The Proust Project, Day 4

Where this began
Day 3

Swann's Way (translated by Lydia Davis), pp. 37-48.

And so we come to the scene everyone knows (or knows about), the "Proustian moment," the epiphany in a teaspoon. I admit that from my previous forays into Proust, I had thought it came at the very beginning of the novel, not 40-some pages in. (Although in a novel the size of In Search of Lost Time, 40-some pages in does rather qualify as "the very beginning.")

The narrator's account of the scenes of his childhood rising before him, awakened by the taste of crumbs from a madeleine steeped in tea, comes after his account of the rare, privileged night his mother spent in his room, reading to him from books that were supposed to be a gift from his grandmother. It is "a sort of puberty of grief, of emancipation from tears," "the beginning of a new era" that "would remain as a sad date."

It also reinforces the grandmother's role in forming the narrator's character as an aesthete, a man of discerning tastes. She "could never resign herself to buying anything from which one could not derive a intellectual profit." And even when forced to select a gift that was utilitarian, preferred to give antique things in which "long desuetude had effaced their character of usefulness."

We could no longer keep count, at home, when my great-aunt wnted to draw up an indictment against my grandmother, of the armchairs she had presented to young couples engaged to be married or old married couples which, at the first attempt to make use of them, had immediately collapsed under the weight of one of the recipients.

Of course, the narrator comes to rebel against the imbuing of art with "that moral distinction which Mama had learned from my grandmother to consider superior to all else in life, and which I was to teach her only much later not to consider superior to all else in books."

But for years afterward, his childhood in Combray remained limited to what it has been in the first 40-some pages of the novel: "the theater and drama of my bedtime" -- "as though Combray had consisted only of two floors connected by a slender staircase and as though it had always been seven o'clock in the evening there." The rest of it comes to life when he pursues something ineffable awakened by the taste of the madeleine in tea. At first, he doesn't know what he has glimpsed: "Undoubtedly what is palpitating thus, deep inside me, must be the image, the visual memory which is attached to this taste and is trying to follow it to me." Note here that he ascribes the volition to the memory, that he must meet the memory -- "struggling too far away" -- halfway.

Ten times I must begin again, lean down toward it. And each time, the laziness that deters us from every difficult task, every work of importance, has counseled me to leave it, to drink my tea and think only about my worries of today, my desires for tomorrow, upon which I may ruminate effortlessly.

For Proust this is, I think, the distinction between the artist and the layman, the willingness to struggle against the "laziness" that traps most of us in the quotidian.

And then he meets the memory, of aunt Léonie giving him a taste of madeleine soaked in lime-blossom tea. It's the fortuitous combination of tea and madeleine that does it -- the intimate power of taste that proves more effective than sight alone in raising the past. He had seen madeleines in shops without awakening any distinct sensations. He even finds a way of moralizing the image of the little shell-shaped cake, "so fatly sensual within its severe and pious pleating."

But, when nothing subsists of an old past, after the death of people, after the destruction of things, alone, frailer but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, smell and taste still remain for a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, upon the ruins of all the rest, bearing without giving way, on their almost impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory.

And so rooms, roads, people and the town join themselves in his imagination. The stage is set.

The Proust Project, Day 3

Where this began
Day 2

Swann's Way (translated by Lydia Davis), pp. 23-37.

Swann comes to dinner, with the result that the narrator is sent to bed early without a goodnight kiss from his mother. He persuades Françoise, the cook who is tasked with looking after him, to take a letter to his mother asking her to come see him, but his mother declines the request. Unable to sleep, he waits until she comes upstairs, even though he fears that he'll be punished by being sent away to school. To his surprise, his father tolerates his misbehavior, and even suggests that his mother spend the night in the narrator's room.

But first, we see the grandmother's spinster sisters again, and learn their names -- though Proust makes a mistake when he reveals them. One sister addresses the other as Céline, but when she replies, Proust writes, "answered her sister Flora." He has no particular interest in distinguishing Flora from Céline; they are there only for sake of the joke, which in this case involves their making "such a fine art of concealing a personal allusion beneath ingenious circumlocutions that it often went unnoticed even by the person to whom it was addressed." And so their thanks to Swann for the case of wine he has sent them goes so veiled in indirect references that grandfather is indignant at the end of the evening when he learns that their coy allusions to "good neighbors" were their expressions of gratitude.

We learn one more bit of information about Swann's unhappy marriage, which has been alluded to earlier, when the narrator hears his great-aunt say, "I think he has no end of worries with that wretched wife of his who is living with a certain Monsieur de Charlus, as all of Combray knows. It's the talk of the town."

But the bulk of these pages deals with the narrator's long evening of waiting for his mother's arrival. They include some of Proust's famous long, curlicue sentences, exploring every nuance of the boy's anxiety but also anticipating some of the obsessiveness that will fill his later life. Proust's psychological insight radiates through these pages, as when he remarks of the "precious and fragile kiss" that on dinner-party evenings he had to "snatch ... brusquely, publicly, without even having the time and the freedom of mind necessary to bring to what I was doing the attention of those individuals controlled by some mania, who do their utmost not to think of anything else while they are shutting a door, so as to be able, when the morbid uncertainty returns to them, to confront it victoriously with the memory of the moment when they did shut the door." That's about as good a description of obsessive-compulsive disorder as you can find.

In the end, the father is kind, Abraham spares Isaac, and we have a happy ending. Or as happy an ending as you're likely to find in a writer like Proust, who can turn any triumph into melancholy:

This was many years ago. The staircase wall on which I saw the rising glimmer of his candle has long since ceased to exist. In me, too, many things have been destroyed that I thought were bound to last forever and new ones have formed that have given birth to new sorrows and joys which I could not have foreseen then, just as the old ones have become difficult for me to understand. It was a long time ago, too, that my father ceased to be able to say to Mama: "Go with the boy." The possibility of such hours will never be reborn for me. But for a little while now, I have begun to hear again very clearly, if I take time to listen, the sobs that I was strong enough to contain in front of my father and that broke out only when I found myself alone again with Mama. They have never really stopped; and it is only because life is now becoming quieter around me that I can hear them again, like those convent bells covered so well by the clamor of the town during the day that one would think they had ceased altogether but which begin sounding again in the silence of the evening.

The Proust Project, Day 2

Day 1

Swann's Way (translated by Lydia Davis), pp. 11-23.

We meet Swann, but first we witness some of the family dynamic. The grandmother's love for being outdoors, even in a rainstorm, puts her at odds with the rest of the family, and even with the gardener whose paths are "too symmetrically aligned for her liking" and the maid who finds her muddied skirts "a source of despair and a problem." She is also perturbed by the failure of the narrator's father to "make him strong and active" and "build up his endurance and willpower." The narrator's mother submits to the father, unwilling to "try to penetrate the mystery of his superior qualities." The great-aunt's teasing of his grandmother provokes the narrator, who, "already a man in my cowardice, ... did what we all do, once we are grown up, when confronted with sufferings and injustices: I did not want to see them."

The boy's love of his mother is so intense that he can't enjoy it. When he hears her coming to his room to kiss him goodnight, the moment is marred because of his awareness that it will end. He comes to prefer anticipation to fulfillment:

It heralded the moment that was to follow it, when she had left me, when she had gone down again. So that I came to wish that this goodnight I loved so much would take place as late as possible, so as to prolong the time of respite in which Mama had not yet come.

And then Swann appears, to set the household dynamic into a new alignment. He has, we are told, an "aquiline nose" and "green eyes under a high forehead framed by blond, almost red hair, cut Bressant-style." A footnote to Lydia Davis's translation tells us that the actor Jean-Baptiste Prosper Bressant "introduced a new hairstyle, which consisted of wearing the hair in a crew cut in front and longer in the back." In other words, Swann had a mullet. But the chief thing that we learn is that, unknown to his neighbors in Combray, Swann, the stockbroker's son, moves in the highest social circles when he is in Paris.

Our ignorance of this brilliant social life that Swann led was obviously due in part to the reserve and discretion of his character, but also to the fact that bourgeois people in those days formed for themselves a rather Hindu notion of society and considered it to be made up of closed castes, in which each person, from birth, found himself placed in the station which his family occupied and from which nothing, except the accidents of an exceptional career or an unhoped-for marriage could withdraw him in order to move him into a higher caste.

This sets in motion some Jane Austen-style comedy, centered on the great-aunt who has pigeonholed Swann because his town house is in "a part of town where my great-aunt felt it was ignominious to live." She handles Swann, "who was elsewhere so sought after, with the naive roughness of a child who plays with a collector's curio no more carefully than with some object of little value."

Proust typically uses Swann's unsuspected double life as a means to reflect on the nature of personality -- we are what we are seen to be:

But even with respect to the most insignificant things in life, none of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others.

And since this is a novel about recovering time, the narrator observes that the varied encounters we have with one person over time are freighted with revelations not such much about them as about who we were when we previously encountered them:

I have the impression of leaving one person to go to another distinct from him, when, in my memory, I pass from the Swann I knew later with accuracy to that first Swann -- to that first Swann in whom I rediscover the charming mistakes of my youth and who in fact resembles less the other Swann than he resembles the other people I knew at the time, as though one's life were like a museum in which all the portraits from one period have a family look about them, a single tonality -- to that first Swann abounding in leisure, fragrant with the smell of the tall chestnut tree, the baskets of raspberries, and a sprig of tarragon.

Finally, we meet grandmother Bathilde's spinster sisters, with whom Jane Austen would have had almost as much fun as Proust does:

They were women of lofty aspirations, who for that very reason were incapable of taking an interest in what is known as tittle-tattle, ... and more generally in anything that was not directly connected to an aesthetic or moral subject. The disinterestedness of their minds was such, with respect to all that, closely or distantly, seemed connected with worldly matters, that their sense of hearing -- having finally understood its temporary uselessness when the conversation at dinner assumed a tone that was frivolous or merely pedestrian ... -- would suspend the functioning of its receptive organs and allow them to begin to atrophy.

The Proust Project

Proust is my Everest, my Northwest Passage, a project much attempted but never achieved. So here's the idea: I'll read ten pages a day (at least) and report on them here. Having exposed my ambitions to Internet eyes, I have more incentive not to fail. My French, never a deftly handled precision instrument, is a thing of rust, dust and cobwebs, so I'll be reading the new translations published in the United States by Viking, and switch to the Scott Moncrieff version for the last three volumes, since the new translations aren't available in the States until 2018. I hope it won't take me that long.

Swann's Way (translated by Lydia Davis), pp. 1-10.

The narrator reflects on sleeping and waking, and the momentary dislocations of time and space that occur when he does so.

A sleeping man holds in a circle around him the sequence of the hours, the order of the years and worlds. He consults them instinctively as he wakes and reads in a second the point on the earth he occupies, the time that has elapsed before his waking; but their ranks can be mixed up, broken.

His mind "hesitat[es] on the thresholds of times and shapes" as it surveys other beds and other rooms before he settles in the one in which he currently exists. At Combray, his mother and grandmother had set up a magic lantern "to distract me on the evenings when they found me looking too unhappy," but the images it projected on the walls, curtains and doors "destroyed the familiarity which my bedroom had acquired for me and which, except for the torment of going to bed, had made it tolerable to me." But the element in the description that I relish most is the humor, the inflated vocabulary with which Proust undercuts the neurasthenia of the narrator:

The body of Golo himself, in its essence as supernatural as that of his steed, accommodated every material obstacle, every hindersome object that he encountered by taking it as his skeleton and absorbing it into himself, even the doorknob he immediately adapted to and floated invincibly over with his red robe or his pale face as noble and as melancholy as ever, but revealing no disturbance at this transvertebration.

Somehow, I had never thought of Proust as funny, but this passage is like something out of Dickens.

Day 2

One Nation, Invisible

Michael Lind on the Pledge of Allegiance.

Could anything be more foreign to America's enlightened 18th-century liberal and republican traditions than this toxic compound of collectivism, nativism, Spartan militarism and theocracy?

Stupak-fied

Jeffrey Toobin on abortion and health care reform.

The President is pro-choice, and he has signalled some misgivings about the Stupak amendment. But, like many modern pro-choice Democrats, he has worked so hard to be respectful of his opponents on this issue that he sometimes seems to cede them the moral high ground. In his book “The Audacity of Hope,” he describes the “undeniably difficult issue of abortion” and ponders “the middle-aged feminist who still mourns her abortion.” Elsewhere, he announces, “Abortion vexes.” The opponents of abortion aren’t vexed—they are mobilized, focussed, and driven to succeed. The Catholic bishops took the lead in pushing for the Stupak amendment, and they squeezed legislators in a way that would do any K Street lobbyist proud. (One never sees that kind of effort on behalf of other aspects of Catholic teaching, like opposition to the death penalty.) Meanwhile, the pro-choice forces temporized. But, as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg observed not long ago, abortion rights “center on a woman’s autonomy to determine her life’s course, and thus to enjoy equal citizenship stature.” Every diminishment of that right diminishes women. With stakes of such magnitude, it is wise to weigh carefully the difference between compromise and surrender.

Scare Tactics

This sort of thing scares the hell out of me.

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What I'm Watching

Waltz With Bashir

When Ari Folman's film switches to live action at the very end, you can see clearly why he chose animation. It's not enough for a documentary to ... well, to document. With no sacrifice of truth, animation allows him to go places documentaries usually can't, not only into the midst of unfilmed battles, but also into the dreams of his interviewees -- the pursuing wild dogs, the giant nude woman swimming to the boat, the swimmers rising from the sea and walking onto the devastated beach. War, as Folman says in one of the DVD's interviews, is the creation of "men with small minds and big egos." Folman's ego, I dare say, is rather large, too, but he has created something more valuable.

Why Jon Stewart Is America's Most Trusted (Fake) Newsman

Will Bunch on the media's failure to cover ... the media's failure.

Jon Stewart and his outstanding team of "Daily Show" producers and writers not only "get" the importance of media manipulation and propaganda, but they can take it a step farther because they also have something that most bloggers do not --resources. Their access to large film libraries is what helps them to take down Fox, CNBC, and all the other media types (and politicians, too) when they say the polar opposite of what they were saying a year ago or even a month ago.

You know who else has those kinds of resources? Mainstream, big media newsrooms. But big media pathologically refuses to think of itself as a part of the national narrative, even as the millions of people who watch Jon Stewart or read your top political blogs know better. And until we in the old media can comprehend that, the new media will continue to leave us in the dust. So will the "fake" media.

What I'm Reading

Notes on Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates.

But first, a word about spoilers.

I like them. I like seeing the way a writer or filmmaker puts things together, the artful dodges that conceal or hint at a story's direction, even when the work hinges on a surprise. I knew the surprise that was coming in The Crying Game, and delighted in the knowledge I had that characters in the film didn't. On the other hand, I didn't know what was coming in The Sixth Sense when I first saw it (though I was aware there was a gimmick), and I enjoyed the movie more on a second viewing, watching the way Shyamalan staged Bruce Willis's interactions with the living.

So this is a warning: There is no way I can write intelligently about Revolutionary Road without alluding to what happens at its end, so if you are a spoiler-phobic who hasn't either seen the film or read the book, you may want to stop right here. Nice to see you. Come back again.

This is not to place either the film of Revolutionary Road or the book in the same category as The Crying Game or The Sixth Sense. They don't depend on withheld plot in the same way. While April's death is shocking, it's not -- in terms of characterization -- a surprise. (I realize I'm being a little unfair to The Crying Game, a comparatively realistic film, by lumping it with a ghost story. What they really have in common is that both films were much discussed for their "twists.")

I saw the film version of Revolutionary Road before I read the book. And in a curious way the book made me more appreciative of the film, and the film made me more critical of the book. Specifically, the book made me better appreciate the skill demonstrated by Kate Winslet at drawing a character who is, I think, somewhat underdrawn in the book. Winslet's April is, I think, bipolar, swinging from the low of her failure in The Petrified Forest to the high of her scheme to drop out of the rat race and move to Paris. The April of the novel is more enigmatic, partly because Yates doesn't narrate from her point of view until the very end, as she's contemplating the suicidal self-induced abortion. We see events through Frank's point of view, through Milly and Shep's, through Mrs. Givings's, and once even through the children's. But we don't enter April's consciousness until it's too late.

Is this a narrative flaw? I hesitate to call it that: A writer has the prerogative to tell his story any way he wants. And by staying distant from April's point of view, Yates makes her even more the isolated, alienated figure in the novel -- a counterpart to the mentally disturbed John Givings. (We don't need to see events from John's point of view, however; he's perfectly willing to tell us what he thinks.) That April is the archetypal alienated 1950s housewife is perfectly obvious. Though she longs to escape to Paris, she couches it in terms of allowing Frank to "find himself." In service to her husband, she has given up her ambitions for a career, the pleasures of urban life, and even dominion over her own body.

Frank, of course, remains oblivious to what's eating away at April. His embrace of the Paris scheme is ambivalent at best -- he lacks the imagination either to conceive of such a plan himself, or to see what it represents for April. Though initially he thinks of his life as a sad carbon copy of his father's -- meaningless work for the same soulless company -- once a new pathway in that life opens up when his talent is recognized by Pollock, he's eager to settle in that routine, greatly relieved when April's pregnancy stymies the Paris escape.

One thing we sometimes forget in thinking about the man-in-the-gray-flannel-suit conformity of the Fifties is that Frank's generation is also the one lately celebrated as the "Greatest Generation." They had been to war, and were quite happy to settle into the routines of peace -- at the expense of becoming boring, as is revealed in the scene in which Frank embarrasses himself by recounting the same war story he had told the same people before. The wartime home-front service and sacrifices of the women of that generation have not been similarly celebrated, and that fact underscores the dissatisfaction of an April.

(Or a Betty Draper. The comparison of "Mad Men" and Revolutionary Road is by now a familiar one -- and a little misleading, since the action of the TV series takes place five to eight years later than that of the novel. And Don Draper/Dick Whitman is a rather more ruthlessly aggressive figure than Frank Wheeler. Don knows what he wants from life and reinvents himself to achieve it. He's also not one to dwell on war stories, since his are not really his own. But even though Matthew Weiner may deny the influence, April looks a lot like the pattern for Betty. Both are caught in the same suburban trap, and even had the same kind of children -- older girl, younger boy -- before unanticipated pregnancies thwarted their potential liberation from child-rearing. Betty studied archaeology only to find herself joking about it while looking at antique furniture; April aspired to be an actress but wound up in a disastrous amateur production of The Petrified Forest in a high school auditorium. And both fell decidedly out of love with their philandering husbands, and wound up having furtive casual sex. But unlike April, Betty has survived the fall. At least so far.)

The novel's beginning, I think, is stronger than its ending. In fact, this is one place where I prefer the film, which condenses the hospital scene and the redundant scenes at the Campbells and the Givingses. I think the inclusion of a shot of Frank playing with the children softens the film a little too much -- the novel almost leaves the impression that Frank farmed the children out to his brother and sister-in-law, an ironic recapitulation of April's scattered childhood. But I do like that both novel and film end with Mr. Givings turning off his hearing aid.

Of course, what makes the novel far superior to the film (even though the film is remarkably faithful to the book) is the fluency of Yates's prose and the keenness of his insight into the characters. We know where we are and where we're going with the Wheelers from the beginning, or at least when we experience with Frank the disaster of the production of The Petrified Forest:

[N]othing had warned him that he might be overwhelmed by the swaying, shining vision of a girl he hadn't seen in years, a girl whose every glance and gesture could make his throat fill up with longing ("Wouldn't you like to be loved by me?") and that then before his very eyes she would dissolve and change into the graceless, suffering creature whose existence he tried every day to deny but whom he knew as well and as painfully as he knew himself, a gaunt, constricted woman whose red eyes flashed reproach, whose false smile in the curtain call was as homely as his own sore feet, his own damp climbing underwear and his own sour smell.

It's a process of illusion and disillusionment that recurs throughout the book; only a few pages later Frank recalls a postcoital April "whispering: 'It's true, Frank. I mean it. You're the most interesting person I've ever met.'" And then only three paragraphs after that the present-day April is saying to him, "All right, Frank. Could you just please stop talking now, before you drive me crazy?" Has a more savagely anti-Romantic novel ever been published?

The key to Frank, I think, is his desire to be a man, not the scared boy he's afraid he really is. Working on the stone path to his house, he prides himself that "At least it was a man's work," and drifts into a reverie about his own masculinity:

At least, squatting to rest on the wooded slope, he could look down and see his house the way a house ought to look on a fine spring day, safe on its carpet of green, the frail white sanctuary of a man's love, a man's wife and children. Lowering his eyes with the solemnity of this thought, he could take pleasure in the sight of his own flexed thigh ... and of the heavily veined forearm that lay across it and the dirty hand that hung there -- not to be compared with his father's hand, maybe, but a serviceable good-enough hand all the same -- so that his temples ached in zeal and triumph as he heaved a rock up from the suck of its white-wormed socket and let it roll end over end down the shuddering leafmold, because he was a man.

And then his daughter asks why Mommy slept on the sofa last night.

No film can be as searching and probing as that passage is about the tyranny of masculinity and the narcissism it inspires, or as revelatory of the human gap between who we are and what we want to be.