I've written a lot about love in these posts on Swann's Way, but a larger, recurring theme for In Search of Lost Time is the interaction between art and reality. This is, of course, manifest in Swann's Way as well, and not only in Swann's comparison of Odette to a Boticelli painting.
Characters often do and say things for the sake of aesthetic effect-- not necessarily out of a genuinely held belief or feeling. Odette's friends the Verdurins epitomize pantomimed emotions, in their case for entertainment. For example, Madame Verdurin puts on a show of intense physical reaction to music (swooning, short of breath, painful headaches), although she knows virtually nothing about music and Swann claims that she has poor taste. She intends to entertain, to amuse, and, most of all, to create her own eccentric and distinct character, as the epicenter of such amusements. Her husband devises a way to create the impression of laughter without actually laughing, for the same purpose of creating his own character. Whenever a guest makes a witty reparte, Mr. Verdurin pretends to choke on his cigar with suppressed laughter. He is not actually laughing or choking, but he began this performance in emulation of his wife's show of suppressed laughter, to "one-up" her. These two pantomimes in particular recall Lacanian psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek's analysis of things "deprived of their malignant property" and other objects devoid of their essential substance: decaffeinated coffee, nonalcoholic beer, fat-free ice cream, virtual sexuality without human contact or intimacy. Zizek's point is that these are all elements of a virtual reality, a sort of aestheticized and ironically detached existence. And to draw a connection to Baudrillard, this is simulacra, in which the essence-free copy becomes more real than the original. In the case of Mr. Verdurin, his feigned laughter more effectively communicates his amusement and geniality than real, genuine laughter would. Art supplants reality, fiction is truer than truth.
Throughout Swann's Way, characters deliberately disguise their feelings, often by putting on these exaggerated "dumb shows." Ironically, such overacting stems from a desire to show emotion with a subtle, artistic flair. Again, Zizek provides some insight; virtual reality permits everything, but everything is deprived of its dangerous element that constitutes its essence. Emotional intensity, in Swann's Way, is permitted but only when presented as an ironically detached pantomime of emotion. The result is a circle of intimate friends, whose interactions are wholly devoid of honesty. Everyone at the Verdurins' parties is required to wear a particular mask, and if a guest departs from the strict script which Madame Verdurin imposes on her parties, that guest is promptly declared a "bore," mocked, and never invited back. She prides herself that everyone at her gatherings is natural and open, but the underlying truth is that such openness can only occur within the rigid boundaries of her aesthetics. Swann's frankness is rejected and he loses favor with "the faithful" (the regular dinner guests) for not surrendering completely to Madame Verdurin's demands, for not complying with her script. The real honesty and frankness of Swann are aesthetically repugnant, in comparison to the affected, stylized interactions among the Verdurins and their guests. In "Combray," Swann does adopt an air of detachment and refrains from stating any opinion without the shield of irony, but this is a rather different aesthetic than the overwrought pantomimes in vogue at the Verdurins.
This preference for stylized frankness (honesty without honesty) extends beyond the Verdurins and their faithful. Francoise, the maid to the narrator's Aunt Leonie, feels compassion for those most remote from her, such as the hypothetical sufferer of labor pains in a medical encyclopedia, but she becomes cold when faced with the reality, such as the kitchen maid who was acutely suffering those labor pains. Similarly, the narrator himself says that "none of the feelings which the joys or misfortunes of a real person arouse in us can be awakened except through a mental picture of those joys and misfortunes" (Proust, 116). In other words, emotion can only be experienced indirectly, detached from the physical reality and immediacy of the individual or the circumstances and supplanted by an aestheticized portrait formed in the imagination.
Throughout Swann's Way, and I expect this to be true of In Search of Lost Time as a whole, there is tension between reality and art, the world of physical experience and that of creative imagination. The two must interact; no one can live entirely in fantasy or in unreflective experience. But the two are also antagonistic, and more often than not in Proust, imagination, ideals, and narratives overpower experienced reality. At the end of "Swann in Love," Swann laments that he has "wasted his life" on Odette, on the images he had formed of his mistress and the aesthetic experience of living solely for love, wallowing voluptuously in the realm of untempered emotions. I'm not sure how the narrator will handle this, since he seems more able to synthesize reality and fantasy in a way that illuminates both, but Swann does serve as a parallel for the narrator's experiences. Disillusionment is certainly on the near horizon.
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Wicked Intelligent Post
I am far too amused by making this connection.
Odette is Swann's love interest in Swann's Way.
Odette is the name of the Swan Princess.
Yes, this Swan Princess:
My three-year-old niece is visiting, so this is all that I have to contribute to Proustian scholarship.
Odette is Swann's love interest in Swann's Way.
Odette is the name of the Swan Princess.
Yes, this Swan Princess:
My three-year-old niece is visiting, so this is all that I have to contribute to Proustian scholarship.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Hey Jealousy
I'm back to write more about love and literature, this time just about Proust; and I begin with the inquiry, does romance depend on mystery?
After suffering the pangs of jealousy as he imagines Odette's infidelities, Swann eventually realizes that "the state for which he so longed was a calm, a peace, which would not have been a propitious atmosphere for his love. When Odette ceased to be for him a creature always absent, regretted, imagined, when the feeling that he had for her was no longer the same mysterious turmoil that was wrought in him by the phrase from the sonata, but affection and gratitude, when normal relations that would put an end to his melancholy madness were established between them-- then, no doubt, the actions of Odette's daily life would appear to him as being of little intrinsic interest" (Proust, p. 435-426).
In Swann's Way, love is only experienced as anguish and an irreconcilable conflict of desires. On the one hand, Swann wants to possess Odette completely, to know every action and to infiltrate her consciousness. But Swann also must have that titillating thrill of Odette's separate life of perverse pleasures, the painful sensation when she imposes prohibitions on him and refuses to see him. He loves her most when they are apart and she exhibits indifference towards him, when he goes to painful lengths to see her and expects her angry rejection.
Indeed, Swann begins to love Odette only when she is inaccessable and no longer at his disposal. For several weeks, he had been accustomed to seeing her every evening at Odette's friends, the Verdurins' home. But one evening, Swann had deliberately delayed his arrival until after dinner was over, and arrived to receive the message that Odette had assumed he was not coming and had left already. Swann immediately became consumed by passion and spent the night searching for her, imagining every man he encountered as a potential rival for Odette's affections. When he finally found her in a cafe late at night, she took him to his home and had sex for the first time. Although Swann attained the physical possession of Odette he desired in the sexual act, he then became haunted by the realization that he could never fully possess her. She had already eluded his grasp and he would never know what she was doing for those hours without him.
Thus far in Proust, I've already noted that love is a desire for control and complete possession, but that desire is inseparable from the intrigue of remoteness. Swann's love is thus characterized by jealousy, a combination of yearning for Odette and needing her to have a secret life apart from him. There must be an element of the forbidden in love: Odette's lowly social status as a demimondaine, the exotic items in her home (Chinese lanterns, Indian rugs, etc.), her infidelity, her refusals all feed the flame of Swann's intrigue and keep the mystery alive. His imagination aids this considerably, in his willed refusal to imagine her other lovers or even precisely what she does in her life away from him; he prefers to keep it vague, so that the mystery is never solved and he remains in that pleasing, painful suspense.
In Swann's Way, love is also a state of moral degradation. Swann finds himself justifying immoral behavior, from spying on Odette to bribing doormen, and convinces himself that it is an intellectual task, this obsessive interest in Odette's life apart from him, on par with his former studies of history and art. He searches for meanings in her actions, and seems to deliberately mislead himself by interpreting her prohibitions against him seeing her in public as proof of her love, or at least of her setting him apart from all other men in her life. Swann thus leads himself away from truth, and becomes obsessed with his meaning-making games and his quest to possess Odette.
This is not only applicable to Swann in his love for an amoral woman, either. The narrator is not overjoyed by his mother consenting to spend the night in his room. He is miserable and guilty, and spends the whole night crying. He feels as though he has, in his quest for his mother (and in his success), failed to exercise proper self-control, and as he pushes forward in this quest, he is feverishly conscious of his transgressions but at a loss to stop himself. Like Swann's physical conquest of Odette through sexual intimacy, the narrator's conquering of his mother's will provides no lasting pleasure. The next night brings the same routine of torture as he anticipates bedtime and parting from his mother. Physical possession, again, does not satisfy; rather, as Sartre wrote, love demands the possession of the other's consciousness. There is something transgressive about this, as though the narrator and Swann are cognizant of the impossibility of total possession. Swann indeed acknowledges this predicament when he says that the calm he seems to desire would mark the end of his love for Odette.
I do not think that this is the only way to experience love, but this point of moral degradation is comprehensible in the context of the obsessive relationships depicted in Swann's Way. The characters become intoxicated by the oscillation between power and subjugation, complete unity with the other and remoteness. Love is not based on the qualities of the loved person in Swann's Way, but on the sensations produced in the individual who loves. It's a very egocentric love, a love of what one projects from within and can only observe without, through the medium of the other.
After suffering the pangs of jealousy as he imagines Odette's infidelities, Swann eventually realizes that "the state for which he so longed was a calm, a peace, which would not have been a propitious atmosphere for his love. When Odette ceased to be for him a creature always absent, regretted, imagined, when the feeling that he had for her was no longer the same mysterious turmoil that was wrought in him by the phrase from the sonata, but affection and gratitude, when normal relations that would put an end to his melancholy madness were established between them-- then, no doubt, the actions of Odette's daily life would appear to him as being of little intrinsic interest" (Proust, p. 435-426).
In Swann's Way, love is only experienced as anguish and an irreconcilable conflict of desires. On the one hand, Swann wants to possess Odette completely, to know every action and to infiltrate her consciousness. But Swann also must have that titillating thrill of Odette's separate life of perverse pleasures, the painful sensation when she imposes prohibitions on him and refuses to see him. He loves her most when they are apart and she exhibits indifference towards him, when he goes to painful lengths to see her and expects her angry rejection.
Indeed, Swann begins to love Odette only when she is inaccessable and no longer at his disposal. For several weeks, he had been accustomed to seeing her every evening at Odette's friends, the Verdurins' home. But one evening, Swann had deliberately delayed his arrival until after dinner was over, and arrived to receive the message that Odette had assumed he was not coming and had left already. Swann immediately became consumed by passion and spent the night searching for her, imagining every man he encountered as a potential rival for Odette's affections. When he finally found her in a cafe late at night, she took him to his home and had sex for the first time. Although Swann attained the physical possession of Odette he desired in the sexual act, he then became haunted by the realization that he could never fully possess her. She had already eluded his grasp and he would never know what she was doing for those hours without him.
Thus far in Proust, I've already noted that love is a desire for control and complete possession, but that desire is inseparable from the intrigue of remoteness. Swann's love is thus characterized by jealousy, a combination of yearning for Odette and needing her to have a secret life apart from him. There must be an element of the forbidden in love: Odette's lowly social status as a demimondaine, the exotic items in her home (Chinese lanterns, Indian rugs, etc.), her infidelity, her refusals all feed the flame of Swann's intrigue and keep the mystery alive. His imagination aids this considerably, in his willed refusal to imagine her other lovers or even precisely what she does in her life away from him; he prefers to keep it vague, so that the mystery is never solved and he remains in that pleasing, painful suspense.
In Swann's Way, love is also a state of moral degradation. Swann finds himself justifying immoral behavior, from spying on Odette to bribing doormen, and convinces himself that it is an intellectual task, this obsessive interest in Odette's life apart from him, on par with his former studies of history and art. He searches for meanings in her actions, and seems to deliberately mislead himself by interpreting her prohibitions against him seeing her in public as proof of her love, or at least of her setting him apart from all other men in her life. Swann thus leads himself away from truth, and becomes obsessed with his meaning-making games and his quest to possess Odette.
This is not only applicable to Swann in his love for an amoral woman, either. The narrator is not overjoyed by his mother consenting to spend the night in his room. He is miserable and guilty, and spends the whole night crying. He feels as though he has, in his quest for his mother (and in his success), failed to exercise proper self-control, and as he pushes forward in this quest, he is feverishly conscious of his transgressions but at a loss to stop himself. Like Swann's physical conquest of Odette through sexual intimacy, the narrator's conquering of his mother's will provides no lasting pleasure. The next night brings the same routine of torture as he anticipates bedtime and parting from his mother. Physical possession, again, does not satisfy; rather, as Sartre wrote, love demands the possession of the other's consciousness. There is something transgressive about this, as though the narrator and Swann are cognizant of the impossibility of total possession. Swann indeed acknowledges this predicament when he says that the calm he seems to desire would mark the end of his love for Odette.
I do not think that this is the only way to experience love, but this point of moral degradation is comprehensible in the context of the obsessive relationships depicted in Swann's Way. The characters become intoxicated by the oscillation between power and subjugation, complete unity with the other and remoteness. Love is not based on the qualities of the loved person in Swann's Way, but on the sensations produced in the individual who loves. It's a very egocentric love, a love of what one projects from within and can only observe without, through the medium of the other.
Friday, February 12, 2010
Love and Literature
This post isn't just for the sake of Valentine's Day; love is a constant theme in literature, and regardless of the day on the calendar, it's worth contemplating.
This is not the first time I've written about love in books on this blog, either. My first post, on Albert Camus' The Plague, remarked on the novel's rather bleak outlook on human relationships. Leo Tolstoy's "The Kreutzer Sonata" is about marriage. Romantic longing is a motif throughout the Combray chapter of Swann's Way, and becomes even more prominent in "Swann In Love." Love is part of the human condition, a mysterious force that affects everyone. Authors will write about it, scholars will analyze it, and everyone else is striving to figure it out too.
I'm uncertain of how helpful literature is in that quest to figure it out; novels, plays, and short stories often dramatize when love fails. Jealousy, infidelity, disparity between ideals and reality, objectification, conflict of natures, fears of lost freedom, desire for possession: all of these are well-represented in literature. In Camus, love generally fails because of the impossibility of mutual freedom. In a similar vein, for Tolstoy, love is a struggle for power and control. Anna and Vronsky attempt to dominate each other and strive to break the other's desire for independence in Anna Karenina. They use guilt and anger as tools of manipulation, to force the other to make grandiose declarations of their love. Their affair ends tragically. So does the marriage in Tolstoy's "The Kreutzer Sonata"; it ends in death, caused by domestic violence after a fit of jealousy and lucid fury. Even the one "successful" couple in Anna Karenina, Levin and Kitty, complete their narrative with Levin's withdrawal from his family life as he retreats into solitary spirituality. He and Kitty are alienated; she can never comprehend his spiritual experience, and he only reluctantly returns to her and their son in the novel's final scene. Tolstoy offers a view of love as an impossible, frustrating attempt to bring two individuals into union through possession.
Possession and love are also closely linked in Proust, although in a less violent and tragic way than in Tolstoy. In Search of Lost Time's first instance of love, between the narrator as a young child and his mother, is so fulfilling because the narrator believes that he possesses his mother completely. With her, he feels "that untroubled peace which no mistress, in later years, has ever been able to give me, since one has doubts of them even when one believes in them, and never can possess their hearts as I used to receive, in a kiss, my mother's heart, whole and entire, without qualm or reservation, without the smallest residue of an intention that was not for me alone" (Proust, p. 261). The narrator feels at ease with his mother's love because, he believes, that when she kisses him goodnight, he occupies the entirety of her thoughts and feelings. In that kiss, she exists for him alone. Sartre points out that the narrator requires not only physical possession of the person he loves: "It is certain that the lover wishes to capture a 'consciousness'" of his beloved (McDonald, p. 199). In this episode of the maternal kiss, the physical contact fulfills the desire for physical possession, but what distinguishes her kiss from that of any subsequent mistress is that he may be secure that there is not "the smallest residue of an intention that was not for me alone." He dominates her consciousness in that evening kiss; in true Freudian fashion, he is confident that this mother is an object without her own independent consciousness. She is the Freudian archetype of an object of desire, and to compound this desire further, it is not even challenged by his father; in fact, the night when the boy appeared in the hallway to demand a kiss as his parents went to bed, his father suggested that his mother sleep in the boy's room, rather than with him. Apparently, the narrator never feels that complete and uncomplicated possession of a woman, and I think it's because, as an adult, he is no longer able to so easily deny the subjectivity of another.
Swann's love for Odette also involves his belief that he possesses her. Proust remarks that, "in his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses a woman's heart may be enough to make him fall in love with her" (p. 277). Indeed, Swann fails to find Odette physically attractive or even particularly interesting, but her persistence in flattering him provokes love. He does not stop there, though; he sustains his love by superimposing an ideal Odette over the real woman, obscuring her with similarities he draws between her physical appearance and Boticelli's Zipphora, with invented virtues she lacks entirely. Through this idealized image and disregarding the actual Odette, he achieves total possession; she becomes his creation, and thus completely under his control. It is not easy to maintain this control, however; Swann has to continuously delude himself and dispell his recognition of her separateness.
Love in Proust, however, is not so simply explained-- not even Swann's delusional love for Odette. Mixed with this desire to possess is the intrigue of mystery, remoteness, and the exotic. Part of why Swann finds Odette desireable is her position outside of proper society; she is described as a demimondaine (a woman of ill repute, on par with a prostitute), which is wildly divergent from his aristocratic social sphere. Her perverse secret life simultaneously titillates Swann (because she is exotic and her sordid world a mystery to him) and disturbs him (because he still longs to possess her). The narrator experiences similar ambivalence toward Swann's daughter Gilberte. When he sees her, he feels that she looks at him with disdain and mockery; at this assertion of her superiority, of an unbridgeable gap between them, his "humiliated heart sought to rise to Gilberte's level or to bring her down to its own" (Proust, p. 200). This is the desire for, if not possession, then at least admission into her now-exotic world of dinners with Bergotte (an author the narrator admires) and his family's refusal to receive her or her mother in their home. Yet the remoteness from himself and his experiences, the notion that she occupies a separate plane of existence, is what first stimulated his interest. He is conflicted between wanting possession (symbolized in his voracious attempts to remember the nearby hawthorns and bringing up her name in conversation whenever possible) and attraction to the distance that separates them.
The question remains, however; is this useful? In Search of Lost Time has thus far presented love in terms of pain, unfulfilled longing, possessiveness, and self-delusion. Not exactly a model for a good relationship. Tolstoy of course offers few comforting words, and Camus and Sartre declare love impossible because mutual freedom cannot exist. I could give numerous other literary examples of failed love or superficial love, but I've already gone on for long enough. In spite of all this negativity, though, I believe that love does work, it doesn't have to be possessive and frustrating (although I think that there is truth in the simultaneous desire for complete union and maintaining separateness).
This weekend, I'm going to read the Symposium, and I may return here with some better insight into the nature of love. But for now, I will invoke Sartre again, in a more helpful way. Perhaps Sartre was right in saying that the thing itself can never be described. Love is the thing, and attempts to describe it necessarily distort it, constrain it, reduce it. In that case, I shall let it be as it is, in its entirety, without any attempt to label and control it. That may be the best approach to love: not to elaborate or put it into a narrative.
Love is. And that's all that needs to be said.
This is not the first time I've written about love in books on this blog, either. My first post, on Albert Camus' The Plague, remarked on the novel's rather bleak outlook on human relationships. Leo Tolstoy's "The Kreutzer Sonata" is about marriage. Romantic longing is a motif throughout the Combray chapter of Swann's Way, and becomes even more prominent in "Swann In Love." Love is part of the human condition, a mysterious force that affects everyone. Authors will write about it, scholars will analyze it, and everyone else is striving to figure it out too.
I'm uncertain of how helpful literature is in that quest to figure it out; novels, plays, and short stories often dramatize when love fails. Jealousy, infidelity, disparity between ideals and reality, objectification, conflict of natures, fears of lost freedom, desire for possession: all of these are well-represented in literature. In Camus, love generally fails because of the impossibility of mutual freedom. In a similar vein, for Tolstoy, love is a struggle for power and control. Anna and Vronsky attempt to dominate each other and strive to break the other's desire for independence in Anna Karenina. They use guilt and anger as tools of manipulation, to force the other to make grandiose declarations of their love. Their affair ends tragically. So does the marriage in Tolstoy's "The Kreutzer Sonata"; it ends in death, caused by domestic violence after a fit of jealousy and lucid fury. Even the one "successful" couple in Anna Karenina, Levin and Kitty, complete their narrative with Levin's withdrawal from his family life as he retreats into solitary spirituality. He and Kitty are alienated; she can never comprehend his spiritual experience, and he only reluctantly returns to her and their son in the novel's final scene. Tolstoy offers a view of love as an impossible, frustrating attempt to bring two individuals into union through possession.
Possession and love are also closely linked in Proust, although in a less violent and tragic way than in Tolstoy. In Search of Lost Time's first instance of love, between the narrator as a young child and his mother, is so fulfilling because the narrator believes that he possesses his mother completely. With her, he feels "that untroubled peace which no mistress, in later years, has ever been able to give me, since one has doubts of them even when one believes in them, and never can possess their hearts as I used to receive, in a kiss, my mother's heart, whole and entire, without qualm or reservation, without the smallest residue of an intention that was not for me alone" (Proust, p. 261). The narrator feels at ease with his mother's love because, he believes, that when she kisses him goodnight, he occupies the entirety of her thoughts and feelings. In that kiss, she exists for him alone. Sartre points out that the narrator requires not only physical possession of the person he loves: "It is certain that the lover wishes to capture a 'consciousness'" of his beloved (McDonald, p. 199). In this episode of the maternal kiss, the physical contact fulfills the desire for physical possession, but what distinguishes her kiss from that of any subsequent mistress is that he may be secure that there is not "the smallest residue of an intention that was not for me alone." He dominates her consciousness in that evening kiss; in true Freudian fashion, he is confident that this mother is an object without her own independent consciousness. She is the Freudian archetype of an object of desire, and to compound this desire further, it is not even challenged by his father; in fact, the night when the boy appeared in the hallway to demand a kiss as his parents went to bed, his father suggested that his mother sleep in the boy's room, rather than with him. Apparently, the narrator never feels that complete and uncomplicated possession of a woman, and I think it's because, as an adult, he is no longer able to so easily deny the subjectivity of another.
Swann's love for Odette also involves his belief that he possesses her. Proust remarks that, "in his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses a woman's heart may be enough to make him fall in love with her" (p. 277). Indeed, Swann fails to find Odette physically attractive or even particularly interesting, but her persistence in flattering him provokes love. He does not stop there, though; he sustains his love by superimposing an ideal Odette over the real woman, obscuring her with similarities he draws between her physical appearance and Boticelli's Zipphora, with invented virtues she lacks entirely. Through this idealized image and disregarding the actual Odette, he achieves total possession; she becomes his creation, and thus completely under his control. It is not easy to maintain this control, however; Swann has to continuously delude himself and dispell his recognition of her separateness.
Love in Proust, however, is not so simply explained-- not even Swann's delusional love for Odette. Mixed with this desire to possess is the intrigue of mystery, remoteness, and the exotic. Part of why Swann finds Odette desireable is her position outside of proper society; she is described as a demimondaine (a woman of ill repute, on par with a prostitute), which is wildly divergent from his aristocratic social sphere. Her perverse secret life simultaneously titillates Swann (because she is exotic and her sordid world a mystery to him) and disturbs him (because he still longs to possess her). The narrator experiences similar ambivalence toward Swann's daughter Gilberte. When he sees her, he feels that she looks at him with disdain and mockery; at this assertion of her superiority, of an unbridgeable gap between them, his "humiliated heart sought to rise to Gilberte's level or to bring her down to its own" (Proust, p. 200). This is the desire for, if not possession, then at least admission into her now-exotic world of dinners with Bergotte (an author the narrator admires) and his family's refusal to receive her or her mother in their home. Yet the remoteness from himself and his experiences, the notion that she occupies a separate plane of existence, is what first stimulated his interest. He is conflicted between wanting possession (symbolized in his voracious attempts to remember the nearby hawthorns and bringing up her name in conversation whenever possible) and attraction to the distance that separates them.
The question remains, however; is this useful? In Search of Lost Time has thus far presented love in terms of pain, unfulfilled longing, possessiveness, and self-delusion. Not exactly a model for a good relationship. Tolstoy of course offers few comforting words, and Camus and Sartre declare love impossible because mutual freedom cannot exist. I could give numerous other literary examples of failed love or superficial love, but I've already gone on for long enough. In spite of all this negativity, though, I believe that love does work, it doesn't have to be possessive and frustrating (although I think that there is truth in the simultaneous desire for complete union and maintaining separateness).
This weekend, I'm going to read the Symposium, and I may return here with some better insight into the nature of love. But for now, I will invoke Sartre again, in a more helpful way. Perhaps Sartre was right in saying that the thing itself can never be described. Love is the thing, and attempts to describe it necessarily distort it, constrain it, reduce it. In that case, I shall let it be as it is, in its entirety, without any attempt to label and control it. That may be the best approach to love: not to elaborate or put it into a narrative.
Love is. And that's all that needs to be said.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Sartre and Proust
In my previous post, I wrote about memory and inner reality, as they are connected to Proust's theme that memory and imagination transform life into art. There is the implication that life is only comprehensible as art and that there is a self, an interior consciousness, which directs the transformation . Jean-Paul Sartre provides an interesting companion to Proust's philosophy of the mind as presented in In Search of Lost Time.
I recently read an introduction to an anthology of Sartre's writings and an article by Christie McDonald, "Sartre Rereading Proust." McDonald's article reads Sartre's Nausea as a response to and rejection of Proust's In Search of Lost Time. In both novels, the narrators embark on a quest to create meaning by "decoding" sensory experiences and memories. Proust dramatizes the exploration of one's own consciousness throughout In Search of Lost Time, but, according to McDonald, Sartre dramatizes the failure of that search in Nausea. Proust's work upholds the notion that "sensation will give rise, in privileged moments, to an inner truth, culminating in the ability to create something new" (McDonald 199). In short, sensations are not simply sensations (to give a more pointed Proustian example, a madeleine is not simply a madeleine). There is considerable distance between the outside world of sensory experience and the inner world of the mind.
Sartre, however, rejected the notion of consciousness' ability to turn its attention onto itself and view itself as an object, and even more, he was critical of literature's role in the exploration of the self. The act of reflecting on experience puts greater distance between the individual and the direct (what Sartre calls pre-reflective) consciousness of "the thing itself," and distorts and limits the thing that narrative attempts to describe. In Sartre's view, the narrator of In Search of Lost Time is doomed to failure because, by dissecting his experiences, he is distorting and constraining the very thing that he wishes to comprehend. In reality, objects and events are indifferent to and resist the meanings that humans seek to impose on them, and so those meanings constantly elude our grasp; this is the unsettling feeling that Roquentin, the narrator of Nausea, encounters. Unlike Proust's narrator, Roquentin finds that writing does nothing to help him describe and understand his world and himself. Instead, he only becomes aware of the instability and uncertainty of existence. He feels that "there seems to be no distance between him and objects, no clear distinction between inside and outside" (McDonald, p. 200). Now, this is not entirely foreign in Proust; the narrator of In Search of Lost Time finds the lines between external and internal reality blurry. But, those lines still exist in Proust, and reflective consciousness acts as an interpreter of sensory experience. In Sartre, Roquentin cannot find distance between the intenal and external worlds, or depth beneath surfaces. The surfaces remain surfaces, the things are unendowed with meaning, and Roquentin experiences nausea from his inability to force the world into comprehensible terms. McDonald writes that, for Sartre, "consciousness only transcends immediate circumstances to the extent that consciousness can recognize the circumstances, nothing more" (p. 199). The meanings for which Roquentin searches are imposed on top of an amorphous reality. Furthermore, this structure of narrative and meaning can only be imposed retroactively: "Experience does not, cannot constitute an adventure, and it is a lie to think that it does" (McDonald, 202). McDonald implies that, in Proust, the meanings beneath objects are essential, inherent in the things the narrator contemplates and examines, and that life can become art in an instant.
McDonald's article adequately demonstrates the disparities between Sartre and Proust, but I find that there are many more similarities, especially in Sartre's notion of the transcendental ego. For Sartre, an individual is in "bad faith" when he tends too much in one of two opposing directions, facticity and transcendence. To retreat too far into facticity is to deny any transcendent part of the self, to identify completely with a particular role (such as one's occupation or social status); this results in emptiness, because the roles are convenient fabrications that provide a simple identity that denies "the thing itself," or the self itself. One cannot state one's identity; to do that is to pin it down, flatten it out, and excise large portions of the self. Retreat into transcendence is equally dangerous and produces the same result of emptiness; it's living in a fantasy world for potentials that never come to be and (I think this is where McDonald focuses perhaps too blindly) prevents action and engagement with real life.
I'm not certain that I would classify Proust's narrator as too involved in fantasy. As a child in Combray, he certainly has an active imagination, but it hardly prevents him from engaging in reality. Of course, he cannot create and experience simultaneously; all of his recollections of Combray come about during a night of insomnia, in the dark blank where sleep should be. Similarly, Sartre's Roquentin becomes annoyed when he must choose between continuing to write or departing from his narrative and rejoining life when a woman interrupts his work. Proust's narrator only appears to us in the past, and McDonald asserts, "The present exists. The past does not" (p. 203). In this way, one might say that Proust's narrator is divorced from reality by looking backward, by focusing so much on the past that he negates the present. Swann, however, appears to be most in danger of tending too much toward transcendence. I've started the chapter "Swann in Love," which details the affair between Swann and his present-day wife Odette, and from the beginning of their interactions, Swann's interest in Odette has to be fabricated by his imagination. He initially finds little in her that is attractive, but because she is so forward about her interest in him, he starts to will himself into admiring her; he imagines that she resembles one of Boticelli's paintings and, from then on, he justifies the time that he spends with her by relating it to admiring a living work of art. He rejects the real Odette before him and replaces her with an image of Boticelli's Zipphora, whom he can love and find aesthetically beautiful. This is dangerous territory, and Swann is setting himself up for disillusionment and emptiness.
I've written quite a lot on this subject today, but I want to continue this commentary between Sartre and Proust on the subject of experience and aesthetics. More to come as I do more research into this.
I recently read an introduction to an anthology of Sartre's writings and an article by Christie McDonald, "Sartre Rereading Proust." McDonald's article reads Sartre's Nausea as a response to and rejection of Proust's In Search of Lost Time. In both novels, the narrators embark on a quest to create meaning by "decoding" sensory experiences and memories. Proust dramatizes the exploration of one's own consciousness throughout In Search of Lost Time, but, according to McDonald, Sartre dramatizes the failure of that search in Nausea. Proust's work upholds the notion that "sensation will give rise, in privileged moments, to an inner truth, culminating in the ability to create something new" (McDonald 199). In short, sensations are not simply sensations (to give a more pointed Proustian example, a madeleine is not simply a madeleine). There is considerable distance between the outside world of sensory experience and the inner world of the mind.
Sartre, however, rejected the notion of consciousness' ability to turn its attention onto itself and view itself as an object, and even more, he was critical of literature's role in the exploration of the self. The act of reflecting on experience puts greater distance between the individual and the direct (what Sartre calls pre-reflective) consciousness of "the thing itself," and distorts and limits the thing that narrative attempts to describe. In Sartre's view, the narrator of In Search of Lost Time is doomed to failure because, by dissecting his experiences, he is distorting and constraining the very thing that he wishes to comprehend. In reality, objects and events are indifferent to and resist the meanings that humans seek to impose on them, and so those meanings constantly elude our grasp; this is the unsettling feeling that Roquentin, the narrator of Nausea, encounters. Unlike Proust's narrator, Roquentin finds that writing does nothing to help him describe and understand his world and himself. Instead, he only becomes aware of the instability and uncertainty of existence. He feels that "there seems to be no distance between him and objects, no clear distinction between inside and outside" (McDonald, p. 200). Now, this is not entirely foreign in Proust; the narrator of In Search of Lost Time finds the lines between external and internal reality blurry. But, those lines still exist in Proust, and reflective consciousness acts as an interpreter of sensory experience. In Sartre, Roquentin cannot find distance between the intenal and external worlds, or depth beneath surfaces. The surfaces remain surfaces, the things are unendowed with meaning, and Roquentin experiences nausea from his inability to force the world into comprehensible terms. McDonald writes that, for Sartre, "consciousness only transcends immediate circumstances to the extent that consciousness can recognize the circumstances, nothing more" (p. 199). The meanings for which Roquentin searches are imposed on top of an amorphous reality. Furthermore, this structure of narrative and meaning can only be imposed retroactively: "Experience does not, cannot constitute an adventure, and it is a lie to think that it does" (McDonald, 202). McDonald implies that, in Proust, the meanings beneath objects are essential, inherent in the things the narrator contemplates and examines, and that life can become art in an instant.
McDonald's article adequately demonstrates the disparities between Sartre and Proust, but I find that there are many more similarities, especially in Sartre's notion of the transcendental ego. For Sartre, an individual is in "bad faith" when he tends too much in one of two opposing directions, facticity and transcendence. To retreat too far into facticity is to deny any transcendent part of the self, to identify completely with a particular role (such as one's occupation or social status); this results in emptiness, because the roles are convenient fabrications that provide a simple identity that denies "the thing itself," or the self itself. One cannot state one's identity; to do that is to pin it down, flatten it out, and excise large portions of the self. Retreat into transcendence is equally dangerous and produces the same result of emptiness; it's living in a fantasy world for potentials that never come to be and (I think this is where McDonald focuses perhaps too blindly) prevents action and engagement with real life.
I'm not certain that I would classify Proust's narrator as too involved in fantasy. As a child in Combray, he certainly has an active imagination, but it hardly prevents him from engaging in reality. Of course, he cannot create and experience simultaneously; all of his recollections of Combray come about during a night of insomnia, in the dark blank where sleep should be. Similarly, Sartre's Roquentin becomes annoyed when he must choose between continuing to write or departing from his narrative and rejoining life when a woman interrupts his work. Proust's narrator only appears to us in the past, and McDonald asserts, "The present exists. The past does not" (p. 203). In this way, one might say that Proust's narrator is divorced from reality by looking backward, by focusing so much on the past that he negates the present. Swann, however, appears to be most in danger of tending too much toward transcendence. I've started the chapter "Swann in Love," which details the affair between Swann and his present-day wife Odette, and from the beginning of their interactions, Swann's interest in Odette has to be fabricated by his imagination. He initially finds little in her that is attractive, but because she is so forward about her interest in him, he starts to will himself into admiring her; he imagines that she resembles one of Boticelli's paintings and, from then on, he justifies the time that he spends with her by relating it to admiring a living work of art. He rejects the real Odette before him and replaces her with an image of Boticelli's Zipphora, whom he can love and find aesthetically beautiful. This is dangerous territory, and Swann is setting himself up for disillusionment and emptiness.
I've written quite a lot on this subject today, but I want to continue this commentary between Sartre and Proust on the subject of experience and aesthetics. More to come as I do more research into this.
Friday, February 5, 2010
Hand-Me-Down Memories
I just finished the nearly 300-page first "chapter" of Swann's Way, which details the routines, rituals, and discoveries of the narrator's childhood in the titular town of Combray. The final paragraphs of Combray point ahead to the next chapter, Swann In Love, as the narrator describes the process of absorbing and recalling the memories of another person, memories of experiences that were never his, but which apparently had a significant impact on the narrator, to the point that he includes them with memories of his own direct experiences:
"All these memories, superimposed upon one another, now formed a single mass, but had not so far coalesced that I could not discern between them-- between my oldest, my instinctive memories, and those others, inspired more recently by a taste or "perfume," and finally, those which were actually the memories of another person from whom I had acquired them at second hand-- if not real fissures, real geological faults, at least that veining, that variegation of colouring, which in certain rocks, in certain blocks of marble, points to differences of origin, age, and formation."
Marcel Proust, p. 262-263
This particular quote brought to light the communal aspect of memory and remembering. As much as memory is a private recollection of direct, personal experiences, another part of memory and the history of an individual is attributable to second-hand memories. Although, I'm not entirely certain that I agree with Proust that it is so easy to discern the origin, age, and formation of memories. Try this for an example.
What was your first word?
How do you remember what that first word was? You were probably about a year old, give or take a few months. You probably remember nothing else until you were two or three years old. I know that, for me, my "memory" of my first word is not truly mine. My earliest memory is of being in a grocery store when I was about two years old, and I cannot be certain whether it's wholly my own receollection or if it was influenced by the perceptions of others, or perhaps entirely fabricated. Nevertheless, I have obtained these memories and countless others from my parents, sisters, family members, and neighbors. These stories of my infancy and early childhood have been repeated so often that I have absorbed them into my sense of self; although they are hand-me-downs, they have become mine. They have become me.
In one of my college classes, on 20th century American drama, I suggested that selfhood begins with the first memory. In some ways, I stand by that assertion, because identity is constructed, in part, through narratives; in order to have a sense of self, a person must have a sense of personal history and be able to reflect on past experiences. I mostly connected this sense of history to national identity and post-colonial readings (e.g., the insomnia motif in One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez illustrates the loss of memory and subsequent loss of self among a colonized people), but I think it also works on the personal level. Character is constructed through a series of actions, which are all supposedly guided by internal qualities-- the character's nature, so to speak. A person has to have access to (selected) events of his or her past in order to construct a cohesive identity.
Identity's dependence on memory is a theme of Proust's In Search of Lost Time; the narrator claims that "reality takes shape in memory alone" (p. 260). I read that sentence as an assertion that narratives are necessary to make things real, to gives things existence. Naming also serves a similar function in the Combray chapter; for example, the mysterious woman in the church takes on a completely different meaning once the narrator learns her name and that she is a descendent of the medieval, fantastic Guermantes family. At the moment of hearing her name, she becomes real to the narrator, and thus loses some of her mystique and appeal (if only for a moment). In Proust, art, in addition to reality, takes shape in memory; as Mosher's article details, memory transforms life into art. This frustrates the barriers between fact and fiction; art creates something new, something outside of material reality, and yet it is reality.
I think that Proust is referring to the reality of the mind, or consciousness, when he writes that reality takes shape in memory alone. This reality begins with sensory information, but it finds hidden depths, it goes beyond the world of the senses and creates meaning. The meaning consciousness creates may be fictional and imposed upon a physical world devoid of intrinsic meaning, but Proust certainly is not one to disparage the veracity of this inner reality; even if it is constructed, if it is art rather than bare fact, the world of the mind is real. In fact, Proust suggests that this internal world of the mind (and, intimately connected to this, the realm of art) is the most real of all.
"All these memories, superimposed upon one another, now formed a single mass, but had not so far coalesced that I could not discern between them-- between my oldest, my instinctive memories, and those others, inspired more recently by a taste or "perfume," and finally, those which were actually the memories of another person from whom I had acquired them at second hand-- if not real fissures, real geological faults, at least that veining, that variegation of colouring, which in certain rocks, in certain blocks of marble, points to differences of origin, age, and formation."
Marcel Proust, p. 262-263
This particular quote brought to light the communal aspect of memory and remembering. As much as memory is a private recollection of direct, personal experiences, another part of memory and the history of an individual is attributable to second-hand memories. Although, I'm not entirely certain that I agree with Proust that it is so easy to discern the origin, age, and formation of memories. Try this for an example.
What was your first word?
How do you remember what that first word was? You were probably about a year old, give or take a few months. You probably remember nothing else until you were two or three years old. I know that, for me, my "memory" of my first word is not truly mine. My earliest memory is of being in a grocery store when I was about two years old, and I cannot be certain whether it's wholly my own receollection or if it was influenced by the perceptions of others, or perhaps entirely fabricated. Nevertheless, I have obtained these memories and countless others from my parents, sisters, family members, and neighbors. These stories of my infancy and early childhood have been repeated so often that I have absorbed them into my sense of self; although they are hand-me-downs, they have become mine. They have become me.
In one of my college classes, on 20th century American drama, I suggested that selfhood begins with the first memory. In some ways, I stand by that assertion, because identity is constructed, in part, through narratives; in order to have a sense of self, a person must have a sense of personal history and be able to reflect on past experiences. I mostly connected this sense of history to national identity and post-colonial readings (e.g., the insomnia motif in One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez illustrates the loss of memory and subsequent loss of self among a colonized people), but I think it also works on the personal level. Character is constructed through a series of actions, which are all supposedly guided by internal qualities-- the character's nature, so to speak. A person has to have access to (selected) events of his or her past in order to construct a cohesive identity.
Identity's dependence on memory is a theme of Proust's In Search of Lost Time; the narrator claims that "reality takes shape in memory alone" (p. 260). I read that sentence as an assertion that narratives are necessary to make things real, to gives things existence. Naming also serves a similar function in the Combray chapter; for example, the mysterious woman in the church takes on a completely different meaning once the narrator learns her name and that she is a descendent of the medieval, fantastic Guermantes family. At the moment of hearing her name, she becomes real to the narrator, and thus loses some of her mystique and appeal (if only for a moment). In Proust, art, in addition to reality, takes shape in memory; as Mosher's article details, memory transforms life into art. This frustrates the barriers between fact and fiction; art creates something new, something outside of material reality, and yet it is reality.
I think that Proust is referring to the reality of the mind, or consciousness, when he writes that reality takes shape in memory alone. This reality begins with sensory information, but it finds hidden depths, it goes beyond the world of the senses and creates meaning. The meaning consciousness creates may be fictional and imposed upon a physical world devoid of intrinsic meaning, but Proust certainly is not one to disparage the veracity of this inner reality; even if it is constructed, if it is art rather than bare fact, the world of the mind is real. In fact, Proust suggests that this internal world of the mind (and, intimately connected to this, the realm of art) is the most real of all.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
In Search of Lost...
Thyme.
My first Proust entry was ridiculously huge, which isn't exactly the best way to write in the blog medium. Anyway, I'll try to be a bit more concise; I'm still getting the hang of this thing.
I've been reading some articles about Swann's Way today, and one, titled "Stylistic, Structural, and Thematic Transformations in Proust's Du cote de chez Swann" by Harold F. Mosher, Jr., highlighted the metafictional elements of the novel as aspects of the theme of "life as art." As I wrote in my previous post, the narrator and several other characters escape into fantasy worlds, and that the line between fantasy and reality is not always clear. Mosher expounds on this theme further, in relation to the romances between Swann and Odette, and the young narrator and Swann's daughter Gilberte. Both Swann and the narrator transform life into art through elevating their beloveds, and thereby largely fictionalizing them. Swann exhibits "willed blindness" to Odette's infidelity, and he transforms her from a demimondaine into his wife, a member of the aristocracy. Although Swann, and the narrator in relation to Gilberte, elevates his beloved to the level of a goddess, he occupies the role of creator, of a godlike figure with the power to shape this woman through his own imagination.
Swann's Way, in placing the narrator at that age where romantic longings are quite intense, has some elements of the fairy tale in it. Mosher identifies the three subdivisions within Swann's Way as examples of different types of romance; Part One is a pastoral romance, in which the narrator finds mystery and divinity in nature (and his desires are rather undifferentiated); Part Three is a heroic romance, with a specific object (Gilberte) and the narrator's religious reverence for her and his quest to obtain her love. Mosher claims that Part Two is a romantic comedy of manners, in which Swann confronts the reality of Odette compared with his idealized fantasies of her.
With Valentine's Day approaching, this is an apposite topic of discussion, one that I raised in my post on Tolstoy's story "The Kreutzer Sonata"; does love necessarily entail an element of fictionalization?
I think that, to a certain extent, we all fictionalize ourselves. We form abstractions, images, and narratives in order to organize our experiences and make sense of them. The transformation of life into art is a mode of comprehending our experiences; the very act of reflecting on an experience requires it to be translated into narrative form, which is of course, a creation of art.
And so we do this with our individual love stories. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, and it doesn't mean that love is based on a falsehood. As Heidegger wrote, art and poetry function to reveal truth, they "unconceal" a person or an object's true being. That is, of course, how art should ideally function; there is art that is more divorced from truth (as I'm sure all of us can agree upon recalling some embarrassing and nonsensical middle school crushes and imagined romances such as Proust's narrator). But, I think that in our artistic renditions of our own love stories, the images that we must create of a loved person in order to comprehend them, do function to reveal the truth of what is best in that individual. Whether art reveals truth in the romances in Swann's Way, however, remains to be seen.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Dream a Little Dream: Fantasy in Combray
As promised, here is the inaugural post of my In Search of Lost Time series. Where to begin?
With the cover, of course.
(Tangentially, I'm always intrigued as to how publishers decide what to place on the cover, whether it's well-known works of art or abstract expressionist paintings, but that's another story.)
My edition of Swann's Way (translation by C.K. Scott Moncrieff), the first volume of Marcel Proust's oeuvre, has this rumpled pillow and bed sheets as the cover art. The fabrics are all creamy white and the pillow, although bearing the indentations from a presumably just-awakened head, is full and inviting.
So what does this have to do with Proust? A lot, actually.
The first chapter is comprised of the narrator's recollections of his childhood visits to a small village in rural France, Combray. He begins by detailing his nightly ritual of going to bed and anticipating his mother's appearance to kiss him goodnight. Without this goodnight kiss, he cannot sleep, as one tortured episode attests; during one summer evening at Combray, the adult members of the family held a dinner party, and the presence of guests in the house prevented the narrator's mother from kissing him goodnight. Terribly upset, the narrator spends the hours past his bedtime in contriving how to get his mother to come up to his room so he can see her again and fall asleep. He first calls for the maid, Francoise, and hands her a desperate note claiming that he is ill and needs his mother's immediate attention. His mother, of course, sees through this manipulative note and sends the maid back with no answer-- a rather cold refusal of her son's request. This sends the narrator into despair, and he vows to stay awake until the guests leave, go out into the hallway and intercept his mother on her way to bed. He does this, and his mother is angry for a moment, until she realizes how upset her son is and decides to sleep in his room and comfort him. The boy cries himself sick, overcome with emotion as his mother recognizes and validates that he is of a very sensitive, nervous nature. Until then, his emotional variations had caused his family members to regard him as weak and in need of stricter discipline, but in this episode, he discovers that his sensitivity isn't shameful. Rather, he experiences things more intensely than many others and he is only now beginning to comprehend his own mind and emotional states.
Beyond the obvious connections with sleep in that scene of the goodnight kiss, the first chapter takes place at a pivotal moment in the narrator's life; he's about 11 or 12 years old in the first part of this volume, on the cusp of adolescence, at the dawning of a new consciousness of himself and the world around him. He is, in a sense, just now awakening, as his intellectual life becomes richer and more complex, as he loses some of his childish innocence and realizes that many of the people around him are not simply the image that they wish to project, but lead separate lives (both separate social lives outside of his family's circle and distinct inner lives), of which he is only tangentially aware.
For instance, the narrator's Aunt Leonie is supposedly an invalid, unable to leave the two rooms that she occupies in Combray. She is pious in her sufferings, which include never sleeping, hardly eating, and having such a weak constitution that she can only speak in hushed tones. Yet the narrator discovers her talking to herself, often quite animatedly, reminding herself of the image she has constructed of her own life (he recalls her saying, "I must remember, I never slept a wink" and occasionally catches her waking up in the grips of a nightmare). More intriguing is that Aunt Leonie often gives voice to her fantastic imaginings when she believes that no one else is around, delivering fervent, vituperative monologues in an imagined confrontation with a friend, whom she suspects is disloyal, or with the maid Francoise, whom she suspects is scheming for her money. She often fantasizes about some "domestic calamity" interrupting her life, destroying the house at Combray and killing her entire family, leaving her as the sole survivor. In these fantasies, she imagines herself venturing outside to the church at the town's center and delivering the eulogies for her family, shocking the entire population with her strength through such an ordeal. She rehearses such scenarios in her mind periodically when her routine existence becomes oppressive. Even the sedate, sickly Aunt Leonie lives a rather separate life in her own mind, one of passions and intense emotions that she would never admit, but which need to be expressed. Later on, a friend of the narrator suggests that Aunt Leonie had been a passionate younger woman, a claim so shocking that the boy was no longer allowed at the family's house at Combray. Yet there is evidence, in Aunt Leonie's turbulent fantasies, that her current state of repose is not the whole of her existence, and that her very illness is a complete fabrication (she does in deed sleep, quite often, she has many appetites, both physical and emotional, which she sates in her inner world). The narrator is often surprised by these findings, realizing that the adults understand that Aunt Leonie is not really as sick as she says she is, that her fragility is of a more psychological nature than physical, but they accept her fictions without contradiction. They understand that she needs these fantasies, or at least believes that she does, and clings to them with such fervor that they realize attempts to dissuade her would be futile. There is still a sense that the narrator is unaware of a great deal of his family's relations and past, but he is gradually becoming more aware of the blurry line between reality and fantasy.
The narrator is entering a new dream, after being disabused of some of his youthful assumptions about his family and worldly matters such as actresses and supposedly glamorous people, through his own capacity for vivid fantasy. Much to his active grandmother's chagrin, he often retreats into his own mind, burying himself in books and poetry, fantasy lives, an imagined and idealized woman whom he loves with such passion that her lack of physical existence hardly deters his romantic longings. This fantasy world may be inchoate, and heavily influenced by what he reads, but it is an expression, an outpouring of his soul as it awakens to new sensations, desires, and intensities. In this sense, his comparative anonymity and vagueness is fitting; I'm uncertain of his exact age, and he does not identify himself by name, perhaps because he is recounting a time in which he is just now contemplating how to construct his identity.
In Swann's Way, identity is something assumed to be fixed, simple and immutable, but the narrator soon comes to learn that it is part fiction, part fact, and always based on an incomplete perception. In short, he is encountering subjectivity, both his own and that of others. The narrator learns that the titular associate of the family, Swann, is not all that he seems. In his family's snobbish middle-class estimation, Swann is a social inferior, and they do him the favor of accepting him graciously (although they are generally condescending in how they expect him to behave around them). Swann complies and even appears to be happy to fill that role for the sake of this upper-middle class family's pleasure and companionship. But, the narrator discovers that Swann has a much more varied social circle than he keeps in Combray; he is friendly with famous authors and artists, and lives a very fashionable life in Paris, of which the narraotr's family does not approve and functions as the reason why they consider him inferior. They are scandalized by Swann's wife, whom they hint was a prostitute, and pointedly exclude her from their society, and frequently bemoan the fact that a man of such a respectable background as Swann would willingly associate himself with such fringe characters.
The narrator, however, is in awe of Swann's lifestyle, I believe for the same reason that Aunt Leonie constructs her doomsday fantasies; there is the hint of eschewing the banalities of his everyday existence, so bound by the rules of propriety and routine, expectations and narrow definitions that constrain his desires and invalidate his longings for intense and novel experiences. At this stage in his life, the narrator is very fond of the theater and is in love with several actresses, although he has never set foot inside a theater. He has a thirst for drama, and much of the allure of the theater and the glamorous women who seduce his imagination from the playbills is derived from the fact that this world is forbidden. His parents do not allow him to attend plays because it isn't respectable; he has an uncle who associates with actresses, but is careful to hide these acquaintances from the family. Like many of the characters, this Uncle Adolphe leads a rather different life from that he presents to the middle-class sensibilities of his family.
At this point in the novel, I get the feeling that the narrator very much desires to shock and offend those refined sensibilities.
With the cover, of course.
(Tangentially, I'm always intrigued as to how publishers decide what to place on the cover, whether it's well-known works of art or abstract expressionist paintings, but that's another story.)
My edition of Swann's Way (translation by C.K. Scott Moncrieff), the first volume of Marcel Proust's oeuvre, has this rumpled pillow and bed sheets as the cover art. The fabrics are all creamy white and the pillow, although bearing the indentations from a presumably just-awakened head, is full and inviting.
So what does this have to do with Proust? A lot, actually.
The first chapter is comprised of the narrator's recollections of his childhood visits to a small village in rural France, Combray. He begins by detailing his nightly ritual of going to bed and anticipating his mother's appearance to kiss him goodnight. Without this goodnight kiss, he cannot sleep, as one tortured episode attests; during one summer evening at Combray, the adult members of the family held a dinner party, and the presence of guests in the house prevented the narrator's mother from kissing him goodnight. Terribly upset, the narrator spends the hours past his bedtime in contriving how to get his mother to come up to his room so he can see her again and fall asleep. He first calls for the maid, Francoise, and hands her a desperate note claiming that he is ill and needs his mother's immediate attention. His mother, of course, sees through this manipulative note and sends the maid back with no answer-- a rather cold refusal of her son's request. This sends the narrator into despair, and he vows to stay awake until the guests leave, go out into the hallway and intercept his mother on her way to bed. He does this, and his mother is angry for a moment, until she realizes how upset her son is and decides to sleep in his room and comfort him. The boy cries himself sick, overcome with emotion as his mother recognizes and validates that he is of a very sensitive, nervous nature. Until then, his emotional variations had caused his family members to regard him as weak and in need of stricter discipline, but in this episode, he discovers that his sensitivity isn't shameful. Rather, he experiences things more intensely than many others and he is only now beginning to comprehend his own mind and emotional states.
Beyond the obvious connections with sleep in that scene of the goodnight kiss, the first chapter takes place at a pivotal moment in the narrator's life; he's about 11 or 12 years old in the first part of this volume, on the cusp of adolescence, at the dawning of a new consciousness of himself and the world around him. He is, in a sense, just now awakening, as his intellectual life becomes richer and more complex, as he loses some of his childish innocence and realizes that many of the people around him are not simply the image that they wish to project, but lead separate lives (both separate social lives outside of his family's circle and distinct inner lives), of which he is only tangentially aware.
For instance, the narrator's Aunt Leonie is supposedly an invalid, unable to leave the two rooms that she occupies in Combray. She is pious in her sufferings, which include never sleeping, hardly eating, and having such a weak constitution that she can only speak in hushed tones. Yet the narrator discovers her talking to herself, often quite animatedly, reminding herself of the image she has constructed of her own life (he recalls her saying, "I must remember, I never slept a wink" and occasionally catches her waking up in the grips of a nightmare). More intriguing is that Aunt Leonie often gives voice to her fantastic imaginings when she believes that no one else is around, delivering fervent, vituperative monologues in an imagined confrontation with a friend, whom she suspects is disloyal, or with the maid Francoise, whom she suspects is scheming for her money. She often fantasizes about some "domestic calamity" interrupting her life, destroying the house at Combray and killing her entire family, leaving her as the sole survivor. In these fantasies, she imagines herself venturing outside to the church at the town's center and delivering the eulogies for her family, shocking the entire population with her strength through such an ordeal. She rehearses such scenarios in her mind periodically when her routine existence becomes oppressive. Even the sedate, sickly Aunt Leonie lives a rather separate life in her own mind, one of passions and intense emotions that she would never admit, but which need to be expressed. Later on, a friend of the narrator suggests that Aunt Leonie had been a passionate younger woman, a claim so shocking that the boy was no longer allowed at the family's house at Combray. Yet there is evidence, in Aunt Leonie's turbulent fantasies, that her current state of repose is not the whole of her existence, and that her very illness is a complete fabrication (she does in deed sleep, quite often, she has many appetites, both physical and emotional, which she sates in her inner world). The narrator is often surprised by these findings, realizing that the adults understand that Aunt Leonie is not really as sick as she says she is, that her fragility is of a more psychological nature than physical, but they accept her fictions without contradiction. They understand that she needs these fantasies, or at least believes that she does, and clings to them with such fervor that they realize attempts to dissuade her would be futile. There is still a sense that the narrator is unaware of a great deal of his family's relations and past, but he is gradually becoming more aware of the blurry line between reality and fantasy.
The narrator is entering a new dream, after being disabused of some of his youthful assumptions about his family and worldly matters such as actresses and supposedly glamorous people, through his own capacity for vivid fantasy. Much to his active grandmother's chagrin, he often retreats into his own mind, burying himself in books and poetry, fantasy lives, an imagined and idealized woman whom he loves with such passion that her lack of physical existence hardly deters his romantic longings. This fantasy world may be inchoate, and heavily influenced by what he reads, but it is an expression, an outpouring of his soul as it awakens to new sensations, desires, and intensities. In this sense, his comparative anonymity and vagueness is fitting; I'm uncertain of his exact age, and he does not identify himself by name, perhaps because he is recounting a time in which he is just now contemplating how to construct his identity.
In Swann's Way, identity is something assumed to be fixed, simple and immutable, but the narrator soon comes to learn that it is part fiction, part fact, and always based on an incomplete perception. In short, he is encountering subjectivity, both his own and that of others. The narrator learns that the titular associate of the family, Swann, is not all that he seems. In his family's snobbish middle-class estimation, Swann is a social inferior, and they do him the favor of accepting him graciously (although they are generally condescending in how they expect him to behave around them). Swann complies and even appears to be happy to fill that role for the sake of this upper-middle class family's pleasure and companionship. But, the narrator discovers that Swann has a much more varied social circle than he keeps in Combray; he is friendly with famous authors and artists, and lives a very fashionable life in Paris, of which the narraotr's family does not approve and functions as the reason why they consider him inferior. They are scandalized by Swann's wife, whom they hint was a prostitute, and pointedly exclude her from their society, and frequently bemoan the fact that a man of such a respectable background as Swann would willingly associate himself with such fringe characters.
The narrator, however, is in awe of Swann's lifestyle, I believe for the same reason that Aunt Leonie constructs her doomsday fantasies; there is the hint of eschewing the banalities of his everyday existence, so bound by the rules of propriety and routine, expectations and narrow definitions that constrain his desires and invalidate his longings for intense and novel experiences. At this stage in his life, the narrator is very fond of the theater and is in love with several actresses, although he has never set foot inside a theater. He has a thirst for drama, and much of the allure of the theater and the glamorous women who seduce his imagination from the playbills is derived from the fact that this world is forbidden. His parents do not allow him to attend plays because it isn't respectable; he has an uncle who associates with actresses, but is careful to hide these acquaintances from the family. Like many of the characters, this Uncle Adolphe leads a rather different life from that he presents to the middle-class sensibilities of his family.
At this point in the novel, I get the feeling that the narrator very much desires to shock and offend those refined sensibilities.
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