Consider the lantern in Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu.
This magic lantern is a symbol for the novel itself--or, let's say, for art in general. A lantern is a medium which captures or reveals time which is otherwise lost (all art does this). A lantern allows a child to present something captured. A lantern is close to a toy, but it is a start, a beginning.
A lantern is age appropriate. It is the right "tool" for the narrator at that age. Anyone with a lantern may grow up to use more evolved ways to present captured time.
A book, a painting by Elstir, a sonata by Vinteuil--they can be a grown-up way to do what the lantern does for the child.
In the opening pages of Du côté de chez Swann (1913), the narrator recalls his boyhood after a madeleine dipped in tea triggers old, and hidden memories. He recalls Geneviève de Brabant (the legend of Genevieve of Brabant) coming alive through a lantern that projected colorful slides onto walls and a ceiling. His age is not stated. Age 5?
In this medieval legend, a nobleman’s wife is wrongly accused of adultery with the evil Golo. Geneviève escapes execution and hides in a cave for years with her child before being discovered by her husband and reinstated. The Merovingians--a dynasty of French kings--ruled at this time.
A lantern sounds fun, right? Not for the neurotic narrator, who is disturbed by his bedroom losing stability when the lantern is used: "But I cannot express the discomfort I felt at such an intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room which..."
The setting is a boy's bedroom in Combray, France, in the 1870s. As each new slide is projected, the narrator's "great-aunt" reads aloud text (from a booklet that came with the slides?)
The "great-aunt" who reads is given no name. This mother of the bed-ridden Aunt Léonie is not technically the narrator's "great-aunt." She is really a cousin of the grandfather.
The maternal grandmother has two unmarried sisters. They are technically great-aunts to the narrator. But each is called "aunt." Confusing, eh? Céline and Flora are minor characters.
The novel's "Combray" is based on Illiers, where Proust's father was raised, but, in the novel, characters who live in Combray were based on his mother's family! It's backwards--get it?
Did Françoise or another servant keep dust off the lantern?
The narrator reports, "Someone had indeed had the happy idea of giving me, to distract me on evenings when I seemed abnormally wretched, a magic lantern, which used to be set on top of my lamp while we waited for dinner-time to come; and, after the fashion of the master-builders and glass-painters of gothic days, it substituted for the opaqueness of my walls an impalpable iridescence, supernatural phenomena of many colors, in which legends were depicted as on a shifting and transitory window.
This magic lantern is a symbol for the novel itself--or, let's say, for art in general. A lantern is a medium which captures or reveals time which is otherwise lost (all art does this). A lantern allows a child to present something captured. A lantern is close to a toy, but it is a start, a beginning.
A lantern is age appropriate. It is the right "tool" for the narrator at that age. Anyone with a lantern may grow up to use more evolved ways to present captured time.
A book, a painting by Elstir, a sonata by Vinteuil--they can be a grown-up way to do what the lantern does for the child.
In the opening pages of Du côté de chez Swann (1913), the narrator recalls his boyhood after a madeleine dipped in tea triggers old, and hidden memories. He recalls Geneviève de Brabant (the legend of Genevieve of Brabant) coming alive through a lantern that projected colorful slides onto walls and a ceiling. His age is not stated. Age 5?
In this medieval legend, a nobleman’s wife is wrongly accused of adultery with the evil Golo. Geneviève escapes execution and hides in a cave for years with her child before being discovered by her husband and reinstated. The Merovingians--a dynasty of French kings--ruled at this time.
A lantern sounds fun, right? Not for the neurotic narrator, who is disturbed by his bedroom losing stability when the lantern is used: "But I cannot express the discomfort I felt at such an intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room which..."
The setting is a boy's bedroom in Combray, France, in the 1870s. As each new slide is projected, the narrator's "great-aunt" reads aloud text (from a booklet that came with the slides?)
The "great-aunt" who reads is given no name. This mother of the bed-ridden Aunt Léonie is not technically the narrator's "great-aunt." She is really a cousin of the grandfather.
The maternal grandmother has two unmarried sisters. They are technically great-aunts to the narrator. But each is called "aunt." Confusing, eh? Céline and Flora are minor characters.
The novel's "Combray" is based on Illiers, where Proust's father was raised, but, in the novel, characters who live in Combray were based on his mother's family! It's backwards--get it?
Did Françoise or another servant keep dust off the lantern?
The narrator reports, "Someone had indeed had the happy idea of giving me, to distract me on evenings when I seemed abnormally wretched, a magic lantern, which used to be set on top of my lamp while we waited for dinner-time to come; and, after the fashion of the master-builders and glass-painters of gothic days, it substituted for the opaqueness of my walls an impalpable iridescence, supernatural phenomena of many colors, in which legends were depicted as on a shifting and transitory window.
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