Englishness

I've been slow because of a stupid cold that will not go away. Anyway, one of the things I want to write up a bit before saying goodbye to Gabriel Josipovici is his response to Englishness.

Josipovici is a big fan of modernism and he wants to get the novel back on the modernism track. Right from the beginning, and I mean right from the beginning, of What Ever Happened to Modernism we see that Englishness is a problem for him. In the preface he describes going to see David Cecil give a talk in 1958 about then contemporary English novelists. Cecil recommended the work of Anthony Powell, Angus Wilson and Iris Murdoch. Reading them, Josipovici was disappointed.

Years later, he revisited the three authors just in case he missed something. Notice his response:

They still said nothing to me, still seemed 'English' in a way Borges and Simon and Robbe-Grillet were not Argentinian or French, still seemed to belong to a different and inferior world to that of Proust and the others.

The first thing to note is that Josipovici is not objecting to jingoism here for the simple reason that there isn't much of it in the English novel. No, what he objects to is a general cultural attitude you find in these novels.

What makes an English novel English then if not nationalism? I'm going to suggest there are three things:

1. They are about Marriageship. These are stories about people manœuvering there way to marriage and either succeeding or failing. Marriage is the most important element in human happiness; it's more important that wealth, than politics or, and this can be puzzling to modern readers, having a great sex life.
2. They are Comedic in spirit. I reversed the normal order to say "succeeding or failing" in the previous point because English novels tend to be about succeeding at love and marriage. They don't necessarily end happily but even when the hero fails at marriage they leave us with a clear sense of what it would take to succeed; the possibility of success, of gaining the wisdom it would take to get there is the point. Behind this is a larger point behind this and it is that the world makes sense and you can get what you want.You might fail and you might even fail for random reasons but the possibility is always there.
3. They are committed to social class as a means to social order. Again, the assumption isn't that everyone at each level social status is a good person who takes their responsibilities to society seriously. Some can be complete scum. But the assumption is always that social order depends on people in different classes doing what is expected of them.

And if you don't believe me, sit down and watch season one of Downton Abbey. You'll be able to tick off each and every one of those concerns.*

Contrary to what you might guess, all three of those characteristics turned out to be easily adaptable to modernity. Which is to say, the English novel had no trouble becoming modern without becoming modernistic. And here is the source of Josipovici's frustration.

I've already hinted at the big one. This style of novel is easily accommodated to the modern notion of randomness. Because of the effects of World War One, all art had to allow fort the possibility that random forces could seriously mes up our sense of order. And the reasons for this are historic as much as they are a matter of art. Life was upset by the war in Britain but it also returned to something like before.

This unexpected resilience of the form is a big problem for modernists like Josipovici.

It's also a problem when it gets to Proust for the Englishness of the English novel tends to influence the way English people read Proust but that is a subject for another day.




*Consider a novel such as Lucky Jim. In the end, Jim Dixon sees happiness in terms of a relationship with a woman he might marry. No matter how ridiculous the challenges become, the novel remains focused on the possibility of his success. Jim could not be an absurdist. One of the primary criticisms the novel makes is of what we might call the professorial class and how the failure of the members of this group to accept the moral obligations that go with their class causes problems.

The Crisis of Modernism?

As I've mentioned before, I'm reading What Ever Happened to Modernism? by Gabriel Josipovici as part of my prepatration read all of Proust again beginning in 2013, the hundredth anniversary of the publication of Volume one of The Novel.

The publication opens with an odd, and I suspect unintentional, juxtaposition of sentiments. In the preface, Josipovici begins by describing how he sat down to read some writers who were being touted as the promising new voices in 1958. The sentiment this inspires in him is disappointment.

The second sentiment, crisis, appears four pages later at the start of chapter one.

In 1864 Mallarmé, aged twenty-three, wrote to his friend Henri Cazalis: 'I feel like I'm collapsing in on myself day by day, each day discouragement overwhelms me, and lethargy is killing me. When I emerge from this I'll be stupefied, nullified.'

Lest anyone think I am being unfair in describing "crisis' as a sentiment, note that Josipovici describes the crisis of modernism entirely in terms of the feelings of leading artists: Mallarmé is followed by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett. Josipovici assures us he could also make his point by quoting Herman Melville, Thomas Mann, Paul Celan, Schoenberg, Francis Bacon or Geörgy Kurtág.

But Josipovici says the piling up of examples is unnecessary and that the feelings of these few is enough to make his point.

Let these four examples stand for a century of pain, anxiety and despair on the part of writers, painters and composers, and let their words stand for what has been called the Crisis of Modernism.

Keep that thought in mind and read this from some guy named Jim Todd speaking of the Crisis of Modernism in 1995:

We live in an age of global transformation and uncertainty on all levels: economic, political, religious and cultural.

I remember studying The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology by Edmund Husserl back in the early 1980s and my professor beginning the class by saying, "the problem with modernism is that it is always in crisis." He meant that as a putdown but you wouldn't have to look very far to find defenders of modernism who would immediately cheer at that and say, "That is exactly what we have been trying to convey."

And that is why I begin with Josipovici's initial feeling of disappointment; because a feeling of disappointment is not the way to respond to a crisis. Here is how he expresses his disappointment at reading what had been identified for him as leading English novelists in 1958:

... when I borrowed their work from the library I was disappointed to find that they seemed to have nothing whatsoever in common with the writers I had been reading. They told entertaining stories wittily or darkly or or with sensationalist panache, and they obviously wrote well, but theirs were not novels which touched me to the very core of my being, as had those of Kafka and Proust.

And it's telling that, when it comes the moment to make a key point, Josipovici, who is, after all a novelist and university professor and is, therefore, someone whom we should expect to be good with language, falls back on an appalling cliché: "touched me to the very core of my being".

I also wonder what counts as the criteria to establish that something "touched me to the very core of my being"? The temptation is to say, "I don't need to explain because I can feel it," with lots of emphasis on the feeeeeel! But that is simply another way of saying "this meaningful to me" and, in that case, "So what?"There are people for whom violent porn is meaningful.

To say anything at all, Josipovici, has to establish that modernism is not only meaningful to him but that it should be meaningful to you too. And that means he has to establish that the crisis of modernism is also your crisis. We need to believe not only that there is a crisis but that there is a superior way to experience that crisis and that we all should turn to, not just modernist art, but modernist artists to learn what we are experiencing and how we ought to experience it.

I don't think Josipovici is unaware of this. I think the problem is that he doesn't believe it. What he points to is something that operates like a religion. It has its beliefs and rituals and these make sense to the people who have invested a lot of time and effort on modernism. But he does not explain why we should care in the first place. Unless he can do that, he will have to admit modernism is just a  style, something you could sell in a book: "You too can dress, decorate your apartment and stock your library just like Don Draper."

And remember that style is always about feeling. Fashion editors cheerfully begin articles with phrases like: "The attitude of today's trend setters is ..."

This matters when we read Proust. Do we see his success in his ability to write well or do we think he has valuable lessons to teach us about how we should experience life?

Feu Marcel Proust

Today is the anniversary of Proust's death.

Just a few days ago, I commemorated the hundredth anniversary of the publication of the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu. If we do the arithmetic, we can see that Proust had just nine years to finish his masterwork following the publication of volume one.

The temptation is to think he didn't know this but the truth is that he did. Always a sickly boy, he knew he wasn't going to have a long life. As he wrote The Novel, he grew increasingly convinced he would die. If anything, he may have been too aware of his coming death.

On my other blog I was writing of the modernists desire to make certain modernism was not just a  style. They wanted to change the culture. Ironically, the explosion in the popularity of modernism in recent years has been precisely because people like it as an historical style. Looking at Proust and his ill health and his constant awareness of his coming death, we can not only easily understand but also easily sympathize with his desire to be more than a stylist.

But should we? Wanting to do more than contribute to a style is a very ambitious thing to want to do. Perhaps too ambitious. I mean that both prudentially and morally.

I have, as I have noted elsewhere been reading What Ever Happened to Modernism? by Gabriel Josipovici to prepare myself for rereading all of À la recherche du temps perdu beginning  next year (I think this will be my third time of reading the whole thing through, although I have read certain volumes and parts of volumes many times more often). One of the points Josipovoci hammers when he discusses The Novel is that Marcel the narrator is a better person than Charles Swann. And you'd have to say that if you were, as Gabriel Josipovici is, an unreconstructed modernist.

Josipovici's argument is worth reading at some length:

Our existence is radically contingent. And yet the story of Swann himself, placed by the author near the start of his novel, demonstrates that despite the the uniqueness and contingency of each of our lives, there are general laws of existence as well, which make us all behave in similar ways: the story of Swann's love for Odette parallels that of Marcel for Gilberte and then Albertine. At the same time the novel shows us it is possible to react to similar experiences in very different ways, to learn or not to learn from what one goes through. Swann, with that slight coarseness of spirit which characterizes him, says Marcel, dismisses his affair with Odette with the remark" 'To think that I gave up the best years of my life to a woman who was not my type.' Marcel, on the other hand, more intelligent, more dogged perhaps in his desire to understand, comes to see that suffering and joy are not to be dismissed like that, but form part of the fabric of existence, the exploration of which becomes the theme of his life as a writer. All this makes nonsense of the claim, sometimes still heard, that Proust is merely the exquisite chronicler of the upper echelons of French society in the years leading up to 1914.

I'll start with the last sentence for the word "merely" along with some rhetorical sneering is doing a lot of work here. For while Proust certainly is not only an exquisite chronicler he most certainly is an exquisite chronicler and a lot of people read him solely for that reason. Who are we to prevent them from getting the enjoyment they get out of reading it the way they like to read it?

Next, let's return to the first two sentences and particularly to the expression "radically contingent". What can that mean? Does it mean anything that isn't, on more careful analysis, trivial? And how does the second sentence, with it's claim "there are general laws of existence as well" coexist with "radically contingent"? When someone make those two claims one after another is there any reason to believe that they are using words in a meaningful way?

Obviously, I  meant those questions as rhetorical. I think the expression "radically contingent" is just jargon for a modernist like Josipovici. It's the modernist's version of the consultant con, the lit crit version of "applying creative solutions in today's business environment", which is to say, it's a case of throwing words that sound impressive together with the intent of being obscure so was to impress the rubes.

I'm skipping a lot of steps in a long argument here but I think that if we peel away all that consultant con talk, we might ask some very old-fashioned questions about the relative moral stature of Swann and Marcel. For Swann does achieve marriage and his marriage lasts until his death. Marcel achieves no such union. His relationships are either obsessive and yet failed, as is the case with Gilberte, or they are obsessive and creepily possessive as is the case with Albertine. For all Swann's supposed coarseness, if we had to pick between his life and Marcel's, I don't think many of us would pick Marcel.

Ask yourself the heartless question. Here is Proust lying in bed at the end of a life that he has largely wasted on social climbing and the pursuit of crude sexual experience and looking for so0mething to redeem it. Looking at Charles Swann, we can see how the urge to draw parallels between their lives would be tempting can't we?

I'm not sure we should go the next step, though, and imagine that Proust himself saw Marcel the narrator as a better person than Swann. I think that if we read The Novel more carefully than Josipovici has, we will see that the implicit criticism that Proust makes of Marcel is far harder than the explicit criticism our narrator levels at Swann.

"Ninety-nine?" "Yes, Max."

Du côté de chez Swann, the first volume of THE NOVEL, was published ninety-nine years ago today, which explains why next year is the year of reading Proust.

I was writing on my other blog just this morning that "modernism" has gotten rather long in the tooth. It doesn't make sense to speak of a style that began more than 100 years ago, never really caught on and is now over for all intents and purposes as "modern". But we do because we are stuck with the term "modernism". That anomaly is because the modernists didn't intend to be a new style. They believed that the world had changed in a radical way such that the old styles were no longer possible  and sought to create a new culture in response. They were wrong about the former and failed at the latter.

Some people argue, by the way, that Proust isn't really a modernist but a late romantic. I don't think you can really make that argument stick but you can read him as if he were and get a coherent reading out of the book. I do.

More Proust Love

Here is a passage to ponder:

If we believed that the eyes of such a girl were nothing but shiny little discs of mica, we would not be eager to enter her life and link it to our own. But we are well aware that whatever it is that shines in those reflective discs is not reducible to their material composition; that flitting behind them are the black incognizable shadows of the ideas she forms and the people and places she knows ... the dimness of the house into which she will disappear, her own impenetrable projects and the designs of others upon her; and that what we are most aware of is that she herself lies behind them with her desires, her likes and dislikes, the power of her inscrutable and inexhaustible will. I knew I could never possess the young cyclist, unless I could also possess what lay behind her eyes.

There is a sense that all that makes sense. We could read it in certain moods and think, I recognize that sentiment.

It also seems to me that much of it is slightly unhinged. Notice how he starts with expressions such as "enter her life" and "link it to our own" but ends with a desire to penetrate the "impenetrable" and "possess" her. Again, we might think ordinary male attitudes towards love. But how much can these be justified? Especially the second?

And note that there is something here that simply isn't true. We can tell what other people are thinking and feeling from looking at them. No, we can't do it perfectly and we can't actually read minds. But much of the time, we can read people's intentions and feelings towards us from their facial expressions. Well, most of us. There are people who cannot.

The sense in which all the above is most credible is if we imagine these as the thoughts of an adolescent boy.

It is well, well, into the volume entitled A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs that the five girls whom young Marcel finds himself in the shade of make their appearance*. In some ways they are more boy-like than girl-like but I think any heterosexual male can identify with this thought of young Marcel's when he tells us the various things he thought about the girls:

Certainly, in none of my conjectures did I entertain the possibility that they might be chaste.

Not because it is impossible to imagine women as chaste but you tend not to when you are sexually attracted to them.  

Which leads to odd tensions. You sit down and have a pleasant conversation about Proust with the woman you just a few hours ago were imagining what it would be like to dribble chocolate sauce on her nipples, which you have never seen, and watch it form little dark  streams down over her white, white breasts. And you wonder, "Does she know what sort of things I think of her?" and "Would she be pleased or horrified?" All the while you keep up the pretense.

Now, the normal course of events is that you meet a woman and the two of you get closer and slower and get a better and better understanding of your thoughts about one another. She doesn't know about the chocolate precisely but she knows you and gets a good notion of how you are likely to have thought about her and you get a better understanding of her and how she is likely to respond to being told that you have thought such things. And away you go.

But in adolescence such things seem impossible. Girls are older and more knowing than you and, at the same time, your thoughts of them seem so over the top that you cannot imagine connecting.

What sort of world was the one from which she was looking at me? I could not tell, any more than one could tell from the few details which a telescope enables us to descry on a neighbouring planet whether it is inhabited by human beings, whether or not they can see us, or whether their review of us has inspired any reflections in them.

Naturally, you are attracted to girls but, equally naturally, girls whose outward behaviour is a little more vulgar and openly sexual, and who perhaps belong to a new and rising class not so beholden to all the manners and mires that make direct expression between boys and girls more difficult. And thus the five girls who come down the beach at Balbec.





* Why does this second volume take so long to get to the point? Why make your reader beat his way hundreds of pages in, more than 60 percent of the text, before justifying your title? The answer to that, I think, is that the first volume was self-published and Proust was limited in the number of pages he could print. As a consequence, he cut the third section of volume 1 way down. When he found an actual publisher to print volume 2, he revisited at the beginning the stuff he would have liked to have put in Volume1.

I know this is heresy, but I rather wish he hadn't. I think Proust needed an editor and there isn't a single volume of the novel that couldn't have been cut quite a bit and thereby have been made even better.

Did Proust believe in love?

I've mentioned before the brilliant way Proust uses his own experience as a little boy craving his mother's kiss to write about Swann's craving as an adult man for Odette's attention. It was a large part of Proust's object to show that a person need not have lived an experience to write about it and that, therefore, Saint-Beuve's contention that we need to study the artist's autobiography to understand the art was misleading.

A while ago, a cousin of mine read something critical I had said of Woody Allen and said, "You can't criticize him because you have no idea what it feels like to be him and to experience what he has experienced". That's nonsense of course but it's a common form of nonsense. It's solipsistic. And Proust, like is contemporary Wittgenstein, saw that solipsism is a huge problem for modern moral psychology. Thus his insistence that, contrary to Saint-Beuve, we can put ourselves in the place of others and describe their experience of the world even if we have not lived their lives. And the fact that we cannot do this with the same certainty that we do mathematical calculations does not mean that we cannot do it all.

But, we might stop and ask ourselves questions. For example, is the feeling that a child has for its mother love? Well, stupid question, of course it is. Then again, we might say, "Well, that depends on what you mean by love." No woman, for example, wants the man she loves to crave her in that terribly one-sided way that a boy child feels love for his mother. That sort of love might be flattering for a while but it would very quickly become tiresome to always be the mother figure, which is a large part of why Odette tires of and begins cheating on Swann. Any man who offers a woman the sort of clinging, needy love that Marcel has for his mother and Swann has for Odette is going to be cheated on and damn well deserves to be.

And here the temptation to grant Saint-Beuve his revenge and go all auto-biographical on Proust is very strong. The temptation is to say that, in an era when homosexuality was so suppressed, Proust never had the opportunity to learn what love based on mutual giving was. Without this crucial experience, we might continue, he was unable to write convincingly about any of his characters being in love and, especially, he was unable to give Marcel, his narrator, such an experience.

[Note: as far as possible, "Marcel" means the narrator of and character in the novel and "Proust" means the author.]

And we must give full weight to the evidence here. Really convincing portraits of mutually giving love are, at the very least, rare in Proust. It's not that such a thing is absent. We might well argue that such a relationship must exist between by his parents but, to so, we would have to argue that it is there by implication. Proust spends literally hundreds of pages describing an odd narcissistic kind of love that is spurred by jealousy; that is to say, a love where the intensity of the love is a product of feelings that are inside the lover. This is not a love that grows through mutual efforts as two people go through a courtship ritual. Quite the contrary, Proust denigrates habit and writes as if habitual love and willed love are only illusions.

Cruising by

The large division of À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs* called "Place-Names: The Place" begins with some absolutely brilliant observations about social distinctions and interactions at a seaside "Grand Hotel". But running through it, as if preparing us for the theme that will dominate in the final movement, Proust has his narrator again and again see beautiful young women. But he sees them only in passing: from the train, from a carriage and on a bridge he walks by on his way to see an historic church. He never has a chance to connect with these girls.

Along the way, our narrator makes some telling observations not about love but about the psychology of love. And these observations are quite frankly narcissistic. The only reactions from the girls that interests him are those reactions that would confirm his impact on them. And, as we will see later this week, the impact he seeks is bluntly sexual. I'm going to cite him at some length here, interrupting to make comments as I go along.

1. These glimpses, and the loss of every girl glimpsed, aggravated the state of agitation in which I spent my days; and I wished for the wisdom of the philosophers who counsel the curbing of desires (assuming they mean one's desire for another person, as that is the only mode of desiring which can lead to anxiety, focusing as it does on a world beyond our ken but within our awareness—to assume they mean desire for wealth would be too absurd).

 Note that on one level this simply is not true. As I write this, we are one week from an American presidential election. There are lots of people who desire an outcome and that desire is causing them lots of anxiety. That said, we can still see Marcel's point but we can see this if and only if the thing we are talking about is a desire to possess another sexually. Okay, moving on:

2. At the same time I was inclined to find something lacking in this wisdom, sensing well enough that these glimpsed encounters made for greater beauty in a world which sows such flowers, rare though common along every country roadside, a new spice being added to life by the untried treasures of each day, by every outing with its unkept promises, my enjoyment of which had hitherto been prevented only by contingent circumstances which might not always be present.

Okay, note the expression "unkept promises" which has a delightful ambiguity here. Who is promising and not keeping? Is that the "flowering girls" he sees are not available to him or is it that he, by moving so quickly from each glimpsed wonder top the later one who replaces her. Well, keep that thought in mind and read the next sentence:

3. Of course, it may be that, in looking forward to a freer day when I meet similar girls along different roads, I had already begun to adulterate the exclusive desire to share one's life with an individual woman whom one has seen as pretty; and the mere act of entertaining the possibility artificially fostering it was an implicit acknowledgment that it was an illusion.

Okay, lots of parsing needed here. At first glance we can see Proust's intention easily enough. Although Marcel is in the North, he thinks like a southerner and he shares the belief held by Dante and the troubadours that love that is sought after is not real. The superior love is the one that is not sought and that reflects something greater than the person who pursues it.

The joys of translation

Fair enough, but we are also losing something here.

First, note that the similar sound and root shared by "adulterate" and "adultery" does not exist in French. Our translator has put it here in the hope of capturing something Proust does in French in a  different way more suitable to the inherent poetry of the English language. And it sort of works with the notion of "unkept promises" in the previous sentence.

But none of that is in the original! There it is in another word "croître", translated here by the humble English word "to sow", where the wonderful ambiguity lurks.

If we go back to the second sentence, we can already see the thing going astray. Consider the clause:

"... sensing well enough that these glimpsed encounters made for greater beauty in a world which sows such flowers ..."

The French reads:

"... car je me disais que ces rencontres me fassaient trouver encore plus beau un monde qui fait ainsi croître sur toutes toutes les routes campagnardes des fleurs ..."

Here is faily literal rendering of that with emphasis added:

"... for I told myself that these encounters made me find more beautiful a world that so made to grow on every country road these flowers ..."

Notice how much more active the intelligence of young Marcel is here. He tells himself that he is finding the world more beautiful. The English translation I am reading makes a completely different sense with its "sensing well enough" and "made for a greater beauty". These are passive expressions that describe something happening to young Marcel and not something that he is doing.

And the world around Marcel is also different in the original. The word "croître" shares both the sound and the and the root of the French word for belief. It doesn't mean "belief" but we will feel that. What "croître" does mean is to grow but it also means to develop slowly towards an end. These girls are flowering, meaning they are coming to the most magnificent phase of a natural development.

If we go on to sentence three, the word Proust uses is not the French of "adulterate" but he uses "fausser" which means to distort or pervert. Now, if we combine that with the more active role that Marcel is playing in the way his thoughts are shaping his world, we can see that something more intentional is happening here.

Conclusion

So, does Proust believe in love? We can't say just yet.








* Literally, that translates as "in the shadow of young girls in flower" and recent versions have been published under that title. This "accurate" translation, however, loses all the poetry of the French. C.K. Scott Montcrieff's "Within A Budding Grove", on the other hand, has lots of poetry but, unfortunately, the wrong poetry. The point that the French conveys and the English does not is that the girls in question are sexually powerful. Think, "they are in flower but you are not". Young Marcel is still at that age where boys are behind girls and clumsily struggling to gain sexual maturity.

Maybe it's much to early in the year ...

... but what are you doing starting New Year's Eve?

Here is one possibility:

2013: The Year of Reading Proust

2013 will be the year for reading—or re-reading—Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu or In Search of Lost Time.

The culture in Proust

When people read Proust in English, or when English-speaking people read him in French, one of the reasons they do so is an admiration for some quality they see in French culture. It because of a sense, as the New Yorker's Adam Gopnik once put it, that France produced the greatest common place culture ever.

This is probably less true today but if you went to France sometime in the last five decades you could see something most countries don't have today: a culture that runs deep. Everything—from the food people ate and the clothes they wore to the politics and history they argued about—drew from a shared culture that everyone participated in in a deep way.

A friend of mine and I saw a fascinating example of this in the late 1980s when we too some visitors from France to a restaurant in Chinatown. He took them there to give them an experience they couldn't have at home. He told them, what is quite true, that you simply cannot find the kinds of restaurant you can find in a North American Chinatown anywhere in Paris. And they loved the idea. They were looking forward to a new experience.

But the second they picked up the menus, they unconsciously set about transforming the meal into a French meal. They ordered not spring rolls but hors d'œuvres and they insisted on discussing and picking a wine that went with the main course. They were not disappointed but pitying when they learned that the restaurant had no cheese course to offer and stunned when they learned that coffee was unavailable said, with a tone of charity, "Oh well, we can have coffee elsewhere".

My friend was offended but I loved it. They weren't imperialistic about it. They didn't see themselves as imposing any judgments on anyone. They simply had this whole rich culture to draw on so they drew on it.

And the thing is they weren't cultured types. They were computer geeks here to talk about microchips. Think of it this way, you wouldn't be surprised if you met a computer geek from Cupertino who could was deeply interested in New Orleans cuisine but you'd treat him as unusual just as you would treat a computer geek who was deeply interested in new Orleans jazz. If, however, you found yourself treating a group of computer geeks at a conference who were a only together because they all happened to come from the United States, you'd be more than a little shock if they all shared the same deep interest and knowledge of a particular cuisine.

That is what France has that most other countries don't. And even other countries that have it, say Ireland, for example, don't have the depth and richness that France has.

That is a big part of the reason people from outside France read Proust. You get a detailed look at French culture at two levels. You get to see the aristocracy who were living their last gasp and you get a detailed look of the rising middle class who were seeking something like what the aristocracy had but also managing to create something new in the process.

You see this last in two women—Mme Verdurin and Odette de Crecy. The first is a member of the upper middle class, possessed of as much wealth but not the status of the aristocracy, who maintains a salon. Odette, on the other hand, is a courtesan who aspires to join the same social class as her lovers. And both largely succeed in their ambitions. (One of the biggest mistakes you can make in reading Proust is to disdain or hate particular characters, you must love them all to get this work.)

In order to show us their lives and their rise correctly, Proust must, and does, give us a highly detailed picture of their culture. As I've said before, it's a huge mistake to read Proust for his psychology. It has its moments to be sure, but, to paraphrase what Rossini said about Wagner, Proust's explorations of psychology does have some wonderful moments but it also has some terrible half hours. No, it is the outside account, the la belle epoque as you will find it nowhere else, that is the primary reason for reading this.

Romanticism?

I'll start with a juxtaposition:

1. Camille Paglia is at it again. She has a piece up in the Wall Street Journal called, "How Capitalism Can Save Art". The gist of it, and it's far from crazy, is that industrial design has produced far more of great worth than the art world the last few decades. You may or may not like Paglia's specific examples and taste, I certainly don't, but I still think her basic argument is irrefutable. The art world is decadent, corrupt and moribund.
2.  In an oddly related vein, we have a piece wondering why hipsters love obsolete technology. And they do. But they're right to do so. They can't bring themselves to love the latest products of industrial design but they love the old stuff. And, again, they are right to do so. Someone could, and they'd also be right, construct an argument explaining this in terms of motive. Two decades from now, when it too is obsolete, hipsters will celebrate the iPhone. They can only love this stuff once it has a history; they can only love it once they can associate it with lives and loves, battles won and lost ...

But here is my question, what about romanticism. The official art world hates neo-romanticism and the latest technology doesn't sit comfortably with it. And yet, the art that most people love is romanticism. And there is a huge market for fantasy fiction that tries very hard to make new technology fit into romantic tales.

So the question I have is this: Is it time to embrace romanticism again?

Serious writers will rush in now and point out how vulgar and unsophisticated current romanticism is with its princesses, rural revival fantasies, hopelessly exaggerated emotional upheavals and much else. And all that is true but you do have to wonder if that isn't in large part because serious artists refuse to try their hand at it.

I think a big part of why I like Proust and Waugh's Brideshead Revisisted so much is that they are both late romantics. I feel the same way about Mahler.

Erec and Enide

I am having a relaxing vacation by the seashore in a place where the Internet is very spotty. Every time the fog comes in, the Internet goes out.

And when the time comes in, the fog usually comes with it. Very romantic but not good for telecommunications.

In any case, I am reading a prose translation of Chretien de Troyes and I share this from the story of Eric and Enide:

Now Erec was strong and well, cured and recovered. Now that Enide was very happy and had everything she desired, her great beauty returned to her; for her great distress had affected her so much that she was pale and wan. Now she was embraced and kissed, now she was blessed with all good things, now she had her joys and pleasures; for unadorned they lie in bed and each enfolds and kisses the other; nothing gives them so much joy. They have had so much pain and sorrow, he for her, and she for him, that now they have their satisfaction. Each vies in seeking to please the other. Of there further sport I must not speak. Now they have so welded their love and forgotten their grief that they scarcely remember it any more.

If you are married and reading this, you have your orders so get about it.

Slightly more regular posting next week.

The middlebrow's Proust continued

After the Swann in Love section, I'd go straight to the section immediately after it called "Place Names, the Name". It has a magnificent plot twist that you'll both see and not see and then, when it arrives, it is somehow thrilling even though you've come to expect it.

It's short section, the shortest section of any of the volumes of the novel. Ironically, it would have been much longer if it had been up to Proust but, because he self-published, this was all he could get for his money. It's better for being shorter. I know this is a terribly disrespectful thing to say, but À la recherche du temps perdu would have been even better if Proust had had a good editor forcing him to write shorter.

Unfortunately, all the stuff that would have been in section three of Volume 1, appears in the first part of Volume 2. There is a lot of good stuff there but there is also a lot that would have been better left on the cutting room floor. I'd skip that first section it tells of Marcel's fruitless pursuit of Gilberte and his interest in her parents. You don't need it to figure it out. By the way, many good editions come with a synopsis of events making this sort of skipping easier.

The place to go next is part 2 of Volume 2, also called Place Names, the Name. It tells the story of Marcel's visit to the seaside town of Balbec with his grandmother. It's magnificent.

Dante and fictionalized autobiography

Google says:

No results found for "Did Dante really love Beatrice?".

That astounds me. You'd think more people would have wondered about this. The simpler question, "Did Dante love Beatrice?" gets 55 hits, most of them duplicates, and the answer is yes in every single occasion.

I don't think her did. I think he used the the conventions of Provençal love poetry to write about love and that Beatrice was a handy peg to attach that love talk to. I suspect he gives us a hint of what he is really up to when he tells us of the incident in church when he supposedly looked upon Beatrice and others present imagined he was gazing at some other woman also in the line of his vision and that, this mistake made, he tells us that he decided to use this other woman as a screen for the love he really felt for Beatrice.

I think something more like the opposite is the case. Ask yourself this question then: Would it make any really profound difference if he played a double game and that his love was really for the first woman after all? I don't think it would.

Beatrice was the ideal screen, not least of all because she was dead.

I should say, by the way, that I am no Dante scholar and that I don't know of anyone else who has advanced this theory. I have zero authority and if you want to laugh in my face, go right ahead.

Why does this matter? If I am right, then Dante's La Vita Nuova is fiction and meant to be fiction. But it's not just a made up story but rather clever creative use of facts of the author's life to create a fictionalized autobiography. In other words, it is the first example of the type of writing that Proust later becomes famous for.

While I'm at it

An interesting passage  from Muriel Spark's Loitering With Intent. I believe that title is a reference to Flaubert's narrative innovations.

Anyway, a little context. Our narrator has gotten tied up with a group of people writing their autobiographies. At one point she altered these by adding fictional events.

I was sure that nothing had happened in their lives and equally sure that Sir Quentin was pumping something artificial into their real lives instead of on paper. Presented fictionally, one could have done something with that poor material. But the inducing them to express themselves in life resulted in falsity.

What is truth? I could have realized these people with my fun and games with their life stories, while Sir Quentin was destroying them with his needling after frankness. When people say that nothing happens in their lives I believe them. But you must understand that everything happens to an artist; time is always redeemed, nothing is lost and wonders never cease.

I haven't told you who Sir Quentin is but you can tell from the quote that he is a rival of some sort and that he is pushing for frankness and she is all for making stuff up. It seems to me that the line about "time is always redeemed" and "nothing is lost" is meant to recall Proust. At the same time, the line, "What is truth?" is meant to make us think of Pilate questioning Christ before having him crucified as recounted in John's Gospel.

What is truth in autobiography?

And that is all I have to say for now. Next week I'll give some more suggestions for the cheater's Proust.

Can fiction lie?

Two twists today. First this post in coming up on Monday; I won't even pretend I'm writing on Sunday. I just have too many things to do Sunday so all Proust posts will appear on Monday from now on and be cross posted to my other blog, although I may continue to date them to Sunday. Second thing, I'm going to talk about Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

I just finished it last night—it's long been on my list of books I ought to read but had no enthusiasm to actually read. Having finished it, I think my lack of enthusiasm must have been driven by my having some sense that this is one of those novels inevitably assigned by the kind of English teacher who ought to be driven out of the profession.

If you read it at the surface level, it is very much their sort of book. It seems to be a simple moral tale pushing a pretty conventional liberalism that everyone can get behind. It also has that gift of pushing views that everyone can instinctively agree with while feeling terribly much like they are being terribly unconventional. It does this in two ways ...

Before I go on, if you haven't read this novel you probably want to stop reading right here.




... first of all the major moral turning point seems to be the Fascist sympathies that develop into Nazi sympathies of the Miss Jean Brodie who gives the novel its name. Who would hesitate to condemn a Nazi? Second, the book subversively encourages us to distrust the teacher, which must give a real thrill to the sort of teacher who would put this novel on a Grade 11 or 12 or undergraduate reading list. "Don't trust me, use your own critical faculties," the teacher daringly says, forgetting that she set the whole curriculum up and that her poor students get to do a rushed reading and then get one, maybe two class sessions on a novel that she has much more knowledge about and has had much more time to prepare than they do. She pretends to be giving them freedom when the whole discussion is just as loaded in her favour as a Vegas crap game is loaded in the house's favour.

But I have a question for all of you folks who have read the novel: Can we trust Sandy? Or, to put it much more bluntly, what if Sandy, later known Sister Helena of the Transfiguration, is a lying liar-head who lies?

Here, for example, is (as far as I can tell from Googling) a pretty conventional reading of the novel in four quotes:

1. As the story develops, one member of the set, Sandy Stranger, emerges as a central figure. Her changing perception of Miss Brodie colors the reader's understanding of the schoolteacher's character and significance.
2. This is an important step in her relationship with Miss Brodie, who, from her first lessons, encouraged the belief among her pupils that her own opinions were facts.
3. Similarly, Sandy's gradual realization that Miss Brodie's opinions are not only subjective but often dangerous leads her to lose faith in this mentor and ultimately betray her.
4. This manipulative style of teaching is made more remarkable by the fact that Miss Brodie claims to be using a very different style. Her familiar refrain about education is that it should be "a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul," not "a putting in of something that is not there".Similarly, Sandy's gradual realization that Miss Brodie's opinions are not only subjective but often dangerous leads her to lose faith in this mentor and ultimately betray her.

But what if that is exactly backwards?

1. What if, Spark cleverly uses the dominant consciousness of the Eleatic, I mean Sandy Stranger to colour the readers perceptions in ways that obsure reality?
2. What if she lets us quietly assume for ourselves that Sandy/Helena's opinions are facts?
3. What if Sister Helena is really trying to justify her own betrayal of Jean Brodie that was really driven by her inability to make her one-time lover Teddy Lloyd take her as seriously as he did Jean Brodie?
4. What if Sandy/Helena is such a good student of Jean Brodie that she surpasses her in the ability to manipulate others?  A few hints why this might be so:

• Although it is also commonplace to say that young Sandy is exposed to Calvinism through her upbringing in Edinburgh, the text lets slip at one point that the opposite is the case. Sandy has been raised by modern people who quite explicitly deny her access to Calvinism and she has to go out of her way to learn about the God who resembles the authorial role in a novel.
• Sandy is prone to fantastic imaginings all of which turn around Jean Brodie. At one point a mysterious character who strongly resembles one of Sandy's imaginary characters named Joyce Emily. She barely touches anyone's life, to the point that the memorial service for her death is just a tossed of detail that no one discusses.
• Joyce Emily is supposed to have died because Jean Brodie convinced her to go to Spain and fight on Franco's side. Think about this one for a while: a teenage girl is supposed to have run away from her home in Edinburgh in the 1930s and made her way all the way to Spain to fight!!!! for Franco. Does that sound even remotely credible? And remember that this appears in the novel as a minor, almost incidental, detail. Teenagers do do incredible things sometimes but suppose that young Joyce Emily had made it all the way to Spain only to be killed, don't you think that much more fuss would be made over such a girl than a perfunctory remembrance service?
• The death of Joyce Emily is Sandy's supposed justification for betraying Jean Brodie. That is odd because we have a novel that is otherwise just drenched in sex and where we have endless foreshadowing that Jean Brodie's downfall will be over a matter of sex. Jean Brodie's politics, meanwhile, flat along in the background as merely an odd quirk before very suddenly and mysteriously flowering into her getting an innocent girl killed.
• Note also that we learn that Sister Helena later meets other fascist sympathizers in the Catholic church whom she describes as much worse than Jean Brodie. How exactly were they worse than a woman who supposedly got an innocent girl killed?
• Sister Helena's book is called The Transfiguration of the Commonplace* and she clings to the grille when people visit her at her convent in a way that suggests a prisoner rather than someone freed.

I could go on but won't.

I hesitate in advancing this thesis just in case it's a commonplace in the better English classrooms but it seems to be that that is Spark's really intention. When we first meet Sister Helena she is an adolescent girl named, wait for it, "Sandy Stranger"! This from a woman whose first novel was about a woman who slowly comes to realize that she is just a character in a novel. Not surprisingly, the public found that a little daunting. But why not write another story about a woman who is just a character in a novel only never let the cat out of the bag. Most people can read it at face value while a few spot the joke and get to laugh up their sleeve through a few English classes before, wisely, writing their term paper about something else so as not to shake up their teacher/professor too much.

What can we learn from this?

First, I'd suggest that, for the late twentieth century, the Fascism played a role not unlike  the Dreyfus Affair did in the first have of the twentieth century. Both are affairs that seem remarkably clear-cut in hindsight.  Both are events that liberals have relentlessly used to separate sheep from goats after the fact. But both were once far muddier. There were, as Proust likes to remind us, moral imbeciles who supported Dreyfus and good people who opposed him. I don't think many people have had the courage to say so, but similar issues arise when considering attitudes towards fascism in the 1930s. Lots of good people failed to see the dangers.

Second, I think that Spark is doing something somewhat Proustian here. She is revisiting and reconstructing her past. What she has done that Proust did not do, is to allow art to overflow reality. In Proust, reality keeps failing to live up to art. Here art becomes a way to vanquish reality.

Let me explain what I think is happening here.

Muriel Spark is remembering a dominant figure from her adolescence. She is remembering a woman who had a commanding presence and was sexually powerful at a time when she was neither of these things. This woman was a rival, we might even say a mimetic rival. As an adult she is trying to deal with these memories and even to justify her moving beyond her teacher but this moving beyond feels like a betrayal. It will always feel like a betrayal.

So she makes a fictional story about it which turns on an actual betrayal. She makes up a fiction that just can't be taken seriously. Sister Helena is not an unreliable narrator, she is an unreliable consciousness. And here we depart from Proust, for Spark's point, it seems to me, is that when people are gone, all we have left is our stories about them. There is no special experience—no Madeleine, no Hawthorns in bloom, crooked paving stone—that can ever bring these things back. Lost time is forever lost and we cannot erase our sins by cleverly recreating a time of innocence.



* Corrected, an earlier version had the wrong title.

Things that go with Proust

A while ago I caused great offense by making a remark about tattoos—actually about the lack of tattoos in a particular location. I pointed out that one of the things that distinguishes a Nordstrom's from some other stores was that you many people displaying tattoos there than you saw down the street at the Guess Jeans shop. A woman in the group got all huffy and said, "How dare you tell me that I'm not allowed to go to Nordstrom's?"

Besides showing the incredible ease with which people take umbrage these days, the remark was also interesting because the woman had missed the thing I'd actually said. I hadn't said that people with tattoos aren't allowed to go to Nordstrom's (to the contrary, I'm sure Nordstrom would welcome them) but that people with tattoos freely choose not to go there. They do freely choose to go the Guess Jeans store.

There are whole value sets that go together. That is to say, people tend to like groups of things and if you study the people who really like Proust, you will find that they share other interests. The word for these things is syndromes. Sometimes we have a logical explanation for why certain things go together to make up a syndrome and other times we don't. Reading Proust goes with certain other interests. Proust fans don't all fall into one group—in fact, as I will hint below, there are at least two broad groups of syndromes that Proust fits into.

Funnily enough, Proust fits in with different Syndromes in France than they do in the English speaking world. Proust's greatness was never denied in France but the truth is that he wasn't much studied in France until the 1950s. By that time, readers in English had had Proust to themselves without having to look back at the French for an example to follow for a long time. As a result, there are two syndromes including Proust in the English world that would both puzzle your average French-speaking Proust fan.


A big part of the reason for this is C.K Scott-Moncrieff. His English translation makes the novel into very much a period piece, almost more of an Edwardian novel. The other reason was the Bloomsburies who read it as a work that was primarily about consciousness—that isn't crazy, a lot of it is about consciousness, but that isn't all it is about and, I would argue, is far from the most important thing about the novel. In any case, English-speaking people who have come to the novel have generally been attracted to it as a period piece or as an avant garde novel about consciousness, and never both at the same time.

I'm in the period piece camp. I came to Proust first because I have this thing about English fiction cranked out by upper-class boys who were at Oxford after World War . I was primed for this stuff because of a misspent youth in which I spent a lot of time reading English schoolboy fiction. I still remember trhe glorious day I received this gift as a young boy:

 I suspect that a good case could be made for why school fiction "goes with" Proust. For starters, it often begins with a lonely boy who misses his mother and doesn't fit in with other boys. (Which is also the case, by the way, with James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artists as a Young Man.) I won't though.

Suffice to say for now, that I think that one of the things that goes with Proust is confessional style writing and I'm going to focus on Dante's Vita Nuova a bit.

Some developments on the shaving front

Note: this is cross-posted from my other blog because I thought of a connection with Proust.

It's Friday, so something light seems called for. Like Psalm 51 perhaps.

Something light on the blog I mean—Friday is a day of repentance in real life.

Shaving oil
I've started using one. Mostly for sensual purposes. I love the way it smells. My barber puts it on my skin before she shaves me and the whole thing is a sensual pleasure of the highest order. A beautiful young woman dotes on me and cares for me for the better part of an a hour, cutting my hair and shaving me. In one especially delicious moment, she puts oil on her hands and massages my face.

I always get a haircut and barbershop shave on the Monday after First Friday of each month as a reward for remembering to go to confession on First Friday. At moments like that I pity the great sultans that they lived such impoverished lives, completely empty in comparison with the rich, sensual existence I live. Using the shaving oil at home doesn't quite reproduce that sensation but it feels good and smells good.

And added benefit is that it makes your skin tingle. I'm guessing that it is eucalyptus oil perhaps with some other stuff such as mint extracts that does this (Shaving oil isn't medicine or food, so J Crew don't have to tell us what goes into it). But the question is: what does it signify?

I have a suspicion that most women I know would respond to my saying that I like the tingle by saying, "That's because you can feel it working." I don't think women are stupid or silly, although they are almost certainly wrong when they say things like that. But they've been trained to say things like that by advertising. Here is an example of the sort of ad copy that is levelled at women:

Feel this rich lathering cleanser tingle as it deep cleans down to the pores. The water-based formula with camphor, menthol and eucalyptus dissolves oil and removes dirt and make-up.

I don't know if you could pack more stupid into two sentences. What, for example, is so good about a water-based formula? "Water," you say, "why water is good, all living beings need water." But so what? Here is a teaspoon of cyanide guaranteed to kill you. I will now stir it into a glass of water. Okay, here is a glass of water-based formula, want to drink it?

(And do you know what will do a better job of cleansing your pores than any "lathering cleanser"? A good hard work out that makes you sweat followed by a shower.)

There is lots of stuff that tingles when you put it on your skin. Maybe it has antiseptic qualities, maybe it doesn't. But it feels good doesn't it?

Why isn't "because it feels good" a good enough reason to do something?

I'll grant you that there are plenty of occasions when we do things we know are wrong because they feel good. But why is it that we can't bring ourselves to do something simply because it feels good in the absence of any reason not to do it? How did we get to be such appalling puritans we have to make up pseudo-scientific nonsense to justify our sensual pleasures?

"Because there are people suffering while you're decadently smearing costly cosmetics on your face, you idiot!" Maybe but there were also people suffering while you surfed the net instead of starting work this morning. And you felt guilty when you finished wasting that time. I felt good after shaving. And people have jobs making those cosmetics because of people like me so show respect you puritan!

Eau de toilette as aftershave
This is my latest discovery. Eau de toilette literally translates as 'toilet water", which isn't very appealing, but it actually means scented stuff that is heavily diluted in in alcohol. If you put it on it leaves a scent that a woman can only smell after she has gotten close enough to you to let you kiss her.

I like the aesthetics of that. It's not advertising. It's sort of a secret benefit that comes after she has committed herself. An extra sensory trigger that she can associate with you in her memory. Very Proustian that. Of course, you can also ruin it bey being a complete creep and she can thereafter think hateful thoughts of you every time she smells the key scent ingredient. That, it seems to me, is the manly way to think of these things.

But what is wrong with aftershave you ask? There is nothing necessarily wrong with it. In the beginning, all aftershaves were simply eau de toilette relabeled for the male market. "Eau de toilette" sounds girly and suggests some babe in her boudoir feeding bonbons to her Pekinese while maiden servants spritz her with eau de toilette. But that equation has now reversed. Eau de toilette is the simple goods while aftershaves have become the decadent product sold with all sorts of narcissistic mystique. Most of the price you pay is for the brand name on the front and the personality you think you are buying with the product.

The other problem with current aftershaves is that they are too damned strong. Some of these you step on the bus and people start diving for the exits. But even if not that bad, not about to let you kiss her should ever smell your scent. It just isn't manly to advertise like that.

In any case, check it out eau de toilette as an option. I have been using Lothantique "Marine".

By the way, one of the best things about a nice subtle scent is that you can smell it. It adds just a little extra sensual pleasure to your life. You'll be a better person for it.

Oh yeah, the alcohol really tingles when it hits your just shaved skin. It's bracing and makes you feel like a man. That's a good feeling. In fact, I'm not sure there is any better feeling. It's another reason to praise God and give him thanks.

Confessions

You yourselves were once alienated from him; you nourished hostility in your hearts because of your evil deeds.

Colossians 1: 21

Saint Augustine casts a long shadow and Proust is in that shadow. Augustine pioneered a new kind of writing in his Confessions. It is a story written by a man who has changed but who is writing about a man who has not yet changed. It is a story that essentially says, "This is what I was like before I knew better".

And it is written in first person; it is an autobiographical story. The challenge is that nothing in the first part of the story can give away what the writer already knows. But he cannot simply write as if he didn't know.

Do a little thought experiment and you can see why. Imagine that some huge event, some person or perhaps God, is going to transform your life completely three months from now. You don't know that yet but you are a determined diarist. Every night you go home and write stuff that seemed significant that day. But the significance of all these things will change completely sometime and you don't know what they real significance of anything is.

Only the person writing post-big event would know enough to write a sentence such as, "When I first met her I didn't think much of her".

After Augustine comes Dante who models his La vita nuova. One of the elements that Dante adds that is relevant to Proust is that he writes not just of a man pre-conversion but of an artist before his conversion; he writes a portrait of an artists as a young man. The influence on Joyce is most remarked. Joyce not only writes his own sort of Vita Nuovo in Portrait, he then turns around to crank out an epic tail with a journey to the underworld in Ulysses.

I don't know why people don't make more of the equally strong parallel with Proust. Like Dante, we have the story of a young man who seeks love and, in process, gets the inspiration to write.

Both writers "modernize" the thing. Divinity and the sacred, while they are very much part of the story, are not the answer for either man.

(By the way, Evelyn Waugh takes the form a turn back towards Augustine and Dante.  His young artist does not learn about art from his experience with love but about God. Charles never becomes a great artist.)

The oddness of Proust

I keep hammering on this not to diminish Proust but to help us see him as we should unerstand him: as an deeply alienated figure.

After Saint-Loup becomes his friend and says very kind things about the pleasure of being with him, Marcel thinks:

Such talk saddened me in a way, and I never knew how to respond to it: for in spending my time chatting with him, I felt none of the happiness I was capable of deriving from being without company; and in this, I suspect it would have been the same for me with any other person.

I love being alone myself but I could never say that. There are some people whom I like being with more than anything else in life. Marcel is just weird. There is very little to be gained by coming to understand our narrator or his creator. What makes Proust worth reading are the things this deeply alienated but very perceptive man noted about the people and society of his time.

A connoiisseur of degenerates?

"Well, you do get up," she said, wrinkling her nose at the faded red settee, the two odd semi-easy chairs, the net curtains that needed laundering and the boy's size library table with the venerable magazines on it to give the place a professional touch. "I was beginning to think perhaps you worked in bed, like Marcel Proust."

"who's he?" I put a cigarette in my mouth and stared at her. She looked a little pale and strained, but she looked like a girl who could function under strain

"A French writer, a connoisseur in degenerates. You wouldn't know him."

"Tut, tut," I said. "Come into my boudoir."

from The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

Well, we all need a métier.

 I think the thing we really have to grasp to even begin to get Proust is what a profoundly alienated man he was. We can easily forget that when we see what a successful social climber he was. The inescapable facts about the man are that he was weak and sickly, unable to do many of the things most of us would take as essential for living a full life. He was incapable of anything like a normal loving relationships and incapable of anything most of us would consider a satisfactory sexual relationship.

If Proust has anything worthwhile to say about human relationships—and I think he has quite a bit that is worthwhile to say—he came by that knowledge by observing others from the outside.

And that opens up a rather odd contradiction. For an awful lot of what Proust writes is based on the analysis of consciousness. That is to say, a lot comes from the belief that we all have a consciousness and that we can analyze our consciousness the same way we might analyze a chess problem. I can sit around and think about how I experience things and make an analysis. Further, this analysis is generalizable. Everyone has a consciousness and we all experience, among other things, time, smells, pain and love. On this model, we analyze our own consciousness and extrapolate from that "research" to reach conclusions what others are like.

I could go on quite a bit about this, but the short version is this: Proust tends to write in a solipsistic manner. He doesn't deny that things exist outside of the individual consciousness but he often writes as if it didn't matter that they have independent existence. And he is at his worst when he gets going about erotic love. He writes as if falling in love has nothing to do with the person we love and everything to do with what we project on them driven by our emotions, particularly jealousy. (He is heavily influenced in this by Stendhal, by the way, but that is a subject for another day.)

Now that sort of talk isn't crazy. A long time ago, I had a girlfriend cheat on me and I reacted by clinging to her as if my life depended on it. That a not uncommon reaction. But is it love? For Proust the answer is often "yes" because he thinks that is all erotic love is. And his alter-ego Marcel can go on for pages—hundreds of pages—talking about his obsessive need for Albertine. Much of this stuff is worth skimming over if not skipping entirely.

But his observations about people and manners are so good you don't want to miss them. You can pop the Novel open just about anywhere and be pretty certain that you will hit a gem somewhere. Here, I'll do it ... okay, got one. Proust is describing Mme de Villeparisis's, who is an aristocrat very much born to the manner, attitudes towards art:

She gave the impression that the only paintings worth inheriting are the ones you inherit.

That's lovely. Not necessarily because it is a unique observation about human beings that no one else could have made. It's lovely because it is at once bitchy and loving about its subject.

A question

Mme de Villeparisis preferred, whether because of good breeding, graciousness, genuine modesty or even an unphilosophical cast of mind to explain her familiarity with all the arts by that purely material circumstance, managing to let it appear that she looked on painting, music, literature and philosophy as merely the unavoidable accomplishments of any young girl given an aristocratic upbringing and happening to live in a building famous enough to figure on the list of national monuments. She gave the impression of believing that the only paintings worth anything are the ones you inherit.

So is that the result of sharp observation or a brilliant act of creation?

Swann in Love: the middlebrow's Proust

He shall drink from the stream by the wayside
and therefore he shall lift up his head.

 I assisted at two masses and three baptisms today. I've said vespers (from whence the quote above comes, it's from Psalm 110 if you are interested) and I'm ready to unwind a bit.  I've gotten myself a helping of Tiramisu and some chilled grappa. I will almost certainly regret this later tonight but I feel like I owe it to Proust.

Let me give you some irresponsible advice. Advice that right-thinking people everywhere will deplore. My advice to those daunted by Proust is don't read the whole thing. Read just one small part of it. I'd go even further and say, listen to an audiobook of that one part. And don't ever feel obliged to read another page of Proust beyond that unless you really want to.

Not just any part mind you.

For years there used to be a little novel called Swann in Love by Marcel Proust (en Francais: Un amour de Swann) on the shelves at the bookstore and at the public library. If you tripped across it, as I did some thirty years ago now, you would think that this must be some shorter work that Proust wrote before launching into his epic novel. In fact, it is the second of three large sections that make up the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu.

This little book was sold back in the day when being a middlebrow was still an acceptable thing. Nowadays, few openly admit to being a middlebrow. Many are in secret but that is another matter.

In any case, the little volume that is Swann in Love works very well as a stand alone book. Read it and you will have read enough to handle most cocktail chatter about Proust. In fact, you will notice, if you look about, that an awful lot of the critical commentary about Proust deals with this relatively small selection of the masterwork. (No one admits this but you can, and many do, read the thing by skipping over large sections of the novel. I'll probably suggest some options, a cheater's Proust as it were, as I blog along.)

Besides being a good standalone, Swann in Love also consists of a great little story that is easy to get hooked into, which not true of a lot of the rest of Proust. This selection is about love, obsession, sexual infidelity, girls having sex with other girls and lots of other great stuff.

By the way, I'd go even further and say, don't read but listen to it. There is a great little audiobook read by Sir Ralph Richardson of Swann in Love.  Unavailable for many years, it can now be purchased from iTunes. One of the really difficult things about Proust is "getting" his sentences. They often ramble on for most of a page with introductory clauses and long, long parenthetical clauses. Sometimes you have to stop dead and go back over a sentence several times to figure out what it is about. Sir Ralph reads the sentences so well you don't have any trouble understanding them, making it much easier to follow the action.

If you want to read Swann in Love, you may not have much luck finding it anymore. It has been a victim of the war on middlebrowism. Not to worry, simply buy or borrow the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu. It's usually called Swann's Way in English. Then read just the middle section, helpfully called "Swann in Love". If it catches your interest, you can go back and reread from the beginning.

By the way, there is no shame in having only a single volume of the Novel on your shelf. If anyone asks, tell them that you are saving the rest for your retirement.

Feast of Saint Mary Magdalene

The date on this is a cheat. I started thinking of this blog on the Feast of Saint Mary Magdalene and then got around to creating it some days later. Somehow, however, publishing in the past seems entirely appropriate for a Proust lover.

Saint Mary Magdalene is also entirely appropriate for the name "Madeleine" is a name derived from hers. "Magdalene" means either "from Magdala" or, less likely, "curling women's hair". The second theory goes better with the story that Mary was a reformed whore. These days scholars like to cast doubt on that story but I'm rather fond of it, not because I like to think ill of Saint Mary Magdalene but because I like very much the idea of redemption. For Jesus chose Mary as the very first person to appear to after his resurrection, and because nothing Jesus did was done by accident, it seems to me that w as a very powerful way of reminding us that he really came for sinners and not anyone who thinks themselves good enough as they are.

My inspiration for this blog is rather esoteric little site called Proust Said That. This site is, sadly, no longer operative. If I understand the sad story correctly, the owner of the site, one P Segal, is a Proust fan and a chef. A friend of hers asked her to help him for a "Proust support group" so that this group could help him finally finish À la recherche du temps perdu. (Literally that is "In Search of Lost Time", but translation of Proust, and particularly his titles, is a complex subject I may return to).

The group expanded and pretty soon they were having parties, baking Madeleine's and publishing an electronic fanzine called Proust Said That. 

This is conjecture but I think the sad history goes something like this. Ms. Segal also opened a restaurant called the Café Proust. Starting any business is a high risk activity and there is no shame, although there is much sadness, in failure. The Café went under in the slow down that occurred in the wake of 9/11. That is oddly appropriate for I cannot help but think that if Proust were still alive and still adding volumes to his great work, that he would handle and event such as 9/11 on a small canvas, perhaps talking about a Café.

In any event, when the Café was lost, I believe P Segal also lost the rights to Proust Said That. I don't know that for sure. It's conjecture. (P Segal has a blog and you can read more about her here.)

Over the years, I found that I miss reading Proust Said That. It seems to me that there is a place for a blog that approaches Proust and enthusiasms he inspires not in a scholarly or even serious way but with pure amateurism, which is to say, with love. So that is what I will do.

I'm not going to post terribly often. I will post at least once a week. The posts will all be dated Saturday but I will  probably (almost certainly) cheat. The idea is not that anyone would follow this blog but rather that the stuff will just be there waiting for Google to find it.

All the posts will be related to Proust in a  way that I find satisfactory just as, for example, Mary Magdalene is related to Proust. Perhaps you can't see why that connection is so obvious and natural to me? What I find satisfactory, you may not.