The Proust Project, Day 5

Where this began
Day 4

Swann's Way (translated by Lydia Davis), pp. 49-60.

We begin our post-madeleine exploration of Combray, a village not that different from the ones in Austen and Trollope or Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford. Or rather we begin in the bedroom of Aunt Léonie, who gradually retreated there after the death of her husband, Octave, and can be found there "always lying in an uncertain state of grief, physical debility, illness, obsession, and piety."

The vehicle that conveys the narrator there is the sense of smell, "the thousand smells given off by the virtues, by wisdom, by habits, a whole secret life, invisible, superabundant, and moral, which the atmosphere holds in suspension." Proust is careful to undercut the sentimentality evoked by these "linen smells, morning smells, pious smells" by characterizing them as "happy with a peace that brings only an increase of anxiety and with a prosiness that serves as a great reservoir of poetry for one who passes through it without having lived in it." It's a nice life, but you wouldn't necessarily want to live it, as Proust, himself a famous semi-recluse, is aware.

Aunt Léonie, the daughter of the narrator's imperious great-aunt, who was his grandfather's cousin, "always talked rather softly because she thought there was something broken and floating in her head that she would have displaced by speaking too loudly." But she talks constantly "because she believed it was beneficial to her throat," and "she attributed to the least of her sensations an extraordinary importance." She could be dismissed as a stock figure, the malade imaginaire, except that Proust devotes so much nuance to her portrayal. As he does with Léonie's dutiful servant Françoise, who

was one of those servants who, in a household, are at the same time those most immediately displeasing to a stranger, perhaps because they do not bother to win him over and are not attentive to him, knowing very well they have no need of him, that one would stop seeing him rather than dismiss them; and who are, on the other hand, those most valued by masters who have tested their real capacities, and do not care about the superficial charm, the servile chatter that makes a favorable impression on a visitor but that often cloaks an ineducable incompetence.

It is, I think, because Proust tells us so much about these relatively minor characters, analyzes them so individually, that we come to take them as real -- or rather as a remembered reality. Otherwise, they could be just dismissed as "comic relief" for their bits of idiosyncratic provincialisms, such as the conviction that "in Combray, a person 'whom one does not know at all' was a creature as scarcely believable as a mythological god."

One knew everybody so well, in Combray, both animals and people, that if my aunt had chanced to see a dog pass by 'whom she did not know at all,' she would not stop thinking about it and devoting to this incomprehensible fact all her talents for induction and her hours of leisure.

Beyond Politics

Matt Taibbi has at Palin, too.

Palin’s extraordinary ability to inspire major national controversies around these injustices done to her immediate person is going to guarantee her some kind of major role in American politics for the next dozen years. In this regard she is going to have a willing ally in her supposed keen enemy, the mainstream media, which likewise loves nothing more than a political narrative that has nothing to do with politics.

Running Wild

Frank Rich decodes Sarah Palin.

Even by the standard of politicians, this is a woman with an outsized ego. Combine that with her performance skills and an insatiable hunger for the limelight, and you can see why she will not stay in Wasilla now that she’s seen 30 Rock. The question journalists repeatedly asked last week — What are Palin’s plans for 2012? — is a red herring. Palin has no obligation to answer it. She is the pit bull in the china shop of American politics, and she can do what she wants, on her own timeline, all the while raking in the big bucks she couldn’t as a sitting governor. No one, least of all her own political party, can control her.

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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