Proust, Leopardi, and Thinking While Reading

On pages 78 and 79 of the silver Moncrieff edition of The Guermantes Way, Marcel describes the unexpected wonders of staying the night at the barracks where his friend Robert resides. He begins by recalling his dinner of young partridges washed down with champagne and then seamlessly shifts to the next morning, when he wakes to a landscape obscured by mist. At first, Marcel compares his experience of viewing the landscape through the barracks window to viewing a mist-enshrouded lake through the window of a country house. He then focuses on the lone bare hill he sees in the landscape, "raising its lean and rugged flanks, already swept clear of darkness, over the back of the barracks." In a sure sign that we've come to the heart of this passage, Proust offers up a long, syntactically complex sentence in which he collapses time into a web of associations:

But when I had formed the habit of coming to the barracks, my consciousness that the hill was there, more real, consequently, even when I did not see it, than the hotel at Balbec, than our house in Paris, of which I thought as of absent—or dead—friends, that is to say scarcely believing any longer in their existence, caused its reflected form, even without my realising it, to be silhouetted against the slightest impressions that I formed at Doncières, and among them, to begin with this first morning, the pleasing impression of warmth given me by the cup of chocolate, prepared by Saint-Loup's batman in this comfortable room, which seemed like a sort of optical centre from which to look out at the hill—the idea of doing anything else but just gaze at it, the idea of actually climbing it, being rendered impossible by this same mist.

I'm reminded of Giacomo Leopardi's famous poem "L'infinito," in which the poet's gaze of a lone hill in the distant landscape is obscured by an overgrown hedge, setting off a chain of associations made more vivid because they are imagined rather than seen. This poem best represents Leopardi's early romantic view that when our sight is blocked in some way, the imagination is stimulated and set free to create a transcendent and eternal vision of the world.

Sempre caro mi fu quest'ermo colle,
E questa siepe, che da tanta parte
Dell'ultimo orrizonte il guardo esclude.
Ma sedendo e mirando, interminati
Spazi di là da quella, e sovrumani
Silenzi, e profondissima quiete
Io nel pensier mi fingo; ove per poco
Il cor non si spaura. E come il vento
Odo stormir tra queste piante, io quello
Infinito silenzio a questa voce
Vo comparando: e mi sovvien l'eterno,
E le morte stagioni, e la presente
E viva, e il suon di lei. Così tra questa
Immensità s'annega il pensier mio:
E il naufragar m'è dolce in questo mare.

Or in my translation:

Always dear to me was this lone hill,
And this hedge, blocking so much
Of the far horizon from my sight.
But sitting and watching, I see in my mind
Boundless spaces beyond, and unearthly
Silences, and deep calm: my heart's
A short beat from fear. And when I hear
The wind rustling through leaves,
I compare that voice to infinite
Silence, and the eternal comes to me,
The seasons dead, and the live
Present and its sounds. So in this
Immensity my thought sinks,
And to drown in this sea is sweet.

Proust does not say that the mist obscuring the landscape made the hill more vivid and memorable, nor does he treat this experience as a celebration of the imagination's power to create eternal visions. Nonetheless, I associate Proust's "bare hill" and "mist" with Leopardi's "lone hill" and "hedge." I'm not suggesting that Leopardi influenced Proust; I leave such suppositions to scholars. Nor am I speculating on where Proust may have gotten his ideas for this passage. I don't care where Proust got his ideas, and I'm not even sure that good novelists have "ideas" that they "get." Rather, I'm interested in the associations I make while I'm reading.

I've just begun reading Maryanne Wolf's Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. As I understand it, Wolf is arguing that when we first learn to read, large regions of our brain come into play. However, over time, as new pathways are created and cells specialize, our brain becomes more efficient at reading and less of it is engaged in the task. Decoding text becomes increasingly automatic, and more of our brain is freed to think while reading.

I may have explained Wolf's theory badly, but as we reading teachers have been taught, good readers try to understand what they'll read even before they've read it. Be that as it may be, I'm intrigued by Wolf's theory (as I understand it) because it flies in the face of much educational theory about reading these days. Educational researchers have studied what good readers do when they read texts—for example, they make predictions, stop and ask questions, backtrack, make notations, puzzle over interesting or confusing passages, and so on. These researchers have found that poor readers tend to read through texts without giving them much thought. The things that good readers do are called "reading strategies," and current educational dogma dictates that if teachers teach poor readers these strategies, they'll magically become good readers. There are literally dozens of books on teaching these strategies, and no self-respecting reading teacher would step foot into a classroom without being familiar with their contents.

Earlier this year, when I tried to replicate what it must be like for struggling readers by reading Crónica de una muerte anunciada, I found that I exerted so much effort simply trying to decode the Spanish text that I often found myself giving the novel the most superficial interpretation possible. I know all about reading strategies, but none of them were very useful when I was simply trying to comprehend what the Spanish was saying. I can imagine how perplexing and frustrating it would be for a student who is trying to comply with some well-meaning teacher, dutifully schooled in current theory, who's trying to impose a bizarre regimen of tasks that seemingly have nothing to do with the incomprehensible words on the page. In a way, Wolf's theory confirms my experience. Readers only begin to think complexly about what they're reading when their brains have become efficient enough at decoding the language to free up thought for more sophisticated responses to the text.

The kind of thoughtfulness that comes over me when I read stimulating books is one of my chief pleasures of reading. In the case of Proust's bare-hill passage, I could have responded in any number of ways. I could have focused on how the passage related to previous passages on landscapes. I could have connected the cup of hot chocolate and its associations to the famous tea-and-madeleine scene in Swann's Way. I could have thought about my own experiences of waking up in novel circumstances to a wondrous landscape. However, for reasons I don't understand, my strongest association was with another text, Leopardi's "L'infinito." These days I often find myself reading that way: my experience of one text is infused with the experiences of other texts. I'm not saying that I read exclusively in that manner. Rather, intertextuality has become a prominent theme in that personal, internal symphony I hear when I read.

For her epigraph to Chapter 1, Maryanne Wolf quotes from young Proust's famous essay "On Reading," in which he speaks of reading as "that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude." I'm not sure how much "communication" the later Proust thought there was in reading, but I would certainly assent to his emphasis on solitude. One of the things that our civilization will lose when reading for pleasure becomes arcane is the cultural knowledge of how to make good use of our ever-present solitude. One of the achievements of such a culture is that it informs us how to converse with each other about the books we experience in solitude.

Today's language arts teachers who instruct college-bound students are typically saddled with the mission of preparing them to read texts solely for writing lit-crit papers on them. I personally detest such papers, and I look forward to the day when I can focus on teaching students to read texts thoughtfully and then talk about them, either verbally or in blogs. In the long run, I think it's a more important skill to teach students how to participate in a book club than to write lit-crit papers, which, I'm told, are becoming passé in university freshman English classes. Thirty years from now, very few of the advanced students I've taught will be writing critical papers for publication. However, some of them—perhaps many of them—will find the need to talk about what they've been reading or would like to read. One of the ironies of reading is that it creates an inwardness and an interiority that compels us to find company for our thoughts. If, as some have been predicting, reading for pleasure is destined to become the practice of a few, then the readers left among us will have more need, not less, to converse about the books that still matter to them.

Crossposted on Ludwig Richter's Blog.

Reading Proust the Easy Way

From "The New Yorker" issue I referred to in my previous post:

The Decline of Reading

Proust seems to be everywhere, demonstrating at least that readers of Proust and readers interested in commentary about Proust are not declining.















In "The New Yorker" Caleb Crain discusses the decline of reading, a topic--tangentially related to Proust--that has received much attention lately, from The English Teacher among others.

My Widower and Proust

Via 3 Quarks Daily, Elatia Harris's story, My Widower and Proust.

Proust, Plato, Nietzsche

Daniel Mark Epstein, writing in the The New Criterion about the pleasures of reading Proust, argues that "there is the strange influence of Platonism, Plato direct, and Plato via Kant. Plato hovers over Proust’s pages, as daemon, as tutelary spirit, just as Aristotle and Aquinas accompanied James Joyce on his journey." Joshua Landy's Philosophy As Fiction challenges the view of Proust as Platonist. His study, unfortunately expensive to buy and difficult to find in community libraries, persuades me that Proust's view is closer to the perspectivism of Nietzsche than it is to Plato. Landy discusses Proust with Robert Harrison, host of Stanford University's radio program, "Entitled Opinions." The hour-long program is informative and entertaining.

Proust on Reading

Recently The English Teacher continued exploring the nature of reading with two thought provoking essays. His discussion, which includes a look at how Thoreau, Emerson, and Montaigne think about reading, looks again at Proust's 1905 essay "On Reading." I contributed a response.

Reading Proust (Part 8): Not Reading Proust

The English Teacher's thoughts on not reading Proust, February 4, 2007.

I am not reading Proust. Actually, I read one page this morning—a beautiful page to put me in the mood for writing. But that's about it for the last few weeks. I don't have time for books I want to read because I'm too busy with books I have to read.

One of the books I have to read these days is Madame Bovary. I'll be team-teaching the novel in the spring, and I haven't read it since I was in high school. Until I picked up the book some days ago, I remembered (accurately or falsely) very little: Madame Bovary read romantic novels; she fooled around with a slick rich guy who dumped her; her husband was dull as an ox (the words "Bovary" and "bovine" are linked in my mind); Madame Bovary took arsenic or rat poison; she died a painful death.

In high school, I also read The Sorrows of Young Werther, which featured, as I recall, a dramatic suicide. I don't remember whether Werther read romantic novels, but Goethe's romantic novel left me depressed for several days. I contemplated suicide. When my English teacher, Mrs. Orris, told me she didn't like it when students read The Sorrows because they often became depressed, I felt so unoriginal that I soon snapped out of it. I was a genius then, and geniuses don't experience unoriginal things.

Is the conventional wisdom that Madame Bovary is an unoriginal character originally conceived by Flaubert? I don't know how to address this question because I'm only a fifth of the way through the book, but I do recognize Madame Bovary as solidly within the literary tradition of bad readers. Indeed, one could argue that the form of the novel itself began with a famously bad reader—Don Quixote. However, when Flaubert describes an evening get-together in which Charles and M. Homais fall asleep at the fire and Léon and Emma are drawn into a tête-à-tête, I suspect Flaubert's literary sources go back further than Cervantes. Here is the scene in Lowell Bair's translation:

By now the fire had died down and the teapot was empty; Léon continued to read and Emma listened to him, absent-mindedly turning the lampshade decorated with paintings of pierrots in carriages and tightrope dancers with their balancing poles. Léon would stop and make a gesture calling her attention to his sleeping audience; then they would talk to each other in low voices, and their conversation seemed sweeter to them because no one else could hear it.

Thus a bond was established between them, a continual exchange of books and songs; Monsieur Bovary, little inclined to jealousy, took it as a matter of course.

I'm thinking of Dante's account of Paolo and Francesca in Canto V of The Inferno. Canto V is set in the realm of the lustful, where, like hapless birds, the damned are buffeted by tormenting winds. The symbolism is obvious: the lustful are overcome by punishing winds in death because they allowed themselves to be overcome by their sinful passions in life. Dante initially serves us up with a series of cameos by the literary lustful, including Semiramis, Dido, Cleopatra, Helen, Achilles, Paris, and Tristan. Virgil apparently names another thousand souls—how patient Dante is—but the two eventually come upon those historical figures now made literary by Dante. The passage begins with Francesca's famous line:

. . . "Nessun maggior dolore
che ricordarsi del tempo felice
ne la miseria . . ."

Or in my translation:

. . . "There is no greater pain
than to remember times of happiness
when in misery . . . "

Francesca then goes on to describe how she and Paolo were seduced by reading the romances of Lancelot:

". . . One day, for pleasure,
We read of Lancelot, by love constrained:
Alone, suspecting nothing, at our leisure.

Sometimes at what we read our glances joined,
Looking from the book each to the other's eyes,
And then the color in our faces drained.

But one particular moment alone it was
Defeated us: the longed-for smile, it said,
Was kissed by that most noble lover: at this,

This one, who now will never leave my side,
Kissed my mouth, trembling. . . ." [Robert Pinsky's translation]

The passage ends with this:

". . . Galeottto fu 'l libro e chi lo scrisse:
quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante."

Or in my translation:

". . . That book was a Galeotto and he who wrote it:
that day we read no further."

I quoted the final two lines in Italian because the use of the name Galeotto is important. Galeotto is Italian for Gallehault, who acted as a go-between for Lancelot and Guinevere. The influence of Dante's Tuscan dialect on what we now call Italian is apparent in the meaning of the modern galeotto: a panderer. In effect, Dante is saying that in bad reading, the book serves as a kind of pimp between the reader and her sinful acts of passion.

I stand in awe of Dante as a poet; as a theologian he appalls me. Yet, his belief in the justness of eternal torture is merely conventional for his time. As long as pride against God was seen as the first and fundamental sin, the use of torture was a justifiable corrective to bring about a restoration of humility before God. As Judith N. Shklar has pointed out in Ordinary Vices, Montaigne moved outside the Christian theologian framework when he made man the measure of all things and judged cruelty as the worst thing we do to each other. As Montaigne famously said in "Of Cannibals":

But there never was any opinion so disordered as to excuse treachery, disloyalty, tyranny, and cruelty, which are our ordinary vices. [Donald Frame translation]

If Christians are a bit less cruel than they were in Dante's time, it's because their Christianity has been humanized by our first and greatest essayist and humanist, Montaigne. Avishai Margalit—skeptical as he is that John Rawls' idea of social justice can be pragmatically realized—has posited the decent society as one that refrains from institutionalizing cruelty and humiliation. In this sense, Margalit is working within the humanistic strain of Judaism, which is as much heir to Montaigne's humanism as liberal Christianity.

A couple years ago, when my wife and I visited the Cappella degli Scrovegni in Padova, I was struck by the resemblance of the stacks of tormented naked bodies in Giotto's Inferno to some of the photographs coming out of Abu Ghraib. I wouldn't call it so much an instance of life imitating art as conceptual structures reverberating through time. As I understand it, Flaubert saw himself as objectively, almost scientifically, portraying his characters in precise evidential detail. One should not take his intention, however, as indicative of an art free of art, any more than we should expect, say, documentaries to be free of the art of filmmaking. Flaubert, whatever he may have thought he was doing, was working within ineluctable literary structures whose sources, though at odds with his philosophical outlook, compelled him through time with their aesthetic power.

Reading Proust (Part 7): Proust on Reading

On reading Proust on Reading, by The English Teacher December, 2006

The opening passages of Marcel Proust's On Reading contain the most beautiful account of childhood reading that I've ever read. Originally serving as a preface to Proust's translation of Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies, the essay begins this way:

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book. [translations throughout by Jean Autret and William Burford, found in On Reading (New York, 1971)]

His opening is deceptive in its simplicity, for Proust quickly complicates his first thought with his second sentence:

Everything that filled them for others, so it seemed, and that we dismissed as a vulgar obstacle to a divine pleasure: the game for which a friend would come to fetch us at the most interesting passage; the troublesome bee or sun ray that forced us to lift our eyes from the page or to change position; the provisions for the afternoon snack that we had been made to take along and that we left beside us on the bench without touching, while above our head the sun was diminishing in force in the blue sky; the dinner we had to return for, and during which we thought only of going up immediately afterward to finish the uninterrupted chapter, all those things with which reading should have kept us from feeling anything but annoyance, on the contrary they have engraved in us so sweet a memory (so much more precious to our present judgment than what we read then with such love), that if we still happen today to leaf through those books of another time, it is for no other reason than that they are the only calendars we have kept of days that have vanished, and we hope to see reflected on their pages the dwellings and the ponds which no longer exist.

While Proust was already thirty-four when he wrote this essay in 1905, it marks, as the translators put it, a "true beginning" for the writer. His second sentence contains, for example, a Proustian reversal in which the annoying distractions from his early reading turn out to be, years later, the primary pleasures recalled in memory. This reversal is embodied in syntax and capped off with the longing to recapture days long "vanished."

Proust continues in a Proustian vein as he describes, in a kind of drama of detail, the two rooms he read in: the dining room before lunch and his bedroom after lunch. In the case of the latter, Proust introduces another Proustian reversal: the abundance of ornamental objects in the room makes it difficult for him to find and employ the few useful ones there, but the ornamental objects provide him with the most pleasure while he's reading. He writes:

. . . [A]ll those things which not only could not answer any of my needs, but were even an impediment, however slight, to their satisfaction, which evidently had never been placed there for someone's use, people my room with thoughts somehow personal, with that air of predilection, of having chosen to live there and delighting in it, which often the trees in a clearing and the flowers on the road sides or on old walls have. They filled it with a silent and different life, with a mystery in which my person found itself lost and charmed at the same time . . .

In a recent article, Alex Ross compared Wallace Stevens' poem "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm" to the opening passages of Brahms' fourth symphony. I associate the poem with Proust's "silent and different life"—a reading life that progresses through the day and late into the night, culminating with an inevitable Proustian disappointment when he finally finishes the book:

Then, what? This book, it was nothing but that? Those beings to whom one had given more of one's attention and tenderness than to people in real life, not always daring to admit how much one loved them, even when our parents found us reading and appeared to smile at our emotion, so that we closed the book with affected indifference or feigned ennui; those people, for whom one had panted and sobbed, one would never see again, one would no longer know anything about them.

Soon after this passage, he shifts to a more scholarly discussion of Ruskin, and we immediately feel the disappointment of losing our seemingly familiar Proust for an oddly academic one. Our disappointment is—dare I say it?—so Proustian.

My wife is currently reading Swann's Way, and she recently reminded me of a passage on pages 90-93 of the Moncrieff-Kilmartin edition in which Marcel describes how the people and landscapes in the novels he's reading are more real to him than actual people and landscapes. (With my wife, a close friend, and I all reading Remembrance at the same time, I'm beginning to feel part of something like the cult of Proust readers that Natalia Ginzberg describes with amusing irony in her novel Lessico Famigliare or Family Sayings). In Swann's Way, Proust carefully develops his aesthetic theory of "real" people versus "book" people, but for the moment I'm more intrigued with his discussion of "book" landscapes:

. . . [F]or the landscapes in the books I read were to me not merely landscapes more vividly portrayed in my imagination than any which Combray could spread before my eyes but otherwise of the same kind. Because of the choice that the author had made of them, because of the spirit of faith in which my mind would exceed and anticipate his printed word, as it might be interpreting a revelation, they seemed to me—an impression I hardly ever derived from the place where I happened to be, especially from our garden, that undistinguished product of the strictly conventional fantasy of the gardener whom my grandmother so despised—to be actually part of nature itself, and worthy to be studied and explored.

Had my parents allowed me, when I read a book, to pay a visit to the region it described, I should have felt that I was making an enormous advance towards the ultimate conquest of truth. . . .

Do I detect here a faint echo of Emerson? I'm thinking of the passage I cited in my previous piece on Proust:

By persisting to read or to think, this region gives further sign of itself, as it were in flashes of light, in sudden discoveries of its profound beauty and repose, as if the clouds that covered it parted at intervals and showed the approaching traveler the inland mountains, with the tranquil eternal meadows spread at their base, whereon flocks graze and shepherds pipe and dance. But every insight from this realm of thought is felt as initial, and promises a sequel. I do not make it; I arrive there, and behold what was there already. I make! O no! I clap my hands in infantine joy and amazement before the first opening to me of this august magnificence, old with the love and homage of innumerable ages, young with the life of life, the sunbright Mecca of the desert. And what a future it opens! I feel a new heart beating with the love of the new beauty. I am ready to die out of nature and be born again into this new yet unapproachable America I have found in the West.

The idea of advancing upon a landscape, the complicated association of literary landscapes with Nature, the imagination in action as a form of exploration—these motifs belong to both passages, and while the comparison might seemed far-fetched, I note that the scholarly Proust of On Reading writes about how there are writers "who liked to read a beautiful page before starting to work." "Emerson," he says, "would rarely begin to write without rereading some pages of Plato."

I don't know whose "beautiful page" Proust might have turned to before he took up Remembrance each day, but I understand the sentiment thoroughly. Much of what I'm reading these days—I'm thinking now of political blogs and academic articles—is atrociously written. Despite the demands on my time, I still aspire to string together some well-phrased sentences from time to time. But before I can take up that endless work one more time, I sometimes feel the need to refresh my eyes with a "beautiful page"—something neither political nor educational, but, as A Reader says in Unpacking My Library, something that "rekindles the imagination, and eases the way forward, if momentarily."

Reading Proust (Part 6)

On December 21, 2006, the English Teacher posted this, the sixth of his commentaries on Proust.


I've begun reading the opening paragraphs of The Guermantes Way, and I feel that sense of hopefulness I often feel when starting a new book. Everything is before me, and I can already anticipate Marcel's touching love for his grandmother, his odd infatuation with Mme de Guermantes, the reappearances of Françoise, Saint Loup, Albertine, and the inimitable Charlus. Here is an illustration of why I said in my previous piece that I'd once decided only to read books I'd already read: because reading the best books a second time is arguably more pleasurable than reading any book the first time.

Not that this has stopped me from, on occasion, lining up six or seven books I've never read and reading the first several pages of each. My ostensible purpose in doing so was to see which book hooked me, but I also think I just enjoyed repeating the ritual of new beginnings. I'm reminded of that well-known passage from Emerson's "Experience" in which he writes of "the mode of our illumination" as being like the approach of "a new and excellent region of life":

By persisting to read or to think, this region gives further sign of itself, as it were in flashes of light, in sudden discoveries of its profound beauty and repose, as if the clouds that covered it parted at intervals and showed the approaching traveler the inland mountains, with the tranquil eternal meadows spread at their base, whereon flocks graze and shepherds pipe and dance. But every insight from this realm of thought is felt as initial, and promises a sequel. I do not make it; I arrive there, and behold what was there already. I make! O no! I clap my hands in infantine joy and amazement before the first opening to me of this august magnificence, old with the love and homage of innumerable ages, young with the life of life, the sunbright Mecca of the desert. And what a future it opens! I feel a new heart beating with the love of the new beauty. I am ready to die out of nature and be born again into this new yet unapproachable America I have found in the West.

We are entitled to wonder at this last puzzling sentence. Stanley Cavell has made more of it than I would have thought possible in his This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein. Lacking Cavell's talent for subtle distinctions and precise indecisions, I read the passage as illustrating how the illumination arising out of the "converse" with "a profound mind" is like the vision of a grand landscape always unfolding before us into the distance. There is a sense of "beginningness" in this beholding, and Emerson would die out of nature and live again in this great new American landscape of unapproachable anticipation. I put "die out of nature" in italics not only for the complications of what he means by "nature," but also for the suggestiveness of the inevitable association of "die out of" with the passing of his son Waldo.

For those of us who've already read Remembrance, we know that the first paragraph of Guermantes, in which Marcel describes the change of residence to the Hôtel de Guermantes, foreshadows the death of his beloved grandmother. In the meantime, it is also a beginning with a beginning:

The twittering of the birds at daybreak sounded insipid to Françoise.

The irony of daybreak marred by insipid twittering birds is soon explained by the change at work:

Every word uttered by the maids upstairs made her jump; disturbed by all their running about, she kept asking herself what they could be doing. In other words, we had moved.

Their new existence at the Hôtel de Guermantes, while marked with unsettling commotion, begins in sentences simple enough. But it isn't long before Proust draws us into this bit of syntax:

Hence, if I had been tempted to scoff at her when, in her misery at having to leave a house in which one was "so well respected by all and sundry," she had packed her trunks weeping, in accordance with the rites of Combray, and declaring superior to all possible houses that which had been ours, on the other hand, finding it as hard to assimilate the new as I found it easy to abandon the old, I felt myself drawn towards our old servant when I saw that moving into the building where she had not received from the hall-porter, who did not yet know us, the marks of respect necessary to her spiritual wellbeing, had brought her positively to the verge of prostration.

In my first article, I had described how one of the pleasures of reading Proust was that it provided me with rich distractions during my bouts of insomnia. In Proust, one of the modes of our distraction is his syntax, which fixes our attention with its labyrinthine reversals. These reversals come quickly in this first paragraph, in which Marcel laughs at Françoise's tears but goes to her for sympathy; in which Françoise shows icy indifference to Marcel's sorrow because she shares it; and in which Françoise, as soon as Marcel tries to speak of the new house, laments the disadvantages of the old and speaks well of the new. Marcel writes of Françoise's "true feminine inconstancy," but this paragraph is all inconstancy embodied in syntax.

In my last article, I claimed not to have cracked Paradise Lost in three decades, but I remember my Milton professor having said something to the effect that Miltonic syntax was designed to remind us that we're fallen. If Proust's is about the irony of new beginnings in reversals, is Milton's about bringing us down to hard earth every time we reach the end of a period and can't quite hold the whole sense of the sentence in our distracted minds? Or was he suggesting something much simpler, that if we undergraduates were less sinful, we would have an easier time reading Milton? If anything, I mourn that I hadn't been more sinful as an undergraduate, even if it had meant foregoing the pleasures of Paradise. Like Thoreau, I wonder:

What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?

I have to say that I'm on the side of William Blake's ironic devil when he says "Exuberance is Beauty." This fall, I found graduate school to be a kind of new beginning for me, and I reached the end of the quarter feeling about as energetic and vigorous as I've felt in years. In a recent letter to an Italian friend, I apologized for not having responded sooner to his missives. He replied:

Anch'io sono lieto di sentirti dire che state bene. Essere occupati non è un delitto, bensì è sinonimo di vitalità.

Or in my translation:

I'm also happy to hear you say that you're well. To be busy is not a sin; rather, it's synonymous with vitality.

My friend had it right. Like Whitman and Montaigne—who share in common the invention of distinct literary personalities of seeming flesh and blood ("Cut these words, and they would bleed," writes Emerson of Montaigne)—I'd been feeling the busy vitality of bodily health. Naturally, this feeling couldn't last.

We Americans love new beginnings, the ready approach of the unapproachable. But as in "Othello," that other great work of jealously, Shakespeare reminds us that all beginnings start in mid-sentence. Roderigo starts the play with:

Tush, never tell me, I take it much unkindly
That thou, Iago, who hast had my purse
As if the strings were thine, shouldst know of this.

What, we're left to wonder, is "this," which Iago does not illuminate by calling it "such a matter?" "Desdemona's elopement" will do as a provisional answer, but the initial indefiniteness of the conversation between Iago and Roderigo throws us off, forcing us to strain at what they're talking about. The disorienting effect is but prelude to the much greater disorientations Iago insinuates into Othello's elusive consciousness. Othello, whose voice bespeaks a larger-than-life bodily command and presence, is undone not only mentally but physically. Iago's feat is to accomplish in the court what no one had ever accomplished on the battlefield: his mind's fear of betrayal betraying his body's sanity.

"Sanity," of course, derives from the Latin sanus or "healthy." A doctor's bad news always comes as a betrayal, though our first inclination is often to attribute the betrayal to the doctor instead of our own bodies. A health scare is just as good a way to end a year and begin a new one as any, but I find it ironic, to say the least, that at a time when I was enjoying the illusion that my middle-aged body might just keep going forever—I can still run a treadmill four-mile in under thirty minutes!—my urologist thinks I should get a biopsy of my prostate. That pesky persistent nub on the left side has not gone away, and while my PSA hasn't gone up—in fact, oddly, it went down over the last six months—there are those infrequent cases of men who have prostate cancer and low PSAs. The verbiage on the box of my "Prostate Ultrasound and Biopsy Prep Kit" (don't ask) says not-so reassuringly that approximately "50% of lumps found turn out to be non-cancerous." I flip a coin, heads cancer, tails not-cancer. Not-cancer! I flip again. Not cancer again! I flip again. Cancer. Shit.

While it may be a matter of luck how we die, it's not a matter of luck that we will die. I should qualify this overly confident statement by saying that after reading Robert Nozick's "Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?" in Philosophical Explanations, I'm half-convinced that the existence of existence is itself a matter of luck and therefore, by extension, so is non-existence. Be that as it may be, I take more comfort in the eminently sane Michel de Montaigne, who wrote in "Of Experience":

This ordinary expression "pastime" or "pass the time" represents the habit of those wise folk who think they can make no better use of their life than to let it slip by and escape it, pass it by, sidestep it, and, as far as in them lies, ignore it and run away from it, as something irksome and contemptible. But I know it to be otherwise and find it both agreeable and worth prizing, even in its last decline, in which I now possess it; and nature has placed it in our hands adorned with such favorable conditions that we have only ourselves to blame if it weighs on us and if it escapes us unprofitably. The life of the fool is joyless, full of trepidation, given over wholly to the future [Seneca]. However, I am reconciling myself to the thought of losing it, without regret, but as something that by its nature must be lost; not as something annoying and troublesome. Then too, not to dislike dying is properly becoming only to those who like living. It takes management to enjoy life. I enjoy it twice as much as others, for the measure of enjoyment depends on the greater or lesser attention that we lend it. Especially at this moment, when I perceive that mine is so brief in time, I try to increase it in weight; I try to arrest the speed of its flight by the speed with which I grasp it, and to compensate for the haste of its ebb by my vigor in using it. The shorter my possession of life, the deeper and fuller I must make it.

In a recent conversation with a friend, we talked ironically about how much of literature is just too depressing to read during winter, and I remarked, too easily, that it's depressing because the human condition is tragic. He asked me why I thought so, and I replied that one of the few things we have in common is that we're all going to die, and we're unable to celebrate it. Instead, he added, we go around killing each other. It passes the time, I said.

Charles Simic has described that type of poem made up out of thin air as possessing the beauty of religions made the same way. We have created elaborate structures of thought and feeling that seem designed to blunt the fact of our mortality. I understand the fear at work in such structures, but I see wisdom in Montaigne's determination not to live what life he has left with "trepidation," but with determination to make it "deeper and fuller." As I suggested to my friend, Montaigne's essays are one of those works of literature not depressing, because what we behold over the course of hundreds of pages of his musings is the wondrous growth of his own consciousness—a consciousness at once expansive and humane. We witness the creation of a self aware of its own character and accepting of its limitations. If, at the end of Remembrance, Proust shows us astonishing impressions of declining old age, Montaigne, at the end of the essays, leaves us with the hope that we can achieve our humanity nearly to the very end.

Reading Proust (Part 5): On Reading Itself

The fifth of the English Teacher's thoughts on Proust (December 14, 2006)

In his chapter "Reading" in Walden, Thoreau writes:

For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old. To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

Thoreau does not suggest that reading is an exercise in reading oneself, as Proust does. Rather, Thoreau describes the "whole life" we must bring to reading if we are to read well and what kinds of works are worthy of that life. Earlier in this chapter, Thoreau recalls how he'd kept Homer's Illiad on his table, but because he'd been so busy building his house and hoeing his beans, he merely "looked at his page only now and then." In place of this "classic," he took up the kind of light reading we're all too familiar with:

I read one or two shallow books of travel in the intervals of my work, till that employment made me ashamed of myself, and I asked where it was then that I lived.

Is this a not-so-subtle way of saying that bad reading drives out good? Or is he saying that when we can't devote our whole lives to reading, because we're busy hoeing our beans, the only reading left to us is the kind that makes us ashamed? Where, indeed, does a "true" reader live if not in "true" books?

The intention of living in books, as Thoreau suggests, must be "steady"—that is, when he speaks of the "whole life," he means not only our whole being drawing on all of its accumulated experience, but our whole being devoted to a lifelong pursuit. A true reader is not merely an athlete in the prime of her life, but an athlete always. The shame for Thoreau is to have forgotten, for a stretch, how to live within the whole of himself, and the question of where he is living and in what pursuit is a theme Thoreau returns to repeatedly in Walden.

I don't know whether Thoreau read Montaigne, but his teacher—if I may call him that—Emerson did. In his essay "Of Books," Montaigne says that "I seek in books only to give myself pleasure by honest amusement; or if I study, I seek only the learning that treats of the knowledge of myself." At the end of his own book, in "Of Experience"— that great precursor to Emerson's essay—Montaigne illuminates his passage on reading when he says, "It is an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know how to enjoy our being rightfully." Montaigne, whose every page testifies to his devotion to books, understands the pleasure of reading as the pleasure of being, an end inseparable from his greatest of all projects, the assay of his self in writing.

While Thoreau can instruct us on what to bring to our reading and Montaigne on what to derive from it, we are left, in the solitude of our selves, to our own experience. Some months or years ago—what does it matter in book-time?—I told a few of my friends that from now on, I would read only books I'd already read. By my spurious calculations, I'd reached that late point in life that if I didn't cease trying to fill out my literary education, I'd run out of time for rereading the books that, over the last thirty-odd years, have given me the most pleasure. I'm not exactly sure what books I had in mind when I was saying this. I note that I still haven't cracked my old copy of Paradise Lost after nearly three decades. Perhaps I had in mind Proust, for whom such portentous declarations are hardly necessary.

If we consider writing as an assay of memory and experience, then Proust's closest descendent might be Wordsworth. However, I like to think of his more ancient countryman as Montaigne, whose work, for me, shares one important characteristic with Proust's: I can pick it up any time and read any passage, and still find the thread. I can't argue against Thoreau's ironic shame—how does one argue against his peculiar irony?—at having read travel books instead of Homer. However, as someone who's been hoeing his share of beans in graduate school, I could have recommended to him Montaigne, whose essays he might have borrowed from Emerson when he was over at his house, enjoying Mrs. Emerson's cooking. Or, had he lived long enough, he could have read Proust, though I somehow have a hard time imagining Thoreau feeling anything for Marcel's pursuits. Nature was Thoreau's mistress, and he loved her as all writers should love their subjects: with obsessiveness.

Reading Proust (Part 4)

The English Teacher's fourth commentary on Proust, first published December 2, 2006

I don't have a scholarly mind. By that I mean that I'm not inclined to make a careful study of a subject, to weigh competing considerations, to marshal my research in an even-handed way, and to delineate my arguments in precise and exacting detail. I tend to personalize the subjects I'm interested in and jump around at will, making the connections that appeal to me for emotional or intuitive reasons. I feel a little like the fox in Isaiah Berlin's famous essay in Russian Thinkers. The foxy style of mind—one "scattered or diffused," to borrow from Berlin—might not be useful for getting articles published in scholarly journals, but it's no impediment to commenting on Proust, as Proust himself might have agreed, even if Berlin did classify him as a hedgehog. In the October 9, 2006 edition of The New Yorker (not available, alas, online), the novelist Milan Kundera cites the following quote from Proust:

"Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth."

For one who sometimes has trouble seeing to read, I'm fascinated by the idea of reading to see. I recently finished Within a Budding Grove, and I found myself deliberately resisting seeing anything of myself in the climatic moments of the book's final pages. Instead, I focused on my regret at not having paid better attention to a relatively minor character, M. de Norpois. It was as if, on leaving a thoroughly enjoyable party, I pondered how I should have spent more time talking to an interesting but reticent guest of the host's. M. de Norpois was certainly not the star of the party, nor had he much to do with my enjoyment of it, but he was the one I wished I'd talked to.

On page 1002 of the Moncrieff-Kilmartin edition, in a very long passage in which Marcel is attempting to illustrate the contradictions of Albertine's character, he says the following about M. de Norpois:

Among the men who have struck me as practising most consistently this system of killing several birds with one stone must be included M. de Norpois. He would now and then agree to act as intermediary between two of his friends who had quarrelled, and this led to his being called the most obliging of men. But it was not sufficient for him to appear to be doing a service to the friend who had come to him to request it; he would represent to the other the steps which he was taking to effect a reconciliation as undertaken not at the request of the first friend but in the interest of the second, a notion of which he never had any difficulty in persuading an interlocutor influenced in advance by the idea that he had before him the "most obliging of men." In this way, laying both ends against the middle, what in stage parlance is known as "doubling" two parts, he never allowed his influence to be in the slightest degree imperilled, and the services which he rendered constituted not an expenditure of capital but a dividend upon some part of his credit. At the same time every service, seemingly rendered twice over, correspondingly enhanced his reputation as an obliging friend, and, better still, a friend whose interventions were efficacious, one who did not simply beat the air, whose efforts were always justified by success, as was shown by the gratitude of both parties. This duplicity in obligingness was—allowing for disappointments such as are the lot of every human being—an important element in M. de Norpois's character.

Although this kind of duplicity is hardly confined to Ambassador Norpois's character,—indeed, one might say that the Parisian society of Proust's novel is filled with such amateur ambassadors—M. de Norpois is marked by combining this finely honed skill with another one of professional application. On page 605 we read:

And when Bergotte's opinion was thus contrary to mine, he in no way reduced me to silence, to the impossibility of framing any reply, as M. de Norpois would have done. This does not prove that Bergotte's opinions were less valid than the Ambassador's; far from it. A powerful idea communicates some of its power to the man who contradicts it. Partaking of the universal community of minds, it infiltrates, grafts on to, the mind of him whom it refutes, among other contiguous ideas, with the aid of which, counter-attacking, he complements and corrects it; so that the final verdict is always to some extent the work of both parties to the discussion. It is to ideas which are not, strictly speaking, ideas at all, to ideas which, based on nothing, can find no foothold, no fraternal echo in the mind of the adversary, that the latter, grappling as it were with thin air, can find no word to say in answer. The arguments of M. de Norpois (in the matter of art) were unanswerable simply because they were devoid of reality.

M. de Norpois is in full possession of the politician's art of making an argument so detached from reality, and yet so formidably internal to itself, that it's unassailable by any reference to reality. M. de Norpois is a poet in the style that Charles Simic often writes about: one who constructs poems seemingly out of thin air, with no apparent preexisting frame of reference. This style of poet is, for example, the opposite of W.H. Auden in his public mode, where the purpose of his ceremonial, occasional poems is signaled from the first line, if not the title. The same is true of Yeats—one of Auden's more famous subjects—in his public art. M. de Norpois is more like Simic himself, whose purpose in a poem may never be revealed. All we know is that it does what it does, and we're not likely to succeed in critiquing it by references to reality.

With regard to Proust's novel, we might argue that references to Proust's life are equally useless. In the same New Yorker article, Kundera writes:

In "In Search of Lost Time," Proust is absolutely clear: "In this novel . . . there is not one incident that is not fictional . . . not one character à clef." However tightly bound to the life of its author, Proust's novel stands, without question, at the opposite pole from autobiography: there is in it no autobiographical intention; he wrote it not in order to talk about his life but to show his readers their own lives.

I will add, parenthetically, that Kundera's view of Proust's view is very much the opposite of James Baldwin's. In "The Northern Protestant," his essay about meeting Bergman, Baldwin wrote:

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up. All of it, the literal and the fanciful.

Around Christmas of 1983, I had dinner with James Baldwin and a couple of his friends when they were staying at the Amherst home of James Tate, who was on sabbatical. Baldwin was a Five-College Professor and was teaching fiction classes to some of my colleagues. I'd made Baldwin's acquaintance through friends and had gotten myself invited to dinner when, it seemed, just about everyone else had vacated town for the Christmas holidays. I was at least as presumptuous then as I am now, and at dinner I talked about reading the "confessional" poets, assuming that Baldwin didn't know anything about them because he wasn't a poet. Little did I know that Baldwin would soon be coming out with a volume of his own poems and that among the poets I discussed was one who had been an important friend of his—Randall Jarrell. Baldwin responded to me by quibbling with the word "confessional," arguing that all art was confessional. I don't know if he added "more or less oblique," but he certainly could have—or so it seems in my less-than-reliable memory.

Naturally, I would like to have it both ways: all art is confessional, more or less oblique, but its intention, at least in the case of Proust, is not autobiographical. Rather, the intention of the more or less oblique confession is to provide us with the optical instrument with which to reveal ourselves to ourselves. In the case of Within a Budding Grove, the optical instrument appropriately begins with an anacoluthon regarding the ambassador:

My mother, when it was a question of our having M. de Norpois to dinner for the first time, having expressed her regret that Professor Cottard was away from home and that she herself had quite ceased to see anything of Swann, since either of these might have helped to entertain the ex-ambassador, my father replied that so eminent a guest, so distinguished a man of science as Cottard could never be out of place at a dinner-table, but that Swann, with his ostentation, his habit of crying aloud from the house-tops the name of everyone he knew, however slightly, was a vulgar show-off whom the Marquis de Norpois would be sure to dismiss as—to use his own epithet—a "pestilent" fellow.

The original French ends with the word puant, which seems more suited, if you'll forgive me for saying so, to the idiotic Cottard. Be that as it may be, Proust's optical instrument doesn't work like an optician's, letting us get a better look at the surface or inner recesses of the eye. Rather, it's like one of those periscopes that allows us to look around corners at our own characters, as Helen Vendler once said of Berryman's "Dream Songs." I think it's worth asking ourselves what this opening has to do with the climatic moment on page 995 when Marcel is about to fling himself on Albertine and partake of his hyper-imagined kiss. If an anacoluthon is reversal represented in syntax, then the foiled kiss is an anacoluthon of the imagination. Not heeding Albertine's threat to ring the bells, Marcel persists:

. . . Albertine's round face, lit by an inner flame as by a night-light, stood out in such relief that, imitating the rotation of a glowing sphere, it seemed to me to be turning, like those Michelangelo figures which are being swept away in a stationary and vertiginous whirlwind. I was about to discover the fragrance, the flavor which this strange pink fruit concealed. I heard a sound, abrupt, prolonged and shrill. Albertine had pulled the bell with all her might.

What the periscope of this passage revealed to me was not some disappointed kiss of years past. Rather, it called to mind its precise opposite. When I was twenty-six and old enough to know better, I went out on St. Patrick's Day with a bunch of colleagues from my proposal writing group at Boeing. I sat next to a young woman whose name we'll call Marcy. She worked in the data entry group—are there such things now?—and I didn't realize I was attracted to her until we'd both had several beers. Suddenly I was possessed with a desire to kiss her and promptly did so. She seemed to enjoy it as much as I did, and an entire table of colleagues was treated to the spectacle of the two of us going at it for several minutes.

The next day I felt giddy, despite the mild hangover. I checked my heart and detected no blot of shame. Rather, I remembered with pleasure the sensation of Marcy's lips pulling on mine, her tongue worming around in my mouth. At lunch, we took a walk out to the parking lot. I showed her the used Toyota Tercel I'd recently purchased. Her comment was that she'd preferred the bright-red 240-Z I'd been borrowing from my father. Then, out of the blue, she asked, "Did we kiss yesterday?" She went on to explain that it was just kissing and that it really didn't mean anything.

Far from disappointed, I simply moved on, soundly reasoning that someone who couldn't accept my Toyota Tercel was clearly not meant for me. In those days, I knew how to move on. I had not yet met my Albertine as, in a sense, Marcel has not. For the Albertine of Within a Budding Grove is simplicity itself compared to the Albertine of later books. It's one of the pleasures I have to look forward to in the following pages: the reencounter with Marcel's Albertine and mine.

Swann in Love

Published originally November 22, 2006

Midway through Swann’s Way, we find Swann looking at what he thinks is the bedroom window of his lover, the courtesan Odette de Crécy. Earlier in the evening she complained of a headache and declined to make love—to make some “nice little cattleyas”, in Proust’s amusing phrase. Suspecting that Odette sent him away so she could entertain another man, Swann has returned after midnight to spy on her.

Jealousy has reduced him to a peeping tom. No matter. Swann is shameless. Spying outside a window, “bribing servants, listening at doors” are now “merely methods of scientific investigation with a real intellectual value.” Impassioned by “the desire for truth,” Swann knocks on the window shutter. He hears a voice. The window opens. Two old men stand in an unfamiliar bedroom, looking at him questioningly.

This comic moment occurs near the bottom of the parabolic trajectory that characterizes Swann’s love for Odette. Starting in indifference, descending to unrelenting jealousy, and ending several years later once more in indifference, the milestones of Swann’s love are clear. Meeting Odette at the Verdurin salon for the first time, he finds her unattractive, though speculates that others may think her beautiful. When, later, her cheek reminds him of a figure in a Botticelli fresco, Swann develops an aesthetic appreciation of her. Jealousy and obsession soon follow, and with them physical and mental anguish. Only after a prolonged separation does Swann gradually become indifferent again. The story reveals a truth demonstrated throughout In Search of LostTime. To love is a complex experience, and love—indeed all social experience—cannot be contained by a single verb:

For what we believe to be our love, or our jealousy, is not one single passion, continuous and indivisible. They are composed of an infinity of successive lives, of different jealousies, which are ephemeral but by their uninterrupted multitude give the impression of continuity, the illusion of unity.

If we readily understand Swann’s move from indifference to aesthetic appreciation, the leap to crazy-making jealousy is puzzling. Why would Swann, son of a wealthy stockbroker, owner of large estate, at ease in Parisian high society, and quite acquainted with prostitutes, become obsessively, publicly in love with a courtesan?

“Courtesans exist in all times and places….But has there ever been an epoch in which they made the noise and held the place they have usurped in the last few years?” wrote an observer of Parisian society in 1872. “They figured in novels, appeared on stage, reigned in the Bois, at the races, at the theatre, everywhere crowds gathered.” In a study of the emergence of modernism, The Painting of Modern Life, T. J. Clark argues that the courtesan was a category, a way of perceiving (and representing) a changing Parisian culture. She was, Clark writes, “the necessary and concentrated form of Woman, of Desire, of Modernity… ‘the captain of industry of youth and love’.” Captain of industry, but only with a wink of the eye, for “it was part of the myth that the courtisane’s attempt to be one of the ruling class should eventually come to nothing.” The courtesan’s game was “to play at being an honest woman;” her admirers, aware of the game, knew she was not of the ruling class at all but from the “faubourgs or the Parisian lower depths….”

Odette was from the demimonde, the half world, Proust tells us. The term refers to the night world of prostitution and suggests a place in the consciousness of the bourgeoisie where the lower classes are shuffled off, marginalized, and contained. Demimonde also brings to mind the outskirts of the city where the working class was being relocated as Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann remade Paris.

Odette’s play acting causes us sometimes to laugh and other times to cringe as she attempts to be part of high society. Proust calls her a cocotte—hen—a term used for women who had not achieved the highest rank in the world of courtesans (see Virginia Rounding’s study of Parisian courtesans, Grandes Horizontales, for the distinctions). Though Odette succeeds at ruling Swann sexually, she is not convincing in her role as a woman of the ruling class.

Flaubert observed of 1870 Paris, “Everything was false, false army, false politics, false literature, false credit, and even false courtisane’s.” Fourteen years later, Joris-Karl Huysmans would depict in his novel À Rebours a world where falsity itself is the highest virtue. The courtesan’s falsity, her play acting, was quintessential to fin-de-siècle life.

Though the middle and upper classes marginalized the courtesan’s origins, they cast her in a central role as representative of the cultural changes sweeping Paris. In Gustave Caillebotte’s painting, Le pont de l'Europe, our eye, guided by the diagonals of the road, dog and trestle, rests on a courtesan strolling with an upper class gentleman. A worker looking from the bridge ignores them and whatever city life may be happening behind him. The painting captures the courtesan of late 19th-century Paris—class differences, the duality of attraction and disregard, the public spectacle taking place in a Haussmann street clean to the point of sterility.


Odette plays the game, but she isn’t alone. The Verdurins and nearly every member of their salon exude falseness. And Swann himself is characterized by a kind of falsity. The narrator of the first section of Swann’s Way remarks: “It appeared that [Swann] dared not have an opinion and was at ease only when he could with meticulous accuracy offer some precise piece of information.” Swann has strong opinions about what Odette should or should not do, and changes them as his needs require, but he rarely ventures an opinion we feel is not determined by his obsessive love. Swann takes a stand for the first time when he laughs off the Verdurin’s disparaging remarks about his society acquaintances. Swann’s honesty contributes to his expulsion from the Verdurin salon. Falsity is woven into the fabric of Parisian high society.

When indifference to Odette returns, Swann is drawn to Combray. The worlds of Paris and Combray are not neatly separated. Combray has its fake, the snob M. Legrandin. His sister, Mme. de Cambremer, has married into Parisian aristocracy and is returning to Combray for a visit. But the village’s two ways—Swann’s and Guermantes—balance each other, and, one feels, the village itself.
As in Van Gogh’s The Mowers, Arles in the Background, with its figures working together to gather a plentiful harvest, its steepled church, and a village that seems to embrace the train that races by, life in Combray is of a piece. Swann is anxious to get back.

Reading Proust (Part 3)

The English Teacher comments on Within a Budding Grove (October 6, 2006)

How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?

--Stanley Kunitz, "The Layers"

I have reached that point in Within a Budding Grove when Proust is introducing to us the inimitable M. de Charlus, whom young Marcel has met in Balbec. Charlus is easily one of the most memorable characters in a work full of memorable characters. As Harold Bloom writes somewhere—he doesn't bother anymore to reference his quotes, and so I won't bother to reference his—

Proust's greatest strength, amid so many others, is his characterization: no twentieth-century novelist can match his roster of vivid personalities. Joyce has the single, overwhelming figure in Poldy, but Proust has a portrait gallery.

I don't know about greatest strength, but be that as it may be, Bloom heads his list of all-time Proustian characters with Charlus, a preeminence I won't dispute. In a passage (p. 817) that particularly struck me today, Marcel writes:

If he was so cold towards me, while making himself so agreeable to my grandmother, this did not perhaps arise from any personal antipathy, for in general, to the extent that he was kindly disposed toward women, of whose faults he spoke without, as a rule, departing from the utmost tolerance, he displayed towards men, and especially young men, a hatred so violent as to suggest that of certain misogynists for women. Of two or three "gigolos," relatives or intimate friends of Saint-Loup, who happened to mention their names, M. de Charlus remarked with an almost ferocious expression in sharp contrast to his usual coldness; "Young scum!" I gathered that the particular fault which he found in the young men of the day was their effeminacy. "They're nothing but women," he said with scorn. But what life would not have appeared effeminate beside that which he expected a man to lead, and never found energetic or virile enough? (He himself, when he walked across country, after long hours on the road would plunge his heated body into frozen streams.) He would not even concede that a man should wear a single ring.

This passage contains a giant hint of what's to come, and yet I managed to miss it completely the first time around. While I wouldn't say this to a reading group taking up Proust for the first time, I'm reminded that one cannot really begin to read Remembrance until one has already read it. How odd to read a work whose effects depend so much on a memory of having already read it—a work which itself has so much to say about the very memory we must employ to read it.

For example, as I read Remembrance for the second time, I'm keenly aware that the narrative is recounted by an older man looking back on his youth. One of the shocks of Time Regained is suddenly realizing how much age separates the narrator from his past. For long stretches of Remembrance, Marcel has been detailing the past with such vividness that we've felt fully immersed in a present more present than the one we're living outside the book. As I inch my way through Within a Budding Grove, I marvel that Proust could tell this story at all without falling into an inconsolable sorrow over lost and irretrievable time. But then this is probably a case of reading in a book what we carry to it.

As a teacher, I've spent a fair amount of time around children the last five or so years. Inevitably, I've been reminded of my own childhood over and over again. Mostly it's been interesting to me, even when an experience has triggered a deeply painful recollection of my sometimes terrifying youth. The last six weeks, however, as I've spent many of my waking hours with people twenty or more years younger than I am, I've felt something much different. As exhilarating as it was initially to spend so much time around these young people, I seem to have moved into Phase 2, in which I'm experiencing that "inconsolable sorrow over lost and irretrievable time." It makes me, irrationally, want to turn to the later poems of Stanley Kunitz, though I am not nearly to that point yet. I am a long way from saying, in my seventy-fifth year,

Maybe
it's time for me to practice
growing old.

("Passing Through")

On Sunday, I heard my mother-in-law, the poet Beth Bentley, give a reading at the Ballard library. Although most of us knew that it was her eighty-fifth birthday, she preferred we ignore it for the sake of the reading. True to herself, she wanted the focus to be on her poetry, not the passing of another year. Nonetheless, the theme of growing old was implicit in nearly every word she spoke. She read from a book-in-progress, with the tentative title Autumn Gardner. What "autumn" signifies here need not be deliberated. During the reading, Beth referred to Kunitz and his garden, and then quipped, "I don't plan to live to a 100, just to get a letter from the President."

I would venture to speculate that Autumn Gardner will be her best book, though she wouldn't appreciate me saying that. She believes her most mature work is contained in Little Fires. But my wife and I find it almost a relief that she's abandoned the high literary mode of Little Fires for the more personal poems of aging and loss. Anyone eighty-five has lost more than I can imagine, but in terms of literary skill, she has lost little, and what she has lost is more than compensated for by the same happy simplification of style that came to Kunitz in his later years. In some rare instances, a poet must practice her craft an entire lifetime before achieving a simplicity of style that marks her as the best artist she can be.

During the reading, Beth remarked that she has worked the same garden for fifty years. That is more literarily true than literally. As my wife well knows, her backyard garden was little to speak of for decades. But fifty years ago she gave up her novels—said to be in the Jamesian mode—for poems that soon found their way into The New Yorker. I don't take anything away from the lovely mini-lecture she gave us on the relationship between poetry and gardens in literary tradition and practice. (I dearly wish I had a recording of the reading.) I merely wish to make the obvious point that fifty years of working a garden is a painfully long time to look back on, layered, as the soil is, with spent effort and incalculable sacrifice.

By the way, I probably picked up from Beth, at least in part, the idea of reading Proust during bouts of insomnia—only Beth reads her Proust in French. There's still time for that, too, isn't there?

Proust and Habit

My response to The English Teacher's Reading Proust (Part 2). The response was originally published on October 6, 2006.

Edmund White, in his quirky Proust biography, characterizes the novelist’s philosophy as “You can only have what you want when you no longer want it.” The passage describing Marcel’s glimpse of Mme. de Villeparisis seems to support White’s reductionist view. We are charmed by a place as long as we cannot visit it; life would be delightful, Marcel remarks, if one of the defining characteristics of being human—habit—didn’t exist. We nod in agreement; habit is a veil that prevents delight. But then there’s the perplexing phrase that ends the passage: stripped of habit, “life must appear delightful to those of us who are continually under the threat of death—that is to say, to all mankind.”

Habit is the “regulator” of our nerves. Unregulated nerves cause unpleasant sensations. Excessive nerves, the jumps. Nerves shut down, depression. Uncontrollable itchiness or bone-numbing lethargy. Habit protects us from life’s terrors, among them the terror of death, at the cost of a kind of insensate existence. Citing the passage you quote, Samuel Beckett observes that in Proust’s fictional world

The fundamental duty of Habit, about which it describes the futile and stupefying arabesques of its supererogations, consists in a perpetual adjustment and readjustment of our organic sensibility to the conditions of its worlds. Suffering represents the omission of that duty, whether through negligence or inefficiency, and boredom its adequate performance. The pendulum oscillates between these two terms…

The relationship between habit and perception is not as cozy as I implied in my reply to your first Proust entry. We need both: habit to avoid suffering, and perception to live more than a merely organic—that is, non-human—life. However, both habit and perception have their dangers. In the volume Sodom and Gomorrah, Marcel returns to the hotel where he customarily stays when visiting the seaside village of Balbec. He recalls the first time he entered the hotel, and contrasts the strangeness of that first experience with the comfort he now feels:

This time, on the contrary, I had felt the almost too soothing pleasure of passing up through a hotel that I knew, where I felt at home, where I had performed once again that operation which we must always start afresh, longer, more difficult than the turning inside out of an eyelid, and which consists in the imposition of our own familiar soul on the terrifying soul of our surroundings. Must I now, I had asked myself, little suspecting the sudden change of mood that was in store for me, go always to new hotels where I shall be dining for the first time, where Habit will not yet have killed upon each landing, outside each door, the terrible dragon that seemed to be watching over an enchanted existence, where I shall have to approach those unknown women whom grand hotels, casinos, watering-places seem to bring together to live a communal existence as though in vast polyparies?

Confronted by new surroundings, Marcel must assimilate them, make them habitual. Without the “imposition of our familiar soul,” they would remain terrifying. Marcel then makes a sudden shift away from this embrace of habit to ask if he must always seek out new hotels where habit has not yet had a chance to kill “enchanted existence.” Is Marcel contradicting himself? No. Both are true: unfamiliar surroundings have a terrifying soul and habit is a “terrible dragon” because it kills that terrifying soul. In Beckett’s terms, we need Boredom to escape the terror of the unfamiliar, and must endure Suffering if we are to create for ourselves more than a base life.

Still, the phrase that ends the encounter with Mme. de Villeparisis remains perplexing to me. I can’t take Marcel at his word. Stripped of habit, death would become The Terrifying Soul unrelentingly confronting us. Ungaretti has it right. Sleep follows illumination. I think Proust would agree.

Reading Proust (Part 2)

Orginally published by The English Teacher on September 30th 2006

"Energy is Eternal Delight."

--William Blake, "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"

On page 765 of the first volume of the silver Moncrieff edition, we read another instance of Marcel catching sight of a beautiful girl—only this time it's from Mme de Villeparisis's carriage. As in the passage I previously discussed, Marcel again yearns to be noticed by the girl, but to no avail. He muses:

Was it because I had caught but a momentary glimpse of her that I had found her so attractive? It may have been. In the first place, the impossibility of stopping when we meet a woman, the risk of not meeting her again another day, give her at once the same charm as a place derives from the illness or poverty that prevents us from visiting it, or the lustreless days which remain to us to live from the battle in which we shall doubtless fall. So that, if there were no such thing as habit, life must appear delightful to those of us who are continually under the threat of death—that is to say, to all mankind.

When I first read this passage, I lightly laughed for reasons I'm not entirely sure of. The idea that, were there no habit, life would appear delightful to us while continually under the threat of death—that idea initially struck me as uncharacteristically simple and formulaic for Proust. Perhaps my sense of the sudden incongruity of that phrase made me laugh—I don't know. Yet, I find, upon further consideration, that it oddly resonates with the ending of my first meditation on Proust:

But with my increasing sense of time swiftly carrying my body to the next sudden reversal, I find it more imperative than ever to live within a consciousness alert to itself and to the fleeting world it endeavors to hold.

Isn't this just a fancy way of saying that I'm feeling an increasing sense of mortality, and for that reason I want to break habit and live delightfully while there is still time? The association of death, habit and delight seems an inevitable one in Proust, especially if you've read Remembrance to the final volume. Why, at this point in Within a Budding Grove, does Proust suddenly spell it out for us?

I think of Chris' insight in his guest column: "While Emerson requires positive action to break from habitual ways of looking at the world, Proust often welcomes habit because, however much we value exhilarating experience, exhilaration cannot sustain us." I would add that one reason it can't sustain us is because, over the long haul, exhilaration is exhausting. Delightful as it may be to live continually under the threat of death, we eventually expend all the resources that once seemed so charged within us. Don't we have, for example, a whole body of World War I poetry to tell us that? I think of Giuseppe Ungaretti's minimalist masterpiece from the trenches:

M'illumino
d'immenso

Or:

Immensity
illumines me

The next piece in his book L'allegria is—not by coincidence, I take it—"To Sleep":

I would imitate
this country
lying down
in its gown
of snow

[translations mine]

In one transcendent moment Ungaretti—whom the poet calls elsewhere "man of pain" ("uomo di pena")—is filled with an immensity recalling Leopardi's "L'infinito." And on the next page he's exhausted unto death. ("To die—to sleep," says Hamlet.) In a sense, Ungaretti's great first book, which deserves a new translation in its entirety, dramatizes a poet-soldier's alternation between sudden revelatory insight and world-weary exhaustion of body and soul. The compact, minimalist style he invented is sometimes seen as necessity finding its virtue—that is, he wrote that way because he was under a continual threat of death, and he dashed off what he could when he could. Yet, I would also argue that his style is meant to sharpen the dramatic interplay between revelation and exhaustion.

In "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," William Blake famously said, "Exuberance is Beauty." Giuseppe Ungaretti, near contemporary of Marcel Proust, convinces us that, under pain of death, neither is long sustainable, however vital they may be to us.

The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

--Philip Larkin, "The Mower"

Frost, Emerson, and Proust

Originally published by The English Teacher in October 2006.

The English Teacher wrote, as an introduction to this piece:
The following guest column—a response to my post Reading Proust (Part I)—comes to us from A Reader.

Bringing Frost into a discussion of Proust: an inspired pairing. For both Proust and Frost, habit is an impediment to perceiving beauty, to looking behind the veil. Frost’s poems often speak of the necessity of working against it (a bit of irony, having to develop the habit of not being habitual). The speaker of “The Woodpile” considers returning home (a place of habit), but pushes on through the winter woods where he discovers the abandoned woodpile. What can account for someone abandoning this creation, 4X4X8 feet of split wood? Well, it’s the doing work that matters because the doing is a process of rediscovery. The woodcutter, “turning to fresh tasks,” may be simply starting a new woodpile. Isn’t that the implication? (I’m working my way to Proust.)

Frost likely assimilated from Emerson the idea of habit as a wall standing between us and Nature. And, of course, in Emerson Nature is God.

Nature is made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us. Certain mechanical changes, a small alteration in our local position, apprizes us of a dualism. We are strangely affected by seeing the shore from a moving ship, from a balloon, or through the tints of an unusual sky. The least change in our point of view gives the whole world a pictorial air…. What new thoughts are suggest by seeing a face of country quite familiar, in the rapid movement of the railroad car!
.
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In a higher manner the poet communicates the same pleasure… He unfixes the land and the sea, makes them revolve around the axis of his primary thought, and disposes them anew.

Proust read and admired Emerson’s essays. One is tempted, perhaps tempted too much, to see direct parallels. Alterations in the Proustian narrator’s local position lead to moments of insight. Marcel catching sight of the girl from the train is coincidentally similar to Emerson’s “mechanical changes.”

There is, however, a notable difference between Proust and Emerson. Proust views habit as a kind of negative virtue. While Emerson requires positive action to break from habitual ways of looking at the world, Proust often welcomes habit because, however much we value exhilarating experience, exhilaration cannot sustain us. “Habit!” the narrator declares in Swann’s Way

That skillful but very slow housekeeper who begins by letting our mind suffer for weeks in a temporary arrangement; but whom we are nevertheless truly happy to discover, for without habit our mind, reduced to no more than its own resources, would be powerless to make a lodging habitable.

Early in the novel, after attending Mass, the narrator (Proust has not yet named him) takes a late afternoon walk through Combray with his mother and father. The walk continues through nightfall, when moonlight “destroys” the village, transforming it into a work of classical art. Dragging his feet and exhausted, he walks on with concentrated effort: “the fragrance of the lindens that perfumed the air would seem to me a reward that one could win only at the cost of greatest fatigue.” Suddenly father, mother, and child are back at home, its back gate “having come… to wait for us at the end of these unfamiliar streets.” The transcendent experience having ended, he can happily fall back on habit.

And from that moment on, I would not have to take another step, the ground would walk for me through that garden where for so long now my actions had ceased to be accompanied by any deliberate attention: Habit had taken me in its arms, and it carried me all the way to my bed like a little child.

Changing jobs or careers to break out of a habitual work life (something I myself have done several times) reminds me of one of my favorite stories, which Sam Spade tells in The Maltese Falcon. A businessman named Flitcraft has disappeared, “like a fist when you open your hand.” His wife hires Spade to track Flitcraft down. When Spade finds him, Flitcraft has created the same life he had before the disappearance. He has remarried, has a family, manages a business, and goes to the country club as predictably as he did before.

Spade asks Flitcraft why he took off. Walking to lunch one day, Flitcraft explains, a safe being hoisted into an upper story window fell, missing him by inches. An exhilarating experience indeed. It caused Flitcraft to change his life. Or so he thought. Although he could shake up what was customary before the safe fell, Flitcraft could not change his habitude. As Frost, Emerson, and Proust show, exhilarating experiences, whether sought after or thrust upon us, pleasurable or frightening, can provide insights into this life, not create a radically new one.

Reading Proust (Part I)

Originally published by The English Teacher on September 24, 2006

As some of you may know, I have returned to graduate school. I don't have a lot of time for sustained reading outside of my classes, but in my spare moments—which often come about four AM, when I suddenly awake fully alert—I turn to Remembrance of Things Past. I chose the book for a specific reason. After a week's neglect, I can almost immediately pick up its thread again, and because Remembrance is so imbued with Proust's richly woven consciousness I'm soon distracted from whatever anxieties have awoken me unceremoniously in the wee hours.

By a happy coincidence, a close friend of mine is preparing to lead a book group on Swann's Way at the Richard Hugo House in Seattle. Whenever I can squeeze in a phone call to my friend, we discuss Proust in bits and pieces. He recently reminded me that a major theme of the novel revolves around habit, which, necessary as it is in Proust's view, has an inevitably dulling effect on attentiveness. In Within a Budding Grove, I recently came across a passage that speaks directly to my friend's observations.

On page 705 of the silver Moncrieff edition, young Marcel is taking the train for the first time to Balbec. The train stops at a little station between two mountains, and Marcel spots a tall girl emerging from the station house, carrying a jar of milk. She walks past the train windows and offers milk and coffee to the few awakened passengers. Marcel suddenly remarks:

Flushed with the glow of morning, her face was rosier than the sky. I felt on seeing her that desire to live which is reborn in us whenever we become conscious anew of beauty and of happiness.

To what should we attribute Marcel's sudden awakening to a renewed sense of life and beauty? Marcel analyzes it this way:

But in this again the temporary cessation of Habit played a great part. I was giving the milk-girl the benefit of the fact that it was the whole of my being, fit to taste the keenest joys, which confronted her. As a rule it is with our being reduced to a minimum that we live; most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services. But on the morning of travel, the interruption of the routine of my existence, the unfamiliar place and time, had made their presence indispensable. My habits, which were sedentary and not matutinal, for once were missing, and all my faculties came hurrying to take their place, vying with one another in their zeal, rising, each of them, like waves, to the same unaccustomed level, from the basest to the most exalted, from breath, appetite, the circulation of my blood to receptivity and imagination.

Marcel feels the need to be noticed by the milk-carrier, and he signals her and calls to her. However, he is too late, and she slips away from him in a kind of burning vision as the doors close and the train begins to move. Marcel is not sure whether his exaltation was produced by the girl or whether his exaltation produced the pleasure of being in the girl's presence, but, whatever the case, he yearns to hang onto his excitement and the girl associated with it. Yet, as Marcel all too quickly realizes, his life is speeding away from her, and his thoughts turn to a fantasy of one day arranging to meet up with her again. The final irony is that the fantasy itself becomes a kind of habit of mind, which replaces the effort needed to recreate within him the very exaltation he yearns to hold onto.

I have some practical reasons for attending graduate school, but I only acted on those reasons because I thought the experience would, in my middle age, be an invitation to a renewed attentiveness to life. In a way, it fits a pattern of mine. As soon as I find myself competent at some endeavor, surrounded by respectful colleagues, I feel seized by a desire to jump into fresh endeavors, which, because they are new to me, I'm incompetent at. As increasingly difficult as it is for me to accept newfound incompetence, I feel, in the present case, more than compensated by the falling away of habit that comes with novel challenges. The anxiety that wakes me at four AM also brings with it an alertness that had been so long lost to me that I find it both unnerving and exhilarating.

I do not, as Robert Frost's woodsman, live by "turning to fresh tasks"—at least not in the way that Frost meant it. But with my increasing sense of time swiftly carrying my body to the next sudden reversal, I find it more imperative than ever to live within a consciousness alert to itself and to the fleeting world it endeavors to hold.

Posted by The English Teacher at 6:06 AM