#ProustTogether 1/25
THREAD on the event at Albertine bookstore in NYC live with Paris and Proust specialist Jean-Yves Tardie who published a Cahier Proust, Editions de L'Herne.
I watched it this evening -not live- which allowed me to stop to take notes.
So here we go!

#ProustTogether 2/25
Proust, age 17, told his friend Vercini about his homosexuality. He told him about a "nasty encounter" with a boy who forced him (raped hin). Apparently he also told his mother and father of this sexual assault and of his sexual orientation. They knew!

#ProustTogether 3/25
Proust's mother tried to marry off Marcel tofamous author Anatole France's daughter. Anatole France is the main inspiration for Bergotte.
Celeste, however, always refused to acknowledge his homosexuality and even denied it when asked.

#ProustTogether 4/25
Proust was shocked by the Wilde trial and the Eulenbourg trial, 2 trials in which the defendants were homosexuals.
In France, 3 authors of the early 20th century kept sexuality /sex at the heart of their literary work: Gide, Proust and Colette.

#ProustTogether 5/25
Sex and sexuality is more important than Time and Memory in Proust's work (readers should not limit their reading of his work to ISOLT, otherwise they get the wrong idea!)
Sodom and Gomorrhah is a "marvelous entry into the life of a persecuted minority."

#ProustTogether 6/25
In our era, Proust appears as the "champion du confinement" (lockdown champ). In France he became a very popular figure during and since the pandemic. People turned back to him en masse.

#ProustTogether 7/25
The newly discovered "75 feuillets" have come out as "the Holy Grail", the "Origin", the "source text" of ISOLT. Had they been discovered in the 1950s, no-one would have cared. French People were into Sartre, Camus, and the "Nouveau Roman" at that time.

#ProustTogether 8/25
So the discovery of those 75 pages forms a "moment sacré" (sacred moment).
Good news for the group: these pages will be translated and published by Harvard University Press in about a year! @literatureSC we can re-read ISOLT starting with this text 1st!

#ProustTogether 9/25
Proust, work-wise, after turning down Diplomacy, went back to school in the hope of becoming a translator @LizoksBooks ! Every great French writer of the late 19th/early 20th century thought that translation was a marvelous school to learn the art of writing!

#ProustTogether 10/25
All French writers of this era learned to write novels by translating other authors into French...
Proust did not know how to speak English but nonetheless translated Ruskin. He famously said that he could "understand" Ruskin.

#ProustTogether 11/25
His mother (who spoke English & a few other languages) helped him with this translation (never credited for it, of course!)
In summer 1907, he wrote these now famous 75 pages, started as an autobiography & with the REAL names of parents/ grandparents.

#ProustTogether 12/25
These 75 pages contain only one novelistic element, the figure of Swann, which was then called Mr. de Bredeville (bad audio, I listened 5 times, cannot be sure, but definitely a very aristocratic name with the -ville ending).

#ProustTogether 13/25
These 75 pages contain the 1st draft of Combray, of Les noms de pays, of Within a Budding Grove, of the Guermantes Way, of a part on Aristocratic Names, and of Venice (mentioned later in The Captive & The Fugitive)

#ProustTogether 14/25
In Summer 1909 Proust picked up those pages and started from scratch again: he changed all the names, and adopted the POV of a narrator rather than writing a full-blown autobiography.
He said: "Nothing is invented and everything is a novel."

#ProustTogether 15/25
It became a novel with 500 characters, most are fictional, but as in every "period novel", some are real, such as the comte de Noailles, the Queen of Naples, Prince de Sagan.
Proust's writing in these 75 pages is "already natural, it flows like a river."

#ProustTogether 16/25
What is NOT found in these 75 pages is the Memory theme, whether voluntary or involuntary.
For the artist, involuntary memory is in the principle: everybody & everything comes out of a cup of tea
--> the way to enter into the world of Literature, Imagination

#ProustTogether 17/25
--> the cup of tea is a gimmick to enter into the novel.
Hence the mention of the Japanese crane paper lanterns in the first volume.

#ProustTogether 18/25
Before WW1, Proust did not think he was a Jew. He had been baptized Catholic, received the Holy Communion, and was raised Catholic.
The antisemitism he and his family exhibited, which can be found in the novel, is not self-hatred (according to speaker)

#ProustTogether 19/25
Rather, Proust's antisemitism was a "social antisemitism" existing in assimilated Jewish families. The lecturer mentioned Proust's mother (a Jew) saying: "Don't go on that beach, there are too many Jews." (Gasp!!)
The Bloch character represents this.

#ProustTogether 20/25
Proust had a very assimilated Jewish family : his Jewish mom married a Catholic and she raised her son as a Catholic.
The antisemitism exhibited is a form of "social despise/condescendance" towards less assimilated Jews (less successful). Not racism (hmmm!)

#ProustTogether 21/25
For most Proust scholarships, Proust was pro-Jew, pro-homosexuals, pro-sick and invalid people. His best and many friends were Jews (I felt this sentence by Mr. Tardie sounded like tokenism to me, seeing how fascinated Proust was by the aristocratic world!)

#ProustTogether 22/25
I must say I was VERY surprised when Mr. Tardie said :"In 1910, the French society could not have known /thought that one day there'd be a Hitler and a Petain."
Well, Antisemitism in France did not wait for Hitler!! "La France Juive" was published in 1886!!

#ProustTogether 23/25
Not acknowledging the existence of virulent antisemitism in France in 1886, i.e, 8 years before Colonel Dreyfus was arrested and tried (1894) is a MAJOR lapse in my eyes, especially for such a famous academic and scholarly figure as Mr. Tardie is!

#ProustTogether 24/25
However, Mr. Tardie said that Sodom and Gomorrhah, as a literary work, is a defense of "the Jews and the homosexuals [who] are [at that time] the persecuted of the world."
It is not always obvious though... for the uninitiated in Proustian verve.

#ProustTogether 25/25
Proust apparently wrote about his life: "My childhood was a well of sadness." He had wealth, he had affection, so why he?
--> All he wanted was very simple sentences to throw a strong light that would make people feel that well of sadness.