Thursday, May 13, 2010

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

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