What I'm Watching

Star Trek

Now that's a movie. A smartly made movie, with an excellent cast of young actors who evoke the originals without undue mimicry or excessive tongue-in-cheek. J.J. Abrams knows that the original is camp, and he doesn't try to de-camp it -- he puts all the women crew members in those ridiculous minidress uniforms, for example. But he freshens it, too, with special effects that don't look too easy, that have rough edges, unlike a lot of the CGI stuff today. Compare the three most recent Star Wars movies, for example, in which everything has the lifelessness that comes from computerized effects. The extra on the making of the movie on the DVD shows the effort that went into using real locations and real sets, instead of green-screening everything.

The Proust Project, Day 25

Where this began
Day 24

Swann's Way (translated by Lydia Davis), pp. 340-356.

Proust remains in satiric mode, giving us a portrait of those gathered at Mme. de Saint-Euverte's soiree, including the Marquise de Cambremer and the Vicomtesse de Franquetot, and the various layers of snobbery on display. We also learn that Swann is the object of some anti-Semitism:

"It's funny that he should go to old Saint-Euverte's," said Mme de Gallardon. "Oh, I know he's intelligent," she added, meaning he was a schemer, "but still and all, a Jew in the home of the sister and sister-in-law of two archbishops!"

"I confess to my shame that I'm not shocked," said the Princess des Laumes.

"I know he's a convert, and even his parents and grandparents before him. But they do say converts remain more attached to their religion than anyone else, that it's all just a pretense."

(One thinks of the insistence that Obama is still a Muslim.)

The Princesse de Laumes reveals why Swann is so attached to her when Mme. de Gallardon persists in observing that "people claim that M. Swann is someone whom one can't have in one's house, is that true?" The Princesse replies, "Why ... you ought to know, ... since you've invited him fifty times and he hasn't come once."

The Princesse is herself no stranger to the sexual vagaries of high society, "because everyone knew that the very day after the Prince des Laumes married his ravishing cousin, he had deceived her, and he had not stopped deceiving her since." No wonder then that

Swann liked the Princesse des Laumes very much, and the sight of her also reminded him of Guermantes, the estate next to Combray, the whole countryside which he loved so much and had ceased to visit so as not to be away from Odette.

He can talk to the Princesse in ways that he is unable to do with others: "Swann, who was accustomed, when he was in the company of a woman whom he had kept up the habit of addressing in gallant language, to say things so delicately nuanced that many society people could not understand them.... Swann and the Princesse had the same way of looking at the small things of life, the effect of which -- unless it was the cause -- was a great similarity in their ways of expressing things and even in their pronunciation." So he fully understands and agrees that "life is a dreadful thing." When he hears her say this, "he felt as comforted as if she had been talking about Odette."

The Princesse, who senses Swann's unhappiness and its cause, says later to her husband,

"I do find it absurd that a man of his intelligence should suffer over a person of that sort, who isn't even interesting -- because they say she's an idiot," she added with the wisdom of people not in love who believe a man of sense should be unhappy only over a person who is worth it; which is rather like being surprised that anyone should condescend to suffer from cholera because of so small a creature as the comma bacillus.

The Proust Project, Day 24

Where this began
Day 23

Swann's Way (translated by Lydia Davis), pp. 328-340.

In addition to "the mystery of personality," which I singled out yesterday as one of Proust's great themes, there's also the nexus of pleasure and pain, which is what the past few days' segments have focused on. Swann has carried it to an extreme in what he now recognizes as a "neurotic" state: his obsession with Odette. But it is, of course, the theme that the narrator dealt with in the very opening pages of the novel, in which he dwells on the pleasure of his mother's visits at bedtime and the pain he felt in both anticipation and aftermath. The absence of pain is not pleasure, of course, as Emily Dickinson noted: "After great pain a formal feeling comes." And Dante was not the first nor the last to observe that pleasure only heightens pain ("Nessun maggior dolore / Che ricordarsi del tempo felice / Nella miseria." -- There's no greater sorrow than remembering happiness in the midst of pain).

Proust puts it like this: Finding out where Odette has gone "would have been enough to soothe the anguish he felt at these times, and for which Odette's presence, the sweetness of being close to her was the only specific (a specific that in the long run aggravated the disease, like many remedies, but at least momentarily soothed his pain)." The thing is, he's beginning to show signs of boredom with the relationship: "if, during this period, he often desired death though without admitting it to himself, it was to escape not so much the acuteness of his sufferings as the monotony of his struggle."

Odette is certainly showing signs of fatigue with the relationship. Proust neatly encapsulates the progress of their affair with two paragraphs in which he contrasts past and present. In the early days, Odette would say "admiringly: 'You -- you will never be like anyone else.'" Now she says, "in a tone that was at times irritated, at times indulgent: 'Oh, you really never will be like anyone else!'" Once she would look at him and think, "He's not conventionally handsome, granted, but he is smart: that quiff of hair, that monocle, that smile!" Now she thinks, "He's not positively ugly, granted, but he is absurd: that monocle, that quiff of hair, that smile!" Earlier she would think, "If only I could know what is in that head!" Now, it's "Oh, if only I could change what's in that head, if only I could make it reasonable."

Well, if the characters are getting bored, what about the reader? I think Proust realizes this when he decides to get out of Swann's feverish head for a while and send him out into society, sans Odette. For Swann, "society as a whole, now that he was detached from it, ... presented itself as a series of pictures." And so we get passages of wit (a footman who "seemed to be showing contempt for his person and consideration for his hat") and description ("The Marquis de Forestelle's monocle was minuscule, had no border, and, requiring a constant painful clenching of the eye, where it was encrusted like a superfluous cartilage whose presence was inexplicable and whose material was exquisite, gave the Marquis's face a melancholy delicacy, and made women think he was capable of great sorrows in love.") This comes as comic relief at a point where the novel needs it, and evokes the earlier parts of the novel when the narrator indulged himself in portraits of his aunts and depictions of hawthorn blossoms as relief from psychological introspection.

The Proust Project, Day 23

Where this began
Day 22

Swann's Way (translated by Lydia Davis), pp. 317-328.

Disease or addiction? Proust shifts to the latter metaphor for Swann's obsession with Odette in this section, describing Swann's futile attempts "to break the habit of seeing her."

just as a morphine addict or a consumptive, persuaded that they have been prevented, one by an outside event just when he was about to free himself of his inveterate habit, the other by an accidental indisposition just when he was about to be restored to health at last, feel misunderstood by the doctor who does not attach the same importance they do to these contingencies.

The disease metaphor continues to dominate, however: "this disease which was Swann's love had so proliferated ... that it could not have been torn from him without destroying him almost entirely: as they say in surgery, his love was no longer operable." Proust also announces here what is perhaps the central theme of his fiction: "one thing love and death have in common ... is that they make us question more deeply ... the mystery of personality."

At this point, another figure begins to play a significant role: the Baron de Charlus. Proust has already alerted our suspicions about Charlus by showing him in the company of Odette when the narrator first sees Mlle. Swann. But Swann has no such suspicions. Charlus is one of the "distinguished friendships" that bring him "consolation" that his affair with Odette has not been damaged. Indeed, he relies on Charlus, whom he refers to as "my dear Mémé," as a kind of go-between between him and Odette, asking him to "run over to her house" and to reassure him that all is well with her. "He was happy each time M. de Charlus was with Odette. Between M. de Charlus and her, Swann knew that nothing could happen."

The narrator returns, mentioning that his great-uncle Adolphe, the one for whom he would later precipitate a break with his family, was "acquainted with" Odette. Swann asks Adolphe for advice in his relationship with Odette, but this ends badly: "A few days later, Odette tells Swann she had just had the disappointment of discovering that my uncle was the same as every other man: he had just tried to take her by force." But by now, the reader has every reason to doubt Odette's veracity. The break with Adolphe thwarts Swann's plan to ask him about Odette's life in Nice, about which Swann has heard rumors:

He was even given to understand, at one point, that this laxness in Odette's morals, which he would not have suspected, was fairly well known, and that in Baden and in Nice, when she used to spend a few months there, she had had a degree of amorous notoriety.

Unable to get solid confirmation of the rumors, Swann falls back on his usual rationalizations and willful blindness.

The Proust Project, Day 22

Where this began
Day 21

Swann's Way (translated by Lydia Davis), pp. 300-317.

Proust further analyzes "the very chemistry of [Swann's] disease."

Cut off from the Verdurins' circle, Swann experiences more separations from Odette, as she's invited to places with them. He "would read in Odette's eyes a fear that he would ask her not to go, which once upon a time he would not have been able to keep himself from kissing as it passed over his mistress's face, and which now exasperated him." When he tries to explain himself to her, in a long-winded, intensely convoluted and somewhat insulting speech, he fails:

Although she failed to grasp the meaning of this speech, she did understand that it might belong to the category of "scoldings" and scenes of reproach or supplication, and her familiarity with men enabled her, without paying attention to the details of what they said, to conclude that they would not make such scenes if they were not in love, that since they were in love it was pointless to obey them, that they would be only more in love afterward.

One begins here to suspect that Swann has greatly underestimated her intelligence -- or at least her cunning and her knowledge of the relationships between men and women.

Even the change in her physical appearance -- "she was growing stout" and has lost some of her youthful freshness -- doesn't deter him, "knowing that under the new chrysalis, what lived on was still Odette, still the same will, evanescent, elusive, and guileful."

As the weather grows warmer, the Verdurins invite Odette to join them on more travels outside Paris, torturing Swann because he can't join them and also can't just show up in the places they're visiting without revealing his obsession and thereby losing face. The cruel fact is that Odette frequently returns to Paris without even letting him know -- sometimes "only after several days." She lies to him about her returns, and for once he fails to see through the lie.

Sometimes, especially after she torments him by flirting with Forcheville, he hates her.

And because his hatred, like his love, needed to manifest itself and to act, he took pleasure in pursuing his evil fantasies further and further, since, because of the perfidies he imputed to Odette, he detested her still more and could, if -- something he tried to picture to himself -- they were found to be true, have an occasion for punishing her and for satiating on her his increasing rage.

She even asks him for money, so she can go to Bayreuth with the Verdurins. He is rightly outraged by the request, but softens at the thought that if he "went out of his way to make it pleasant for her, she would come running to him, happy, grateful, and he would have the joy of seeing her, a joy which he had not experienced for almost a week and which nothing could replace."

Proust's analysis of this almost sadomasochistic relationship is so thorough, so dense in its particularities, that it comes as a bit of a shock when the novel's narrator surfaces again, likening the tormented Swann to himself: "as anxious as I myself was to be some years later on the evenings when he would come to dine at the house, at Combray." It's a startling interruption because we have at this point almost forgotten that the story of Swann in love is being told to us by someone who could not have witnessed the events, who claims to have been told these stories by Swann years later.

What purpose does this interjection by the narrator serve? I think it must be at least in part a preparation for the narrator's own experiences later in the book -- a suggestion that the narrator could not have analyzed Swann's experiences in such detail, have imagined them so specifically, if he had not undergone something similar. It's this identification of the narrator with Swann (and obviously of Proust with both of them) that enables him to write sentences like these:

Like all those who enjoy the possession of a thing, in order to know what would happen if he ceased for a moment to possess it he had removed that thing from his mind, leaving everything else in the same state as when it was there. But the absence of a thing is not merely that, it is not simply a partial lack, it is a disruption of everything else, it is a new state which one cannot foresee in the old.

The Straight Dope

Rachel Maddow's two segments on "straightening out the gays" therapy tonight are a must-see.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The Proust Project, Day 21

Where this began
Day 20

Swann's Way (translated by Lydia Davis), pp. 287-300.



Can this relationship be saved?

Swann arrives at Odette's in the middle of the day, rings the bell, thinks he hears footsteps inside, but no one comes to the door. When he comes back an hour later, Odette tells him she was asleep and by the time she got to the door he was gone. He knows she's lying, but he doesn't accuse her of doing so, "because he thought that, left to herself, Odette would perhaps produce some lie that would be a faint indication of the truth." Her expression as she lies reminds him once again of Botticelli's women, of "their downcast and heartbroken expression which seems to be succumbing beneath the weight of a grief too heavy for them."

When he leaves, she gives him some letters to post for her, one of which is for Forcheville. He mails the others, but takes the one for Forcheville with him and reads it by holding it up to a candle, ingeniously rationalizing "that by not looking, I'm behaving with a lack of delicacy toward Odette, because this is the only way to free myself of a suspicion which is perhaps calumnious for her, which is in any case bound to hurt her, and which nothing would be able to destroy, once the letter was gone." The letter betrays nothing conclusive.

His jealousy, like an octopus that casts a first, then a second, then a third mooring, attached itself solidly first to that time, five o'clock in the afternoon, then to another, then to yet another.

It changes him radically:

And so he who ... had sought out new people, large groups, now appeared unsociable, appeared to be fleeing the company of men as if it had cruelly wounded him. And how could he not be misanthropic, when he saw every man as a possible lover of Odette's.

And he finds himself shut out from the one social group he had relied on, the Verdurins and their "little set." When he discovers that he has not been invited on one of their outings, he is mortified, so visibly that "his coachman looked at him and asked if he was not ill or if there had not been an accident." He sends the coachman away and walks home, railing against the "sublimely bourgeois" Verdurins, and even against Odette: "He could see Odette in clothes far to formal for this country outing, 'because she's so vulgar and worst of all, poor little thing, such a fool!!!'" He professes to be through with the Verdurins for good: "Thank God -- it was high time I stopped condescending to mix in utter promiscuousness with such infamy, such excrement."

The irony, of course, is that the Verdurins are equally glad to rid themselves of Swann, whom Mme. Verdurin calls "deadly dull, stupid, and ill-mannered."

The Proust Project, Day 20

Where this began
Day 19

Swann's Way (translated by Lydia Davis), pp. 276-287.

Swann has gone nuts. Even if we hadn't been alerted to the unfortunate outcome of his relationship with Odette earlier in the novel, it would be quite apparent by now that it can't end well. But there's no talking him out of it, even with warnings that she's more interested in his social status or his money. As he sees it, those things will only bind her to him the more: "self-interest ... would prevent the day ever coming when she would be tempted to stop seeing him." A "dilettante of immaterial sensations," he regards Odette as worth the price:

as we observe that people who are uncertain whether the sight of the sea and the sound of the waves are delightful convince themselves of it and also of the exceptional quality and disinterest of their own taste, by paying a hundred francs a day for a hotel room that allows them to experience that sight and that sound.

His "mental laziness" deters him from investigating her reputation as a "kept woman," and his behavior begins to attract comment like that of the Princesse des Launes, whose dinner party he leaves early so as to meet Odette: "Really, if Swann were thirty years older and had bladder trouble, one would excuse him for running off like that. But the fact is he doesn't care what people think." Indeed, he's pleased when Odette reveals to the Verdurins and the "little set" that Swann will be seeing her at home later.

Moreover, the depth of his obsession is revealed when, after Odette pleads a headache, meaning "no cattleyas tonight," he sneaks back to her house later and, seeing a light at what he thinks is her window, he fancies that she is entertaining a lover there. In fact, it fills him with a perverse, almost masochistic, joy.

And yet he was glad he had come: the torment that had forced him to leave his house had become less acute as it became less vague, now that Odette's other life, of which he had had, back then, a sudden helpless suspicion, was now in his grasp.... And perhaps, what he was feeling at this moment, which was almost pleasant, was also something different from the assuaging of a doubt and a distress; it was a pleasure in knowledge.

Characteristically, Swann intellectualizes his obsession:

[T]he curiosity he now felt awakening in him concerning the smallest occupations of this woman, was the same curiosity he had once had about History. And all these things that would have shamed him up to now, such as spying, tonight, outside a window, tomorrow perhaps, for all he knew, cleverly inducing neutral people to speak, bribing servants, listening at doors, now seemed to him to be, fully as much as were the deciphering of texts, the weighing of evidence, and the interpretation of old monuments, merely methods of scientific investigation with a real value and appropriate to a search for the truth.

Of course, this "scientific investigation" ends in farce, when he knocks on the window and discovers that what he thought was her room is actually in the house next door.

At this point, Swann's love has turned to neurosis, and however he might try to shut out the embarrassment of this misstep, "To wish not to think about it was still to think about it, still to suffer from it." And "every pleasure he enjoyed with her, ... he knew that a moment later, ... would supply new instruments for torturing him."

This section ends with a further unmasking of the "real" Odette, the woman who takes pleasure in Forcheville's cruelty to his brother-in-law, Saniette, and casts "him a glance of complicity in evil." It's an expression that tortures Swann.

The Proust Project, Day 19

Where this began
Day 18

Swann's Way (translated by Lydia Davis), pp. 250-276.

So much of the Swann-Odette affair has been seen from his point of view, that we're almost overdue seeing it from hers. When we do, we find that she regards Swann as "intellectually inferior to what she would have imagined" and that he's "reserved" -- partly because he's aware that she's incapable of understanding him. "She would marvel more at his indifference to money, his kindness to everyone, his refinement." Rather surprisingly, perhaps, though she's awed by his "position in society," she is not inclined to use him as a vehicle for social climbing, partly because she dreads the world's cruelty, and partly because, being ignorant of this more fashionable world, she fears it. And so she begins to imagine barriers between herself and Swann:

People who liked collecting curios, were fond of poetry, despised crass calculations, dreamed of honor and love, she saw as an elite superior to the rest of humanity. One did not really have to have these predilections, provided one proclaimed them.... But men who, like Swann, had these tastes, yet did not talk about them, left her cold.... [I]n fact, what spoke to her imagination was not the practice of disinterestedness, but its vocabulary.

And so it falls to Swann to try "to see that she enjoyed being with him, not to oppose the vulgar ideas, the bad taste, which she displayed in all things, and which he loved, moreover, like everything else that emanated from her." He "sought to enjoy the things she liked" rather than make the considerable effort to educate her tastes. The affair intoxicates him so that "he did not dare to say to himself, afraid that he would not believe it, that he would always love Odette." Because he thinks that he will always be able to see her at the Verdurins, he convinces himself that they possess virtues that they don't actually have: "How fundamentally real their life is! How much more intelligent, more artistic, they are there than high-society people!... More and more, that is where I will find my companionship and live my life."

The trouble is, the Verdurins don't reciprocate his enthusiasm. And their suspicions that Swann isn't really one of them come to a head at the dinner party at which Swann's honesty is judged inferior to the hypocrisy of the snobbish Comte de Forcheville, and his intellect to the pretentiousness of Brichot, a professor at the Sorbonne whose wit "would have been considered pure stupidity by the people among whom Swann had spent his youth." It's Forcheville in particular who puts Swann on the spot with the Verdurins by revealing some of his connections to the aristocracy whom the Verdurins regard as "bores."

Swann's unwillingness to renounce such connections unequivocally draws Mme. Verdurin's fire: "she was feeling the rage of a grand inquisitor who cannot manage to extirpate the heresy." She presses Swann to speak ill of his friends, but he persists in saying, "They're charming people." It outrages Mme. Verdurin "that because of this one infidel she would be prevented from creating a complete moral unanimity among the little clan."

The evening ends with Swann "still unaware of the disgrace that threatened him at the Verdurins'" and with M. Verdurin, because "Swann wants to play the society man with us, defender of duchesses," suggesting that "Odette really seems to prefer Forcheville" who is, after all, he notes, the "Comte de Forchevile."

What I'm Watching

Up

Like so many Pixar films, particularly WALL-E and Ratatouille, this one packs much of its charm and inventiveness in the beginning. The setup -- the life together of Carl and Ellie -- is enchantingly and touchingly done, and the initial scenes of the house escaping from the ground and soaring through the city are lovely. I particularly like the moment when the balloons cast their multicolored shadows on the walls of a room whose window it's passing. But when the story devolves into the usual hair's-breadth adventures, it feels a little routine. Still, I can't fault the imagination of writers Pete Docter, Bob Peterson and Thomas McCarthy, the voice work of Ed Asner, and the extraordinary animation.