Some of Proust's best writing toward the end of The Prisoner

 The last pages of Proust's volume 5, The Prisoner, bring us back to the kind of writing for which Proust is best known, that is, observations about sensory perception and the effect of certain objects and sensations can release hidden pathways in the brain, leading toward memory and recollection - for ex., the long passage a few pp before the conclusion in which MP wakes in the morning and hears sounds of trams outside his window and detects some of the aromas from the world at work outside of his cloistered room, such as the suds from a washer-woman's tub -all of which remind him of his time at the seashore and his first moments of love for, or actually adoration of, Albertine - and so forth. Toward the end we also get some examples of MP's eccentric or at least unconventional literary criticism, esp his critique of Dostoyevsky that left me wondering whether we read the same novels (Proust would say that we did not). Much of the volume overall, however, concerns his obsession w/ Albertine an din particular his distress at the possibility - the likelihood actually - that she has been engaging in Lesbian relationships even while living w/ Marcel. Why is Marcel/Proust so obsessed with and troubled by these suspicions? A # of possible answers: His own guilt or shame about his own homosexuality? A way to lead the reader to recognize the homosexuality of the narrator (say, to imagine Albertine as Albert, having affairs on the side w/ women)? A way to emphasize the narrator's discomfort w/ Lesbianism and thereby to bolster his masculinity? A way to denigrate Albertine and to highlight her infidelity and duplicity? Finally, Proust on memory: it is a kind of pharmacy of chemical laboratory, where one's hand may fall at any moment a sedative drug or a dangerous poison. 

Despite many great passages, the second half of Proust's The Prisoner gets tedious

 Despite the many pleasures and astonishing moments in Book 5 (The Prisoner) of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, some of which I've quoted in previous posts, this volume in particular seems to be heavily freighted w/ long passages about social caste, class, and just plain snobbery, all of which Proust seems to want to bring down but which, somehow, become the complete milieu of The Prisoner. The first half of the volume is focused on the narrator's - who he at last admits is named Marcel! - extreme jealousy regarding his beloved Albertine, in particular a jealousy about her rumored lesbian relationships with other young women. The novel shifts at about the midpoint to focus on a party at Mme Verdurin's in which the ultimate snob and creep throughout the entire Search, M. de Charlus, arranges to have his much younger and untitled protege/lover play violin in a septet previously unheard by the late composer Vinteuil (Marcel's fave!); the importance of a live performance, we realize, is almost unimaginable today - compared w/ the 1920s when there was no possible way to hear music of high-quality in any way but in concert of private performance. This section of the novel gives Proust leeway to offer many insights on musicology - a high point of the volume - and then concludes w/ many pages of social diatribe: M. de Charlus undercuts the host family, the Verdurins, trying to get all the credit for the performance and the event, making sure that all the guests speak to him personally on their way out while insinuating to all that the Verdurins played no role in staging the successful event - but Mme Verdurin gets her revenge, as she turns the violinist, Morel, against he sugar daddy and benefactor. All of this I found disconcerting and sometimes tedious. Ditto for the 20 of so pages near the end of this section, in which Charlus and others express their contemptuous views on homosexuality; Charlus suggests that a near majority of men are homosexual and tells his friend Brichot, a Sorbonne prof., that someday they will teach homosexuality in his school - sounded like a joke in 1920, but in a way her foresaw "queer studies." The final 100-pp of the volume concern Albertine's "escape" from the "prison" of Marcel's family home. 

Proust on music

 It's hard to write, or even to blog, about literature, but at least this type of criticism or analysis (Criticize is, I think, from the Greek for "to separate") is composed from the same signage/materials as the work under examination: Literary criticism uses language to examine art composed in language. It's much harder, I believe, to write criticism of art or music, to use language to examine and appreciate works of art composed of other signage: sound, light, texture. For that reason, Proust's account of the chamber performance of the Vinteuil septet is one of the greatest passages in In Search of Lost Time (in volume 5, The Prisoner). Especially amazing: Vinteuil, the late composer whose work was almost entirely lost but saved be a few devotees who carefully reconstructed several pieces based on V's cryptic notations, is a fictional character, though several have attempted to ID him as one of the late-19th/early20th French composers (I think of Saint-Saens).  Proust's comments on the septet apply to all music, perhaps to all of the arts - and the comments are made even stranger in the context of this volume, as he sits enraptured by the music and surrounded by all the vectors of a pretentious, competitive artists' salon, with the champion of the music - M. de Charlus - in essence using the performance to advance the reputation of his much young male lover (Morel), and in his annoying aristocratic way judging all of the other attendees and ordering everyone around. I could quote many passages to illustrate the complexity and insight of Proust's comments, but here are one or two: "This song, so different from everyone else's, so similar in all his own works, where had Vinteuil learned it? Each great artist seems to be the citizen of an unknown homeland which even he has forgotten, different from the land from which another great artists will soon set sail for the earth." Or: "The only real journey, the only Fountain of Youth, would be to travel not toward new landscapes but with new eyes so 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 - and we can do that w/ the help of an [ artist, novelist ] or a Venteuil - with them and their like we can truly fly from star to star. "

Should George Saunders continue writing stories similar to his ground-breaking early work?

 I'm feeling like a hypocritical reader (Lecteur, Hipocrite!) but I'm having a lot of trouble w/ George Saunders's story, Ghoul, in current New Yorker, trouble in the sense that it's a long story and I can't even bring myself to finish reading it in that it all seems such familiar ground and could be/could have been Saunders story ca 1990 when he was just breaking through and his works seemed - were! - strikingly original and weird and in their sly way - most were stories about people in some not too distant future in a somewhat Earthlike planet - employed as  human props in various diorama and amusement parks and in the end each story felt strangely allegorical, in that: What if we all are props in some vast otherworldly game? And in fact, aren't we? Plus many stories about misfits and eccentric losers told with a great deal of empathy and insight. OK, I have been a Sanders champion from the outset, though I registered my disappointment in his (only) novel, Lincoln at the Bardo, which felt like it was forced out into novel length because it is and always has been really hard for a writers of stories only to get the major literary props (Munro aside). And then Lincoln/Bardo gets a Booker Prize, first awarded to a U.S. writer I think, so who am I to judge. He was trying something different, for him, and it obviously worked. So here I go criticizing him when he returns to the ground of his earlier success; the guy can't win! But Ghoul just feels so much like material revisited and already bled dry. So I take it back, George Saunders! Try different forms and milieux, you probably have a lot to say. In fact, I did very much like the previous NYer GS story, a letter, sent sometime in the near future, from a grandfather to his young grandson, about an America stepping ever closer to fascism and about his guilt and shame for not doing more to resist - for GS, a straightforward and emotional piece, quite different from much of his other work. 

Some beautiful passages in Volume 5, the Prisoner, in Proust's Search for Lost Time

 I have slowly and attentively been reading volume 5 - The Prisoner - in Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Carol Clark tr. ; now I'm at about the midpoint - 200 dense and often difficult passages covering a sliver of time, three days so far I think, in which not much "happens" in the conventional sense - the narrator, Marcel, spends his days at home in his bedroom (for the most part) as his beloved Albertine, now living w/ him in an arrangement that seems improbable for its era (she's in an adjacent bedroom in the rather large apartment of his family - mother, father, himself + servants), goes off on various jaunts with her friends, leaving Marcel restless and anguished. This volume is entirely focused on jealousy, which Marcel suggests makes his love all the more sharp and intense and gives him the necessary separation from his beloved to analyze, observe, and write. That's a somewhat thin thread, and in some ways we just want to say to Marcel, get over it, get on w/ it (i.e., your writing). We can understand this section better if we know even a little bit about Proust's life, notably that he was a homosexual and had a long relationship w/ a chauffeur (his family's employee, I think); this would explain the access to each other in the family household and would add dimension to his fear that Albertine when left to her own was having sexual relationships w/ other women - sub in the chauffeur, about whom Proust evidently did not wish to write about directly- and the Marcel-Albertine relationship makes more sense. All that said, we don't read Proust for the plot but for the many insights into memory, human consciousness, art, and beauty; this volume has fewer of these "apercus" than we find in the preceding 4, though some are laugh-out-loud (Proust on the insidious nature of publishers, others of showing insight and beauty, such as this description of Wagner's music: "those insistent, fleeting themes which appear in one act, fade away only to return, and sometimes distant, muted, almost detached, at at other times, while still vague, so immediate, so pressing, so internal, organic, visceral that their return seems not so much that of a motif as of a nerve pain." He could be, he is, describing his own work. Or this concise description, admiring one they pass by as he walks with Albertine, a summary of this entire volume: "We find desiring innocent, and hideous that the other should desire." Or this of his life: "Love, no, pleasure well rooted in the flesh helps literary work because it cancels out other pleasures, the pleasures of social life, for example, which are these for everyone. " Or this on his major theme: "Memory is not a copy, always present to our eyes, of the various events of our life, but rather a void from which, every now and then, a present resemblance allow us to recover, to resurrect, dead recollections the there are also thousands of tiny facts which never fell into this well of potential memory and which we shall never be able to check."

A story about the creepiness of the Pence position on being alone w/ a woman not his wife

 After a week in which the New Yorker story was so oblique and pretentious as to be impenetrable (which is to say, unreadable), it was great to see a story this week, A for Alone, by Curtis Sittenfeld, a writers who's always been approachable and intelligent and whose style seems to be developing over time (though I admit most or all of what I've read of hers, since Prep, has been short fiction). What I like about this story is that if first I didn't like it at all. The plot such as it is involves a 40-something fabric artist and mother of twin boys college-age, obviously fully supported her husband, embarks on a new project: she reaches out to men she has known across her life, some w/ only a tenuous connection to her, to invite them to lunch w/ her at which time she'll ask them to respond to a questionnaire regarding the "Pence-Graham" question: When was the last time they were alone w/ a woman not their wife?, and other related queries. the first few lunch/responses were pretty bland and predictable, and I was not sure of her point; then, in what becomes the last of the series, the lunch invite leads to further meetings and developments, maybe pretty obvious, but I won't divulge anything. I have to say that, though the Pence/Graham connection seemed like a slender thread for a story, by the end CS did get me to think, in ways I hadn't or wouldn't expect to, about the Pence question and how it in a weird way, even though most progressives find the question condescending at best and sexist and discriminatory at worst, we are all in some way we hadn't, or I hadn't, though about. Though I am and always will be completely faithful to my wife, there would be something a little creepy by an invitation to a one-on-one lunch from a woman (I suspect and believe the same would be true in reverse) without a clear message as to what the invite was about, who else if anyone would be there, and so forth. Is that sexist? Or sensible? And how far does that remove me from the creepiness of Pence/Graham?