Fadem's class and the Episode of the Madeleine

“Blooming snowdrops, skyrocketing daffodils, and Fadem redux – surely spring is in the air!” says Judith Miller of  Richard Fadem’s class this spring on Swann’s Way, the first volume of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.

For the most part the class will rely on the translation by Moncrieff-Kilmartin (in stock at Darvill’s), though Fadem notes that other versions are also welcome, and that Lydia Davis’ translation “which is excellent,” might be especially interesting for comparative purposes.

Fadem said in a recent interview with Orcas Issues, “I believe the novel teaches one to see more finely, to think differently about time — less linearly and terminally — and to read (and live) with attention to the particles that make up our life before they coagulate into the rough clumps and mounds most of us dwell upon.”

The class will begin on April 15 and run for six weeks at the Emmanuel Episcopal Parish Hall on Wednesdays from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

Participants are asked to sign up at the library ahead of time, which eases the planning process, but pay the $20 fee at the first session.

Remembrance of Things Past is a seven-volume,  semi-autobiographical novel. It is light on plot, but strong on humor, Fadem says. He looks forward to enjoying the slow pace and reflective nature of Swann’s Way.
Remembrance of Things Past. It ranks with Mann’s The Magic Mountain and Joyce’s Ulysses as the triumph of Modernism. It is popularly known for its extended length and the notion of “involuntary memory,” the most famous example being the “episode of the “Madeleine (cake)”

“The Episode of the Madeleine”

Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, save what was comprised in the theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had any existence for me, when one day in winter, on my return home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent for one of those squat, plump little cakes called “petites madeleines,” which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell. And soon, mechanically, dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could, no, indeed, be of the same nature. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it?

The seven volumes of Remembrance of Things Past are:

1913 Swann’s Way

1919 Within a Budding Grove and
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

1920/21 The Guermantes Way and Cities of the Plain and
Sodom and Gomorrah

1923 The Captive and The Prisoner

1925 The Fugitive and
The Sweet Cheat Gone

1927 Albertine Gone and
Time Regained