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.
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.
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