The Proust Project, Day 8

Where this began
Day 7

Swann's Way (translated by Lydia Davis), pp. 90-102.

The narrator is introduced to the works of a writer named Bergotte "by a friend of mine older than I whom I greatly admired, Bloch." Unfortunately, the rather pretentious and affected Bloch is not admired by the rest of the family. The narrator's grandfather is concerned that Bloch is "a Jew, which would not have displeased him in principle -- even his friend Swann was of Jewish extraction -- had he not felt that it was not from among the best that I had chosen him." His barometer-watching father is perturbed by Bloch's indifference to the weather. His grandmother suspects Bloch of insincerity when he wipes away tears after hearing that she was "a little indisposed." And when he arrives for lunch "an hour and a half late covered with mud," Bloch, instead of apologizing, proclaims that he knows "nothing about the use of those ... pernicious and insipidly bourgeois implements, the watch and the umbrella." But the final straw is Bloch's telling the narrator "that he had heard most positively that my great-aunt had had a wild youth and had been known to be a kept woman." The narrator, incapable of keeping secrets, tells his parents with the result that Bloch is banished and the narrator's tattling ends their friendship.

But the narrator's obsession with Bergotte continues. He becomes so taken with the writer's observations and opinions "that, when by chance I happened to encounter in one of his books a thought that I had already had myself, my heart would swell as though a god in his goodness had given it back to me, had declared it legitimate and beautiful." So he's overcome when Swann informs him that he knows Bergotte quite well and would even ask him to inscribe the narrator's book. The narrator learns that La Berma is Bergotte's favorite actress and that Swann's daughter is great friends with Bergotte, which puts the narrator "on the point of falling in love with" Mlle. Swann.

Our belief that a person takes part in an unknown life which his or her love would allow us to enter is, of all that love demands in order to come into being, what it prizes the most, and what makes it care little for the rest. Even women who claim to judge a man by his appearance alone see that appearance as the emanation of a special life. This is why they love soldiers, firemen; the uniform makes them less particular about the face.

In these pages we also learn a little more about Swann's mannerisms, including his adoption of an ironic tone of voice, "as though he had put it between quotation marks, seeming not to want to take responsibility for it," when expressing an opinion.

Until then his horror of ever expressing a serious opinion had seemed to me a thing that must be elegant and Parisian and that was the opposite of the provincial dogmatism of my grandmother's sisters; and I also suspected that it was a form of wit in the social circles in which Swann moved, where, reacting against the lyricism of earlier generations, they went to an extreme in rehabilitating those small, precise facts formerly reputed to be vulgar, and proscribed "fine phrases." But now I found something shocking in this attitude of Swann's toward things. It appeared that he dared not have an opinion and was at his ease only when he could with meticulous accuracy offer some precise piece of information.

The Gender Gap

One of Andrew Sullivan's readers on why women don't like Sarah Palin.

Sarah Palin is the peppy cheerleader in high school all the boys thought was so sweet but the girls knew was really a vicious shrew. She's the new girl in the office who wears tight shirts and three-inch heels, is super-friendly to her male superiors, ignores the other women, and gets promoted sooner than her more capable and hard working peers. She's the outgoing PTA mom all of the other women are scared to cross because they will find themselves put on the worst committees. Only a woman knows how to give another woman a sweet smile and at the same time cut her down to size with an artfully crafted "compliment" without male observers having a clue about what just happened. It's like a dog whistle.

The Proust Project, Day 7

Where this began
Day 6

Swann's Way (translated by Lydia Davis), pp. 73-89.

The narrator is sent out to "get a little fresh air first so that you don't start reading right after leaving the table" -- a caution familiar to every bookworm child. We are on the brink here of a dense philosophical excursus on the externality of nature and the internality of literature, the kind of passage that stymies some would-be readers of Proust, and may have been the one that stymied me in my earlier attempts to read him. Some of it remains opaque to me, but I think I glimpse where he's going.

But first, we meet Uncle Adolphe, the brother of the narrator's grandfather, "who no longer came to Combray because of a quarrel that had occurred between him and my family, through my fault." The narrator "loved the theater, with a platonic passion since my parents had not yet allowed me to enter the theater." And he is drawn to his uncle because Adolphe was friends with actresses -- "and also some courtesans whom I did not distinguish clearly from the actresses. He would entertain them at home. And if we went to see him only on certain days, this was because on the other days women came whom his family could not have met." But the narrator, slipping away from home to see his uncle on one of the "other days," does meet one, a woman in a pink dress, who demonstrates to him "one of the touching aspects of the role of these idle and studious women that they devote their generosity, their talent, a free-floating dream of beauty in love ... to enrich with a precious and refined setting the rough and ill-polished lives of men." Infatuated with her, he blurts out to his parents the full story of his encounter, with the result that his uncle "died many years later without any of us ever seeing him again."

We also meet the pregnant kitchen maid who reminds Swann of the image of Charity in Giotto's Padua frescoes of the Virtues and Vices, who "holds her flaming heart out to God, or, to put it more exactly, "hands" it to him, as a cook hands a corkscrew through the vent of her cellar to someone who is asking her for it at the ground-floor window." Swann has given the narrator photographs of the frescoes which hang in the schoolroom. "There must have been a good deal of reality in those Virtues and Vices of Padua, since they seemed to me as alive as the pregnant servant, and since she herself did not appear to me much less allegorical." This correlation between art and life leads us into the reflections on the external world and the world of the imagination.

When I saw an external object, my awareness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it, lining it with a thin spiritual border that prevented me from ever directly touching its substance; it would volatize in some way before I could make contact with it, just as an incandescent body brought near a wet object never touches its moisture because it is always preceded by a zone of evaporation.

The natural world remains at a distance, because it apprehended only by the senses. So too do human beings: "A real human being, however profoundly we sympathize with him, is in large part perceived by our senses, that is to say, remains opaque to us, presents a dead weight which our sensibility cannot lift."

Fictional characters, on the other hand, occur "within us." The novelist "provokes in us within one hour all possible happinesses and all possible unhappinesses just a few of which we would spend years of our lives coming to know and the most intense of which would never be revealed to us because the slowness with which they occur prevents us from perceiving them."

Similarly, the landscapes of the imagination have for the narrator an immediacy that observed nature lacks. But then memory transforms the external world into a world that can be apprehended by the imagination. So these reflections on the relationship between life and art, between nature and the imagination, between experience and memory, end with a lyrical valorizing of the Sunday afternoons in Combray:

Lovely Sunday afternoons under the chestnut tree in the garden at Combray, carefully emptied by me of the ordinary incidents of my own existence, which I had replaced by a life of foreign adventures and foreign apirations in the heart of a country washed by running waters, you still evoke that life for me when I think of you and you contain it in fact from having gradually encircled and enclosed it -- while I went on with my reading in the falling heat of the day -- in the crystalline succession, slowly changing and spanned by leafy branches, of your silent, sonorous, redolent, and limpid hours.

Palin Meets the Press

Matt Taibbi on media groupthink and Sarah Palin.

The press corps that is bashing her skull in right now is the same one that hyped that WMD horseshit for like four solid years and pom-pommed America to war with Iraq over the screeching objections of the entire planet. It’s the same press corps that rolled out the red carpet for someone very nearly as abjectly stupid as Sarah Palin to win not one but two terms in the White House. If there was any kind of consensus support for Palin inside the beltway, the criticism of her, bet on it, would be almost totally confined to chortling east coast smartasses like me and Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Sullivan.

The Proust Project, Day 6

Where this began
Day 5

Swann's Way (translated by Lydia Davis), pp. 60-73.

Sundays in Combray, starting with the narrator and his parents going to Mass, and with Proust's rhapsodic description of Saint-Hilaire. The passages describing the church are not only a tour de force, but they also serve a thematic purpose. The church becomes "an edifice occupying a space with, so to speak, four dimensions -- the fourth being Time -- extending over the centuries its nave which, from bay to bay, from chapel to chapel, seemed to vanquish and penetrate not only a few yards but epoch after epoch from which it emerged victorious." Saint-Hilaire is time recaptured itself, so that later, glimpsing "some hospital belfry, some convent steeple" in Paris reminiscent of the church in Combray, the narrator will "remain there in front of the steeple for hours, motionless, trying to remember, feeling deep in myself lands recovered from oblivion draining and rebuilding themselves."

The narrator's grandmother, she who found the gardener's paths "too symmetrically aligned," has her own take on the church:

Without really knowing why, my grandmother found in the steeple of Saint-Hilaire that absence of vulgarity, of pretension, of meanness, which made her love and believe rich in beneficent influence not only nature, when the hand of man had not, as had my great-aunt's gardener, shrunk and reduced it, but also works of genius.... I believe above all that, confusedly, my grandmother found in the steeple of Combray what for her had the highest value in the world, an air of naturalness and an air of distinction.

In these pages we also meet M. Legrandin, the engineer-poet who spends his weekend in Combray, and whom the narrator's family regards as "the epitome of the superior man, approaching life in the noblest and most delicate way." The grandmother has reservations, of course. She

reproached him only for speaking a little too well, a little too much like a book, for not having the same naturalness in his language as in his loosely knotted lavalier bow ties, in his short, straight, almost schoolboy coat. She was also surprised by the fiery tirades he often launched against the aristocracy, ... going so far as to reproach the Revolution for not having had them all guillotined.

And we learn a little more about Aunt Léonie, who has banished all visitors but Eulalie, a former servant to Mme. de la Bretonnerie. Eulalie has the tact to avoid falling into either of the categories of people Léonie detests.

One group, the worst, whom she had got rid of first, were the ones who advised her not to "coddle" herself.... The other category was made up of the people who seemed to believe she was more seriously ill than she thought, that she was as seriously ill as she said she was.... In short, my aunt required that her visitors at the same time commen her on her regimen, commiserate with her for her sufferings, and encourage her as to her future.

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.