British and French Fiction:
Proust: Swann's Way
Colette: Gigi
Gide: The Immoralist
Crevel: Putting My Foot In It, Difficult Death
Cocteau:
Carco: Perversity
Waugh: Brideshead Revisited
Genet: Notre Dame des Fleurs
Baudelaire: Les Fleurs du Mal
DH Lawrence: Everything
Conrad: (re-read) The Secret Sharer
Eliot: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Forester: (re-read) A Room with a View
Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, The Voyage Out, (re-read) Orlando
Theory:
Irigaray: The Sex Which is Not One
Streit: Joyce/Foucault: Sexual Confessions
Sedgwick: Touching Feeling, Between Men
To be continued...
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Carolyn,
ReplyDeleteAs an admirer of Proust's style, I'm delighted that you have responded as positively as you have to Swann's Way. There are, of course, 6 more books to go in order to see the full "picture" Proust paints of desire and memory.
You have noted Proust's view of the tragic irony of intense desire: if you finally do "get" the object of your desire, you then no longer feel the desire and so it is never fulfilled: Swann with Odette; "Proust" with Albertine, ...several other characters as well. Then there's the theory of memory and how things trigger their release, developed in the closing pages of the introduction to Swann's Way. How closely does Proust's novel actually follow this teory? Does it follow it at all, or after the episode with the madeleine, for whose veracity we have only the story teller's word, does it fade away? What does it mean to base a novel of recapturing one's past through retrieving one's memories, that the narrator describes what's going on in other people's minds or events at which he was not present or conversations in which he did not participate, and so cannot have memories of them?