Free Lunch

Buffalo is a very poor, segregated city with many homeless people. A lot of them flock to my neighborhood, which is in the wealthier, gentrified section of the city, and stand outside of the stores on Elmwood Ave (the main shopping area), begging. I encounter at least one or two every day, and I'm really torn on how to respond to them. Is it better to refuse the homeless person there before you in the flesh and donate to a charity or a shelter instead? I'm uncertain of that mentality, because it seems too abstract, even if it ultimately does more good than to give to an individual; that individual still matters, that person right before you, appealing to you for help. The endless obligation to the other, when confronted with the other face-to-face. The face-to-face matters, the reality and individuality of the other is far more demanding, and more difficult to respond to, than the abstract vision in the mind when donating to an institution. I feel really guilty when I refuse that, but I often do refuse. Most of the time, I apologize and say that I don't have any cash on me, which is true; I very seldom carry cash. This was the case yesterday; I was walking to the corner store to buy some oatmeal for breakfast, when I saw a woman leaning up against the side of the building. I've seen her multiple times before; mid to late 40s, heavy-set, disheveled hair, the same clothes every day, flagging down every person who walks by and asking for cash. She's not aggressive or threatening, like some of the other visible homeless who regularly frequent the area. I've given her cash before when I've had paper money on me. As I approached the entrance of the store, she asked me if I could spare any money; I only had my credit card on me, so I started apologizing as I thought of maybe asking for cash back when I purchased my oatmeal, when she asked if I could buy her food. I was a little surprised, because just a few days ago, Jarrod and I had talked about people begging on the street and how our responses are really constrained. Both of us wanted to buy something for the people-- food, a sweatshirt, something-- but didn't know how to offer it. The act of begging is inherently uncomfortable in the overt recognition of class differences, a stark demarcation of those with excess and those with nothing. There's instantly a tense dynamic between the beggar and the other, an accusation of being selfish if you refuse to give some of your excess, an accusation of being wealthy. Granted, as a grad student, I don't have much excess, but my very position as a grad student designates me as privileged.


I agreed; she asked me if I could buy her food and I said, sure and she followed me into the store, clearly surprised and pleased. The dynamics of this encounter weren't aggressive or threatening, but it was still strange. She disappeared into the aisles of the store as I went for my oatmeal, and for a minute, I thought she had gone back outside and was expecting me to choose her meal. Then I thought about it, and she was probably embarrassed by my acceptance, even though she was clearly happy that I had agreed to buy her a loaf of bread and sandwich meat. I was self-conscious myself, looking around for her, wondering if she was going to thrust the items into my hands and leave the store. I thought of the reversal of the physical discrepancies between the privileged and the poor in the 21st century; this woman easily outweighs me by 60 lbs, but heaviness no longer indicates wealth and the ability to feed oneself to excess. It's because she's forced to eat convenience store food, buying bags of Doritos and 99 cent donuts with the spare dollars she collects, while I walk another block to buy fresh produce at the local co-op. I rounded the corner and headed towards the check-out line and noticed her standing off to the side, holding a loaf of bread and a package of bologna. I made eye contact, and she placed her items on the counter before me. The cashier, a grim-faced older woman, asked me gruffly if I was paying for her things and I said yes. The homeless woman requested a separate bag, I paid, and headed for the door; she thanked me again and I just nodded and said no problem.


Did I handle this well? I obviously helped this woman; the loaf of bread and sandwich meat would probably make 10 sandwiches, so maybe she wouldn't have to stand outside and beg for the rest of the afternoon. I didn't look back to see where she went; she was still inside the store when I left, and I sort of didn't want to know what she did after. I had the impulse to disengage, to slip back into anonymity and have no one else confront me, recognize me, ask of me. I think I did something good, but am I obligated to do this every time I encounter a homeless person? Is it my personal responsibility to triple the cost of my order to buy food for others when I'm rationing that container of oatmeal so it lasts for the last month or so of the semester? I'm not sure if there's any good solution, if it's my responsibility to take on, but I also feel like I couldn't have refused. In total, it only cost about $10 for my food and hers, giving her $7 that she just didn't have, $7 that I could spare. Perhaps that's the difficulty of all of this-- what, exactly, can you spare?

The Habit-Driven Life

"As a rule it is with our being reduced to a minimum that we live; most of our faculties lie dormant because they rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services" (Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time Vol II: Within a Budding Grove, 319).

In the first two volumes of In Search of Lost Time, habits play a major role in the activities of all the characters. Life at Combray is so uniform that the mere suggestion of an unknown visitor sends many residents into a state of anxiety. Aunt Leonie was particularly disturbed whenever she heard that there was someone unknown in Combray, and her life was so organized around routines that, should her friend be a minute late in visiting her every Sunday, she would be disconsolate and agitated for the entire day. The narrator has been extremely perturbed by any variation in his habits; in the Combray chapter of Swann's Way, he makes himself ill with anxiety whenever he cannot receive his mother's goodnight kiss; in the chapter "Madame Swann at Home," he is aggrieved when Gilberte unexpectedly cannot come to the Champs Elysees; and he eventually utilizes the force of habit to make himself stop loving Gilberte. Madame Verdurin demands the unwavering devotion and regularity of her "faithful," every Wednesday, and in the second volume, Odette Swann is on her way to forming her own salon of society ladies. Such social interactions are dictated by habitual roles each person is expected to play, and conventional opinions which the entire group must hold in common, and as a result, the individual becomes engulfed in and defined by his habits, his conventions.

This calming but deadening effect of habits, and the unsettling awakening of the senses when those habits are impossible to maintain, reminds me of Jean-Paul Sartre's novel Nausea, which centers on nauseating sensations of unfamiliarity, which arise from confronting reality without the filter of imposed interpretations of reality. In Search of Lost Time is by no means an existential novel, but there is an affinity here between the narrator's sense of intense anxiety when he is unable to maintain his habits, and the feeling of nausea that Sartre's character Roquentin experiences when contemplating things stripped of the meanings and even his own perceptions. For Sartre, those perceptions and customary interpretations of things, events, people, etc. obscure their reality. Proust's narrator has a more genuine confrontation with existence in this section of the novel, "Place-Names: The Place" than he has ever had before. Early on in Within a Budding Grove, the narrator deliberately chooses to see his favorite actress in a play he knows by heart, so that he can immediately dissect what she adds to the text. He is distraught that he cannot readily interpret Berma's performance of Phaedre without the authority of the text because her words fly by too quickly. Afterwards, he seeks external authority to verify that she is indeed a great actress, to counteract his own feelings of disappointment and blankness. As a young adolescent, he depends upon authorities to provide him with ready interpretations of everything; he looks to Swann to judge art for him, M. de Norpois to give him the meaning of Berma's acting, and Bergotte as the standard of his own writing, to his grandmother for social cues and judgment of potential acquaintances. With all of these filters of interpretation, the narrator is spared a direct confrontation with reality; everything is predetermined and externalized, and he need not do any work to comprehend his surroundings.

But when he abandons his habits (or more appropriately, when he is forced to abandon them, since he is a self-described creature of habit), he is sent into confusion and anxiety because of the astonishing richness of reality. There is a sense of fear, and a fear of loss, of death perhaps, when he is separated from his habitual existence. Life becomes incomprehensible because the ready interpretations no longer apply; he is forced to use all of his faculties, which come rushing back into his consciousness, in order to create new meaning. This is a difficult, frightening task, but one that he eventually comes to see as a source of joy. As his consciousness pullulates, the narrator becomes more self-aware and more interested in exploring his relation to things outside of himself; in the first volume, his imagination was such a powerful force that he was content to simply dream and escape into himself, but in this second volume, he is more apt to reach out, to contemplate the relationship between that external reality of other people and his internal reality, how his impressions and internal states create meaning that does not exist objectively. I think the intense anxiety that the objective reality of things which he cannot fully access, the recognition of his own imposition of meaning onto the outside world, provokes him to create new habits, to ease the pain of acute consciousness and the strain of using all of his faculties. There is something seductive in living thoughtlessly and automatically, in a sedated state like the Lotus Eaters in the Odyssey, because one is free of anxiety; but then, as the narrator writes toward the beginning of this chapter on his travels to Balbec, one lives at a minimum, and risks sinking into oblivion when too much is left to habit.

The World's a Stage

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.

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.

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.

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.