A shortcut to understanding Proust
By: Sebastian S
Tags: Literature, Quotes, Book Review, Books, Quotes About Life

Context is as important as the words on the page

8. “They themselves offered me no enlightenment, and I could not call upon any other flower to satisfy this mysterious longing. And then, inspiring me with that rapture which we feel on seeing a work by our favorite painter quite different from those we already know, or, better still, when we are shown a painting of which we have hitherto seen no more than a pencilled sketch, or when a piece of music which we have heard only on the piano appears to us later clothed in all the colours of the orchestra, my grandfather called me to him, and, pointing to the Tansonville hedge said to me: “You’re fond of hawthorns; just look at this pink one — isn’t it lovely?”

The first time I read Mrs. Dalloway, I was a sophomore in college, reading it in one rushed sitting for an English class. I had heard of the book and Virginia Woolf and knew a bit about stream-of-consciousness and the Modernists, but I read it because I had to, and did it in as hurried a mode as possible. I didn’t sit and ponder, didn’t double back, hardly processed it.

As a result of this, and perhaps where I was in life, I detested it, and two years later, when, with the same professor, I had to read To the Lighthouse, after having digested a lot more British literature and having been told, repeatedly, about Virginia Woolf’s genius, I was set on not making the same mistake again. I read To the Lighthouse over multiple days, often in a vacant library, rereading tricky passages and marking down notable pages. Feeling that I had had a “mysterious longing” fulfilled, I came out of it championing Woolf and her genius novel. Years later, I returned to Mrs. Dalloway, this time armed with the To the Lighthouse experience, “clothed with all the colours of the orchestra,” and saw now the “painting” where previously it had only been a “pencilled sketch.”

What I mean to say by this lengthy anecdote is that judgment, particularly judgment of a work of art, is more fickle than we care to admit, since it’s as much about ourselves and our ability to contextualize the object being judged as it is about the work. We can enjoy something, return to it, and find it distasteful (Hello, Pearl Harbor), or, more wonderfully, we can find something incomprehensible, or plain, or dull, or just plain bad, and return to it and enter a rapture (Hello, Mrs. Dalloway). Such rediscovery is possible because our judgments, like ourselves, are mutable.

I thought of this while reading the above passage, in which Proust describes an increased appreciation for works of art that he had not fully appreciated. In the excerpt, the work of art itself undergoes a transformation: a piece of music now has a full orchestra, a sketch is now in color. (Notice please the intermingling of the two analogies when he says that the orchestra provides “colour”.) In my case, I and my context for reading changed. They seem like starkly different circumstances, but Proust, like me, had believed that he’d experienced the piece of music or picture, when he’d only experienced a shadow of it.

The reader and his context for reading is not intrinsic to a work of art, but it is intrinsic to his experience of the art. The purpose of reading such articles as this is not to have the book, or even the quotes, explained to you, but rather to add context so that when you read it, you experience more of an orchestra than simply a piano piece. Any work of art worth discussing is, in some key ways, indescribable. The parts of art that matter (the form and its relation to the content) cannot be paraphrased. Yet, I believe such subjective analysis is not without value; at its best, it can add color and dimensions to the piece, can be as simple as pointing to a flower and saying, “You’re fond of hawthorns; just look at this pink one — isn’t it lovely?”