The Proust Project, Day 9

Where this began
Day 8

Swann's Way (translated by Lydia Davis), pp. 102-117.

Thanksgiving, a day of rituals (turkey, cranberry sauce, yams, etc.), is a good day to read about the routines and rituals of Combray.

We focus again on Aunt Léonie and Françoise, as they await the arrival of Eulalie with news about the church service. Rain begins to fall, and Françoise reports that Mme. Amédée, the narrator's grandmother (who has previously been identified as "Bathilde"), has gone out for a walk.

"That doesn't surprise me at all," said my aunt, lifting her eyes to the heavens. "I've always said that her way of thinking is different from everyone else's...."

"Mme. Amédée is always as different as she can be from everyone else," said Françoise gently, refraining until she should be alone with the other servants from saying that she believed my grandmother was a little "touched."

Finally, Eulalie arrives, but her visit coincides with that of the garrulous curé -- "an excellent man," the narrator observes, "with whom I am sorry I did not have more conversations, for if he understood nothing about the arts, he did know many etymologies." His visit tires out Aunt Léonie, who sends Eulalie away without learning the "important" information whether "Mme. Goupil arrived at Mass before the elevation."

Françoise, who detests Eulalie, is unhappy that Aunt Léonie always gives Eulalie money.

She would not, however, have seen any great harm in what my aunt, whom she knew to be incurably generous, allowed herself to give away, so long as it went to rich people. Perhaps she thought that they, having no need of gifts from my aunt, could not be suspected of showing fondness for her because of them.

And so the routine goes on, interrupted only by the kitchen maid's suddenly going into labor, an event that deprives Aunt Léonie of Françoise's ministrations while she is sent to fetch a midwife. The narrator, sent to check on his aunt, looks in to find her awaking with a look of terror on her face. He lingers to hear her murmur, "I've gone and dreamed that my poor Octave had come back to life and was trying to make me go for a walk every day!" There are even subroutines within the routine, as when lunch is served early on Saturdays because Françoise goes to the market in the afternoon. Any stranger who is ignorant of this change in routine, or even any family member who forgets it, is subject to ridicule.

The surprise of a barbarian (this was what we called anyone who did not know what was special about Saturday) who, arriving at eleven o'clock to talk to my father, found us at table, was one of the things in her life which most amused Françoise.

We also meet the "extremely prudish" M. Vinteuil and his "tomboyish" daughter, and we go on a Sunday walk with the narrator and his parents, following a circuitous route familiar only to the father until they reach home.

And from that moment on, I would not have to take another step, the ground would walk for me through that garden where for so long now my actions had ceased to be accompanied by any deliberate attention: Habit had taken me in its arms, and it carried me all the way to my bed like a little child.

Borderlines

The following review ran today in the San Francisco Chronicle:

CROSSERS

By Philip Caputo

Knopf, 480 pp., $27.95

The enormous malevolence of Sept. 11, 2001, still squats upon the imagination, resisting our efforts to comprehend it. Writers as various as Jay McInerney (“The Good Life”), Jonathan Safran Foer (“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”), John Updike (“Terrorist”) and Andre Dubus III (“The Garden of Last Days”) have tried working the events of 9/11 into their novels, but most of these ambitious books were doomed to at least partial failure because our memories of the actual events retain an emotional immediacy that even the most skillfully crafted fiction can't approximate.

But Philip Caputo's “Crossers” succeeds, in part because it's about a man who recognizes that the imagination is inadequate to comprehend evil. For Gil Castle, Caputo's protagonist, the enormity of 9/11 is “beyond grasp – an insane act perpetrated by sane minds.” Castle's wife was aboard the first plane that flew into the World Trade Center towers, and the senselessness of her loss has left him emotionally crippled. After pulling back from the brink of suicide, he decides to withdraw from the sources that feed his memories and his grief – the home where he and his wife lived and the city where he worked and she died. Castle, who has made a fortune on Wall Street, liquidates his holdings, sells his house, and moves to his cousin Blaine Erskine's ranch on the Arizona-Sonora border.

Castle takes this course not out of any mythic urge to move West – in fact, he explicitly rejects it: “It was important in America to move on, to avoid living in the past. That, Castle supposed, made him somewhat un-American. He could not help but live in the past; it clung to him like a second skin.” And so he holes up in an outbuilding on Blaine's ranch, nursing his grief and reading the Roman Stoic Seneca, though he finds Seneca's counsel -- “there is such a thing as moderation in grieving” -- inadequate.

Castle's grief will moderate, though not without the hard wrenching away that produces guilt and pain, because he is right about the inability to avoid living in the past. The irony here is that the past that will intrude upon him is not his own but that of his family. The novel begins with a story from the boyhood of Castle's maternal grandfather, Ben Erskine, who was once described as “the last ember of the true Old West,” and as “an adventurer, a soldier of fortune, and a lawman, [who] put about twelve men in the ground – the ones he didn't put in jail.”

As “Crossers” intermingles the stories of Ben Erskine and Gil Castle, it becomes a novel about the intersection of history and the present, set in a place where, as Blaine's wife observes, things are “like the days of Pancho Villa, except now the bad guys ride Dodge Rams instead of on horses and bang away with AK-47s instead of Winchesters. ... Cell phone on one hip, pistol on the other. The Wild West meets the twenty-first century.” The Erskine family's ranch edges up to the U.S.-Mexican border, a barrier ineffective in stemming the traffic in narcotics and undocumented immigrants. Castle is caught in the crossfire – sometimes literally – between people who run drugs and people who run people, between law enforcement and lawbreakers, and between cultures separated only by a boundary made visible by the barbed-wire fences that deter cattle from crossing, but not human beings.

Caputo gives us characters with credibility and individuality, even though we can see the Western-fiction stereotypes underlying them: the Tenderfoot Easterner, the Rugged Individualist Rancher, the Woman Who's As Tough As Any Man, and so on. There's even a Man With a Mysterious Past known as “The Professor,” who travels between the two countries gathering information. “I can't figure out if you're in this for yourself, if you're a double agent, a triple agent, a quadruple agent, or what,” says one baffled lawman. “I'm an agent of history,” replies The Professor. It takes a skillful writer to avoid falling into hokum with a character like that, but Caputo avoids it -- narrowly. He is a little less successful with his novel's villain, the rapacious drug queen Yvonne Menéndez, whose son reflects, “The only thing he would not put past his mother was cannibalism.” Caputo takes the character so far over the top that the reader probably won't put even that past her.

Similarly, Caputo's plotting has elements of conventional fiction: Castle's healing process is accelerated when he falls in love again, and the novel climaxes in a rush of thriller-type action. But the book manages to rise above its generic elements. Without any ripped-from-the-headlines artifice, “Crossers” gives us an intense, clear-sighted account of the times in which we live, of 9/11, the Iraq war, the “war on drugs” and the conflict over illegal immigration. Caputo succeeds in showing how our contemporary paranoia and homeland insecurity are rooted in the inescapable past.

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.