More Proust babble
How does one go about deciphering the vast imagery in Proust's vaguely autobiographical mega-novel Remembrance of Things Past? It would take a lifetime to critically analyze all of the volumes or even just one.
The portrait is painted in not the exact words or even specific words. It is painted rather in recollected vignettes pieced together by the fragments of memories or pieces of the puzzle that reveal the life of the somewhat inert observer (narrator) The story revolves around a bourgeois and yet intellectual family in Paris during the early 20th century.
The narrator, Marcel, relects and observes. He is often a voyeur. As revealed historically, Proust was a semi-invalid Asthmatic, which gives reason for the seeming inertia of the narrator. He reminscenes and while his memories have movement and feeling, the narrator remains motionless, caught in a sickly stasis. The reference of the bed in his earlier years probably reflects his illness and his inability to play as most children would do, outside and such. This bolsters his isolation as an outsider for health reasons and also he is isolated due to his families position in Parisian society. The combination of these elements lead him to assume the role of a voyeur/observer.
The Oedipal dialectic involved between Marcel and his mother and Marcel and his father is a mirror of Proust's own neurotic attachment to his mother, whom passes away before the novel was begun. It is evident that (at least in Swann'a Way) that he aching and longing for his mother in childhood recollections mirrors his adult loss of his mother. Through his childhood recollections, he suffers the loss of his mother every time she leaves his side. He longs and aches for her constant return (Freud and Lacan, both have done studies on this type of psychosexual behavoir in children). Marcel sees his father as an obstacle and there is a tension that mounts. In the case of an Oedipal child who holds the intense love for his mother, will grow to resent the father, the tension mounts as the child vies for the attention of the mother.
Proust often took up the roll of being an outsider, his physical condition aside, he was also a practicing homosexual. (Again, I am sure that Freud could relate his neurotic obsession with his mother to his homosexuality)
Growing up in the shadow of cathedrals like Chartes and Notre Dame, there are numerous mentions of Gothic architecture and style throughout the book so far. There is an aesthetic quality that was endowed in the architecture, especially of Chartes, (which I just read about in Cynthia Freeland's "But Is It Art?" (more on that later)