Playing the Illness and/or Disability Card

In a recent MacLean's article entitled "Leave Anne Alone! An Academic Suggests Canada's Most Beloved Herione Had Fetal Alcohol Syndrome," Professor Helen Hoy from Guelph University is questioned for her newest reading of Anne. Though she insists that her reading is merely one possible perspective, I have to say that I tire easily of articles and books that re-read characters as being ill and/or disabled.

In Proust's case, I feel as though the topic of illness is both something his readers ought to notice and think about, as well as something that would perhaps be an obvious theme to explore; and therefore a bit of an easy, go-to option.

However, any topic or reading can be new if creative questions are asked about it. The trouble is, when is playing the illness and/or disability card an academically trendy and thus potentially unoriginal choice, and when is it an earnest and creative pursuit?

-natalie

Losing Proust

I imagine many of us are working our ways through Proust and various critical writers, in this spirit, I post a quotation from Lawrence R. Schehr's book, The Shock of Men: Homosexual Hermeneutics in French Writing. I have been working through several pieces of his writing and this quotation caught my attention, especially in light of many discussions throughout the year on this very question.

Furthermore, I would state that any valid reading of [In Search of Lost Time] should be able to engage the question of homosexuality. An interpretation could not successfully deal with the questions relating to homosexuality in the novel cannot be considered effective in explaining the work. I am not saying that everyone has to talk about homosexuality, but that every reading should be able to engage the question. Thus, to take the most banal example, a psychoanalytic reading that departs from or arrives at the Oedipus complex may miss the mark if that alone is the 'answer,' if the text is somehow perceived as a symptom of the failure to resolve the Oedipal crisis, meaning that homosexuality is seen as secondary to the 'normal' world. (34)

I am working through many of these concerns in my own writings and find this to be a very provocative thought. I wonder . . . how many of us are guilty of "invalid" readings of Proust?

Reading Men's Writing

I have been working on a chapter in my dissertation in which I begin to think about “men’s writing” and what it means to write as a man, read as a man, and so on. I am not simply inverting “women’s writing” and studies of it, but rather, genuinely interested in why we do not read “men’s writing” in the same fashion as “women’s writing.” For instance, we find no course taught at the university that explicitly concerns itself with “men’s writing” and I imagine a laughable scenario of students reading a course calendar and coming across “Introduction to Men’s Writing” and wondering, well, how is that different from “Western Literature” which has been dominated by men. My point however is one which asks, what happens when we pay as much attention to gender identities in literature written by men as we have done with literature written by women?

Proust, of course, becomes an interesting example to consider here – so would Joyce (Ulysses for the long novel; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) and Mann (Magic Mountain); I imagine Lawrence could fit into this equation too, though, his novels do not seem to have the same concern as Proust, Joyce, Mann (though I welcome thoughts on this).

In his book, Male Confessions: Intimate Revelations and the Religious Imagination (2010), Björn Krondorfer argues that we must develop, as he does,

A consciously male-gendered reading [that] is a critique of hegemonic masculinity and heteronormativity (and the concomitant social privileged bestowed upon men of certain classes) without giving up on the category of ‘men’ altogether. It is an acknowledgement of difference (and we always need to ask, ‘difference from what?’) as well as an awareness that such differences may not exist in any essential or natural sense but are constituted by the way of articulating oneself in contradistinction to (often fictionalized) others.

In addition to this praxis of ‘male-gendered reading’ – a term that uneasily rests between the essentialism of biology and the constructed-ness of gender – Krondorfer elaborates:

A critical and consciously male-gendered reading, then, assumes a male difference without claiming that men constitute a homogenous whole. Put simply, but no less thorny in its implications: men are men, but not all men are equal; men become men by articulating their distinctiveness from women; men become ‘straight’ by distinguishing themselves from ‘deviant’ male behavior; men become heteronormative by mistaking sameness of discrete groups of men as universal; men become ‘real men’ by reiterating the fictions they have helped fro construe about the other.

Unpacking all of this is surely no easy task, but it does seem to me that this could be an instructive example or model to follow when reading through Proust. We have all addressed the questions of gender and sexuality (and also class) in Proust, but have we done this from the starting point of “men’s literature.” I think back to the questions of sleep, dreams, fantasy, and sexuality. What would a “male” response to these instances be? How does a man write about these and is it any different from the way a woman writes about them?

These are some of the questions that are currently occupying my time as I write about virginity, adolescence, puberty, and sexuality in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. I will follow this entry with more observations soon enough. For now, I am still not entirely certain how all of this can or will unfold.

J.A.

Photo: Oliver Ray's "Man Writing"

Her Lies, She Lies

E-L. J.'s thoughtful post regarding Proust's Albertine and the power of her slumber reminded me of the double meaning of the verb "to lie" that Shakespeare takes such advantage of in Hamlet. The only time Albertine cannot lie is when she is lying. In bed. Asleep.

Ok, so my comparison and poetic analysis kind of crumbles after this, especially when considering that Proust, unlike our Elizabethan beloved, writes in French and thus does not use the verb "to lie" at all. But, the idea remains despite the downpeel of its symbolic skin.

The last three posts from E-L. J. and J.A. are blending together in my thoughts. Moments of reading and being do mix together into a single timeline wherein the reading becomes being and our being starts to be self-reading. And this idea of lying (asleep) and lying (to be deceptive) are just forms of being. But the difference is in the position of the being, one is upright and one is horizontal. Lying in bed is a theme that persists throughout In Search of Lost Time, though whether Marcel is just too ill to get up, or Albertine is channeling Sleeping Beauty (now there's a whole other parallel romance), the crux of this theme is just as much about ways of seeing as it is about moments of being.

Rosalind Krauss writes, “[i]t will be symmetry and particularly center that will ballast rules [of good physical form].” An infant’s “I” is prefigured by his/her viewing of a “figure of coherence, balance, and wholeness.” What changes if the body is unwell or seen to be unconscious, alseep? It seems that this horizontal positioning places the subject one step closer to death: by lying, the body rehearses its own "putting to rest," so to speak.

But the most important part of "The Mirror Stage" seems to be the "seeing" part. It's not so much what is there that matters, but what is seen to be there. The imagination reflects much more detail and depth than the mirror does in its raw form. In this sense, to get back to Jonathan's point, it is more of a "reading into" or a "being into" than a simple reading and being. It is a deeper, layered seeing that transforms the image from just-another-thing to "my body;" transforms object into subject.

And when we lie down to sleep, or to rest our sickly bodies we see the world sideways. We go back to a time before our verticality, or perhaps we merely foreshadow our permanent rest; either way, with our seeing altered, our subjectivity changes and we again, like in the mirror stage, become not only what we see, but the way we see. Prof. Jagoe's discussion about Marcel's attraction to Albertine only when she is unaware of his objectification of her actually resembles our own viewing delight in gazing at the aloof boys in Mann's photos in more than one way. Might I suggest that sleep is also a metaphor for childhood? Or at least child-likedness?

In the sense that sleeping allows her to escape the super ego, self-critiquing, inhibitioned, begazed self-object that is aware of everyone else around her, Albertine becomes the aloof boys shooting their "so what?" looks back at the camera. What Lacan calls an “eminent manque-à-être” or a "lack of being" can only be amended by accessing “the forgotten language of [one’s] childhood.” This language is a spoken language, the immediacy of which opens the passageway for expressing one’s unedited, uncensored thoughts that lay buried in the unconscious, that we can not edit, delete, scratch out and rewrite until there are no blunders. Blunders are the language of the unconscious and Lacan is positive they are not really blunders at all, but rather windows into our own little mannikins that socialization has turned back into a wooden puppet boy for ever. But he still comes back to life as soon as we close our eyes.

Krauss suggests the “upright” subject also reflects the ill subject’s perspective on “being” from a horizontal, rather than vertical position. For, in their resting state, the sickly are always laying down, and as V. Woolf articulates in her On Being Ill, “[d]irectly the bed is called for, or, sunk deep among the pillows in one chair, we raise our feet even an inch above the ground on another, we cease to be soldiers of the upright; we become deserters” (12). We become deserters of being. Deserters of being what others want us to be or what we think others want us to be. We become children (?).

Being is seeing is reading is sleeping.

-natalie

Looking at You: Sleep and Fantasy

One of the canonical moments of In Search of Lost Time must be the moment in which Marcel reflects upon falling asleep, the moment that opens the book. Eva-Lynn writes in her entry the following:

The place where Albertine stops trying to be the object of his fantasy is perhaps at the moment when she most is: in her sleep. He turns her head so that she looks the way he wants, he gazes at her, he kissses her, he masturbates against her. This would seem to be the place where she is most objectified, most made to fit his image of her. Yet there is something untouchable in it as well. Yes, she is there, being looked at and touched, but she is not engaging with him, not trying to be what he wants. Lost in sleep, she is in the only place that she can get away from her consciousness of his desire.

There is something interesting about this and yet I am not quite certain what to do with it. If it is true that the moment when Albertine stops being the object of fantasy is the moment she sleeps which paradoxically is the moment she is most desired, what are we to do with Marcel’s ruminations about sleep? Or, in other words, is it simply that Marcel longs to be desired, the object of fantasy, etc.? I guess in this regard, perhaps, I am just inverting Eva-Lynn’s comment about the expectations of the reader:

I would argue that this is because he knows that to be able to write he needs to be able to be aware of his readers without being too anxious about how to fulfill their fantasy of him and his book.

In my reading, I would suggest that instead perhaps Marcel longs to be desired and longs to be the object of fantasy. However, I’m not entirely certain, as I suggested at the beginning, of just how all of this will unfold (if at all).

J.A.

Thomas Mann and Marcel Proust: Long Novels

Throughout much of the course on Proust, we often referred to other long novels and to these ends I have started to read some of these novels. Right now Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain has my attention. During Eva-Lynn’s lecture on the “long novel” at the conference, she noted the similarities between the long novel and psychoanalysis. Thomas Mann, perhaps, picks up on this very question, he writes:

A human being lives not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or subconsciously, the lives of his epoch and contemporaries; and although he may regard the general and impersonal foundations of his existence as unequivocal givens and take them for granted, having as little intention of subjecting them to critique as our good Hans Castorp had, it is nevertheless quite possible that he senses his own moral well-being to be somehow impaired by the lack of critique. (31)

Aside from the gut-recognition of psychoanalytic terms, there is something more, I think, to be taken from this. The long novel – like psychoanalysis – perhaps requires that we become critical not only of the character in question but also of ourselves. I wonder how often each of us thought that they had something in common with Marcel while reading In Search of Lost Time. I guess what strikes me here about this is that we probably all had moments where we saw ourselves in Marcel and then moments where we were annoyed, angered, or repulsed by Marcel. How do we come to terms with these moments of reading and being? I think the correlation between psychoanalysis and the long novel is likely to be found in these “moments of reading and being” wherein our reading becomes about our being and our being about our readings. It is the moment when we can no longer recognize the difference between being and reading that we must focus on and consider deeply, intimately, closely, textually.

J.A.

You looking at me?

There’s this photograph, that I think I may have imagined, of a boy looking straight at the camera but without really seeing it. I thought it was a Sally Mann photograph of her son Emmett, but in all of them he seems to have an air of resignation or of frustration, defiance. He is interacting with the camera. Perhaps the “white boy” has a little more of the look that I’m thinking of. Looking, but not really interacting, thinking something to which the camera is not privy. But I’m not sure about this boy, it could be that he’s posing, even that he’s titillated by being photographed. In my imagined photograph, the boy is completely aware that the camera is trained on him, and he looks directly at it, but doesn’t attempt to attend to it, to to imagine what it wants from him. The camera is asking a question, but it is unclear what the answer should be. It’s just there, mute, not dictating anything other than its insistence on seeing him. The child can’t know what the camera wants, why it’s just there, watching. And the camera can’t know what’s going on in the child when he stares, seeing and not seeing. His gaze back is inscrutable, self-enclosed. Not posing. Not anxiously trying to present himself for the camera. Not trying to discern what the camera’s fantasy is and be the object of it. Not trying to be the object of fantasy.

What Marcel longs for from Albertine is to be able to look at her without her responding to his gaze, without her making herself into who he wants her to be. After all, his initial attraction to her began when she paid no attention to him, when she was unaware of him and she was just one of the girls in Balbec. In The Captive, Marcel’s obsession with her is so changeable, so not hooked to her, that she is constantly trying to be whoever she thinks he wants her to be at the moment. Thus the lies, the docility, the carefully controlled gaze. Caught, she can’t look at a woman or look away from a woman, for each action proves to Marcel that his suspicions are justified. Always wanting to catch her betraying her desire, he is both mollified and thwarted that her overt desire is to please him. How to see her when she is not aware of him? This voyeuristic urge is one of the fantasies that recurs throughout the book, and affords the narrator advantageous peeping positions where he can catch people (Mmme. Vinteuil, Charlus and Jupien, Charlus in an S/M situation) acting upon their desire.

The place where Albertine stops trying to be the object of his fantasy is perhaps at the moment when she most is: in her sleep. He turns her head so that she looks the way he wants, he gazes at her, he kissses her, he masturbates against her. This would seem to be the place where she is most objectified, most made to fit his image of her. Yet there is something untouchable in it as well. Yes, she is there, being looked at and touched, but she is not engaging with him, not trying to be what he wants. Lost in sleep, she is in the only place that she can get away from her consciousness of his desire.

Proust starts the whole novel with his sleep, and returns to its states of reverie, possibility, and bare affect often. I would argue that this is because he knows that to be able to write he needs to be able to be aware of his readers without being too anxious about how to fulfill their fantasy of him and his book. Like Albertine, who can only be free of his gaze when she sleeps, he seeks to find a place where the reader’s presence will always be there but he will be able to speak in ways that do not try to respond so much to it. Much of the book shows his shame and self-disparagement around his failure to write, to produce that which his reader so much wants to see. Thus characters such as his family members, the people he knows in society, his friends, project onto his body, his language, his infirmity, his weakness a “literariness” that anticipates a production. Uncomfortable under this gaze, he seeks a sleep-like state where he can not be the object of their fantasy of him, where he can speak with a lessened anxiety about what they want from him. He is in search of the lost time of sleep, a space of dreams, of lack of self-consciousness, where the presence of the other lessens and the work of introspection, interiority, thought, can be done.

(In the longer version of this, as you can imagine, I compare the camera and the reader to the analyst. I also talk about the state of sleep being like that image of himself as a tree, needing to draw from within without the distraction of the other). --ELJ