Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novel Of The 1910's

But I think Proust and the narrator rise to the imaginative challenge of this displacement. They do understand and feel the appeal of girls, to certain rich, lifetime-adolescent, questing collector-types anyway (and Colette said that, in their first encounter, she found herself being followed from room to room in a house party, by a boy with remarkable eyelashes, while she was dressed as a boy, in uniform--reminding me of that portrait of Odette.)

oh man the passage about the portrait of odette as a boy is one of the most unmooredly beautiful in the entire book, partly because its subject isn't revealed until the end of the scene and elstir's strange embarrassed don't-tell-my-wife reaction to the narrator's unearthing it always has me wrongly guessing at first that it's a self-portrait, a feminine elstir rather than a masculine odette

book is def full of authentic het feeling and his silly raptures over his fantasy gang of meangirls whose perceived personalities he keeps discovering he's projected on them have often have me feeling pretty seen tbh; i was just quibbling w straight

any kind of displacement is obv only fuel for this book yeah

*have often had

watching the steeples of three different churches align in parallax: a metaphor for metaphor.

Nice, I love this

"Dr. Percepied's Carriage" is my fave track on nuggets

i was just quibbling w straight

As a gay man reading the novel for the last 30 years (I reread The Fugitive or whatever the latest translation calls it a few months ago) I noted how my experiences affect how Proust shades and obscures the sexuality. I used to laugh at what I thought was the way too reductive reading of Odette-as-boy or Albertine-as-young-male-trick, but given what you read in, say, a period Gide novel the freedoms allowed to Albertine and her posse the way Marcel obsesses over banal details of her liberties -- the liberties only a man could've taken in pre-Great War France -- they only make sense with the gender reversal.

I should note, the Swann-Odette affair makes more "straight" sense than the Marcel-Albertine one.

The narrator-Albertine-in-apartment thing drove me up a wall--such a claustrophobic, musty reduction and rehash of Swann In Love, and according to Penguin Modern translators' notes, *not* part of the original plan for Recherche---what the hell, Marcel? And after all that, the narrator's like, "eh, so what. Next concern."

*not* part of the original plan for Recherche

The tale grew in the telling

I recommend Malcolm Bowie's piece "Proust, jealousy, knowledge" for a really good discussion on The Prisoner. He thinks that the theme of jealousy operates as a kind of shadow or opposite to the theme of involuntary memory. You can see the book as growing out of these opposing notions of knowledge; again, back to the goodnight kiss and the madeleine. I don't quite see the narrator's jealousy of Albertine as a rehash of the Swann/Odette narrative. To me there's a strange sense of inevitability about it - the earlier story is almost like a curse that the narrator can't escape. The same patterns keep repeating. (You can also ask retrospectively, how much of the Swann/Odette narrative is the narrator's reconstruction following his experience in the Albertine saga?)

It is conspicuous how little thought he seems to give Albertine in the final volume, though she does have a lingering presence in the closing pages; a loose thread that seems to slip out of his grand theorizing.