Brain Pain discussion

This discussion covers:

Part 2: Place-Names: The Place
5. Balbec
Penguin: 219-308
Vintage: 253-356

First of all, just a word of warning, if you're using a Moncrieff translation, your book might be split in Part I and Part II (which have a roughly equal number of pages) as well as in the chapters used by the French edition (At Mme Swann’s and Place-Names: The Place), try not to get confused by it like I did.

I'm quite excited by the fact that we're getting out of Paris and going by the seaside, of all places. There's quite a long tradition of literature about innocent(ish?) Northern(ish?) Europeans going on holiday by the sea somewhere warm and getting sexually awaken. Examples of that tradition Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, Andre Gide's The Immoralist or A Room with a View by E. M. Forster - all of which were written in the early 20th century just like Within A Budding Grove. It's also interesting to watch out for classical imagery (Greek mythology, e.g.) in this part of Within A Budding Grove.

It's been a while since I read Gide and Forster, but I read Death in Venice a few months ago and I distinctly remember Mann's many references to Ancient Greece. We often think (rightly? wrongly?) of classical civilisation as being very "elevated", cerebral - all about the spirit not the body and thusly chaste (?), yet here it's used in a very unchaste way.

Another interesting feature of this part are the numerous references to other writers, especially Romantic ones. Mme de Villeparisis is a neverending spring of anecdotes (isn't she a delightful snob?) - we see now a continuation of the theme of the relation between the writer/artist and his personal life and morals (or rather the lack of a strong relation between the two?), but as well, I personally, get a sense of Proust being very deeply planted in French literature. An anecdote about Stendhal's bad manners, for example, brings to mind not just the idea that writers can be horrible people and write good books, but also Stendhal's theory about the cristalization of love (it's a very interesting theory, you can read about it on wikipedia and, if you know French, you can read Stendhal's original essay here, I've tried to find an English translation online but to no avail, maybe somebody else will be more lucky).

Stendhal is the one I picked up on especially because I really like Stendhal, but there are many other nods and winks at other writers and I'm hoping maybe other people have picked up on other ones.