Jon Stewart takes on Robertson and Limbaugh on Haiti. But he also zings Rachel Maddow.
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Friday, January 15, 2010
No Time for Politics
Exhuming McCarthy
REM was right:
When we last checked in on the U.S. history textbooks standards setting process down in Texas, the conservative-dominated State Board of Education was mulling one-sided requirements to teach high school students about Newt Gingrich, Phyllis Schlafly, and the Moral Majority.
Now, in the home stretch of a process that will set the state's nationally influential standards, a liberal watchdog group is worried that the State Board of Education will try to push through changes to claim that communist-hunting Sen. Joseph McCarthy has been vindicated by history, among other right-wing pet issues.
From Russia With Stories
The following article appeared, in another version, in the January-February issue of Stanford Magazine.
The title of Elif Batuman's new book, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), echoes that of Dostoevsky's strange, dark novel, which is also known as The Demons. In the introduction to her book, Batuman, PhD '07, tells us that Dostoevsky's novel “narrates the descent into madness of a circle of intellectuals in a remote Russian province: a situation analogous, in certain ways, to my own experiences in graduate school.” But the adventures that Batuman recounts in her book are more like those of Alice in Wonderland than like those of Stavrogin in provincial Russia.
The title of Elif Batuman's new book, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), echoes that of Dostoevsky's strange, dark novel, which is also known as The Demons. In the introduction to her book, Batuman, PhD '07, tells us that Dostoevsky's novel “narrates the descent into madness of a circle of intellectuals in a remote Russian province: a situation analogous, in certain ways, to my own experiences in graduate school.” But the adventures that Batuman recounts in her book are more like those of Alice in Wonderland than like those of Stavrogin in provincial Russia.
Batuman grew up in New Jersey, the daughter of Turkish-born physicians who emigrated to the United States in the 1970s. When she graduated from Harvard, she wanted to be a writer, but although she was offered a fellowship at a writers' colony housed in a former lumber mill on Cape Cod she chose graduate school at Stanford instead. She recalls her first impressions in the introduction to her book: “Under rolling green hills, positrons were speeding through the world's longest linear accelerator; in towers high above the palm trees lay the complete Paris files of the Russian Imperial secret police. Stanford was essentially the opposite of a colonial New England lumber mill.”
She now teaches a workshop for seniors in Stanford's Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities program, but she has also fulfilled her goal of becoming a writer. Keith Gessen, editor of the magazine n+1, saw the work she had published in the Harvard Advocate as an undergraduate and asked her to write for him. “Babel in California,” her account of her participation in a conference at Stanford on Isaac Babel's life and work, appeared in the second issue of n+1 in the spring of 2005. There it caught the attention of David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, who assigned her a piece on Thai kickboxing that appeared in 2006. She has written several more pieces for the New Yorker, as well as for the Guardian and for Harper's. In 2007, Batuman received a grant from the Rona Jaffe Foundation for women writers, which gave her some leisure to work on the novel that's her next major project.
It was Gessen who urged her to collect several of her articles in book form. The Possessed recounts some of the things that happened to Batuman in the course of obtaining her doctorate in comparative literature: She encountered Babel's eccentric relatives; journeyed to Samarkand to study Old Uzbek (a language that her instructor claimed has a hundred words for crying); attended a conference at Yasnaya Polyana where she pursued a (mostly) tongue-in-cheek theory that Tolstoy was murdered; explored a palace made entirely of ice in St. Petersburg; and experienced the friendships, frustrations, and challenges of graduate school.
Batuman has an almost Dickensian eye for precise and unusual detail and a gift at vivid characterization, and her sharpness of wit and slyness of tone are reminiscent of such humorists as Twain and Thurber. She acknowledges a fondness for all of those writers, but cites another influence: Haruki Murakami, for “the way the real shades into the surreal in his stories.” Batuman says her essays are the result of “copious note-taking,” and the abundance of often hilarious, occasionally poignant, and invariably off-beat details about people and places -- the unexpected and sometimes bizarre experiences of living and studying in Uzbekistan, the aura of decadence of the St. Petersburg ice palace, the obsessive scholars at the Babel and Tolstoy conferences – does lend an aspect of the surreal to her work.
But while the essays in her book present graduate study as a kind of “descent into madness,” she admits that graduate school is “one of the last spheres where private life and 'interpersonal relationships' -- relationships with other students, with professors, with the books you're reading, between the books you're reading, within the books you're reading – are accorded the highest priority and become the subject of attention, description, and study.” She sees literary scholars as “progressing toward a cumulative understanding of literature,” and cites as her mentors such professors as Gregory Freidin, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Monika Greenleaf, Franco Moretti, and Joshua Landy. In the book she concludes, “If I could start over today, I would choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or in the universe, I still think that's where we're going to find them.”
The Proust Project, Day 58
Where this began
Day 57
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 380-391.
Preparing to go out to dinner at Rivebelle with Saint-Loup, the narrator summons the "lift," who makes small talk as they ascend, giving the narrator some insights into "the working classes of modern times," such as their efforts "to remove from their speech all reminder of the system of domestic service to which they belong." The "lift" (Proust always puts the word in quotation marks) says "tunic" for "uniform" and "remuneration" for "wages," and puzzles the narrator by referring to "the lady that's an employee of yours." The narrator thinks, "'we're not factory-owners -- we don't have employees," before he realizes that the "lady" is Françoise and that "the word 'employee' is as essential to the self-esteem of servants as wearing a mustache is to waters in cafés."
But mostly his mind is on the group of girls he has seen on the esplanade. He had overheard a woman comment, "she's one of the friends of the Simonet girl."
In his room, the narrator reflects -- in one of those extended, minutely observed, but seemingly skimmable Proustian passages -- on the view from the window, until it's time to dress for dinner, full of anticipation of seeing again "a particular woman whom I had noticed the last time we had gone to Rivebelle, who had appeared to look at me, who had even left the room for a moment, conceivably for the sole purplose of giving me the chance to follow her out." Then Aimé arrives with the list of new arrivals and the comment that "there could be no doubt that Dreyfus was guilty, totally and utterly." This dates the stay at Balbec to 1897 or 1898, which means that if the narrator is Proust himself, he is at least 26 -- a more advanced age than the reader might expect from his frequent childishness.
More important for the story, however, is that "not without a little palpitation ... I read, on the first page of the list of newcomers: The Simonet family.... I had no idea which of these girls -- or, indeed, whether any of them -- might be Mlle Simonet; but I knew that Mlle Simonet loved me and that, because of Saint-Loup's presence, I was going to try to make her acquantance." This fantasy so delights him that he surprises Saint-Loup when they arrive at Rivebelle by letting the servant take his overcoat despite Saint-Loup's warning that "it's not very warm here." "I had lost all fear of being ill; and the need to protect myself against the possibility of dying ... had likewise vanished from my mind."
Day 57
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 380-391.
Preparing to go out to dinner at Rivebelle with Saint-Loup, the narrator summons the "lift," who makes small talk as they ascend, giving the narrator some insights into "the working classes of modern times," such as their efforts "to remove from their speech all reminder of the system of domestic service to which they belong." The "lift" (Proust always puts the word in quotation marks) says "tunic" for "uniform" and "remuneration" for "wages," and puzzles the narrator by referring to "the lady that's an employee of yours." The narrator thinks, "'we're not factory-owners -- we don't have employees," before he realizes that the "lady" is Françoise and that "the word 'employee' is as essential to the self-esteem of servants as wearing a mustache is to waters in cafés."
But mostly his mind is on the group of girls he has seen on the esplanade. He had overheard a woman comment, "she's one of the friends of the Simonet girl."
Why I decided, there and then, that the name 'Simonet' must belong to one of the gang of girls, I have no idea: how to get to know the Simonet family became my constant preoccupation. ... The Simonet girl must be the prettiest of them, and also, it seemed to me, the one who might become my mistress, since she was the only one who, by turning slightly away two or three times, had appeared aware of my staring eyes.When asked if he knows anyone named Simonet, the "lift" says vaguely that "he thought he had 'heard tell of some such a name,'" so the narrator asks him to have a list of the latest arrivals to the hotel sent up to him. He also lets the reader know that "the name of 'the Simonet girl'" was to become important to him "several years later."
In his room, the narrator reflects -- in one of those extended, minutely observed, but seemingly skimmable Proustian passages -- on the view from the window, until it's time to dress for dinner, full of anticipation of seeing again "a particular woman whom I had noticed the last time we had gone to Rivebelle, who had appeared to look at me, who had even left the room for a moment, conceivably for the sole purplose of giving me the chance to follow her out." Then Aimé arrives with the list of new arrivals and the comment that "there could be no doubt that Dreyfus was guilty, totally and utterly." This dates the stay at Balbec to 1897 or 1898, which means that if the narrator is Proust himself, he is at least 26 -- a more advanced age than the reader might expect from his frequent childishness.
More important for the story, however, is that "not without a little palpitation ... I read, on the first page of the list of newcomers: The Simonet family.... I had no idea which of these girls -- or, indeed, whether any of them -- might be Mlle Simonet; but I knew that Mlle Simonet loved me and that, because of Saint-Loup's presence, I was going to try to make her acquantance." This fantasy so delights him that he surprises Saint-Loup when they arrive at Rivebelle by letting the servant take his overcoat despite Saint-Loup's warning that "it's not very warm here." "I had lost all fear of being ill; and the need to protect myself against the possibility of dying ... had likewise vanished from my mind."
From that moment on, I was a different person, no longer the grandson of my grandmother, to whom I would not give another thought until after having left the restaurant, but briefly the brother of the waiters who were about to serve us.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Things Are Really Foxed Up
Andrew Sullivan views Palin's Fox News contract with great alarm:
This FNC/RNC merger is another threat to reasoned discourse in public life, because it is a showman's concoction of very powerful emotional elements: resentment, sex, religion, anger. It creates its own reality. "We Do Not Torture"; everyone in Gitmo was the "Worst of the Worst"; the stimulus lowered growth; all the debt is Obama's fault; Obama is a Muslim and non-American; the White House is stacked with the Islamist/socialist enemy within; if we had not bailed out the banks, we would be roaring back from the recession; Obama wants to ignore the war in order to effect a radical transformation of America into some kind of scary version of France and Waziristan. And on and on. I'm not exaggerating. Listen to these maniacs.
...
Non-believing people have a hard time swallowing all this. It seems so wacko. Religious people who have had any experience of fundamentalism in their lives know it all too well.
The Proust Project, Day 57
Where this began
Day 56
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 369-380.
A passage that reflects both the actual title and the more approximate one -- Within a Budding Grove -- of the Scott Moncrieff translation.
The narrator tells us that his "health was going from bad to worse" and that he "was at one of those times of youth when the idle heart, unoccupied by love for a particular person, lies in wait for Beauty, seeking it everywhere, as the man in love sees and desires in all things the woman he cherishes." And he finds it, while waiting outside the Grand-Hôtel for his grandmother, in a "gang of girls" that he first glimpses far away along the esplanade. One girl pushes a bicycle, two others carry golf clubs, "and their accoutrements made a flagrant contrast with the appearance of other young girls in Balbec." They stride along together, swaggering almost, and careless of other people strolling in their path, sometimes even bumping into them.
He characterizes their attitude as one of complete indifference to others, which he regards as unique.
Gradually he begins to distinguish one girl from another as they draw closer, but before he does he perceives "the uninterrupted flow of a shared, unstable, and elusive beauty." They represent for him "the new interest in sports, spreading now even among the working classes, and in physical training without any concomitant training of the mind.... For surely these were noble and tranquil models of human beauty that met my eye, against the sea, like statues in the sun along a shore in Greece."
Their erotic potential becomes strong as they come nearer, for "in none of my conjectures did I entertain the possibility that they might be chaste." He is struck in particular by "the brunette with the full cheeks and the bicycle," and though she is not the one he liked the best, because Gilberte's golden skin and "fairish ginger hair" had become his "unattainable ideal," he centers his attention on her after their eyes meet.
We have seen him obsessed with the desire for possession -- both body and mind -- before, in the encounter with the village girl in Carqueville, where he similarly experienced the concept of "replacing sensual pleasure with the idea of penetrating someone's life." And he likens his experience with "this little sauntering gang of girls" to his encounters with "those fleeting passersby on the road," the ones he fantasizes about but knows he will never re-encounter. "If they had been offered to me by a madam -- in the sort of house that, as has been seen, I did not disdain -- divorced from the element that lent them so many colors and such attractive imprecision, they would have been less enchanting."
Day 56
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 369-380.
A passage that reflects both the actual title and the more approximate one -- Within a Budding Grove -- of the Scott Moncrieff translation.
The narrator tells us that his "health was going from bad to worse" and that he "was at one of those times of youth when the idle heart, unoccupied by love for a particular person, lies in wait for Beauty, seeking it everywhere, as the man in love sees and desires in all things the woman he cherishes." And he finds it, while waiting outside the Grand-Hôtel for his grandmother, in a "gang of girls" that he first glimpses far away along the esplanade. One girl pushes a bicycle, two others carry golf clubs, "and their accoutrements made a flagrant contrast with the appearance of other young girls in Balbec." They stride along together, swaggering almost, and careless of other people strolling in their path, sometimes even bumping into them.
He characterizes their attitude as one of complete indifference to others, which he regards as unique.
[F]or love, hence fear, of the crowd is one of the most powerful motives in all individuals, whether they wish to please others, astonish them, or show that they despise them. In a recluse, the most irrevocable, lifelong rejection of the world often has as its basis an uncontrolled passion for the crowd, of such force that, finding when he does go out that he cannot win the admiration of a concierge, passerby, or even the coachman halted at the corner, he prefers to spend his life out of their sight, and gives up all activities that would make it necessary to leave the house.Is Proust talking about himself here?
Gradually he begins to distinguish one girl from another as they draw closer, but before he does he perceives "the uninterrupted flow of a shared, unstable, and elusive beauty." They represent for him "the new interest in sports, spreading now even among the working classes, and in physical training without any concomitant training of the mind.... For surely these were noble and tranquil models of human beauty that met my eye, against the sea, like statues in the sun along a shore in Greece."
Their erotic potential becomes strong as they come nearer, for "in none of my conjectures did I entertain the possibility that they might be chaste." He is struck in particular by "the brunette with the full cheeks and the bicycle," and though she is not the one he liked the best, because Gilberte's golden skin and "fairish ginger hair" had become his "unattainable ideal," he centers his attention on her after their eyes meet.
I knew I could never possess the young cyclist, unless I could also possess what lay behind her eyes. My desire for her was desire for her whole life: a desire that was full of pain, because I sensed it was unattainable, but also full of heady excitement, because what had been my life up to that moment had suddenly ceased to be all of life, had turned into a small corner of a great space opening up for me, which I longed to explore.
We have seen him obsessed with the desire for possession -- both body and mind -- before, in the encounter with the village girl in Carqueville, where he similarly experienced the concept of "replacing sensual pleasure with the idea of penetrating someone's life." And he likens his experience with "this little sauntering gang of girls" to his encounters with "those fleeting passersby on the road," the ones he fantasizes about but knows he will never re-encounter. "If they had been offered to me by a madam -- in the sort of house that, as has been seen, I did not disdain -- divorced from the element that lent them so many colors and such attractive imprecision, they would have been less enchanting."
No actress, no peasant girl, no boarder in a convent school had ever been so beautiful to me, so fascinating in a suggestion of the unknown, so invaluably precious, so probably unattainable. The exemplar these girls offered of life's potential for bringing unexpected happiness was so full of charm, in a state of such perfection, that it was almost for intellectual reasons that I despaired of ever being able to experience ... the profound mystery to be found in the beauty one has longed for, the beauty one replaces ... by seeking mere pleasure from women one has not desired ... with the result that one dies without ever having enjoyed that other form of fulfillment.He knows that "having botanized so much among such young blossoms, that it would be impossible to come upon a bouquet of rare varieties than these buds."
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
The Proust Project, Day 56
Where this began
Day 55
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 359-369.
Bloch mystifies the narrator by his effect on Françoise, who seems to have expected some "prodigy of nature" and is disappointed when she meets him: "She seemed to bear me a grudge, as though I had misled her about him, or exaggerated his importance." She's also disappointed when she finds out that Saint-Loup, "whom she adored, ... was a Republican." But Françoise, who is a royalist, gets over it, "and when she spoke of Saint-Loup, she would say, 'He's just a hypocrite,' her broad, kindly smile showing that she thought a well of him as before and that she had forgiven him."
We learn more about Saint-Loup and his mistress, whom the narrator credits with a positive effect on him. His family "did not understand that, for many young men in fashionable society, who might otherwise never acquire a certain cultivation of mind or a measure of mildness in friendship, who might never be exposed to good taste or gentler ways of doing things, it is often in a mistress that they find their best teacher, and in relationships with such women that they make their only acquaintance with morality, serve an apprenticeship in higher culture, and learn to see the value of knowledge for its own sake." (Imagine an English or American writer contemporaneous with Proust making such an assertion.)
An actress of sorts, the mistress made Saint-Loup "see the company of fashionable ladies as insipid and the requirement to attend their functions as intolerable." She thereby "saved him from snobbery and cured him of frivolity." But things do not go well between them. Her friends, writers and actors, make fun of him, and she asserts that "their worlds were too dissimilar." There's also an implication that she is gold-digging, and that "she would wait quietly until she had 'made her pile,' which, in view of the sums doled out by Saint-Loup, looked as thought it might take a very short time." His ill-advised suggestion that she perform a scene from an avant-garde symbolist play for guests of his aunt is also a disaster.
And then the narrator goes into a fit of jealous pique because Saint-Loup asks his grandmother if he can photograph her before he leaves Balbec. His grandmother and Françoise make so much fuss over the request that the narrator gets huffy and the grandmother takes offense at his attitude. He retreats into childishness again.
Day 55
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 359-369.
Bloch mystifies the narrator by his effect on Françoise, who seems to have expected some "prodigy of nature" and is disappointed when she meets him: "She seemed to bear me a grudge, as though I had misled her about him, or exaggerated his importance." She's also disappointed when she finds out that Saint-Loup, "whom she adored, ... was a Republican." But Françoise, who is a royalist, gets over it, "and when she spoke of Saint-Loup, she would say, 'He's just a hypocrite,' her broad, kindly smile showing that she thought a well of him as before and that she had forgiven him."
We learn more about Saint-Loup and his mistress, whom the narrator credits with a positive effect on him. His family "did not understand that, for many young men in fashionable society, who might otherwise never acquire a certain cultivation of mind or a measure of mildness in friendship, who might never be exposed to good taste or gentler ways of doing things, it is often in a mistress that they find their best teacher, and in relationships with such women that they make their only acquaintance with morality, serve an apprenticeship in higher culture, and learn to see the value of knowledge for its own sake." (Imagine an English or American writer contemporaneous with Proust making such an assertion.)
An actress of sorts, the mistress made Saint-Loup "see the company of fashionable ladies as insipid and the requirement to attend their functions as intolerable." She thereby "saved him from snobbery and cured him of frivolity." But things do not go well between them. Her friends, writers and actors, make fun of him, and she asserts that "their worlds were too dissimilar." There's also an implication that she is gold-digging, and that "she would wait quietly until she had 'made her pile,' which, in view of the sums doled out by Saint-Loup, looked as thought it might take a very short time." His ill-advised suggestion that she perform a scene from an avant-garde symbolist play for guests of his aunt is also a disaster.
And then the narrator goes into a fit of jealous pique because Saint-Loup asks his grandmother if he can photograph her before he leaves Balbec. His grandmother and Françoise make so much fuss over the request that the narrator gets huffy and the grandmother takes offense at his attitude. He retreats into childishness again.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
The Proust Project, Day 55
Where this began
Day 54
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 340-359.
The narrator goes to two very different social events.
In the first, he accepts the Baron de Charlus's invitation to tea, and is puzzled by the baron's behavior, including his apparent refusal to acknowledge his arrival. Then he realizes "that his eyes, which never met those of the person with whom he was speaking, were in constant motion in all directions, like the eyes of some animals when frightened, or those of peddlers who, while they recite their patter and display their illicit wares, manage to study all the points of the compass without so much as looking around, in case the police are about." But he is more astonished when Charlus says to his grandmother, "how nice of you to think of dropping in like this!" when he has explicitly extended an invitation. When the narrator insists on asking the baron if he didn't invite them, he gets no reply -- only "the smile of the man who looks down from a great height on the characters and manners of lesser men." The narrator concludes "that it was his pride making him wish to avoid appearing to seek out people whom he despised, and that he therefore shrugged off onto them the idea that they should come to visit."
We learn a few more things about Charlus, including the fact that he wore "a faint dusting of powder" on his face, and that "he was as well disposed toward women ... as he was disgusted by men, and especially young men."
When Charlus comments scornfully on the wealthy Jewish family, the Israels, who bought one of his family's estates, he "shrieked, 'Just think -- to have been the dwelling of the Guermantes and to be owned by the Israels!'" And, "noticing that his embroidered handkerchief was revealing part of its colored edging, he thrust it back into his pocket with a startled glance, like a prudish but not innocent woman concealing bodily charms that in her excessive modesty she sees as wanton."
And he thinks wearing a ring is effeminate?
Later that evening, Charlus surprises the narrator by coming to his room with a volume of Bergotte to lend him. He says, among other things, "you have youth, and youth is always irresistible," and comments about the narrator's affection for his grandmother, that it is "permissible mode of affection, I mean a requited love. There are so many other modes of affection of which one cannot say the same!" The next morning the narrator encounters Charlus on the beach where "he pinched me on the neck, with a most vulgar laugh and air of familiarity" and criticizes him for "wearing that bathing suit with anchors embroidered upon it."
The second social event is the dinner with Bloch's family, a section filled with allusions to literature and politics that are arcane to the modern reader (and heavily footnoted), but which reveals that Bloch and his father are very much alike.
The elder Bloch is an inveterate name-dropper and repeater of received opinions, whose "world was that of approximations, where greetings are half exchanged, where half-truths usurp the place of judgment. Inaccuracies and incompetence in no way reduce self-assurance." And yet Bloch senior is also acutely self-conscious, especially about being Jewish, and when his uncle, Nissim Bernard, makes a reference to Peter Schlemihl, he bristles because "the mentión of a word like 'Schlemihl,' though it belonged to the sort of semi-German, semi-Jewish dialect which delighted him within the family circle, he thought was vulgar and out of place when spoken in front of strangers."
As for Bernard, his nephew's insults offend him mainly because of "being treated rudely in the presence of the butler." Both Bernard and Bloch derive gratification "from their double satus of 'masters' and 'Jews.'" Bernard has his manservant bring him the newspapers in the dining room "so that the other guests could see he was a man who traveled with a manservant." Bernard is a poseur, who brags about acquaintances and possessions he doesn't really have, serves "mediocre sparkling wine, poured from a carafe" as Champagne, and invites the group to the theater and claims that all the boxes were booked so that he had to book the front stalls, which "turned out to be seats in the back stalls, half the price of the others" -- and the boxes turn out to be unoccupied.
Once the dinner and the theater are over, the younger Bloch walks the narrator and Saint-Loup home. Along the way, he makes fun of Charlus, to Saint-Loup's annoyance, and asks the narrator about the "beautiful creature" he had seen with him at the Zoo. "I had of course noticed at the time that the name of Bloch was unfamiliar to Mme Swann," the narrator comments. Bloch goes on, "I was sort of hoping you could let me have her address, and then I could pop round there a few times a week and share with her the joys of Eros, favorite of the gods."
Day 54
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 340-359.
The narrator goes to two very different social events.
In the first, he accepts the Baron de Charlus's invitation to tea, and is puzzled by the baron's behavior, including his apparent refusal to acknowledge his arrival. Then he realizes "that his eyes, which never met those of the person with whom he was speaking, were in constant motion in all directions, like the eyes of some animals when frightened, or those of peddlers who, while they recite their patter and display their illicit wares, manage to study all the points of the compass without so much as looking around, in case the police are about." But he is more astonished when Charlus says to his grandmother, "how nice of you to think of dropping in like this!" when he has explicitly extended an invitation. When the narrator insists on asking the baron if he didn't invite them, he gets no reply -- only "the smile of the man who looks down from a great height on the characters and manners of lesser men." The narrator concludes "that it was his pride making him wish to avoid appearing to seek out people whom he despised, and that he therefore shrugged off onto them the idea that they should come to visit."
We learn a few more things about Charlus, including the fact that he wore "a faint dusting of powder" on his face, and that "he was as well disposed toward women ... as he was disgusted by men, and especially young men."
I gathered that the thing he disliked most about young men of today was their effeminacy.... But the life led by any man would have seemed effeminate compared with the kind of life he would have preferred to see men lead, ever more energetic and virile. ... He even disliked it if a man wore a ring on his finger.And yet the narrator's grandmother "detected in M. de Charlus feminine sensitivity and intuitions." And the reader may wonder at the implications of this statement: "'But the most important thing in life is not whom one loves,' he declaimed in a voice that was authoritative, peremptory, almost cutting. 'The important thing is to love.... The limits we set to love are too restrictive and derive solely from our great ignorance of life.'" And then there's that "authoritative" voice, which
like certain contralto voices in which the middle register has been insufficiently trained and which, in song, sounds rather like an antiphonal duet between a young man and a woman, rose as he expressed these subtle insights to higher notes, took on an unexpected gentleness, and seemed to echo choirs of brids and loving sisters.... While he spoke, one could often hear their light laughter, the giggling of coquettes or schoolgirls full of pranks, mischief, and teasing talk.
When Charlus comments scornfully on the wealthy Jewish family, the Israels, who bought one of his family's estates, he "shrieked, 'Just think -- to have been the dwelling of the Guermantes and to be owned by the Israels!'" And, "noticing that his embroidered handkerchief was revealing part of its colored edging, he thrust it back into his pocket with a startled glance, like a prudish but not innocent woman concealing bodily charms that in her excessive modesty she sees as wanton."
And he thinks wearing a ring is effeminate?
Later that evening, Charlus surprises the narrator by coming to his room with a volume of Bergotte to lend him. He says, among other things, "you have youth, and youth is always irresistible," and comments about the narrator's affection for his grandmother, that it is "permissible mode of affection, I mean a requited love. There are so many other modes of affection of which one cannot say the same!" The next morning the narrator encounters Charlus on the beach where "he pinched me on the neck, with a most vulgar laugh and air of familiarity" and criticizes him for "wearing that bathing suit with anchors embroidered upon it."
The second social event is the dinner with Bloch's family, a section filled with allusions to literature and politics that are arcane to the modern reader (and heavily footnoted), but which reveals that Bloch and his father are very much alike.
So, set within my old school friend Bloch was Bloch senior, forty years behind the times of his son, who recounted stupid stories and laughs at them in the son's voice, as much as the real Bloch senior laughed at them in his own voice, since whenever he bayed with laughter and repeated the funny part several times, so that his audience would properly savor the point of each anecdote, the gales of the son's faithful guffaws would never fail to celebrate in unison with the father the latter's table talk.
The elder Bloch is an inveterate name-dropper and repeater of received opinions, whose "world was that of approximations, where greetings are half exchanged, where half-truths usurp the place of judgment. Inaccuracies and incompetence in no way reduce self-assurance." And yet Bloch senior is also acutely self-conscious, especially about being Jewish, and when his uncle, Nissim Bernard, makes a reference to Peter Schlemihl, he bristles because "the mentión of a word like 'Schlemihl,' though it belonged to the sort of semi-German, semi-Jewish dialect which delighted him within the family circle, he thought was vulgar and out of place when spoken in front of strangers."
As for Bernard, his nephew's insults offend him mainly because of "being treated rudely in the presence of the butler." Both Bernard and Bloch derive gratification "from their double satus of 'masters' and 'Jews.'" Bernard has his manservant bring him the newspapers in the dining room "so that the other guests could see he was a man who traveled with a manservant." Bernard is a poseur, who brags about acquaintances and possessions he doesn't really have, serves "mediocre sparkling wine, poured from a carafe" as Champagne, and invites the group to the theater and claims that all the boxes were booked so that he had to book the front stalls, which "turned out to be seats in the back stalls, half the price of the others" -- and the boxes turn out to be unoccupied.
Once the dinner and the theater are over, the younger Bloch walks the narrator and Saint-Loup home. Along the way, he makes fun of Charlus, to Saint-Loup's annoyance, and asks the narrator about the "beautiful creature" he had seen with him at the Zoo. "I had of course noticed at the time that the name of Bloch was unfamiliar to Mme Swann," the narrator comments. Bloch goes on, "I was sort of hoping you could let me have her address, and then I could pop round there a few times a week and share with her the joys of Eros, favorite of the gods."
Monday, January 11, 2010
The Proust Project, Day 54
Where this began
Day 53
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 325-339.
Bloch badmouths the narrator to Saint-Loup, and Saint-Loup to the narrator, and when each shows no sign of having told the other about his slanders, confesses to them that he did it to get each of them on his side. The narrator's reaction to this perverse little trick is curious:
This is ironic (and may be meant ironically), because the narrator is gifted at condemnation by satire. He goes on further to observe that these days -- as contrasted with the idealized image he retains from his childhood -- "one's choice among men is more or less reduced, on the one hand, to uncomplicated troglodytes, unfeeling, straightforward creatures ... and, on the other, a race of men who, while they are in your company, can sympathize with you, cherish you, be moved to tears by you, and then, a few hours later, contradict all this by making a cruel joke about you.... I prefer men of the latter breed, if not for their human value, at least for their company."
Bloch's father invites the narrator and Saint-Loup to dine with him, but the invitation is delayed because of the anticipated arrival of Saint-Loup's Uncle Palamède. In talking about his uncle, Saint-Loup naively describes him as a man who in his youth, when someone made homosexual advances toward him, had his friends beat the man to a bloody pulp. But these days, Saint-Loup insists, his uncle would never do anything so brutal. Why, he even takes an interest in men of the working classes: "A footman who attends him in a hotel somewhere and whom he'll set up in Paris; a peasant lad whom he gets apprenticed to a trade -- that sort of thing. It's just this rather nice side of his nature, as opposed to his society side."
Uh-huh.
The next day, the narrator is returning to the hotel when he feels himself being watched, and finds that he is being stared at, "with eyes dilated by the strain of attention," by "a very tall, rather stout man of about forty, with a black mustache." When he returns the gaze, the man pretends to look at other things and makes "the gesture of irritation that is meant to suggest one has had enough of waiting, but which one never makes when one has really been waiting" and breathes "out noisily, as people do, not when they are too hot, but when they wish it to be thought they are too hot."
Later, when he and his grandmother have gone for a walk, they meet the man in the company of Saint-Loup and Mme. de Villeparisis, who introduces him as the Baron de Guermantes, her nephew, then corrects herself: "What am I saying? Baron de Guermantes indeed! Allow me to introduce my nephew, the Baron de Charlus!" The baron shakes hands -- proffering two fingers -- with the narrator in a chilly fashion. And so the narrator learns that his uncle is Palamède de Guermantes, the brother of the owner of the château at Combray.
The narrator now realizes "that the fierce stare that had attracted my attention ... was the one I had seen at Tansonville, when Mme Swann had called out the name of Gilberte." He asks Saint-Loup if Mme. Swann had been one of Charlus's mistresses, and Saint-Loup denies it emphatically: "'You would create consternation in the ranks of society if it was thought you believed that.' I did not dare reply that I would have created greater consternation in Combray if it was thought I did not believe it."
The narrator's grandmother is quite taken with Charlus, who doesn't seem to fit under the rubric of "naturalness." "But there were things in M. de Charlus, such as intelligence and sensibility, which one sensed were of acute potency, distinguishing him from the many society people whom Saint-Loup found painfully amusing; and it was especially these things that made my grandmother so indulgent toward his aristocratic bias." That bias extends to women:
The narrator's grandmother responds to this attitude because "she was susceptible to something masquerading as a spiritual superiority, which was why she thought princes were the most blessed of men, in that they could have as their tutor a La Bruyère or a Fénelon."
Then Charlus surprises the narrator, to whom he has "not spoken a syllable" after that chilly handshake, by inviting him and his grandmother to tea.
Day 53
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 325-339.
Bloch badmouths the narrator to Saint-Loup, and Saint-Loup to the narrator, and when each shows no sign of having told the other about his slanders, confesses to them that he did it to get each of them on his side. The narrator's reaction to this perverse little trick is curious:
I bore him no ill will, as my mother and grandmother had handed down to me not only their inability to bear a grudge, even against those who deserved it more than he did, but their reluctance to condemn anybody.
This is ironic (and may be meant ironically), because the narrator is gifted at condemnation by satire. He goes on further to observe that these days -- as contrasted with the idealized image he retains from his childhood -- "one's choice among men is more or less reduced, on the one hand, to uncomplicated troglodytes, unfeeling, straightforward creatures ... and, on the other, a race of men who, while they are in your company, can sympathize with you, cherish you, be moved to tears by you, and then, a few hours later, contradict all this by making a cruel joke about you.... I prefer men of the latter breed, if not for their human value, at least for their company."
Bloch's father invites the narrator and Saint-Loup to dine with him, but the invitation is delayed because of the anticipated arrival of Saint-Loup's Uncle Palamède. In talking about his uncle, Saint-Loup naively describes him as a man who in his youth, when someone made homosexual advances toward him, had his friends beat the man to a bloody pulp. But these days, Saint-Loup insists, his uncle would never do anything so brutal. Why, he even takes an interest in men of the working classes: "A footman who attends him in a hotel somewhere and whom he'll set up in Paris; a peasant lad whom he gets apprenticed to a trade -- that sort of thing. It's just this rather nice side of his nature, as opposed to his society side."
Uh-huh.
The next day, the narrator is returning to the hotel when he feels himself being watched, and finds that he is being stared at, "with eyes dilated by the strain of attention," by "a very tall, rather stout man of about forty, with a black mustache." When he returns the gaze, the man pretends to look at other things and makes "the gesture of irritation that is meant to suggest one has had enough of waiting, but which one never makes when one has really been waiting" and breathes "out noisily, as people do, not when they are too hot, but when they wish it to be thought they are too hot."
Later, when he and his grandmother have gone for a walk, they meet the man in the company of Saint-Loup and Mme. de Villeparisis, who introduces him as the Baron de Guermantes, her nephew, then corrects herself: "What am I saying? Baron de Guermantes indeed! Allow me to introduce my nephew, the Baron de Charlus!" The baron shakes hands -- proffering two fingers -- with the narrator in a chilly fashion. And so the narrator learns that his uncle is Palamède de Guermantes, the brother of the owner of the château at Combray.
The narrator now realizes "that the fierce stare that had attracted my attention ... was the one I had seen at Tansonville, when Mme Swann had called out the name of Gilberte." He asks Saint-Loup if Mme. Swann had been one of Charlus's mistresses, and Saint-Loup denies it emphatically: "'You would create consternation in the ranks of society if it was thought you believed that.' I did not dare reply that I would have created greater consternation in Combray if it was thought I did not believe it."
The narrator's grandmother is quite taken with Charlus, who doesn't seem to fit under the rubric of "naturalness." "But there were things in M. de Charlus, such as intelligence and sensibility, which one sensed were of acute potency, distinguishing him from the many society people whom Saint-Loup found painfully amusing; and it was especially these things that made my grandmother so indulgent toward his aristocratic bias." That bias extends to women:
In the view of M. de Charlus, a pretty woman of the middle classes, in relation to any of these women [whose ancestry traced to the ancien régime], was like a contemporary painting of a road or a wedding party in relation to an old master, the history of which we know, from the pope or the king who commissioned it. ... M. de Charlus drew comfort too from the fact that a similar bias to his own prevented these few great ladies from frequenting other women of lesser breeding, thus enabling him to worship them in their unimpaired nobility.
The narrator's grandmother responds to this attitude because "she was susceptible to something masquerading as a spiritual superiority, which was why she thought princes were the most blessed of men, in that they could have as their tutor a La Bruyère or a Fénelon."
Then Charlus surprises the narrator, to whom he has "not spoken a syllable" after that chilly handshake, by inviting him and his grandmother to tea.
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