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.

The particularity of proper names

As for my own reading, I read two unrelated things this last week that seemed to share a fair bit in common. I'll see if I can flesh that out.

The first was a paper by Cora Diamond dealing with Wittgenstein's Lectures on Religious Belief. I find Diamond frustrating, because she's brilliant, insightful, and sometimes immaculately clear, but then sometimes seems to decide not to bother explaining what seems to me to be the crucial point. But that's neither here nor there.

In the paper, she talks (among other things) about a view she ascribes to Franz Rosenzweig, Kornelius Miskotte, Helmut Gollwitzer, and in a less academic way, Flannery O'Connor. This is a view opposed to the position that any mature thinker has outgrown an anthropomorphic conception of God, a position best exemplified by Norman Kemp Smith, who refers to God as "the Divine" in order to de-anthropomorphize divinity. These theologians that interest Diamond counter this position by insisting on the importance of God's having a name, and of His presence as not just an all-pervading divinity, but as being able to manifest itself in particular places at particular times in particular ways so that the Hebrews, for instance, could rightly talk about God's presence among their people as not just an instance of God's omnipresence.

This insistence that God have a name is closely tied to the particularity that proper names bestow: in calling my friend "Kevin," I associate him not just with a role or a set of qualities, but with his particular self, and if Kevin were to die, it would be no comfort if I were to befriend someone else with similar qualities because that someone else, no matter how similar to Kevin, wouldn't be the particular person that Kevin was.

One thing, Diamond claims, that the particularity of a name makes possible is that the named person can change us at the level of our concepts. She uses the example of George Eliot, who was famously ugly. If one got to know Eliot, saw her lively wit in conversation or read her books, one would come to see her as beautiful, and knowing this particular person as beautiful, despite her ostensibly ugly appearance, would have the effect of shifting our conception of beauty. Similarly, she claims, the idea that God has a name--has particularity--makes it so that God is not simply the word we associate with our concept of divinity, but that witnessing and contemplating God's actions--by considering the ways in which the Hebrew or Christian or whatever God manifests Himself to his people--actively shapes our conception of divinity. And, Rosenzweig and Miskotte claim, only by understanding God in terms of his actions can we understand what kind of responsiveness those actions call for in us.

The other thing I read, totally unrelated, and for unrelated reasons, was a short story by Peter Carey called "The Chance." It imagines a futuristic world in which a race of aliens called the Fastalogians have come to earth and mingled with us. Like the Americans before them, what they bring to the people that they come to dominate is superior technology, canny business acumen, and the ability to promise a better life. Their great product--or swindle--is called the Genetic Lottery, known colloquially as The Chance. For several thousand dollars, you can take a Chance, where your body and face are randomly changed, so that you may come out looking older or younger, prettier or uglier, but with most of your memories and the like intact.

The Chance has a devastating impact on the unnamed society our narrator lives in, though we're only given hints about just how it plays itself out. It's clear enough, though, that The Chance is like opium in China, becoming a universally addictive drug that becomes the most important thing in people's lives. People cease to take any interest in their present role, and are constantly saving for a Change that will thrust them into a new life. We get a sense of a crumbling city, where institutions are left to rot because everyone's too caught up in pursuing their next Chance and aren't connected to the present. (I'm doing a terrible job of relating this story).

Our narrator--a middle-aged man who's unable to raise the money for his next Chance because he spends all his meagre salary on booze to numb the pain of his downcast position--falls in with a beautiful young woman from a well-off family, who he can tell has never taken a Chance because of the comfort and ease with which she inhabits her body. Soon after they become lovers, he learns that she's a Hup, part of a revolutionary organization that wants to overthrow and kick out the Fastalogians, and that is disgusted with bourgeois ideals of beauty. Like senior members of the Hups, Carla wants to take a Chance as soon as she can so that she can make herself ugly and rebel against the societal standards that judge her beautiful. Our narrator is horrified at the thought, and we follow their relationship in the months and weeks leading up to her Chance, as he tries to persuade her to stay the way she is. I find the ending heartbreaking; I don't want to ruin it.

One of the things that the story captured quite well for me was this notion of particularity, this time coming not with a name but with a face and physiognomy. The cliché that beauty is only skin deep fails to appreciate just how much of our expressiveness is uniquely our own, and that cliché in a way does violence against our particularity in insisting that a different physiognomy could just as well express the same person. The Hup mentality, with a few alterations, could be the mentality of Norman Kemp Smith, the view that the essential thing--about people, about God, about life--lies in concepts, abstractions, universals. What I find interesting about Carey's story, as well as the theologians Diamond discusses, is the fierce insistence upon particularity, however superficial or superstitious it may seem.

And like Diamond's example of Eliot's particularity being able not just to instantiate a pre-conceived concept of beauty, but to effect a shift in that concept, what I find moving about the story is that the two main characters effect a shift in one another's concept of what love is, so that what's threatened by Carla's intention to take a Chance is the love that they've discovered by sharing in one another's particularity.

I think there's a lot more to be said about particularity, though I think I've typed enough for now, and I'm not sure what more I might say. One thing to remark upon in closing is a thought a professor articulated for me some years ago, that only language, through the use of proper names, opens up a world of particulars for us. Here he distinguishes between particularity and specificity. I can hone in on identifying Kevin with greater or lesser degrees of specificity by picking out various qualities that attach to him--American, student of French literature, frequently unshaven, etc.--and while sufficient specificity may pick him out uniquely, that uniqueness is merely contingent, as it relies on the fact that it just so happens that no one else shares just that set of properties. The particularity that proper names gives us allows for an entirely different way of picking out uniqueness.