Reading Proust

Thinking of Proust

2009-01-25T22:09:00.000-08:00

A librarian ponders reading Proust, often accompanying her thoughts with Masao Yamamoto's photographs.

[Thanks to The English Teacher.]

Breaking through Appearance

2009-01-15T06:36:00.000-08:00

Cross-posted from Unpacking My Library.

It may be wholly coincidental that dissociation—the disintegration of a person’s psychological integrity—figures in Moby-Dick and Swann’s Way as a way to break through Appearance to what the narrator perceives as Truth. Early in Moby-Dick, Ishmael experiences a disconcerting dissociative experience when waking to find Queequeg beside him in bed. “My sensations were strange,” remarks Ishmael, who goes on to recount a similar experience when he was a child. “The circumstance was this,” he tells us.

I had been cutting up some caper or other - I think it was trying to crawl up the chimney, as I had seen a little sweep do a few days previous; and my stepmother who, somehow or other, was all the time whipping me, or sending me to bed supperless, - my mother dragged me by the legs out of the chimney and packed me off to bed, though it was only two o'clock in the afternoon of the 21st June, the longest day in the year in our hemisphere.

Ishmael lay in bed for a time, calculating how many more hours he’d be condemned to his room. Finally, in desperation, he went to his stepmother, begging to be released from his punishment, but “she was the best and most conscientious of stepmothers, and back I had to go to my room.” Eventually falling asleep, then into a nightmare, he slowly awoke.

I opened my eyes, and the before sun-lit room was now wrapped in outer darkness. Instantly I felt a shock running through all my frame; nothing was to be seen, and nothing was to be heard; but a supernatural hand seemed placed in mine. My arm hung over the counterpane, and the nameless, unimaginable, silent form or phantom, to which the hand belonged, seemed closely seated by my bedside. For what seemed ages piled on ages, I lay there, frozen with the most awful fears, not daring to drag away my hand; yet ever thinking that if I could but stir it one single inch, the horrid spell would be broken. I knew not how this consciousness at last glided away from me; but waking in the morning, I shudderingly remembered it all...

In his Melville biography Andrew Delbanco argues this passage signifies Ishmael’s release from the bonds of tradition and a society that strictly defined and rejected those who did not share its values. Whether Delbanco means the childhood punishment or the recounting of it isn’t clear, but the dissociation is, in any case, the ground on which Ishmael can stand to establish his friendship with the cannibalistic, Polynesian harpooner.

The young Marcel has a similar, if less troubling, experience while watching a magic lantern in his Combray bedroom. The lantern projects a scene from the medieval story of Geneviève de Brabant. The seducer Golo rides toward her castle, his “mind filled with an infamous design.” “The body of Golo himself,” Marcel says,

being of the same supernatural substance as his steed's, overcame all material obstacles--everything that seemed to bar his way--by taking each as it might be a skeleton and embodying it in himself: the door-handle, for instance, over which, adapting itself at once, would float invincibly his red cloak or his pale face, never losing its nobility or its melancholy, never showing any sign of trouble at such a transubstantiation.

As the lantern opens “mystery and beauty” onto Marcel’s bedroom, he feels an “anesthetic effect,” just as Ishmael’s sense of bodily disengagement characterizes his waking from the nightmare. In both cases, a momentary disintegration of the narrator’s sense of psychological coherence reveals mystery.

Ishmael and Marcel are alike also in their reluctance to embrace the dissociation that each experiences. Ishmael tells us that “for days and weeks and months afterwards I lost myself in confounding attempts to explain the mystery.” As he laid next to Queequeg recounting his childhood banishment, his “sensations at feeling the supernatural hand in mine were very similar, in their strangeness, to those which I experienced on waking up and seeing Queequeg's pagan arm thrown round me.”

Yet, he quickly is able to place himself in the inn and integrate his recent memories “one by one, in fixed reality.” Instead of mystery accompanied by terror, Ishmael finds himself this time “alive to the comical predicament.”

Marcel too is shaken by the radical alteration of the familiar. “I cannot express the discomfort I felt at such an intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room which I had succeeded in filling with my own personality,” he writes. He is disturbed by the effect dissociation has had on his customary life. Opening the door-handle of his room had been habitual and unconscious; it “was different to me from all the other doorhandles in the world, inasmuch as it seemed to open of its own accord and without my having to turn it.” The lantern had transformed it into “an astral body for Golo” and—introducing a point that Proust returns to many times in the Search—the momentary replacement of habit by mystery became a threat to simply going on with life.

This threat is dramatically illustrated in "The Try-Works" chapter of Moby-Dick. With responsibility for steering the Pequod, Ishmael is drawn into the nighttime activity of the crew working the try works. Watching the “fiend shapes” as they moved about the deck, he began to see “kindred visions” and an “unaccountable drowsiness” descended upon him.

But that night, in particular, a strange (and ever since inexplicable) thing occurred to me. Starting from a brief standing sleep, I was horribly conscious of something fatally wrong. The jaw-bone tiller smote my side, which leaned against it; in my ears was the low hum of sails, just beginning to shake in the wind; I thought my eyes were open; I was half conscious of putting my fingers to the lids and mechanically stretching them still further apart. But, spite of all this, I could see no compass before me to steer by; though it seemed but a minute since I had been watching the card, by the steady binnacle lamp illuminating it. Nothing seemed before me but a jet gloom, now and then made ghastly by flashes of redness … Convulsively my hands grasped the tiller, but with the crazy conceit that the tiller was, somehow, in some enchanted way, inverted.

Ishmael had turned himself around, facing the stern of the Pequod. “In an instant I faced back, just in time to prevent the vessel from flying up into the wind, and very probably capsizing her.” Melville and Proust both show us that dissociation may yield mysteries unseen without the momentary dissolution of one’s personality, but it carries with it the danger of radically disrupting life.

Reading Moby-Dick

2009-01-13T12:40:00.000-08:00

Having finished In Search of Lost Time, I'm reading Moby-Dick and leading a group through Melville's masterpiece beginning next month. I'll be posting occasional musings on the novel at UnpackingMyLibrary.

I hope to read Swann's Way again in 2009, and perhaps lead another group through Proust's first novel of the Search. Of the seven, it's my favorite and, I believe, the one novel that can give first-time readers of Proust a feeling for the texture of the entire Search.

Happy reading to all!

Paintings in Proust

2008-12-08T06:46:00.000-08:00

Eric Karpeles' compilation of paintings in Proust is receiving attention before the holidays. For a slide show with corresponding passages, see The New York Times. David Carrier has a dissenting opinion in artcritical.com.

The Search Ends

2008-11-21T07:25:00.001-08:00

The Richard Hugo House Proust Reading Group finished In Search of Lost Time with a celebration at a local French bistro. (With apologies to Marcel Proust), the group came “to endure the Search like a form of fatigue, build it up like a church, follow it like a medical regime, vanquish it like an obstacle, win it like a friendship, cosset it like a little child, create it like a new world without neglecting those mysteries whose explanation is to be found probably only in world other than our own and the presentiment of which is the thing that moves us more deeply in life and in art.” In short it became part of our lives, and we part of the lives of each other.

Bonne lecture!

Observations on Writing and Art

2008-11-13T15:26:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned earlier, one of our reading group reduced Marcel's thoughts on writing and art to one-sentence summaries. Below is her list, in the order they occur as Marcel waits to enter the Guermantes salon in Time Regained.

1. Memory of madeleines, Balbec…render death unimportant.
2. Memory frees us from the order of Time.
3. Impressions have spiritual equivalents.
4. Genius = instinct; importance of spontaneity
5. The artist “discovers” reality.
6. Naturalism is not art.
7. Rejects literary theories
8. Artists submit to reality within different selves over time.
9. Relationship of reading and memory: reading substitutes another memory for original memory
10. Artist fears to lose first impressions.
11. Truth = extracting common essence and reuniting in metaphor
12. The writer translates essences for the reader.
13. Reality is a private experience, in rather than outside the mind.
14. Art lovers remain ignorant of the essence of the work.
15. Discerning reader adds nothing to literature.
16. Value of literature: lays bare and illuminates real life immanent in all men
17. Art makes us known to ourselves and others.
18. Work of artist is to render our “essences” whole.
19. Value of suffering: Illumination of things hidden from us
20. Reality is outside of habit. Habit obscures essences.
21. Truth derived from intellect has no depth; it is merely an outline.
22. Suffering leads to divine form reflected in others (Platonic Ideal)
23. Material of work of art is the artist’s experiences.
24. All experience nourishes writing.
25. Experience is stored in his memory.
26. Writer remembers “general” which is common to many people.
27. Therefore, artist MUST suffer.
28. Writing is cleansing for the writer.
29. Book = cemetery
30. People and relationships = “models’
31. Writers life = writer’s work
32. Value of unhappiness: transforming idea through grief
33. Necessity of happiness and unhappiness
34. Literature is a composite of writer’s experience.
35. Literary criticism is futile.
36. Only ideas exist.
37. Grief is multiple.
38. Writing = encounters with suffering
39. Sorrow leads us to truth and death.
40. Thought grafts memory onto anything.
41. Reader reads himself.
42. Dreams = mode of recovering Lost Time
43. Everything is in the mind.
44. Dreams are second muse.
45. Experience becomes literature.
46. Solitude not a prerequisite to writing.

Marcel's Manifesto

2008-11-11T09:50:00.000-08:00

“I must admit this much: the passages that I like least in Proust…. Are precisely these resurrection which emerge for his “second memory”… those disillusioned discoveries of familiar places which have shrunk and become unrecognizable when one returns to them after a long absence; those amalgams of a name and an image, of a feeling and a circumstance, of the sound of a heating installation and a period of one’s life, of a smell and the memory of a great love…. Yes, all that is true; it all happens to us, but we have to admit that it does not possess much interest except for ourselves.”

Jean-Francois Revel, On Proust

I wonder about the distinction between “ourselves” and others in Proust’s masterwork. Isn’t the whole of the Search Marcel’s? As we read into Time Regained, doesn’t the blurring of boundaries between Marcel and others become more evident as he meets old acquaintances? Don’t Marcel and readers of the Search meld, becoming “ourselves?” M. Revel argues that Proust is best when describing social events, the numerous descriptions of soirees, dinners, tea parties. Instances of involuntary memory? M. Revel would like to run away each time he encounters one.

M. Revel, whose thoughts on Proust are penetrating, must have sprinted from his reading when he reached the first transition in Time Regained. The transition moves us from wartime Paris to the city in 1926. Marcel has returned after a long stay at a sanatorium. We find him in the anteroom of the Princesse de Guermantes where he has arrived late and must wait until the music in the inner chamber has finished before joining the soiree. As he waits he experiences three involuntary memories in succession. First, tripping on the stones in front of the Princesses’ home evokes the vision standing on uneven stones in Venice’s St. Mark’s. This involuntary memory is soon followed by the clinking of a spoon, which brings up the memory of dispassionately seeing trees from a railway car during his return to Paris. Lastly, wiping his mouth with a napkin brings up an azure vision of his first day in Balbec. Reading of these involuntary memories, I sympathized briefly with M. Revel in his dislike of these private, inward moments. Three seemed a bit much. But, the accumulation of three involuntary memories propels Marcel, as presumably one or two might not, into the realization that he can become a writer. And, of more interest to me, the three memories show Marcel what is a worthwhile subject for the writer.

There follows a prolonged exploration of art and its value. One of our Proust group declared this Marcel’s manifesto, reduced each exploratory foray to a sentence, and read the sentences one after another to great comic effect. The joke hinges on presenting Marcel’s assertions linearly. Proust, we know long before coming to Time Regained, is hardly a linear writer. He presents an idea, circles around it, leaves it and returns to circle again. Nor is Proust reducible (despite Monty Python). Put him in a box, wrapped and ready to be presented, and you’ll find that he’s squeezed out while you were proudly finishing tying the bow.

The three memories yield Marcel’s breakthrough insight: description is worthless without involuntary associations between disparate things. Description without association is “a mere vain and tedious duplication of what our eyes see and our intellect records.” This puts to rest the anxiety Marcel experienced when reading the Goncourt journal; no matter how brilliant it seems, and how lacking Marcel feels to achieve that descriptive power, the result is not worth the effort because it lacks involuntary association. For it is association that reveals the essence of things, which are “immanent in all men no less than the artist.” But it is the artist who translates these truths, becoming “a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceive in himself.” The metaphor of the optical instrument recurs throughout the Search and once again leads one to ask: Does the artist see Truth or a truth that resonates with the reader?

Proust's Mock Goncourt Journal

2008-10-29T13:13:00.000-07:00

A recently published collection of short parodies that Proust wrote for Le Figaro includes a mock Goncourt Journal entry concerning the Lemoine diamond fraud. Proust creates his own obituary at the end of the parody.

Goncourt Journal 21st December 1907

Dined with Lucien Daudet [Proust’s lover] who spoke to me with a touch of whimsical humour about the fabulous diamonds seen on the shoulders of Mme X..., diamonds said by Lucien in vigourously amusing language, to be sure, always the artist in his notation, revealing the wholly superior writer by the savoury choice of his epithets, to be in spite of everything a bourgeois stone, rather silly, in no way comparable, for example to emerald or ruby. And at dessert Lucien almost knocked us to the floor by what he had been told by Lefebvre de Béhaine that evening, to he Lucien, and as opposed to the opinion held by that charming woman Mme de Nadaillac, that a certain Lemoine had discovered the secret of the manufacture of diamonds. According to Lucien all this was causing furious anxieties in the world of business, in the face of the possible depreciation of unsold diamond stocks, anxieties that could well end by prevailing over the magistracy and leading to the imprisonment of this Lemoine for the rest of his days, in a sort of in pace, for the crime of lèse-bijouterie. It is more powerful than the story of Galilee, more modern, lending itself more to the artistic evocation of the times, and all at once I saw an excellent subject for one of our pieces, a piece which could contain some robust things about the power of today's high industry, a power guiding, in the main, government and judiciary and resisting any new invention which could be calamitous to it. Like a bouquet, Lucien is brought the news, giving me the details of the tale which had just been sketched out to him, that their friend Marcel Proust had killed himself, after the fall in price of diamond shares, a fall which had annihilated part of his fortune.

Proust parodies the Goncourt brothers again in Time Regained, using a much longer mock Goncourt journal entry to describe the ascent of the Verdurins to the pinnacle of Parisian society.

Proust's Unchanging Characters

2008-10-21T15:10:00.000-07:00

“Proust’s characters change without changing,” writes Jean-Francois Revel in On Proust. “Sometimes they undergo a complete change without anything remarkable happening to them. On the other hand, there are times when their existence undergoes a major transformation without their changing.”

… it is in spite of and within the limits of the unchanging character and destiny that the Proustian characters undergo a process of renewal. The head waiter is always the same head waiter; I shall come across him tomorrow in the same place, but he will renew himself because his mimicry will be even more fetching that it was yesterday… Proust enjoys showing us personal renewals, which are not merely changes in social status (there are few of them or they only happen to secondary characters) as though they had no roots in the past and are therefore not the result of a process of evolution, but the equivalent of the birth of a fresh individual…. Proustian time is not creative. Its role, while bringing about change in the social situation—minimal changes which nevertheless seem of capital importance to the interest parties and are always announced with surprise by the narrator—is to reveal the true nature of the characters, to unveil what men already were without our knowing it. The Albertine of whom we catch a glimpse on the beach is already everything which will be discovered by the narrator as a result of his posthumous investigation of her liaisons.

This strikes me a largely true. So, to use an example provided by Revel, we discover that Octave, the apparently shallow-minded teenage golfer at Balbec, has become a successful writer “whose latest work has just turned modern literature upside down!” The two cannot be linked. On the other hand, Mme. Verdurin devolves into deeper and deeper viciousness as the Search unfolds. If we are not surprised that this character trait continues to define her, we are stunned by the degree to which she unleashes it. Mme. Verdurin may be the exception to Revel’s observation, however. Just as the two ways are revealed in the last novel to be one and the same path, Proust’s characters seem to circle about themselves and one another, their personalities unchanged as they weave the fabric of Time.

Regaining Time

2008-09-24T19:47:00.000-07:00

I have been reading Time Regained, reading and pondering it, underlining, noting this and that passage. My reading had seemed perfunctory, though pleasurable, until I came to the passage in which Marcel has finally been allowed into the salon of the Prince and Princess Guermantes. As you remember, he was asked to wait until a music recital finished, and sat outside the grand hall, musing about his past and eating tidbits brought to him by the Guermantes servants. Now Marcel is talking with Gilberte.

Bored I may have been as I stood talking this afternoon to Gilberte or Mme. De Guermantes, but at least as I did so I held within my grasp those of the imaginings of my childhood which I had found most beautiful and thought most inaccessible and, like a shopkeeper who cannot balance his books, I could console myself by forgetting the value of their actual possession and remembering the price which had once been attached to them by my desire.

Here, in a sentence, Marcel squarely faces the choice that has confronted him throughout the Search: Will he choose (to use Edmund Wilson’s phrase) “the life of art or the art of life”? He is bored by society people. Even the beloved Gilberte has become boring. Yet, “at least” (as if they were his lifeline) he has retained “the imaginings” of childhood. At this point in the unfolding of Proust’s sentence, Marcel has not thrown his weight to his imaginings; the word “imaginings” suggests something standing apart from the substantial and putatively real world of adulthood, a world Marcel has been a part of for years.

This is a moment of foreshadowing. Proust looks forward to the end of the sentence by introducing two contrary ideas, the beautiful and the inaccessible. How would anything we perceived as beautiful be inaccessible? Unachievable, perhaps, but not inaccessible. Proust’s words suggest we are still in childhood. When Marcel turns, in the sentence’s final clause, to the present moment—his presence in the Guermantes salon—we once again confront the initial dilemma. Marcel can find relief from the conflict between art and life only by forgetting the value of “actual possession” and remembering the price (the value) he once attached to his youthful imaginings. The simile of the shopkeeper is striking. He is the shopkeeper, balancing the value of actual possession with youthful imaginings. We do not yet know the result; this is a waypoint along the route that Marcel has journeyed now for 3000 pages. Nor are we shocked by his attempt to balance one way of living with another, for in the first pages of Time Regained Marcel put forth the choice: before him stood Swann’s Way or the Guermantes Way. Which would he choose? In this short sentence the choice has become more pressing, if not resolved. Marcel, like the shopkeeper, cannot yet balance his books.

I put down Time Regained, rose from my chair, and took from the shelf my copy of Irving Penn’s Moments Preserved. Haphazardly, I opened Penn’s book of photographs and looked. Before me lay portraits I had first seen nearly fifty years ago, and which retained the price that I had once attached to them by my youthful desires. Turning the pages, I stared at Corbusier, Mauriac, Carlo Levi, Gioni, Marin, Charlie Parker, Montale, T.S. Eliot. Marcel’s effort to balance actual possession with the price of past desire had suddenly become my own.

A Proust Comic

2008-09-16T18:05:00.000-07:00

I missed Charles Mudede's review of a Swann's Way comic book when The Stranger published it earlier this year. As always, his critical take is worth reading.

Proust, James, and Society

2008-09-15T16:55:00.000-07:00

“Why, it might be asked, is Proust’s work so different in form [from Henry James’], given the fact that he, too, is drawn by the resplendent image of the ‘great world’ and, presumably, is quite as responsive to some of the values attributed to James?” Philip Rahv asks the question in an essay on James’ heroines. “Proust’s picture of society contains elements of lyricism as well as elements of objective analysis,” he goes on to observe.

He is a more realistic painter of social manners than James, perhaps for the reason that he permits no ethical issues to intervene between him and the subject, approaching the world ab initio with the tacit assumption that ethics are irrelevant to its functions. By comparison James is a traditional moralist whose insight into experience turns on his judgment of conduct. If sometimes…we are made to feel that he is withholding judgment or judging wrongly, that may be because he is either conforming, or appears to conform, to certain moral conventions of the world’s making by which it manages to flatter itself. In Proust such conventions are brought out into the open, but not for purposes of moral judgment.

Whether or not this is true of James I leave to a later time, after I’ve re-entered James’ world. But of Proust, Ravh’s comment seems on the mark. “The sole morality of which the protagonist of his novel is conscious grows out of the choice he faces between two contrary ideals. He must decide whether to pursue the art of life or the life of art…,” a trait that has driven the Richard Hugo House Proust group crazy at times. As they put it, the protagonist is a self-centered adolescent boy with little genuine concern for the people around him. A harsh view of Marcel, perhaps, but not without basis.

It is not until Time Regained “that the world is finally renounced; and through a kind of optical illusion induced by the novel’s astonishing unfoldment, we seem to participate in this renunciation of the world at the precise moment when its alternative—i.e. the world of art—actually comes into being, or more accurately, is at last fully realized.” This “work in the world” is overcome, Rahv concludes, only after it has been possessed. More recently, Joshua Landy develops a similar argument, adding that it is not only Marcel that finally possesses the world, but we who have gained possession of it by reading In Search of Lost Time.

Soon the Hugo House Proust group, have possession of the Proust’s world, will begin its last session to participate in the long-awaited blossoming of Marcel’s life as a writer.

The Bleak World of The Captive

2008-07-29T10:48:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, as Poe showed in The Purloined Letter, the clue to a puzzle may be so obvious that we are unable to see it. The puzzle, in my case, is Marcel’s jealousy in The Captive. The emotion has been prominent in the Search. Swann’s courtship of Odette, Marcel’s friendship with Gilberte, Charlus’ pursuit of Morel—all have been memorable portraits of jealousy. But The Captive portrays extreme, almost unimaginable jealousy. Marcel’s interest in Albertine has grown into an obsession large even by Proustian standards. Yet that explanation, while true, isn’t sufficient, at least to me.

John Rawls has noted that jealousy arises from the wish to keep what one has. Does Marcel have Albertine? Marcel fears not, even though he has attempted to fulfill this wish in a literal way, by making Albertine a prisoner in his parents’ house. The lock on the prison door is the lie. The opposite appears (falsely) to be the case—a lie exposed would result in Albertine’s expulsion from the house. Marcel is constantly fabricating lies to catch Albertine in what he supposes is one dalliance or another. The motive for Albertine’s lies is more ambiguous; she sometimes tells lies to protect herself, other times to protect Marcel. The Captive tells the story of people struggling to gain control of someone.

One of the great themes of In Search of Lost Time is this struggle. The struggle is bound to fail because the feelings and thoughts of others are always beyond our control. This is a truth Marcel discovers again and again, yet has not be able to act upon on his journey toward becoming a writer. It is “a charming law of nature,” Marcel tells us in The Guermantes Way, “and one that is evident in the heart of the most complex societies, that we live in perfect ignorance of those we love.” I take “charming” to be an ironic touch. “Such a society,” he goes on to explain, “where every being is double, and where the most transparent person, the most notorious, will be known to others only from within a protective shell, a sweet cocoon, as a charming natural curiosity.” Control requires knowledge of others, which Marcel denies possible. Later, in The Captive, he is on a tear to prove himself wrong in his relationship with Albertine. As we know, the effort is futile; the novel ends with her escape from the hôtel and ends the illusion of his control.

Throughout the novel, as the struggle between Marcel and Albertine plays itself out, the possibility of understanding anyone is raised and dismissed. Deception is the social norm. “The fact of a man’s having proclaimed… that it is wicked to lie obliges him as a rule to lie more than other people, without on that account abandoning the solemn mask, doffing the august tiara of sincerity.” The one we love wears the mask and ( in a reversal of the expected Janus face) “is to us like Janus, presenting to us a face that pleases us if the person leaves us, a dreary face if we know him or her to be at our perpetual disposal.” Social events are not what they seem, but “resemble those parties to which doctors invite their patients, who utter the most intelligent remarks, have perfect manners, and would never show that they were mad if they did not whisper in your ear, pointing to some old gentleman going past, 'That’s Joan of Arc.'” Medicine too has its lies in remedies that created “artificially grafted illnesses.” Even the Search itself has its lies. “If we were not obliged, in the interest of narrative tidiness, to confine ourselves to frivolous reasons, how many more serious reasons would enable us to demonstrate the mendacious flimsiness of the opening pages of this volume,” Marcel/Proust tells us.

If life includes redemption from the bleak world that Marcel portrays, we find it in art:

All the residuum of reality which we are obliged to keep to ourselves, which cannot be transmitted in talk, even from friend to friend, from master to disciple, from lover to mistress, that ineffable something which differentiates qualitatively what each of us has felt and what he is obliged to leave behind at the threshold of the phrases in which he can communicate with others only by limiting himself to externals, common to all and of no interest—are brought out by art…

And so Marcel thinks again of the steeples of Martinville and the trees near Balbec. In these experiences lie the possibility of escape from the sterile, mendacious world that permeates The Captive. Albertine is beyond his control; perhaps art is not. If only he could resume writing.

In the Footsteps of Proust

2008-07-10T18:18:00.000-07:00

I'm rarely drawn to places which writers or their fictional characters have inhabited (though several years ago I couldn't resist walking past Stanley Kunitz's home in Provincetown, Massachusetts).

If you are traveling to France and are interested in seeing Proust sites in Paris and Illiers (Combray), here's a guide for you.

Swann's Way Wordle

2008-07-07T14:05:00.001-07:00

It's summer.... time to be frivolous.

Art. Death. Transcendence?

2008-07-07T07:38:00.000-07:00

Book sales of Proust’s fifth and sixth novels drop significantly when compared to the four novels that precede them, suggesting that people stop reading In Search of Lost Time when they come to The Captive. I sympathize with readers’ willingness to give up at this point. I did not have a fond memory of the novel before I jumped into it again. “You read The Captive and The Fugitive on your own,” I suggested to the RHH Proust group as we finished Sodom and Gomorrah. “We can reconvene for Time Regained.”

They balked. “We want to read them together. Besides, if we don’t read as a group, we’ll lose our motivation.” I was not at my best when I pressed on, urging, “Don’t worry about motivation. If you don’t read all of The Captive and The Fugitive, that’s okay. They’re a separate, self-contained part of the Search.” Doubting the integrity of my argument, the group scheduled four dinners during the summer.

As I drove to our first meeting, I imagined an evening of regrets. “You were right,” I would hear the group admit. “Let’s skim through these novels. Page after page of Marcel’s obsession of Albertine! Enough!”

Instead, after finishing dinner and listening to the group discuss The Captive, I heard, “Are we glad we didn’t skip this novel!” “I’m glad too,” I replied truly, if sheepishly. The group had again shown me aspects of Proust that I had not seen before.

I had not sufficiently taken in—blinded as I was by Marcel’s incessant jealousy—the novel’s ruminations on death and art, which begin with Bergotte’s death while viewing A View of Delft at a Vermeer exhibition.

Gazing at the painting, Bergotte “noticed for the first time some small figures in blue, that the sand was pink, and finally, the precious substance of the tiny patch of yellow wall. His dizziness increased; he fixed his gaze, like a child upon a yellow butterfly that it wants to catch, on the precious little patch of wall. 'That’s how I ought to have written,' he said. 'My last books are too dry. I ought to have gone over them with a few layers of colour… like this little patch of yellow wall.’” Repeating the phrase “little patch of wall,” the writer collapsed and died. He was dead, Proust writes. "Dead for ever? Who can say?...All we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying a burden of obligations contracted in a former life…” The artist leaves behind works, even great works, that matter little to his “worm-eaten body, like the patch of yellow wall painted with so much skill and refinement by an artist destined to be for ever unknown and barely identified under the name Vermeer." We cannot know what precedes and follows our life, but the artist’s work survives. Bergotte, dead and interned, was gone, "but all through that night of mourning, in the lighted shop windows, his books, arranged three by three, kept vigil like angels with outspread wings and seemed, for him who was no more, the symbol of his resurrection."

Later in the novel, Marcel questions this conclusion. After playing Vinteuil’s sonata on his piano, Marcel denies that art is “something above and beyond life.” Individuality in works of art is “due merely to the illusion produced by technical skill,” he says. Marcel, however, does not hold this view for long; as he vacillates again in his relationship with Albertine, his ideas about art, which threatened to prevent him from becoming a writer, recover “from the diminution that they have suffered…” Thinking of Swann’s life, Marcel reaffirms the writer’s ability to create something that lasts beyond death. Speaking of the Search, Marcel/Proust addresses Swann, dead many years. Marcel himself, “he whom you must have regarded as a young idiot has made you the hero of one of his novels [so] that people are beginning to speak of you again and that your name will perhaps live. If, in Tissot’s picture representing the balcony of the Rue Royale club, where you figure with Galliffet, Edmond de Polignac and Saint-Maurice, people are always drawing attention to you, it is because they see that there are some traces of you in the character of Swann.”

At this point in the Search’s narrative, Marcel has been able to only write his impression of the steeples of Martinville. We know, of course, that he has achieved becoming a writer, for we are reading the Search, Marcel’s story of his quest to become an artist, which begins with the novel that made Swann a hero. Within the chronology of that story, Swann could have been in Tissot’s 1868 painting. Fiction—the narrative, Marcel as the author of that narrative, and Swann’s presence in the painting—mingles with reality—our reading of the Search, the actuality of Swann’s Way, and Tissot’s painting—to affirm the possibility of art and its ability to transcend death. Both had been in doubt.

Doubt is a poison that flows like a raging stream through The Captive. Marcel is enervated by it, a man thrashing about in a seemingly vain attempt to escape from doubt into truth. This drama of Marcel’s battle with doubt and jealousy centers on his sexual relationship with Albertine, a battle so fierce that it became my memory of The Captive. But mine was a myopic view of the novel. I had underestimated Marcel’s critical struggle to overcome his doubt about the value of art. Is art, even great art, merely a mastery of technique, or is art able to transcend our mortality? Provisionally, at least, Marcel believes in the power of art to symbolically “resurrect” the artist who has died. Reading the Search, we might believe it also.

Sodom and Gomorrah (2)

2008-06-20T10:55:00.000-07:00

As I was saying, Balbec, “a place that had been once mysterious and anxiety provoking” to Marcel, had become by the end of Sodom and Gomorrah “laden with purely human effluivia,” a landscape whose atmosphere was now “breathable without difficulty, too soothing even.” Social life had drained the seaside resort and its surrounding villages of their mystery. Or so Marcel claims.

Near the close of the novel, this passage, I think, throws his claim in doubt:

The light of the sun, which was about to come up, by modifying the object around me, made me once again, as if shifting my position for a moment in relation to it, aware, even more cruelly, of my pain. Never had I seen so beautiful and so sorrowful a morning. Reflecting on all the indifferent landscapes that were about to be illuminated, and which, only yesterday, would have filled me only with the desire to visit them, I could not contain a sob, when, in a mechanically executed gesture of oblation, seeming to symbolize for me the bloody sacrifice that I was about to have to make of all joy, each morning, until the end of my life, a renewal, solemnly celebrated at each dawning of my daily unhappiness and of the blood from my wound, the gold egg of the sun, as if propelled by the break in equilibrium produces at the moment of coagulation by a change of density, barbed with flames as in painting, burst in one bound through the curtain behind which I sensed it quivering for the past few moments, ready to enter on the stage and to spring upwards, and whose mysterious, congealed purple it erased beneath floods of light.

The pain Marcel speaks of is, of course, his fear that Albertine is a lesbian, a fear that has intensified following his discovery that she had been raised by Mlle. Vintueil’s friend (the friend whom a younger Marcel had secretly watched make love to Mlle. Vintueil). Marcel’s cry is an “oblation,” a “bloody sacrifice” to joy, a gesture “solemnly celebrated” with the “blood from my wound.” The language evokes the Passion. Faced with yet another real or imagined bit of damning evidence, he is suffering as Jesus suffered on the cross. The imagery of the sun (son) reinforces the comparison. As it rises “barbed with flames,” it erases the “congealed purple” behind Marcel’s curtains. (Purple the color of vestments worn in Catholic masses during Good Friday and the Easter Vigil, the high holy days preceding the Passion.) The contrast between indifference and engagement could hardly be more startling. Those who hesitate to identify Marcel with Jesus might still concede that this passage presents us with a mystery.

As a whole the closing pages of Sodom and Gomorrah are filled with mystery. As the sun rises, “in the disorder of the night mists that still hung in blue and pink shreds over waters littered with the pearly debris of the dawn, boats were passing, smiling at the oblique light that had turned their sails and the tips of their bowsprits yellow….” The sunrise was a “pure evocation of the sunset…” Just before watching daybreak, Marcel had woken suddenly to his bedroom door opening. “My heart pounding, I seemed to see my grandmother before me, as in one of those apparitions that I had already had, but only in my sleep.” Like the dawn, this experience—the apparition is his mother—inverts the expected to create a mysterious, other-worldly moment. Perhaps the most striking transformation occurs still earlier in the novel's last pages, when Marcel reflects on his distance from Albertine. “Should something violently alter the position of that soul in relation to us, to show us that it loves other human beings and not ourselves [as apparently Albertine had], them by the beating of our dislocated hearts, we feel that the cherished creature was not a few feet away, but inside us.” Not more distance, but not distant at all.

When I read the last pages of Sodom and Gomorrah, I see only counter-evidence to Marcel’s assertion that mystery no longer exists. “What a deceitful sense sight is!” he exclaims. Yes, what a misleading observation!

Proust and Fashion

2008-06-08T17:24:00.000-07:00

Ms. Grapeshot/Odette has interesting comments about Proust and fashion. One notes the fascination Yves Saint Laurent had for Proust, with an aside about Ms. Grapeshot/Odette's link to the designs of YSL. The other provides a pointer to Fortuny, the designer of some of Mme. de Guermantes' clothes. (Remember Marcel grilling her about what she wore so that he could buy similar clothes for Albertine?)

Sodom and Gomorrah (1)

2008-06-05T10:03:00.000-07:00

As our Proust reading class made its way through Sodom and Gomorrah, the group asked, “Why are we reading this?” More to the point, “Why did Proust write more than one hundred pages on the Verdurin salon?” While the Verdurins’ missteps and faux pas in Swann’s Way made us laugh, their mean spirited, self-serving attempt to establish themselves in high society did not amuse us now. What was the point? How did the large middle section of the novel fit in with the rest of In Search of Lost Time? Our reading had begun to acquire a tinge of drudgery.

It was easy to condemn the Verdurins and their “little clan.” Yet I noticed moments in which Proust tempered his view of them. The gathering of the clan on the train created a touching portrait of the group, even if they expelled those who made the mistake of coming into their railway compartment. So I argued with little effect. What of M. and Mme. Verdurin’s interest in the sights and landscape around their rented chateau, La Raspelière? Their main business there, observes Marcel , “was to live agreeably, to go on excursions, to eat well, to talk, to entertain agreeable friends whom they made play amusing games of billiards, have good meals and cheerful tea-parties.” Yet he would discover later

how intelligently they had learned to know the locality, taking their guests on excursions as ‘original’ as the music to which they made them listen. The part that the flowers at La Raspelière, the roads along by the sea, the old houses and the unknown churches played in M. Verdurin’s life was so great that those who saw him only in Paris… could scarcely comprehend the idea he had formed of his own life, and the importance that his pleasures lent it in his own eyes.

The reading group remained unconvinced. Hadn’t Marcel made the same observation earlier, adding that the Verdurins allowed the beauty of the place to “wash passively over them rather than making it the object of their concerns”? I was misreading the novel in order to find something to redeem these social climbers.

The group felt Marcel had matured. He seemed more active in the gatherings of the little clan, for example taking an interest in Brichot’s endless etymologies. Still, the novel seemed unmoored from what we had read before. Marcel’s quest to become a writer had dropped from sight long ago. As Roger Shattuck observes, “the theme of great expectations runs very strong at the start [of In Search for Lost Time] and then diminishes [in Sodom and Gomorrah], leaving us adrift on the ocean of Marcel’s desultory life. The ocean seems to go on forever.”

Perhaps, argued one of our group, the point was to become tired and exasperated by the Verdurins. By doing so, we were experiencing what Marcel lived. The problem with the argument, it seemed, was that Marcel was not tired of the Verdurins. He looked forward to their dinners and enjoyed the gatherings of the clan, only balking at visiting La Raspelière when a visit would interfere with his plans to be alone with Albertine.

And yet. At the end of Chapter 3, Marcel clarifies the change in him, if not in us readers. He had acquired a new habit, the habit of filling his time by visiting friends in the countryside of Balbec; if the “territorial distribution” of the friends along the coast

necessarily lent to the visits I made… the form of a journey, they also now confined the attractions of that journey to the social ones, of a succession of visits…. In this too social valley, to the sides of which clung, whether visible or not, a numerous company of friends, the poetic cry of evening was no longer that of the owl or the frog, but the ‘How goes it?’ of M. de Criquetot, or the ‘Kaire’ of Brichot.

A place that had been once mysterious and anxiety provoking, was now “laden with purely human effluivia” and “breathable without difficulty, too soothing even.” If we were still bored and frustrated with the social world of Balbec, Marcel had become comfortable in it, at a price.

Recovering Grief

2008-04-28T16:28:00.000-07:00

This week the Proust Reading Group at Richard Hugo House will read and discuss the beautiful passage of Sodom and Gomorrah in which Marcel discovers that he has been numb for a year to his grandmother's death. André Aciman, author of the Proust Project, discusses Marcel's discovery in a short talk given at the PEN American Center in 2001. You can find more short talks about Proust and his work here .

André Aciman: Parce Que C'était Lui

This talk was originally presented at a Twentieth-Century Masters Tribute to Marcel Proust, sponsored by the PEN American Center, Lincoln Center, the PEN Forums Committee, and Lipper Publications.

Parce Que C'était Lui

The little phrase I’m about to read comes from a famous passage in Sodom and Gomorrah when Marcel the narrator is suddenly reminded of his grandmother. He had stayed at the same beach resort in Balbec with her once, but now, more than a year after her death, he’s back at the very same hotel. What he finds, as Proustian characters always find when they expect maximum emotion is, however, minimum sensation. He encounters, more or less, what he experienced at the time of her death, a sense of surprise at feeling so singularly numb, almost indifferent, blasé. All of it is colored by Marcel’s overloaded feeling of not feeling enough, and by the hope that this shamed admission of emotional inadequacy might itself pass for a form of genuine emotion. Now, surrounded by the indolent charm of the grand hotel, what the young adult Marcel thinks of when he arrives at Balbec is not his grandmother, but the social life awaiting him, of the band of young girls he had met there once before, and of the vague, tantalizing thing which Marcel always looks forward to: something exotic, someone new, unexpected, different, who might ultimately lure him out of his humdrum, bookish cocoon, into what Proust calls a new life.

As for his grandmother: well, if bereavement is the toll the living must pay for the loss of a loved one, then clearly Marcel, to use Jane Austen’s words, has been let off easily. But we are, of course, being set up. For as soon as Marcel is in his hotel room, and bends down to undo one of his boot buttons, something his grandmother had helped him do in that very same room, he suddenly bursts out sobbing, vehemently. What hits him is not just that he misses her terribly, but that he will never, ever, see her again. Because for the first time in his life, and in a manner that devastates him, the arch-premeditator Marcel finally understands, long after it happened, that his grandmother is in fact dead. Yet, come to think of it, this shouldn’t be surprising. Emotion, as every reader of Proust knows after about thirty pages, always comes unannounced, obliquely, inadvertently, just as it does, say, in Freud. The more unexpected, the more poignant it is.

This is how life works in Proust. Conversely, one may bump into the right people, but never when one wants to. One may get what one wants, but only after giving it up, or wanting something else instead. We reach out to seize precious moments not as they are happening to us, but once it’s clear that we’ve lost them. So far, so good. The set up is familiar enough. Proust—this cross between Freud, Woody Allen, and Murphy of Murphy’s Law—is one of us. How well we know him, and how well he knows us. How well he understands repression. And how simple and direct that outburst of earnest grief, and how admirable his knowledge that it is always better to feel something, anything, than to feel nothing at all; that human beings should, and want to, feel things; that we are each of us heat-seeking subjects starved for feeling. Which is why, even at the risk of getting hurt, or making tremendous fools of ourselves, we will not shirk from being drawn to certain places, to certain objects, certain odors, to art, to tears, to plants, to writing, to memory, to music, to vice, and of course, to other human beings. Because by so doing, each of us finds a secret, private conduit to an inner life that is not just our new life, or our true life, but our whole life.

How magnificently—and predictably—modern Proust is. So, for the sake of argument, because I am perverse, let me overturn everything I’ve been saying and ask: What if this true inner life is nothing more than a life made to be lost? But lost before it was ever possessed, or even glimpsed, though it seems to have been lived, because it claims to be remembered. What if this true, inner life hovers on the horizon like a ghost ship that never materializes, but never vanishes either? What if this other life were an ancillary life called: paper. An unlived life made on paper, lived for paper, by a man raised and fed on paper, who has learned that life itself can be so drearily unimaginative sometimes that by a sort of miracle that justifies his life-long commitment and confinement to paper, life will mimic what could only have happened on paper. Where else but on paper does a man desperately seeking a woman among millions in Paris actually bump into her on the streets at night? Proust’s bookish eye is transfixed by those moments in life that are stunning, not because of their inherent beauty, but because they cry out to be committed, that is returned, to paper, to literature, to fiction, the ultimate seat of the inner life.

Small wonder that Proust put so much stock in style. The Proustian sentence, which personifies procrastination, allows him to sink in to paper and never to come up for air, to pile up metaphors and clauses, and take all sorts of sinuous turns, the better to take sorrow and pain and spread them out like gold into cadence, just cadence, because cadence is like feeling, and cadence is like breathing, and cadence is desire, and if cadence doesn’t reinvent everything we would like our life to be, or to become, or to have been, then just the act of searching, and probing, in that particularly cadenced way, becomes a way of feeling, and of being in the world. And yet, having built such a paper world, Proust can suddenly overturn everything I’ve been suggesting, and jolt out, like someone waking from a dream, sputtering things as randomly, and inchoately, as a man who has barely learned how to speak.

No reader of Montaigne can forget that stunning moment when, after probing why he loved his deceased friend Etienne de La Boétie so much, the author of the essays, this master-stylist of baroque prose, breaks down and scrawls out one of the most beautiful sentences penned in French: “You ask me why I loved him,” Montaigne says. “I don’t know. All I can say is parce que c’était lui, parce que c’était moi.” Because it was he, because it was I. Proust too knows how to cut through layer after layer of searching and probing prose and write as brief a sentence, if only because it too, like his sudden outburst, wells up in him and erupts on something that is more than just paper now. “You ask me why I love my grandmother,” he says. “I don’t know. All I know is this”—and here is the little sentence I promised you earlier— “Elle était ma grand-mère et j’était son petit-fils.” She was my grandmother, and I was her grandson. And if that’s not enough, a few lines down, Proust will say it again, more forcefully. While staring at her photograph in his hotel room, he will say it in even more guileless terms: “C’est ma grand-mère, je suis son petit-fils.” It’s my grandma. I’m her grandson. Anyone can write this. But of course, what surrounds it makes it eloquent. More to the point: life can’t compete with this. Life doesn’t even come close. And, come to think of it, perhaps no one alive can today.

Proust and Photography

2008-03-31T10:11:00.000-07:00

“Whenever Proust mentions photographs, he does so disparagingly: as a synonym for a shallow, too exclusively visual, merely voluntary relation to the past, whose yield is insignificant compared with the deep discoveries to be made by responding to cues give by all the senses—the technique he called ‘involuntary memory’.”

Susan Sontag, On Photography

For this photograph was like one encounter more, added to all those that I had already had, with Mme. de Guermantes; better still, a prolonged encounter, as if, by some sudden stride forward in our relations, she had stopped beside me, in a garden hat, and had allowed me for the first time to gaze at my leisure at that plump cheek, that arched neck, that tapering eyebrow (veiled from me hitherto by the swiftness of her passage, the bewilderment of my impressions, the imperfection of memory)…

The Guermantes Way

Doubting the success of his manipulative attempt to have his friend Saint-Loup introduce him to Mme. de Guermantes, Marcel wants the photograph of her—a second best choice, and one at hand. The portrait would provide an encounter with the Duchess that has qualities an actual meeting does not; the photograph would prolong a (albeit vitual) meeting with her and allow Marcel to see the Duchess in a way that a brief encounter would not. More interestingly, Marcel claims here that he could see the Duchess more clearly, as impressions confuse and memory is unreliable. The photograph, Marcel thinks in the midst of his obsession over the Duchess, would enhance his relationship with her.

In the Search, photographs often console, as when Marcel looks at a photograph of Gilberte or Swann uses a photograph of Odette to “remember how exquisite she had been” and relieve himself of the “sufferings that he voluntarily endured on her account.” Referring to a photograph of a house whose residents have fallen out of favor, and another of the Duchess in her youth, M. de Charlus could be describing Swann’s attempt to understand Odette when he remarks that “a photograph acquires something of the dignity which it ordinarily lacks when it ceases to be a reproduction of reality and shews us things that no longer exist.”

Proust sometimes presents photographs as vehicles of insight. Visiting his friend Saint-Loup at Donciere, Marcel imagines his grandmother “as she was when I was with her, but not taking into account the effect upon her of this elimination.” On his return home, he discovers to his dismay that the effect is to make him see his grandmother as she would be if he were not part of her life. We see, he remarks, those we love “through the perpetual motion of our incessant love for them, which, before allowing the images their faces represent to reach us, draws them into its vortex, flings them back onto the idea of them we have always had, makes them adhere to it, coincide with it.” We see through the accumulation of the history of our love; every “habitual glance is necromancy,” bringing to life what is dead rather than seeing what is now on the faces of those we love. Marcel’s eyes, removed by absence from the vortex, took a photograph of his grandmother when he caught sight of her, causing him to see “what they ought never to linger upon… and start to function mechanically like photographic film” to show him “not the beloved figure who has long ceased to exist, and whose death our affection has never want to reveal, but the new person is has clothed… in a lovingly deceptive likeness.” Photographs can’t but record the present at the time they are created. This is Sontag’s complaint, why photographs are “shallow.”

Photographs play an important part in Marcel’s understanding of his relationship with his grandmother. Marcel stares at her photograph for long periods after she comes to him in a sudden, vivid, involuntary memory. The memory overwhelms him on the evening of his arrival in the seaside resort of Balbec. Marcel tells us he reached down to remove his boots, in the same room he had occupied two years before when his grandmother and he had spent a month at the seashore, and his “chest swelled, filled with an unknown, divine presence.” Sobbing, he “glimpsed, in my memory, bent over my fatigue, the tender, concerned, disappointed face of my grandmother, such as she had been on the first evening of our arrival…” The experience jolts him; “it was only at this instant—more than a year after her funeral…—that I just learned she was dead.” The memory, he realizes, has rescued him “from the aridity of his soul.”

Saint-Loup took the photo that Marcel ponders. When Saint-Loup showed up to take the portrait, the grandmother acted coy, posed in ways that Marcel thought demeaning. Marcel ended up acting badly toward her. Now, two years later, that event has blossomed into nagging guilt. In a reversal characteristic of Proust, Marcel learns from Francoise that his grandmother, terminally ill, had asked Saint-Loup to photograph her so Marcel could have her image after she died. Marcel stares at the photograph, saying to himself, “'It’s grandmother, I am her grandson,' just as an amnesiac rediscovers his name, or as an invalid changes personality.” And the photograph achieves what the grandmother intended. Instead of remembering her as sick and debilitated, Marcel sees in the photograph his grandmother, “looking so elegant, so carefree…less unhappy, and in better health than I imagined.”

Sontag is right to say that photographs are “insignificant compared with the deep discoveries to be made by responding to cues give by all the senses—the technique he called ‘involuntary memory’.” But what does not fall short of involuntary memory's rewards? If the photograph cannot match the achievements of memory and the mining of personal history, in the Search it provides a valuable instrument for examining memory and its mysteries.

M. de Charlus, Jupien, and the Bee

2008-03-18T20:08:00.000-07:00

The tension that Proust creates between the natural and the unnatural in the opening section of Sodom and Gomorrah perplexes me. Marcel, perched at the upper story of his parents’ apartment in the Hotel de Guermantes, is watching for the Duc and Duchesse to return home. Seeing a bee enter the courtyard, he descends the stairs to observe more closely whether “the improbable insect would come to visit the tendered and forlorn pistil” of an orchid. Hidden behind a shutter, Marcel remains unnoticed when M. de Charlus enters the courtyard on his way to lunch at the apartment of Mme. de Villeparisis. Still waiting for the Guermantes, intrigued by the bee, Marcel is at his vigil when Charlus soon reenters the courtyard.

At this point, an amazing exchange between Charlus and the tailor Jupien begins. Charlus,

his half-closed eyes all of a sudden opened wide, was gazing with an extraordinary intentness at the former waistcoat-maker on the doorstep of his shop, while the latter, standing suddenly transfixed in front of M. de Charlus, rooted like a plant, was contemplating with an air of wonderment the ageing Baron’s embonpoint.

A kind of dance begins, where Jupien, “in perfect symmetry with the Baron” had “drawn back his head, set his torso at an advantageous angle, placed his fist on his hip with a grotesque impertinence and made his behind stick out, striking poses with the coquettishness that the orchid might have had for the providential advent of the bumblebee.” The dance leads Jupien to invite Charlus into the tailor shop. Marcel makes his way through the cellar to a shop room, separated by a partition from the two men, where he hears the moans of the two. “I might have thought,” Marcel notes, “that one person was slitting another’s throat close beside me and that the murderer and his resuscitated victim were then taking a bath in order to erase the crime.”

The spying Marcel achieves in this humorous scene recalls the Montjouvain episode of Swann’s Way, when a much younger Marcel secretly looks through a window to watch Mlle. Vinteuil and her female companion making sadistic love. In his biography of Proust, William C. Carter writes that Proust’s editor had wanted him to cut that episode, but Proust “had constructed this work [Remembrance as a whole] so that this episode in the first volume explains the jealousy of my young man in the fourth and fifth volumes, so that by ripping out the column with the obscene capital, I would have brought down the arch.” At this point, the “young man’s” jealousy is yet to foment. We are similarly left wondering when Marcel tells us that while observing the flower, he “had already drawn from the conspicuous stratagem of the flowers a consequence bearing on a whole unconscious element in the work of literature.” The clear and immediate result of observing Charlus and Jupien is a dramatic change in Marcel’s view of the Baron. The Baron’s transformation “into a new person was so complete that not only the contrasts in his face and his voice, but, in retrospect, even the ups and downs of his relationship with me, all that had up until now appeared incoherent to my mind, became intelligible…”

Colleen Lamos argues in Deviant Modernism that the scene in the courtyard of the Hotel de Guermantes “endorses the belief that the male invert has, in Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’s notorious phrase, "the soul of a woman in the body of a man.” This certainly is Marcel’s view of Charlus. “I understood why,” Marcel goes on to say following his earlier observation, “when I had seen him coming out of Mme. de Villeparisis’s, I had been able to think that M. de Charlus had the look of a woman: he was one!” Andre Gide admired Charlus yet complained to Proust that the character “contributed to the habitual confusion between the homosexual and the invert.” That is, the identification of the homosexual with a man who has a woman trapped within him.

The long disquisition about inverts and solitaries (gay men who remain alone all their lives rather than reveal their sexuality) feels like a curious departure from the encounter between the two men in the courtyard. For the overriding imagery that flows through the whole section is organic, botanical, and natural. The men are referred to repeatedly as flowers and plants, and when Charlus eventually leaves the hotel after making love, he crosses paths with the bee, on its way to make love with the orchid. As Marcel observes, the joining of the two men was “non-elective,” just as the bee’s union with the orchid’s pistil is hard wired. Marcel remembers seeing jellyfish on the beach when he summered at Balbec. At the time, he thought them ugly, grotesque. After seeing Charlus in a new light (literally in the new sunlight of the courtyard), he realizes that his view was limited. From the point of view of natural history, jellyfish are, “with the transparent velvet of their petals, like the mauve orchids of the sea.” In this opening section of Sodom and Gomorrah, all life seems to be organically one, regardless of the labels Marcel has adopted for men like Charlus and Jupien.

Alex Ross on Proust on Music

2008-01-06T18:31:00.000-08:00

Alex Ross, author of the highly praised The Rest is Noise, points to a passage of Sodom and Gomorrah for Proust's insight into 20th-century music.

The Imagination, Saint-Loup, and His Mistress

2008-01-02T16:54:00.000-08:00

The imagination is “like a barrel organ that does not work properly and always plays a different tune from the one it should,” Marcel observes while watching the Princess Guermantes-Baviere. The Princess, whose name had evoked “certain sixteenth-century masterpieces” in Marcel’s imagination, is asking a “stout gentleman” in her opera box, “Will you have a bonbon?” Bonbons do not mix with sixteenth-century masterpieces, and so the imagined Princess begins to change. However, he notes, this bit of reality did not “lead me to conclude that she and her guests were mere mortals like the rest of us.” If not a sixteenth-century masterpiece, she certainly is other than a woman of Marcel’s social class. “I was very conscious of the fact,” he goes on to say

that what they were doing was only a game, and that as a prelude to the acts of their real life (the important part of which they presumably did not conduct here) it was appropriate, in accordance with rituals of which I knew nothing, that they should pretend to offer and decline bonbons…

Imagination persists. Marcel thinks the stout gentleman and the Princess have “sublime thoughts” which they are husbanding for a time when the bonbon game ends. His supposition is immediately undercut, however, when a companion adds a bit more reality and a tad less imagination by referring to Marcel’s stout gentleman as the “fat man.”

Imagination’s power to reach beyond mere reality is a Proustian theme; when Marcel feels he has gotten to the truth, it is almost always the result of an exercise of his imagination. From another perspective, however, imagination gets Marcel and his friends into trouble. The bonbon episode is a prelude to a more extended exploration of this downside of imagination’s power.

The meditation occurs when Marcel meets the mistress of his friend Robert Saint-Loup. Up to this point an unseen figure, the mistress has been a torment to Saint-Loup, first at Balbec, where Saint-Loup reports she is nagging him to return to Paris, and more recently at Doncieres, where her silence drives Saint-Loup crazy with jealousy and worry. Marcel and Saint-Loup have taken the train to her home on the outskirts of Paris. Marcel’s expectations may be high. “She’s a sublime creature,” Saint-Loup had told him. “If you ever meet her, you’ll see what I mean; there’s something noble about her…. She has an astral quality, even something quite vatic. You grasp my meaning—the poet veering toward the status of priest.” Now Marcel waits for the two to emerge from her house.

Suddenly Saint-Loup appeared, accompanied by his mistress, and this woman, who was for him the essence of love, of all the sweet possibilities of life, whose personality, mysteriously enshrined in a body as in a tabernacle, was the constant focus of my friend’s imaginative attention, something he felt he would never really know as he went on asking himself what her inner self could be, behind the veil of eyes and flesh—in this woman I recognized at once “Rachel, when of the Lord,” the woman who, a few years ago (women change their status so rapidly in that world, when they do change), used to say to the procuress, “Tomorrow evening, then if you need me for someone, you’ll send for me, won’t you?"

Though she did not remember, Marcel had met her in a brothel.

In this high comedy, Marcel’s “coarsest sort of acquaintance” with Rachel is strangely different from his friend’s understanding of her. Rachel’s life, thoughts, and “all the men by whom she must have been possessed, were so indifferent” to Marcel that he would have barely any interest if she confessed her past. To Saint-Loup, Rachel was “all-consuming,” the source of his anxiety, fears, torment, and love; to Marcel she was a mere “clockwork toy.” The two men saw

the same thin and narrow face. But we had come to it by two opposite paths that could never converge, and we would never see the same face. I had know this face from the outside, with its looks, its smiles, the movements of its mouth, as the face of some woman who would do anything I asked for twenty francs… for me her looks, her smiles, the movements of her mouth, had seemed meaningful merely as generalized actions with nothing individual about them, and beneath them I should not have had the curiosity to look for a person.

What to Marcel had been merely the “consenting face” of a prostitute, was for Saint-Loup “a goal toward which he had been struggling through endless hopes and doubts, suspicions and dreams.” The experience causes Marcel to realize “how much power a human imagination can put behind a tiny scrap of a face,” a power that led Saint-Loup to spend countless hours of agony and more than thirty thousand francs on jewelry for a woman who seemed to Marcel “not worth twenty francs” when offered to him in a brothel.

“It was not,” Marcel notes, “so much that I found ‘Rachel, when of the Lord’ of little consequence, but that I found the power of the human imagination, the illusion that fostered the pains of love, so momentous.” If the imagination can inflict so much pain, perhaps embracing it is dangerous. The imagination may not be able to transcend the bounds of reality. The barrel organ may always play a tune different from the one it should.

The visit to Rachel’s home occurs several days before Easter, during which Catholic children traditionally receive their first communion in churches decorated with white lilies. In one of the most beautiful passages of The Guermantes Way, Proust draws the association as Marcel catches sight of small gardens “decked with the huge white altars of the flowering fruit trees… the tall pear trees enveloped each house, each humble courtyard, in a more extensive, more uniform, and dazzling whiteness, as if all the dwellings, all the gardens in the village were making their first communion on the same day.”

The beauty of the gardens has moved Marcel close to things we see “not only with our eyes but also feel in our hearts.” Distinguishing between the material world and the world of feeling and spirit, again finding himself coaxed from mere reality by his imagination, Marcel pulls back for a moment to ask whether, in seeing the trees as angels, he has made the same mistake “as Mary Magdalene when, in another garden, on a day whose anniversary was fast approaching, she saw a human form, ‘supposing him to be the gardener'.” Has he, he wonders, wrongly imagined one world for another? In answer, Marcel reaffirms his believe in the power of the imagination to let us see beyond the merely real:

Guardians of the memories of golden age, keepers of the promise that reality is not what we suppose, that the splendor of poetry, the magical light of innocence may shine in it and may be the reward we strive to deserve—were they not, these great white creatures so magnificently stooped over the shade that invites us to rest, to fish, to read, were they not more like angels?

As Marcel, Saint-Loup, and Rachel walk through the village, the material and the spiritual, the real and the imagined, coalesce into one. “The houses were sordid. But beside the most dilapidated of them, the ones that looked like they had been scorched by a shower of brimstone,… a resplendent angel stood over it, stretching the dazzling protection of his widespread wings of innocence in blossom: a pear tree.” In this unexpected, strange, funny, beautiful encounter with Rachel, Marcel’s momentary loss of faith in the imagination strengthens his belief in its power.

Crossposted on Ludwig Richter's Blog.

Proust, Leopardi, and Thinking While Reading

2007-12-23T16:41:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-23T16:02:00.002-08:00

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

The Decline of Reading

2007-12-20T07:37:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-20T07:23:00.001-08:00

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

Proust, Plato, Nietzsche

2007-12-18T21:12:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-14T19:00:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-14T17:00:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-14T05:45:00.000-08:00

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)

2007-12-14T05:40:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-14T05:34:00.000-08:00

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)

2007-12-14T05:30:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-14T05:27:00.000-08:00

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)

2007-12-13T19:09:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-13T14:20:00.000-08:00

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)

2007-12-13T14:15:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-13T10:05:00.000-08:00

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!
.
.
.
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)

2007-12-12T19:25:00.000-08:00

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