Proust between two centuries

I'm sorry about the book report style of my recent entries... and many of the posts I'll be making over the next several months. It's useful for me to keep these things I'm reading in my memory and to organize my thoughts. I'm going to have to read a phenomenal amount over the next several months, and around thanksgiving I'm going to have to be able to recall a lot of it, and I hope I don't bore you too much in the process. Part of the purpose of this blog was always supposed to be that we could have a bit more insight into what one another are reading and thinking about, and have a sense of what's out there in terms of books we might one day want to pick up, or even just have some sort of vague insight into even if we don't find time to read them ourselves. Anyway, you'll just skip over whatever doesn't interest you... and hopefully in each of these something more interesting or thoughtful will come out than simply 'this was a book that was (or wasn't) worth reading' or insights that only a specialist would care about.
I just finished reading 'Proust between two centuries' by Antoine Compagnon, which I've been meaning to read for years, because of its author, because it is referenced, and because someone I respect who knows Proust well seems to value it pretty highly. It covers two topics that are only vaguely related, and somewhat contradictory. Stendhal, who was one of the most vocal and articulate proponents of romanticism when romanticism was a new and controversial movement (when theater-goers rioted over Victor Hugo's 'Hernani', which overturned classical French theater), wrote a polemical book called something like 'Shakespeare and Racine'. In it, he largely takes Shakespeare as the great model for romantics - Shakespeare was still kind of scoffed at in France. French theater was still largely in verse, killings and deaths happened off-stage, unities of time, place and action were more or less respected, etc. etc. Though Racine seemed to be the negative figure in the book, it was actually just the continued adherence to Racine style composition that Stendhal objected to. He claimed (and I could sort of take issue with this), that Racine was great not because of, but in spite of the restraints he accepted in writing. More importantly, he stated that Racine WAS a romantic in his time, just as the romantics would be classical for future generations, and that in aping past styles and treating them as fixed and unchanging, the classicists of his generation were treating literature as a dead letter. For Compagnon, this idea that the difference between classical and revolutionary writers is nothing but a question of perspective is central to understanding Proust... except that this particular argument, which is supposed to equally condemn the avant-gardes who want to sever all ties to their predecessors (see the surrealists, symbolists, situationists, etc.), and the reactionaries (following his argument, almost any group you can come up with who wrote anything memorable can be shown not to be real aesthetic reactionaries), this argument isn't all that intimately linked to Proust. I shouldn't really say that, because not only does Compagnon show where Proust thematizes and defends this idea (which wouldn't be of much interest), but his reason for picking Proust particularly is clear. For Proust the idea of intermittency is extremely important. He regularly associates Baudelaire with Racine, and follows both of them. He denies the existence of progress in art, and along with it any purely linear development. What he acknowledges is rebirth, family traits, even the transmigration of souls... things lying dormant and resurfacing, authors finding similar goals or tactics treated differently in authors that have preceded them and appreciating this, without any necessary question of influence (I still haven't read Harold Bloom's 'anxiety of influence', though I know I should). Proust thinks it is quite normal and natural to talk about 'the Dostoyevsky side of Mme de Sevigny', despite the fact that Mme de Sevigny died long before Dostoyevsky was born and what's Dostoyevskian in her writing is so only retrospectively (I think I've told you before what Proust considers 'Dostoyeveskian'). This is not to say that Proust denies the influence of context and culture, or puts forth a romantic notion of the artistic genius creating in a vacuum (which would bring him closer to the avant-garde position)... I don't think it's worth talking much in generalities about 'the artist' and his relation to predecessors and successors, particularly not in a normative fashion of talking about what an artist should do, except to say that Proust provides a number of pleasant and useful images, some of which are surprising.
It could be asked what the point is of talking about Proust as being 'between two centuries' or moving forward while looking back if there's a general denial of a deterministic, linear view of literary history (and the tension between the determined and the voluntaristic could be brought into line with the opposition between the Will to Power and the Eternal return in Nietzsche), and it is perhaps a little strange that Compagnon spends so much time tying Proust to the generation that came before him and debates that were already outdated though Proust kept them alive, but for him, the idea of 'the in-between' is important, and he continually brings up dichotomies that Proust straddles. The decadents were reproached with allowing their work to disintegrate into details at the expense of an overarching structure, and when Nietzsche is brought up, it is because he reproached Wagner for this. Compagnon faults those who overemphasize Proust's strong architecture, and the fact that the end is tightly bound to the beginning (a fact Proust himself liked to draw attention to). For him the important thing is the fact that the end is constantly deferred, and there is so much that is inessential and digressive in between. What makes Proust great is precisely the fact that the plan fails, that the work is profoundly flawed. All great works are determined by the flaws and failings - both structured and open, given to intermittences, tied together but not fully determined. The book that Proust's narrator describes would be boring according to Compagnon. Of course, the in-between was important to the decadents, and as with Proust, sexuality is a prime place to discuss indeterminacy. The decadents were practically obsessed with hermaphrodites, particularly in renaissance painting prior to Raphael. But Proust's Man-woman and woman-man inverts (there's a discussion of the rejection of the term homosexual) are not the decadents' hermaphrodites. Somewhere in the course of writing, Proust decides to make his two representatives of Sodom and Gomorra a very feminine girl and a very masculine man (there's a strange connexion in Proust that Compagnon brings up between being an artist, being gay and being Jewish - a connection which Racine becomes weirdly emblematic of - though Racine was neither Jewish [his last two plays took subjects from the old testament] nor gay [at the end of the nineteenth century he did take on a representation as a hysteric, and his last two plays were written to be performed exclusively by school girls in a particular Jansenist girls' school]).
I'll talk later about Deleuze's book on Proust, which is brilliant and shows Proust as being organized around learning to decode signs. To me it accounts better for a lot of what Compagnon sees as purely digressive (in a good way), and for that reason I won't talk here too much about the opposition between the poetic and the historical aspect of names. Place names and family names have a strange importance for Proust, and in his book he has large discussions of etymology. The purely sonorous quality of names causes the hero to daydream as long as they are opaque, and there seems to be a certain amount of disillusion involved in names becoming familiar and transparent (which are two very different things - the destructive power of habit is another topic). But in showing Proust's fixation on name origins and etymology, I think Compagnon overstates the idea that knowing where the names comes from destroys them. I think Proust is rather fascinated with the fact that, beyond the daydreams projected on a mysterious name - which seems to have a mystical link to the spirit of a person, place or family and everything that is metonymically associated with it, the fact that a name has a history, and records a history actually adds to the possible material for fantasy and interest. It's the accretions of generations and the stories that are linked to those accretions that actually add to the opacity of the name and give it a life it wouldn't otherwise have. I think it is rather the banality of the current possessor of that name, and the fact that the person or place the name is currently attached to can seem to have none of the romance the name suggests that destroys the name in the end.

Raymond Roussel

Once upon a time, I read and enjoyed a number of biographies of writers. Some, like Dostoyevsky and Malraux, had strange, incredible lives that sort of resembled their novels. Tolstoy got particularly interesting as a character after he stopped writing great books. Nowadays, it seems that whenever I pick up a writer's biography I find it dull and pointless and can't read it all the way through. I don't know if I've changed and become less tolerant of the genre, or if I just haven't come across a good one in a while. I imagine it is a bit of both. I've never understood the tendency a lot of biographers have of starting with irrelevant family histories. It seems to me that what can be gathered about childhoods rarely gives much insight. I don't care who they slept with, or dined with. With prolific writers, if everything they wrote is discussed, it is usually necessarily in an incredibly superficial manner. The book on Flaubert that I discussed a few weeks ago was sort of a biography, but it was precisely what a writer's biography ought to be and rarely is - in examining Flaubert's juvenile writings, the author, Cullers, looked at them as a series of experiments, a stumbling toward a specific style by finding ways of dealing with specific difficulties. There was something a little bit artificial in how much emphasis was put on the free indirect style as the final solution to an overriding concern, but it was put forth convincingly, and the whole book was about Flaubert's books and not about his personality or the banal details of his private life.
Perhaps none of this is worth saying, but it's the first thing that comes to mind in trying to talk about the book I finished reading yesterday, a biography of Raymond Roussel. The author, Francois Caradec, is an oulipo writer, as is the translater, Ian Monk (I got the book in English), which led me to expect something a bit more unconventional. Still, in this case, the style fit the subject. There was something obsessive about the archival work that went into writing the book, and the minute details that were included are appropriate to a writer whose books obsessively describe things like carnival parades at unbelievably exhaustive length. There was also an overall project and a clear narrative, in a way you don't find in many lives. If both oulipo writers and Roussel are fond of games, procedures and puzzles, Roussel himself is a kind of puzzle - the author spends a lot of time talking about the things he doesn't know and can't explain. Roussle is both mysterious, and naively predictable.
I don't know if you know anything about Roussel. I might have spoken to you about him in the past. What's most well known about him is the procedure he used writing some of his books which he described in his posthumous work "how I wrote certain of my books", which he always planned to have published after his death. He would spend a lot of time finding words with double meanings or similar sounds and string them together in nearly identical sentences with wildly different meanings. The most famous pair are "les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billard/ les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux pillard", the first sentence meaning "the white letters on the cushions of the old billiard table", and the second, "the letters written by the white man about the hordes of the old pillager". An entire book is structured around a link between scenes evoked by the two sentences, although the sentences themselves don't actually appear in the book. That book has countless other scenes that are structured by similar accidents of language - in other words, Roussel didn't start with characters or a plot, he started with puzzles that he set himself; how can I connect these two things? He made his challenges as intricate and complicated as possible. He wrote whole novels in verse, and though he was trained as a musician, the verse novels don't read like real poetry. There's some sort of basic rhythm or melody lacking, which is to say the rhymes and twelve syllable lines seem to be there purely as an additional restraint he had to write around. His work isn't normally described the way I'm describing it. He's usually presented as a complete madman (and I would like to talk somewhere about the question of sanity, largely because he's hard to classify as sane or mad. He isn't delusional or given to fits, or anything of the sort, but there is a sort of disconnect between him and the world that's larger and more evident than with most people. It made him impossible to know or get close to, as was observed by many people who tried, and it is interesting precisely because it brings to light the area where the sane/insane dichotomy breaks down. This probably sounds banal, but the relationship between misfits and mental illness fascinates me, and I can explain why - at least partly). Anyway, Roussel's books really are bizarre, but their strangeness leads people who are aware of this procedure he occasionally used to ignore the fact that working within strict constraints is not particularly eccentric, even if Roussel is an extreme case and gives himself a somewhat unusual set of constraints. You can, of course, see why he was eventually picked up by the same writers group that was responsible for a whole novel that doesn't use the letter 'e' a single time (I don't know whether Perec himself was a big Roussel fan). That this particular famous procedure wasn't all that extraordinary becomes that much clearer if you look at some of the stuff that Mallarme wrote - for instance the poem beginning "ses purs ongles..." meaning "her pure fingernails...", he first three syllables of which sound identical to "c'est pur son", meaning "it is pure sound", basically declaring that the poem is sound devoid of meaning (I'll talk elsewhere about Mallarme and the fact that his poems never really are devoid of meaning, even when they take absence of meaning as a theme). You can also think of Mallarme's famous poem in -yx, which takes one of the most obscure difficult sounds to make rhymes with as the central rhyme, just for the sake of the challenge this poses. Perhaps this is all to obvious to be worth bringing up (I could start talking about dodecaphonic music or a hundred other things), but there does often seem to be a general desire to see Roussel as an archetypical madman.
As I said before, it isn't entirely wrong to see Roussel as an extreme eccentric. His books are incredibly weird, they have basically no narrative development most of the time. He has a whole book which is a scientist bringing visitors around his laboratory to witness the chemical he has made which causes dead people to play out a certain moment from their past lives, and you see scene after scene after scene of disconnected single moments. He has talking heads and lights made of veal. The surrealists were among the first ones to pick up on his writings and praise him, but Roussel thought the surrealists were all a bit vague, and he kept wanting mainstream popularity. His heroes were Jules Verne and Edmond Rostand. There something both touching and upsetting about how desperately he wanted to be praised by the general public and how baffled he was that he didn't receive it. He constantly wanted medals and honors of any sort and for anything. He submitted patent applications, and wanted to have a chess move named after him. He was incredibly rich, and had to pay to have all his books published. Not only did he pay for extremely expensive editions on Japanese vellum, but he imagined that if his novels were made into plays, he might get more attention, so he rented out theaters, paid outrageous amounts of money for well-known actors and musicians and stage designers, not to mention special effects, and put on these elaborate, spectacular performances that got universally panned (though eventually he started putting on shows by invitation only and party because of his surrealist supporters he was able to drum up good-sized groups of partisans to drown out the hecklers and critics).
Andre Breton more or less admitted he had no idea what was going on in Roussel and sort of joined in the rest of the surrealist group in supporting him simply out of solidarity. I could go into detail about who genuinely love him (Desnos, Eluard - and among the somewhat older non-surrealists, Gide and Robert de Montesquiou - whose an interesting figure), but the one supporter who is of interest is Michel Leiris, who I'm going to be working on a lot this summer, for whom Roussel was a friend of the family when he was growing up and who was extremely attached to him both as a person and as an artist. I get the sense that Roussel was probably his most important influence. Later this summer I have to read the book he wrote on Roussel, and the book that Foucault wrote on Roussel (Roussel is the only author Foucault wrote a book about).
I imagine I was going to spend more time in this post talking about Roussel's love of games and charades, his obsessive mimicry, his fascvination with parades and carnivals, and how all of that effected his writings... the whole building up a scene around a set of sounds meant to evoke a similar set of sounds has a clear similarity to parlor games, where the audience has to guess what you are acting out.The childish wonder Roussel brought to those things, goes along with his love of adventure tales and scientific inventions (plus when he saw a dog that could smoke a pipe he instantly offered the owner an outrageous sum to buy it - he would give his incredibly difficult novels to children and be very interested in what they thought), but there are always all sorts of side issues, and without actually giving full fun anecdotes, I find myself dropping names and facts, which I started the entry by deploring, so I'll stop here, and hope I do better next time I post about something by or about Roussel.