Imitating Proust: A Comparison and Analysis of Expression

Colleen Karaffa

Part. I: Introduction

Proust captures moments and memories with an unrestrained entirety of thought in his writing. He uses unsparing description, repetition, and punctuation to achieve his goals. His style gave him the freedom to convey a piece that is honest and true to the natural flow of human thought, which is in itself unbounded and limitless. In the following piece, I have attempted to imitate a brief section of the famous Madeleine cookie scene from Swann's Way through my own personal experience. The two excerpts will be analyzed with regard to syntax, rhythm, and content that reveal the deeper understandings of humanity that Proust strove to unearth, as well as his unconventional artistry of language.

Part II: Imitation

A Brief Remembrance

Imitation from an excerpt of Swann's Way

In Scotland, abroad for the first time in my life, I sat with four friends at an Italian restaurant. I had been working all day, serving homemade ice cream, fresh scones, and cappuccinos to strangers in one of the downtown cafe's. As I sat at the table after a full day of work, which was exhausting not only in the time and energy expended, but also mentally, as I was under the constant scrutiny of foreigners: foreign bosses, foreign co-workers, and foreign customers. In truth I was the foreigner in the situation and found it difficult to understand the sarcastic jokes, the idioms, and the phrases which were, to them, a product of habit, commonplace. Finally, when I was able to sit down for a meal, I felt my body spent and restful, pensive and observant, as my friends took up conversation with each other - I was grateful to be ignored.

When my steaming bowl of pasta was delivered to my place, I expected nothing of it, considered it the most traditional and predictable of meals, and picked up my fork almost out of instinct as one does when a food so familiar is set before them. But when the food reached my mouth, the wine soaked taste of tomato had struck a chord somewhere within me that I could not quite understand, but I felt some recognition of my home and family being evoked. A comfort I attached to evenings around dinner tables when all of my siblings were still living in one household together began to creep forward as if from some hidden box, like from a forgotten hope chest in the attic, reopened. The feeling that traps a quick breath in your lungs, that pauses you with your teeth clenched, that begs you to close your eyes and take a moment to search out the black abyss onto which shadowy images rise briefly, to see without looking, to open compartments long closed off within the self rose through my being. With the pasta in my mouth I experienced its smell, its touch, its taste, and I did not swallow this first bite immediately. I let my tongue realize the fullness of its flavor as I paused and went blind to the faces of my friends, deaf to the soft accordion music of the restaurant, and let the fork in my hand transform into my grandmother's silver, the food to her food, the plates to her china.

The soft, giving pasta blanketed with the tang of wine and tomato, the spice of garlic and parsley, brought to my mind those moments at my grandmother's house with my family seated around the table. For that instant I was given seven-year-old eyes again through which I saw the tray of fresh Italian breads moving from my grandmother's hand to my mother's hand to mine; then would be passed the shallow dish of penne with red sauce (a meal whose preparation I would later realize was an act of love rather than simply, a few hours of work), the plate of herbed meatballs and spicy sausages, the dishes of softened, whipped butter. Across from me, my two older brothers sat pinching each other across the table, my youngest brother was in a high chair stirring water into his food, one of my sisters avoiding the spinach on her plate, and my youngest sister happily chomping her buttered Italian bread. What the adults were talking about I do not know, nor care to know. But there was passion in their voices and whooping laughter, and boisterous shouts erupting from my father's Italian mouth. Through the sliding glass doors behind the dinner table, the moon could be seen, rising, too quickly making its ascent to the height of the winter sky, moving like the tip of a hand on a clock, it's beauty a deceiving reminder of an unstoppable clock, and of all the clocks - on ovens, on wrists, on golden chains, alarms, computers, cars, on towers striking high above us in the streets.

Before tasting the pasta, it had sat on my plate like a familiar dinner, one of staple habit and I was sure to approve of it, the way on approves of something habitual, something ordinary and comfortable. The pale bodies lay under the blanket of sauce in that familiar toppled mound. It was only upon placing them into my mouth did I find my soul strangely engaged. During the chewing, the breaking apart of each helpless penne was I able to fully realize the implication of sensations emerging from the taste and the smell. Those sensations surrounded me; after I swallowed, the flavor lingered on my tongue like the sting of a wound.

I felt myself sitting back and watching them as I have always done, as I was sitting back with my friends now enraptured, lost somewhere far within myself, the self begging for connection with someone who could understand not only the thoughts, but the feelings attached to them, not only the images but the implications they have had on my life. Opening my eyes again I was awakened to a world with tomato sauce not made by the meticulous calculations of my grandmother's recipes, the pasta not boiled with her personal attention given to salting the water and dashing it with olive oil, where the bread rose on long metal racks in some unknown bakery miles away, imported on massive, metal trucks. I was awakened to the table with my four friends who could know nothing of what had just been found; and I had no way of communicating it to them, nor did I even want to. I wanted to remain silent, in that state where I saw not only my friends in front of me, but also my grandparents, my parents, my brothers and sisters gathered around the table, where I could taste the whole of my life at once, it was if by magic the clocks had vanished and there was no linear progression, only a great freedom to move.

Part III: Analysis and Comparison

The passage I have chosen to imitate from Swann's Way illustrates Proust's characteristic style of conveying images through expanded sentences of connected thought. Proust begins the selected passage with a short engaging sentence in which the image is introduced. This introduction is like the soft, burst that opens a flower at the moment when the petals break free from one another. The following sentences, like the flower, delicately unfold to reveal an involved, sensuous, and resonating image. His writing establishes a flow that moves in and out of the past and present to reveal the ways in which a person's past is brought to bear upon their present. To create this flow Proust writes using long sentences filled with images that overlap in time and are concentrated in content. Sentences are punctuated to convey a particular rhythm and mimic the breathing pattern of the narrator, thus knitting a close level of intimacy between narrator and reader.

Proust's use of varied syntax adds to the complexity of his sentences. Here, after he has dipped the Madeleine cookie into the tea, the punctuation plays an important role in delivering the thought in its unbroken entirety.

“And as soon as I had recognized the taste of the piece of Madeleine dipped in lime-blossom tea that my aunt used to give me (though I did not yet know and had to put off to much later discovery why this memory made me so happy), immediately the old gray house on the street, where her bedroom was, came like a stage set to attach itself to the little wing opening onto the garden that had been built for my parents behind it (that truncated section which was all I had seen before then); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square, where they sent me before lunch, the streets where I went on errands, the paths we took if the weather was fine” (Proust, 47-48).

In the parentheses Proust interjects telling details. They provide a way to include an important piece of the past, perhaps a much nearer past, into the work, and link it to the remembrance of Combray. Including segments from another part of the past, though only hinted at here, is another way in which the narrator is able to reveal himself. Such interjections suggest a language that is true to human conversation. We are not inclined to recount the events of our lives without references to other experiences or other sources of knowledge that may be out of joint with the conversation at hand. Thus Proust's style feels honest and candid. Proust's frequent use of commas gives the piece a stream-of-consciousness feel. His style allows him to be genuine, earnest, and unsparing in all he wishes to convey. I attempted to recreate this building, flowing type of thought expression in my imitation. Take for example the sentence in the third paragraph in which plates of food move around the table from hand to hand. The image is extended through the use of commas and broken with one set of parentheses. In my imitation, I hoped to convey an entire scene as it came to me and also to include a realization from the more recent past, similar to Proust. When comparing these two sentences, Proust is able to create a much more scenic and complex image. He includes not only the remembrance of the tea, but also of his home and of Combray, whereas my sentence is able to incorporate only a single scene.

Punctuation unifies Swann's Way not only on a grammatical level, but also on the level of rhythm and music. Analyzing a translation becomes complicated when addressing its musicality and poetic elements. It is difficult to discuss possible tonal and syllabic connections between words from a translation. Taking into account that certain variations will occur, a discussion on rhythm is still relevant when focusing on the syntax. Proust's sentences have a force driven rhythm about them. He achieves this rhythm through his phrasing, which shortens and lengthens within the sentence like a musical phrase within a movement. Looking closely at the phrase: “…after the destruction of things, alone, frailer but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, smell and taste will remain for a long time…”(47) shows how the varied length of detail between the commas creates a rhythm. Also, the repetition of words spurs on the next thought and creates the sense of an earnest need to write every existing fragment of thought and feeling onto the page. It seems as though Proust cannot bear to break the sentence completely for fear of losing the rhythm which drives the thought from mind to pen and pen to paper. In my imitation, the phrase lengths are varied in parts of this sentence “… the moon could be seen, rising, too quickly making its ascent to the height of the winter sky, moving like the tip of a hand on a clock…the clocks - on ovens, on wrists, on golden chains, on alarms, on computers, on towers…” This sentence is also a good example of how seemingly insignificant repeated words such as “on” can sustain the rhythm. The rhythm that urges on the thought process is a characteristic in which my piece is most successful in imitating Proust. As the rhythm is perpetuated, the sentence expands and becomes like a musical phrase during a crescendo.

This rhythm pushes the crescendo onward, yet the content of the sentence creates the rising, expanded element to Proust's writing. The content of his writing is directly connected to the style. An example of this style is in the third sentence of the selection:

“…perhaps because of these recollections abandoned so long outside my memory, nothing survived, everything had come apart; the forms and the form, too, of the little shell made of cake, so fatly sensual within its severe and pious pleating - had been destroyed, or still half asleep, had lost the force of expansion that would have allowed them to rejoin my consciousness” (47).

The content and structure of Proust's sentences challenge traditional forms of writing style. The words themselves suggest a break from convention as “everything had come part; the forms and the form too....” The structure of the sentence in its elongation and complexity becomes something individual to the author, they become his art. The language conveys not only the story, but also suggests intent of the artist, to reform sentences in his own style. The words “abandoned,” “come apart,” and “destroyed,” are a few examples of how he emphasizes the breakdown of a conventional sentence; this breakdown gives Proust the opportunity to rebuild sentences in his own way. The rebuilding is emphasized through “force of expansion.” Not only is the narrator recovering a lost part of him, and perhaps building a part of his identity, but also discovering a way to exemplify this through language. AsProust's piece is a discovery, my piece attempts to regain the experience of this discovery. At the end of the fourth paragraph, I attempt to introduce the “breaking apart” phrase in order to convey a sense of detachment from present into the past as well as into an imitation of Proust's new style. I do not feel that the form of that sentence, rather simple in comparison to Proust's, helps significantly in conveying the message. What I have found however, is that word choice can be used to convey a message on both personal and literal levels.

The fluidity of Proust's writing allows him to express thoughts that link like chains, expanding in form and theme. Proust is a master of relating the content of his work to the form in which it takes, allowing the form to reinforce all that is happening with story in terms of content as well as art. The language suggests a deconstruction of tradition and a rebuilding of an individual artist - the narrator - and an individual style of Proust himself. Proust's art lies in his unconventional style, his sentences saturated with sensual experience, and his musical, yet seemingly candid way of connecting thoughts. Such a master of language is truly an artist, as he employs every aspect of language to compose a moving, successful piece. After attempting my own imitation, I have learned that it is much more difficult to create such a work than to read it, fully imagined, from the page.

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