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.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
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.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Be Kind to Spinsters
I know that I just wrote that my new theme would be In Search of Lost Time, but in preparation for a job interview this week, I just finished Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, and as I've resolved to write something about every book I read, here's my take on the children's classic.
Most of Alcott's first-time readership is between 10 and 13 years old; I'm an obvious late-comer at age 23, so my experience with the book is probably very different than other readers my age, who will look back upon it with fond childhood memories. I'm also reading a biography of Louisa May Alcott and her family as I read Little Women, which has enriched my understanding of the characters and Alcott's authorial remarks.
Like much 19th century domestic literature, gender is a prominent feature of Little Women. Alcott's protagonist Jo March is based on the author herself- a tempestuous, vibrant, independent tomboy with a strong sense of the dramatic, who also cannot seem to find a place within the feminine world to which she is confined. Jo angrily says that she wishes she were a boy so she could do whatever she wanted, and the young Louisa felt the same way; she was constantly reprimanded for her improprieties, her un-ladylike interests in athleticism and drama. In her diary as a teenager, Alcott wrote that if she couldn't be a writer, she wanted to be an actress; at that time, a career in the theater was still considered highly inappropriate for a middle class young lady, not only because of the ostentatious position in the public sphere, but also because of the theater's past association with prostitution. Actresses were still very much regarded with suspicion for stretching the narrow confines of gender roles (especially in the wildly popular but risque burlesques, in which women dressed in drag and mocked public figures). Although she never gave her heroine Jo this ambition and kept all of the March sisters' dramatic performances strictly within the domestic sphere of their parlor and barn, Alcott was a daring woman who took pleasure in shocking her family and polite society.
The March girls are a rather watered-down version of Louisa herself; Jo was defiant, but became docile and gentle, two qualities that Alcott claims, at the age of 50, she never acquired in her entire life. She, unlike the March sisters, would not be content with submissive meekness.
Marriage also becomes a prominent feature of the narrative in the latter two-thirds, as the March girls grow into women and meet suitable mates. Even wild Jo March settles into domestic life; Alcott gives her a husband and children, and reworks Jo's literary aspirations into running a school for boys out of her home (and Jo's husband, not Jo, is the schoolmaster and teacher, while she plays mother to the lonely little boys). This is an intriguing departure from autobiography for Alcott's heroine, for she never married. At the end of the novel, Jo claims that she couldn't be happier as a wife and mother, although she hasn't given up her literary dreams. But, she reasons, those can wait while she raises her children and the boys at the school. Alcott, however, seemed to be faced with two irreconcilable options: marry and become a mother, or remain a spinster and become an author. The first choice requires giving up her freedom and a large part of her identity. The latter means resigning herself to a loneliness, which she seemed to feel painfully as she wrote Little Women. After describing the happy marriage of the youngest March sister, Alcott inserts an authorial aside, imploring young people to be kind to the spinsters, because their lives are difficult and lonely, and they are already isolated from society by virute of having no husbands. She alludes to the fact that she has enough internal strength to fight off despair and is fulfilled by her writing career, but there is a tinge of regret that she never was loved. In the biography, that is a sadly frequent refrain of Alcott's diaries; as a child, she felt that her unruly behavior and feisty independence made her bad and unworthy of love (her father often scolded and threatened her that God only loves good children). As a teenager, she had fervent crushes on Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, impossible unrequited love for these two much older and married men. She experienced a young romance with a former schoolmate, who died shortly after he extended an invitation to go riding together. This seems to have been a dilemma and disappointment for Alcott her entire life, that she could love, but never felt it was fully reciprocated by anyone but the characters she created herself. As she wrote in Little Women, she had her pen for a spouse and her stories for her children, and this was not altogether satisfying.
Alcott also gives Jo March a quick temper, which she herself had, but she spares her heroine from the debilitating bouts of depression and despair that she suffered herself. I think that a significant factor in Alcott's wildly variable moods was the fact that she could not fulfill the very restrictive feminine ideal of her age. She was told, from age two onward, that she was a bad child, that she couldn't do the things that she longed to do, and she was forced to choose between giving up her writing and independence, or living a solitary life as a noevlist, pursuing a career that still wasn't very highly respected or well paid. She could never fully be herself, and I read that in Little Women; she couldn't find the intellectual man who would bolster her own literary pursuits for herself, and she felt terribly isolated for much of her life.
Most of Alcott's first-time readership is between 10 and 13 years old; I'm an obvious late-comer at age 23, so my experience with the book is probably very different than other readers my age, who will look back upon it with fond childhood memories. I'm also reading a biography of Louisa May Alcott and her family as I read Little Women, which has enriched my understanding of the characters and Alcott's authorial remarks.
Like much 19th century domestic literature, gender is a prominent feature of Little Women. Alcott's protagonist Jo March is based on the author herself- a tempestuous, vibrant, independent tomboy with a strong sense of the dramatic, who also cannot seem to find a place within the feminine world to which she is confined. Jo angrily says that she wishes she were a boy so she could do whatever she wanted, and the young Louisa felt the same way; she was constantly reprimanded for her improprieties, her un-ladylike interests in athleticism and drama. In her diary as a teenager, Alcott wrote that if she couldn't be a writer, she wanted to be an actress; at that time, a career in the theater was still considered highly inappropriate for a middle class young lady, not only because of the ostentatious position in the public sphere, but also because of the theater's past association with prostitution. Actresses were still very much regarded with suspicion for stretching the narrow confines of gender roles (especially in the wildly popular but risque burlesques, in which women dressed in drag and mocked public figures). Although she never gave her heroine Jo this ambition and kept all of the March sisters' dramatic performances strictly within the domestic sphere of their parlor and barn, Alcott was a daring woman who took pleasure in shocking her family and polite society.
The March girls are a rather watered-down version of Louisa herself; Jo was defiant, but became docile and gentle, two qualities that Alcott claims, at the age of 50, she never acquired in her entire life. She, unlike the March sisters, would not be content with submissive meekness.
Marriage also becomes a prominent feature of the narrative in the latter two-thirds, as the March girls grow into women and meet suitable mates. Even wild Jo March settles into domestic life; Alcott gives her a husband and children, and reworks Jo's literary aspirations into running a school for boys out of her home (and Jo's husband, not Jo, is the schoolmaster and teacher, while she plays mother to the lonely little boys). This is an intriguing departure from autobiography for Alcott's heroine, for she never married. At the end of the novel, Jo claims that she couldn't be happier as a wife and mother, although she hasn't given up her literary dreams. But, she reasons, those can wait while she raises her children and the boys at the school. Alcott, however, seemed to be faced with two irreconcilable options: marry and become a mother, or remain a spinster and become an author. The first choice requires giving up her freedom and a large part of her identity. The latter means resigning herself to a loneliness, which she seemed to feel painfully as she wrote Little Women. After describing the happy marriage of the youngest March sister, Alcott inserts an authorial aside, imploring young people to be kind to the spinsters, because their lives are difficult and lonely, and they are already isolated from society by virute of having no husbands. She alludes to the fact that she has enough internal strength to fight off despair and is fulfilled by her writing career, but there is a tinge of regret that she never was loved. In the biography, that is a sadly frequent refrain of Alcott's diaries; as a child, she felt that her unruly behavior and feisty independence made her bad and unworthy of love (her father often scolded and threatened her that God only loves good children). As a teenager, she had fervent crushes on Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, impossible unrequited love for these two much older and married men. She experienced a young romance with a former schoolmate, who died shortly after he extended an invitation to go riding together. This seems to have been a dilemma and disappointment for Alcott her entire life, that she could love, but never felt it was fully reciprocated by anyone but the characters she created herself. As she wrote in Little Women, she had her pen for a spouse and her stories for her children, and this was not altogether satisfying.
Alcott also gives Jo March a quick temper, which she herself had, but she spares her heroine from the debilitating bouts of depression and despair that she suffered herself. I think that a significant factor in Alcott's wildly variable moods was the fact that she could not fulfill the very restrictive feminine ideal of her age. She was told, from age two onward, that she was a bad child, that she couldn't do the things that she longed to do, and she was forced to choose between giving up her writing and independence, or living a solitary life as a noevlist, pursuing a career that still wasn't very highly respected or well paid. She could never fully be herself, and I read that in Little Women; she couldn't find the intellectual man who would bolster her own literary pursuits for herself, and she felt terribly isolated for much of her life.
Monday, January 25, 2010
New Direction
I started writing this as a way to organize my thoughts better on what I'm reading, but I haven't really done that very well; I've done absolutely no research, read no secondary sources, and have let my entries become rambling and at best semi-coherent. So I'm going to re-group here and start anew.
This Christmas, I started reading the first volume of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, an intimidating mass of work that has long been on my "to-read" list. I haven't taken it all that seriously, though, and let my attention wander, stopped reading it in the middle, read it while my parents were watching TV and on Skype with my sister. In short, I've been really unfocused. I'm quite determined, though, to read this work and to give it the thought and attention that I should put into everything that I read, so for the time being, I think the theme of this blog will be on Proust's literary project and my process of reading through it.
Most of my previous entries haven't been all that useful, so I've deleted a lot of them and I'm going to re-name the blog. I'm ready to start this thing fresh. I like the idea of blogging, but the entries so far have mostly been testing the waters and trying to put together themes, without much direction or even keen interest on my part. Well, after a brief hiatus, I'm going to return and have better things to say, more trenchant observations, and I invite anyone else interested in eitehr Proust or what I have to say about him to join me!
This Christmas, I started reading the first volume of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, an intimidating mass of work that has long been on my "to-read" list. I haven't taken it all that seriously, though, and let my attention wander, stopped reading it in the middle, read it while my parents were watching TV and on Skype with my sister. In short, I've been really unfocused. I'm quite determined, though, to read this work and to give it the thought and attention that I should put into everything that I read, so for the time being, I think the theme of this blog will be on Proust's literary project and my process of reading through it.
Most of my previous entries haven't been all that useful, so I've deleted a lot of them and I'm going to re-name the blog. I'm ready to start this thing fresh. I like the idea of blogging, but the entries so far have mostly been testing the waters and trying to put together themes, without much direction or even keen interest on my part. Well, after a brief hiatus, I'm going to return and have better things to say, more trenchant observations, and I invite anyone else interested in eitehr Proust or what I have to say about him to join me!
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
New Year
Happy 2010, everyone! It doesn't really feel like a new year; the same snow is covering the frozen earth and we're all back to business as usual for the most part after weeks of festive holiday cheer. April 1st probably was a better choice for the start of the new year; spring evokes that feeling of rebirth and renewal that we usually seek when the new year begins.
Anyway.
I've been reading "The Kreutzer Sonata" by Leo Tolstoy in the last week or so. It's a novella about two men conversing on a train, mainly about marriage and family life. The twist is, one of these men, Posdnicheff, recently murdered his wife.
Although "The Kreutzer Sonata" is horribly misogynistic (Posdnicheff is of the opinion that a woman's greatest virtue is remaining a virgin and that, because of women's education, the only control on their coquettish behavior is pregnancy and nursing children), it does raise some interesting questions about male-female relationships. None of the characters have happy, successful relationships; an old man at the beginning of the story claims that married people are doomed to misery because wives have lost their sense of fear of their husbands and husbands no longer fear God, so they commit all sorts of debaucheries. Posdnicheff, meanwhile, struggles with what really attracted him to his wife in the first place, and he concludes that he only decided to marry her because he admired her physically and wanted sexual contact. He convinced himself that this feeling was love, he heaped all of these impossible ideals upon her and then found himself disgusted by her once they consummated their marriage and she gave up her only virtue, her virginity.
Obviously, this guy has a major Madonna-Whore complex, but I think the story is still relevant in that question of human relationships. How do they develop? How much of love is actually idealization divorced from the reality of human flaws, and how do you cope when the other person departs from your idealizations?
Tolstoy wrote this story at a time when marriage was undergoing a significant transformation in Russia; arranged marriages were beginning to fall out of social acceptability, in favor of love marriages. But the interactions between the sexes were still constrained to superficial venues like ballrooms and the theater, and guided by very scripted conversations that included the same behavioral tropes: calculated charm, excessive enthusiasm for certain subjects that one does not really care about but feigns interest to become more intriguing to the prospective mate.
Is it all that different today? Male-female interactions are much less constrained in contemporary America, but there's a disturbing parallel to Posdnicheff's description of dances; he says that the women all put themselves on display, and the men peruse the options and choose to dance with whichever woman strikes him as most attractive and desireable. This reminded me of internet dating; you search through profiles and although there is personality information, it's all a calculated image designed specifically to attract. It's not necessarily the entire truth, but a particular version of a person that s/he uses to attract as many people as possible. Even in the "real world," there's still that element of superficiality, of calculations to figure out what will best attract a desireable mate.
But it doesn't have to be that way. One problem that I've noticed with a lot of young women my age, is that they are constantly trying to figure out "guys." They complain on Facebook that "guys are so dumb" or that they "just don't get guys," and they search as though there is some formula, some mathematical calculation that will solve all of their relationship problems.
The problem lies in that generalization, in the assumption that there is something universal about "guys" that will suddenly clarify and guide all interactions once that something is discovered. It's a version of Posdnicheff's problem, obscuring the individual with these abstract ideals and notions of behavior. When we relate to individuals as individuals, rather than a representative of a gender or as a manifestation of ideals that we privately hold, only then is love possible.
Anyway.
I've been reading "The Kreutzer Sonata" by Leo Tolstoy in the last week or so. It's a novella about two men conversing on a train, mainly about marriage and family life. The twist is, one of these men, Posdnicheff, recently murdered his wife.
Although "The Kreutzer Sonata" is horribly misogynistic (Posdnicheff is of the opinion that a woman's greatest virtue is remaining a virgin and that, because of women's education, the only control on their coquettish behavior is pregnancy and nursing children), it does raise some interesting questions about male-female relationships. None of the characters have happy, successful relationships; an old man at the beginning of the story claims that married people are doomed to misery because wives have lost their sense of fear of their husbands and husbands no longer fear God, so they commit all sorts of debaucheries. Posdnicheff, meanwhile, struggles with what really attracted him to his wife in the first place, and he concludes that he only decided to marry her because he admired her physically and wanted sexual contact. He convinced himself that this feeling was love, he heaped all of these impossible ideals upon her and then found himself disgusted by her once they consummated their marriage and she gave up her only virtue, her virginity.
Obviously, this guy has a major Madonna-Whore complex, but I think the story is still relevant in that question of human relationships. How do they develop? How much of love is actually idealization divorced from the reality of human flaws, and how do you cope when the other person departs from your idealizations?
Tolstoy wrote this story at a time when marriage was undergoing a significant transformation in Russia; arranged marriages were beginning to fall out of social acceptability, in favor of love marriages. But the interactions between the sexes were still constrained to superficial venues like ballrooms and the theater, and guided by very scripted conversations that included the same behavioral tropes: calculated charm, excessive enthusiasm for certain subjects that one does not really care about but feigns interest to become more intriguing to the prospective mate.
Is it all that different today? Male-female interactions are much less constrained in contemporary America, but there's a disturbing parallel to Posdnicheff's description of dances; he says that the women all put themselves on display, and the men peruse the options and choose to dance with whichever woman strikes him as most attractive and desireable. This reminded me of internet dating; you search through profiles and although there is personality information, it's all a calculated image designed specifically to attract. It's not necessarily the entire truth, but a particular version of a person that s/he uses to attract as many people as possible. Even in the "real world," there's still that element of superficiality, of calculations to figure out what will best attract a desireable mate.
But it doesn't have to be that way. One problem that I've noticed with a lot of young women my age, is that they are constantly trying to figure out "guys." They complain on Facebook that "guys are so dumb" or that they "just don't get guys," and they search as though there is some formula, some mathematical calculation that will solve all of their relationship problems.
The problem lies in that generalization, in the assumption that there is something universal about "guys" that will suddenly clarify and guide all interactions once that something is discovered. It's a version of Posdnicheff's problem, obscuring the individual with these abstract ideals and notions of behavior. When we relate to individuals as individuals, rather than a representative of a gender or as a manifestation of ideals that we privately hold, only then is love possible.
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