MDDM Ch. 58 Young Nathe

[Clément Levy]

Paul Mackin à dit à ÒRe: MDDM Ch. 58 Young NatheÓ.
[2002/06/18 17:17:11]

> Think you might well be onto something, Clement. By way of research I 
> checked
> the English translation of Proust and found the word 'milk-girl' rather 
> than
> the more picturesque 'milkmaid' or 'dairymaid' is used by way of rendering
> Proust's words.  Is this because P's narrator  emphasizes her milk-
> selling role
> with 'la 'marchande de lait'  rather than with what must have been her
> cow-milking duties as well? Seems to me that the English word milkmaid (or
> dairymaid) tends at least  slightly to connote the latter function.  
> There was,
> and maybe still is, the  prominent tradename of "Diarymaid," which I think
> might have pictured a girl with a cow.  Does anyone remember it?
> 
> But more important to your point, I do think that the way young Marcel 
> sees the
> tall beautiful girl from the window of the train  to Balbec as a concrete
> embodiment of the dream and possibility of happiness is quite similiar to 
> the
> way young Nathe, who knows little yet of the opposite sex,  views his own
> milkmaids.
> 
> P.


Hi Paul, I think you got the point. The important thing is erotick in this 
figur of young girl selling milk. I did a mistake as it's in the beginning 
of the second part of A l'ombre, that the young story-teller goes to 
Balbec, but you looked at the right place. The difference lies in the fact 
that Pynchon's milkmaids or diarymaids (I don't know English as much as 
being able to understand these differences) seem to follow the Party (or am 
I wrong?) whereas Proust's one simply waits for the train to stop at the 
station.
The young man of A la recherche still believes that any country has got its 
particular type of girls in which the whole landscape, country's flowers or 
fruits or anything that grows there are resumed. I'm not sure that the 
young MacClean is such an "esthète" (a kind of tourist aswell, don't you 
think so? there's something of the Baedeker in these types of girls for 
every place in a country).
Didn't you remember of the Vermeer portrait, which in France we use to call 
La Laitière (milkmaid properly, I guess)?
Good-bye.
Clément