Winter Weekend—Past And Beyond
FELIPE III of Spain looked out the window one day and saw a young man laughing wildly. He’s either insane, the king remarked to a courtier, or he’s reading Don Quixote.
The second half of the novel had recently been printed, and already Cervantes’s work had become not just another tale, but an enduring cultural phenomenon. Four centuries later, 100 of the world’s most distinguished writers were polled as to what they considered the best novel of all time. Don Quixote was easily the winner.
But tell me the truth: have you actually read it? It’s one of those books we all feel we know, or at least recognize, through such familiar incidents as the hero’s tilting at windmills or mistaking a tavern maid for a princess or through the antics of his earthy companion, the original of all sidekicks, Sancho Panza. The appearance of a new translation by Edith Grossman provided an opportunity to see if Don Quixote lived up to its reputation; by a nice coincidence it was also the much-celebrated 400th anniversary of the publication of the first half of the novel. (Cervantes and Shakespeare were contemporaries, and 1605 also saw the first performance of King Lear, another study in self-delusion.)
As with previous Winter Weekends, we assembled a distinguished array of scholars, feasted in a style Cervantes might have recognized, heard some very good Spanish music, and argued about the book for a day and a half. Was it brilliant? Or almost unreadable? Was it a comic masterpiece? Or the saddest, most cruel book ever written? Or all of the above?
There was a tinge of irony in asking 125 serious readers to devote a good chunk of their winter to a 1,000-page novel—which, after all, is about a man who reads far too much for his own good. And there were interesting echoes from earlier Winter Weekends. Paolo and Francesca, for example, from Canto V of Dante’s Inferno. Reading together a romance about Sir Lancelot, they slip into adultery and eternal damnation. Or who could be as deluded, as obsessional, as Captain Ahab? At the point in her life when Mary Shelley was writing Frankenstein, she read aloud to her husband Percy from Don Quixote. And was not Beowulf, in his shaggy sort of way, the first in a long line of knights errant? Don Quixote mistakes sheep for armed men; Odysseus turns his armed men into sheep, as it were, to escape from Polyphemus’s cave.
Harold Bloom says that Don Quixote is the first and still the best of all novels. For Winter Weekend 2006 (March 10-11, Bowdoin College) we take up what some would argue is an even greater novel, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. We won’t tackle the entire 3,000 pages, but only the first of its seven parts, Swann’s Way, a mere 444 pages in Lydia Davis’s new translation (far more straightforward and concise than the earlier, more florid attempts to put Proust into English).
Not much “happens” in Proust: a young man (who may or may not be the author) grows up, falls in and out of love, meets some more or less interesting people in the upper reaches of French society, travels a bit, falls ill, thinks his life has been squandered. (A loose translation of the title might read: How Did I Waste So Much Time?) At the end, however, he has an epiphany that changes his perception of his life, of everyone’s life, and he begins to write the novel we are reading. Along the way we find some brilliant set pieces from Belle Epoque France and distant rumblings of politics and social change—the Third Republic, the Dreyfus Affair, the Great War, the arrival of telephone and aeroplane.
Proust’s novel has much to say about the virtues of friendship and the corrosive effect of jealousy, but it is also very much a book about how to write a book. If Cervantes invents the novel with Quixote—a narrative that combines close observation of everyday life with an astute grasp of human nature—Proust re-invents it, by intensifying that power of observation and making the writer himself the object of scrutiny, within a framework that jettisons traditional notions of chronology and plot. He is to prose what Picasso is to painting.
Too often dismissed as a gossipy, frivolous piece of self-absorption on the part of an inveterate snob, Proust’s novel is in truth the most devastating account of snobbery ever written. Like a skilled surgeon, Proust (the son of a doctor) peels back layer after layer of society to reveal the fatuity at its core. His book is also very funny. And far more readable than the author’s meandering, page-long sentences might at first suggest.
I would not go so far as Alain de Botton’s claim that Proust can change your life (a rather Mme. Verdurin-like remark), but I do think Proust can change the way you perceive the world. He is like Wagner: you either love him, or hate him, and next March you can find out for yourself.
