It's Not You, Marcel, It's Me...

...but I think we need to see other people. No, no, dear, of course I'm not breaking up with you, it's just that I need...some...time.

So Buce to Marcel Proust, or perhaps to his shadow Marcel, hero of his 3,000-page doorstop, À la recherche du temps perdu.  Seems like only yesterday (actually, I guess it was last month) that I set out to  make the long journey through this which Edmund White calls the most respected of 20th Century novels.   I suspected what would happen, and it happened. As long as i had an hour or two or three a day, I was able to keep a rhythm, and even follow up with some of the original French.

But then school started and now here I am back in the classroom with the markedly un-Proustian agenda of bankruptcy and corporate finance.  And I can certify that Proust and the finance classroom just don't mix.  It's not the time: I'm not one to work 18 hours a day at anything, and I probably could find time for an hour, maybe even two, or three, a day to indulge my Belle Epoque enthusiasm.

I suppose you could say it's brain cells:  I've reached the age where 200,000 brain cells die every day and I just can't risk destroying too many of the survivors in a private enthusiasm. But it'd not just brain cells.  No; it is the utter discontinuity of tone, of manner, of sensibility that it takes to move from one to the other.  I woulds get the bends, and bends are not covered by my health plan.

I expect to be back in the spring, Lord willin.' And if the Lord is not willin'--if I die with a stack of Prousts on the night table--why then, you'll know that I was never bored, that I never ran out of stuff to read.

Now, exactly which things are there about financial  accounting that my students just must learn?

Twophers: a Post of Surpassing Triviality

I'm sure that this makes no difference to anybody--and I'm sure any number of people have noticed it before--but I just picked up on a couple of amusing doubles in literature.

One, Borges and Bierce. You may remember the Borges story "The Secret Miracle," about the playwright who is granted the boon of imagining his play, complete down to the last detail, in the moments before the bullets from the firing squad crash into his brain. You are perhaps even more likely to remember Ambrose Bierce's "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," and is it not the same plot--soldier at the point of execution escapes, flees home and is reunited with his loving family--but then he feels the pain in the back of his neck and we know that he has been hanged.

Oh, wait. I see that Wiki picks up the parallel here--along with others entirely unknown to me. Hah!  Or rather, O snap!  Not easy to be original in the world any more, even when sussing out parallels.  But my second pairing may be more obscure.  It starts, you can hardly be surprised, with Proust in The Guermantes Way.  The subject is Rachel "when of the Lord," the prostitute and Jew--twice an outcast--who becomes an actress, then a courtesan, then a great lady.  Of her appearance in the theatre, we learn: 

Rachel had one of those faces that distance—and not necessarily that between the auditorium and the stage, the world itself in this respect being merely a larger theater—throws into sharp outline, and which, seen close up, crumble to dust.  

Proust, Marcel (2005-05-31). The Guermantes Way: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 3 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (Kindle Locations 2972-2974). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition. 

Shrewd and subtle in its way, I suppose. But do you remember Raymond Chandler in The High Window:

 From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.

I rest my case.   Hard to believe that Chandler was a Proust fan, but you never know, or at any rate, I never know.  Maybe it was Marlowe.

Proust and Self-Parody

I apologize for my current obsession to those who come here looking for a more scattered and slapdash approach. Next week when I gear up for the classroom, I suppose I'll have to turn my mind to more mundane matters.   For the moment, it's Proust again, and this time, the matter of self-parody.

But I start with my old college bud Larry Block.  Over something like 50 years now, Larry has established himself as a journeyman producer of mystery novels (here's his Facebook fan page) with a faithful and enthusiastic audience.  Among the many virtues of his work, we can count the fact that his books are darkly funny.  But before he became a player,  he apprenticed by churning out product for an outfit called Nightstand Books, whose genre was pretty much what you might guess it to be ("books to  be held with  one hand," oh snigger snort).  There's a genial account in his personal memoir, but you probably want to read some of his novels first.

I read a few Nighstands in those palmy times--purely as a matter of personal loyalty, oh yuk yuk.   And one of the main things I remember is that they were funny--intentionally funny, in a sense that was probably apparent to the reader and certainly to the author.   "It was Tippecanoe," wrote Larry, describing the main event, "and Tyler, as well."  Now, that is funny--funny enough for a college humor magazine at least, and funny enough to fend of boredom for the ink-stained wretch in the struggle to achieve his meagre coin.   Funny, I suppose as a kind of parody, perhaps self-parody, of what might be more exalted prose.  As the links above will suggest, there is even a modest retro-fan-base for this sort of trash stuff based in large part, I suspect, on their success as comedy.

Okay. now Proust.  Among Proust's many talents, it is said that he is a master of pastiche, the imitation of other's styles.  I speak with caution because he is writing, after all, in French, and my French is so primitive that I am sure I miss the best of it.  But I do know a couple of things about pastiche. One, it's almost always funny.  Even if you are trying to be deadpan, the very idea that it can be done, inevitably turns into a joke. And two, it is possible to pastiche oneself.  Think Ernest Hemingway. Any but the most faithful would admit that almost anything Papa wrote after, say, 1922, is an imitation of his (brilliant, but brief) creative flowering.  For almost all of it, if you didn't laugh you'd jump of a bridge.  Papa, unfortunately seems not to have realized that he was writing comedy, but then his bank balance didn't seem to care.  

Now at last turn to Proust, and consider in particular his description of his attempt (unsuccessful, as it turns out) to snatch a kiss from his beloved Albertine:

I found Albertine in bed. Her white nightgown bared her throat and altered the proportions of her face, which seemed of a deeper pink, because of the warmth of the bed, or her cold, or her recent dinner; I thought of the colors I had seen close at hand a few hours before on the esplanade, which were now going to reveal their taste; her cheek was bisected from top to bottom by a lock of her long black wavy hair, which to please me she had completely undone. She smiled at me. Beside her, through the window, the valley was bright with moonlight. The sight of her naked throat and her excessively pink cheeks had so intoxicated me (that is, had so transferred reality from the world of nature into the deluge of my own sensations, which I could barely contain) as to have upset the balance between the tumultuous and indestructible immensity of the life surging through me and the paltry life of the universe. The sea, which through the window could be seen beside the valley, the swelling breasts of the closest of the Maineville cliffs, the sky where the moon had not yet reached the zenith, all of this seemed to lie as light as feathers between my eyelids, at rest upon eyeballs in which I felt the pupils had expanded and become strong enough, and ready, to hold much heavier burdens, all the mountains in the world, on their delicate surface. Even the whole sphere of the horizon did not suffice to fill their orbits. Any impingement of the natural world upon my consciousness, however mighty, would have seemed insubstantial to me; a gust of air off the sea would have seemed short-winded for the vast breaths filling my breast. I leaned over to kiss Albertine. Had death chosen that instant to strike me down, it would have been a matter of indifference to me, or, rather, it would have seemed impossible, for life did not reside somewhere outside me: all of life was contained within me. A pitying smile would have been my only response had a philosopher expressed the view that, however remote it might be now, a day was bound to come when I would die, that the everlasting forces of nature would outlive me, those forces with their divine tread grinding me like a grain of dust, that after my own extinction there would continue to be swelling-breasted cliffs, a sea, a sky, and moonlight! How could such a thing be possible? How could the world outlive me, given that I was not a mere speck lost in it—it was wholly contained within me, and it came nowhere near filling me, since, somewhere among so much unoccupied space, where other vast treasures could have been stored, I could casually toss the sky, the sea, and the cliffs! “If you don’t stop that, I’ll ring!” Albertine cried. ...

Proust, Marcel (2005-01-25). In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 2 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (Kindle Locations 8641-8659). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition. 

Can we agree on a few points here?  One, properly understood this is beautiful   Two, every word of this rings true, in the respect that it is a fair representation of any besotted adolescent on his way to home third second first base.  Three, at least if you are alert, I'd say it is also very funny: funny in its portrait of adolescent passion, but funny also in its presentation of a writer when his words get away from him.  And finally, not least important, can we stipulate that Proust is in on the joke.  He knows he is laughing at his narrator.  He may also be laughing at countless unknowns who scrivened away at their own versions of Nightstand books. And he knows, finally, that the joke is on himself.  Proust the self-parodist.  Just like Larry Block.

Proust and the Deflationary Bada Boom

You know the joke that ends "no, I'd just forgotten to put on my trunks."  It's a classic example of what I will choose to call "the deflationary bada boom,"a joke that starts with some sort of exalted narrative and then ends with a sudden, sharp return to reality.   A sting.   Bada boom.

The deflationary bada boom is everywhere in humor. Maybe it is the only kind of joke there is.  It certainly suffuses, say, the modern practice of  publishing, where nearly every subtitle takes the form of How ABC did X, found Y and wound up Z.  How a small boy from a Pennsylvania mining town won the lottery, cured cancer and wound up serving five to life in the stony lonesome. Bada boom.

As you sink in to Proust you may be surprised to discover--I was--that he is drenched in incongruity, often comic incongruity.  Look for it and you find it on almost every page.  Here's a classic example from early in Swann's Way.   The narrator is in the kitchen and the topic is asparagus:

It seemed to me that these celestial hues revealed the delicious creatures who had merrily metamorphosed themselves into vegetables and who, through the disguise of their firm, edible flesh, disclosed in these early tints of dawn, in these beginnings of rainbows, in this extinction of blue evenings, the precious essence that I recognized again when, all night long following a dinner at which I had eaten them, they played, in farces as crude and poetic as a fairy play by Shakespeare, at changing my chamber pot into a jar of perfume.

Proust, Marcel (2004-11-30). Swann's Way: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 1 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (pp. 123-124). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition. 

Bada boom.  But there is so much more.  Just a few pages later we learn how Marcel's mother, always delighted to enjoy her country walks with her family is always astonished to find herself back at her own front door.  Bada boom.  Later in the second book, Marcel takes the furniture which he has inherited from a beloved aunt and gives it to the keeper of a brothel--and not  particularly important brothel at that, bada bash bada boom boom ba.

I wouldn't be surprised if somebody has catalogued the whole lot of these things.  I have not, but I think I have read enough to note a larger point.   Try this: it seems to me that the function of all these bada booms is not mere entertainment, not mere comic relief. Rather, I'd mark them down as far more pervasive in he structure of the novel.   For what Proust is trying to explore (inter alia) is the relation between imagination and reality, between anticipation and the crude thinginess of life.

In short, irony.  Not just the irony of the comic moment, but the irony of life itself, where things are so often both less and so much more urgent than they seem.  In a splendid essay on the topic, -- writes:

Irony may be defined as the conflict of two meanings which has a dramatic structure peculiar to itself: initially, the one meaning,  the appearance, presenting itself as obvious truth, but when the context of the meaning unfolds, in depth or in time, it surprisingly discloses  conflicting meaning, the reality, measured against which the first meaning now seems false or limited and in its self-assurance, blind to its own situation.

Norman D. Knox, "Irony," Dictionary of the History of Ideas II 625-34, 626, Philip P. Weiner ed. (1973).

There is a great deal more here, from Socrates through to Northrop Frye (though unless I missed it, no mention of Proust).  And I won't try to itemize all the Proustian applications here (as if I could). As a reader, I will often enough content myself with the jokes--but with the guiding voice to remind me that things are often not as funny as they may seem.

Bada boom.

Hey, wait a minute, what did you just say?

On Proustian Rhetoric (Proust and Gibbon)

This is going to be another post about Proust, but bear with me a moment, dear reader, while I say a word about Edward Gibbon, he of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  The comparison stretches across space and time, but the points of contact shouldn't be that hard to see. Each has a name to be uttered  in hushed tones, as if  the patriarch of his particular tribe.  Both wrote long: for each there is a standard edition in three volumes.   Both are famous for the long, convoluted, serpentine sentence.

Both, in the cliché, are more talked about than read.  But hold on here a moment: I suspect that last generalization is true as far as it goes but that it obscures an important distinction.  Which is to say:  I've no doubt that the number of Proustians is small, but I'm betting that it grows over time and that Proust is slowly, incrementally, making his way into the common culture.

And Gibbon?  Well, I wouldn't be surprised to find that quite a few people have tried Gibbon.  But my own bet is that very few have gotten beyond the first hundred pages.  Or maybe the famous "Chapters 15 and 16," where Gibbon takes his most enthusiastic swipe at Christianity.  I suspect that few aside from a handful of academics who do it for money ever complete the long, slow, slog through the Byzantines (full disclosure: I have not).

And here's one very good reason why people slack off after a while: Gibbon after a while gets really boring, in a way that Proust does not.  

You laugh, or, more likely, snort.  You say that both Proust and Gibbon are boring, and in the same way; long sentences and longer paragraphs that put you to sleep before you're half done.  Well, I'll grant you long (mostly--see infra), and I'll grant you difficult in the sense that it may take work to disentangle all the cantilevered commas and semicolons and get to a point.  Difficult in the sense of complex, then, although for my money, neither one is difficult in the sense of being obscure: with each, if you disentangle the threads you will find that the end product is entirely clear.'

So, what is the difference? The difference, dear reader, is that Proust's rhetoric--his orotund periods, if you will--display an amazing flexibility.  He's got easily a dozen, maybe several dozen, different modes of expression, and he is a master of flexibility, a master of fitting the word to the action.  Gibbon, after a while you realize, just keeps repeating the same damn thing.  Hypnotic for 10 pages, soporific for 100, and nobody knows what it is for 1,000 because by that time you are all dead.

Proust's rhetorical fluency does, I admit, require a certain kind of attention.  That's one reason why I so much enjoy Neville Jason's superb audio version.  Jason clearly gets it, and he helps you to get it, to understand just what Proust can do not just with the vocabulary but with the structure of the language.

[Idle aside: it just lately struck me that Proust and Hemingway would have lived "together," as it were, for a short time in Paris, just blocks apart: I read that Hemingway took up residence in December of 1921 and Proust died in November of 1922.   Fun to imagine what they might have said to each other but I can't imagine the conversation lasting very long.  Anyway, back to Jason and Proust.]

Indeed, Jason is so good with the language that I admit I find myself not just subvocalizing but actually reading aloud long with the written text, just to catch the flavor.  Probably freaks out the guy on the next elliptical machine, though I try to keep my voice down.  And it is something I can't begin to imagine myself doing for very long with Gibbon.

Marcel as Pug

This may be no more than a quibble--and anyway, I suppose there is a vast literature on the topic with which I am vastly unacquainted--but let me quibble away.  One thing I really don't get about "Marcel" in the novel is how he gets to be buds with all these important people.  Robert Saint Loup showers him with friendship.  Madame de Villeparisis takes him for a drive in the country.  Swann addresses him (even when a child) as "vous."  Even La Duchesse de Guermantes gravely smiles at him from her box at the theatre.   After a while you begin to think you are reading about "Pug" Henry, the Robert Mitchum character in the Herman Wouk novel who just happened to meet everybody  who was anybody in World War II.   Or Mel Brooks' 2,000-year-old man, who knew Jesus Christ ("thin lad …  Always asked for water").

You may not notice it on first or second reading (I don't think I gave it any thought until just now).  But once you do think of it, you can't help but think of it as absurd.  Who is this wimpy, neurasthenic  after all, who gets singled out and taken in hand by the good and great?   So posed, this is a problem that needs some sort of solution.

I suppose there are various lines of attack.  You could put this off as a mere literary convenience, but Proust doesn't seem to allow that. Elstir the painter for example, is insistent that it is he and not St. Loup whose visit he solicits--no mere happenstance here.    You could simply throw in your hand and write  it off as just the odd bit of  narcissism ("how could everyone not love me?") and I suspect there has to be some of that. 

But if you must have a respectable explanation, I think I can offer a possibility. That is Proust-the-author (similar to, but not the same as "Marcel" the protagonist) does in fact seem to have been almost preternaturally shrewd in his literary or artistic, not to say his human, judgments (In this respect, for whatever it may be worth, he is entirely unlike the 2,000 year old man.  The Brooks routine is funny precisely because Brooks does not get it.  I'm arguing that Marcel really does.). It is just remotely possible that some grownups, men of the world and suchlike, really did take a fancy to this kid, and really did find themselves treating him as a person who must be taken seriously, no matter his age and his superficially unprepossessing manner.  Maybe Proust-the-author can't quite show all this in the novel because, living inside this bubble of sympathy--maybe he never noticed it.

Maybe, but I don't think that will quite wash. If Proust-the-author is so insightful about so much else in the world (and he was) how did he not notice this curiosity of relationships surrounding Marcel-the-character.  I confess that beyond this offering, I got nothing.  And I'll have to learn either to ignore it (actually, I probably can do that) or go back to treating him like "Pug" Henry or the 2,000-year-old man.

Afterthought:  Another example: Johnson's Boswell.  Nobody, and particularly not Boswell, can comprehend what the great man thinks of the impressionable young puppy.  But Johnson's affection for the young man seems sincere and enduring.

Nobody Does Condescension like You-know-who

I was going to write something about fear and loathing in the  Duck Dynasty and the wingnuts' rediscovery of the fairness doctrine.  But my betters are probably all over it and I'd rather get back to my reading so I content myself with an excerpt of an insight at which Marcel Proust has no peer--the gracious condescension of a great lady.  Here, the young Marcel encounters--no, better, is encountered by--the Princesse de Luxembourg:

Despite her wish not to appear to dwell in spheres far above ours, she must have misjudged the distance between us; and her eyes, not properly adjusted, overflowed with such loving sweetness that I would not have been surprised if she had reached out a hand and patted us, as though we were a brace of docile animals, poking our heads through the railings at the Zoo in the Bois de Boulogne. This idea of being animals in the Zoo was instantly underlined for me.  It was the hour when hawkers of sweets, cakes, and other delicacies haunt the esplanade, barking their wares in strident tones. At a loss to show her goodwill toward us in a fitting manner, the Princess stopped the next one who came along. All he had left was a little loaf of rye bread, the sort you feed to the ducks. The Princess took it, saying to me, “This is for your grandmother.” But she then handed it to me, with a smile full of feeling: “You be the one to give it to her,” meaning no doubt that my enjoyment would be greater if nobody came between me and the animals. Other hawkers having gathered around us,

Proust, Marcel (2005-01-25). In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 2 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (Kindle Locations 4742-4749). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition. 

Is This Your First Time?

The other day  I was nattering on about seeing my favorite Caravaggio "for the first time."  Count on Proust to remind me that "first time" is a far more complicated concept than it may seem at first blush.  Here he is talking about music, but I don't see why you couldn't carry it over to art in general or, for that matter, to life itself:

 Listening for the first time to music that is even a little complicated, one can often hear nothing in it. And yet, later in life, when I had heard the whole piece two or three times, I found I was thoroughly familiar with it. So the expression “hearing something for the first time” is not inaccurate. If one had distinguished nothing in it on the real first occasion, as one thought, then the second or the third would also be first times; and there would be no reason to understand it any better on the tenth occasion. What

Proust, Marcel (2005-01-25). In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 2 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (Kindle Locations 1887-1891). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition.

He elaborates:

What is missing the first time is probably not understanding but memory. Our memory span, relative to the complexity of the impressions that assail it as we listen, is infinitesimal, as short-lived as the memory of a sleeping man who has a thousand thoughts which he instantly forgets, or the memory of a man in his dotage, who cannot retain for more than a minute anything he has been told. Our memory is incapable of supplying us with an instantaneous recollection of this multiplicity of impressions. Even so, a recollection does

Proust, Marcel (2005-01-25). In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 2 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (Kindle Locations 1890-1894). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition.

And a bit later, he writes of the fictional composer, Vinteuil:

In the Vinteuil Sonata, the beauties one discovers soonest are also those which pall soonest, a double effect with a single cause: they are the parts that most resemble other works, with which one is already familiar. But when those parts have receded, we can still be captivated by another phrase, which, because its shape was too novel to let our mind see anything there but confusion, had been made undetectable and kept intact; and the phrase we passed by every day unawares, the phrase which had withheld itself, which by the sheer power of its own beauty had become invisible and remained unknown to us, is the one that comes to us last of all. But it will also be the last one we leave. We shall love it longer than the others, because we took longer to love it. This length of time that it takes someone to penetrate a work of some depth, as it took me with the Vinteuil sonata, is only a foreshortening, and as it were a symbol, of all the years, or even centuries perhaps, which must pass before the public can come to love a masterpiece that is really new.

Proust, Marcel (2005-01-25). In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 2 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (Kindle Locations 1909-1916). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition.

That last, I suspect you might apply to Proust himself.  So what could I have possibly meant when I spoke of my shock at seeing the Caravaggio "for the first time"--?  My best guess is this:I do remember being bowled over when I first saw The Calling of Saint Matthew. If pressed, I'd still say it is "the best" Caravaggio (but why let myself be pressed?).  But it wasn't my first Caravaggio.  Earlier--some years earlier, in fact--I had seen the Crucifixion of Saint Peter  and The Conversion of Saint Paul.  I knew I was in the presence of something important--knew it, not least, because I had been told as much by my friend and guide.   Indeed, the same day that I saw the Saint Matthew, I had earlier seen the Madonna dei Pellegrini in the Chiesa San'Agostono just up the street.  So I was, as its were, primed.

Was it Vladimir Nabokov who said that one should never read a book for the first time?  Maybe.  He apparently did say:

When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting.

Quoted here.  And come to think of it, I am remembering one person who said we should never read (a certain) novel for the first time.  It was Joseph Epstein. The novel he had in mind was À la Recherche du Temps Perdu.

Footnote:  I just pulled down my copy of Terence Kilmartin's fine Reader's Guide to Marcel Proust where, inter alia, he lists all the "persons" listed in the novel--i.e., authentic human beings, as distinct from "characters" (they get their own list).  There must be well over 500 such"persons." Caravaggio is not one of them

Old Norpois

Reading Proust, I've always had a soft spot for Old Norpois, the shrewd, some would say cynical and sardonic, master of affairs and stalwart of the reactionary virtues.  You, perhaps, are not impressed. But do you know that Napoleon III might have saved himself had he taken the old scoundrel's advice?

My father was aware that M. de Norpois had been perhaps the only one to warn Napoleon III about Prussia’s growing power and warlike intentions, and that Bismarck had a high regard for his intelligence.

Proust, Marcel (2005-01-25). In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 2 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (Kindle Locations 293-295). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition. 

Later, papa tries to draw the old man out on the regime in Germany:

"I was pretty sure the Kaiser’s recent telegram would not be very much to your taste,” my father said. 

As much as to say, “That man!,” M. de Norpois cast his eyes heavenward: “For one thing, it was an act of arrant ingratitude. It was worse than a crime—it was a mistake! And as for the stupidity of it, the only word for that is monumental. For another thing, if someone doesn’t put a stop to it, the man who gave Bismarck his marching orders is quite capable of repudiating each and every one of Bismarck’s policies. And when that happens, we’ll see a fine mess!”

Proust, Marcel (2005-01-25). In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 2 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (Kindle Locations 748-753). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition. 

"That man" is pretty clearly Wilhelm II who ascended to the throne as Kaiser in 1888.  I'm a little shaky on just when this conversation would have taken place:  the Kaiser pushed Bismarck out of office in 1890; Bismarck died in 1898.   The scene seems to be set prior to World War I.   The book wasn't finally published until 1919 but Proust had been working on the project for years and I really can't say whether it was written before or after the War (i.e., careful students may know but I do not).  "Worse than a crime, a mistake," I have always heard attributed to that prince of old scoundrels, Talleyrand himself, but apparently there are other contenders.   In either event, it is said to describe "Napoleon’s execution of the Duc d’Enghien in 1804." 

Proust on Love: A Footnote

I suppose somebody has made this point somewhere but I haven't seen it so I'll give it a try.

The subject is Proust and love  Or lust, or passion, whatever.  There's certainly a lot of it in Proust.  Indeed sometimes you forget there is anything else.

But as many have observed, if love it's a bleakly self-absorbed sort of love.  It's hard to think of any lover in Proust who shows any real tenderness for the "beloved," any concern for their well-being.  Think Swann and Odette, where the very title "Un Amour de Swann," "Swann in Love" is  a kind of acid irony.  I'd sign on to this view, and add that it is one of the things, perhaps the main thing, that hangs a cloud over so insightful a narrative.

But here's what I never noticed before: the married couples.  The Verdurins. The Cottards, Heck, Marcel's own parents. Even--though I am a bit more tentative here--the Duke and Duchess de Guermantes.  Perhaps there are others.

I'm not suggesting there is any real passion here--there just might be, but we don't see it. But neither is there any of the isolated obsession. Instead, what we have is couples that just seem to rub along, that wear each other like an old shoe.  

I'm not exactly how this works in practice but that also is part of my point: for the most part, Proust doesn't tell us.  For such a great student of the human soul, he seems oddly uninterested in these relationships.  It's almost as if they aren't there.  For your weekend homework, discuss where "just rubbing along" and "private obsession" rank in the hierarchy of loving relationships.

Undocumented Extra: I do love this little tidbit which suggests what challenges Swan and Odette face as they try to rub along together:

 As for Vermeer of Delft, she asked if he had ever suffered because of a woman, if it was a woman who had inspired him, and when Swann admitted to her that no one knew anything about that, she lost interest in the painter. 

Proust, Marcel (2004-11-30). Swann's Way: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 1 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (p. 250). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition.

More Proust, Joe Biden Memorial Edition: "If She Knew Me, She Would Like Me"

I seem to be yielding to the lazy temptation to clog the blog with gobs of Proust.  I will try to avoid the standard stuff (petites madeleines the steeples at Martinville) and choose pieces for which I can find a reason.  

So for today.  My good buddy Joel once said that the mark of success for a celebrity is to convince the Mugginses that "if he knew me, he would like me."  So Franklin D. Roosevelt saying "and you are my friends."  So Ronald Reagan saying--oh, whatever it was that Ronald Reagan said. And here, in Swann's Way, young Marcel gazing for the first time on Mme. de Guermantes, living avatar of a clan that can trace its lineage back to Gilbert the Bad, in whose chapel she now appears.  This being Proust, we are not surprised to learn that our narrator encounters a confused mismatch between reality and expectation. Still, much of the aura remains.

[I] can still see her, especially at the moment when the procession entered the sacristy, which was lit by the hot and intermittent sun of a day of wind and storm, and in which Mme. de Guermantes found herself surrounded by all those people of Combray whose names she did not even know, but whose inferiority too loudly proclaimed her supremacy for her not to feel a sincere benevolence toward them, and whom, besides, she hoped to impress even more by her good grace and simplicity. Thus, not being able to bestow those deliberate gazes charged with specific meaning which we address to someone we know, but only to allow her distracted thoughts to break free incessantly before her in a wave of blue light which she could not contain, she did not want that wave to disturb or appear to disdain those common people whom it encountered in passing, whom it touched again and again. I can still see, above her silky, swelling mauve tie, the gentle surprise in her eyes, to which she had added, without daring to intend it for anyone but so that all might take their share of it, the slightly shy smile of a sovereign who looks as though she is apologizing to her vassals and loves them. That smile fell on me, who had not taken my eyes off her. Recalling, then, the gaze she had rested on me during the Mass, as blue as a ray of sunlight passing through Gilbert the Bad’s window, I said to myself: “Why, she’s actually paying attention to me.” I believed that she liked me, that she would still be thinking of me after she had left the church, that because of me perhaps she would be sad that evening at Guermantes. And immediately I loved her, because if it may sometimes be enough for us to fall in love with a woman if she looks at us with contempt, as I had thought Mlle. Swann had done, and if we think she will never belong to us, sometimes, too, it may be enough if she looks at us with kindness, as Mme. de Guermantes was doing, and if we think she may someday belong to us.

Proust, Marcel (2004-11-30). Swann's Way: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 1 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (pp. 181-182). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition. 

Proust: Some Beginning Thoughts and Some Afterthoughts

I suppose it is some kind of irony that I am beginning my reading of Proust just as the rest of the world is finishing its. Fine, big deal: maybe I am in some other time zone. I'm not even sure what started me on this latest exercise although I do know I was flailing around for something to sink my teeth into; and it may have had something to do with this guy.

This would be my third reading of Proust, more or less, if I tough it out, which I very likely will not. I'm a little coy with the "more or less;" reason is that I never read it through as a sustained exercise but over the years, I'd say I've been through it twice--more if you count those wonderful Neville Jason CD (I did the "abridged" not the whole nine yards).  I even had the Jasons with me for a couple of days while I languished sick in my hotel room in Uzbekistan and that was a little weird, let me tell you: they were on shuffle and I was super medicated and I would drift in and out of these glorious, disconnected little jewels.

I can note a few things about this new venture that will distinguish it from previous outings.  One, an insight I think I owe to the best of all short intros to Proust (at least that I've seen).  That would be Sur Proust by the French belle-lettrist Jean-François Revel.  It was Revel, if memory serves, who argued that Proust is perhaps best understood not as a conventional novelist but as an essayist in the tradition of Montaigne.  That strikes me as entirely right. Think of it: the plot of Proust is improvisational, almost perfunctory.  But every page or two or three, Proust is saying something on the order of "it reminded me of.." and flying off into one of those jewels I was describing before.    Montaigne also, of course, takes second place to no on as a student of his own inner life. Well: to no one except Proust.

Another: I think I understand Proust's style better than I did.  Everyone talks about the famously long sentences. There are plenty of those.  My college dorm-mate Mark Strand called them "great cathedrals of commas and semicolons."  And dense, no doubt about that.

But be careful here: dense but not abstruse.  I indulged myself by rebuking an old friend just this afternoon for treating Joyce and Proust as the same.  I think that is wildly of base.  Joyce is a trickster, a leprechaun.  He takes pride in his puzzle-making.   He used to boast that people would still be trying to figure him out after 100 years.  Proust's sentences may be sinuous, serpentine. But disentangle them and their meaning is always exactly clear.  I'm pretty sure there is a rhetorical purpose to the complexity (though I probably haven't doped it out),  But I know there is one, and that it adds to the book's bite, power and drive).

[And BTWFWIW, the book is not all serpentine sentences.  "Combray" in Swann's Way can be almost daunting in its complexity. But turn the page and begin "Swan in Love" and you find yourself in an entirely different world.  Somebody (Joseph Epstein) said that Proust set out to write a trashy novel and by mistake wrote a masterpiece.  "Swann in Love makes that case."]

And finally, the French.  The first time through, I stuck to the old standard Scott-Moncrieff translation.    The second, I went for Kilmartin.  This time, I thought well, I really  ought to try the original. That was when I downloaded a French version (along with a Lydia Davis English) plus a French dictionary.  And it worked like ma--well, no, not quite magic.   Passages that I remember well in English--those I find I can plow through in the French.  Others--well, I can make some headway with extensive access to the dictionary.  Too bad.  I can see that for a book like this, there really is no second best.  But the fact is, I'd rather read than struggle.  Maybe in my fourth read...

Not Another Thing, Ma, I'm Stuffed...

Forget about Thanksgiving.  Here is Sunday lunch with Marcel's family at Combray under the ministrations of  Françoise, the family's apparently immortal retainer.

[A]u fond permanent d'œufs, de côtelettes, de pommes de terre, de confitures, de biscuits, qu'elle ne nous annonçait même plus, Françoise ajoutait— selon les travaux des champs et des vergers , le fruit de la marée, les hasards du commerce, les politesses des voisins et son propre génie, et si bien que notre menu, comme ces quatre-feuilles qu'on sculptait au XIIIe siècle au portail des cathédrales, reflétait un peu le rythme des saisons et les épisodes de la vie—: une barbue parce que la marchande lui en avait garanti la fraîcheur, une dinde parce qu'elle en avait vu une belle au marché de Roussainville -le-Pin, des cardons à la moelle parce qu'elle ne nous en avait pas encore fait de cette manière-là, un gigot rôti parce que le grand air creuse et qu'il avait bien le temps de descendre d'ici sept heures, des épinards pour changer , des abricots parce que c'était encore une rareté, des groseilles parce que dans quinze jours il n'y en aurait plus, des framboises que M. Swann avait apportées exprès , des cerises, les premières qui vinssent du cerisier du jardin après deux ans qu'il n'en donnait plus, du fromage à la crème que j'aimais bien autrefois, un gâteau aux amandes parce qu'elle l'avait commandé la veille, une brioche parce que c'était notre tour de l'offrir.

Marcel Proust. Du côté de chez Swann (Kindle Locations 113-1144). 

[U]pon a permanent foundation of eggs, cutlets, potatoes, jams, biscuits which she no longer even announced to us, Françoise would add—depending on the labors in the fields and orchards, the fruit of the tide, the luck of the marketplace, the kindness of neighbors, and her own genius, and with the result that our menu, like the  quatrefoils carved on the portals of cathedrals in the thirteenth century, reflected somewhat the rhythm of the seasons and the incidents of daily life—a brill because the monger had guaranteed her that it was fresh, a turkey hen because she had seen a large one at the Roussainville-le-Pin market, cardoons with marrow because she had not made them for us that way before, a roast leg of mutton because fresh air whets the appetite and it would have plenty of time to “descend” in the next seven hours, spinach for a change, apricots because they were still uncommon, gooseberries because in two weeks there would not be any more, raspberries that M. Swann had brought especially, cherries, the first that had come from the cherry tree in the garden after two years in which it had not given any, cream cheese, which I liked very much at one time, an almond cake because she had ordered it the day before, a brioche because it was our turn to present it.  

Proust, Marcel (2004-11-30). Swann's Way: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 1 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (pp. 72-73). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition. 

New Epigraph Again

Proust, quoting.  A footnote to the Lydia Davis translation identifies it as Corneille, La Mort de Pompée, act III, scene 4.  But to gets more abstruse than that. The original French Proust says "Seigneur, que de vertus vous nous faites haïr!  But Davis says the Corneille reads "O ciel, que de vertus vous me faites haïr!" Haven't a clue whether the change was a slip on the author's part or a particular point about the speaking character.

Auto-correct kept telling me to say "What virus," etc.  The reader is left to meditate on the meaning of that version.

Swann's Way with the Rush of Events

Now let me see--shall I go surf my Feedly or shall I settle down with some Proust?  Oh, I have it--let's ask M. Swann:

Ce que je reproche aux journaux c'est de nous faire attention tous les jours à des choses insignifiantes tandis que nous lisons trois ou quatre fois dans notre vie les livres où il y a des choses essentielles. Du moment que nous déchirons fiévreusement chaque matin la bande du journal, alors on devrait changer les choses et mettre dans le journal, moi je ne sais pas, les... Pensées de Pascal! 

--Marcel Proust. Du côté de chez Swann (Kindle Locations 392-394).

What I fault the newspapers for is that day after day they draw our attention to insignificant things whereas only three or four times in our lives do we read a book in which there is something really essential.  Since we tear the band off the newspaper so feverishly every morning, they ought to change things and put into the newspaper, oh, I don't know, perhaps … Pacsal's Pensées!"

--Marcel Proust, Swann's Way (Lydia Davis trans. Kindle page 26), 

Right, that settles it.  Pascal it is then. 

French Face: The Ruinatioin of the Duke

Reflecting yesterday on French "face," in particular as represented by Marcel Proust, I found myself remembering what is surely funniest yet also most horrifying episodes in the whole of Proust's long novel.  Our subject is the encounter--really, two encounters--between "the Princess's usher" (unnamed) and "Son Altesse, Monseigneur le duc de Châtellerault."  We begin in the shadows:

Now, a few days earlier, the Princess’s usher had met in the Champs-Elysées a young man whom he had found charming but whose identity he had been unable to establish. Not that the young man had not shewn himself as obliging as he had been generous. All the favours that the usher had supposed that he would have to bestow upon so young a gentleman, he had on the contrary received. But M. de Châtellerault was as reticent as he was rash; he was all the more determined not to disclose his incognito since he did not know with what sort of person he was dealing; his fear would have been far greater, although quite unfounded, if he had known. He had confined himself to posing as an Englishman, and to all the passionate questions with which he was plied by the usher, desirous to meet again a person to whom he was indebted for so much pleasure and so ample a gratuity, the Duke had merely replied, from one end of the Avenue Gabriel to the other: “I do not speak French.”

From there we emerge into the blinding light--the Princess's dazzling party, where that same usher presides as gatekeeper, "garbed in black like a headsman, surrounded by a group of lackeys in the most cheerful livery, lusty fellows ready to seize hold of an intruder and cast him out of doors."  Monseigneur le duc approaches the entryway, and disaster:

Having to respond to all the smiles, all the greetings waved to him from inside the drawing-room, he had not noticed the usher. But from the first moment the usher had recognised him. The identity of this stranger, which he had so ardently desired to learn, in another minute he would know. When he asked his ‘Englishman’ of the other evening what name he was to announce, the usher was not merely stirred, he considered that he was being indiscreet, indelicate. He felt that he was about to reveal to the whole world (which would, however, suspect nothing) a secret which it was criminal of him to force like this and to proclaim in public. Upon hearing the guest’s reply: “Le duc de Châtellerault,” he felt such a burst of pride that he remained for a moment speechless. The Duke looked at him, recognised him, saw himself ruined, while the servant, who had recovered his composure and was sufficiently versed in heraldry to complete for himself an appellation that was too modest, shouted with a professional vehemence softened by an emotional tenderness: “Son Altesse Monseigneur le duc de Châtellerault!” 

 --Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain Chapter  1; 

vol. 4 of Remembrance of things Past, 

translated from the French by C. K. Scott Moncrieff 

(Sodom et Gomorrhe, Tome 4 of À la Recherche du temps perdu)

 

Proust's Monocles, and Other Man/Machine Confusions

In his indispensable Reader's Guide to Remembrance of Things Past ((1984) translator Terence Kilmartin devotes a 12-line entry to the topic of "monocles." I find fully a dozen characters whose lives are enhanced, clarified or otherwise made this little sliver of glass.

Some are straightforward. Baron de Charlus, perhaps the most interesting (male) character in the book, has the least problematical monocle; it is just there. (II: 278) Mme de Verdurin (newly redefined as the Princess de Guermantes, at least get to use hers: She "fixe[s] her great monocle in her round eye, with an expression half of amusement, half of apology for her inability to sustain gaiety for any length of time ... " (III: 1033)

Monocles come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Thus the Marquis de Foresetelle's is "minute and rimless...like a superfluous cartilage the presence of which is inexplicable and its substance unimaginable." (I:356) But M. de Saint-Candé's "encircled, like Saturn, with an enormous ring, was the center of gravity of the face.." (I:356)

Other monocles have more complex assignments. General de Frobervilles's is "stuck between his eyelids like a shell-splinter ... a monstrous wound which it might have been glorious to receive but which it was indecent to expose" (I:355). M. de Bréauté sports his "as a festive badge...[it] bore, glued to its other side, like a specimen prepared on a slide for the microscope, an infinitesimal gaze..." (I:356); his "smiles [come] filtered through the glass of his monocle" (II:447); cf. (II:679). But Mr. Palancy, with "his huge carp's head ... had the air of carrying about upon his person only an accidental and perhaps purely symbolical fragment of the glass wall of his aquarium..." (I:356-7); cf. ( II: 39): "unconscious of the press of curious gazers, behind the glass wall of an aquarium."

But in others, there is a sometimes-subtle shift to a more unsettling role. Thus,
The Marquis de Cambramer's monocle "protect[s], like the glass over a valuable picture," a deformity in his eyeball. (II:1101) Protects? Granted we may be observing a mere passive instrumentality, but it is hard to escape the suspicion that it may be the monocle itself engaged in the act of protecting.

So also, the duc de Guermantes:his monocle has a "gay flash" (II:49) We can accept the "flash" as as reflection of the sunlight, but in what sense is the monocle "gay"? If this seems too picky; note that few pages earlier we were told tht the monocle is "quizzical." (II:27). Quizzical? So also Swann's monocle. Odette finds it "tremendously smart" (I:268). Swann removes it "like an importunate, worrying thought ... from whose misty surface, with his handkerchief, he sought to obliterate his cares" (1:377-8). Worrying? The Monocle has his cares?

Two other monocles exceed all others in their purposeful activity. First, consider Marcel's old friend, Bloch: "By introducing an element of machinery into Bloch's face [his] monocle absolved it of all those difficulties which a human face is normally called upon to discharge, such as being beautiful or expressing intelligence or kindliness or effort. The monocle's mere presence even absolved an interlocutor ... from asking himself whether the face was pleasant to look at or not... [B]ehind the lens of this monocle, Block was newly installed in a position as lofty, as remote and as comfortable as if it had been the glass partiation of a limousine ..." (III: 996)

And if he monocle engaged in the act of absolution is not enough, consider at last the most active, the most playful, the most alive of all monocles--a monocle with at least as much character as its owner himelf. That would be the monocle of Marcel's friend Robrt St. Loup, who "strode rapidly across he whole width of the hotel, seeming to be in pursuit of his monocle, which kept darting away in front of him like a butterfly." (I: 783-4). Later it "resume[s] its gambolings on the sunlit road, with the elegance and mastery which a great piaanist contrives to display in the simplest stroke of execution..." Elsewhere we have "...his monocle spinning in the air before him..." (II: 68)

I think there may be a more pervasive point underneath all this frivolity. Start with one clear principle: Proust is a very funny writer--sometimes and earthy or a bawdy writer with a sense of the absurd that could come straight out of a Feydeau farce. Moreview Proust acquired a lot of his world-view from his near-contemporary, the philosopher Henry Bergson. For Bergson, comedy was a person acting like a machine. There may be more to it than that; others have suggested that you can make comedy when a machine acts like a person.

Once you think about Proust in this context, you find suggestive examples everywhere. Madame Cambramer, seeking to impress on those around her that she has an appreciation for great music, undertakes to bob her head back and forth like a metronome; but her diamond earrings snag in her bodice show show she has ceaselessly to rearrange herself, all the time seeking not to miss a beat. Berma in Phèdre is a branch of coral in an aquarium (M. de Palancey's?) (I:732) Marcel remembers Albertine the cyclist "speeding through Balbec on her mythological wheels" (II: 498) ((Kilmartin gives eight lines to "bicycles"). Marcel disgraces Aunt Léonie's sofa by losing his virginity on it; he disgraces his beloved grandmother's sofa by presenting it to a brothel. The 1.22 train to Normandy is "fine, generous." (I:418-19) The aeroplane over Versailles is a "little insect." (III:413). And so it goes. In a world like this, for a man to be led around by his monocle is a small matter indeed.

Warm Appreciation: Proust in Painting

I don't buy a lot of art books; I tend not to look at them a second time, and they are inconvenient to store. But here's a gem: Eric Karpeles' Proust in Painting, a collection of 206 paintings, each linked to the passage in Remembrance of Things Past in which it is mentioned.

The book is more than just a laborious exercise in archival research (altough it is that). Karpeles also offers crisp and pointed introductions to each pairing. And he throws in some shrewd addditional commentary in extensive footnotes (unfortunately, in tiny type). In a jacket blurb, the historian and critic Richard Howard expresses surprise in the discovery that Proust's ventures into art were not just window dressing, but "bearers of allusive meaning, which makes [Proust's work] the most powerfully inclusive experience in modern reading." One can only wish that somebody would do the same thing with Proust's music.

I was tempted to put up samples here, but Karpeles has his own website where he presents his own material graciously and with aplomb, so I am pleased just to let him speak for himself.

Great Chain of Being

My 73d birthday today. As Saul Bellow used to say, I don't need to visit cemeteries; the ghosts come and visit me. Now this:

Quand nous avons dépassé un certain âge, l'âme de l'enfant que nous fûmes et l'âme des morts dont nous sommes sortis viennent nous jeter a poignée leur richesses et leurs mauvais sorts, demandant à coopérer aux nouveaux sentiments que nous éprouvons et dans lesquels, effacant leur ancienne effigie, nous les refondons en une création originale. ... Nous devons recevoir, dès une certaine heure, tous les parents arrivés de si loin et assemblés autour de nois.

That is:

When we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child that we were and the souls of the dead from whom we sprang come and shower upon us their riches and their spells, asking to be allowed to contribute to the new emotions which we feel and in which, erasing their former image, we recast them in an original creation. … We have to give hospitality, at a certain stage in our lives, to all our relatives who have journeyed so far and gathered round us.

--Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past V, 82

What Do You Do to Stay Sane?

Research Digest asks: what do you do to stay sane? Tyler Cowen rounds up some plausible suspects: surprise hugs (watch it there, big guy); music. Commentators add good stuff, but I offer an item I haven't seen elsewhere: reading. But not just any kind of reading: I mean the kind of reading you turn to for solace, or as a means of therapy. Some people would interpret this to mean "reading the Bible;" actually, I can understand this choice, if you are choosy about how you read: (stick close to Song of Songs or Ecclesiastes; go easy on Leviticus). But my own choice would run elsewhere--specifically to Shakespeare, and Proust.

I don't want to make elaborate pretensions here: I don't think I've read an entire Shakespeare play, cover to cover since--oh, heavens, I can't remember when. But I do keep a copy of the Penguin Complete at the bedside, and I find it is the kind of thing I can dip into at any of 100 places and find something familiar and consoling and (often enough) still thrilling after all these years. Lately I've found I can do the same with Proust: in English at least; I am stretching for the French but I'm not there yet.

I can also work a bit with stuff that I have memorized: half a dozen Shakespeare sonnets, a scattering of speeches, fragments (mostly fragments) of other things; my only regret is that I haven't memorized more. Meanwhile:

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?