Proust redux

So it turns out that when I am not distracted by other books, I can read Proust on a fairly normal schedule.  The first two volumes took 2 months each, but I managed to get through the 3rd in 3-4 weeks.  The bad news, however, is that reading it straight through didn't really make it any more compelling, even when Proust kills off one of the key characters to the Narrator's early development, and while the Narrator does mope about it to some degree, he actually seems to think it is just as well that this person died before their being "on the down low" was discovered.  (I'll actually dwell a bit more on the somewhat bizarre treatment of homosexuality below, since it is inescapable from the second volume on).  The depiction of the writer Bergotte's death is certainly more sensitive, though as I already groused it is spoiled for me by the fact that the Narrator could not have possibly witnessed it or known Bergotte's last thoughts. Basically, I never did get over the issues I had with memory -- false memory and impossible memories, particularly the hundreds of pages that Proust devotes to Swann’s love affair with Odette, when there doesn’t seem to be any opportunity for the Narrator to ever have learned about these details, particularly at such length.

On the whole, there are a few decent insights per chapter and one or two true belly laughs, but there is nothing in here that truly merits this length. I'll go ahead and provide a few of the most interesting bits below. If they strike you as pretty thin gruel, then by all means skip Proust entirely; you don't need to feel like you are missing out.

[Françoise] was one of those servants who in a household seem least satisfactory, at first, to a stranger, doubtless because they take no pains to make a conquest of him and shew him no special attention, knowing very well that they have no real need of him, that he will cease to be invited to the house sooner than they will be dismissed from it; who, on the other hand, cling with most fidelity to those masters and mistresses who have tested and proved their real capacity, and do not look for that superficial responsiveness, that slavish affability, which may impress a stranger favourably, but often conceals an utter barrenness of spirit in which no amount of training can produce the least trace of individuality.

It is paradoxical, as Françoise seemed so uncongenial to the Narrator but then ends up sticking around forever. To some extent this was one of the problems of this particular form of labour relations -- what to do with aged servants who had more or less become part of the family. What does seem particularly unfair is how Proust translated an actual servant who was completely devoted to him (Céleste Albaret)* into this querulous, fairly stupid peasant-type. There is also perhaps a bit of transference of guilt over being so coddled and pampered by others (though this definitely might be a modern day rereading of Proust).  Rushdie's Midnight's Children seems to encapsulate the dilemma of living so closely with servants who know every bit of your business, though he adds a somewhat creepy sexual dimension on top of this by having Saleem sleep with Padma on an occasional basis.

What is somewhat interesting is the Narrator's description of certain kinds of technologies coming into more widespread use (at least among the upper classes), such as telephones and private automobiles.  There is even a bizarre bit where the Narrator is befuddled by a revolving door.  While the coming of the railroad and its impacts on society was even more profound (and well covered by Dickens (see Dombey and Son), Trollope (The Way We Live Now) and Tolstoy (Anna Karenina, obviously)), Proust was writing in a time when technological change was really picking up steam.  He generally was writing about the more positive side of technological change, which makes sense that these inventions were often first marketed to the well-off as conveniences or even expensive toys.  You would have to look to Dickens and even Trollope to get the more rounded picture of how industrialization also changed societies and put many out of work and divorced the factory workers from the land.  (Heck, you could even find this line of thinking expressed by Father Beaubien in MacLennan's Two Solitudes, written 25 years after Remembrance.)

Certainly a Marxian critic could have a field day with Proust, given that he provides so much detail about the upper classes and occasionally furnishes some insight into the relationship of the working class servants to their employers.  I think class-based analysis is essential to understanding Proust, but at the same time there is a certain sameness to what one could say about this, book after book.  I very quickly found the Narrator deeply immersed in a world of boring parasites, who were almost indistinguishable at the many boring parties that Proust describes. Even the Narrator later seems to feel a bit ashamed of how he sometimes spurned more artistic types in favour of attending another party.

I was constantly asking myself why I spent thousands of pages inhabiting the world of people whom I despised, not least of which was the Narrator. He reports at one point that his servant Françoise once said he wasn’t worth the rope it would take to hang him, and it’s hard to say she was wrong. He is a schemer, loose-lipped, very full of himself and generally disinclined to actually do anything other than go to parties. His entire class appears parasitical and unbelievably status-conscious. Since they all seem interchangeable, I have no desire to read at length about a party where they try to snub others outside their circle, and yet that kept coming up over and over. I thought the nobility in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina were pretty intolerable, but this batch is far worse.

It was marginally interesting to see how the Dreyfus affair did divide society, raising its head in different contexts and even causing some breaks between friends.  Typically, Proust describes how one salon would primarily be inhabited by those who were completely convinced about Dreyfus's guilt and then another where most people had doubts.  Obviously, antisemitism was a recurring theme whenever Dreyfus came up.  Proust does show how at least some people in society could either change their minds or, more typically for those that didn't particularly care either way, equivocate so that they could move in both social spheres.  Certainly a number of people decided it was the wisest course to simply hide their true feelings regarding the Dreyfus affair unless it was completely clear what those around them thought about it.  I think if one was going to write a contemporary novel set in New York or particularly D.C., any discussions about Snowden would be somewhat comparable, though no one doubts he really took the NSA documents, but rather whether his actions were justified.  If one is more interested in conversations where guilt is uncertain (and sometimes discussions over the slippery nature of Truth can be worthwhile) then the Amanda Knox case or even the Woody Allen molestation accusations might be more polarizing (than Snowden -- given that people on the two sides hardly talk to each other other than just hurling insults on Internet message boards), though I don't know whether these cases are discussed "in society."

Still, Proust's introduction of the Dreyfus affair resulted in this short passage, which was just about the only time I laughed out loud in weeks of reading: “My mother, torn between her love for my father and her hope that I might turn out to have brains, preserved an impartiality which she expressed by silence.”

One other insight related to these salons: the more literary the salon, the more likely that it appear to historians to be the most popular when this probably wasn’t the case at all, but simply that it left more records.

That pretty much is the extent of what I found worthy in Proust. The rest was incredibly repetitive. The sexual politics in Remembrance were appalling. Virtually all the men in the book end up falling for courtesans who were two-bit whores earlier in their careers. I haven't felt the whore-madonna complex so widespread in society (or at least one author's representation of society) since Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy (of which my overall review is shamefully delinquent -- it probably shouldn't be hard to guess that I found The Cairo Trilogy far more rewarding, and it can sometimes be harder to write about things you respect more than things you don't care for).

Throughout the book, particularly the first two volumes, the Narrator strikes me as such a whiny, boring and immature brat. He pines endlessly for one woman after another. I found it very hard to get a handle on his age in the second and beginning of the third volume.  While I would guess he was roughly 18 or 19 (as he had visited brothels already) he seems to act closer to 15, particularly when he first meets Albertine and the other girls on vacation. 

I'm turning the corner on this admittedly very long wrap-up of Proust, but now is the time for a SPOILER warning.

SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER

I've gone into some of my major stylistic problems with Proust here and here, but ultimately I was totally turned off by the twist at the end of vol. 2 (Sodom and Gomorrah) where the Narrator learns that Albertine has occasionally indulged in lesbian antics and decides he will marry her to "save" her from these tendencies.  So he installs her in his house with the promise of marriage and turns her into essentially a prisoner (and thus the title of book 5).  But he suffers unbearably from jealousy and obsesses just how much lesbian sex Albertine has actually had.  It is so unpleasant reading this.  Why couldn't he just leave her alone?  Even leaving aside the fact that homosexuality was not acceptable in this era, he could have just stayed out of it.  It makes no sense to me that he ran through all his inheritance in a totally futile attempt to change someone else and force them to conform to his views (and admittedly most of society's) of what was acceptable.  I guess it was telling that Proust often used the term "invert" for male homosexuals, which while marginally more acceptable than "deviant" is pretty judgmental.  Proust also says some frankly silly things about how inversion can be conquered by will-power, which he must have surely known was not the case.  (This blog goes into considerable detail about how Proust transformed a male love-interest into Albertine.)

Even leaving the Narrator's obsession with whether Albertine and Andrée got it on and, if so, how many times aside (and it is the main thrust of The Prisoner (or The Captive) and The Fugitive), the last volume of Remembrance is basically a monument to The Closet.  Almost all the men that interact with Palamède de Guermantes, the Baron de Charlus,** are homosexuals, and there is a bit where he basically finds homosexuals under every overturned stone in Paris.  It is all a bit much.  Obviously there is transference going on on an epic scale, as the Narrator (and his father and Swann and Palamède's brother) ultimately end up just about the only straight men in Paris.  A bit of an exaggeration, but not much.  I found it exhausting and more than a little tragic, thinking of all the lives that were ruined by having to hide their sexuality.  Nonetheless, the Narrator's deliberate attempts to squelch Albertine were just one more thing in a long list of things that turned me against him and Remembrance of Things Past in general.

And with that, I think I have finally had my say on Proust.

* Apparently, she wrote a book, Monsieur Proust, about her experiences living with and working for Proust.  It fleshes out what we think we know about Proust from his descriptions of the Narrator.  Not surprisingly, some biographical details embedded in Remembrance still hold up whereas others were completely transformed or fictionalized in some way.  To be honest, I don't have enough interest in Proust to read this, but I can see the appeal for anyone who was more sympathetic to Proust and what he was up to.  While perhaps it is too much of a stretch, I wonder if the portrait of the secretly intelligent concierge, Renée, in Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog was somewhat inspired by Céleste Albaret.  Perhaps I am just particularly resistant to French literature these days, as I was quite turned off by Hedgehog as well.

** The Baron de Charlus is an unpleasant character to be sure, though I (and certainly the Narrator) may on occasion cut him a bit of slack simply because it was so difficult to be a man with "vices" that would have destroyed him in society were they discovered.  And indeed this basically what transpires in the final book, Time Regained.  (Incidentally, there is a movie of that title directed by Raúl Ruiz where John Malkovitch is cast as the Baron de Charlus.  I haven't seen it but that strikes me as just terrible celebrity-driven casting.  I'm sure I am being unfair, however.)  While he doesn't have quite as far to fall, I find there are some interesting ties between Charlus and Edward II (as represented in Marlowe's play).  I have trouble believing Proust would have been aware of this play (and obviously not the brilliant Derek Jarman film) but stranger things have happened.

Anyway, despite his decline in society, Charlus is sort of restored to his former glory (at least in his own mind) when wartime comes and Paris fills with soldiers and is largely emptied of women.  There is a kind of creepy scene where Charlus pursues "rough trade" sex from a soldier and then runs into the Narrator just outside the bawdy house.  Perhaps for the best, he is not aware of what the Narrator knows about him and his proclivities, and they stroll on for a bit in the darkened streets of Paris.  I find this section just slightly Cooveresque (here I am thinking of Pinocchio in Venice).  To be scrupulous, this passage did catch my attention and was, for me, the best part of all of Time Regained:

The aeroplanes which a few hours earlier I had seen, like insects, as brown dots upon the surface of the blue evening, now passed like blazing fire-ships through the darkness of the night, which was made darker still by the partial extinction of the street lamps. And perhaps the greatest impression of beauty that these human shooting stars made us feel came simply from their forcing us to look at the sky, towards which normally we so seldom raise our eyes. In this Paris, whose beauty in 1914 I had seen awaiting almost defenceless the threat of the approaching enemy, there was certainly, as there had been then, the ancient unalterable splendour of a moon cruelly and mysteriously serene, which poured down its useless beauty upon the still untouched buildings of the capital; but as in 1914, and more now than in 1914, there was also something else, there were lights from a different source, intermittent beams which, whether they came from the aeroplanes or from the searchlights of the Eiffel Tower, one knew to be directed by an intelligent will, by a friendly vigilance which gave one the same kind of emotion, inspired the same sort of gratitude and calm that I had felt in Saint-Loup’s room at Doncières, in the cell of that military cloister where so many fervent and disciplined hearts were exercising themselves in readiness for the day when, without hesitation, in the midst of their youth, they would consummate their sacrifice.