Monthly Archives: June 2007

I haven’t posted on Proust in a while (which Stefanie’s post reminded me of); I’m not sure why I haven’t, except perhaps laziness — it feels like a lot of effort to pull together a post on In Search of Lost Time. But I have been reading steadily away, and have reached the middle of The Fugitive, the second to last volume. I plan on finishing the entire thing by the end of the summer, assuming nothing unexpected gets in the way.

To be honest, I don’t think I’d be able to keep reading this if I didn’t have a steady pattern of reading 50-60 pages a week. I mean, if I read now and then, stopping and starting, picking it up as I have time and am inspired, I probably would have stopped for good at some point. I would have piled other books on top of it and would have eventually given up. But a regular schedule keeps me going; reading Proust is just one of the things I do every week. When I’m finished reading Proust I will feel a sense of loss, I think. He’s been a constant companion for a year now.

Oh — I just remembered that it’s almost exactly one year since I began reading Proust. Involuntary Memory, the group blog devoted to reading Proust began last July. I wonder how the other members are doing with the book? That blog has languished of late.

I don’t want to imply that reading Proust has not been enjoyable — it certainly has. It’s just that … well, one doesn’t keep reading it for the plot. It’s beautiful and thought-provoking and brilliant, but not exciting. So a little bit of discipline helps me out.

I found the first two volumes Swann’s Way and In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower to be the best so far (I’ve heard wonderful things about the last volume, though, so I don’t know which ones will turn out to be my favorites). The third and fourth volumes, The Guermantes Way and Sodom and Gomorrah are a bit slower going. They still have much that’s wonderful — those long passages where the narrator analyzes his thoughts and feelings in such wonderful depth and detail and that say so many wonderful and true things about life and existence — but they also have long passages describing parties and social intrigues and gossip that aren’t quite as fascinating. (This is one advantage of reading through the volumes slowly — I never feel that bogged down when things get slow, since I’m only reading 10-20 pages at a time.)

I’ve felt that in The Prisoner and The Fugitive the book is closer to what it was in the first two volumes. There are fewer party scenes and more passages of introspection and analysis. These are the Albertine volumes, where the narrator describes his ever-changing feelings toward her — and believe me, they are ever-changing.  Nobody captures the vicissitudes of feeling better than Proust.  I have just finished a section of The Fugitive, about half the volume, where the narrator describes his feelings in response to a big plot event — which I won’t give away here, although someone gave the event away to me a while back, so I’ve spent a long time wondering when this big thing would happen.  It’s a little like reading Clarissa, where big events don’t happen very often, so you learn to treasure the ones that do.

I’m far enough along in the book now that I’m quite sure I’ll finish it, and I know I will be happy that I did.  The world will never look quite the same again after reading Proust.

If we went to Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, everything we might see there would take on the same aspect as the things we know on Earth.  The only real journey, the only Fountain of Youth, would be to travel not towards new landscapes, but with new eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them can see, or can be …

I began Alison Lurie’s novel Foreign Affairs last night and continued reading it for a while this afternoon, and I’m finding it to be the perfect thing to read right now. It’s a novel that I feel I can read for hours on end; although I really loved The Voyage Out, I didn’t feel I could read it for hours on end (maybe one or two, but not longer). I’m in need of something absorbing — something serious, but just a little on the lighter side. Lurie is perfect.

It’s got a lot of things I like — it’s about characters and relationships and emotions and conversations; it’s also about academic-type people, which, although I sometimes feel this is a masochistic tendency, I like reading about. (Don’t I spend enough time among academics as it is?) It’s about Americans in London, so I can read and fantasize about being there myself.

The story is about two English professors from Corinth University, which, since it’s prestigious and in upstate New York, I’m presuming is something like Cornell; plus there’s the fact that Lurie has taught at Cornell for many years. Both professors are conducting research in London. One of them is a woman in her 50s, independent and eccentric; the other is in his late 20s, recently separated from his wife, and very unhappy. So far they have met in London a few times and don’t like each other particularly.

One thing I’ve noticed — a couple of times Lurie refers directly to her text; for example, she mentions the length of a particular paragraph, or in Chapter 3 she makes a reference to Chapter 1. She’s being playful, I suppose, pointing out to readers that it’s a novel they’ve got in their hands, not trying to be perfectly realistic and to make readers forget that it’s a book they are reading. And the tone of the novel is light; it seems like she had fun writing it, and I’m having fun reading it.

I have now finished Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out, and I just finished reading the chapter on the novel in Julia Briggs’s Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. I enjoyed all this reading very much and would like to continue reading more of her work and more about her, although I’m not sure I’ll pick up another novel really soon. But I can see myself reading through Woolf’s novels slowly over the course of a few years. I always talk about how much I love Woolf’s writing, and yet there’s so much of hers that I haven’t read, or that I should re-read. I read both The Waves and Jacob’s Room and found myself a bit bewildered, and I wonder if I re-read them now whether I would have a different response. I like Woolf’s other novels and essays enough to be willing to give it a try.

The Voyage Out is a more traditional novel than many of Woolf’s later works, although even here she is playing around with narrative conventions. I can’t really describe how she plays around with these conventions or I’d have to give away the ending, but let’s just say that the ending does something quite different from your typical 19C novel.

The story is about a group of English people who travel to South America; among them are Rachel Vinrace, a young woman who has led a very sheltered life, and Helen Ambrose who takes charge of Rachel and attempts to educate her. In South America, they meet a group of people staying in a resort hotel, and the novel describes the interactions among all these people — the love affairs, engagements, arguments, irritations, likes and dislikes, etc.

Underneath all these interactions lies much that is deeper and darker. Rachel has many difficult things to learn; she undergoes a sort of sexual initiation that leaves her shaken. She learns about prostitutes in Piccadilly and realizes:

“So that’s why I can’t walk alone!”

By this new light she saw her life for the first time a creeping hedged-in thing, driven cautiously between high walls, here turned aside, there plunged in darkness, made dull and crippled for ever — her life that was the only chance she had — a thousand words and actions became plain to her.

“Because men are brutes! I hate men!” she exclaimed.

Women’s status in society is a recurring theme — the characters talk about differences between men and women, the possibility that women will gain the vote, and the compromises that marriage requires. The novel considers the various fates that await women; one woman is single and must work for a living, and the other characters admire but mostly pity her. For another character, Susan Warrington, marriage seems to be a way out of a life spent caring for an aging relative, but she is heading into a similar relationship with her husband-to-be. And even Helen’s marriage, which seems to be the strongest, has flaws.

Through the course of the novel, Rachel learns much about the flawed, complicated world Woolf describes — and she only ambivalently finds her own place within it. She’s haunted by dreams that speak to the difficulty of the initiation she is undergoing.

The book has a dream-like quality to it, perhaps partly because of its exotic location; the characters feel adrift in a world that is so different from England — they try to recreate English traditions, but it often feels like play-acting. A group of them take a trip into the interior to see a native village and (in a way that is reminiscent of Heart of Darkness) feel themselves increasingly uneasy and disoriented as they travel inland.

The conversations struck me as odd, although they also struck me as typical of Woolf’s writing; there isn’t the psychological exploration in this novel that she would develop in her later ones, but I do see the beginnings of it in the way the characters often seem to be speaking from the depths of their minds. The dialogue doesn’t seem realistic to me at all, but somehow it captures a truth about these characters’ experiences and it works to create that dream-like mood. To me, Woolf captures what it feels like to exist, to be aware of one’s own mind and the minds of others.

I’m wondering what people think about the conversation in Don Quixote between the canon and the priest in chapters 47-48. The canon at times seems very logical and at other times inconsistent. He criticizes novels of chivalry as “foolish stories meant only to delight and not to teach, unlike moral tales, which delight and teach at the same time.” And yet he says that he has read the beginning of almost every chivalric novel that’s been written. He can’t read to the end of any of them, though, because their plots are so repetitive. So why does he keep beginning them over and over?

In spite of being so critical of chivalric novels, he can’t seem to let them go:

Despite all the bad things [the canon] had said about those books, he found one good thing in them, which was the opportunity for display that they offered a good mind, providing a broad and spacious field where one’s pen could write unhindered, describing shipwrecks, storms, skirmishes, and battles …

and the canon goes on for a long paragraph listing all the wonderful things a writer of chivalric novels can write about. He ends his long speech describing how fabulous a chivalric novel could be if only people wrote them well:

And if this is done in a pleasing style and with ingenious invention, and is drawn as close as possible to the truth, it no doubt will weave a cloth composed of many different and beautiful threads, and when it is finished, it will display such perfection and beauty that it will achieve the great goal of any writing, which, as I have said, is to teach and delight at the same time. Because the free writing style of these books allows the author to show his skills as an epic, lyric, tragic, and comic writer, with all the characteristics contained in the sweet and pleasing sciences of poetry and rhetoric; for the epic can be written in prose as well as verse.

He’s so convinced the genre of chivalric novel can be saved, that he has tried to write one of his own and has written more than a hundred pages.

The canon sees so much potential in this genre that he seems obsessed with it. And I can’t help but think of Don Quixote itself when I read the last sentence of the above quotation — Don Quixote has its own “free writing style” that combines epic, lyric, tragic, and comic aspects, with a little poetry and rhetoric and a lot of prose. Is Cervantes speaking through the canon here, working his way toward the new genre that the novel will be?

My reading in Don Quixote is zipping along; I’m nearly up to p. 300 and enjoying it immensely. I’m now in the middle of the first of what I understand will be several long interpolated stories; I remember people saying they get a bit dull and make one long for Don Quixote and Sancho Panza to return, and I will probably feel that way eventually, but for now I’m enjoying the story of Anselmo and Lotario from “The Man Who Was Recklessly Curious.” Isn’t that a great story title?

These interpolated stories are nice reminders of just how interested Cervantes is in storytelling, and I like how he includes one just after the chapter in which the characters — Don Quixote excluded — discuss the value of those chivalric romances DQ is so obsessed with. We get discussions about the value of stories and then we get the stories themselves, so we can think about them theoretically — maybe that’s too strong a word, but we can think about what their purpose is and what makes them work along with the other characters — and then we can experience them directly. I haven’t gotten to the end of “The Man Who Was Recklessly Curious” yet, but I’ll bet when it’s finished, the characters will have a discussion of the story’s merits and perhaps of the quality of the reading (the priest reads the story out loud). I love the way Cervantes includes all these layers of story and response — and I’m only talking about the interpolated stories here, when they are only a small part of all the self-reflexivity going on.

I really got a kick out of reading Chapter 32, the one mentioned above about the merits of chivalric romances; when the priest tells the story of how these romances turned DQ’s brain, the innkeeper launches into a defense of them:

The truth is, to my mind, there’s no better reading in the world; I have two or three of them, along with some other papers, and they really have put life into me, and not only me but other people, too. Because during the harvest, many of the harvesters gather here during their time off, and there’s always a few who know how to read, and one of them takes down one of those books, and more than thirty of us sit around him and listen to him read with so much pleasure that it saves us a thousand gray hairs; at least, as far as I’m concerned, I can tell you that when I hear about those furious, terrible blows struck by the knights, it makes me want to do the same, and I’d be happy to keep hearing about them for days and nights on end.

Cervantes is clearly having a laugh at these people and the simplicity of their enjoyment and their response (they sound like modern-day boys going to see thrillers at the movies because they like the violence and the special effects), but there’s also something charming about this story of the harvesters gathering around and listening to the stories of chivalry. Their pleasure in them is infectious.

After the innkeeper speaks, several other characters give their assessment; the innkeeper’s wife, speaking to her husband, says she likes chivalric tales “because I never have any peace in my house except when you’re listening to somebody read; you get so caught up that you forget about arguing with me.” Maritornes likes the love stories, and the innkeeper’s daughter enjoys feeling sorry for the knights who are mourning the absence of their ladies. These are all unsophisticated ways of reading, and I think Cervantes wants the readers of his novels to read in more complicated ways than these characters do, but I also think Cervantes hopes his readers get some simple pleasure out of his novel too; he knows just how much fun it is to sit around and listen to stories with others or to read them in privacy, so just as much as he’s making fun of the inkeeper and his family, he’d like to be able to entertain them too.

The priest and the innkeeper then to go on to debate the truthfulness of the chivalric tales; the priest tells the innkeeper that some of the books are full of lies, while others tell stories that are based on historic events. He seems to be trying to keep fact and fiction separate and therefore to be a much more sophisticated reader than the innkeeper, who believes, much like Don Quixote does, that many of the obviously fictional tales are real. But even the priest has trouble telling what’s what; of the adventures of Diego Garcia de Paredes, one of the real-life heroes of literature, he says:

he [Diego Garcia] recounts them and writes about them himself, with the modesty of a gentleman writing his own chronicle, but if another were to write about those feats freely and dispassionately, they would relegate all the deeds of Hector, Achilles, and Roland to oblivion.

Even the priest, trying hard to teach the innkeeper how to be a more sophisticated reader, ends up mixing fact and fiction, real life and literature himself.

So when the priest tries to lecture the innkeeper on the uses of chivalric literature (they are “intended to amuse our minds in moments of idleness”) and claims that “I would have something to say about the characteristics that books of chivalry ought to have in order to be good books,” I don’t think we’re meant to take him seriously.

What we have are the priest and the innkeeper with conflicting views of what’s valuable and what’s true, and neither of them is particularly persuasive. The innkeeper is enthusiastically gullible, and the priest is more sophisticated but patronizing and lecturing and lacking in self-awareness.

I see this a challenge to the readers of Don Quixote — can we be better readers than the innkeeper and the priest? We have plenty of models of bad reading in this novel (Don Quixote himself as chief among these) — can we do any better?

A friend recommended Anita Brookner’s novel Leaving Home; this was a book she’d loved and was intrigued by, partly because of Brookner’s writing style, which breaks the “show don’t tell” rule all over the place. This style is one my friend is drawn to because it’s similar to her own — this is the friend whose novel I’ve been reading and giving feedback on. Both Brookner and my friend write about consciousness, what it’s like to live in one’s mind, and do so in an analytical way — although there’s lots of emotion in the writing too — that involves a lot of explanation and summary. This style appeals to me greatly; while I like plot, what I’m really drawn to (and I know I’ve written about this at length already) is character and idea, and there’s something appealing in a writer breaking a commonly-known rule (show don’t tell) and writing something great while doing so.

Although I enjoyed reading Leaving Home, I have to say that as far as analytical, idea-driven, consciousness-exploring novels go, I’ve been having more fun reading my friend’s book than Brookner’s. I don’t think this is fair to Brookner, though; maybe reading two novels in this style at once is a little much, and at another time I would have been more absorbed in Brookner’s book. I liked it, definitely; I just was willing to set it aside a little too frequently.

The story is about 26-year-old Emma who decides to leave her quiet life with her mother in London and move to Paris to study landscape gardening. She longs for a life that is fuller and more exciting than what she’s known, but she also knows herself quite well and knows that she is most comfortable in the order and solitude she has left behind. She leaves home and then begins to wonder what “home” is and whether she will ever feel at home again. Although she learns to be independent and meets new people in Paris — Michael, with whom she takes very chaste walks, and Francoise, who lives the kind of exciting life she sometimes wishes for — she soon enough finds herself returning to London — and then traveling back and forth between the two cities — as she tries to figure out just what she can have and what she wants out of life.

The fundamental question she faces is whether she should push herself to change the kind of person she has been in order to live a more vibrant life, or whether she should accept the quietness, the isolation, the melancholy, as simply who she is, make peace with it, and go on. The landscape gardening she studies becomes a metaphor for this conflict — the careful control of nature she sees in the gardens mirrors her own self-controlled, orderly life, and as she feels ambivalently about her life, so she feels ambivalently about those gardens, wanting, at times, nothing more than to devote her life to studying them and, at others, rejecting the whole enterprise.

The writing is very calm and matter-of-fact, expressing Emma’s personality by both hiding and revealing the emotional turmoil underlying the surface quiet. The sentences themselves are generally simple and straight-forward, almost emotionless; for example, she says of her mother:

We passed the slow day together, reading. I was beginning to mirror her habits, her reclusion. When we embraced it was wordlessly, as if we understood each other perfectly. Away from her it seemed as if there were no end to leaving home.

But the emotion is there, after all, and maybe more present because it is so seldom acknowledged. In this sense, Brookner does show instead of tell — she leaves the reader to intuit the level of turmoil her narrator experiences. The narrator tells us much about her thoughts and feelings — in long analytical passages of summary — but there are also depths she hides.

I will certainly read more Brookner novels in the future; this is my second one (after Hotel du Lac), and I’ve liked both of them enough to be interested in reading them again, as well as picking up more of her numerous other novels.