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