Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.

Some Notes on Monsieur Proust's Library

by Françoise Rees

Monsieur Proust's Library - Anka Muhlstein

The book contains spoilers in the list of characters at the beginning and in most chapters.

Because of the spoilers I chose to highlight some sections or anecdotes from the book that either pertain to sections we've already read or are general to the whole book.

Muhlstein looks both at books/authors who influence Proust based on his copious correspondence and articles he's written but also at what characters read in La Recherche and how authors (Bergotte especially) are described in it.

 

Proust as a reader

At the time, children didn't read books especially written for young readers. They read renowned authors, generally in illustrated editions that were sometimes abridged.

"He adored Théophile Gautier's Capitaine Fracasse, a cloak-and-dagger story set in the 17th century under Louis XIII".

"Another favorite was Alexandre Dumas, who he quoted often in letters to his mother and to his brother, and continued to read for fun all his life."

As a teenager Proust did serious reading, encouraged by his grandmother. "He wrote to her how sad and beautiful he found Balzac's Eugénie Grandet, and in the same letter incorporated quotes of Corneille, Racine and Molière with abandon, perhaps to impress her with a familiarity-unusual for a teenager- with the classics."

"By the time he was in seconde (10th grade), he had discovered both Anatole France's ironical, skeptical, and often racy novels written in the purest French and those of Pierre Loti, whose style is very sensual and impressionistic; he was familiar with the obscure poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, and memorized poems by Leconte de Lisle, holding in great regard his detachment, precision, and richness of classical references. And Proust had read a number of novels by Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Dickens and George Eliot."

 

What characters are reading in La Recherche

"In Combray, one evening the young boy is so upset that his mother reluctantly agrees to spend the night in his room, and as he is too agitated to fall asleep, she reads him François le Champi by George Sand, a somewhat curious choice.

The story is that of a foundling, an infant boy raised by Madeleine, a good woman married to a miller. The boy leaves when he is old enough to find work, but returns to marry the window Madeleine, thus transforming a filial attachment into conjugal bliss."

Marcel recalls in La Recherche that he used to read Augustin Thierry, a historian of the Middle Ages, before setting off for a walk toward Méséglise.

 

Authors mentioned in La Recherche

Style preoccupied Proust greatly, but memory, and particularly the phenomenon of involuntary memory and its potential role in artistic creation, obsessed him. Three writers, François de Chateaubriand, Gerard de Nerval and Charles Baudelaire shared this obsession.

The most well known passage in La Recherche is the episode of the madeleine. Chateaubriand has used this technique, but, in his case, it was a sound that awakened the involuntary memory. Proust recognized the debt to his predecessor for a process that would prove all-important in La Recherche in a candid admission: “ And in one of the masterpieces of French literature … les Memoires d’outre -tombe… there figures a sensation of the same species as the taste of the madeleine” [P 19]

Baudelaire

Critics have often commented on the similarities between the two men, who both remained absorbed by the lost paradise of their childhood, were passionately attached to their mothers, fell sick at a relatively young age, and used narcotic freely.

Poem Les petites vieilles (Baudelaire) to which Proust returns many times in Contre Saint Beuve

In Proust , the mother “stood with the unheeding desolation of a tree lashed by the rain and shaken by the wind” [P22]

Description of the dying grandmother. This vision is as cruel as anything in Baudelaire’s work. Similar to Baudelaire’s poem, both reflect a deep understanding and compassion.

Baudelaire’s famous line “The sounds, the scents, the colors correspond” echos Proust description and unexpected association [P27]

No character in La recherche directly brings to mind Baudelaire. Instead Baudelaire’s presence in the novel is inescapable yet hidden.

 

Foreign influences

John Ruskin: English writer and critique. 19^th century art critique. Proust enthusiasm was kindled by Ruskin’s conception of the artist as interpreter, a link between nature and men, and his belief that beauty resided in the “simplest of objects…”

[P 30] Find some of Ruskin theory in Elstir.

That the artist should only paint or describe what he sees was a precept which delighted Proust, who claimed he had no imagination. In La Recherche, the painter Elstir will present this very same theory to the Narrator. He needs to shed all preconceptions when he starts painting in order to paint only what he sees and not what he knows.

Proust translated Ruskin with the help of his mother who was fluent. She did the first draft of the translation and he rewrote it. Proust was asked to write a long obituary on Ruskin when he died in 1900, from then on he was recognized in France as an authority on the English master.

Robert Louis Stevenson, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy

Tolstoy. [P44] He placed Tolstoy-“a serene God”- very high in the pantheon of artists, far above Balzac, probably because he considered a novel like Anna Karenina to be “not the work of an observing eye but of a thinking mind."

The reflections on Tolstoy appears in Proust’s notebook but not in La Recherche.

Dostoyevsky, who in Proust’s opinion surpassed all other writers, is the subject of extensive comments and analysis in the course of the novel.

Straightforward and brilliant analysis of his work is provided in the literary courses the Narrator inflicts on one of the characters in a section to come.

Dostoyevsky never reveals the true personalities of his characters at the outset. Neither does Proust and in a curious letter to Gaston Gallimard he asserts that The Guermantes Way has a lot more Dostoyevsky in its composition (and add that he hopes Gallimard will excuse the arrogance of the comparison) than the other volumes because the characters will do the contrary of what one expects them to do. There is, however, one constant in their behavior, and that is a passion for reading. Positions, opinions, and sexual orientations may change, but everyone keeps reading in La Recherche.

 

Good readers and bad readers

Not surprisingly Proust made literary taste and reading habits a means of defining his characters.

Readers are ranked according to their attitudes toward books, and he catalogues with delight those he finds wanting.

In Combray, scene when the kitchen maid suffers appalling pains in the kitchen soon after giving birth. The narrator’s mother send Françoise to get the medical encyclopedia in hope of finding some information, but Françoise doesn’t come back and when sent to check on her the narrator finds her in tears in the library reading about afterbirth cramps and so move that she’s sobbing violently. But when she’s back in the kitchen and faced with reality, rather than the written word, she’s totally unmoved .

The footman, wants to show that he’s became a sophisticated Parisian, steals the narrator’s books and copies from them quotations with which he peppers haphazardly the letters he writes home.

For Françoise as for the footman books are foreign objects and they see no relations between what they describe and their own lives.

For the Duchess de Guermantes, reading is less a source of enjoyment than a wonderfully subtle social instrument of domination. (for ex when she declares Zola to be a poet to rattle the Princesse de Parme.)

Her husband the Duke, is polished enough to know that one is expected to appreciate literature, but he is ordinarily content to bask in the reflected glory of the Duchess, whose accomplishments, in his opinion, subjugate the most erudite guests.

Madame de Villeparisis. When we meet her she’s busy writing her memoirs. In the eyes of Proust, she commits the ultimate reader’s sin: she judges authors who were her contemporaries by the figure they cut in society. [P 58]

Mme de Villparisis’s opinions about writers are a spoof of the theories of the great literary critic Sainte-Beuve, who held that knowing an author’s character, morals, religion, and comportment was indispensable for assessing the value of his work.

 

A homosexual reader: Baron de Charlus

Charlus – Mme de Sévigné et Saint-Simon

Mme de Sévigné is used to demonstrate the Baron’s sensibility especially at the beginning of the novel when we don’t know yet that he’s an homosexual. (conversation with the Narrator’s grandmother about Mme de Sévigné and the mother daughter love, and love in general)

Saint Simon is used to caricature the Baron’s peculiarities.

Balzac

Proust wrote at length about Balzac in Contre Sainte-Beuve

He complained about a certain lack of elegance in Balzac's style and the excessive explanations of his characters'  feelings (Proust prefers to evoke)

"Readers interpret the great books of the past in light of their obsessions" wrote Proust.

"Balzac did in fact write at length about homosexuals and lesbians without ever pronouncing a moral judgment. This neutrality, and the willingness to plunge into the world of Sodom and Gomorrah, must have endeared him to Proust, and may explain why he read Balzac so assiduously, and made such striking use of him in La Recherche.

Mention  a couple of passages in La Recherche where anecdotes based on Balzac stories (Lily in the Valley and The Deserted Woman) serve no purpose in the story but only to make the text richer for the reader who recognizes its provenance.

More Balzac themes evoked later in the novel: cruelty of children toward their parents and "unnatural passions"

Charlus and Vautrin live in worlds separated by an incalculable social distance, but they have many things in common. Each is extremely powerful in his milieu. Each of them in his own sphere is feared, and rightly so. [P80] Both are given to orating, and both are nonconformists. Vautrin is in open revolt against society; Charlus's insolence and recklessness in pursuit of sexual satisfactions are capable of undermining a social position even as unassailable as his. If they care to be they are delightful with women. However the resemblance between the two characters remains superficial. There inner selves are completely different . One feels that Proust took the outer envelope of Vautrin and poured into it a very different man.

 

Racine

Proust looks closely at three plays by Racine, Phèdre and the two biblical plays about Jewish queens, Esther and Athalie.

[P94]

Allusion to the princess in Phèdre occurs in the comparison between her and the Narrator, still a child in Combray, distraught at the thought of parting with his beloved hawthorns: "On the morning of our departure I had my hair curled, to be ready to face the photographer, had had a new hat carefully set upon my head, and had buttoned into a velvet jacket; a little later my mother, after searching everywhere for me, found me standing in tears on the steep little path near Tansonville, bidding farewell to my hawthorns, clasping their sharp branches in my arms and, like a princess in a tragedy oppressed by the weight of these vain ornaments, with no gratitude towards the importunate hand which, in curling all those ringlets, had been at pains to arrange my hair upon my forehead"

[...ingrat envers l'importune main qui en formant tous ces nœuds avait pris soin sur mon front d'assembler mes cheveux, foulant aux pieds mes papillotes arrachées et mon chapeau neuf.]

Phèdre" "What efficious hands/Has tied those knots, and gather'd o'er my brow/These clustering coils"

[Quelle importune main en formant tous ces nœuds a pris soin sur mon front d'assembler mes cheveux?]

The Narrator admiration for Racine gets him invited to the Swann, where  Gilberte procurs him with Bergotte's little volume of Racine

Phèdre summary:

Phèdre is consumed by an illicit passion for her stepson Hippolyte.  She could accept being separated from him if she was the one who had banished him. But it is he who decides to leave, with the result that, half demented, Phèdre reveals to him her passion. The young man is unmoved. She grasps the reason:  he is in love with another woman. From that moment, she pursues him with deadly hatred, although, if he had given any sign of being interested in her, she would have rejected him as an unworthy son and lover.

Phèdre is the symbol of l'amour-maladie, love experienced as a sickness, which underlies the Narrator's masochistic conception of love.

 

The Goncourts

Brothers, Jules and Edmond. Best known for having created the arguably most important of French literary prizes, the Prix Goncourt, which is awarded each year by ten writers who constitute the Académie Goncourt, a literary foundation established by Edmond both to honor his brother and to encourage young and innovative novelists.

They wrote art criticism and theater reviews, and then history books, biographies, sketches of living authors, and novels.

All the while keeping a journal that described the literary and social life of the time (they're one generation alder than Proust, Edmond the oldest was born in 1822 and died in 1896, Jules 1830-1870).Their malicious gossip was irresistible, as was their mastery of what was known as l'écriture artiste, distinguished by the use of rare and archaic words, audacious neologisms, and startling juxtapositions of seemingly conflicting terms.

The Goncourts occupy an unusual place in La Recherche. They are not quoted, though they often serve as a source of anecdotes, and they never serve to illuminate a character's personality. Nor are they the favorite authors of any of Proust's characters. Their Journal appears in the most ambiguous form as the subject of pastiche, several pages long, and is crucial to understanding, first what the Narrator initially perceives as his inevitable failure as a writer, and second his subsequent determination to commence and complete his work. As a result, the Goncourts' importance is more negative than positive. They are used as a foil and never as an ideal.

The Princess of Parma's physical appearance and way of dressing, as described by Proust, no doubt reminded readers of Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, the Emperor's cousin, who figures prominently in the Journal. Mme Verdurin owes a lot to Mme Aubernon. And Mme Villeparisis, as a source of anecdotes, may have been inspired by Mme de Beaulaincourt.

The Goncourt pastiche appears near the end of Time Regained, in the form of a passage of the Journal.  [spoiler]

The Goncourts - or rather the Goncourts as imagined by Proust in his pastiche- see the Verdurin very differently from the way they were perceived by Swann, or twenty years later, by the narrator. In Swann's and the Narrator's version, M. Verdurin is very much the husband whose role is to pay the bills and show his wife in the best possible light; Mme Verdurin is a ruthless, gratuitously cruel, and morbidly ambitious. But as seen by the fictional Goncourts, M. Verdurin is a sensitive artist and Mme Verdurin a charming hostess.

The Goncourts did not have the profound , personal resonance that Racine, Beaudelaire, or Balzac had for Proust, but they stimulated his critical faculty, enriched his knowledge of an era he was too young to have known except secondhand, and in the process helped him find his own voice.

 

Bergotte: the writer in the novel

First meeting between Marcel and Bergotte. The young narrator has a mental image of this writer of genius that he derived from his books. He's shocked to meet "a youngish, uncouth, thickset and myopic little man, with a red nose curled like a snail-shell and a goatee beard.

The contrast illustrates the divergence, which Proust always insisted upon, between the artist in society and the artist at work. According to him the artist reveals himself only in his creations;

He (Bergotte) wrote so well and yet his speech was affected, emphatic, and monotonous. This trait was inspired by Anatole France, the author of many delectably ironic novels, who was known to be something of a bore in society. He has many characteristics that reminded contemporaries of Anatole France, and Proust went so far as to plant real France sentences in passages of Bergotte's prose, as if he had secretly wanted to sanction the identification.

Bergotte is very different from Anatole France in  many respects, the most important distinction being his total lack of political engagement as opposed to France's very active role in the Dreyfus affair, but his relationship with the narrators mirrors faithfully that of Proust and France.

However as the narrator develops intellectually and emotionally, his admiration for Bergotte's work diminishes, even though he continues to read and reread his books. In real life, Proust's enthusiasm for France's writing also waned over the years.

The narrator may be disappointed that the artiste is so eager to ingratiate himself with society people and second-rate writers and journalist and that he leads what appears to be such a boring life, but soon the young man comes to understand that it is not an interesting life that makes a great writer; rather, it is the ability to transform the elements of which a life is composed -whatever they may be-into something else: "But genius, and even great talent, springs less from seeds of intellect and social refinement superior to those of other people than from the faculty of transforming and transposing them ... Genius consist[s] in reflecting power and not in the intrinsic quality of the scene reflected".

Notes on the March 6, 2013 Meeting

These notes cover to p. 204 of Volume IV, Sodom and Gomorrah, in the Modern Library edition (Moncrieff / Kilmartin / Enright).

We had our meeting last night, yes.

And we had a dinner party!

Everybody brought something -- salad, potatoes, bread, cheeses, paté, quiche, soup, vegetables, chocolate pudding, madeleines, wine...

At about 9 pm we sat down at a long table in the living room, all 20 of us, to begin our dinner and our discussion.

1. Françoise's Presentation on Monsieur Proust's Library

Françoise shared with us some thoughts on a recently published book about the various literary influences on Marcel Proust (see her full notes below). She mentioned that, above all, Proust considered himself in great debt to Dostoevsky (he particularly admired how Dostoevsky's characters surprise the reader by revealing hidden traits or otherwise changing over time). Françoise also mentioned Proust's debt to Balzac (the Baron de Charlus, for example,  is inspired by Balzac's Vautrin); to the poet Baudelaire (the mixing of the senses and the powers of association); and to Racine (they share, among other things, an obsession with l'amour-maladie). Florence asked about Oscar Wilde, wondering if the work of this aesthete and homosexual had crossed the English Channel to stir Proust. But Françoise said that Wilde had not been mentioned as a significant influence in Proust's Library.

2. The Discussion

Drinking, as I was, more red wine than usual, my memory is not very clear as to what we discussed.

Some of the themes that have lingered with me, a day later:

The Duck

A number of guests commented on the deliciousness of Renée's "wild duck with cranberries" main course, the recipé for which she had found in Dining with Proust (under the title "The Bachelor Dinner"). "This duck did not die in vain!" Yann pronounced.

Us vs. Them

We returned to a discussion of the status-games and social anxieties demonstrated by so many of the characters in Proust's novel.

At one point we asked Jennifer's question again (Jennifer, your presence was felt):

Is this succession of parties even relevant to us? 

Can we recognize ourselves in these people?

Renée made the case that their basic humanity, so well observed by Proust, and the fragility of the friendships they form, are common threads with our experience.

So, if we are like them, someone asked, then are we just as status-conscious as they are, but less aware of it? 

Yann insisted that, at least among the super-wealthy in our contemporary world, status still plays an important role. He told a funny story about sitting next to one of his business partners, who admitted that the size of the Saudi Arabian and other Middle-Eastern Emirs' private jets at Heathrow airport always made him feel "humble" (as they wheeled down the runway in this man's own private jet!). But Yann agreed that this kind of display of opulence is restricted to a very small percentage of people. Instead, he suggested that in the Bay Area we base our status claims on "intellectual capital."

Alex suggested that, unlike in France, it is a brute question of money here. Someone else wondered: Or is it the prestige of your career track and your professional achievements?

Some of us insisted that, to the contrary, people we know are simply not as status-conscious as turn-of-the-century Parisian aristocrats appear to have been -- on the basis of Proust's descriptions at least. Sure, status is still a factor, but it is much farther down on our list of concerns.  

Florence remarked that she was deeply uninterested in these questions about Berkeley and our contemporary values. She wanted to return to a discussion of Proust.

Not quite yet, though--

It was a dinner party, after all, as well as a meeting!

I posed a connected question of the group before we returned to the novel:

If we agree that, here in the Bay Area, we are only minimally concerned with status... And if, as far as I can tell, we do not engage in affairs and philandering and frequent sexual conquests... In other words, if neither of these, the two engines powering the social world of the Guermantes, are available to us anymore -- then what does motivate us?

Marie-José rejected the premise that our friends and colleagues in the Bay Area are not engaging in affairs and philandering and sexual conquests -- "poly-amory," she called it. (You must have wilder friends than we do, Marie-José!)

Florence, grudgingly getting dragged back into the conversation about contemporary life, granted the premise that we are not as concerned with status and sex as the Narrator's acquaintances. She said that we are motivated by a different urge, an urge for "complexity."

Renée returned to her theme that we, like the characters of In Search of Lost Time, are motivated by concern, empathy, love. We are more similar than different, but in a good way.

I was almost swayed by Renée's beautiful vision... In fact, I think I was in the moment. But upon reflection a day later, sadly, I would say that I think the primary motivator for our time, based on what I see, is consumerism. People of all social and economic stations today are interested mostly in their purchases, whether it be a new antique bronze faucet in their kitchen, a power tool, an app, a dance class, a membership, a cellphone, the latest laptop, a blue Prius, a week at a wooded ski cabin in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, or season tickets to the SF Giants. This is what you hear about in small-talk... Subtext: I have this. I enjoy this. I provide this. How about you?

I wish Renée and Florence were right that the status-games and pretensions of high society in Paris in the early 20th century have been replaced by a culture of concern, empathy, nuance, respect for complexity in the early 21st century. But instead -- please convince me that I am wrong! -- I think the Baron de Charlus' twin gods of Status and Sex have been replaced by... their mild-mannered cousins, Taste and Comfort. Just consider the dull, shiny, technology surrounding us in our homes and cars, and the (mostly) sexless pleasures that define privileged lives in the year 2013. With few exceptions (Burning Man? hiking in Yosemite?), crass consumerism is the only game in town.

A Close Reading of the Dirty Bits

Heeding Florence's wish for us to return to the novel, I stood abruptly at one point to give a close reading of the passages covering the sexual acts that occur between Jupien and M. de Charlus.

Somebody had to do it.

Intrigued by the Narrator's Navy SEAL-like efforts to view the encounter, I explained, I had found myself, as I was reading, wanting to know exactly what was taking place between these two men.

Upon wrapping up my textual analysis, I was able to determine that there were at least two, and possibly three, sex acts that occur.

The first, quite unmistakably, is intercourse, with anal penetration. Or, as the Narrator describes it:

"For from what I heard at first in Jupien's quarters, which was only a series of inarticulate sounds, I imagine that few words had been exchanged. It is true that these sounds were so violent that, if they had not always been taken up an octave higher by a parallel plain, I might have thought that one person was slitting another's throat within a few feet of me... I concluded from this later on that there is another thing as noisy as pain, namely pleasure, especially when there is added to it -- in the absence of the fear of pregnancy which could not be the case here... an immediate concern about cleanliness" (SG, 12).

Minutes later, after having offended Jupien by inquiring whether there might be other available men in the neighborhood (..."the chemist opposite, he has a very nice cyclist who delivers his medicines..."), M. de Charlus has to make good again. With this aim in mind, he whispers something in Jupien's ear something which pleases him very much.

This exchange of words initiates the second sex act between these two men. But what is it, exactly?

Jupien studies "the Baron's face, plump and flushed beneath his gray hair," and remarks something to the effect of what a firecracker you've got! (The Moncrieff translation is "What a big bum you have!" but our French readers straightened us out on this.) So is this an offer for a blow job? If so, who is giving and who receiving? Or, if I may, whose firecracker?

After some digressions, the Narrator returns us some 25 pages later to the same scene. There we find our "retired tailor," Jupien, "quivering in ecstasy before a stoutish man of fifty" (SG, 38). Here, then, as I told our group, I was convinced that the Baron de Charlus had, as we say in English, gone down on Jupien -- an interesting reversal of their usual social positions. But then, turning the page, there is a most remarkable additional descriptive passage:

"As for M. de Charlus's part in the transaction, I noticed later on that there were for him various kinds of conjunction, some of which, by their multiplicity, their scarcely visible instantaneousness, and above all the absence of contact between the two actors, recalled still more forcibly those flowers that in a garden are fertilised by the pollen of a neighboring flower which they may never touch" (SG, 39).

Now we were getting into fetishistic territory... a complete "absence of contact"? What is going on? To make it even more vivid, the Narrator goes on with one of his extended metaphors:

"By a simple use of words the conjunction was effected, as simply as it can be among the infusoria. Sometimes... the relief was effected by a violent diatribe which the Baron flung in his visitor's face, just as certain flowers, by means of a hidden spring, spray from a distance the disconcerted but unconsciously collaborating insect" (SG, 39-40).

Don helpfully explained that the term of art for this act, in pornography, is a "facial." (Thank you, Don!) 

My conclusion? Jupien and Charlus engage in: 1) anal intercourse (with presumably, Charlus on top) 2) a blow job performed by Charlus, leaving Jupien "quivering in ecstasy," and finally, 3) a "facial" (is that really a term, Don, or were you just having fun with us?) delivered by Charlus to Jupien, at some distance.

Having delivered my lecture I sat down, feeling very learned.

Mostly people laughed; Jeff seemed disturbed. Though, notably, he did not dispute my findings.

3. End of the Evening

At about 11 pm we had to end. What a fun night!

The last surprise of the evening took place at midnight, just as Renée and I were turning off lights and heading upstairs. From down in the basement we heard a shriek (which was quite inexplicable to us, considering that we knew of no one else in the house except our children sleeping in their beds). A hulking figure emerged. Yann. At some point in the evening he had collapsed on the sofa in the basement. He had opened his eyes to find himself in a strange place. Worse, a black cat face loomed over him, its body pressing down on his chest, its eyes round and glowing blue. He screamed in terror. It was only when he fled upstairs and found us in the hallway that he remembered who he was and how he got there. Proust. Dinner. Wine. Duck with cranberries. It all came back. We had a good laugh and sent him on his way home.

Reading for Our Fifteenth Meeting, on April 3, 2013

For our next meeting, on April 3, 2013, we will read to p. 381 of Volume Four, Part Two, Chapter Two of Sodom and Gomorrah, in the Modern Library (Moncrieff / Kilmartin / Enright) edition.

There is a line break on this page that should be easy to find. The sentence that precedes this break reads:

"A far from scrupulous politician to boot, who, with all the lofty contempt for a thoroughbred nobleman, did not hesitate to play both ends against the middle when he felt like it, and remained left of centre until his dying day."

The sentence that follows the break reads:

"At Saint-Pierre-des-Ifs we were joined by a glorious girl who, unfortunately, was not a member of the little group."

Photos from the Proust Dinner

Lucie took some photos at our halfway up the mountain Proust Dinner last week. Here's the first one...

For more photos go to Lucie's blog: http://tacocat.com/pictures/v/2013/03-10/proust/

Thank you Lucie!

Notes on the April 3, 2013 Meeting

These notes cover pp. 204 - 381 in Volume IV, Sodom and Gomorrah, in the Modern Library edition (Moncrieff / Kilmartin / Enright).

Last week we met for another great discussion.

We covered, among other things, the Narrator's grief over his grandmother's death (delayed by a year but finally brought on by his return to the Grand Hotel in Balbec) and his growing suspicions that Albertine is carrying on secretive lesbian love affairs...

Death and secretive lesbian love affairs, all in one evening.

Oh, I have to mention that Walden brought to the meeting another of those Guinness chocolate cakes his wife makes, a cake so moist and flavorful that it is astonishing.

Death, secretive lesbian love affairs, and a moist and flavorful Guinness chocolate cake.

What more could you want from a Proust reading group? 

1. Tom's Presentation on the Increasingly Unattractive Character of the Narrator

Since, at the end of last month's dinner party I forgot to ask for volunteers to do a presentation, I had to prepare a short one myself.

My presentation took the form of a question:

Why is our beloved Marcel, whom we knew to be such an observant little boy, so dedicated to the truth, so gentle, so generous... growing up to be such an arrogant prick?

In other words, is it just a phase, or is this a permanent condition?

I directed the group's attention to certain irritating features of his personality...

The way, for example, he often boasts of his ability to manipulate others with words: "I gave myself the pleasure of informing her, but by addressing my remark to her mother-in-law, as when, at billiards, in order to hit a ball one plays off the cushion, that Chopin, so far from being out of date, was Debussy's favorite composer" (SG, 293, italics added).

Or the frequent misogynistic descriptions of women: "... the old lady's toothless mouth allowed to trickle from the corners of her faintly mustachioed lips a few drops of misplaced moisture" (SG, 281)... "The wife had a round face like certain flowers of the ranunculus family, and a large vegetal growth at the corner of her eye" (SG, 298).

Or the ease with which he tells lies "This avowal to Albertine of an imaginary sentiment for Andrée, and, towards herself, of an indifference, as though out of a scrupulous politeness... enabled me at length... to speak to her with a tenderness which I had so long denied myself " (SG, 311).

Or his ridiculous self-image as a kind of Don Juan for the smart set: "I counted that, in that one season, a dozen conferred on me their ephemeral favours. Another name came back to me later, which made thirteen. I then had a sort of childish fear of settling on that number. Alas, I realized that I had forgotten the first, Albertine... who made the fourteenth" (SG, 256).

Jaimey lept to Proust's defense. He insisted that the author is, in fact, quite aware of the off-putting tone of these passages. (Have some respect, Clyde!) When the Narrator boasts of 13 sexual conquests, not including Albertine, during his time in Balbec, or when he dismisses the "lift-boy" as a vulgar money-grubbing fool ("And the idiot... had begun to tremble, supposing that... I would never give him anything again" (SG, 305)), we are of course meant to judge the Narrator poorly. Indeed, Jaimey argued, the divergence between the author and his namesake, "Marcel," is pronounced in these passages for a very specific purpose: to guide us along a gradual process of renunciation of the norms of society (as conventionally lived). Our Narrator leads us astray because our author, behind him, leads us astray, so that in time, all together, we may seek greener pastures elsewhere.

Renée concurred with this outlook. Rather than focus on whether we sympathize with this protagonist, she insisted, we should focus on appreciating the arc of his moral development and wondering where it will lead us.  Marie-José hinted (spoiler alert!) that it leads towards a single-minded devotion to art and beauty, a narrow path not available to the addled masses. But to get there, you need to get addled first...

(In some ways, it occurs to me now, this may be a description of the experience of all of the best works of fiction.)

Heather commented that, curiously, she found the hyper-sensitive child more bothersome than the scheming, sexually boastful, self-satisfied young man. Somehow he seems more human now, more recognizable. After all, who among us didn't act like an arrogant (read: deeply insecure) 20something during our arrogant (read: deeply insecure) 20s?

Listening to these robust defenses of Proust's achievement, I was reminded of Nabokov's advice that "the worst thing a reader can do" is to "identify himself with a character in the book."

Whenever we read a novel, Nabokov instructed us, we must always remember that we are entering not a character, but a world.

2. Types of Grief

Next, if my memory serves me, we talked about the differences between the Narrator's sudden nervous breakdown over his grandmother's death and his mother's more bleak and steady sorrow.

Proust's Narrator draws the distinction this way, and he does not go easy on himself:

"... in reality there is a world of difference between real grief, like my mother's -- which literally crushes the life out of one for years if not for ever, when one has lost the person one loves -- and that other kind of grief, transitory when all is said, as mine was to be, which passes as quickly as it has been slow in coming, which we do not experience until long after the event because in order to feel it we need first to 'understand' the event; grief such as so many people feel..." (SG, 227).

Pushing back against Proust's Narrator's implied approval of his mother's behavior, Heather wondered whether such "real grief" may be considered "pathological." She mentioned, in this context, the indelible image the Narrator paints of his mother on the beach at Balbec:

"I saw her from my window, dressed in black, and carrying my mother's sunshade, advancing with timid, pious steps over the sands which beloved feet had trodden before her, and she looked as though she were going in search of a corpse which the waves would cast up at her feet" (SG, 230).

Although I didn't feel completely comfortable with the label "pathological," I agreed with Heather that the mother's behavior revealed much about the intensity of the parenting that we may imagine Marcel having received as a child. In a way, this insight into his mother is one of the first clues that Proust has given us into his Narrator's backstory .

Even so, it is enigmatic. It resists that Hollywood paint-by-numbers quality. The Narrator remarks, for example, how "the blank, tearless gaze" that his mother "had worn since [his] grandmother's death was fixed on that incomprehensible contradiction between memory and non-existence" (SG, 228). This is definitely not the stuff of a Nora Ephron film.

No, this is a grief taken to its existential limits; it has thrown the mother into a state of near-paralysis, a kind of death-in-life. What does it say about her needs? Her disappointments? What does it say about Marcel that he does not share it?

Jaimey spoke up at this point to challenge the description of this grief as "pathological" or deviant or extreme. He argued that Heather's and my concerns regarding the extent of the mother's grief actually post-date Proust, relying as they do on the normative framework of psychology established by Freud in the early 20th century. Although Freud was working at the same time as Proust, Jaimey remarked, it is unlikely that either was familiar with the other's work. It was only decades later, after all, mid-century, that Freud's work led to our contemporary, cognitive behavioral approach to "fixing" problems.

So Proust and his contemporaries, Jaimey insisted, would have been unlikely to have seen anything pathological about a grief that lingers for years and makes one ill-suited to society. To them it represented sadness. Deep, "real" sadness; a question without an answer.

But he didn't stop there. Jaimey went on to suggest that "pathological" behaviors in our time overlap in a surprising way with the notion of being dysfunctional in a capitalist economy, i.e. "non-productive". With the rise of industry and mass employment (as opposed to subsistence farming and craftsmanship), society required a new kind of docile and conformist worker. Psychology arose in parallel with this need...

This was when the yelling started. Heather's label of "pathological," Jaimey stammered, rising to his feet, "is merely a gag stuffed in the mouth, a blood-soaked club, a piece of fabricated technology used to prop up the interests of our capitalist overlords!"

Okay, he didn't go that far. But that's what I heard between his words. My blood was racing with excitement. I was about to start quoting lines from Equus.

At some point during all this Jaimey acknowledged that his father was a therapist, so he knows of which he speaks...

"And that, my friend, is why you are so angry," I said, in my best attempt at dead-pan.

Jaimey (who is, in truth, a remarkably calm and measured person) laughed at this from where he was sitting. "Yes, that's exactly it."

"Still, you have to admit, Heather said, bringing us back to the question of Marcel and his mother, "We are talking about a very funky family."

No one could argue with such overpowering alliteration.

It is, we all agreed, a very funky family.

As we continued to discuss the question of grief, though, I had the occasion to read aloud another passage from Proust:

"It is in this sense (and not in the other sense, so vague, so false, in which the phrase is generally understood) that we may say that death is not in vain, that the dead continue to act upon us. They act upon us even more than the living because, true reality being discoverable only by the mind, being the object of a mental process, we acquire a true knowledge only of things that we are obliged to re-create by thought, things that are hidden from us in everyday life..." (SG, 229)

This passage had struck me because it ties to a previous discussion this group had regarding the value people place on death. Proust seems to be saying that death does have a value, after all. It does not, of course, have a value in the clichéd sense of making life meaningful as we live it. But it does have value as an event that renders the raw data of experience moot at long last; as an event that makes the experience of what we re-create in our minds absolute and exhaustive.

You might even say that death is, for Proust, the ultimate trump card, loading the deck in favor of subjective experience over objective experience.

Both Renée and Jennifer, to my surprise, agreed with Proust's appreciation of the value of death. In turn, they each commented on their personal experiences of losing someone whom they loved dearly. Faced with this person's death, each of them felt that the wholeness of someone's life, seen in its entirety only after it is over, provided a coherent memory from whom to draw solace and guidance, even more perhaps than memories of friends still living.

This discussion made a deep impression on me. I have lost three of my grandparents, and I loved them very much... Yet I realized, as I listened, that I have never lost someone with whom I was in constant communication. Listening to Renée and Jennifer, I grasped for the first time, even if abstractly, that death can create resonances and meaning otherwise never known by the living.

I stand my ground that death has no value -- zippo! -- for the person dying (death remains a drag to all concerned, and is best avoided). But still, the discussion did help me to get a glimmer of what Proust was saying in regards to death's transformative effect on those still living.

As a coda to this discussion, Renée remarked how moving it was to her, to read that the Narrator's mother had assumed many of the personality traits of her mother, so long harbored but never expresssed until the absence caused by death left a role waiting to be filled. She said she has experienced something of this herself, taking on the traits of those she has loved and lost.

3. The Intermittencies of the Heart

I can't remember how we got there exactly, but a little while later Jaimey observed how this month's reading, in its structure as a whole, demonstrates Proust's memorable phrase, "intermittencies of the heart." Not only do we see contradictions and inconsistencies in the day-to-day behavior of the people in this novel, but we also see the shocking contrast between the love the Narrator felt for his grandmother and the cruel and calculating way that he treats Albertine.

Proust wants us to see human nature for what it is. The grief the Narrator feels is undeniable. Yet death, he points out, is truly of little concern for most of us, most of the time. In one brief scene, for example, a "judge" at the Grand Hotel commiserates with the Narrator's mother over her grief, while a "president's wife" stays silent. Considering this, the Narrator draws the following blunt conclusion:

"In reality, the judge cared no more about my grandmother than the president's wife. The affecting words of the one and the other's silence, for all that my mother put so vast a distance between them, were but alternative ways of expressing the indifference which we feel towards the dead" (SG, 230).

Proust backs this up with his frequent knocking off of characters (e.g. Aunt Leonie) in parentheses -- or anyway, in passing, as it were. Am I the only one who found it somewhat traumatic -- is the concept of "trauma" another repressive invention of 20th century psychology, Jaimey? Or is it that one a tool for liberation? -- to learn so casually and indirectly that Swann had died? We read of a "visit of condolence" that a minor character had "paid to Mme Swann after the death of her husband" (SG, 364).

Dear Swann!

The fact is, death itself, the act of death, is incidental to Proust. What matters is everything in our minds before and after. Thinking about this now I realize how consistent it is with the outlook guiding this novel from the beginning; it is the same approach Proust has his Narrator take to the sights and smells of his childhood in Combray, only now it is applied to the dust and decay of the grave. Either experience is, first and foremost, a subjective one, and that is where its value lies.

We ended our discussion of grief and death with an acknowledgement that Proust writes of the experience of the arrival of acceptance very beautifully. When he finally comes to accept, through a dream, that "the dead are dead" (SG, 242), we then follow him outdoors into the countryside. He looks around and sees that the apple-trees are "in full bloom, unbelievably luxuriant, their feet in the mire beneath their ball-dresses, heedless of spoiling the most marvellous pink satin that was ever seen..." (SG, 244). The pathetic fallacy has never been so welcome.

4. Same-Sex Encounters at the Turn of the Century

Our discussion of the Narrator's suspicions of Albertine and her friend Andrée led us to a question of why gay and lesbian liaisons seem so frequent in Proust's novel.

Was Proust's perspective warped by his own obsessions? Why are so many guests at the Grand Hotel doing it with people with parts matched to their own? Or did men and women engage in same-sex relations more frequently then?

I mentioned that in my reading in 19th century history (particularly with the great Professor Estelle Freidman at Stanford) I did encounter the assertion that women would quite commonly engage in petting and sexually satisfying each other, without considering it anything untoward. The terms "gay" and "lesbian" did not exist; more importantly, the identities did not exist.

For men there was, of course, the physical act of buggery, and unlike today it was crime under the law, but hardly anyone considered a single sexual encounter as a marker of one's "orientation." In England, the trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895 did begin to define homosexuality, separate from mere sodomy, as an offense. But women who liked other women were largely still free of condemnation. Without penetration, it was thought, it was all just fooling around anyway! (Funny, isn't it, that contemporary sexual norms insist quite the opposite: today, penetration absent fooling around is hardly "sex" in the proper sense of the word.)

So perhaps there were more "Sapphic" romances, in Proust's day... More late nights spent whispering secrets and caressing a friend in bed... And perhaps sexual liaisons between men were more frequent too, since they did not require that the participants change their self-identification as men desiring, and desirable to, women. 

Or perhaps Proust is exaggerating the gay scene at Balbec a bit for his own novelistic purposes.

Certainly, as someone in the group pointed out, there are plenty of misstated facts regarding sexuality in this month's reading. Cottard, for example, while watching Albertine dance with Andrée, remarks: "It's not sufficiently known that women derive most excitement through their breasts" (SG, 264). It's doubtful that the good doctor (or Proust) even knew that the clitoris existed.

And there's the charged energy surrounding the Narrator's every encounter with the "lift-boy"... (SG, 257-259, 303-306). There seems to be a lot of misdirection in this month's reading.

Though I have to say, I was impressed that, after a few thousand pages, Proust does finally manage a convincing evocation of female sensuality in one passage:

"The fact was that I had just heard her [Albertine] laugh. And this laugh at once evoked the flesh-pink, fragrant surfaces with which it seemed to carry with it, pungent, sensual and revealing as the scent of geraniums, a few almost tangible and secretly provoking particles" (SG, 263).

This struck me as a tribute to the power of Proust's imagination -- that he could even imagine a man's desire for a woman's pungent, sensual and revealing body. To the contrary, though, someone pointed out that Proust later makes the observation that it is a mistake to assume that "the two things were irreconcilable" (SG, 357), urges for both men and women.

We had a laugh reading the Narrator's description of the farm laborers he watches one day during an outing with Albertine, and how he insists that their image has become interwoven with his adoration of women:

"I remember the hot weather that we had then, when from the foreheads of the farm laborers toiling in the sun drops of sweat would fall, vertical, regular, intermittent, like drops of water from a cistern, alternating with the fall of the ripe fruit dropping from the tree in the adjoining orchard; they have remained to this day, together with that mystery of a woman's secret, the most enduring element in every love that offers itself to me" (SG, 320).

"Drops" would fall...

"vertical, regular, intermittent..."

...from these men's "foreheads..."

"...like ripe fruit..."

Please. The last-second, obligatory mention of an unspecified "mystery of a woman's secret" is not going to cut it, Marcel. Just say it, those laborers were way goooood-looking.

5. A Portrait of the Artist

We also, at one point, talked fondly of the two employees of the Grand Hotel whom the Narrator befriends, Marie and Céleste. Their rough and idiosyncratic commentary, which the Narrator likens to poetry, provides us with our first visual portrait of the Narrator:

"There, Marie, look at him sipping his milk with a reverence that makes me want to say my prayers. What a serious air! Someone really ought to take a picture of him as he is just now. He's just like a child. Is it by drinking milk, like them, that you've kept that clear complexion? Ah, what youth! Ah, what lovely skin! You'll never grow old. You're lucky, you'll never need to raise your hand against anyone, for you have eyes that know how to impose their will. Look at him now, he's angry. He shoots up, straight as the gospel truth" (SG, 355).

6. Proust on the Nature of Being "In Love"

Proust, as we have seen, has made many brilliant observations on the nature and experience of love in this novel.

But the passages in this month's reading during the Narrator's hotel room break-up with Albertine are, we agreed, unsurpassed. Proust delineates here in great detail the stages of a love affair, its push-pull nature, the alternation of desire and despair, toughness and tenderness.

After lying to Albertine and pretending that she is to him merely a "good friend," the Narrator delivers for the reader what amounts to a schematic drawing of the internal dynamics of a love affair.

I think it will be worth it to include the whole, extended passage (I have broken it into paragraphs, though the original is continuous). Here goes:

"As it happened, in thus underlining to Albertine these protestations of coldness towards her, I was merely -- because of a particular circumstance and with a particular object in view -- making more perceptible, accentuating more markedly, that binary rhythm which love adopts in all those who have too little confidence in themselves to believe that a woman can ever fall in love with them, and also that they themselves can genuinely fall in love with her.

They know themselves well enough to have observed that in the presence of the most divergent types of women they felt the same hopes, the same agonies, invented the same romances, uttered the same words, and to have realised therefore that their feeling, their actions, bear no close and necessary relation to the woman they love, but pass one side of her, splash her, encircle her, like the incoming tide breaking against the rocks, and their sense of their own instability increases still further their misgivings that this woman, by whom they so long to be loved, does not love them.

Why should chance have brought it about, when she is simply an accident placed in the path of our surging desires, that we should ourselves be the object of the desires that she feels?

And so, while feeling the need to pour out to her all those sentiments, so different from the merely human sentiments which our neighbor inspires in us, those highly specialized sentiments which are those of lovers, after having taken a step forward, in avowing to the one we love our passion for her, our hopes, we are overcome at once by the fear of offending her, and ashamed too that the language we have used to her was not fashioned expressly for her, that it has served us already, will serve us again for others, that if she does not love us she cannot understand us, and that we have spoken in that case with the lack of taste and discretion of a pedant who addresses an ignorant audience in subtle phrases which are not for them; and this fear and shame provoke the counter-rhythm, the reflux, the need, if only by first drawing back, hotly denying the affection previously confessed, to resume the offensive and regain respect and domination; the double rhythm is perceptible in the various periods of a single love affair, in all the corresponding periods of similar love affairs, in all those people whose self-analysis outweighs their self-esteem" (SG, 309-310).

Wow. That's exactly it, no?  

7. End of the Night

There was more talk about the striking image of the Baron de Charlus, with his garish make-up and silvery hair, stepping out on the train platform in the sun.

There was talk of the withering of the Narrator's friendship with Saint-Loup.

And we did continue the conversation from the previous month, regarding the question of the depth of the characters in this novel. We agreed that Proust's portraits of other people (other than his Narrator, that is) are all filtered through a singular sensibility. So if a reader is looking for the omniscient narrative voice, as you might find in a Balzac or a Tolstoy or a Franzen, he or she will be disappointed. Proust's novel is not an attempt to paint a realistic picture; his is an impressionistic technique, teaching us to see the "light" of human relations in ways that we had not noticed before. This was a useful reminder that not all readers will respond to Proust; at some level whether you like one author or another is simply a question of taste. What form do you prefer chaos to be organized into when it is served to you? Cynical realism? Expressionist poeticism? Dialogue-heavy comedy? Vengeance plays? Subjective emotionalism? Omniscience? Tweaked self-consciousness?

Near the end of the night I do remember saying to the group that, having made our way more than halfway through the novel, I didn't want to pat ourselves on the back but I do think that we are grappling with the main themes of this work. I am so grateful for the intelligence and seriousness of this group, and I believe that, with our minds all together, we are actually tracking the developments in this novel fairly closely. Heather chimed in at this point: "So you are saying we are up to the task!" "Yes!" I said in reply.

See you on May 1. Two and a half weeks. Better get cracking.

Reading for Our Sixteenth Meeting, on May 1, 2013

For the next meeting, on May 1, 2013, we will read to the end of Part Two, Chapter Two, of Volume IV, Sodom and Gomorrah.

In the Modern Library (Moncrieff / Kilmartin / Enright) edition this falls on page 514.

Notes on the May 1, 2013 Meeting

These notes cover the end of Part Two, Chapter Two, of Volume IV, Sodom and Gomorrah (in the Modern Library edition), pp. 381 - 514.

So on Wednesday night we started off with a casual, leisurely meeting... which ended in a philosophical shouting match!

What could be better?

This is no dull, by-the-numbers Proust reading group, that's for sure. We get right in there.

We raise our voices... Our cheeks flush... The veins bulge in our necks!

No need for any talk of finger foods tonight. 

Let's leap right in.

1. Heather's Presentation: a Reading of Claude Ponti

To start us off, Heather read from the French children's author, Claude Ponti.

She felt that one of his stories in particular captured that fleeting quality of beauty which Proust emphasizes in his discussions of Elstir's work (for more on Proust's association of beauty with loss and time, please see our previous discussion, "What Is Art?").

The tale she read aloud (in lightly-accented French -- very impressive, Heather!) was called "Au fond du jardin." It features... a melon sitting on the floor of a forest. As the story develops this melon is gradually, quite accidentally, transformed by passing ants and a bird and butterflies into a face, which then vanishes as the living things scatter again.

The last line of the story struck me as containing the elusive quality of genius. After the insects and wild life have all gone away, the melon returns to being a blank, spherical fruit again: all rind, no personality. And Ponti has the melon wondering what face he will have tomorrow...

Don't we all wonder that? There is something very touching in that simple question, a sense of possibility, of hope, or endurance...

But Heather did not end with this dramatic reading.

Peering down into the glow of her iPad like a sorceress, she then began to explore some of the incidents and themes in the month's reading.

She mentioned, for example, how the Narrator seems very quick to judge the assorted guests at the Verdurins' party. In Heather's view, he demonstrates a very "cynical" and even "snarky" take on human nature. To support this she quoted a "general law" the Narrator cites when speaking of unrequited love:

"Although everyone speaks mendaciously of the pleasure of being loved, which fate constantly withholds, it is undoubtedly a general law, the application of which is by no means confined to the Charluses of this world, that the person whom we do not love and who loves us seems to us insufferable" (SG, 431).

Recall that the Narrator has previously observed that pity and love are opposites (SG, 313). Pity is something that he may feel for his servant Francoise (SG, 240), but apparently not for a rejected lover.

In a tepid counter to this, I noted that we also got some clues pointing the other direction in this month's reading: namely, that the Narrator may be learning to love in a more lasting way. For example, his devotion to his grandmother goes on, unabated. Twice, in this month's reading, he mentions her.

First, when he hears the sounds of distant waves traveling up the cliffs from the sea he remarks:

"I thought to myself that my grandmother would have listened to it with the delight that she felt in all manifestations of nature or art that combine simplicity with grandeur" (SG, 402).

And then later, at the party, confronted with the duplicity of Morel (who asks the Narrator to lie on his behalf to hide his low social standing -- and then shuns him once he does so), the Narrator comments:

"But inasmuch as I had inherited a strain of my grandmother's nature, and enjoyed the diversity of other people without expecting anything of them or resenting anything that they did, I overlooked the baseness, rejoiced in his gaity when it was in evidence... and above all I was enraptured by his art [i.e., his skill in playing the violin]" (SG, 420)

Are these unbidden thoughts of his grandmother not an indication of a a genuine and lasting love? For what is love but to cherish someone with no hope of gain or advancement?

2. The Verdurins' "Bad" Party

The conversation moved, then, more generally to the awkwardness and pettiness that the Narrator observes between the various guests at the Verdurins' party. 

We talked about the conflicting, and outright incompatible, status claims of the various guests at this party... ranging, as they do, from the aristocratic owners of the house, Mme and M. Cambrember, to the haute bourgeois Verdurins, to the social climbing son of a valet, Morel, to the professionally acclaimed Parisian doctor, Cottard, to the pompous, very high-born and very fey Baron de Charlus, to the Princess Sherbatoff, an aristocratic Russian lady exiled from her own land.

It's a hodge-podge, you might say.

How can a party go well when the guest are all have different status claims and live by different norms? Nothing can cohere; no one knows the score; everyone is off his or her game. So perhaps, rather then think poorly of the Narrator, or the petty, judgemental, quite patently insecure behavior of the guests, we should simply write it off as a bad party?

(We've all been there, haven't we? When you climb into your car at the end of the night and you feel worse off than you did when you parked on that same street a few hours earlier? And you can't even put your finger on exactly why?)

Our Francoise (not the Narrator's) mentioned at this point how relieved she was, as she reached the conclusion of the party, finally to get out of there: that is, to sit back on the (velvet? silk? upholstered leather?) seat cushions in the waiting carriage and make an escape along with the Narrator.

She noted, however, that despite the failure of this party we should keep in mind that the Verdurins are on the right side of history. Proust is no doubt documenting the ascendancy of this new haute bouregois social set over the Cambremer and Guermantes of the world. By showing this party as a failure, he may be pointing out to the reader that historical change is clumsy and dull when it arrives... not clean, not obvious.

In the little passing exchanges at this party (e.g. the Baron de Charlus to M. Verdurin, following a dispute over the seating arrangement: "I could see at a glance that you were out of your depth" (SG, 464)), we are, Francoise suggested, witnesses to a kind of verbal sparring over who is rising and who is falling. It reminds me of the dynamics of a cold war; outbreaks of conflict can surface anywhere at any time; advances and retreats must be sleauthed out of the phrasing of public pronouncements.

(If you think about it, only a few years later an actual war would erupt in Imperial Russia... And soon the equivalent of the Guermantes there -- the Sheremetevs and the Golitsyns, for example --  would be labeled "former people"... rounded up, shot, or made to dig ditches and fill them up again. Perhaps, then, this threat of possible bloodshed lurks in the background even at the Verdurins' party and gets sublimated into snarky comments over the colors of the new drapes?)

3. Class Distinctions in Turn-of-the-Century France, as Transposed to an American High School

As a more light-hearted aside, I mentioned here a different kind of comparison. It struck me, as I was listening to the conversation, that the contrast between the Guermantes scene and the Verdurin scene reminds me of the contrast, in an American high school, between the "popular" scene and the "theater nerd" scene (or substitute for "theater nerd" any subculture -- the school newspaper, the debate club, etc.). 

In my experience, both have strengths and weaknesses...

The popular kids (the Guermantes) are of course (by and large) wealthy, unapologetic, witty, full of verve, taking full advantage of social and sexual opportunities whenever they can. They are also often a little vacuous and conceited.

The theater nerds (the Verdurins' "little nucleus") are status-conscious too, but they go about it in a different way. They are more intelligent and observant, and also, to their credit, more willing to act the fool and push against convention. On the flip side, though, they can often be pretentious, acerbic, ruthless in the judgments they make on one another...

This comparison made me feel closer to Proust's Narrator.

I mentioned that all the way through high school and college I felt torn between these two social scenes. My interests naturally aligned me with the theater nerds -- I was always angling to be one of the "faithful," I suppose. (That is, to talk about Brecht or Beckett, late-night, lying on our backs on the stage of a dusty black box theater after a long rehearsal.) But who really wants to go only to Verdurin parties, when you might drink fine wine and nibble on roast duck and possibly make out with the gorgeous and self-assured Mme de Guermantes? (That is, when you can drink Jager bombs -- Jägermeister shots dropped into a foamy beer, remember those? -- with some confident and funny blonde at a beach party?) Like the Narrator in Proust's novel, I felt myself drawn to both, and so an imposter, in some sense, to both.

Jaimey, arriving late, entered as this monologue was wrapping up. Having been my roommate in college for a year, he chuckled and asked, "Who was I then?" 

"You were Elstir," I responded. "Focused on your work."

4. Gay and Lesbian Stereotypes in Proust's Time

Next, I believe, we talked about the rampant stereotyping that the Narrator (and Proust behind him?) applies to the Baron de Charlus, and gay men generally. And how outdated these stereotypes seem to us now.

The Narrator describes, with an unfortunate undercurrent of derision, the Baron's "endless simperings and wrigglings of his hips" as he responds to the question of whether he has partaken of a glass of orangeade...

No, he says, I preferred its neighbor, which is strawberry juice.

It is a hilarious phrase, it must be acknowledged. And this is where the Narrator really goes in for the kill:

"Perhaps the people who deduce, from a man's way of saying: "No, I preferred its neighbor, the strawberry juice," a love of the kind called unnatural, have no need of any such scientific knowledge. But that is because here is a more direct relation between the revealing sign and the secret. Without saying so to oneself in so many words, one feels that it is a gentle, smiling lady who is answering and who appears affected because she is pretending to be a man and one is not accustomed to seeing men put on such airs. And it is perhaps more gracious to think that a certain number of angelic women have long been included by mistake in the masculine sex where, feeling exiled, ineffectually flapping their wings towards men in whom they inspire a physical repulsion, they know how to arrange a drawing-room, to compose 'interiors'" (SG, 498).

That whole "interior designer" thing? Really, Proust, you're going there? (No doubt Hollywood would cast Nathan Lane as the Baron de Charlus.)

This got the group speculating about how the rise of sexual stereotypes and the increasing acknowledgement of a "gay" or "lesbian" identity during Proust's time may, in fact, have limited the behavior rather than encouraged it. For we could imagine that the outing of some prominent individuals, like Oscar Wilde, and the emergence of gay and lesbian scenes in urban areas, may have actually inhibited some men and women from youthful experiments they may have otherwise taken...

I mentioned a review I had read only a few days earlier of the publication of Willa Cather's letters in the New York Times Book Review section. The reviewer quotes Cather (1873-1947, born two years after Proust but living 25 years longer) writing to a friend, without a hint of self-consciousness, about driving "a certain fair maid around the country with one hand, indeed, sometimes with no hand at all" (hint, hint). In her later years, however, as the reviewer notes, while continuing to have lesbian relationships Cather refrained from commenting explicitly about her sexual liaisons in her letters... Something changed in the culture around her to make her more circumspect.

Jaimey mentioned in this context how Foucault highlighted, in his History of Sexuality and other works, the way in which Victorian frigidity and moral reproach, quite to the contrary to the superficial view, in fact signaled an intensely sexualized society.

Talking about sex, talking about gay and lesbian relations, even in terms of abuse, suggests not indifference, of course, but rather that the associated libidinous energy is being rechanneled, concentrated. According to Foucault, Victorians thought about, and engaged in, sex so incessantly... that they could talk of nothing but stamping it out! So it is not so simple to say that sexual liberation in a culture, in public, means more acting out of sexual desires, in private. It may actually lead to the dilution of sexual energy.

5. The Quiet Contemplation of Nature vs. the Noisy Social Whirl

Renée brought us back, halfway through the meeting, to that quote referenced earlier, about the sound of waves drifting up the side of the cliff.

She insisted that, in addition to being a touching remembrance of the Narrator's grandmother, this passage strikes her as having something in it, some secret fragment of code, which, if cracked could help us to understand the fundamental difference between the Narrator's outlook and that of the other characters in society.

She read aloud to us from where the Narrator has just commented on the "beautiful" view to the Princess Sherbatoff:

"She professed that she too loved this spot more than any other. But I could see that to her as to the Verdurins the thing that really mattered was not to gaze at the view like tourists, but to partake of good meals there, to entertain people whom they liked, to write letters, to read books, in short to live in these surroundings, passively allowing the beauty of the scene to soak into them rather than making it the object of their conscious attention.

"I opened the window; the sound, distinctly caught, of each wave breaking in turn had something sublime in its softness and clarity. Was it not like an index of measurement which, upsetting all our ordinary impressions, shows us that vertical distances may be compared with horizontal ones, contrary to the idea that our mind generally forms of them; and that, through they bring the sky nearer to us in this way, they are not great; that they are indeed less great for a sound which traverses them, as did the sound of those little waves, because the medium through which it has to pass is purer?" (SG, 402)

We tried to press Renée further on what exactly she thought this fragment of secret code might be telling us in this passage.

And like usual, she came through when pressed! She said that she was struck by how the Narrator's relationship with nature is an active one; he is seeking to direct his attention, quite self-consciously, to the larger sensual world around him. Whereas the others have merely a passive relationship with nature; they inhabit the spaces in which they move but do not directly confront them.

For the Narrator, then, the scenery is the action; for the others it is just a setting for the more important actions of the human beings in front of it. 

Walden spoke up here to say that it occurs to him that the Narrator has two alternating modes of observation: in the first, he is cutting and scornful of others; in the second, he is entirely confused and therefore quite deferential. He seems to flip back and forth between these modes. Don added that he has detected a third mode of observation, as well: an ecstatic state of appreciation.

Jaimey pointed out that one of the aspects of Proust's genius is the way that he moves effortlessly between so many wildly different registers. His Narrator may be urbane and bored in one moment, then naive and enthusiastic in another. Proust may write aphoristically in one sentence, summing up all men or women with a sweeping generalization, and then in the next he will describe some specific encounter in minute detail, making it seem like nothing that had ever come before. What makes the novel work so well, what is its secret in many ways, may be exactly this invisible and expert technique by Proust.

6. "Primate Pragmatism" (for Lack of a Better Name! "Naturalism"?) and Its Enemies

It was getting late at this point, and we probably should have called it a night. But I guess it was not too late for one last spirited debate...

I spoke up to say that I wanted the group to consider one aspect of Proust's novel that I think may be too easy to overlook: it is couched in a cultural construct that is, ultimately, false. It venerates the artist -- the Narrator as a proxy for Proust himself -- as a kind of secular saint. Yet it has no basis for doing so except that the writer is under the sway of the "auratic/sacred," as Jaimey (following Benjamin) would call it, borrowed from religion.

We are so accustomed to the idea that a fine artistic sensibility -- genius! -- offers some means of transcendence, some path out of our grubby world. So it is hard for us to resist the appeal of Proust's building case for the superiority of his Narrator, as Artist, over the other characters.

Certainly in the West, from the Romantic era on, we have come to think of great artists as being privy to some great truth that regular, workaday people are not. Lord Byron symbolized, to readers in his day and ever since, something more than a poet; he was a heroic figure, pushing against the conventions of his day. Indeed, Walt Whitman truly represents a kind of secular saint in American literary culture. And it continues to this day in our popular entertainment complex; from the fan cults around everybody from John Lennon to Jack Kerouac, from Kurt Cobain to David Foster Wallace, from -- I don't know, who comes to mind today? -- Jay Z to Lady Gaga?

Proust seems to be heading this direction in his novel: he seems to be leading us to a rejection of the enervated existences most people live in favor of the more holy and meaningful life of the artist.

"I want to throw down a marker here," I said. "I want to assert that this view is, in fact, based on a misconception that the artist is made of purer stuff, somehow, than everybody else. It has been held that way by our culture for about 200 years. But there is, in truth, nothing special about doing art. We should keep in mind that it really is just one more activity, which (if carried out successfully) establishes a status claim for the artist, with which he or she can accumulate and consume resources, as we all aim to do (whether we are conscious of this or not)."

"Well, Tom," Jaimey said. "That's fine if you want to reject the very premises of Modernism.  You are entitled to say that art has no special value. But I disagree."

"Don't get me wrong, Jaimey. I like art myself! But I am pointing to a philosophical incoherence in Proust's narrative arc. He seems to be hinting that some few brave souls, the avant garde (himself included?), can somehow transcend the muck of the world."

"Well, he is placing more value on the sensibility of the artist than the habitual hypocrisy and self-promotion of the Verdurins, yes... And you are defending them? Is that what you are doing?"

The group looked at me, wide-eyed, wondering how I could defend Mme Verdurin.

"Yes," I said. "I am defending the Verdurins, I suppose. Again, I like art and the contemplation of nature, myself. So I would much rather stand on a cliff with the Narrator and wax poetic about vertical vs. horizontal distances any day... But what I am saying is that, however much our individual tastes happen to align with Proust's and his Narrator's (after all, we are in a Proust reading group!), we should still recognize that the artistic sensibility, too, is merely a pose of sorts, a matter of a comfortable fit, based on personality type, resource availability, and the prevailing norms of our culture. All of us, from Mme Verdurin to the Narrator, from you to me... all of us are doing roughly the same thing: trying to retain enough social status to harness resources for our own use during our brief lives. We are also, each of us, desperately trying to find meaning in our brief lives. The Narrator does it by his "active" engagement with the beauty of the natural world and his piercing insights into human personalities. Mme and M. Verdurin do this by organizing a salon, maintaining a complicated collection of friendships, pouring enormous energy into impressing and pleasing other people. But we should not valorize (to bring back that word from our discussin a few month's ago) the artist over the socialite just because we prefer him ourselves."

Jaimey was looking fierce. He chuckled lightly, which I have known since our college days is always a sign that he is about to strike -- like a green bamboo snake hanging from a branch! (Nice image, no?)

"This is a kind of radical relativism that I reject, Tom," he said. "I would argue that, on the contrary, art represents a social good, far exceeding Mme Verdurin's limited social ambitions. Can you not even say that there are some social goods in the world?"

"As I say, I like art too. But is it a social good that far exceeds the ties of friendship linking together Mme Verdurins' 'little clan'? I'm not so sure. Certainly I do not think that art, even at its best (as in Proust's accomplishment with this amazing novel), presents the possibility of transcendence. I mean, let's not forget: we are all animals. We are all stuck with ourselves and the narrow band of our consciousness given to us by adaptation to the natural environment around us. I would suggest that what any single person does is not, somehow, mysteriously, intrinsically more valuable than anything any other person does. Though each person will rightly feel that it is -- which gives his or her life a sense of meaning."

This is where it started to get animated.

"What?" said Jaimey. "So you are not willing to say that great art, and rationality, and democracy, and the whole humanist tradition, the products of the Enlightenment -- you are not willing to say that these are preferable to other ways of living (say the Viking culture of pillaging, or facsism), in the sweep of history?"

"I am personally very partial to our own heritage in the Enlightenment (though you denigrate, perhaps too hasily, my grandfather's Norweigian ancestry -- anybody else been watching Vikings on the History Channel?). I too have stood in awe at Monticello. I would even, I believe, fight to the death to defend these values. But I understand that impulse in me this way: certain resource-rich communities, starting in the West, have managed to create collective projects, such as science, and the rule of law, and election-driven democratic politics, which allow for a closer match to people's individual needs and aspirations. Yes, I will acknowledge this has been good -- at least for the relatively few people who enjoy their benefits. But this is not because Westerners in the developed world, unlike other humans in history, have discovered some absolute social good. These collective projects are simply what our particular species of primate does when under a particular set of circumstances, given a spectacular amount of resources. When we are under conditions of scarcity, on the other hand, we do other things. Neither democratic capitalism, nor a failed post-Colonial African nation state now riven with murderous tribal loyalties, offers any hope of transcendence or superior meaning."

"I am astonished," said Jaimey.

Don chimed in too: "So your view collapses into a form of defeatism, then. You are saying that we are all just monkeys... all the same."

"No," I said. "Stop making it so binary, both of you. Get out of your religious-influenced mind-set, looking for heaven and hell, the straight and narrow path or nothing. I am not, by any means, saying that we are all the same. We are, each one of us, quite unique, based on our resources, our upbringing, our peer groups, our communities. We have strong convictions. We fight for them. But the flaw in your thinking (and most people's -- again, I see this as the common misconception of our time) is that there needs to be an all-purpose justification for your outlook, whether it favors art or human rights or sexual liberty or anything else held passionately as an ideal -- some justification that stands outside of your contingent experience and trumps everybody else's justifications for their outlooks."

"But see, Tom," said Jaimey, rising to his feet, "You are neglecting to consider that resources must be distributed according to some value system! If you were in government it sounds as if you would just throw up your hands if asked, for example, whether local art groups should receive tax-payer funded grants..."

"On the contrary," I said, rising to my feet also, just to keep up my side. "I would personally argue strenuously for increasing government funding of the arts! How many times do I have to say it? I really like the arts! I would also argue, off the top of my head, for more funding for early childhood education, for intensive, ongoing teacher training, for instituting background checks on gun sales, for science and research generally... I have my personal outlook of how the world should look, in which these things feature prominently. And it remains intact -- what would make it crumble? But, unlike you, I would argue for all of this while knowing, with full modesty, that my outlook is contingent on my upbringing, my community, my social standing, my predisposed taste."

"This is radical relativism, whatever you say."

"No. It allows for strong moral claims, strong positions. And unlike the claims of the Enlightenment (which by the way have contributed greatly to our culture, just as certain Bronze age religious myths have in their time) mine are not "nonsense on stilts" (Bentham), flimsy, held in the air by abstractions. My view is closer to the ground. It belongs, I suppose to the Pragmatist tradition. Richard Rorty is probably the closest to it. It has long stuck with me how he once said, in a lecture he gave while I was at Oxford on "Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality," that when addressing morality we should not ask, What is right? What is good? Rather we should ask: How do we want the world to look?"

"Why do you keep talking about us as primates? Is that from Rorty too?"

"No. What I suppose I am mixing in with the pragmatist tradition is the emphasis on our rootedness in our biology. We should abandon the idea of creating, discovering, proving some potential escape from ourselves. It isn't going to happen because it is based on a flawed Cartesian idea of the thinking self, separate from the body. In fact, we are always both, mind and body all mixed up. There is no perfect moral being, separate from his or her own biological urges. We will always accumulate and consume resources for our personal use, in one form or another. We will probably always care more about the immediate needs of our own children than the long-term needs of children who are strangers to us. We are, all of us, consistently willing to ignore some people's misery and endangerment (e.g. Third World garment factory workers in Bangladesh, China, India...) so that we can enjoy the products they make cheap for us at Target (Maybe we can change that?). Let's be honest with ourselves and start from there. You see? Once we acknowledge that we are animals, that we are not and never will be privy to some greater, purer path (be it meditating on a mountaintop or producing a work of art or dedicating ourselves to charity) -- once we acknowledge that and yes, reject the Enlightenment faith in progress, then we can begin to have an honest discussion about the trade-offs we currently face, the values we want to uphold individually or collectively, i.e. we can begin to ask, in earnest, how we want the world to look. I assure you, it will not be as bleak as the Pope and you think, Jaimey. You can let go of the handlebars of the bike and you will find that you are not suddenly falling; you will not suddenly find yourself a radical, relativistic sociopath scrambling through a scorched and valueless wasteland. You will find that you are, like most chemically-balanced people on the face of the earth, pretty kind and compassionate towards others, particularly when you see their faces or hear their stories. You want to be treated with respect, and you like to be surrounded by people whom you respect. You like consistency, truth-telling, good cheer. You recoil at cruelty or unfairness. In short, you are a perfectly good representative of a certain nearly hairless species of primate. But don't go fooling yourself, as I am beginning to suspect that Proust does, with the thought that you are going to arrange things one day so that you stop smelling like an animal. Desist from holding your own philosophy and inclinations -- the blue sea! the gold band of light on the curtains! the delicate phrasing in a poem by Baudelaire! -- as a higher good in some intrinsic way. Promote them, persuade your friends and family to give them a chance, but don't think that it is anything but your own way through this life."

"Okay," Jaimey said, glancing at the hallway, where some people were slipping out into the night already. "That's long and convoluted. Let me just ask you a simple question," said Jaimey. "Let's use the Original Postion of John Rawls as a thought experiment. Would you or would you not, if you knew nothing at all about your position, your talents, your circumstances, choose to live in this era, in a developed country, with social welfare and democratic norms in place, or in some other historical era in some other country?"

"No, no, no!" I nearly shouted. "That is a flawed thought experiment from the get go, Jaimey! Rawls comes out of the Kantian tradition, which is essentially religious. The noumenal field, and all that..." I had started so calmly, but now I was getting worked up. "That's my point! Without knowing anything about yourself you are precisely... nothing! There is no Cartesian thinking self who can stand in the Original Position and choose anything! He doesn't exist. When you decide something you are always basing it on your own contingent, culturally informed point of view, and the passions that are released from that! If I were an African villager from a thousand years ago I would likely choose my same way of life: the people, the rituals, the meaning I cherished. Would I not? And if I were myself, accustomed to the comfort of living in Berkeley in the 21st century, I would likely choose this way of life... You cannot ask the question in the abstract. Certainly, though, if this is what you are getting at... I would argue that there is not any more meaning in our lives today than in the lives of any people in any other era or country in history."

Ken spoke up to say, "Well, Tom, I'm sorry. I guess I am a moral absolutist on some issues. For example, female education. I believe that, regardless of when or where or what country or what resources are available, girls should be educated to the same extent that boys are."

"Ken, I personally believe that girls should be educated, just like I like art. From our perspective, why would we discriminate against them? That is ingrained in me because of my upbringing and experience. But how about... all people, young and old, rich or poor, dim-witted or brilliant, having a chance to be schooled in quantum physics -- you can imagine a society, only slightly different from our own, that values quantum physics very highly mandating this, right? In that society someone might say, I'm sorry, Tom, but I think that teaching quantum physics to everyone, young or old, rich or poor, stupid or smart, is a moral absolute. But of course it depends on the cultural construct around it, the opportunities available for people, through which they will accumulate and consume resources for their use. When you say all girls should be educated... the question, in a contingent (that is, in a real) society, is: educated in what? How should they be taught? What are their goals? What gives their lives meaning? These are the substantive questions. And they are of course complicated ones, which require input from many people in the community. Different people, different societies, will have different answers. We have ours -- which we hold strongly. It tingles us with a sense of moral righteousness when we state them. (I am against girls being held back!) But we should, even when doing this, recognize that we are not right in some absolute way. That is a residue of religion. It has taken over 150 years since Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Finally, though, I think, we need to adjust to his irrefutable findings. We are animals. We always will be. Even Proust, for all of his literary talent (which brings great pleasure to us!), is merely finding ways to scratch his way into the community around him, to shape the world he touches to his liking for a little while, before he dies."

At this point we were actually standing at the doorway. Some had left. Jaimey, unconvinced (but surely amused too, knowing that our dialogue will be life-long), ducked out into the night.

Reading for Our Seventeenth Meeting, on June 12, 2013

Please note that we will hold our next Proust meeting on the second Wednesday on the month, June 12 (too much going on for a number of us during that first week of June).

For this meeting, please read to the end of Volume IV, Sodom and Gomorrah.

More on the Experience of Seeing the Reconstruction of Proust's Room

by Jennifer Villarina

 

 

I wanted to follow up on one of my comments that I don't think I expressed very clearly, specifically how seeing the recreation of Proust's room at Musée Carnavalet in Paris had a powerful influence on my perspective of his work. I wanted to clarify because seeing the room affected me deeply.

 

My shift in appreciation is for Proust the author, not Marcel the narrator. Seeing the insulated world in which he wrote his masterpiece and feeling a sensation of isolation and loneliness, I could better appreciate the copious detail of Proust's writing that before I had often found tedious and even petty. Looking at his small brass bed and picturing him writing there at night, the party at the Guermantes suddenly had more life and meaning to me, whereas it annoyed me to no end when I first read it. Standing before his little room I understood something about Proust: in those last years of his life Proust lived through his writing. He created (or in some cases re-created) a social life for himself and lived with his characters. 

 

Previously, I had been irritated by what I considered the superficial nature of Proust's writing. I wanted depth, commentary, greater character exploration. Now I've found I can appreciate the novel as a stream of consciousness without wanting to extract more from it than is offered. I realize this is what various members in the group have been trying to impress upon me all along. I guess I'm a bit set in my literary ways. It took a visceral experience for me to let go of my expectations and appreciate Proust's writing for the true work of art it is.

Notes on the June 12, 2013 Meeting

These notes cover from p. 514  to the end of Volume IV, Sodom and Gomorrah, in the Modern Library edition (Moncrieff / Kilmartin / Enright).

We gathered at 8 pm as usual... but, it being June, it felt different.

The sun glowed yellow over the San Francisco Bay.

Angel Island hovered in a haze above a silver stripe of water.

We wisely decided to enjoy our wine and cheese and bread and tarts out on the front deck, instead of inside as we have done previously.

At 8:30 I chimed a glass and reminded everyone to top off their drinks one last time... and re-enter the house to begin our discussion.

1. Don's Presentation on the Trouble with Time and Memory

Don started us off by sharing his impression that this month's reading -- the ending of Volume IV, Sodom and Gomorrah -- is haunted by the Narrator's growing awareness of the fragmented and elusive nature of his experiences and memories, and therefore the slipperiness of anyone's identity in time.

Don read a number of passages aloud to support this impression.

One of the first he read drew our attention to the way that our everyday experience of sleep reveals to us an incommensurable, parallel existence, with its own rules of physics, which does not match up with our waking hours:

"One can of course maintain that there is but one time, for the futile reason that it is by looking at the clock that one has established as being merely a quarter of an hour what one had supposed a day. But at the moment of establishing this, one is precisely a man awake, immersed in the time of waking men, having deserted the other time. Perhaps indeed more than another time: another life" (SG, 519).

Indeed, even something as irrefutable as a "wet dream" (French readers -- did you know this term? Do you have the equivalent?) does not register as a lived event, in some sense, if it occurs during sleep. After all, who exactly has received satisfaction? Or in Proust's words:

"To take only the most grossly sensual of them all, which of us, on waking, has not felt a certain irritation at having experienced in his sleep a pleasure which, if he is anxious not to tire himself, he is not, once he is awake, at liberty to repeat indefinitely during the day. It seems a positive waste" (SG, 519).

To which Marie-José shouted out from her position on the couch: 

"HA! FOR SOME MORE THAN OTHERS!"

Not understanding exactly what she meant by that, but appreciating her enthusiasm as always, the group left it at that. No one commented further.

Instead, we turned our attention back to the... dry, philsophical question at hand.

Don then read another passage from the month's reading. This one was focused even more narrowly on the distortions of memory and the implications of these distortions for the question of identity:

"We possess all our memories but not the faculty of recalling them.... What, then, is a memory which we do not recall? Or, indeed, let us go further. We do not recall our memories of the last thirty years; but we are wholly steeped in them; why then stop short at thirty years, why not extend to the previous life before our birth? If I do not know a whole section of the memories that are behind me, if they are invisible to me, if I do not have the faculty of calling them to me, how do I know whether in the mass that is unknown to me there may not be some that extend back much further than my human existence? If I can have in me and round me so many memories which I do not remember, this oblivion (a de facto oblivion, at least, since I have not the faculty of seeing anything) may extend over a life which I have lived in the body of another man, even on another planet. A common oblivion obliterates everything. But what, in that case, is the meaning of that immortality of the soul...? The being that I shall be after death has no more reason to remember the man I have been since my birth than the latter to remember what I was before it" (SG, 523).

Don argued (quite convincingly, I thought) that this fragmented, even unknowable aspect of memory contributes to the Narrator's growing sense of isolation, and even paranoia, particularly in his relationship with Albertine.

I spoke up to agree with Don (and indirectly, Joshua Landy of Stanford, whom he cited) that Proust is writing fiction but also engaged in philosophy here. In the Western philosophical tradition -- stretching all the way from Socrates to Immanuel Kant to Bernard Williams to U.C. Berkeley's own John Searle -- there is, in fact, a long tradition of inquiry on this same question of identity.

The British empiricist philosopher David Hume (to name just one of many) noted, famously, how utterly stupefied he was on the question of how our various sense-impressions, grouped together, give us a continuous sense of self. In effect, he found himself asking: Who is the watcher?

Our French readers will of course insist that I observe how, even before Hume, René Descartes was obsessed with this question too.

I didn't mention this in our discussion, but I would direct anybody interested to see also, for a seminal 20th century contribution to this debate, Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons. In that book Parfit asks his readers to imagine a simple scenario:  you have been cloned, and your exact clone has been sent to Mars (you talk to yourself by way of a TV screen). At which point your own original body and brain back on Earth -- duplicated to the last DNA strand on Mars -- will now be terminated... Why do you care? asks Parfit. After all, you have qualitative identity -- the same person, with the same memories and emotions and freckles exists, now on Mars! Why must you insist on your quantative identity too?

I would suggest that, like the Narrator in Proust's novel, we are concerned with this so-called quantitative identity exactly because if we do not have it -- that is, if we are not the same person in space and time  -- then how can we have genuine relationships with others? We need to be able to trust that we will show up with one another.

Indeed, against this background of his anxieties about memory and time, much of the Narrator's relationship with Albertine seems to be driven by the fear that either he or she will not show up. Perhaps this is symbolized best by his inability to step away from the train (containing his dear Albertine and his friend Saint-Loup), stopped at the station, for even two minutes to say hello to Bloch's father (SG, 682). He is not sure, if he lets Albertine out of his eyes, whether she will be the same when he rejoins her in the train compartment.

2. On Loneliness

After this brief philosophical digression about memory, time and identity, I raised with the group a more direct question about the Narrator's emotional experience.

It seems to me, I explained, that the unnerving and dubious nature of our identity over time, and the failures and distortions of memory, together create a distinct emotional tone in this month's reading. If I were to try to capture it in one word I would call it a tone of... loneliness.

I pointed out that it was in this reading that we were afforded a rare glimpse of the Narrator as the (older, wiser?) writer of the novel. And, shockingly (after his previous hints of a sexually playful older self) he describes himself in this bleak way:

"I, the strange human who, while he waits for death to release him, lives behind closed shutters, knows nothing of the world, sits motionless as an owl, and like the bird can only see things clearly in darkness" (SG, 518).

And doesn't the back and forth about Albertine, culminating in the Narrator's abrupt decision to marry her, suggest a growing loneliness too?

It seems that the Narrator cannot tolerate the idea that this woman, connected as she is to his memories and his identity, might enjoy the company of someone other than him. Certainly he cannot tolerate Albertine enjoying the company of a woman. So he decides to marry her, not out of a positive passion but out of a kind of existential fear.

Further, the Narrator is even willing to disappoint his mother to satisfy this desperate, dizzying need to fix himself to the center of Albertine's world as well as his own.

(Before we get too judgemental about his actions, we should probably consider how there is a little of this solipsistic need in all of us... I think of the great comment by the artist-entertainer Tim Minchin in a recent interview, when he was asked to speculate on what might be his last words when he dies: "Who's the world going to revolve around now?" he quipped.)

3. Jennifer's On-Again, Off-Again Affection for Proust

Jennifer, provoked by the quote I read about the Narrator in his shuttered room, mentioned her recent trip to the museum in Paris that features a reconstruction of Proust's cork-lined room.

She said that, after seeing it, she felt more sympathetic to Proust, and hence more postive towards his Narrator in the novel. Seeing the room, with its shabby furniture and his cork panels, brought home all of a sudden, that he was quite ill, and lonely, and was using his gift for words to build a kind of ravishing palace of memory to comfort himself.

I asked why this would incline her to warm up to the novel (which she has been resisting in recent months). Why should this new (and arguable) interpretation of Proust's neediness in his last years make a difference in her experience of his fiction? In answer to this, Jennifer said that it helped her see past the "snarkiness" of the Narrator... to his recognizable humanity underneath. See her post where she clarifies this point below.

Marie-José countered Jennifer's interpretation of Proust as a lonely recluse, suffering from his fits of coughing and strained breathing, worthy of our pity.

She said that the cork-lined room, to her, conjures more of the image of  a deliberative artist, insisting on his privacy and isolation so that he can do what he wants to do: write his masterpiece.

This prompted a brief discussion of the different ideas people have of a good life.

4. A Limited Definition of "Love" in Proust

In speaking of Proust's and his Narrator's conceptions of a good life, Heather returned to her critique of Proust's characters, in that there is little evidence in the novel (so far) of intimate, long-term relationships.

She mentioned that Narrator's understanding of "love" -- as in his love for Albertine, de Charlus' love for Morel, Swann's love for Odette, etc. -- seems to limited to the experience of desire. But desire, Heather insisted, is temporary and in some sense we might even say, trivial. What about acceptance of another person with all his or her foibles and quirks -- or as Heather put it, "imperfections"?

Walden reminded us that we should distinguish between Proust and the Narrator here ("How many times do I have to make this point? Thank you, Walden," no doubt Jaimey was thinking silently). Walden pointed out that for Proust to represent, as effectively as he does, the manipulative and disjointed relationship that the Narrator has with Albertine, he has to know what it lacks. If the author had the same blinkered and needy worldview as the Narrator then he would produce a very different novel, one in which he would include attempts to capture intimacy, which would fall flat. Instead what we get is the intentional absence of these attempts. Everything rings true precisely because the author Proust knows what his Narrator does not know.

We talked about how in our adolescent years we often know ourselves far less than others know us. I speculated that this crosses over, and we begin to know ourselves better than we know others, about our ages now (40s). At least it feels this way. Renée, for one, agreed that she feels she knows herself now in a way that she did not when she was younger.

5. The Baron de Charlus and the Gay Subbacultcha

Jaimey remarked that this month's reading alternates between sections detailing the relationship with the Baron de Charlus and Morel (an imbalanced relationship if there ever was one, between a preening, aristocratic, wealthy drama queen and his musically talented, ambitious, handsome boy-toy) and the relationship between the Narrator and Albertine. These relationships, Jaimey insisted, are intended to complement each other.

In fact, Jaimey further pointed out, these relationship are more similar than different, in their surfaces of affection and their undercurrents of hostility and jealousy and control. Curiously, this parallel structure in this month's reading has the effect of normalizing homosexual love and, simultaneously, estranging us from heterosexual love.

Miriam argued that both relationships may reflect the dynamics that repression produces, with Charlus and Morel an overt example of gay men hiding in the closet, unable to pursue long-term loving relationships in public, and the Narrator and Albertine modeled on the same dynamics, though transposed onto a heterosexual relationship.

I objected to this, though, saying that many of the themes that Proust is exploring -- of the fantasy elements in love, the push-pull, the ambivalence -- are experienced in unrepressed heterosexual love relationships as well. I read aloud the following passage, in which the Narrator describes the phantom-like nature of his experiences of love for various women:

"When I saw them, when I heard their voices, I could find nothing in them which resembled my love and could account for it. And yet my sole joy lay in seeing them, my sole anxiety in waiting for them to come. It was as though a virtue that had no connexion with them had been artificially attached to them by nature, and that this virtue, this quasi-electric power, had the effect upon me of exciting my love, that is to say of controlling all my actions and causing all my sufferings. But from this, the beauty, or the intelligence, or the kindness of these women was entirely distinct... Indeed I am inclined to believe that in these relationships... beneath the outward appearance of the woman, it is to those invisible forces with which she is incidentally accompanied that we address ourselves as to obscure deities.... The woman herself, during our assignation with her, does little more than put us in touch with these goddesses" (SG, 719).

The problem, I suggested, is the human mind, and the phantoms that our imagination produces. Certainly it might be exacerbated by external difficulties in the case of homosexuals in a repressive culture, but that, I argued, is not its cause. Its cause is us, free and unencumbered.

To which Miriam said: "Yes. I agree."

6. The Narrator's Emerging Adult Personality

Towards the end of the meeting we discussed some aspects of the Narrator's outlook on life. Among other things we have learned, by the end of this volume, that he is anything but romantic in his relationships (despite all of his ecstatic imaginings).

I read aloud to the group the half-proposal that the Narrator makes to Albertine near the end of the volume. I believe that it qualifies as... the least romantic marriage proposal possible:

"Then you decline my invitation to come to Paris?" asks the Narrator.

"My aunt wouldn't like me to leave just at present," Albertine replies. "Besides, even if I can come later on, wouldn't it look rather odd, my descending on you like that? In Paris everybody will know that I'm not your cousin."

"Very well, then. We can say that we're more or less engaged. It can't make any difference, since you know that it isn't true" (SG, 714-715).

So the Narrator is not romantic. Nor is he particularly concerned with honesty (he is determined, for example, not to reveal to Albertine his occasional feelings of love for her).

Does he have any redeeming qualities?

We talked about his kindness towards M. de Crécy, the poor faded aristocrat who visits him at the Grand Hotel to talk family lines and social developments in Paris.

We talked about his pleasant relationships with the staff of the hotel -- the two maids who clean his room, the lift boy, Amés the manager.

In some scenes he does seem to be growing up.

But then, in social settings, he also seems as obsessed as ever with being seen as intellectually sharp and charming; he palpably "wants you to want him, needs you to need him" as the song goes.

We concluded that, after so many pages, he remains enigmatic. But we agreed that Proust is doing an amazing job of aging him, altering him, subtly, as we read. 

7. The War Between the Artist and Society, as Embodied in the Estimable Person of Mme Verdurin

Finally, Renée read a passage about the way the world views the artist:

"It is of course justifiable for the man who draws up reports, adds up figures, answers business letters, follows the movements of the stock exchange, to feel an agreeable sense of superiority when he says to you with a sneer: 'It's all very well for you; you have nothing better to do.' But he would be no less contemptuous, would be even more so... were your recreation writing Hamlet or merely reading it. Wherein busy men show a lack of forethought. For the disinterested culture which seems to them a comic pastime of idle people when they they find them engaged in it is, they ought to reflect, the same as that which, in their own profession, brings to the fore men who may not be better judges or administrators than themselves but before whose rapid advancement they bow their heads, saying: 'It appears he's extremely well-read, a most distinguished individual.' (SG, 591)

This provoked us into a conversation about how an artist's devotion to beauty and meaning and truth-telling and intellectual inquiry is always considered suspect by those who do not share it -- until they admire it in someone who has achieved worldly "success."

This mention of hypocrisy lead us to discuss the character of Mme Verdurin.

We have known her for some time by now. After all, we met her years earlier in the "Swann in Love" section, and now she has returned.

Back in Paris, of course, she was fraudulent, cruel, boisterous, generous, ridiculous, perceptive, encouraging, ruthless -- all of that remarkable mix of qualities that we have come to know in her. And she has remained consistent!

Jennifer and Marie-José and Dirk insisted, in turn, that she is fills an important role in society, fostering artists, bringing them together, sparking collaborations. They also noted that in an era where a woman could not pursue a career, Mme Verdurin has found a way to have a dramatic effect on the world.

Still, I could not help but mention my disgust by her hypocritical character.

I acknowledged that she is, ostensibly at least, dedicated to the arts, and for that I appreciate what she does with her salon. But this admirable part of her, I said, is precisely what makes her type so morally distasteful: she masquerades as someone with the values of an artist -- emotional responses to beauty! breaking with convention! -- while in fact she is always, at base, more concerned with her social standing than with those artistic aspirations.

We see this raw reality whenever someone, however talented, fails to flatter her, or in some way is not "faithful" to her little clan. Then, quite without compunction, she excludes that person and sets about damaging his reputation.

Certainly, I conceded, there are worse people, murderers, fanatics, and so on in the grand sweep of history  (e.g. Stalin, Hitler, Charles Manson, the usual suspects). And I recognize her social function. But Mme Verdurin's salon, for all its good, does not I think have to be so exclusive and pretentious and fatuous, does it? What if the world had salons and patrons of the arts who were truly dedicated to the values of the arts themselves?

Heather nicely said that our Proust salon is just this ideal. In response to which I... blushed.

Dirk pointed out, rightly, that even the greatest artists themselves are not always "truly" dedicated to the values of the arts they produce. Many of the most extraordinary artists are -- there's no delicate way to put it -- total asses. He mentioned some world-class photographers he knows. We all know them. I suspect that Shakespeare himself would have quickly dismissed one of us -- even mocked us to Marlowe -- if we had tried to talk to him about the nuances of Hamlet at a pub in London circa 1599. Why should we hold the patrons of the arts to a higher standard than the artists themselves?

Learning fast from Miriam's example, I conceded Dirk's point entirely. 

8. One Last Sentence I Have to Share

I forgot to read this at our meeting but I have to share it now, because it struck me as so beautiful.

"To escape from the heat we took the road through the forest of Chantepie. The invisibility of the innumerable birds, some of them sea-birds, that conversed with one another from the trees on either side of us, gave the same impression of repose as one has when one shuts one's eyes. By Albertine's side, clasped in her arms in the depths of the carriage, I listened to these Oceanides" (SG, 535).

Isn't that so accurate? The way birdsong can make you feel as if you have shut your eyes? Once again Proust is showing us much about our senses simply by paying very close attention to his own experience.

Have a wonderful summer everybody, and we will resume in the fall!