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May 10, 2006
New Title!
We have a new title for our blog! I was thinking about the process of writing blogs and chronicles, and in a way, it's trying to capture lost time, to photograph a moment that's gone.
Part of the long mushy story of how Tim and I fell in love has to do with our realization that we were both reading Marcel Proust's 3,000+ page stream-of-consciousness epic (the longest novel in existence, as far as I know) À la recherche du temps perdu I can count on one hand the people I know who have read it. Actually, one finger as far as people I know who've read all the way through it.
Neither one of us has finished it yet. It's one of the most difficult books I've ever tried to read. It sometimes takes pages to complete one sentence (aaaaah! I can't find the subject! I can't find the verb! What in the world is he trying to say?!?).
It's somewhat disturbing at parts, I get bogged down in the selfishness and empty dreariness of the lifestyle of fin-de-siecle society.
But it's beautiful. It's an incredibly poignant look at the way memories shape our entire being. At one point (probably the most famous scene in the book), the memory of an entire childhood springs out of a bite of Madeleine dipped into tea (er, lime tisane to be technical).
And that's the story of our new title...
fun | By Tim and Jo | 01:38 PM
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Comments
Beautiful. Poetic. :-)
Posted by: Jeannette at May 10, 2006 08:54 PM
Oddly enough, even though I have never read À la recherche du temps perdu, I have read an entire book of literary criticism/theory based on it--Gerard Genette's _Narrative Discourse_ uses Proust to construct and systematize an entire theory of narrative. I gather that Proust didn't use phrases like "diegesis" and "analepsis" as much as Genette did, though.
Posted by: Leopoldtulip at May 11, 2006 10:49 PM
Ooo...is Genette's book worth reading? What did you think of it? Uggh, I don't know how to start a blog conversation!
Posted by: Joanna at May 12, 2006 03:12 PM
I don't know if you'd find the book worth reading or not. It was really insightful in providing organizational principles and how literary time "works" ... it was awfully technical (e.g. it used some math formulae based on structuralist aesthetics) and incomprehensible to me at points, but the book as a whole did impress me with how complex Proust's work must be (to someone who has actually read it:^)). I do have to say that even if all the terminology was daunting, it felt like Genette's terms flowed more naturally than a lot of literary critical jargon.
Posted by: Leopoldtulip at May 15, 2006 02:47 PM