Proust, Leopardi, and Thinking While Reading

On pages 78 and 79 of the silver Moncrieff edition of The Guermantes Way, Marcel describes the unexpected wonders of staying the night at the barracks where his friend Robert resides. He begins by recalling his dinner of young partridges washed down with champagne and then seamlessly shifts to the next morning, when he wakes to a landscape obscured by mist. At first, Marcel compares his experience of viewing the landscape through the barracks window to viewing a mist-enshrouded lake through the window of a country house. He then focuses on the lone bare hill he sees in the landscape, "raising its lean and rugged flanks, already swept clear of darkness, over the back of the barracks." In a sure sign that we've come to the heart of this passage, Proust offers up a long, syntactically complex sentence in which he collapses time into a web of associations:

But when I had formed the habit of coming to the barracks, my consciousness that the hill was there, more real, consequently, even when I did not see it, than the hotel at Balbec, than our house in Paris, of which I thought as of absent—or dead—friends, that is to say scarcely believing any longer in their existence, caused its reflected form, even without my realising it, to be silhouetted against the slightest impressions that I formed at Doncières, and among them, to begin with this first morning, the pleasing impression of warmth given me by the cup of chocolate, prepared by Saint-Loup's batman in this comfortable room, which seemed like a sort of optical centre from which to look out at the hill—the idea of doing anything else but just gaze at it, the idea of actually climbing it, being rendered impossible by this same mist.

I'm reminded of Giacomo Leopardi's famous poem "L'infinito," in which the poet's gaze of a lone hill in the distant landscape is obscured by an overgrown hedge, setting off a chain of associations made more vivid because they are imagined rather than seen. This poem best represents Leopardi's early romantic view that when our sight is blocked in some way, the imagination is stimulated and set free to create a transcendent and eternal vision of the world.

Sempre caro mi fu quest'ermo colle,
E questa siepe, che da tanta parte
Dell'ultimo orrizonte il guardo esclude.
Ma sedendo e mirando, interminati
Spazi di là da quella, e sovrumani
Silenzi, e profondissima quiete
Io nel pensier mi fingo; ove per poco
Il cor non si spaura. E come il vento
Odo stormir tra queste piante, io quello
Infinito silenzio a questa voce
Vo comparando: e mi sovvien l'eterno,
E le morte stagioni, e la presente
E viva, e il suon di lei. Così tra questa
Immensità s'annega il pensier mio:
E il naufragar m'è dolce in questo mare.

Or in my translation:

Always dear to me was this lone hill,
And this hedge, blocking so much
Of the far horizon from my sight.
But sitting and watching, I see in my mind
Boundless spaces beyond, and unearthly
Silences, and deep calm: my heart's
A short beat from fear. And when I hear
The wind rustling through leaves,
I compare that voice to infinite
Silence, and the eternal comes to me,
The seasons dead, and the live
Present and its sounds. So in this
Immensity my thought sinks,
And to drown in this sea is sweet.

Proust does not say that the mist obscuring the landscape made the hill more vivid and memorable, nor does he treat this experience as a celebration of the imagination's power to create eternal visions. Nonetheless, I associate Proust's "bare hill" and "mist" with Leopardi's "lone hill" and "hedge." I'm not suggesting that Leopardi influenced Proust; I leave such suppositions to scholars. Nor am I speculating on where Proust may have gotten his ideas for this passage. I don't care where Proust got his ideas, and I'm not even sure that good novelists have "ideas" that they "get." Rather, I'm interested in the associations I make while I'm reading.

I've just begun reading Maryanne Wolf's Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. As I understand it, Wolf is arguing that when we first learn to read, large regions of our brain come into play. However, over time, as new pathways are created and cells specialize, our brain becomes more efficient at reading and less of it is engaged in the task. Decoding text becomes increasingly automatic, and more of our brain is freed to think while reading.

I may have explained Wolf's theory badly, but as we reading teachers have been taught, good readers try to understand what they'll read even before they've read it. Be that as it may be, I'm intrigued by Wolf's theory (as I understand it) because it flies in the face of much educational theory about reading these days. Educational researchers have studied what good readers do when they read texts—for example, they make predictions, stop and ask questions, backtrack, make notations, puzzle over interesting or confusing passages, and so on. These researchers have found that poor readers tend to read through texts without giving them much thought. The things that good readers do are called "reading strategies," and current educational dogma dictates that if teachers teach poor readers these strategies, they'll magically become good readers. There are literally dozens of books on teaching these strategies, and no self-respecting reading teacher would step foot into a classroom without being familiar with their contents.

Earlier this year, when I tried to replicate what it must be like for struggling readers by reading Crónica de una muerte anunciada, I found that I exerted so much effort simply trying to decode the Spanish text that I often found myself giving the novel the most superficial interpretation possible. I know all about reading strategies, but none of them were very useful when I was simply trying to comprehend what the Spanish was saying. I can imagine how perplexing and frustrating it would be for a student who is trying to comply with some well-meaning teacher, dutifully schooled in current theory, who's trying to impose a bizarre regimen of tasks that seemingly have nothing to do with the incomprehensible words on the page. In a way, Wolf's theory confirms my experience. Readers only begin to think complexly about what they're reading when their brains have become efficient enough at decoding the language to free up thought for more sophisticated responses to the text.

The kind of thoughtfulness that comes over me when I read stimulating books is one of my chief pleasures of reading. In the case of Proust's bare-hill passage, I could have responded in any number of ways. I could have focused on how the passage related to previous passages on landscapes. I could have connected the cup of hot chocolate and its associations to the famous tea-and-madeleine scene in Swann's Way. I could have thought about my own experiences of waking up in novel circumstances to a wondrous landscape. However, for reasons I don't understand, my strongest association was with another text, Leopardi's "L'infinito." These days I often find myself reading that way: my experience of one text is infused with the experiences of other texts. I'm not saying that I read exclusively in that manner. Rather, intertextuality has become a prominent theme in that personal, internal symphony I hear when I read.

For her epigraph to Chapter 1, Maryanne Wolf quotes from young Proust's famous essay "On Reading," in which he speaks of reading as "that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude." I'm not sure how much "communication" the later Proust thought there was in reading, but I would certainly assent to his emphasis on solitude. One of the things that our civilization will lose when reading for pleasure becomes arcane is the cultural knowledge of how to make good use of our ever-present solitude. One of the achievements of such a culture is that it informs us how to converse with each other about the books we experience in solitude.

Today's language arts teachers who instruct college-bound students are typically saddled with the mission of preparing them to read texts solely for writing lit-crit papers on them. I personally detest such papers, and I look forward to the day when I can focus on teaching students to read texts thoughtfully and then talk about them, either verbally or in blogs. In the long run, I think it's a more important skill to teach students how to participate in a book club than to write lit-crit papers, which, I'm told, are becoming passé in university freshman English classes. Thirty years from now, very few of the advanced students I've taught will be writing critical papers for publication. However, some of them—perhaps many of them—will find the need to talk about what they've been reading or would like to read. One of the ironies of reading is that it creates an inwardness and an interiority that compels us to find company for our thoughts. If, as some have been predicting, reading for pleasure is destined to become the practice of a few, then the readers left among us will have more need, not less, to converse about the books that still matter to them.

Crossposted on Ludwig Richter's Blog.