Today, thinking about my own task at hand: applying for a marking position at Brock, my reading from yesterday seems to have gelled into observations on work. I am always thinking about Francoise now as she seems to be the one constant on Marcel's life. She takes care of him and knows his schedule, despite his chagrin for the old maid. But his own fascination for her leads me to believe that he does not actually dislike her. At one point, after complaining about her, he defends himself by explaining that his parents would have hired a different care-giver for him, but that Francoise is just "convenient."
“N’importe, j’étais moins triste d’être malade, de n’avoir jamais eu encore le courage de me mettre à travailler, à commencer un livre…”
Indeed, it's quite explicit, isn't it? He says, "I was less sad at being sick, than I was at not yet having had the courage to work, to start a book..." So it seems as though he was not yet brave enough to put himself out there and write. In contrast to his friend, St-Loup, Marcel does not have to work, that is, he can survive without working. But St-Loup has to work and it is not a passionate job either. When he sees Marcel again he talks about not being made for this kind of work. He does not have an inward pull tugging at his heart, telling him to release it in the form of self-expression, but rather an outward pull, the need to eat, to have a home, to have the money to travel that compels him to work. He says,
“Et le travail, vous y êtes-vous mis? Non? Que vous êtes drôle! Si j’avais vos dispositions, je crois que j’écrirais du matin au soir.”
Always jovial and very admiring of Marcel, he is concerned about his friend's health, but is still surprised that he has not yet started his work at writing: "And the work, you've started? No? How funny you are! If I had your moods, I think I would write from morning to night!" But St-Loup does not envy Marcel, only finds him a bit unusual.
But maybe the small-town, country girl in me is envious of Marcel. I can't help but wonder how he would do with a paper route. In my family, we started working at age thirteen doing laundry at our family's cottage rental company. We didn't want to, but it seemed normal enough for us. Then we continued to work at different jobs - waitressing, babysitting, tree-planting, secretarial work and more - throughout university. I am pretty sure this is a common way of life among Canadians. If writing is work (for Marcel), then I have been "labouring" my whole life just to get the chance to do "work." That seems a little ironic, no?
We started this debate in our Proust class last semester, but I have not been convinced one way or another: what is the difference between laborious, working-to-put-food-on-the-table jobs that we do under the watchful eye of a business mogul, and the work we do out of passion and a desire for self-expression?
If Proust had to abandon his habit of staying up all night and sleeping in the daytime because he had to "work," perhaps at his paper route, maybe he would have had the "courage" to start writing earlier. Then, maybe he would have known the value of our short time here on earth, given that most of us have to spend a large portion of it doing work we do not enjoy.
This is a spiteful entry, I know. I feel like a Marxist-Bourgeois yo-yo this week. My apologies!
-natalie
I'm sorry to turn so often to Eve Sedgwick, but this is appropriate -- or I hope it will become -- to what I was just reading by Jonathan Goldberg, he writes:
ReplyDeleteFor me, writing on this occasion, this is best exemplified in Eve's exploration of the painful contemplation of the death of the grandmother in _Recherhe_ and the ways to which Marcel and his mother respond to it. To this aching loss, Eve attaches an exploration of the abrasive figure o the often abjected family servant Françoise. (376)
Natalie, what strikes me as very rich is perhaps the possibility of creativity and production for you in the figure of Françoise. But, what precisely is her purpose in the novel? I guess that is really the question to struggle (labour, work) with precisely because she is "sticking out" to you. Reading, at its core, should be fundamentally intimate and subjective and this is what is so rich (repetition on my part) about Proust...we can all grab hold of characters and different characters that fascinate us. Maybe this goes back to your earlier question about prefiguration.
I'm positive, actually, that Marcel admires Françoise. He even accords her with a “modesty and integrity which often gave an air of nobility to the face of our old servant” (II 309). In my final paper for our Proust course I argued in part that she was Marcel's double. Proust ties his work as an artist more closely to Françoise's work as a maidservant than to either the pursuits (or lack thereof) of the aristocracy or the bourgeoisie. A passage towards the end of Time Regained notes a significant affinity between Françoise and Marcel:
ReplyDelete"Whenever I had not all my “paperies” near me, as Françoise called them, and just the one that I needed was missing, Françoise would understand how this upset me, she who always said that she could not sew if she had not the right size of thread and the proper buttons." (VI 509)
Proust draws affinities between the writer’s work and the work of the peasant, between “paperies” and thread and buttons.
Another related passage on Françoise:
"Of thought, in relation to Françoise, one could hardly speak. She knew nothing, in that absolute sense in which to know nothing means to understand nothing, except the rare truths to which the heart is capable of directly attaining." (II 309)
This is an exception to her utter ignorance, no doubt, but a significant one, redeeming her completely in Marcel’s eyes, for it harbours truths of a special rarity, ones accessible through the sensibility and intuition of the heart. This is quite the special privilege Marcel is giving Françoise here!