5/25: Reading Proust, Part II: Identity and the Dreyfus Affair

Whenever I read a work of fiction written before the 1960s or so, I can normally be confident, unless the author in question is a particularly sensitive soul, that given an opportunity to address the question of difference (cultural or otherwise), the author will doubtless express an opinion that I’ll find unsettling or at the worst irredeemably prejudiced. Such is the case with Proust, and after reading a number of passages concerning Marcel’s impression in regards to his Jewish friend Bloch and the Dreyfus Affair, I thought it wise to get out the critical magnifying glass and figure out just what was going on.

The contemporary discourse on culture looks something like this to me: if you grew up in a cosmopolitan sort of environment in the last thirty years or so, you probably learned that when speaking in a group composed of people of different cultural traditions, there were certain rules that should be recognized around touchy issues like race, religion, etc... On the surface it’s not much more than propriety (that’s assuming that more than one person from this group will go home and start vomiting the most loathsome language that their discretion prevented them from uttering in a group setting), but it’s also meta-discursive, a way for people who are interested in intelligently discussing the problems of race, religion and culture to address the question of “limits of polite speech” and so on and so forth.

So I’m assuming, that a person of Proust’s sensibility and intellect, were he writing today, would have no problem understanding this manner of speaking – specifically, that one need not profess to be “anti-Semitic” in order to be labeled as such. Alas, society was much less sensitive back then. The scandal that was the Dreyfus Affair split France in two - Dreyfusards, and Anti-Dreyfusards. Consequently, in certain (royalist) circles anti-Semitism came into fashion like the chrysanthemum or the style of Louis XV, and those anti-Semites who might not have vocalized their opinions in the past (or simply had no opinion to vocalize), started crawling out of the woodwork like cockroaches.

That said, it seems to me that the word “anti-Semite” in fin-de-siecle Paris, in the manner that Proust used it at least, applied to the class of anti-Dreyfusards who believed that the evidence of Dreyfus’ guilt lay in the fact that he was Jewish. So that leads me, still hungry for answers, back to the beginning -- how do we deal with Proust’s identity and his portrayal of Jews? I did some reading from secondary-sources on anti-Semitism and the Dreyfus Affair in relation to Proust and instead of unpacking anything for me, they just made my head hurt… A short biography is in order: Proust’s mother, Jeanne Clemence Weil, was Jewish, so by matrilineal descent Proust, too, but he was raised Catholic, and ultimately given a catholic burial, though he retained extremely strong ties to his mother and her family throughout his whole of his life and never denied his Jewish heritage. Politically, he was a (somewhat) vocal supporter of Alfred Dreyfus during the trial (he convinced Anatole Frank to come out publicly in support of Dreyfus), but still moved in aristocratic circles and had more than one friend who was of the extremely anti-Semitic variety.

Though, I don’t feel capable of answering the question of Proust’s feelings about his Jewish Identity, I found a good passage by Ruth Wisse in The Modern Jewish Canon:

“Some critics consider Proust a Jewish writer despite the fact that he was baptized a Catholic… Proust believed that a work of art is not the creation of a single artist but is drawn from the accumulation of memories that reach far back beyond his own life… Proust’s Jewish ancestors assuredly formed part of that accumulated past, but ancestry is quite different from animate life. And though Proust derives from the Jews and shows sympathy with their condition, he is at pains in his writing to show that he does not share their fate… it is surely not the harshness of description that excludes Proust from a Jewish canon, for one can find much harsher characterizations… in Yiddish and Hebrew literature, but simply that his first person narrator emphasizes his own exclusion…”

So that’s a start… there’s also the issue of Swann, who Beckett described as Proust’s double, but that’s for another day.

5/23: An Episode in The Life of a Landscape Painter

Review: An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter / by Cesar Aira ; translation by Chris Andrews. New Directions, 2006.

In the universe of fiction, setting the mood is a practice that critics tend to look down upon, something that seems to suggest forsaking literary sensibilities for the sensibilities of genre fiction (esp. hard-boiled crime, and horror). For better or for worse, the authors who steal the most from genre fiction are those that tend to set the best mood in their work, and the really good ones like Auster, Borges, Gene Wolfe, don’t do it at the expense of their literature. (The truth is, I am a big proponent of mood, and I think almost everything could use a little more of it.) Aira’s novella belongs to this select group of good books that are also capable of entering this expressive space by touching our raw nerves. An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter -- written in historo-biographical fashion -- details a fictional episode in the life of Johann Rugendas, a nineteenth century documentary painter who worked in the physiognomic method of depiction pioneered by the great naturalist Humboldt.

Aira takes the reader along with Rugendas and his steadfast companion Krause (also a documentary painter, albeit a poor one) on a journey from the Cordillera of Chile, to an Argentinean border-town, to the Pampas and back again. While the Germans are visiting the border-town, Rugendas becomes interested in the large carts used to cross the Pampas to the “fabled Buenos Aires”, which move “at a caterpillars pace, which could only be measured in the distance covered per day or per week, (and) provoked a flurry of quick sketches, and perhaps this was not such a paradox in the work of a painter known for his watercolors of hummingbirds, since extremes of movement, slow as well as quick, have a dissolving effect.”

After a week or so, Rugendas and his companion set out for the Pampas with an Indian guide, despite a prolix advisory from Humboldt that a painter would find nothing of a value to depict in a region which was known for its extraordinary flatness. Rugendas, however, has harbored a longtime belief that witnessing the complete and total flatness of the Pampas, a place he describes as “a lunar ocean”, will change his entire understanding of painting. Afterwards, in a series of scene that capture an exquisite, perfectly executed Lovecraftian horror, Rugendas gets his entire face ripped off. The second half of the novella deals with the physical and psychological consequences of his accident, and is unfortunately, somewhat more lackluster than the first, but my feelings might be biased by the extreme pleasure I took in reading the first-half.

For me, the most interesting aspect of Episode is Aira’s exploration of physiognomy, or the idea that outward character/appearance is able to relate certain facts about inward character. The novella explores physiognomy on three different planes: that of art, that of the plant, and that of the human. When the facial twitches that result from Rugenda’s accident frustrate all attempts to communicate meaningful physiognomic information, the entire system of physiognomic painting (or painting that captures the essence of nature), breaks down to absurdity for Rugendas. The idea of flatness, of capturing the void, at first seems in no way related to the violent nature of Rugenda’s facial contortions, but for Aira these phenomena are interconnected – essentially, the impossibility in capturing meaning from signs that either produce nothing or produce everything, that point at which expression breaks down. To a lesser extent this impossibility of meaning is also felt by Rugendas, an obsessive letter writer, when he attempts to convey to loved ones and friends the total devastation of his face; he finds the words are incapable of conveying the magnitude of the accident.

Postscript: In the introduction, Roberto Bolaño compares Aira to “Roussel on his knees in a bath red with blood.” I don’t know if I see it (Aira makes points that are way to calculated for Roussel, who was more interested in the creation of absurdity through calculated production techniques), but I like it.

5/17: Anaïs Nin with Friends in Paris 34-39

Anaïs’ Nin’s Diaries 1934-39 cover her last months in New York -- psychoanalysis under the tutelage of Otto Rank -- and her years in Paris living on a houseboat that came equipped with its own peg-legged skipper. Nin’s diaries are fascinating to me for the same reason that Last Night’s Party is fascinating to a hipster with a cocaine nose-bleed.

The portrait Nin painted of the intellectual community, which she fostered in Paris, was alive with brilliant colors, brilliant for her understanding of the vagaries of human character. Nin’s pen was subcutaneous – she got beneath the skin of some of the great artists, writers, and aesthetes of her time. Moreover, the diaries exposed the difficulties of reading the writer into his/her work or vice versa.

After reading for a while, I began to feel connected to a certain literary universe that I’d only been vaguely aware of before. The amazing thing about the diary, which differentiates it from the biography, or most personal journals, for that matter, was the ability Nin had to balance looking inward and looking outward. The figures that appear in Nin’s diaries are multi-faceted; sometimes she just recounts what they did and said, sometimes they become her own characters (her portraits of these figures often appeared in her fiction in disguise, notably, in Under a Glass Bell). Nin had discovered a secret cross-current between fiction and real life and for her it flowed like the most turbulent underground river. Reading the diaries, one gets the sense that the community of authors met there with their community of books, or if you can imagine a costume ball orchestrated by Ferdinand Pessoa, or a masquerade of Babel ala Borges, where persons come disguised as authors, authors come disguised as characters, and everyone comes disguised as the figures in Nin’s portraits. It will be a hard time telling who is disguised as who, but you can be sure that everybody’s dancing in the same grand ballroom.

I had liked Miller’s Tropic of Cancer when I read it a long time ago, but I always disliked the idea of Henry Miller without knowing anything about him. It must have been a nagging suspicion that anyone sleazy enough to write Tropic must have been even sleazier in the flesh. When I read his charming mini-novella The Smile at The Foot of the Ladder, I became even more confused. Who was this Henry Miller? After reading Nin’s diaries, I realized that the contradictory nature, the sleaze and beauty that Miller wrote about were not necessarily Henry Miller – really, the dialectical relationship between those two forces was something closer to the real Henry Miller. Miller’s books only hinted at this self, Nin grasped it (one day she'd be praising Henry for his insight and inventiveness; the next day she'd be condemning him for his detachment and short-sightedness). She was the better writer of the two.

Nin’s community is, of course, bigger than just Anaïs and Henry. I met some old and new friends: Artaud shows up on several occasions; the shrink, Allendy, who Artaud used to beg for drugs is around; there’s parties at Carpentier’s house before he wrote The Lost Steps; there’s Laurence Durrell; there’s the shadow of Andre Breton, or at least the shadow of his hard-won arrogance.

Aside from those obfuscating textual masturbations that give me so much pleasure, there’s also Nin’s brilliant portrait of the intellectual community of the time, the generation that squeezed between the traditions of the early American moderns of the lost generation like Hemingway, Stein, and Fitzgerald, and the beats like Kerouac, Burroughs, and Ginsburg, who would pick up the torch a decade or so later. As far as I know, Nin’s generation in Paris is nameless. They not only had to squeeze between the fattened calves that were the literary talents of those generations, there was also the Great Depression; the arts had been wiped out of Germany by the Third Reich, following the short-lived decadence of the Wiemar Republic, Spain was war-torn with more than one brilliant mind on the front line; in short, their importance was overshadowed by war and politics.

Anaïs Nin’s work possesses a rare sense of desperation and her contemporaries knew that it wasn’t hard to see the black clouds on the horizon. They only had so much time before their homes would be reduced to smoldering ruins. In a strange way, reading Nin’s diaries gives an optimistic luster to many writers who seemed, on first read to be staring into the mouth of hell as they wrote. In Miller and Durrell’s prose, awash with the scum of humanity, and Artaud’s writings, the scum of the mind, Nin allows us to reevaluate the sense of desperation. Writers don’t rush to finish their masterwork when the inevitability of universal death hangs over their shoulders, they rush to finish something because that sense of doom contains the possibility of new life.

5/16: Reading Roberto Bolaño: Part I or “A Love That’s True”

I have long harbored a secret belief that the Latin American Authors of the past 50 years, or so, are superior to the American ones (with a few notable exceptions). After finishing Roberto Bolaño’s story collection Last Evenings on Earth last summer, which I picked up after reading a review in BookForum titled “Dead Calm” (I mention this only because that phrase has stuck with me in all my subsequent readings of Bolaño), I began to develop a somewhat unhealthy obsession with the aforementioned author. I can’t say that I was blown away by Last Evenings -- only about half of the stories survive a second reading. But something touched me about them, something like the foreboding Mexican/Chilean/Spanish sky that is always on Bolaño’s horizon -- these stories were inhabited by a sublime. To clarify, I’m thinking of a particular variety of the sublime, a unit isolated by Anne Carson in her essay “Monica Vitti and the Sublime”, a unit that consists of punching someone in the face via a particular reading of Longinus or, if you will, the last scene in La Notte, in which, legend has it, Antonioni punched Monica Vitti in the face in order to draw the sublime out of her. Or as Bolaño would end that particular parable: ...and then the fight begins.

In the fall of 2006 I moved to NYC for an internship at FSG. I was sitting in their lobby waiting for my grand tour, flipping through their spring catalogue when I happened upon a two page spread for The Savage Detective, the first of Bolaño’s long novels to be translated to English. Tears of joy were quickly manufactured. As soon as the advanced reader’s copies came in a few weeks later, I grabbed the first one I could get my dirty little paws on, devoured it in a matter of days, then like a mother bird feeding her young, regurgitated it and devoured it again. Needless to say, it did not disappoint. Soon afterward I spoke with translation’s editor LS about my impressions of the book and we discussed how reading Savage Detectives transported you in a way that few books could, that your life became mediocre and meaningless in comparison to Bolaño’s. I would add that it isn’t just that it transports you, which plenty of books do, but it makes you long for the lives you never led and the friends you never had. I will not hesitate to add that if you can’t feel Bolaño, like some reviewers who have bemoaned his repetition of themes and the messiness of his prose, I believe that your soul lacks a certain human quality that is necessary to fully illuminate the darkness of Bolaño’s prose. Part of Bolaño’s brilliance is his capacity for failure, his comedic sense of the failure of self. James Wood (who wrote the NY Times review for Savage Detectives), who I respect despite certain conservative critical tendencies, wrote about the plight of self in his book The Irresponsible Self : On Laughter in the Novel. According to Wood, the idea of the novel is to capture that essential element of self through the use of character, and this effect, so Wood, is often achieved through the use of humor. Specifically, he differentiates a fundamentally religious comedic sense in which humor is meant to teach a lesson to a sublime sense of humor through which an intangible sense of sadness is reached. No wonder he gave Bolaño such a glowing review.

When I finished the canon of Bolaño’s novels available in English translation, it occurred to me that I had developed an oft-articulated complex endemic to the landscape of literature: I had a new favorite author. This term should rarely be applied, but in my cosmology, I now have a new deity that ranks with (okay, ranks a bit below), those heavyweights like Kafka, Pynchon, Borges, and Roussel. This is my tribute to our love (not mutual), a sort of progressive essay in parts: part biography, part criticism, part literary travelogue. More to come...

5/15: Reading Proust in Solitude: Part I

My roommate SW & I have been reading Remembrance of Things Past. Having both relocated to Portland OR, we have been experimenting with different levels of isolation -- the impetus for this experiment can be directly linked to the notably lower levels of intellectual substance in aforementioned metropolis. Everything moves at a snails pace here; I explained to one friend that it’s like the episode in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas where Thompson reflects on the state of drug-culture: the high tide of Haight-Ashbury rolled back from Portland sometime in the 70s then two decades later the tide of Grunge rolled back from Seattle, and now all that’s left are the dead crustaceans and deep-sea fish stuck in the sand.

That said., this is the best possible time to beginning reading Remembrance, a novel, that I, like most of us, started at some point, put down at some point before the end of the introduction, then condemned as a waste of time like one of Proust’s perspective publishers (50 pages, and he’s still in bed – are you mad?). Well, the truth is, when you spend about as much time in bed as the invalid in the novel/Proust, and when your friends from far away call and ask you what your plans for the weekend are and you tell them: I plan on spending some time with Proust or could imagine yourself saying such a thing, then this is the best possible time to start reading… Having finished the first two books, I’m going to sit back and reflect on what it means to read Proust now, what it means to be alone when you’re doing that, and why Proust is sometimes your only friend.

Proust was a true original, and if you’re not convinced, he spells it out for you in the Guermantes Way when he describes his reaction to Berma’s performance in Phedre: “The talent of Berma, which had evaded me when I sought so greedily to seize its essential quality, now, after these years of oblivion, in this hour of indifference, imposed itself, with all the force of a thing directly seen, on my admiration. Formerly, in my attempts to isolate the talent, I deducted, so to speak, from what I heard the part itself, a part common to all the actresses who appeared as Phedre, which I had myself studied beforehand so that I might be capable of subtracting it, of receiving in the strained residue only the talent of Mme. Berma. But this talent which I sought to discover outside the part itself was indissolubly one with it.”

Proust may not have invented the practice of solitude in the novel, but he rarefied it to the point where he could extract its essential essence: memory. Few novels had successfully done it before Remembrance. Flaubert’s criminally underappreciated Temptation of St. Anthony, Huysmans’ Against Nature, and Dostoevsky all spring to mind. But solitude cultivated only madness and decay for these authors, not the sublime state of withdrawal that Proust cultivated. The excess of his reflection was not his downfall but his enlightenment.

Proust withdrew from society to write Remembrance; he rarely left his cork-lined room in the years of its production. It wasn’t just the feeling of having "already done it all" that drove him to do it, but also the desire to critique the society he once glamorized then frequented – at some point he discovered that these socialites did not even operate within the framework of their own social code. Throughout Remembrance Proust outlines the successive stages of appreciation, love, or whatever you want to call it. He knew that all names take on many disguises and meanings over time. They are glamorized (like the Balbec of his imagination), then they disappoint (like the Balbec of reality), then they build into something sublime (like the Balbec illuminated by Elstir & the his girlfriends), and then most of them crumble. The residue of this crumbling of signs allows Proust (and us) to evaluate these ruins: some are beautiful and some are only rubble. We rarely make these connections when we are wrapped up in the world they inhabit. Proust knew it took solitude to let these events fold out into memory proper.

5/14: Review -- Forever Changes

33 1/3 – Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans, 2003.

First, a bit about Continuum Press’ 33 1/3 series: Continuum Press lets critics, super-fans, whoever, write books on their favorite albums. Skeptical? Hold on... So far, they’ve covered classic albums, a few oddities, and at least one extremely questionable album (Celine Dion for god’s sake?). Forever Changes is the story of Love’s seminal 67’ album, written by a former editor-in-chief of Bookforum, Andrew Hultkrans. A friend of mine lent me the book. He told me: I had picked it up expecting something light like cheese and crackers, but this was not the case. The book was horrifying and put me in a horrible mood, eschatology, the Watts Riots, the Manson Family murders, drug-addiction… Great, I said, I’ll read it.

Hultkran’s tribute to Forever Changes is almost a tribute in spite of the album, more of a tribute to the neurosis of Love’s dynamic front-man, the legendary Arthur Lee. At the time of the album’s recording, Lee, once a Sunset Strip socialite, was beginning to withdraw further and further into his own cocoon. Hultkrans brings us on board the bad-trip that was ‘67 L.A., comparing the cultural climate, and Lee’s growing paranoia as he holed up in Das Schloss with a fridge-full of LSD, to the paranoid vision of 60’s writers and playwrights like Thomas Pynchon, Joan Didion, and Peter Weiss (notably, Marat/Sade, one of Lee’s favorite plays). Arthur Lee had a presentiment at the time that Forever Changes was being recorded: he was sure that his days were numbered.

Hultkrans seems to make the connection, though not explicitly, that the myth of Arthur Lee was bigger than the album, that Arthur Lee necessarily acquired the status of prophet through his on-stage preaching (though Hultkrans prefers to call it “Insiting to Riot”). There is a brilliant discussion in Forever Changes (the book) on the nature of prophecy and the role of the prophet in American culture. Hultkrans links Lee’s position to a tradition of false prophet-hood, though the term is not necessarily pejorative – really it’s an attempt to dissect how listeners respond to prophet-hood and the idea that “if you don’t take the message the person behind you might.” Unfortunately, this eventually winds around to the inevitable heavy-is-the-head-that-wears-the-crown comparison to Jim Morrison. I am going to venture a guess and say that, perhaps the reason Love and Arthur Lee have aged like fine-wine, while Jim Morrison and the Doors, have garnered something of a reputation for doped-up baby-boomer bullshit (Morrison couldn’t sing and was mostly illiterate, irregardless of popular opinion), is because the people raised Arthur Lee on an altar that was broken before they even got there. Lee’s soul contained the substance of time, he chose to run away, rather than come out to society, and that’s how he confronted the distress that was 67’ – in spite of himself. He was a prophet because the reclusion of LA that began after the Manson Murders, had already happened to Arthur, it was if his mind was the lens through which the sixties were refracted through – the renouncing of the Summer of Love and the embrace of the Winter of Disillusionment that followed it, which of course are the big theme of Hultkran’s book. The only other musical icon I can think of, who captured the moment like Arthur Lee did was Sly Stone on There’s a Riot Goin On’.

5/9: The Years of the Manifesto

The old masters of modernism used to write manifestos like they meant it. The phantom of Marx’ manifesto haunted a whole generation of intellectuals in Europe, and another generation in the states, and it got to be that sooner or later most of the *great* artistic minds were possessed by this phantom, or at least its possibility. Everyone had a polemic, a patricide, a system to crush like a cockroach, a bourgeoisie to alienate (or integrate, depending on how you look at it) – Marinetti wrote the manifesto on art & violence, Breton wrote the manifesto on art & madness, Tristan Tzara wrote the manifesto on art & anarchy, Amiri Baraka wrote the manifesto on black power in the arts. Everyone was so angry. So angry that they never considered one of the great tenants of modernism: entropy, that is, the cosmic inevitability of decay. With time paper would deteriorate, structures would crumble, minds would drift, and what began as heedless cultural rupture, would never see the light outside of the singularity it had created₁, and after a while all the great friendships ended, the great loves split apart, and now we look back at our *golden age* with a deep nostalgia for its failure.

Why the nostalgia for the years of the manifesto? Perhaps we are attached to the idea, like all great villains, of revealing the entire plot, then not succeeding, then spending the rest of our days following the bread-crumb trail we left in the process. Perhaps the current cultural climate has made us too languorous for all that legwork, all the new vocabulary that must be created or redefined, the neuroses, but we still love the idea of having failed. The idea of failure justifies itself, so ingeniously so that it has become a consumer trend in the art, literature, music, etc…, having done nothing we often reach, what we believe to be, a sturdy, objective judgment on the limits of human possibility. This is a *huge* generalization, I know, but one I am comfortable incubating in. The word is: there are still real, first-class failures out there, those who have attempted to achieve startling originality, and did not. I’d like to think of this space as an incubation period in that grand idea.

¹Perhaps Marinetti was vaguely aware -- his manifesto suggested that his own head be raised on pikes outside the town gates ten years from the date the manifesto was written, but it doesn’t seem that he really wanted it that bad.