«Je ne dis pas non, répondit Swann étonné. Ce que je reproche aux journaux c’est de nous faire faire attention tous les jours à des choses insignifiantes tandis que nous lisons trois ou quatre fois dans notre vie les livres où il y a des choses essentielles.
If in the previous pages we discussed absence and distance in the context of light and stars, these ten pages seemed to dwell on their relationship to writing. First, we have Swann's opposition to the reading of newspapers that breed a thirst for novelty-- but of a highly abbreviated form, where people are reduced to sorts of cliches absent of depth, where the distance between those people's lives and thoughts and one's own is magnified rather than lessened. Swann instead reads to the great-aunts from Saint-Simon, but they, newspaper-readers and they are, and thereby egalitarians, disprove of the aristocratic cult contained within the Memoires. Two different kinds of reading and deciphering the world.
This excerpt was preceded by a long passage on how difficult it is to read Swann's real place in the world, as well as the Narrator's grandfather's obsessions with the names of great men whom those Swann (supposedly, according to the newspaper) frequents used to know.
Lastly we have the letter that the Narrator leaves with his mother in the hopes that it will prompt her to return to him in his room more quickly. The unanswered letter stands in for the larger effort by which the narrator attempts to use language to traverse the gap between the loved object and his mother. Unbeknownst to him at the time (but interjected by the narrator) Swann himself has spent a large part of his life, in his love with Odette, reading-- or rather-- misreading the world in a similar fashion.
Language obscures more than it communicates.
No comments:
Post a Comment