Natalie and I, as we have read through Carol Mavor's Reading Boyishly, have been really struck by how the images work and affect the reader. As such, Natalie hoped that we might incorporate images into how we relate to Proust, how we experience Proust, and so on. I think we have all found Proust challenging in very strange ways and at times we relied heavily on images -- the squid -- so, I hope that we can incorporate these images into the blog. Additionally, perhaps, we can move beyond images and move to moving images, music, etc. And, of course, who could ever forget Moynan's quixotism: Proust on Stage.

J.A.

This seems like an appropriate image, but I can't figure out how to incorporate the image here. So here is the link. (Edited by natalie).

Tree Erections

Just an excerpt from something I've been working on ...

-darcy

K---, my friend, had just flown in to Toronto for the weekend to go to the British embassy and receive his British citizenship. We met up at a bar near my house. He slapped me on the back and I thought of the time when I had stepped off a train in Delhi and, as I was trying to fend off an aggressive vendor, he had jumped up behind me and grabbed onto my back. He swung around me and I almost fell over. The vendor, typically aggressive, seeing now that I was no longer alone, had thankfully given up and was gone. I had seen K--- since then, but this is the incident that always comes to mind when we are reunited after a long absence, as though it had become my person symbol for reunion itself. At the time, I had flown from Japan to India to visit K---, and his partner, Z---, who were spending half a year traveling across the country, staying in Buddhist monasteries, working on farms, and writing lots of poetry. K--- was always the free spirit, more courageous than I. I was making a decent teacher’s salary in Japan off the government’s dollar, working ten hours a day, whereas he was scraping by on his own in Halifax by publishing his poetry, catering, waiting tables, and, when weather permitted, teaching sailing with his partner at a sea school. Circumstances such as his allowed for a type of contemplation that I, a constant slave to small children, marking, and paper work, had no privilege to entertain. India had enabled for K--- such insights as

Ultimately, we all

have to wander a cold city

looking for a place

to piss.

Whereas I would piss everyday but think nothing of it. Piss was to me no different than that tree stump in front of the school, which, each early morning I would ride my bike by but, apparently, never really see. More than a year after I started teaching, I asked a student, half-interested, about the photograph of a tree that was hanging in the school hallway beside all the cubby holes. Apparently it had been cut down several years earlier, but the stump was still there.

--- “You know the stump in front of the school?” No, I didn’t, I don’t think so. Wait, maybe? I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it ...

For Marcel, trees, extending far beyond the reach of his short, and, much like Proust’s, sickly life, reminded him of his mortality; and in doing so they reminded him of the urgency of his task. They urged him to get to work: “When I reflected that their trees -- pear-trees, apple-trees, tamarisks -- would outlive me, I seemed to be receiving from them a silent counsel to set myself to work at last, before the hour of eternal rest had yet struck” (IV 560).

Was I, too, procrastinating, yet oblivious to my procrastination? Certainly, it seemed like I was doing a lot of work. But the days, they would blend together. There really is no difference between tedious work and absolute idleness. In both, time becomes empty. “Homogenous”, even, to quote Benjamin. As an aside, I remember in grade school that a sex education teacher who was teaching us about erections once told the class that ‘erections could happen any time, any place. You could even get an erection just by staring at a tree.’ The whole class was chuckling, the story became legend. Tree erections. Yet this is so Proustian, is it not? The tree that for no apparent reason arouses intense pleasure. I could imagine Proust for hours trying to decipher the reason why a tree gave him an erection, just as he tried to understand the pleasure aroused from his cup of tea. He would walk up to the tree again and again, or turn away and, trying to trick himself into repeating the experience again for the first time, whip back around, but the feeling he had before would not come back.

The Secular Scripture and Proust

While writing the dissertation, I came across this quotation from Northrop Frye's The Secular Scripture and couldn't help but think of Proust -- indeed, one wonders if we can read theory without Proust...

The general theme of descent, we saw, was that of a growing confusion of identity and of restrictions on action. There is a break in consciousness at the beginning, with analogies to falling asleep, followed by a descent to a lower world which is sometimes a world of cruelty and imprisonment, sometimes an oracular cave. In descent there is a growing isolation and immobility: charms and spells hold one motionless; human beings are turned into subhuman creatures, and made more mechanical in behavior; hero or heroine are trapped in labyrinths or prisons. The narrative themes and images of ascent are much the same in reverse, and the chief conceptions are those of escape, remembrance, or discovery of one’s real identity, growing freedom, and the breaking of enchantment.

Marcel wanted to be a writer, but he always felt like he was not naturally good at it. I understand how he feels because I don't just love graphic novels, I want to be one. Well, I guess I want to draw one, be in one, etc. So I started. Proust had the guts to start writing despite his lack of confidence, so I am following his initiative. Here is a portrait of Proust that I copied.

It is nothing special, but it is a start. I think I will use it for our blog header since it is boring at the moment and I have no photos of Proust of my own.

Then I got excited and drew another Proust portrait, this time of him as a boy.And finally, I drew one of me!

When I read today, I saw Proust in the text:

And what about little ___________ , with his blond curls and blue sash and shoes to match, but above all else, his obedient silence and his fixed stare? Deprived of toys he fondles the light glinting off a bunch of keys, is fascinated by the burl of the floorboards, counts the bricks of the houses opposite...

Of course, it's easy enough to laugh at ____________ . The most analytic mind in Europe did not even know how to frame an argument. The most analytic mind in Europe produced _____________ , a work soon to be known as one of the worst-organized books ever to earn the name of literature. Prolix, endlessly digressive, a mass of description, theories that trail off into inconclusiveness, volume after volume, a flood of internal contradiction.

Yet there's still the image of the child, with his physical passivity and his consuming, visual fire. I think of him squatting on the garden path, knees and arms akimbo, staring at ants swarming along the cracks between paving stones, fixating all that miniaturized activity into purest, linear ornament. It's the stare's relation to pattern, and its withdrawal from purpose. His boyish connection to the sea is just one more example of what we could only call the modernist vocation of this stare.

Listen to him saying, 'But before everything, at this time, came my pleasure in merely watching the sea. I was not allowed to row, far less to sail, nor to walk near the harbor alone; so that I learned nothing of shipping or anything else worth learning, but spent four or five hours every day in simply staring and wondering at the sea, - an occupation which never failed me till I was forty...'

Okay. Enough.

Now insert any modernist writer's name and work into the blanks provided. Does the description still fit?

When I read this passage today in Rosalind Krauss' The Optical Unconscious, I felt as though I were reading about someone I knew... Someone I engaged with on a very intimate level, someone who is only slightly alien for having lived at a different time than I, and through whom I am able to travel across centuries and listen to their dusty language.

RK was writing about John Ruskin, the famous 19th Century art critic. This discovery of the similarity between RK's description of Ruskin as a boy and Proust's Marcel in In Search of Lost Time left me thinking, could it be that Proust is not all that interesting after all? Is it possible that all modernismos are weird in the same way? They like to stare at things, they write indulgent, digressive and long books, solitude pleases them: Is Proust just a product of his time?

But no! There must be something different about him. Sure, autobiography and confessional narratives were majorly "in" at during the 19th and 20th century, but Proust goes beyond being "in" - he is the inversion of "in." I say this because even when everyone got bored of psychoanalysis and decided the author was dead, Proust ploughed through those Barthesian years without so much a moustache whisker out of place. His book, him, his book, him, his book are here to stay.

One last thing. Proust translated some of Ruskin's work. Now I'm really on to something.