Proust for Pleasure

     I would stop by the table, where the kitchen maid had just shelled them, to see the peas lined up and tallied like green marbles in a game; but what delighted me were the asparagus, steeped in ultramarine and pink, whose tips, delicately painted with little strokes of mauve and azure, shade off imperceptibly down to their feet--still soiled though they are from the dirt of their garden bed--with an iridescence that is not of this earth. It seemed to me that these celestial hues revealed the delicious creatures who had merrily metamorphosed themselves into vegetables and who, through the disguise of their firm, edible flesh, disclosed in these early tints of dawn, in these beginnings of rainbows, in this extinction of blue evenings, the precious essence that I recognized again when, all night long following a dinner at which I had eaten them, they played, in farces as crude and poetic as a fairy play by Shakespeare, at changing my chamber pot into a jar of perfume.

     I was first attracted to this passage found in the first section of In Search of Lost Time because it appeared to be a still life for vegetarians, not a routine carnivorous description of bifteck aux pommes. This is truly Proust for pleasure: the voluptuous passages ignite all the senses. Certainly no one reads Proust for plot, yet his detail and description can be so flowery at times that his words border on purple prose. Not so here--every bit of paint applies itself to the canvas.
     In this passage, we get a sense of what it feels like to be asparagus. You could say he masters asparagus psychology. They are "creatures" with "feet" and "firm, edible flesh." Yet, at the same time, they are not what they appear; they are not of this world.
     He depicts more than a pretty picture. There is a certain sexual undercurrent to his fascination with asparagus. What's more, his vegetables have undergone an Ovidian metamorphosis.
     He begins with what seems calm and collected in English ("what delighted me were the asparagus"), yet sounds more emotionally charged in French ("mais mon ravissement etait devant les asperges"). Besides "delight," "ravissement" can mean "ecstasy," "rapture," and even "rape." And in his ecstasy (almost drug-induced in its intensity), he sees it all for the first time as in a case of jamais vu--as if he had never seen a countertop of raw asparagus before.
     And his ecstasy in seeing the asparagus has something to do with young Marcel's first stirrings of sexual pleasure. A little further on, we see the secret life of asparagus exposed "in those early hints of dawn, in these beginnings of rainbows, in the extinction of blue evenings" ("en ces couleurs naissantes d'aurore, en ces ebauches d'arc-en-ciel, en cette extinction de soirs bleus"). This is the climactic phrase in the passage: we go from dawn to evening, from birth to death.
     What is this build up to a beautiful death? I suggest it has to do with la petite mort ("the little death," a metaphor for orgasm). Looking the term up in my trusted Wiki, a more far-reaching definition of la petite mort refers to "the spiritual release that comes with orgasm, or a short period of melancholy or transcendence, as a result of the expenditure of the 'life force.'"
     Roland Barthes, the literary critic, spoke of la petite mort as the main goal of reading literature. When I began writing, I wanted to show Proust as hearty and vital, not as stodgy and quaint. Presumably, we all experience a little death in reading Proust through the portal of his attention to detail and description.
     And this is truly Proust for pleasure.