Sedgwick: "The Weather in Proust"

I am pasting here an excerpt -- one of the few available -- from Jonathan Goldberg's recent note -- "On the Eve of the Future" -- from the Theories and Methodologies section published in the most recent volume of the PMLA (125.2); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes:

That the universe along with the things in it are alive and therefore good; here, I think, is the crux of Proust's mysticism. [...] Moreover, the formulation does not record a certainty or a belief but an orientation, the structure of a need, and a mode of perception. It is possible for the universe to be dead and worthless; but if it does not live, neither do the things in it, including oneself and one's contents. So put it comparatively: the universe itself is as alive as anything it holds. (376-77)

Goldberg, for those who do not know, is the author of various important works of literary criticism, notably Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (1992) which was, and in many ways, continues to be a pioneering text in sexuality studies and early modern/renaissance studies. He is Sedgwick's literary executor and is currently preparing "a volume of Eve's writing that represents her work since Touching Feeling" (374).

J.A.

What if Proust had a Paper Route?

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."

After the opera, in The Guermantes' Way, Marcel goes into a long description of his morning walks, followed by a visit from his old friend, St-Loup. This is an exciting event for young Marcel because St-Loup does not have a lot of freedom to come to Paris on account of his work schedule, something that seems bizarre to Marcel, who cannot work because of his poor health. But something in his voice makes me think that it is not only his poor health that is blocking his ability to work:

“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

Plumage and Pearls, Oh Radiant Girls!

On at least three definite occasions in today's 30-page chunk of The Guermantes' Way, Marcel gave me a little quiver of euphoria.

Let me explain. Although the entirety of the 30 pages consisted of a detailed account of Marcel's visit to the opera, neither the play nor the performance were of central concern to our young narrator. Rather, he discussed the current of characters sashaying into the theatre, through the isles and perching onto the real "scene;" that is, the spectators' red velour cushioned seating. For, in Marcel's eyes, this is where the show happens.

Given my inability to take responsibility for my own misgivings, allow me to preface the following confession with an excuse: these days it is a natural thing, and quite acceptable, to have a small attention span, due to our current state of the media. Thus, I am not alone in admitting that I sometimes liken my Proust readings to the event of a duck paddling through thick seaweed for miles and miles. He thinks he just has to kick harder, but alas, the seaweed is both slippery and tangly in the worst of ways. He makes no distance and finally falls asleep from utter exhaustion. I am this duck.

Anyhow, to get back to the point, the three moments in today's reading that resuscitated my reading all concern appearances and especially couture. Today, Marcel gave me a lesson not only in what to wear, but more importantly, how to wear it.

1) The entrance of the marquis de Palancy. In this scene, Marcel describes the creature as something almost animalistic: he has an "oblique figure, with one fat, round eye glued to his monocle." But the best part of the description is the image of the marquis swimming into the room like a "fish" who, contained in his "aquarium" moves through the room oblivious to all the eyes observing him with awe. His presence is enough to magnetize the eyes of the princess de Guermantes. And what eyes! According to Marcel, these gems look with a glance like chained diamonds, filled with both love and intelligence, but in the moment they abandon emotion, are stunning simply for their beauty. Stripped of her own inward projection outward, these eyes take on their own dress; one of sparks ignited from cinders, a profound and inhuman fire - horizontal and spendid! (Marcel later tells us that this marquis is one of the men he truly wishes he could be!)

2) Next comes the duchess de Guermantes. She saunters into the room wrapped in white mousselines. In an effort to give her cousin, the princess a "lesson in taste," the duchess declined the extravagant "costumes" of her fellow socialite women and opted for a simpler toilette gown. Instead of the enormous, marvellous and ever-so-soft plumage of her cousin's headwear, which descended just to the nap of her stunning neck, instead of the reservoir of shells and pearls, she chose the less aquatic "aigrette" (single swan feather) hair clip which gave her whole head and neck a bird-like elegance. Impatiently, Marcel takes our imaginary eye down his own tracing of her dress. The toilette was adorned with a remarkable corsage, constructed of brilliant metal, of rings and of studs! And the dress enraptured her person with a "precision that was altogether Britannic." The duchess sat gingerly next to her cousin, the princess, and Marcel could have sworn he saw them twist their chairs ever so slightly in each others' direction, just to keep an eye on one another.

3) Through the eyes of Mme. de Cambremer. Finally, toward the end of the opera, even Marcel admits to being "feverish with thirst and nostalgia" (?) and so focusses yet again on a delight of sartorial grace - this time from what he imagines is Mme. de Cambremer's perspective. Now we have a new discussion of the Guermates women's attire. Once thought to be exclusive to the Conde and the Guermantes feminine dress, these toilettes with their red collers can never be worn the same way again. For as Proust writes, for both the Guermantes women and the bird, "the plumage is not merely an ornament of her beauty, but an extension of her body." The dresses were like "snowy" drapery that held worlds of activity in every shadowed fold!

These are the moments I savoured today. What positively poetic description of fashion and people Proust gives us. So much delight Marcel takes in the art of couture. For the deliciousness of these paragraphs is not gratuitous, is it? No, there is something I cannot describe that makes fashion important. Two days ago, I felt pity for Francoise and swore I was becoming a Marxist, but with all the beauty of these gowns, how can I? I love clothes, I love shoes, I love accessories, and I love to read about them from any era. Besides, they have kept me mentally alive for another reading session. Can I then say that my survival depends on couture?

-natalie

Literature as Therapy

I post a link here to a posting on The Educated Imagination, a website devoted to studies of Northrop Frye. The author considers Frye's lecture "Literature as Therapy," which was presented at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto as part of the Samya Moranis Chris Special Lectures Series on Science and Culture, November 23, 1989. The lecture is very much a senior scholar at the end of his career and life considering the value of literature and therapy -- perhaps Frye was predicting the cognitive/scientific turn before it would reach the 'mainstream' (if it has yet even achieved this status).

I have, initially two thoughts that relate well to our study of Marcel Proust's masterpiece. The first draws on Carmelo Tropiano's argument that "[t]he cathartic effects of reading appear to segue into the purging of destructive 'imbalances' that contribute to physical illness." To Tropiano's argument, it seems we can add the "cathartic effects" of writing. Could it be that for Proust, writing itself serves as the cathartic act which helps to account for the living with physical illness? To these ends, as with all things Proustian, a necessary inversion occurs. Tropiano writes:

The artist's vision is one in which the reader participates, in such a way as to procure a deeper awareness of the world beyond one's environment; it is a practice that enables a reader to gain insights, through appropriation, that will make his own life more comprehensible.

This, of course, makes sense, but what happens when we flip or invert the artist with the reader? What if it is the reader's vision in which the author participates? Proust was as much a reader as he was a writer. Proust seems to want to understand his own phenomenological experience as he wants to write about it -- this coming to understand his own presence and present become that oceanic moment, those rare glimpses when time and being are captured by the author/reader (indeed, a neologism seems needed, one that would allow reader and author to fold into one another).

The latter thought -- connected and disconnected -- comes from Frye and, at times, seems to have something in common with Tropiano's commentary of Frye's "Literature as Therapy," Frye writes:

There's a very shrewd comment in George Eliot's Middlemarch about a doctor who had a reputation for being a sceptic, but, instead of ruining his reputation in a small Victorian town, his scepticism actually raised his stock very considerably because his patients greatly preferred to deal with somebody who thought entirely in terms of natural causes and natural cures. (463-4)

Frye does not turn to Proust often -- though he certainly does throughout his career -- however, there is something to be said for this doctor and Marcel Proust. As we know, Proust greatly admired Eliot's work and it seems interesting that here we have a medical scepticism while Proust seemed to be sceptical. Proust seems like this doctor in recognising that "the practice of medicine was full of magic" (464) and yet recognises that "it was based on the conception of natural sympathies and natural antipathies" (464). All of this is part of the Proustian inversion which in many instances is a paradoxical embrace -- as readers we are often struggling to understand these inversion which create paradoxes, but, what if instead of 'bracketing' a part of the paradox, we just allow for two contrary ideas to stand together?

A Frygian reading of Proust would likely rely upon the poetics, politics, and hermeneutics of paradox:

Whenever we read anything, we find our attention moving in two directions at once. One direction is outward or centrifugal, in which we keep going outside our reading, from individual works to the things they mean, or in practice to our memory of the conventional association between them. The other direction is inward or centripetal, in which we try to develop from the words a sense of the larger verbal pattern they make. (Anatomy of Criticism 73)

Indeed, this is the very sort of reading that Proust demands of his reader: read internally and externally. This is precisely the challenge of deciding how one must read Proust. We must adopt a reading like that of the doctor in Middlemarch, we must recognise the limits of our approaches and rely upon the magic and scepticism intrinsic to our modes of reading practice.

This returns us to the question, I hope, of the therapeutic value of literature precisely because it becomes a question of how to read, and in turn, how to heal. One of the great traumas of our experience with Proust was the premature ending, we left in media res and were all sort of dealing with questions about the significance of three trees, the madeleines, the writer as reader writing about his readings, the problem of inversion. We were all negotiating which theoretical postures were best when reading Proust, and almost always realising that we were and continue to be without a worthy answer to this question. So now what? In a Proustian inversion, what if reading is an illness that only reading will cure? We all remember that infamous Proustian line -- there are so many! -- "If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time."

To close (though that Proust quotation felt like an ending!) -- and I fear, that I have just run around in circles and will never really close -- Tropiano writes: "[t]he healing properties in literature, thus, are those that allow us to dislocate ourselves form our surroundings" and yet with Proust, it seems as much as we are able to be captivated by the narrative, we are also able to be fugitives and flee from it. Proust heals as much as he wounds. Proust enclosed and disclosed himself in his narrative. Or, perhaps, like Frye teaching Milton, I have fallen victim to the power of tremendous lines:

Many years ago, when I found myself teaching Milton's Paradise Lost with considerable intensity, I discovered that his tremendous lines tended to detach themselves from their context and become individual beings chasing themselves around inside my head. On one occasion when I was very tired and still couldn't get to sleep, I examined the contents of my brain, so far as I could, and I found there the line from book 10 describing the building of the bridge over Chaos to Hell: "Disparted Chaos overbuilt exclaimed." I thought to myself, well, nobody can sleep with a line like that chewing away in the back of his skull, so I concentrated on the line about the planets from Book 8, "With inoffensive pace that spinning sleeps", and was asleep in no time. (475-6)

As with reading Proust, perhaps the challenge is where we put our attention -- can we displace our pain, our aches, our symptoms? I have been caught by the essay/chapter on inversion and have not been quite able to overcome it and perhaps one must, if one is to receive literature as therapy, move beyond the difficulty of one or two passages and, as Proust would say: "[t]he voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes." So, we ought not to give up on the difficulty of Proust, but to focus our attention on other elements and aspects -- of course, I fear that I may just enjoy the symptoms of my own illness too much and will remain stuck on the point of inversion. Virginia Woolf notes, wonderfully so, that,

Incomprehensibility has an enormous power over us in illness, more legitimately perhaps than the upright will allow. In health meaning has encroached upon sound. Our intelligence domineers over our senses. But in illness, with the police off duty, we creep beneath some obscure poems by Mallarmé or Donne, some phrase in Latin or Greek, and the words give out their scent and distil their flavour, and then, if at last we grasp the meaning, it is all the richer for having come to us sensually first, by way of the palate and the nostrils, like some queer odour. (On Being Ill 21-22)

I close here with many unfinished thoughts precisely because I am not quite sure how to overcome this illness of reading Proust and now I must allow for literature to work as therapy and work through the issues that remain unresolved. And to the Captive, I return.

J.A.

Borges, Proust, Buddha

Yet another interesting quotation for perhaps someone to tackle and to deal with in their readings of Proust:

From Chaucer to Marcel Proust, the novel's substance is the unrepeatable, the singular flavour of souls; for Buddhism there is no such flavour, or it is one of the many vanities of the cosmic simulacrum. Christ preached so that men would have life, and have it in abundance (John 10:10); the Buddha, to proclaim that this world, infinite in time and in space, is a dwindling fire. (Personality and the Buddha, 350)

It seems that I am just collecting quotations that are later posted on the blog, but this seems to be an interesting task insofar as we can begin -- or at least I can -- the reach of Proust.

J.A.

Marx, Proust, Benjamin?

I really appreciated the post that Jonathan made the other day commenting on Taussig’s Walter Benjamin’s Grave. In fact, I myself was just writing on the triad of Marx, Benjamin and Proust -- and more specifically (1) Marx’ conception of work as de-humanizing and alienating, (2) the role this depersonalization of work plays in Benjamin’s ‘atrophy of experience’, and (3) Proust’s re-assessment of the meaning of work (work not as dehumanizing, but, quite the opposite, as potentially meaningful, painfully personal, and involving an intimate subjective/phenomenological connection with one’s ‘world’). This quote from Marx in particular seemed to be of relevance to me when trying to conceptualize precisely what it was Proust was critiquing about ‘work’ (which to him didn’t really get to the nitty gritty of real work):

Work is external to the worker, that it is not part of his nature; and that, consequently, he does not fulfil himself in his work but denies himself, has a feeling of misery rather than well-being, does not develop freely his mental and physical energies but is physically exhausted and mentally debased. The worker, therefore, feels himself at home only during his leisure time, whereas at work he feels homeless. His work is not voluntary but imposed, forced labour. It is not the satisfaction of a need, but only a means for satisfying other needs. Its alien character is clearly shown by the fact that as soon as there is no physical or other compulsion it is avoided like the plaque. External labour, labour in which man alienates himself, is a labour of self-sacrifice, of mortification” (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, 1964: 124-5)

If Benjamin is a ‘Proustian Marxism”, then what is it about Benjamin’s Marxism that is Proustian? Is there something 'transcritical' going on here, like Karatani Kojin's transcritique of Marx and Kant? This is something I haven’t quite grasped yet. As “an eccentric overwhelmed by the avant-garde and the fast-moving political scene of the time” (quoting from Taussig), there is both an element of the unconventional, as well as the alienated, even the outcast -- the eccentric is ex-centric, ie. outside of the center. The fascination that Benjamin had with Proust was in part a result of their shared sense of their own alterity. Amit Chaudhuri’s introduction to Benjamin’s One Way Street draws attention to Benjamin’s identity as a secular Jew, ie. his “angularity in relationship to the mainstream”. Like the bourgeoise Bengali subjugated to a colonial modernism, Chaudhuri says, he belongs to a “nomadic family”; he is one “who has become deracinated from his or her tradition” and one who is “unsure of his own identity: confronting world history has displaced him from his lineage, and his politics extends to a critique of his forbears” (x-xi). What if we think, then, of Proust problematic of ‘work’ as being the problem of constructing -- or reconstructing -- not just lost time, but a lost tradition, namely a tradition from which Proust as a modern eccentric -- an eccentric alienated from the modern, from the “fast-moving political scene of the time” (Taussig) -- has become alienated. I am not really articulating this as well as I could, but I feel that this is all connected: the Marxist conception of the alienation of the worker, the Benjaminian idea of the atrophy of experience/tradition, and the Proustian idea of regaining a lost past and restructuring the web of time ... I will end with that for now.

-D.G.

Proust's Theories, Proust's Theorists

As most of you know, my interest now, when reading Proust, is the way in which Proust is read and how we are to read Proust and how Proust reads us. There is, of course that wonderful quotation in Time Regained:

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 this book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is proof of its veracity, the contrary also being true, at least to a certain extent, for the difference between two texts may sometimes be imputed less to the author than to the reader. Besides, the book may be too learned, too obscure for a simple reader, and may therefore present to him a clouded glass through which he cannot. And other peculiarities can have the same effect as inversion. 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 one.’ (VI:322)

To these ends, as I was reading On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain, I noticed how Said turned to Adorno who in turn turns to Proust; I quote here from Mimima Moralia, “For Marcel Proust”:

The son of well-to-do parents, who whether from talent or weakness, engages in a so-called intellectual profession, as an artist or a scholar, will have a particularly difficult time with those bearing the distasteful title of colleagues. It is not merely that his independence is envied, the seriousness of his intentions mistrusted, and that he is suspected of being a secret envoy of the established powers. Such suspicions, though betraying a secret resentment, would usually prove well-founded. But the real resistances lie elsewhere. The occupation with things of the mind has by now itself become ‘practical,’ a business with strict division of labor, departments and restricted entry. The man of independent means who chooses it out of repugnance for the ignominy of earning money will not be disposed to acknowledge the fact. For this he is punished. He is not a ‘professional,’ is ranked in competitive hierarchy as a dilettante no matter how well he knows his subject, and must, if he wants a career, show himself even more resolutely blinkered than the most inveterate specialist. (21)

Following this, Said noted that “Adorno, like Proust, lived and worked his entire life next to, and even as a part of, the great underlying continuities of Western society: families, intellectual associations, musical and concert life, and philosophical traditions, as well as any number of academic institutions. But he was always to one side, never fully part of it” (21).

For now, I have no comment but instead prefer to continue sharing the various theorists who have incorporate Proust into their own thoughts and how this very action seems, appropriately enough, Proustian.

Another thought though on inversion, it struck me that Proust in the above theory of reading speaks about inversion: is the author merely an inversion of the reader or vice versa?

J.A.