Are You There Proust? It’s Me, Natalie

I have not been single for more than two weeks since I was fifteen. I remember a friend of mine asking why I always had to have a boyfriend, why I couldn’t just date around, or, better yet, be alone. I thought about it for a few seconds, though perhaps not long enough because my impetuous answer was that I was scared of loneliness and that when I am alone, I am not sure if I exist or not. This sounds completely silly and will reveal to you all that blonde stereotypes are not complete fabrications, but there is so much truth in what I said. Always having someone by your side reassures or validates you, your thoughts, opinions, emotions, reactions experiences, etc. And when all of a sudden there is no one to play this role, you are left feeling anxious about everything. As though if there is no one to talk to, there is no talk, no thoughts, no life. The end.

This is how I relate to Marcel in The Captive. He narrates,

“I felt that my life with Albertine was on the one hand, when I was not jealous, nothing but boredom, and on the other hand, when I was jealous, nothing but pain.”

She, like a mirror, reflects and tells him about himself, his “way.” She tells him how impossibly angry he can become, and this makes him aware of himself, his tone. He needs her to reflect the parts of himself that he is oblivious to back onto him. He needs to constantly discover himself, know himself and explore obscure parts of himself.

Obviously Marcel is pathetic. But what I like is that he is not ashamed of this. He wants to work through this for himself. He needs to clothe Albertine in “Fortuny” gowns that become a material mark that represents his possession of her. He makes no secret of his thousands of interpretations of her cocked head, sidelong glance, sigh, hesitation and any other tiny gesture; as I have also done with the body language of friends and family, but never had the guts to admit.

His confessions and detailed observations of himself are written like diary entries. In The Guermantes’ Way, he talks about his writing as a task he does most days, but his “musings” are something he takes up constantly, day in, day out. Francoise and St-Loup would interrupt his “musings” just as he was getting deeply into them and this frustrated him. (Who has time to engage in musing all day anyhow?)

But his openness, maybe combined with my willingness as his reader to relate to him, has invited me to share myself with him. As if to console him, and defend him against criticism. I even talk to him. I think as quietly as his writing speaks, but my words are sometimes harsh: “I expected more from you!” after a long and anti-climactic passage. But sometimes reading him just makes me sad for him. It is he who is the captive. Marcel is contained by his own fears, and writing is his way of confronting these darker sides of himself. My only hope is that, like mine is in my diary, his writing was a form of ventilation or a purging of negativity and held a bias for his most painful moments, after the release of which he, Marcel the man, was able to enjoy some of the time in his life that didn’t involve jealousy, anxiety, illness…

-natalie

Jealousy: An Incomplete Thought

In reading The Captive, we are taught much about jealousy and at times, I am left wondering about the connections between it and between Biblical texts. Firstly, one cannot help but notice the sudden re-emergence of the father; secondly, numerous biblical intertexts. I'm not really certain what to do with this. But, let me put out a question: is Marcel an Old Testament God? As I read the Captive (is that a past tense or a present tense?) a single phrase runs through my mind: "For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God" and then, of course, "You shall have no other gods before me." It is as though Marcel has become god(-like) in his recognition of jealousy. This is an incomplete thought, but I thought that I'd put it out there.

J.A.

Racing Against Time

We are scheduled to meet this week and I still have so much to read. I have been side-tracked and have been reading around Proust (and also writing conference papers, packing, etc.). It seems to me that one must read Proust slowly, methodically, carefully. Writing about Proust has allowed for me to read Proust in a new way, and perhaps a better way, but it is still difficult to just read Proust. My reading of Proust is always in relation, at this point, to my thinking about, through, against Proust. And so, today, the race against time begins to complete In Search of Lost Time.

Question: For those who have been writing about Proust, how has it changed your reading of Proust?

J.A

Suspicious Minds

In Balzac's Cousin Bette, jealousy often becomes the source of rupture between two lovers. After a bit of teasing between Hortense and her husband Wenceslas, the former visits the latter in his art studio where he is sculpting a group of people out of clay. When she arrives, he immediately throws a sheet over the sculpture to hide it from his wife.

"'We were not really angry, were we, my pretty puss?' Hortense had caught sight of the group, had seen the linen thrown over it, and had said nothing; but as she was leaving, she took off the rag, looked at the model, and asked--

'What is that?'

'A group for which I just had an idea.'

'Why did you hide it?'

'I did not mean you to see it til it was finished.'

'The woman is very pretty,' said Hortense.

And a thousand suspicions cropped up in her mind, as, in India, tall, rank plants spring up in a night-time."

Hortense's imagination contrives a story out of her husband's actions and the pretty woman she sees that his hands have moulded. It is quite reasonable, actually. Anyone who has drawn another person's portrait or sculpted his/her shape knows just how intimate such a gesture is. You have to love the angles and crevices of the subject you are replicating; you have to explore with a lover's interest the form of the subject's physique, and, most importantly, you have to relish in every aspect that makes him/her truly unique. You have to seek out what makes him/her beautiful, even if he/she is not conventionally so. So, I can understand Hortense's anxiety.

In The Captive, Marcel ponders,

"...by nature I have always been more open to the world of potentiality than to the world of contingent reality. This helps one to understand the human heart, but one is apt to be taken in by individuals. My jealousy was born of mental images, to produce a specific suffering, not based on probability."

Though I have not been so jealous as he is in this book (he ironically claims he does not even want to marry Albertine because he needs his freedom, and yet all he does is think about her affections running astray), I can relate to him. I don't think the jealousy itself is as important as the degree to which he feels this emotion. The reason why I can relate to Marcel is because I have been to such an extreme level of anxiety before, only not because of jealousy, but because of hypochondria. And I think the emotions are very similar. His comment that his feelings were, "born of mental images, to produce a specific suffering, not based on probability," remind me of my own strange suspicions of various symptoms that lead me to believe I have some deadly disease. But it seems to me that even though I can understand the progression of Marcel's jealousy, and I can admire him for being aware of it, jealousy is ranked higher than hypochondria on the scale of unacceptable nervousness. I think more people would call him "crazy," "creepy," or "out of control" when really jealousy is only the symptom of the real problem, just like hypochondria is the symptom of mine. In both cases it is an anxiety that is at the root of our illogical assumptions.

I suppose today I have been ranting a bit, but I just wanted to share some of my own relationship to the text. In both Balzac and Proust, I often relate to the characters - I guess that's how I try to understand the narrative for myself - though often for unlikely reasons. If we don't relate to or attempt to understand the actions and thoughts of characters, how else can we read?

-natalie

Proust's Critics

At this very moment, I am supposed to be writing about monstrous romances and/or the nineteenth-century romance from Latin America, instead, I am reading about Proust. So, I will not provide a lengthy post, but rather a really rather startling quotation which perhaps resonates with some of us. In The Western Canon: The Books and School of Ages (1994), Harold Bloom writes:

Proust has had distinguished critics -- Beckett, Brée, Benjamin, Girard, Genette, Bersani, Shattuck (whom I prefer) among them -- but more than Joyce, Proust defeats his critics. (380)

I'm amazed by this, mostly because here is a critic writing about Proust and realising -- I hope -- that ultimately Proust will defeat him, like every other critic.

J.A.

Teaching Proust

In his book, Proust's Way: A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time, Roger Shattuck writes:

The resourceful independent reader can now find a way through the maze and take sensible shortcuts. Recent editions contain useful summaries. On the other hand, reading Proust in an organized course with a competent teacher to set the level of understanding and interpretation and with perceptive students willing to participate in discussions can develop into a very rewarding collective experience. But a term or semester course is too short and often leads to intense frustration at the end. (24-25)

Well, it isn't perfect, but I think that sense of frustration often was present in our classes and perhaps this is why we ended up with five hour classes. But, then, a practical question appears: how does one "teach" Proust? It seems to me that even a full year course would not be long enough. As I am entering that dreaded last year of the PhD/first year of the job search, I've thought more and more about teaching. Proust is a text that seems like the ultimate challenge to teach and yet strangely there are a large number of books teaching one how to read Proust. At one point, I said to Eva-Lynn, that if I were to teach In Search of Lost Time, I think I'd start with Part One of Sodom and Gomorrah and then go back to Swann's Way and work our way through to Time Regained, always with the infamous inversion essay in mind. So, back to question: how would you teach Proust?

J.A.

A Summer in the Closet

In the first few pages of The Captive, Marcel confesses, “[f]or some moments, knowing that he would make me happier than Albertine, I remained closeted with the little person inside me, the melodious hymner of the rising sun, of whom I have already spoken.” Again, locked or “closeted” in his room, Marcel channels his old little boy self whom “Habit” has long stowed away and hidden from the public. But Marcel seeks comfort in this old self and can only unveil him from behind the curtain of “Habit” when he is alone, in the privacy of his bedroom. This freedom begot from imprisonment echoes my earlier posting, A Room of Proust’s Own.

But look again. If we extract the next few lines from this context and isolate them, they, like our dear narrator, transform into something else, something our habitual style of reading might have concealed from us:

“I know how selfish this little manikin is; I may be suffering from an attack of breathlessness which only the coming of rain would assuage, but he pays no heed, and, at the first drops so impatiently awaited, all his gaiety forgotten, he suddenly pulls down his hood… if a ray of sunshine steals into the room while I am drawing my last breath, the little barometric manikin will feel great relief, and will throw back his hood to sing: ‘Ah, fine weather at last!’”

With Jonathan’s reading on masturbation still warm and fresh in my mind, I can’t help but perform a bit of literary algebra, and replace some of these referents with analogous symbols. Consider my translation:

“I know how selfish this little [penis] is; I may be suffering from an attack of breathlessness which only the coming of [ejaculate] would assuage, but he pays no heed, and, at the first drops so impatiently awaited, all his gaiety forgotten, he suddenly pulls down his hood… if a ray of sunshine steals into the room while I am drawing my last breath, the little barometric [penis] will feel great relief, and will throw back his hood to sing: ‘Ah, fine weather at last!’”

With only three tiny edits, we have another claim for the masturbation theory, as well as—perhaps an added bonus—a parody of Proust. The only question that remains is, who gets off on thinking about the weather!?

-natalie

Pleasuring Reality

In an oft-quoted nugget of wisdom from Marx, we are told: “Masturbation is to sex as philosophy is to reality.”

This observation or witticism sticks out to me as I read and re-read parts of The Captive. For our purposes here, I am only going to deal with the first twenty pages of the volume – in time, more entries will appear – but for the time being let us begin here. (Incidentally, I feel as though I am writing an article in bits and pieces and perhaps should, in an oh-so-typical academic move, surrender to silence and hide these ideas until they have been published in some reputable journal.)

I am struck by the insistence throughout these pages of the polemicising of reality and how we are to interpret reality.

His mistake was, however, perfectly excusable, for reality, even though it is necessary, is not always foreseeable as a whole. People who learn some correct detail about another person’s life at once draw conclusions from it which are not accurate, and see in the newly discovered fact an explanation of things that have no connexion whatsoever. (IV.2)

It does not seem that Marcel is denying “reality,” but rather he is noting that reality and perceptions of it are necessarily flawed. Many have noted previously the phenomenological tones intrinsic to the novel and this very much seems like one of those instances. In his book, Narrative Perspective in Fiction: A Phenomenological Mediation of Reader, Text, and World (1991), Daniel Frank Chamberlain writes:

What is available is the object selected as a foreground from the background and the particular facets of that foreground facing the perceiver at a particular moment. […] No object is totally available to our senses from any one standpoint. There are always aspects hidden from our senses. (37)

Indeed, this very much seems to be the case for Marcel; however, it is additionally important to note that for Marcel this recognition of the impossibility of perceiving everything is thus a questioning of reality. If I am unable to fully understand that which I see, how then do I deal with reality? For our purposes, if I clasp to one aspect of Marcel’s identity, am I guilty of this same charge of having only one correct detail and thus extrapolating it to the totality of Marcel? Of course, only a page or two later, Marcel allows for the possibility of a single, unified self: “when all my other ‘selves’ are dead” (IV.5).

Though we have not yet seen the essay on inversion, moments of inversion are already happening:

So true it is that life when it chooses to deliver us once more from suffering that seemed inescapable, dose so in different, at times diametrically opposed conditions, so much so that it seems almost sacrilegious to note the identical nature of the consolations vouchsafed! (IV.2)

Here then, we have this sort of pre-recognition of the poetics of inversion that will overwhelm the reader in Sodom and Gomorrah and if one is not convinced by this poetics of inversion being present, Marcel reaffirms it when he speaks of Gomorrah:

In leaving Balbec, I had imagined that I was leaving Gomorrah, plucking Albertine from it; in reality, alas, Gomorrah was disseminated all over the world. (IV.20)

I cannot help but imagine the punning potential of this sentence; however, the point being that Gomorrah as defined to a specific space is later defined as being “all over the world” and thus no longer established in one location.

Thus, I return to the witticism that opened this posting: “Masturbation is to sex as philosophy is to reality.” In Proust’s work, at least in the framework of these twenty pages, reality is clouded, made ambiguous, confused. In many regards, reality is like the bathroom window:

The windows of our respective bathrooms, so that their occupants might not be visible from without, were not smooth and transparent but crinkled with an artificial and old-fashioned hoar-frost. All of a sudden, the sun would colour this muslin glass, gild it, and, gently disclosing in my person an earlier young man whom habit had long concealed, would intoxicate me with memories, as though I were in the heart of the country amidst golden foliage in which even a bird was not lacking. (IV.3)

This private space – a bathroom in the country – is not new to readers. Indeed this very space is the masturbatory space that opened In Search of Lost Time:

I ran up to the top of the house to cry by myself in a little room beside the schoolroom and beneath the roof, which smelt of orris-root and was scented also by wild currant-bush which had climbed up between the stones of the outer wall and thrust a flowering branch in through the half-opened window. Intended for a more special and baser use, this room, from which, in the daytime, I could see as far as the keep of Roussainville-le-Pin, was for a long time my place of refuge, doubtless because it was the only room whose door I was allowed to lock, whenever my occupation was such as required an inviolable solitude: reading or day-dreaming, tears or sensual pleasure. (I.14)

While from this room Marcel is able to clearly locate a distant image, in the current room the window clutters and makes ambiguous reality. However, to be taken from this, I imagine, is that in both spaces the solitary pleasures of the imagination can and are to be found. But, in this regard, if reality is blurred so to then sex must be blurred and made ambiguous. And if this is the case, as I argue it is, what then are we to do with the Captive, Albertine? Or, perhaps, is it Marcel who is held captive to his imagination, his fears, his anxieties. In other words, let me turn, once again, to Marcel:

But such a phobia is capable of assuming as many forms as the undefined evil that is its cause. […] But the slightest pretext serves to revive a chronic disease, just as the slightest opportunity may enable the vice of the person who is the cause of our jealousy to be practiced anew (after a lull of chastity) with different people. (IV.18)

In many regards, this “phobia” which allows for a return to the “undefined evil” or the “chronic disease” is like the “misplacing of [his] thigh” (I.3) which is like “the slightest pretext” that returns him to a practice (after a lull of chastity). Thus, what is more real in The Captive: sex or masturbation?

J.A.

Images: Marx Portrait; Onanie (1911) by Michael von Zichy

Marcel's Dreams

Marcel tells us at the beginning of Swann’s Way about his trouble falling asleep, dreams, day-dreaming, and the “room of one’s own”. To these ends, I want to write here about a particular paragraph to further my previous post:

Sometimes, too, as Eve was created from a rib of Adam, a woman would be born during my sleep from some misplacing of my thigh. Conceived from the pleasure I was on the point of enjoying, she it was, I imagined, who offered me that pleasure. My body, conscious that its own warmth was permeating hers, would strive to become one with her, and I would awake. The rest of humanity seemed very remote in comparison with this woman whose company I had left but a moment ago; my cheek was still warm from her kiss, my body ached beneath the weight of hers. If, as would sometimes happen, in waking hours, I would abandon myself altogether to this end: to find her again, like people who set out on a journey to see with their eyes some city of their desire, and imagine that one can taste in reality what has charmed one’s fancy. And then, gradually, the memory of her would fade away, I had forgotten the girl of my dream. (I.3)

This is a very confessional moment and a very early moment in the novel, so, what does the reader do with this? It seems at the very least here that Proust is negotiating the difference between masturbation and nocturnal emission. We are dealing with an adolescent who, as Carter notes, “felt isolated and misunderstood” (4) and yet, I would contend that there is a doubling problem here about the nature of arousal and the erotic. What, if any, is the difference between the masturbator and the sleeper? Or, what is the difference between a day-dream and a wet-dream? Read closely, the “wet-dream” is facilitated by the misplaced thigh that allows for him to imagine a woman “who offered [him] that pleasure” (I.3). Everything here is taking place in slumber – the sleeping male is like Adam. We have a description, so to speak, of coitus: “my body ached beneath the weight of hers” (I.3) and then, suddenly, an awakening, and a subsequent search for this woman: “I would abandon myself altogether to this end, to find her again” (I.3). The question of desire is available to readers in both and yet it would seem that the initial dream scene lacks the agency (will) of the latter dream scene. Indeed, Marcel speaks to this very problem – a problem as old as the Church Fathers – when he says: “Alas! I did not realise that my own lack of willpower, my delicate health, and the consequent uncertainty…” (I.14), he continues to note that it weighed heavily on his grandmother’s mind – in reality, it weighed heavily on his parents’ minds. In a letter to Bizet he writes that his mother feared the two boys might share “the same faults . . . independent spirit, nervousness, a disordered mind, and perhaps even masturbation” (Carter 4). The concern is that masturbation causes all sorts of maladies, and if there is one thing we know from Proust’s life and masterwork, illness and sickness overwhelm the pages.

If this novel opens with masturbation and the privacy of a room of one’s own, why can we not presume that this trope runs wild throughout the duration of the novel? Could we read this novel structurally to show that it has an “orgasm principle and cycle” that very much mimics the masturbatory/sexual/erotic experiences of Marcel?

J.A.

A Room of Proust's Own, Another Perspective

Natalie writes: “If Proust is anything like his alter ego Marcel, and I suspect that he is, he most definitely valued the privacy and solitude offered to him by his bedroom.”

Indeed, I think it is fair to say that Marcel did enjoy the privacy and solitude afforded to him by his bedroom; however, there is much more to be said about the bedroom and Marcel’s writings, identity, and privacy. The bedroom affords Marcel the ultimate locus to explore desire and still enjoy the comfort of the closet. I want to provide here a much closer reading of the bedroom than perhaps previously considered and I should forewarn here that parts of this are coming from dissertation writing (I should, perhaps, provide its title: “The Sexual Scripture: A Study of Virginity in Romance”), so apologies in advance if an argument seems undeveloped here or unexplained (it likely was dealt with earlier in the dissertation).

In the final volume of Proust’s novel, Gilberte explains her own sexual awakenings and recognition of her sexual identity,

“The first time at Tansonville. You were going for a walk with your family, and I was on my way home. I’d never seen such a pretty little boy. I was in the habit,” she went on with a vaguely bashful air, “of going to play with little boys I knew in the ruins of the keep of Roussainville. And you will tell me that I was a very naughty girl, for there were girls and boys there of all sorts who took advantage of the darkness. The altar-boy from Combray church, Théodore, who, I must admit was very nice indeed (goodness, how handsome he was!) and who has become quite ugly (he’s the chemist now at Méséglise), used to amuse himself with all the peasant girls of the district. As I was allowed to go out by myself, whenever I was able to get away, I used to rush over there. I can’t tell you how I longed for you to come there too; I remember quite well that, as I had only a moment in which to make you understand what I wanted, at the risk of being seen by your people and mine, I signalled to you so vulgarly that I’m ashamed of it to this day. But you stared at me so crossly that I saw that you didn’t want to.” (VI: 4-5)

This quotation recognises the very discourse of virginity that runs alongside the epistemology of the closet because it is a revealing of oneself to another and moreover that this “coming out,” is very much a “sexual” coming out. In the case of Gilberte the references to her virginity or virginal nature are manifested in the language of “the first time” which is aligned with virginity and later her discussion of having gained sexual knowledge at Roussainville. These indications are coupled with a past tense that recalls a “lost time,” a “virginal time.” It is interesting to note here that,

The tower of Roussainville is indeed phallic, not only because the protagonist gazes at it from the window while masturbating and yearning for a girl but also because years later he learns that the two had been the scene of sexual experimentations by young people of the village and that what he had mistaken for Gilberte’s obscene gesture of repulsion on first seeing him had in fact been intended as an invitation to join her in the games at the tower. (Carter 5-6)

This site then becomes, in many regards, the door out of the virginal closet; had Marcel realised what Gilberte desired, he would have been able to lose his virginity instead of being a chronic masturbator and a perpetually anxious virgin.

Proust’s room, Marcel’s room is the locus of pleasure for the chronic masturbator. There is a lot of masturbation in In Search of Lost Time – lost time indeed! – and our earliest masturbatory instance occurs in the very opening pages of Swann’s Way: “it was the only room whose door I was allowed to lock, whenever my occupation was such as required an inviolable solitude: reading or day-dreaming, tears of sensual pleasure” (I:14). Incidentally, if we return to the opening line of Swann’s Way: “For a long time I would go to bed early” – the question in the reader’s mind becomes: why is he going to bed early, to read or to “day-dream”? It is interesting to note, however, that it is only within the framework of In Search of Lost Time that his bedroom offers “inviolable solitude,” for in real life, we are told in a letter by Proust: “This morning, dearest, when my father saw me . . . he begged me to stop masturbating for at least four days” (Carter 4). In his book, Proust in Love, William C. Carter provides a brief overview and discussion of masturbation and Proust; however, I want to take this a bit further in relation to our discussions of indulgence, writing, and reading.

We have acknowledged that writing can be a labour; however, what if we read this less in terms of labour and more in terms of pleasure. Proust alludes to this possibility when he speaks of the bedroom affording a place to read and to “day-dream,” but what if we also, in this bedroom, position writing alongside reading and “day-dreaming”? What if these three notions all fold into one another? Is Proust’s masterpiece really the longest of masturbatory exploration of the various desires that the narrator considers in the privacy of his writing and reading space?

J.A.

A Room of Proust’s Own

If Proust is anything like his alter ego Marcel, and I suspect that he is, he most definitely valued the privacy and solitude offered to him by his bedroom.

In The Guermantes’ Way, while Marcel is still a young man, he is fraught with the disabling symptoms of his illness. He is confined to his bedroom for many of his days and often sleeps abnormal hours. This room is such a familiar space for him that it becomes another layer of skin, contained in which is an inside-outside aspect of himself. With the doors locked, the windows shut, he can move about in this space without falling under the gaze of others. He can go uncensored in this room. So, the room is similar to writing: the former is an intermediary space between the private, inner self, and the public, outside world, while the latter is a mediating space that transports what is inside to the outside. Consider Marcel’s musings about his room:

“The walls held the room in a close embrace, separating it from the rest of the world… the doors, if I left them open when I withdrew into this innermost retreat, were not content with tripling [the room’s] dimensions without spoiling its harmonious proportions, and not only allowed my eyes to enjoy the delights of extension after those of concentration, but added further to the pleasure of my solitude—which, while still inviolable, was no longer shut in—the sense of liberty.”

For Marcel, the room signifies a freedom from the gaze of the public, and thus serves as a sort of passageway for him to access that part of himself that may be a little bit “truer” than the self he has to present to others, outside this room – the performing self. The walls confine him, but the limits they impose are rather comforting to him, like an “embrace.” He needs structure, containment, rules in order to feel a sense of security in exposing himself. Likewise in writing, Proust needs to have the structure of language to support his thoughts, to contain them. He finds solace in the rules and linearity of writing because then he knows everything, all his thoughts will be “locked in,” tightly held in the embrace of the words. He can fully expose himself in words, without ever facing the public who reads them. It is the inside-outside space that, by way of imprisonment, frees him.

In honour of my absolute favourite American poet, Emily Dickinson, who died on this day in 1886, I leave you the following poem of hers. In many ways, it says it all, and I tried to echo her in my reading of Proust today:

I dwell in Possibility -


A fairer House than Prose -


More numerous of Windows -


Superior for Doors –

Of Chambers as the Cedars -


Impregnable of Eye –


And for an everlasting Roof


The Gambrels of the Sky –

Of Visitors - the fairest -


For Occupation –

This -


The spreading wide my narrow Hands


To gather Paradise –

-natalie

"Shut up and read!"

The last few posts on reading practices (praxis-es) have given form to a vague discomfort I felt when reading Benjamin's Picturing Proust, in phrases like "Cocteau saw what ought to preoccupy every Proust reader in the highest degree: he saw the blind, absurd, obsessive demand for good fortune in the man", or "the proper reader of Proust will be constantly shaken by tiny alarms". The prescriptive tone of Benjamin's language in these passages struck me as odd -- Benjamin, who when writing this was also experimenting with new ways of reading, ones such as his daring work on German Tragic Drama (his Trauerspiel), a work which was rejected by the conventional academia of his time. Benjamin's own way of reading is acutely distinct, constantly rendering the seemingly recognizable unrecognizable, and insights such as Proust's "obsessive demand for good fortune" are wonderful, but it's odd to see them framed within a prescriptive framework of reading. Why suppose that there is a proper reader? It is unsettling, like Proust's own imperative command to the reader, "be quiet and let me go on with my story". Yet, Proust later offers this welcome inversion of the reader-writer relationship:

The writer must not be indignant if the invert who reads his book gives to his heroines a masculine countenance [...] For it is only out of habit, a habit contracted from the insincere language of prefaces and dedications, that the writer speaks of 'my reader'. In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without his book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself [...] In order to read with understanding many readers require to read in their own particular fashion, and the author must not be indignant at this; on the contrary, he must leave the reader all possible liberty, saying to him: 'Look for yourself, and try whether you see best with this lens or that one or this other one." (273-4, trans. Mayor, Andreas and Terence Kilmartin. London: Chatto and Windus, 1992).

I don't know if Proust is being totally honest here about his intentions as a writer, but I like this quote, for its acknowledgment of multiple readers and how their approach -- their bodies, their sexuality, even -- alters and personalizes the text.

A philosopher I consciously distanced myself from but who recently I have been trying to return to, namely Martin Heidegger, seems to be of unusual relevance to Proust for his insights into the phenomenological foundations of truth. Not only are both fundamentally concerned with the truth of being and of time, but Proust and Heidegger also share the belief that the essence of truth is Aletheia -- that is, "unconcealment". Truth is disclosedness. Trees, for example, communicate with us, and truth is the product of that communication, and nothing else. Truth, and time, are embodied. In Being and Time, Heidegger points out that the first philosophers were aware of the connection between truth and being: namely Parmenides, who wrote that “it is the same thing that can be thought and that can be”. As humanity intellectually progressed, a derivative conception of truth developed, which, by ascribing truth to mere judgment, concealed the fundamental phenomenological ontology of truth.

Proust is a careful reader of the world, profoundly concerned with its essence, and demands of his own readers a careful approach to his text. But this care doesn't imply a singular reading, objectivity or essentialism. Far from it. The essence of things is personal, embodied. Here I think Heidegger comes in again, with his term "care" or "concern" (Sorge in German). Human being (Dasein, or 'being there') for Heidegger is always thrown into the world, into a relationship with things in the world, and those things -- the truth of those things -- is inseparable from their relationship to Dasein. Pondering a Truth without Dasein is impossible for us -- it would be outside our structure of concern with the world. In Dasein’s everyday concerns (care) it uncovers entities as something, and this as is influenced by Dasein’s attunement, what Heidegger calls Dasein’s "moodiness". The way an entity can be revealed to Dasein is thus subjective in that Dasein is receptive to entities in a multiplicity of ways: people perceive things differently depending on their particular mood(s). For example, one might perceive that the sky is bleak and cloudy, another that it is frightening, another that it is romantic. To carry our analogy further, one might say that the sky is in fact not always blue -- as during a sunset -- and may posit that just as the sun colours the sky in different ways, so can our mood colour our perception of things.

Proust writes that “essence is [...] subjective and incommunicable” (VI 285). The essence is attached to individual’s relationship w/ the object, it is found within the self (529). It would be in error, however, to think this means to imply that truth descends into mere relativism. Proust himself denies this. For the particular truths that one is responsible for disclosively uncovering are at one and the same time in the thing and in the mind, "real without being actual, ideal without being abstract" (VI 264) -- in other words truth is a function of time, or our being in time, our being situated in time and projecting through time. I need to think more about this relationship between the essence of things and time, but certainly it is something profoundly important to Proust (and to Heidegger, though perhaps in somewhat different ways), and attests to the fact that truth is not an unchanging ideal, but an existential quality we possess, something existing within our existential structure, something disclosed through our concern with the world. My whole point in posting this was just to say that reading is an existential process, and the meaning arising out of it depends on our approach to the text, our mood or our mode of concern with it.

-DG

Beginnings and Conclusions

Jonathan's post on thinking about reading Proust's theory of reading, brought to mind a quote that I came across in Proust's _Contre Sainte-Beuve_ regarding author-reader reciprocity, quite interesting in fact for the debate on why/how we read: (I only have this one in French...)


Et c’est là, en effet, un des grands et merveilleux caractères des beaux livres (et qui nous fera comprendre le rôle à la fois essentiel et limité que la lecture peut jouer dans notre vie spirituelle) que pour l’auteur ils pourraient s’appeler “Conclusions” et pour le lecteur “Incitations.” Nous sentons très bien que notre sagesse commence où celle de l’auteur finit, et nous voudrions qu’il nous donnât des réponses quand tout ce qu’il peut faire est de nous donner des désirs. Et ces désirs, il ne peut les éveiller en nous qu’en nous faisant contempler la beauté suprême à laquelle le dernier effort de son art lui a permis d’atteindre (176)


I think this is exactly why we're still working on Proust this summer...
Antonio

Reading and Responding

Evidently, I have become the source of a blog posting and my concern was and still remains one of trying to understand how we read. We all approach texts, I'd argue, with a certain series of expectations, prejudices, experiences, readings, etc., and these will necessarily influence how we read. This was my point and continues to be a point of interest (incidentally one I brought up when I asked for a Proustian reading of Freud instead of a Freudian reading of Proust -- I was inverting).

At any rate, I'm currently reading Proust and Emotion: The Importance of Affect in À la recherche du temps perdu (2003) by Inge Crosman Wimmers. In this book, she puts forward the notion of "motivated reader" which I think is yet another interesting "reader" or "reading position" to consider:

The motivated reader I have in mind is open to new ways of being in the world (Proust, Ricoeur) and is not confined to a set of an 'interpretive community' (Fish), to the conventions of the 'competent reader' (Culler), or to psychological determinism (Holland). It is a reader who is sensitive to textual and intertextual strategies, to response-inviting aspects of the fictional world, and to structures of exchange between the world of the text and the world of the reader, all of which the Proustian narrator encourages by initiating readers through the various kinds of metaphoric narration I discuss and through models of how to read literature, art, and music. (14-15)

And to continue, and perhaps of particular importance for Natalie's reading praxis, Wimmers writes:

In an essay entitled 'Journées de lecture,' Proust first presents some of the most important ideas on reading that will be incorporated in À la recherche du temps perdu, as, for instance, the following observation that reading gives us insight into the deepest recesses of our soul: "[L]a lecture est pour nous l'incitatrice dont les clefs magnifiques nous ouvrent au fond de nous-même la porte des demeures où nous n'aurions pas su pénétrer" (180). Reading thus inspires us to probe deeper because, so the argument goes, "par une loi singulière et d'ailleurs providentielle de l'optique des esprits (loi que signifie peut-être que nous ne pouvons recevoir la vérité de personne, et que nous devons la créer nous-mêmes), ce qui es le terme de leur sagesse ne nous apparaît que comme le commencement de la nôtre" (177). It is quite evident from these and similar observations that a motivated reader is at the very centre of Proust's aesthetics. He encourages us not only to descend into ourselves and to be introspective, but to reach out and discover new worlds. (15)

Indeed, to return to Natalie's question of "did we ever think of reading [In Search of Lost Time]?" my response is something of a diversion: did we ever think of reading Proust's own theory of reading when we approach his texts? Of course, we are ultimately asking -- and necessarily so -- about whether the authority of the text resides in the text or in the author while still trying to negotiate the sovereignty of the reader. I don't know if the solution to reading Proust is to read only the novel precisely because the complexity of Proust demands what Jonathan Culler refers to as a 'competent reader' and in many ways we also have to be open to 'new ways of being in the world' as Ricoeur would have it, but to Wimmer's notion of the 'motivated reader,' we might, also, want to incorporate the 'joyous reader' and the 'pleasure of the text.' To close, I think Natalie's question is an important one and our discussion about it was interesting precisely because it revealed how different similar approaches can be and how two readers reading the same text will almost always depart from differing starting points.

J.A.

Experimental Teaching, Experimental Learning

I post here a blog entry that I prepared for the Northrop Frye Blog that addresses the ideas of experimental teaching and experimental learning. For those who were at Eva-Lynn Jagoe's lecture at the conference, parts of this will sound familiar; however, the idea remains the same and a series of questions -- some new -- remain unresolved about the experimental processes of learning and teaching. Thus, I share this with you.

J.A.

- - - - - - - -

Parts of this post come from my introduction to Eva-Lynn Jagoe’s plenary lecture – The Linda Hutcheon and J. Edward Chamberlin Lecture in Literary Theory – at the annual conference at the Centre for Comparative Literature.

I recently had the great pleasure of studying and learning in an experimental setting. The goal of the course – Proust and Modernity – was to read Proust in relation to Modernity alongside various theoretical texts. The theory texts consisted of the usual suspects: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Fredric Jameson, Jacques Lacan, Kaja Silverman, Julia Kristeva, Malcolm Bowie, and Carol Mavor. The course itself consisted of response papers, presentations, and a term paper. Nothing, so far, out of the ordinary. Well, let me introduce the first oddity: only one of the students had read Proust previously, and the professor like the rest of the students was reading Proust for the first time. We ultimately, toward the end of the class, called this “virginal reading.”

Most readers of this blog will likely have never encountered Eva-Lynn Jagoe, the author (currently at work on “the long novel”) or the professor, so let me briefly indulge here in giving some account of her as instructor. In the classroom, Professor Jagoe’s central goal is always to test ideas and question students and their ideas. Her classroom is a laboratory for readers. The first thing to know is that Eva-Lynn often seeks to break down the institutional walls of the structure: we ultimately tossed the syllabus. In its place, each student agreed to offer commentary, work through Proust, and decide with Professor Jagoe (I’m oscillating between the professorial and the personal precisely because blurring of lines is so important, and to show that students ultimately did recognise there was a professor in the room) how we would be evaluated – but evaluation, as a university requirement, takes on a new role in her classroom. Throughout the course on Proust, we experimented with a new pedagogy and a new classroom experience (or, perhaps, just new to me, but something felt novel). The classroom always has food, always has drinks, always had laughter: these were the requirements. Additionally, we were to read and discuss the novel from personal, subjective, and confessional starting points – which, naturally, makes Proust the near perfect subject of study. It is in this space that we, students and professor, began to experiment with modes of teaching, modes of learning, modes of reading.

Initially, we had set upon reading a series of theorists in addition to Proust and we had agreed to follow Roger Shattuck’s plan of study for reading Proust. However, as we began to read, we realised that something was not working; we were not able to do what we had wanted to do, which was read Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Thus, the critical readings became optional and then later they became obsolete. In addition to tossing the theory, we added an extra hour to our Friday sessions. One of our meetings lasted over five hours, we left around 6 pm on a Friday, we began at 1, and the discussion continued over email. In the classroom, Professor Jagoe managed to create something of a utopian space in which Proust was read, discussed, and in many ways dreamed into the living. In these moments, Proust became real, or we became Proustian and from here the text was no longer studied in and of itself, but in relation to the greater problem of the imagination. Proust, of course, will teach this very lesson in the last volume of the novel, he writes: “In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without his book, he would perhaps never have expressed himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is a proof of its veracity.”

Continue reading

Marcel’s Warm Milk

First, I switched to English. In the interest of saving time, I borrowed my fiancé’s version of The Guermantes’ Way. Hopefully this will allow me to finish by the end of the week. Finish The Guermantes’ Way, that is, I still have three more novels in the series after it.

This same fiancé I mention above talked to me yesterday about my previous posts. We had a bit of a spat, in fact. Turns out he thinks I am “holding back.” I am echoing voices that have influenced my thoughts, without making mention of to whom these voices belong. So, am I some kind of a poser?

But, in my defense, I told him that I was doing my best not to buttress my every idea upon the stacks of theory books already devoted to our beloved Proust. I want to see for myself what I think. I told him I want to get lost in the moments of each passing page and not have expectations of myself other than to enjoy Proust’s imagery and insight.

But of this, he was difficult to convince. He is a living paradox: a literary scholar who does not enjoy reading novels in the same way as might the average consumer of literature. Rather, reading is an interactive game, in which he does not get “lost;” he never escapes into a new and interesting world or fantasy. He reads to ask questions and to “investigate” the book. He needs to explore the writing and find answers only after long debates with a host of obscure critics who have only inadequately dealt with the prose at hand. In other words, if he is going to invest energy into reading a book, he wants to publish an article out of it!

This got me thinking. Why do I enjoy reading? What about the activity gives me pleasure?

The easy answer is the escape into a romance that presents me with vicarious possibilities I never could have dreamed of in my real life.

But reading today, I stumbled upon a fairly ordinary passage (for Proust) in The Guermantes’ Way. In it, Marcel describes the difference in the deaf man’s relationship with all things in the external world to that of the hearing man. For, the deaf man cannot even “heat a pan of milk by his bedside without having to keep an eye open to watch.” I immediately thought, “why heat milk in the first place?” (And for that matter, why do it beside one's bed?) This seems completely disgusting to me, though I have heard of people who enjoy hot or warm milk as a comforting drink, or to put in their coffee. But Marcel’s point was not to talk about the milk. He was talking about what it is like to be deaf. Or was he? The milk, in the paragraph in question, became the object of my mind’s picture, painted for me by Marcel. He describes the, “fitfully swelling egg of the boiling milk […] reaching its climax in a series of sidelong undulations,” as it, “puffs out and fills a few drooping sails that had been puckered by the cream, sending a nacreous spinnaker bellying out in the hurricane, until the cutting off of the current, if the electric storm is exorcised in time, will make them all twirl round on themselves and scatter like magnolia petals.” Deaf man, what deaf man? The image I see is the heated milk. And it is beautifully described here. But what makes this passage even more enjoyable, is the extra question I ask, “why heat milk?” Frequently, what seems to be “a given” or perfectly normal to Marcel is strange and even arouses opposite feelings in me as I read. The undermentioned part of his descriptions, the idea that “everyone heats milk” comes across in his tone of narration. And this is what I am interested in. This gives me pleasure: the contrast in what is normal for, or off-handedly mentioned by, Marcel and what is normal for me. Sometimes reading him in this way makes me laugh and sometimes it makes me discover things about myself.

Last semester there was one woman in our class who said she found Proust’s writing funny. The rest of us all thought that it was not intended to be humorous, and we thus were not going to consider this as a theme of discussion. But what if she was on to something. Is it not important to consider how the text makes us feel when we are enjoying it, no matter how we enjoy it? Presumably, those who do purchase a copy of In Search of Lost Time do so precisely so that they may experience some reading pleasure. I can’t help but think that in class we sometimes tried to remove the text from its position as a piece of fiction that anyone can read, and instead tried to negotiate it, deconstruct it, analyse it, explore it, expose it, unfold it, unpack it, reveal it and investigate the work of art. Did we ever think of reading it?

-natalie

Proust, Benjamin, Saturn

I just wanted to quote an excerpt that I read over a few days ago in Benjamin's Arcades Project:

Boredom is a warm gray fabric lined on the inside with the most lustrous and colorful of silks. In this fabric we wrap ourselves when we dream. We are at home then in the arabesques of its lining. But the sleeper looks bored and gray within his sheath. And when he later wakes and wants to tell of what he dreamed, he communicates by and large only this boredom. For who would be able at one stroke to turn the lining of time to the outside? Yet to narrate dreams signifies nothing else. And in no other way can one deal with the arcades -- structures in which we relive, as in a dream, the life of our parents and grandparents, as the embryo in the womb relives the life of animals. Existence in these spaces flows then without accent like the events in dreams. Flanerie is the rhythmics of this slumber. In 1839, a rage for tortoises overcame Paris. One can well imagine the elegant set mimicking the pace of this creature more easily in the arcades than on the boulevards. [D2a,1]

Benjamin was born 'under the sign of saturn' (something Sontag reminded us of): "I came into the world under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays", he writes. The slow tortoise's path of the saturnine was Benjamin's path. I thought that this photograph of Proust (above) was somewhat Saturnine as well, and also like Durer's Melancholia. Proust, head in hand, adopts the pose of one who is almost too weak to stand, too weak to do anything, really, consumed by ennui and the burden of the dreamer. Similarly, Sontag -- who said that we have to begin with photographs of the man, because that's all we have, given the absence of the thing itself -- says that Benjamin has the "soft, daydreamer's gaze of the myopic":

Like Benjamin, Proust was a dreamer. And the lining of the dream world is boredom. I like this passage from Illuminations:

Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience [Erfahrung]. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places -- the activities that are intimately associated with boredom -- are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well.

Boredom has this positive side for Benjamin, that it opened a space for critical reflection, a space of half-buried memories and revolutionary possibilities.

Another thing: Proust, like Benjamin, was lacking in practical skill. As Jacques Riviere humorously commented, "Marcel Proust died of the same inexperience as enabled him to write his work [...] He died because he did not know how to light a fire or open a window". I have to say, Natalie, that I think Proust would be incapable of running a paper route! The paper boy/girl must always move at a quick pace along a linear path, and their movement is entirely goal oriented. Benjamin and Proust on the other hand always moved backwards (Benjamin's famous indictment of historical progress and linearity comes to mind, but so does Proust's embrace of the past, of course). Always turning back, they were like Lot's wife, turned to pillars of salt, or at least turned into tortoises, embracing the slow, sauntering path of remembrance.

Benjamin's mention of "inversion" in the discussion of the dreamer is also fascinating and was actually what I intended originally to draw your attention to with that quote above, but I seem to have gotten distracted -- the saturnine path of "detours and delays", I suppose, might take me back to inversion at some point but for now I'll leave it at that.

-DG