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.