"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