ATDTDA (21): He sees her point, 577-580

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

          Mark Kohut:

          Paul's focus leads me to call this section:
 
          Portrait of the Artist Defining Himself.

---------------------------------------------------------

Howzabout Remembrance of Vacations past?

Venice's ultimate ghost tourist:


Marcel Proust

The Sweet Cheat Gone

CHAPTER THREE VENICE

My mother had brought me for a few weeks to Venice and—as there may be beauty in 
the most precious as well as in the humblest things—I was receiving there 
impressions analogous to those which I had felt so often in the past at Combray, 
but transposed into a wholly different and far richer key. When at ten o’clock 
in the morning my shutters were thrown open, I saw ablaze in the sunlight, 
instead of the black marble into which the slates of Saint-Hilaire used to turn, 
the Golden Angel on the Campanile of San Marco. In its dazzling glitter, which 
made it almost impossible to fix it in space, it promised me with its 
outstretched arms, for the moment, half an hour later, when I was to appear on 
the Piazzetta, a joy more certain than any that it could ever in the past have 
been bidden to announce to men of good will. I could see nothing but itself, 
so long as I remained in bed, but as the whole world is merely a vast 
sun-dial, a single lighted segment of which enables us to tell what o’clock 
it is, on the very first morning I was reminded of the shops in the Place 
de l’Eglise at Combray, which, on Sunday mornings, were always on the point of 
shutting when I arrived for mass, while the straw in the market place smelt 
strongly in the already hot sunlight. But on the second morning, what I saw, 
when I awoke, what made me get out of bed (because they had taken the place in 
my consciousness and in my desire of my memories of Combray), were the 
impressions of my first morning stroll in Venice, Venice whose daily life was no 
less real than that of Combray, where as at Combray on Sunday mornings one had 
the delight of emerging upon a festive street, but where that street was paved 
with water of a sapphire blue, refreshed by little ripples of cooler air, and of 
so solid a colour that my tired eyes might, in quest of relaxation and without 
fear of its giving way, rest their gaze upon it. Like, at Combray, the worthy 
folk of the Rue de l’Oiseau, so in this strange town also,
the inhabitants did indeed emerge from houses drawn up in line, side by side, 
along the principal street, but the part played there by houses that cast a 
patch of shade before them was in Venice entrusted to palaces of porphyry and 
jasper, over the arched door of which the head of a bearded god (projecting from 
its alignment, like the knocker on a door at Combray) had the effect of 
darkening with its shadow, not the brownness of the soil but the splendid blue 
of the water. On the piazza, the shadow that would have been cast at Combray by 
the linen-draper’s awning and the barber’s pole, turned into the tiny blue 
flowers scattered at its feet upon the desert of sun-scorched tiles by the 
silhouette of a Renaissance façade, which is not to say that, when the sun was 
hot, we were not obliged, in Venice as at Combray, to pull down the blinds 
between ourselves and the Canal, but they hung behind the quatrefoils and 
foliage of gothic windows. Of this sort was the window in our hotel behind 
the pillars of which my mother sat waiting for me, gazing at the Canal with a 
patience which she would not have displayed in the old days at Combray, at that 
time when, reposing in myself hopes which had never been realised, she was 
unwilling to let me see how much she loved me. Nowadays she was well aware that 
an apparent coldness on her part would alter nothing, and the affection that she 
lavished upon me was like those forbidden foods which are no longer withheld 
from invalids, when it is certain that they are past recovery. To be sure, the 
humble details which gave an individuality to the window of my aunt Léonie’s 
bedroom, seen from the Rue de l’Oiseau, the asymmetry of its position not midway 
between the windows on either side of it, the exceptional height of its wooden 
ledge, the slanting bar which kept the shutters closed, the two curtains of 
glossy blue satin, divided and kept apart by their rod, the equivalent of all 
these things existed in this hotel in Venice where I 
could hear also those words, so distinctive, so eloquent, which enable us to 
recognise at a distance the house to which we are going home to luncheon, and 
afterwards remain in our memory as testimony that, during a certain period of 
time, that house was ours; but the task of uttering them had, in Venice, 
devolved not, as at Combray, and indeed, to a certain extent, everywhere, upon 
the simplest, that is to say the least beautiful things, but upon the almost 
oriental arch of a façade which is reproduced among the casts in every museum as 
one of the supreme achievements of the domestic architecture of the middle ages; 
from a long way away and when I had barely passed San Giorgio Maggiore, I caught 
sight of this arched window which had already seen me, and the spring of its 
broken curves added to its smile of welcome the distinction of a loftier, 
scarcely comprehensible gaze. And since, behind those pillars of differently 
coloured marble, Mamma was sitting reading while she waited for
 me to return, her face shrouded in a tulle veil as agonising in its whiteness 
as her hair to myself who felt that my mother, wiping away her tears, had pinned 
it to her straw hat, partly with the idea of appearing ‘dressed’ in the eyes of 
the hotel staff, but principally so as to appear to me less ‘in mourning,’ less 
sad, almost consoled for the death of my grandmother; since, not having 
recognised me at first, as soon as I called to her from the gondola, she sent 
out to me, from the bottom of her heart, a love which stopped only where there 
was no longer any material substance to support it on the surface of her 
impassioned gaze which she brought as close to me as possible, which she tried 
to thrust forward to the advanced post of her lips, in a smile which seemed to 
be kissing me, in the framework and beneath the canopy of the more discreet 
smile of the arched window illuminated by the midday sun; for these reasons, 
that window has assumed in my memory the precious quality of things 
that have had, simultaneously, side by side with ourselves, their part in a 
certain hour that struck, the same for us and for them; and however full of 
admirable tracery its mullions may be, that illustrious window retains in my 
sight the intimate aspect of a man of genius with whom we have spent a month in 
some holiday resort, where he has acquired a friendly regard for us; and if, 
ever since then, whenever I see a cast of that window in a museum, I feel the 
tears starting to my eyes, it is simply because the window says to me the thing 
that touches me more than anything else in the world: “I remember your mother so 
well.”

http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/p/proust/marcel/p96sw/chapter3.html

Paul Nightingale:

As Dally's relationship with Hunter develops he begins with the dreamed war;
later, there is another reference linking him to Merle (579). On each
occasion the painter is telling a story; Dally, model and agent, becomes the
audience. Introspectively, she wonders about the questions he isn't
addressing, not least what his plans are.

The dream with which Hunter starts 'places' him in London, erasing his part
in earlier sections of the novel; subsequently, one might ask if it is
indeed his 'own' dream, just as, in the previous section, his "young, almost
adolescent face" is juxtaposed to "gray, nearly white [hair]" (576). Then,
having name-dropped WG Grace (577), he goes on to mention "eminent ghosts,
Turner and Whistler, Ruskin, Browning sorts of chap" (578, the association
with predecessor artists perhaps more obvious than the inclusion in that
list of the poet).

Such ghosts are not mere tourists, "their purpose to infest the Venetian
summer, ... to pass quickly as they must, driven off, forgotten" (568).
History is defined as "bourgeois literalism, ... its ultimate embodiment,
the tourist" (579). Ghosts have left something behind, "subtle vibrational
impulses of the soul" (578). Hence, "dreamers [can] pick up traces of the
dreams of whoever slept there just before them": is the Grace dream, then,
something Hunter has "pick[ed] up"? Either way, the dreamer connects, and
this process echoes Hunter's methodology as a painter: "Imagine that inside
this labyrinth ..." etc (575). The tourist (their obsession a mark of
"bourgeois literalism", 579) wants the same as all other tourists (eg, the
"better-known landmarks around town", 574); whereas the painter looks for
(and expects his audience to look for) something else (eg, "... stay in this
town awhile, keep your senses open, reject nothing ..." etc, 579).

As the audience for Hunter's exposition, Dally is threatened with the role
of tourist: "She was trying to keep up, but Hunter didn't make it easy."
Throughout, she has had little to say, a passive recipient of his speech,
called upon to do little but prompt him, eg: "To the spirit behind it-"

Eventually, his story of Jesus recalls Merle, whose discourse replaces that
of Hunter ("... as Merle had told it"). This is what, finally, allows her to
assert herself ("... it had always seemed to Dally", 580). The section ends
with her lengthy speech, followed by a brief coda from Hunter.