, apparently, in French; this great English translation - I'll get the translator's name for tomorrow's post - does capture those odd French past conditionals and other verb forms that English only approximates - I became totally immersed in his vision and his - Proust's, and his narrator, also (we learn in the last volume) name Marcel - consciousness and vision. If novels serve to give us access to the consciousness of another, none does more so that Lost Time, without question. Even just the first 60 or so pp. in this volume contain some astonishing moments and what the French aptly call apercus - even though not much "happens," that is, we do not read Proust for plot - the fine Penguin edition includes a helpful plot summary cross-referenced with page #s, at the end (a sly reminder of the Monty Python "summarize Proust" skit?), which helps guide us. These first pages show the the narrator now maybe late teens or early 20s?, long beyond the early crush of the young girls in flower at Balbec, the family has just moved to a new right bank apartment (interesting how even very wealthy families of the era were tenants) in a complex owned by the Duchess Guermantes - the narrator spends a great deal of time stalking the Duchess, on whom he has a hopeless, almost ludicrous, crush - and the central "episode" is a night at the opera when she spies him and raises her hand in greeting - this scene give Proust great leeway for description, including a stunning passage in which the entire audience is compared with an aquatic scene (as if all are underwater gazing out - life aquarium fish) as we well as some reflections on social status (of course) and the purpose of art; another element of this first section is his testy relationship with the maid, Francoise, source of some mocking humor (narrator at his least likable) - and leading to a central passage in which narrator reflects that, though we can look through a grating and see flowers in a garden and know exactly what they are, we can never exactly know what another person thinks about us - other people's consciousness is not like a flowerbed but like a dark blur, from which we can at best draw broad inferences. Of course this entire novel, to a degree, belies that truth.