Oh, yes, I’m in the same boat! I should have been clear that that was an approving “boo hiss”.
Hopefully my criticism doesn’t come off that way! I’ve liked the Proust that I’ve read, don’t get me wrong, and I believe that he had a bunch of influence on the French Nouveau Roman (which I have to acknowledge is a blind spot for me). Woolf was aware of him, I believe, and without Proust, you probably don’t get Nin or Henry Miller in quite the same way. So very much looking forward to @kaemi’s thoughts. But there sure seem like there are a large number of other writers who you can make a case for as equally if not more significant to literary development over the 20th Century, and as Brian points out below, messing up the already-jumbled posthumous bits of A La Recherche sure seems like a minor-league alteration.
(Actually, can we go back to the future after losing the manuscript? Is it a failed dystopic ending, if so?)
True!. Maybe in the final sequence we’ll discover this was all a plot by Black to engineer a Proust v. Eliot showdown to see who gets to be the official world-bestriding GOAT writer!
I just pulled it up to try, but we don’t have our possessions in this memory! I’ll try again once we get out.
The status line tells us it’s just after midnight and time is indeed passing, though that might be only metaphorically. We can’t move anywhere (“You seem to be rooted to the spot.”), we have no inventory, and we can’t touch the clock or any of its parts.
Reassured that I haven’t accidentally proven useful to anyone, allow me to flood this thread with Poorly Photographed ProustTM, a cherished lit nerd delicacy.
The final volume has a callback to the madeleine that leads into a pretty influential (as in, I recall Julian Barnes being moved by it) reflection on writing. It’s as close as a thesis statement as a book this discursive gets. In general losing Book 7 would change a lot about the theme and tone of the novel.
I personally liked the super involved, unnecessarily epic section where the Baron de Charlus sets up a concert for Morel, but overall I agree that Books 5 and 6 are the weakest parts of the novel.
I hope it won’t break the spell if I delurk. In defence of the annoying non-interactivity of some of its background objects, “Jigsaw” was written under excruciating space constraints - data, code, text, object count. The latter especially. It makes heavy use of “recycling”, in which the same Z-machine objects become different items in different segments of the game. Writing it was all about boiling down historical detail - I must have gone through twenty or thirty books on the Titanic alone, ordering piles of them up from the Bodleian stacks to the amusement of the librarians - into a ration of something like 10 locations, 10 interactable objects for each time zone, sometimes less.
What I like about the Proust sequence is just that it’s there at all. Successful or not, it’s trying to capture a form of imaginative experience which you didn’t much find in IF in those days. And the first half of the 20th century was an extraordinary time for art and literature - nobody was essential to that, but Proust isn’t a bad representative figure. The London modernists were certainly all reading Proust, in bits and pieces - Eliot, Pound, Virginia Woolf, and so on. And lots of post-war novelists were under his spell, too, even people who don’t seem the least modernistic - C. P. Snow, Anthony Powell. So he wasn’t a form of modernism private to Paris, in the way that somebody like Alfred Döblin was basically unknown outside Berlin.
The forbidding reputation of A la recherche as something you’ll never have time for, so don’t even try, is just undeserved. (And it’s not as if your time is valuable. You’ve been spending it on “Jigsaw”.) You can read, say, the Overture followed by Swann in Love as a compact little novel in its own right. Like most people, I did find that getting through the middle third of the eleven books (let’s not argue about how many volumes there are) takes determination, but the more you go on, the more hypnotic a hold the novel takes on you. The final book is beyond extraordinary. It is problematic for editors because Proust did die before sorting everything out completely, but I wouldn’t put it any more strongly than that. It’s not in any meaningful sense unfinished, in the way that an unfinished symphony is. You’re reading uncorrected proofs, but not sketchy drafts. (Like Tolkien - another contender for most influential - Proust was a messy rewriter-of-proofs.)
As someone reading someone playing Jigsaw, I took that personally.
But more seriously, did you read it in translation (and have a recommendation for a translation) or in French? I thought of trying it but didn’t know which one is better.
For me, the traditional English translation, originally by Scott Moncrieff, simply because it was itself a literary phenomenon. He wasn’t enormously faithful - he went under the title “Remembrance of Things Past”, and called Book II “In the budding grove”, possibly to avoid sounding all French and licentious, for example. “Sodom and Gomorrah” became “The Cities of the Plain”. And lots of little things were wrong. But it reads like between-the-wars writing, because that’s what it is - Moncrieff was basically a contemporary of Proust’s. You feel you’re immersing yourself in the age, not making an attempt to ask “what would Proust read like if he were writing in 2020s English”. Anyway, I think the version of Moncrieff’s Proust which I read was the Penguin Classics one, corrected by Terence Kilmartin, or possibly even the one further corrected by (I think) D. J. Enright.
In the early 2000s there was a determined effort to make a completely new translation, with the books assigned to different Professors of French, under the title “In Search of Lost Time”. It’s almost certainly way more faithful, but it just… isn’t “my” A la recherche. (I expect they would say, not unreasonably, that they were trying to arrive at Proust’s A la recherche.) But another fruit of that rediscovery period, Malcolm Bowie’s critical study “Proust Among the Stars”, written around 2000, was wonderful. I’m slightly chastened to remember the headnote to his bibliography: “Those who have read Proust’s masterpiece once could not do better than to read it again.” Which I really should… if I ever get the time.
Oh, I hope I haven’t been being too unfair to the game in that respect! I know how tight the RAM limits are on the Z-machine, especially with seventeen separate maps, and the variety of custom responses (plus the “that’s not something you need to interact with in the course of this game” notes) gives it a lot of depth even without a ton of scenery objects. (And that’s all within the ROM limits, too…)
It also means we can narrow down what’s important to interact with in, which is a blessing in this era of game (when you’re expected to examine, search, look under, etc every object for clues).
I know I’m being a bit overly snarky about the whole Proust sequence; it’s the first sequence in the game where I really have no relevant knowledge (my sister and my ex are both into modernism but neither of them has read A la recherche either, and I never made it far into Ulysses), so I don’t really have much of value that I can add to these posts. But it is definitely a thematic contrast to the rest of the game so far, and I do like that we’re seeing an artistic turning point as well as scientific and political ones.
While you’re here, by the way—I don’t suppose you could tell us what the crisis Black had already averted on the Titanic was? Or was it supposed to be the letter and it’s just a bug that removing it from the timeline doesn’t break things? (My theory is that Black drugged the senior wireless operator to keep him from doing something history-ruining if he survived, which is why they had his key in their cabin, and why we need to fill in for him to get the distress call out.)
Oh, now that’s interesting. I hadn’t tried TOUCH on its own; the “afraid to touch, but that doesn’t quite seem right” message made me think that we needed to somehow get the clock moving without touching it directly. (Given how everything feels a bit dream-like here in the memory, something metaphorical maybe?)
If nobody else has suggestions, I’ll start off the next session trying out more verbs on the clock and its parts. I confess I don’t really have any great ideas here but at least I can get us more information about what’s possible.
When I read it, it is gonna be the Swedish translation done by Gunnel Vallquist. She spent almost 30 years on the translation and became a member of the Swedish Academy (of Nobel Prize fame) when the first version was finished 1982. Allegedly she could spend weeks just on a single sentence.
A similar story for the Dutch translation of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.
Thérèse Cornips worked on her translation from 1976 until her death in 2016. (The last published part came out in 2009). Apparently she retranslated some parts she was not happy with decades after she had finished them.
As I go over my transcripts, I realize something—I drank the seasickness tonic in an attempt to get the coin. There’s a chance that will end up being necessary later, so our first order of business today is to replay this whole segment from the top.
In doing so, I can confirm that we can’t examine any of the scenery in the hallucination (Black is the real focus of our attention after all), and leaving after ransacking Proust’s apartment does wreck history:
You shake your head, confused, and recite to yourself some of the great poetry of Tom Clancy and Marilyn Monroe. You have the sinking feeling that something is badly wrong here (it’s just like a scene from one of Ronald Reagan’s gothic horror novels) but never mind, time to go out and toast the millennium with an absinthe and tonic.
This time it’s very clear how history has gone wrong! And it’s all our fault—Black didn’t open the window and let the passage blow away, that was all us, in our quest for jigsaw pieces.
Let’s restore a save and try that again. Heading back to the Maison du The…
Maison du The
In other words, a rather dark and gloomy tea-shop beside the river, to which none of the lustre of Paris has attached. The river bank runs east.
A tall grandfather clock stands immobile behind the counter.
There’s one notable bit of scenery I missed last time.
One of M. Proust’s paperoles has somehow got curled up around the pendulum of the grandfather clock.
Huh. Wonder how that could have happened? M. Proust really should take better care of his notes! A writer of his skill should know better than to leave a crucial passage right under the window where it might blow away.
So if you think about it, it’s really his fault, not ours.
> x paperole
It abounds with secondary clauses, circular sentences, aesthetic asides and references to Time. This is the culminating passage of a million and a quarter words: of deep significance. It’d be a shame to lose it.
The “culminating passage”, you say? Sounds like kaemi was right:
And now that we’ve seen what happens in the ruined future, I can buy that losing this would change the course of modernism and thus of 20th-century literature.
Unfortunately the staff of the tea shop don’t see it the same way, so we’ll have to deal with this in a more Proustian manner: through involuntary recollections brought on by tea-soaked madeleines.
There’s a bit of parallelism here:
> drink tea
You sip a little from the tea, but it is both harsh and weak.
> eat madeleine
You nibble at a corner of the madeleine, but it is both stale and dry.
So let’s do some dialectics! (A very topical joke, I’m sure.)
> eat madeleine
The first taste of the madeleine dipped in tea instantly transports you back, in a flood of involuntary memory, to…
Your First School
You are seven or eight years old, and you have squirreled yourself away to a secret corridor behind the hall to see the Clock. The ceiling is far above, the windows are too high for you, the aroma of school dinners drifts in from the kitchens.
The Clock stands before you, huge and lustrous. The pendulum is still: surrounding it, lead counter-weights hang like fir-cones. It is as if the school day will never end, and no bell will sound.
[Your score has just gone up by one point.]
Back in the memory, the windows aren’t implemented (“That’s not something you need to refer to in the course of this game.”) but the ceiling is. The pendulum, weights, and mechanism all appear to redirect to the clock, so I doubt they have to be manipulated separately.
I was wrong about the clock resetting to midnight: the status line is still tracking the time back in Paris, while we…is there a verb form of “reverie” in English? While we reve? “Rêve” is probably going too far.
That works. While we reve. Time here in the memory does seem to be literally standing still, while it’s 11:26 pm back in the waking world. If we don’t figure out this clock soon, the tea shop might close for the night, leaving us stranded and paperole-less! So we better get a move on. (Story-wise, at least. I don’t think there’s actually a time limit in this part of the game.)
You are always fascinated by the Clock, which works the school bell: the cogs, the so-slow mechanism, the pendulum.
The smell in the air is “jam sponge pudding baked in steel tins”, and there’s nothing to hear, yet. On a whim I tried to >BREATHE but that’s not a verb the game knows.
Trying to take it (by accident, during another action) says that we “can’t prise loose the weights”, which my spell checker doesn’t like—do Americans really spell that “prize loose”? That seems so wrong to me!
Anyway, we also can’t climb, enter, turn on, hit, or burn(!) the clock; pushing, pulling, moving, or turning it gets the “that doesn’t seem quite right” reaction, so that seems to be on the right track.
Remembering some feedback from ECTOCOMP beta-testers, I tried >SWING ON WEIGHTS, and struck gold:
Reaching up with a chubby hand, you swing the pendulum back… and the Clock starts: the cogs turn, the bell begins to sound, the weights gradually pull up and down. Time has begun for you, and you know now that it will some day end… but not for many days yet.
Maison du The
In other words, an elegant and zestful tea-shop beside the river, romantic in the moonlight. The river bank invites you to stroll back east.
Behind the counter, a tall grandfather clock smoothly keeps time.
The paperole has fluttered to the floor, dislodged by the pendulum of the clock.
In one corner is a bowl of jasmine tea nobody seems to have noticed.
Elegant and zestful! Romantic in the moonlight!
The tea is still both harsh and weak, though. Maybe we just aren’t fond of the French style.
>buy tea
Nothing is on sale.
Ridiculous. What kind of tea shop isn’t accepting new customers at 11:47 at night? It’s not even midnight yet!
Bah. The French just don’t understand good customer service.
We do still have the madeleine in our inventory, and we can eat the whole thing now (“Delicious!”), but that doesn’t get us any new reminiscences and I’m guessing we’ll need it later. Let’s restore again, and bring this back to M. Proust’s apartment:
>drop paperole
You restore the crucial closing passage of M. Proust’s novel to the heap of manuscript, feeling greatly relieved.
I do wonder where the author himself is right now. Maybe he’s out at that dinner party we stoleborrowed the invitation for.
And, hey. Maybe opening the window to get some fresh air will help his health, and ensure he makes it to November. The miasma theory of disease was pretty thoroughly disproven by this time, but it seems plausible that a 50-year-old hypochrondriac would still believe in it, right?
So our opening the window was actually a good thing! Right?
Probably.
The air here suddenly seems disturbed, and a kind of cloud gathers from light winds and currents.
From inside the rucksack, you hear a bell ring.
Oh hey, right on time.
>press button
The cloud of disturbed air condenses into a kind of spherical ink-black ball, large enough to swallow you up whole.
We can see more of the Land this time, reinforcing my theory that we’re on the puzzle board.
As suddenly as it enveloped you, the blackness begins to thaw and melt, like snow into an ash-grey slush which drifts and piles into landscape.
You have returned to the Land. Grim, monochrome steppes, wide and exposed beneath a brooding sky, the colour of boiled bruised potatoes. Bleak mountain crags surround a huge plain. The pyramid gleams gold like a beacon, like lamplight in the window of a farmhouse at night.
Glacier Milk
A violently rapid glacier-milk river plunges down the western rock face into a canal just to the south, which flows away east.
>n
Cube
The sharp mountain walls to west and north meet here at a basalt pinnacle, on which a perfectly-cut cube two yards across is balanced.
So this would be a1, right? And south of our starting point would be c1?
>s
At the Pagoda
The western rock face meets the glacier-milk canal just to the north.
A Chinese Pagoda, or pavilion, is placed serenely on this bank, its doorway open.
This is all making sense so far. Going in other directions just drops us into the thick mist of unsolved puzzle pieces. I’m making a save here so we can experiment with anything you want to do in the Land, then heading back to the board to place our new pieces.
The edge piece goes at b4, showing “white folds of snow”, and the centre piece goes at b2, showing “rolling, low sand dunes”. Here’s the grid as it stands now:
1 2 3 4
+----------------------------------------------------+
|............. ooooooooooooo|
a |. Mould Park o|
|......o...... oooooo.oooooo|
|ooooooooooooo...... ...... .............|
b |o Invalid .. Dunes .. Snow .|
|oooooo.oooooo............. . ...... ......|
|.............oooooo.oooooo............. |
c |. Glass .. Carriage oo Train .. |
|.............ooooooooooooo............. |
| . o . |
d | |
| |
+----------------------------------------------------+
Which gives us three options for where to go next: “train”, “dunes”, and “snow”. >LIST confirms we’ve solved b1, so we can take a look at its footnote, too:
[ Footnote b1: ]
The geography and decor of Proust’s flat is taken from George Painter’s biography. (Having passed through by chance in 1993, the author can testify that the Rue Hamelin is now somewhat smarter than it was in the 1920s.)
The dinner party alluded to in the invitation took place on 18th May 1922, though it was something of a farce as Stravinsky refused to believe that Proust had any serious interest in music, and because Joyce and Proust were both drunk and had not read each other’s books. (Though Joyce did later read A La Recherche… and scattered his own work with allusions to it.)
By this time Proust was acknowledged as a genius by people other than himself, and his huge novel approached conclusion - but so did his illness. The final volume was just about done (though left in a chaotic mess) before he died, in November, propped up in his childhood bed, drinking iced beer sent up from the Ritz.
So he was at that dinner party!
As always, saves and transcripts below. No changes to the map this time, but I did include a save in the Land to poke at as desired.
Two side notes about previous sections: placing a piece is sufficient to unlock an area of the Land (it doesn’t have to be solved), and I haven’t found any way to actually wreck history in a1 (the discovery of penicillin). Taking the petri dish out of the timeline doesn’t cause an issue, and Fleming keeps coming in and out of the room every five turns, so you always have the opportunity to set it up for him to notice.
Very much agreed! It’s fun to nitpick just to engage with the lovely incongruity of there being a significant work of IF where you follow in Proust’s footsteps; even as someone only glancingly acquainted with his work it’s been very fun to see how you dramatized things.
FWIW, I did a (very) little research preparatory to my abortive attempt on Proust, this (Moncrieff/Kilmartin/Enright) was the one I landed on, since even acknowledging that Moncrieff’s version of the prose isn’t necessarily the most Proust-y, it feels the most Proust-y to me in its flowery, Edwardian way – while the later updates seemed to incorporate some of the later learning about Proust’s intentions vis a vis the fragmentary last bits. As for the newer translations, Davis’s Swann’s Way isn’t actually that different (I read the first couple pages side-by-side) but it just felt a bit more direct, and therefore less fun – though I admit I didn’t get around to reviewing the later volumes with different translators to see whether I’d prefer to switch horses midstream.
Oh, it’s very worthwhile to read Ulysses! Much shorter, albeit perhaps a bit trickier to enter into, than Proust. But once you get the rhythm of it it’s surprisingly readable and fun for such a monumental work.
(If I were to work an episode in literary history into a piece of IF, I’d be tempted to do the Ulysses obscenity trial. There’s actually a reverse-heist aspect to the case, as the customs agents who were supposed to seize the shipment of the book and set off the legal challenge were actually inclined to turn a blind eye, and had to be sort of inveigled into enforcing the law so the legal case could move forward!)
Agh! Rewind rewind rewind!
(Though if Reagan was a novelist, does that mean he doesn’t become president?)
Nicely done!
That’s a lovely detail – and I’m guessing that indicates that this is a memory of our (English) PC, since I doubt a French person would tolerate such a thing!
Wow, that’s a precise formulation! Well, 1995 was another world (and I checked and SWING WEIGHTS also seems to work, which is more reasonable).
Can we push the cube, or enter the pagoda or pyramid?
More vignettes to speculate on! “Snow” is probably a polar expedition, I’d think – perhaps the disastrous Scott expedition (of “I am just going outside and may be some time” fame). Dunes are a little more challenging – perhaps something T.E. Lawrence-ish?
On the topic of the Land: it turns out we can enter the pagoda!
Inside the Pagoda
A single, large room fills the Pagoda, light and pleasant.
A varied and astonishing exhibition of works of Art is on show here. You are surrounded by photographic images, landscapes and portraits.
Art, with a capital A, no less! “The works of a colossal number of unnamed artists.” The pagoda is at C1; north at B1 is “a violently rapid glacier-milk river”.
> x river
The glacier milk is very cold, and although silted with the clay of the White Mountains is unpolluted.
> drink milk
You feel refreshed. The milky water has an odd, but not unpleasant, taste.
If we try to swim, we’re told it “teems with life”, too. Milk fish!
Further north is A1, “a basalt pinnacle, on which a perfectly-cut cube two yards across is balanced”. Unfortunately the cube and the pinnacle aren’t interactible. If we push through the fog, we can get across to A4 at the other end: another pinnacle, this time with a dodecahedron instead of a cube.
The four central spaces seem to be open spaces around the Monument, each with an entrance and a river of some sort. Southwest is steely, southeast is ashen, northwest is probably milky, and northeast is currently unknown.
And that’s all we’ve got for right now. Remember, we can only go to the Land after an area, so the two new pieces from Paris are still shrouded in mist. We’ll have to take another look later once the map’s been opened up a bit!
