In an attempt to slow down in my reading of ATD, I have been trying to distract myself in some way. But why should I want to try to slow down at all? Well, it is entirely possible that I was not in my right mind when I made the decision, but just before the blessed holiday season, I came to the conclusion that I needed to slow down on my reading of that vast tome because, well… Because as I approached the eponymously named Part 4, I felt as if I were engaged in a car chase from some hit action show in the 1970s, in which the laws of physics are ignored with blithe condescension. I was catching air over gentle rises in the street; bullets fired from extremely close range either glanced harmlessly off the bumper or missed altogether. It was like a syndicated rerun flying dream without the commercial breaks; it was awesome.
But once I actually hit Part 4, the car began to disintegrate entirely. The hubcaps zinged off onto the sidewalk; the trunk popped open and ejected its contents all over the road; the glove compartment gaped open suddenly, spitting countless scraps of paper out into the cab to flutter about, while the outdated maps flapped open to paste themselves to the windshield; the doors flew off; the tires shredded themselves on nothing, and tire rims began scraping and throwing sparks in dangerous directions…
It was perhaps time to slow down.
I have since been distracting my magpie mind with any number of dazzling distractions, chief among them Bleak House, which I had not read before. In fact, apart from Great Expectations in school maybe twenty-three years ago, I had never read any Dickens before. I’ve been really impressed. All I’ve read by the way of prose for the last eighteen months has been Proust and Pynchon, with some interludes for The Ginger Man and the White Whale. And I have in fact been a relative stranger to fiction for many years. My relish for Dickens may be nothing much more than of the “Is this a regular cracker or is this a Ritz?" variety. Ne’ertheless, I am relishing it all the same.
Other shiny things? A small Penguin sampler of John Ruskin, another fella I’d read not one word of before, but he’s been taking the top of my head right off. The book itself is slim and ridiculously overpriced, and you’ve probably seen them near the checkout of your local indie bookstore (the megaplexes tend to bury them deep in some counterintuitive section, like self-help or cooking; how these tumorous megastores stay in business boggles my poor naïve mind…) The erstwhile typographer in me was slain at the sight of them and has shown great restraint in not succumbing to their sirensong more than twice.
Also, I have a stack of Dostoevsky standing by for later in the year (some, like Crumbs-n-Puns & The Bros Kay, will be rereads after several decades; others, like the Idiot, for the first time). David Copperfield, Tom Jones, and The Red and the Black. Oh, and a collection of Guy Davenport’s writings (So far, I group him in the same polymathic camp as Louis Zukofsky and Paul Metcalf). I’ve also been hearing a compelling buzz abt Richard Powers, so I picked up his first book, the one about the farmers; also McCarthy’s Suttree. I have this habit of reading the first page of a book in the store; if it stays with me for a few days, it goes on my list (it’s a very long list). Suttree has been on that list for a while.
I highly recommend this review. It is spoilerish, if that’s a concern as you read through Against The Day yourself. This is exactly how it feels to trawl and drift through the book:
There is no narrator quite like Pynchon. The other evening I was up late with this book and it hit me, there in the deep quiet after everyone had gone to bed, that he’s really most like an all-night DJ, spinning his favorites, talking about them, riffing on this and that and not really caring too hard who’s listening. But like the best of those DJs, sometimes what comes out is so beautiful that your heart just jumps right into your throat.
We have been Netflixing Monty Python’s Flying Circus over the last few weeks, and it has been a fascinating experience to come into contact once again with something so formative for me. Apropos of my earlier comments about the two forms of comedy, I have been paying special attention to the things I am laughing at. It tends to be one of these: satire, slapstick, absurdism, music, or archeology.
By archeology, I mean rediscovering the source of some verbal signature or other that I had long since internalized. (“So that’s where I got it!”)
By music I mean when the previous three elements (“satire, slapstick, absurdism”) are harmonized. A perfect example of this is a moment in the Killer Joke sketch, when there is newsreel footage of Chamberlain holding up a piece of paper; the voice-over is talking about how this new Killer Joke is the culmination of “Europe’s pre-war joke.” Peace in our time, indeed. What a joke.
The moment passes quickly in the Killer Joke sketch, and it’s one that lesser comedians would have set as the cornerstone for the whole sketch. But if you’re composing a polyphonic work, no single voice can be principal for long. The “pre-war joke” is a deft harmony between satire and absurdism, helping to balance these with the slapstick of, say, the German soldiers laughing to death and falling out of the trees.
Well, it is finished. After a 12-hour marathon yesterday, I completed the last volume of Á la recherche du temp perdu. I’m still a bit dazzled at the moment, not to mention more than a little exhausted. It may be some time before I can post anything resembling a debrief or final essay. For the moment, I will say that it was extremely rewarding, and that it is a profound work on every level — in its exquisite details, its discursive meanderings, its macrocosmic themes and ideas — which has changed, permanently, how I engage the world and myself.
Okay, so Pynchon’s newest is now listed at Amazon as having 1120 pages, rather than the 992 as previously reported.
I finished MD. It was magnificent. Once Mason & Dixon begin the work of drawing the Line, the story takes several staggering turns, involving (among many other things) various nested fictions, not unlike The Saragossa Manuscript. There has only been a handful of books that, when I finish them, I have a nearly uncontrollable urge to start over again from the beginning. A Room of One’s Own was one; Fitzgerald’s Odyssey another; Walden of course; Moby-Dick. And now Mason & Dixon.
But instead, I have gone back to In Search of Lost Time. The main problem that I was having was, it turns out, with the translation of Sodom & Gomorrah. You will not be surprised if I tell you I have quite a bit of patience for shall we say thick prose, but S&G was turgid, convoluted, plodding… So I skimmed through the synopsis at the end, and moved on to Parts 5 and 6, The Prisoner and The Fugitive, bound together in one volume. And it is the Proust I remember from Guermantes and especially from Young Girls.
I’m sure I can be done with the last one thousand pages of Proust not too long after Against the Day is released. And it’s only 1120 pages long: how hard can it be?
We are staying home today, and we will not turn on the radio, the tv, or the ringers on our phones. It was a crime against humanity, not against some culturally contingent economic theory. Security derives from universal liberty. I am free only so long as everyone else enjoys the same freedom. I live in a country of drooling morons who have forgotten this. (Liberty is expensive, and is often not worth the trouble: people don’t seem to value it. Let’s take it all away and see if anyone misses it. Frogs in a pot of water, the heat rising very slowly.) The only moral or social code I would want to see imposed on all humanity would be the one that allows me to pursue my own quiet life and grants all others the same liberty. Do what you will, but harm none; the rest is bureaucracy. (I know, I know: I am caught in one intractable contradiction after another.)
I wake enraged, and retire in despair. I didn’t know the state of queasy disappointment could be compounded so, and sustained: weeks have turned to months, months stretching to years. Criminals, liars, fools. I bite my tongue; I can think of nothing to say but invective. If I do speak, it will be with a blade unsheathed, burning cold, indifferent to whom it may cut. I can only save myself if others wish to drown.
The casual brutality with which we handle each other: how did we fall into such habits? how deep does our fear run, and what exactly are we all so afraid of? There is, after all, no deity to fear, and the natural universe is lifeless, insensate, wholly incapable of malice. There is only us.
Are we really so pathetic that we are scared of ourselves? Perhaps. I know that my own fear of humans runs deep; there is very little difference between my subway companions and the unstable berserker in repose in the corner over there. Their differences are a matter of degree, not kind. New York didn’t teach me that: the Minneapolis highways did; the playground; the backyard.
I cannot measure how deeply I have been betrayed. I didn’t need help learning how not to trust but I have now learned that lesson again, again, again. Trust, like attention, is precious currency, not to be paid out lightly.
This new day is crisp, blue; leaves once green are now sage and dry in the breeze.
Climbing thru Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, (MD) and have been for roughly the last month. It’s been interrupted by a number of other texts, including The Wandering Scholars, by Helen Waddell, and the incandescent Consolation of Boëthius, and if I don’t get a move on, there will be other seasonal reads (esp. Tripmaster Monkey) to divert it.
At the end of July, I finished Vineland (VL) for what apparently was the first time. I had bought it breathlessly in 1990, right when it first came out, but I now realize I couldn’t possibly have gotten beyond the first thirty or so pages. Someone I thought was the main protagonist essentially vanishes abt that far into the book, not to return until almost the very end.
VL is generally pretty good, if a bit “lite” – it reads at times as if Tom Robbins were half-heartedly trying his hand at a Pynchon impersonation.
I am finding MD a far more mature and measured work even than GR. He can veer from Restoration satire (people bustling in and out of rooms, breathless maids with ripp’d bodices (bodices, in fact, designed to rip open and snap back closed again) thwarted lovers exiting precipitously thru windows) to trenchant observations on the corrosive effects of slavery on culture, often within the same paragraph.
It is written in the diction, grammar, phrasing, and spelling of an 18th century text, but also includes such bemusing phantasms as a talking dog, and wry anachonisms as the first anchovy pizza in England, as well as a 2 or 3 page discussion of “modern” music, ending with this great punchline (you will see, of course, the dazzling bait-and-switch):
“…Much of your Faith seems invested in this novel Musick–"
”Where better?" asks young Ethelmer confidently. “Is it not the very Rhythm of the Engines, the Clamor of the Mills, the Rock of the Oceans, the Roll of the Drums in the Night, why if one wish’d to give it a Name,–”
“Surf Music!" DePugh cries.
After we read about Mason & Dixon observing the 1761 Transit of Venus from the Dutch colonies of South Africa (during which a comically tragic portrait of racism and slavery is drawn with deft and bitter strokes), the two then depart for America to demarcate the disputed property line between Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware.
This, their arrival in America, where everything is for sale, and people stay up all night in coffeeshops; here, in the seething, sprawling metropolis of Philadelphia (then second only to London among English-speaking cities of the earth), is where the satire and fantasy really kicks in. We meet, for example, the irrepressible Dr Franklin, always wearing sunglasses of differing hues, playing his Armonica in nightclubs, and rousing the latenight crowd out into lightning storms.
I am in the midst of a section wherein the two surveyors, standing in various farmers' back gardens, are attempting, with little success, to explain the mathematical and political causes of this geometric nightmare. It’s not just Pynchon’s own tangential writing that obscures the greedy human motives behind such tortured lines.
Okay, one more passage:
Every day the room [of the Coffeeshop], for hours together, sways on the verge of riot. May unchecked consumption of all these modern substances at the same time, a habit without historical precedent, upon these shores be creating a new sort of European? less respectful of the forms that have previously held Society together, more apt to speak his mind, or hers, upon any topic he chooses, and to defend his position as need be? Two youths of the Macaronic profession are indeed greatly preoccupied upon the boards of the floor, in seeking to kick and pummel, each into the other, some Enlightenment regarding the Topick of Virtual Representation. An individual in expensive attire, impersonating a gentleman, stands upon a table freely urging sodomical offenses against the body of the Sovereign, being cheered on by a circle of Mechanics, who are not reluctant with their own suggestions. Wenches emerge from the scullery dimnesses to seat themselves at the tables of disputants, and in brogues as thick as oatmeal recite their own lists of British sins.
Will Ferrell recalls the first time he realized his destiny in life. “I remember in elementary school when I first learned to run into a door, kick up at the bottom and snap my head back,” he says. “I don’t know where I learned it, but I would get huge laughs from the other kids.” (2019 note: the link is long dead)
My mother sent me the link to this profile because it reminded her of my early propensity for exactly that trick, which works best with rattly screen doors. I developed a whole set of things like this, including Dick Van Dyke’s tumble over the ottoman. But the classic, the prototype, was of course the Pie Gag. I would gather up all my stuffed animals and assorted toys, hold them in my arms, stand at the top of the stairs, and call out, “Ten, banana, cream, pies!” Then I would throw myself down the stairs, amid a great clatter and crash. I was five or six. It was inspired by a skit on Electric Company (Sesame Street’s psychedelic younger sibling) in which a baker stands at the top of a grand staircase, balancing two very large platters on each arm, stacked with pies. He falls down, and tumbles to the bottom, pie filling everywhere, his baker’s hat deflated and askew. I never got tired of it.
My grade-school friend, Mike, when we were in maybe fifth grade, said to me that at the first opportunity, he was going to vote me “Most Likely To Grow Up To Be A Stunt Man.” But it wasn’t about the stunt; I was always after the laugh. And it was a good lesson for a kid to learn: you have to be okay with people thinking you really did just walk into that door.
Broadly speaking, there are two sorts of comedy. The first is the father of satire, parody, and the roast; it is the “comedy of resistance.” It deflates the pompous, skewers the vain. It is “The Aristocrats;” Abbie Hoffman levitating the Pentagon; Chevy Chase as Gerald Ford; Monty Python’s Life of Brian. It can be dark, because to raze another, you may be tempted to stand triumphantly over them, and to raise yourself. It is the comedy of the smirk against the smug.
The other comedy is mother of clowns, grandmother to the Absurd and surreal. The world is so sad, so unjust, so carelessly maleficent, that we have no recourse but to laugh, or die. It is collaborative humor, comedy of the improv, where you must cooperate. “Agree and add.” We’re all in this together: we must roll with whatever meanness or misfortune might come our way, and we have to make it as hospitable as possible for the next improv actor who will join us onstage. You must be generous with the punchline, and willing to play someone else’s straight man. The comedian who always has to be out front will soon find that Dame Fortune has stripped him of his gifts, and brought him low.
I don’t pretend to hide my allegiance. I may have developed some skill in the first sort, but I find it sometimes cheap, and often too easy. People always laugh when someone slips on a banana peel, but I’ll never be the one to plant a peel in someone’s path.
I serve the joke. If you are also impressed that I didn’t break my neck when I fell over the ottoman, that’s nothing to do with me. Humility is the only important lesson – otherwise, why would the whole cosmos be constantly teaching it?
I don’t know if I can stand the wait. (See this, and this as well.)
So much for the pattern; up until M&D, his books alternated between encyclopedic, historical sprawls and shorter, “contemporary” things focussing on NoCal. But the newest thing, said to be called Against the Day, is nearly a cool grand (992 pp), and judging by what few descriptions there are (including Pynchon’s own blurb), it is every bit as vast as the Big Three.
Speaking of vast, I’m taking another breather from Proust – only 1700 pages into it, and already it has formed a strong seasonal bond with long winter nights. My reading & rereading habits are often seasonal. Summer inspires me to reread Thoreau and the Odyssey (trnsl. Fitzgerald), and now I’ve been sucked into Crime & Punishment for the first time since 1989. Riveting! But all that, and the others stacked up around me, may have to wait while I dive into Mason & Dixon: it’s the only one I haven’t yet read, even once. I despair: I’m in the middle of about thirty books right now. Faster Pussycat: Read, read!
Based on the actuarial tables, I only have maybe 35 or 40 more years. Assume two books a month; that’s still only just under 1000 books. And what about rereads, which is essential for any good book? (e.g. either read Walden ten times or not at all.) Do they count toward the total? This is a terrible line of thought. If no more new books came out ever again, there are still well over 5000 books I NEED to read. Not to mention the ones I need to write. Who has time for work, let alone eating or sleeping? And dammit: we have Season 2 of Sports Night in the house – that’s time away from reading, too! Can I have some clones, please, like in Calvin & Hobbes?
It is the 20th century in microcosm. People are on obsessive quests for something they don’t understand, and which may be nonexistent; who believe their personal meaning-making can somehow illuminate the wider, meaningless universe – indeed, that simply because they make a connection between two things, they come to think that the connection exists empirically. The Authorities (governments, churches, corporations, aka “Them”) who are obsessed with the clean, the polar, the binary, the unhuman: plastics, robotics; who praise the individual, then crush it. And how delightful to reflect that nothing much has changed since 1204, except They have gotten even more powerful, by making us all think that we have. A great trick right out of Lao-tzu’s playbook: fill their bellies and empty their heads. We are all fated to die, masked and anonymous, pinned beneath the rubble in the basement of some unknown Mediterranean city, as the feral children strip us of our jewels. So remember, in only a few billion years, none of this will matter. In the meantime: go to church, buy your polyester and medications, and vote against your own interests.
Back to Proust with a vengeance; with Boëthius' Consolation, Henrick’s Te Tao Ching and the Tractatus for light distractions.
So, I finished GR last night. So much more beautiful and obscene than I could possibly have fathomed as a callow teenager. And I have glimpsed more finely now the roots for so many of the esthetic choices in my life. “Keep cool, but care.”
The Shakedown is now between V. and resuming Sodom & Gomorrah a dozen or so pages on from where I left off. My mind is still reeling from GR, and there are more than a few overlapping characters and elements, so I may just have to dig in. My copy of V. is a disintegrating Perennial edition from 1986. It’s already lost the half-title page. The binding glue has calcified and is dropping off in little white flecks. I have paperbacks from the 1950s that are in better shape. Shameful. But I’ll make due.
Research for my prose pieces continues, and consumes most of my so-called free time. The minute I don’t want to learn anything new, someone shoot me. (As my neighbor said, tipsy from his second brandy alexander, if you stop moving, you’re dead.) Volcanoes; the Fisher King; the West India Company; the I Ching; the river IJssel; film terms and the history of cinema; the Iliad; medieval satires. Put it all in a pot, along with the medieval and modern ideas of evil (which are, delightfully, almost complete opposites), and you have something rather fun. And I’m reading Ruskin and Boëthius, too.
GR is still going strong: Slothrop is about to ditch his pig suit, so Marvy’s castration and the bombing of Hiroshima are only hours away; it is so much richer than I ever appreciated when last I read it, in the late 80s. Amazing what a difference of 19 years can make. The collective cultural deathwish; dehumanization thru the industrialization of everything; apocalyptic obsession with polarities: themes that have only gotten more terrifyingly relevant since August 6th, 1945.
Only thru gentleness, thru staying on the edges, thru pledging allegiance to softness, diversity, complexity, can we even begin to hope to find some unmarked exit out of this nightmare.
I remain hopeful only because (as Tolkien points out) despair assumes a foreknowledge that is by definition impossible, and is therefore as hubristic as that of the masters of war, who cling to deathlike certainties as fearfully as do the pacifist nihilists…
Time isn’t a line, or even a thing (tho saying can make it seem so); history cannot come to an end (tho histories can); ideas can (and indeed must) be forgotten, and the mountains and rivers persist; the cosmos (or what you will) is fleeting: it flows, and moves on, and we can scarcely step into it even once.
GilbertSorrentino has died. As of 9:30 am EDT, however, I can only find the Wikipedia article as corroboration of this posting.
The theologian Jaroslav Pelikan has also died. Obits here and here. I first encountered him while I was a student living in Aberdeen. I attended as many of his Gifford lectures as I could in the spring of 1992. The lectures I attended focussed on the Cappadocian fathers, Basil and the Gregs (good name for a band, no? playing the Divinity circuit).
Oh, and I read the Da Vinci Code last Sunday afternoon. The whole thing. Is this what all those mass market paperbacks you can buy in grocery stores and airports are like? It was only slightly more entertaining than an episode of E! True Hollywood Story, slightly less intellectually strenuous than watching someone get a haircut, and staggeringly inept in its history. I found it plainly, baldly, distressingly bad on so many levels. It was, as one of my coworkers likes to say, “craptastic.” So this reviewer’s take on the Da Vinci movie does not surprise me: “In the cinema, such matters are best left to Monty Python.”
So. The Proust has stalled. This is okay with me; I need time to digest all that has happened. I reached the end of Vol 3 at the end of January, and decided to take a few weeks off. I read Moby-Dick for what I think was the fifth time; then I finished The Master and Margarita, which had been an xmas present; then I drowsed thru Don Quixote; I put that down midway through while upstate last month, where I bought and read the incandescent Ginger Man by JP Donleavy. After finishing that, I gulped down Eco’s newest book, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. There is, here, an online annotation project for all its millions of allusions and references. I learned of the Loana project from The Modern Word… where I couldn’t help but notice the Thomas Pynchon pages.
Now, people who’ve known me long enough may know of my teen obsession with Pynchon. It was, in fact, twenty years and one month ago that I bought Gravity’s Rainbow. 12 April 1986. I read it two times in succession, and one more time in college. I attempted it again without success some time in the late 90s, and then one more time in the summer of 2000. I couldn’t take it. Giggling fratboy jokes, I thought, and backshelved all my Pynchon.
But something happened as I clicked around the Pynchon page, and felt myself getting all wispy and nostalgic. Three weeks ago, I bought a new copy of The Crying of Lot 49 (the old one, like my copy of V., had long since disintegrated (strangely appropriate for an author so preoccupied with paranoia and entropy)) and dove in. And I loved it. It was actually human. And exuberant. The comedy was a welcome antidote to the lugubrious earnestness of modern “mainstream” fiction, a genre I had vowed I would never commit myself to again. So I pulled GR out, and started. Why not? What’s the worst that will happen? I’ll still find it too reminiscent of my hypereducated adolesencce, or it will make me vomit, and that will be that.
But that wasn’t that. Two weeks later, I’m on page 365. It’s a lark. By turns slapstick, philosophical, vivid, vague…
I am reclaiming old parts of myself. All this spring, as I relearn who I am, in light of deeply saddening revelations, I have been going back to the poetry, music, and prose of my youth and finding that little of it deserves the backshelved neglect it’s received. When did I decide I wasn’t allowed to like what I like?
I am a surrealist. The world is so irredeemably sick and tragic, and the surest way to wither to Bartlebian nothingness is to take it seriously. Instead, we must be like Charles Halloway and draw a smile on the wax bullet, to kill the October Queen. We mustn’t cry because of the world, but laugh in spite of it.
Laughter is a rebellious act. If the world is straight, we must bend it with comedy, which is, of course, the most serious way to face the world.
So I reclaim comedy, the absurd, the impossible, the hopeless. After all: it’s funny!
The trip to Florida was good, calm. We saw dolphins. We watched the Oscars. We developed an unhealthy taste for Sudoku. We returned and hit the ground running. The last two weeks have been an achronic blur. What month is this?
We also finally admitted the obvious, and bought the DVD set of Wonderfalls. Last weekend, a good friend came over to help my wife with the dance piece she’ll be showing next month, and we listened to a lot of Beatles. She stayed over and on Sunday, the three of us watched the entire Wonderfalls series.
Since then, I’ve gone back and watched the five or six episodes that also have commentary. I’ve got it bad.
Girl needs a boy. Girl needs a donut. Take a picture. Save the lovebirds. Lick the lightswitch. Save him from her. Bring her back. See a penny, pick it up. Get to the church on time. Ask the monkey. Shoelace untied: staple it. Show him who’s special. Let him go. Comfort her.
For most of December, we had a trio of DVDs from Netflix in the house, holding up our queue. The complete Wonderfalls, a TV show that was cancelled for no reason whatsoever. It resided in a shadowland between Gilmore Girls and West Wing on the one hand, and vintage supernatural shows such as Bewitched or I Dream of Jeannie on the other. It also learned valuable lessons from Raising Arizona and Sliding Doors. It was witty, surreal, funny, sappy, deep, flaky, dazzling.
A cynical and world-weary 24 year-old woman named Jaye, with a philosophy degree from Brown, has returned to her native Niagara NY, and now lives in a trailer park and works at a souvenir shop near the Falls. One day, inanimate objects begin talking to her, exhorting her with cryptic requests to do things (“Ask about his wedding ring” “Get her words out”) or to not do things (“Don’t give her money back”). She quickly learns to comply, because the objects nag her mercilessly until she does, or smugly rub her nose in it when she doesn’t (“told you not to give her money back”).
Her family is quirky, and seemingly nothing like her; they’re all driven and successful, she’s stalled and under-employed. Also, all their names rhyme: Darren, Karen, Aaron, Sharon. As the episodes progress (there were thirteen in the season; only four ever aired before the show was axed by the typically imaginative and perceptive TV execs), the animals grow more, well, animated; the storylines weave into richer patterns; the characters and relationships deepen.
I found the show very moving, and I easily identified with this girl who is — by her own admission and in accord with her family’s perceptions — a black sheep wracked by the contradictory motives of apathy and compassion.
Most importantly, of course, is that the brilliant theme song was composed and performed by one of my greatest artistic heroes, AndyPartridge.
Watch the show and you’ll soon enough start imagining what the cow creamer might say to you and how it might change your life.
I finished The Guermantes Way a few days ago, after roughly ten weeks of reading. In Search of Lost Time is divided into seven parts, but because Parts 5 and 6 are fairly short, they are bound together. So in reaching the end of Volume 3, I think of myself as half way through. It is appropriate, therefore, that I take a moment and reflect on the book so far.
The Guermantes Way focused on a series of social encounters over the course of two years or so. The narrator has left behind his childish crush on Gilberte, and his adolescent obsession with Albertine, and now finds himself mesmerized by the Duchesse de Guermantes. He stalks her for many months, and in a double attempt to forget her and ingratiate himself with her family in the hope of being invited into her salon, he visits for several weeks one of his very good friends, Robert Saint-Loup, who is a nephew of the Duchesse.
His ardor for the Duchesse finally cools over the course of the next half year, and only then does he finally get invited to one of her parties. He is approached by the eccentric M. de Charlus, another Guermantes. He is an aloof, pompous, and, frankly, creepy old man. The narrator does not keep an appointment with Charlus because he learns that his grandmother has had a stroke. She dies early in the second part, or about halfway through the volume, but we do not hear much about it. Instead, we see how others react, or don’t react. The Duc de Guermantes stops by during the grandmother’s final hours and is left waiting in the hall because the rest of the family is rushing about, calling for servants to bring boiling water, or fresh towels, or more medications. The Duc, oblivious of the crisis, and perplexed that there could possibly be anything more important than a visit from a Guermantes, is extremely offended and goes away with the impression that the narrator’s mother is a distant and antisocial woman who does not know how to run a good house.
In all, the portraits of high society are deeply unflattering; vain and childish fools hide behind grandiose titles. The Proustian habit, established in the first two volumes, of delving into long, discursive reflections and descriptions of peoples' innermost motivations is often abandoned in Guermantes, in favor of straightforward narrative. It is less introspective and more purely driven by narrative than the previous volumes. Many characters' personalities are laid bare through simple descriptions of their actions and words.
So it was a shock yesterday and today to find that Volume 4, Sodom and Gomorrah, returns to the simultaneously microscopic and macrocosmic reflections on human nature. This volume marks the beginning of what Proust called the “great inversion.” Our perception of many characters, beginning with M. de Charlus, are altered utterly through a series of revelations regarding their hidden motives and relationships.
If the principal themes of Swann’s Way were that of childhood and memory (and the introduction of later themes, such as senseless obsessive love), and In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower was that of adolescent puppy love, and The Guermantes Way was the glittering and worthless surfaces of high society, then Sodom and Gomorrah is that of homosexual love. It also begins the reprise of unthinking obsession, first stated relatively mildly in the backstory of Swann, the social-climbing Jew who is passing for a gentile, and Odette, the erstwhile prostitute and courtesan who is clawing her way into society. This time, it is the narrator who finds himself increasingly obsessed and jealous of Albertine, and not Albertine as she is, but Albertine as he imagines her to be, just as Swann has little notion of Odette’s past, and no inclination to find out.
The overall experience of reading Proust is a wrenching one. He is unsparing in his critiques and insights into human behavior; his portrayal of teen love was, for example, pitch-perfect and embarrassingly accurate. I find myself recasting my own life upon reflection. I also find myself recalling events in my own life that had otherwise fallen into oblivion. He describes the sensation of lying awake at night as a child, watching the faint lights seep in through the windows, or around the edges of the door, and I remember my own insomniac anxiety: the gold and glass chandelier over the stairs, the tan carpet, the distant adult voices downstairs.
Reading Guermantes has been, like the previous volumes, a great comfort, but unlike them, a mild torture. Proust’s acuity in portraying the quotidian nature of hypocrisy is devastating. Every relationship in this volume is in one way or another unhealthy, doomed, loveless, mercenary. The Duc, for example, is an incorrigible philanderer, cycling rapidly through gold-digging courtesans, who, when inevitably they are cast off, become confidantes and “ladies-in-waiting” to the spurned Duchesse. The Duc is kind to the Duchesse only when he has discarded a mistress or when he’s beginning to woo a new one. But they are a formidable social team, bound together by deep habit and ancient obligation, and so they entertain together. He serves as the Duchesse’s impresario; her wit is bitter and funny, and he sets up the marks for her to strike down with her sharp tongue.
Another theme relates to the utter divorce between loyalty and reason. The events in the book take place during the height of the Dreyfus Affair. Whether you thought Dreyfus innocent or guilty had almost nothing to do with the facts of the case, which were few and largely indisputable, and had almost everything to do with your social standing, your political sympathies, and, of course, whether you were Jewish or not, and Anti-semitic or not. Just as Swann finds himself blindly obsessed with Odette, despite knowing full well that the tart is a sly, self-serving, faithless whore, and not even remotely his type, so did royalists and conservatives unthinkingly condemn Dreyfus against all reason, and supporters of Dreyfus instinctively dismiss anti-Dreyfusards as worthless and mindless wastes of skin, regardless of their other virtues. It was to French society what the debate over abortion has been for the US in the last several decades.
This is what is so wrenching about Proust: the silly, the callow, the perverted, the vain, the noble, the naïve… they all are me, they all are us.
I may go to a book (poems or prose or fiction) to read new evocations or descriptions of what I already know, believe, feel; or I may go in order to discover new perspectives, previously unkown or unfamiliar ways of thinking, feeling, belief.
But if I am too eager for the one and encounter the other, I probably won’t like the work — it’ll have nothing to do with the quality of the writing or the value of the thinking, the depths of feeling and everything to do with my own expectations, needs, tastes of the moment. I may dismiss the work utterly simply because we are mismatched just then: twenty-four hours earlier or later, and it might have become a seminal and life-changing work.
