For this present object [the girls] was the one I would have preferred above all, as I knew perfectly well, having botanized so much among such young blossoms, that it would be impossible to come upon a bouquet of rarer varieties than these buds, which, as I looked at them now, decorated the line of the water with their gentle stems, like a gardenful of Carolina roses edging a cliff top, where a whole stretch of ocean can fit between adjacent flowers, and a steamer is so slow to cover the flat blue line separating two stalks that an idling butterfly can loiter on a bloom that the ship’s hull has long since passed, and is so sure of being first to reach the next flower that it can delay its departure until the moment when, between the vessel’s bow and the nearest petal of the one toward which it is sailing, nothing remains but a tiny glowing gap of blue.
Love it or hate it, you’ve got to wonder: What is going on here? What begins as a dated (to put it kindly) image of girls as gentle rose stems suddenly, uh, blossoms into a convoluted image of an ocean liner and a butterfly. This is metaphor deliberately out of control: girls equal flowers, ship’s hull equals . . . what (aside from some phallic overtones)? And what does that “gap of blue” equal?
An image of girls on the beach turns into a meditation on the relativity of time and space and perspective and . . . what? One thing it suggests is that from a certain perspective an ocean liner and its world of power and commerce are nothing compared to a flower petal. Another is that someone who loiters moves faster than someone who steams full-speed ahead, and that a “tiny glowing gap of blue” is (from, let’s say, an artist’s perspective) all that separates two worlds that are light-years apart.
Doesn’t this remind you of A Wrinkle in Time? It’s as if Proust is learning to time-travel by crossing those wrinkles, going from a madeleine to his long-dead aunt, from an ocean liner to a rose, ultimately from the living to the dead and back, because something may survive death only if a cookie is as strong as the ocean. Somehow from the girls on the beach Proust moves to an almost abstract manifesto: “Nothing remains but a tiny glowing gap of blue.”
3 comments:
Interesting--I have to use that word cautiously after our discussion about interesting poems. (I got a rejection yesterday from Beloit Poetry Journal that had "all interesting poems" scribbled on it and I thought, Hmmm.) To me the "gap of blue" is the convergence of time and space in one moment. Of course what I like about the passage is its channel into "point of view" and how that alters everything, which I guess is my "thing" these days.
I like the idea that it's the convergence of time and space. I just love metaphors that travel a long distance. Instead of "My father was a bear because bears are fierce and warm and so was my father," something like "My father was a bear because when he died he was white as a polar bear in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge where Dick Cheney wants to drill for oil my father loved his gas-guzzling Pontiac have you ever been to Detroit have you ever seen the Red Dwarf that haunts Detroit ever since Chief Pontiac lead a group of Indians in the Battle of Bloody Run?" I love that stuff.
Hi, Matt, thanks for such a thoughtful response! I like your idea about moving toward the metaphysical while staying in the physical, which feels right to me. For quite a while the narrator can't decide which of the girls he's most infatuated with but, yes, he does get to know them and ultimately falls in love with Albertine, although, as is rather typical for Proust, nothing much comes of their relationship at this point in the novel. Albertine disappears for, oh, 500 or 1,000 pages or so, and then she comes back in full force, years later, and becomes the great love of his life.
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