Does anyone else read and think of the song “Thank Heaven
for Little Girls”? I found myself
thinking of that and Consent: A Memoir by Vanessa Springora. Springora’s memoir details her grooming and
rape by Gabriel Matzneff. It’s the
little girl’s thing. And yes, Proust’s
narrator is young, how young I am not sure, but young. And yes, Proust is writing this in a vastly
different time, but still I keep thinking about. In part it is because the narrator has
visited prostitutes and does seem older than these young girls he meets, who
still seem to be in school. And that
whole scene with Albertine and the bedroom, where she rings the bell. Really thinking about Consent there. I mean, the narrator visits prostitutes so he
really needs to get laid. But then
again, is he telling the truth or is it male bragging. He is obsessive. Are we even supposed to like him? I mean he basically refers to the group of
girls that he sees on the esplanade with
the same terms that the women of Francois I were referred to.
It does
really make you want to visit Normandy as well.
And
there is the anti-Semitism expressed by the characters. I know that Proust’s mother came from a
Jewish family who had immigrated to France from Germany. Proust himself was baptized catholic, so into
his father’s faith. And yes, a narrator
isn’t the author, even in a book that has autobiographical connections like
this one. But what is Proust trying to
show? Part of it is society - the exile of Jews from certain rungs of
Parisian and French society. But Bloch
senior seems to be drawn in particularly cruel way. He in many ways is a poseur – in the same the narrator almost
seems to be one. It’s when Charblus
calls out the character’s behavior that we actually even might clap.
Did find
it more engrossing than the first one, I must say.
“. .
. and in relationships with such women
that they make their only acquittances with morality, serve an apprenticeship
in higher culture, and learn to see the value of knowledge for its own sake”
(362).
“Wisdom
cannot be inherited – one must discover it for oneself, but only after
following a course that no one can follow in out stead; no one can spare us
that experience, for wisdom is only a point of view on things” (444).
Edition cited:
Proust, Marcel. In
the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower.
Trans. James Grieve. Penguin, 2002.
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