Proust’s Pinks

For vast stretches of À la recherche du temps perdu, Proust’s seven volume novel published between 1913 and 1927, there is scarcely a page without a vibrant colour notation. The literary equivalent of the painter’s palette is rich in hue, tone and shade, and its various applications abundantly diverse, from the natural to the human world. There are several schools of thought whose cause is the identification of Proustian favourites. One vote goes to mauve (encouraged no doubt by the asparagus “stippled in mauve and azure”, the “mauve tufts” of the lilac blossoms, the “mauve silk” of Oriane’s scarf, and the “round mauve eyes” of the seductive Princesse de Nassau). Another goes to the series red, white, and gold yellow, while I am aware of at least four voters rooting for pink. (The asparagus also has a tint of “rosy pink”.) This is where I myself shall pitch camp, while also stressing that it is not my purpose to adjudicate claims on the relative values of the colour world of the Recherche. The novel’s chromatic profuseness defies easy summary, and in the Favourites game there will inevitably be fierce competition. To grasp the pointlessness of the various attempts at constructing for Proust a hierarchy of colours that is crowned by one in particular, we need only turn to his short text on Monet (which remained in manuscript form during his lifetime). The paintings of Argenteuil, Vétheuil, Epte, and Giverny capture “those inert hours of the afternoon when the river is white and blue from the clouds and the sky, and greens from the trees and the lawns, and pink from the rays of the sun already setting on the trunks of the trees, and in the blackness lit with the red of the thickets in the gardens where the great dahlias are growing.” White, blue, green, pink, red, and black — where to begin in prioritizing any one colour? And especially where to begin given Proust’s reflection on the “colour” of memory in the concluding paragraph of “Combray”, with its image of memory as a geological formation, the strata of which are differently coloured, akin to “that veining, that variegation of colouring, which in certain rocks, in certain marbles, reveal differences in origin, in age, in formation.”

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/qdN7F4B