A recent Zippy, continuing a series with burlesques of quotes from famous writers (previously: Edgar Allan Poe, Gertrude Stein, Joan Didion):
This time it’s Marcel Proust (under the name Darnell Prouty — cue Olive Higgins Prouty, author of the 1922 novel Stella Dallas and the 1941 novel Now, Voyager, both of which became famous in adaptations, as a movie and a radio soap opera in the first case and a movie in the second). Once again, the writer is caricatured, dressed in a Pinhead muumuu. With the quotations amended by references to snack foods (Chips Ahoy and Little Debbies) and pop culture figures (Rosemary Clooney, Siegfried & Roy in Las Vegas).
This time I’ll give only one of the original quotations, the one for the third panel, the beginning of this material from volume 2 of In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu) — also translated as Remembrance of Things Past (as translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin) — the volume In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (1919), also translated as Within a Budding Grove):
Let but a single flash of reality — the glimpse of a woman from afar or from behind — enable us to project the image of Beauty before our eyes, and we imagine that we have recognised it, our hearts beat, and we will always remain half-persuaded that it was She, provided that the woman has vanished: it is only if we manage to overtake her that we realise our mistake.
Leave a Reply