Proust, part 1, in short

To say the least, it’s been awhile since I updated this blog—mea culpa, mea culpa—but life’s busy, times are hard… you fill in the rest. My general negligence of this blog has not, however, been reflective of my actual working progress. I’m quite ecstatic to report that I’ve finished Proust’s Swann’s Way and basically fell in love with it. I’m such a sucker for a good nostalgic ramble and this novel was that plus some of the most eloquent and sensual prose I’ve ever encountered. I’m actually meeting up with some friends from the English Dept tomorrow night to talk about it some hopefully on Wednesday I’ll post the results of our conversation and see what our three wine-stimulated brains can make of the text. Right now, though, I just through I’d run through some of the thoughts that have been of particular interest to me.

The first of which is the tone with which the narrator thinks about and articulates desire. Just like TS Eliot (and other good, proper modernists) the text of Swann’s Way presents desire as an inescapably painful and self-destructive force. Desire is always a drive for that which is lacking, that which is absent, or that which is past. For this novel especially, it’s articulated as a desperate yearning for a relational dynamic that the protagonist realizes is only attainable through memory:
“From that evening on, Swann understood that the feeling Odette had for him would never revive, that his hope of happiness would not be realized now” (366).
Thus half of the tragedy of Swann’s situation lies in his actual love for a woman who appears not to return the sentiments, while the other (and perhaps more powerful) half is tied to Swann’s recognition of the ironic power reversal of their relationship: originally, Swann was the distant recipient of a love-struck Odette’s attentions. And so the fact that Odette did once love him ultimately acts as that which ‘deals the fatal blow’. Swann is forever left “in search of [the] lost time” when his relationship with Odette was more fulfilling.
Immensely introspective, Swann’s Way battles through the obsessive compulsions wrapped up in the actual experience of love, detailing jealousies, hate, disillusionment and depression. Swann’s desire for Odette becomes a masochistic addiction for him, pulling him, with each encounter with her, towards his own erasure and dissolution.

Teamwork!

So Tony and I were talking today, and given the obvious overlap of both our interests and our reading-lists, we thought it might be fun to collaborate on something. After some back-and- forth with ideas, we decided that co-authoring something on Swann's Way-- which we're both currently reading-- might be good fun. We're doing the writing in true Deleuze and Guattari style: someone starts, sends it to the other who adds and edits, sends it back to the first for more adding and editing, and so it goes until we get tuckered out.
I'm pretty sure we decided that Tony was the schizoid Deleuzian and I the psychoanalytic Guattarian.

First off, I completely left off Joyce (whoops!). I know some of you are probably thinking "but, wait, he's Irish, not British...". Very true. But so, in fact, was Wilde. The reason we're more prone to remember Joyce as "the Irish author" over others (such as Wilde) is that Joyce both lived in Ireland (and wrote extensively about it) and was notably preoccupied with the discomfort he felt in speaking and writing in a language that was not his own. Many of his literary masterpieces arose from his internal battles over the role of the British language in his life and fiction; he felt it to be simultaneously his and yet alien to him-- somehow outside his control... always just escaping him.
Anywhoo, Wilde didn't have those very nationalized anxieties and lived and worked quite comfortably in the Britain (until he was imprisoned, of course). So, to finally get to the point of why I'm including either of these authors, its because, although not British, they both represent different and invaluable perspectives on linguistic expression and the power of cultural to shape the personal.

And, as an update, right now I'm about half way through Swann's Way.

Things to Read:

British and French Fiction:
Proust: Swann's Way
Colette: Gigi
Gide: The Immoralist
Crevel: Putting My Foot In It, Difficult Death
Cocteau:
Carco: Perversity
Waugh: Brideshead Revisited
Genet: Notre Dame des Fleurs
Baudelaire: Les Fleurs du Mal
DH Lawrence: Everything
Conrad: (re-read) The Secret Sharer
Eliot: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Forester: (re-read) A Room with a View
Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, The Voyage Out, (re-read) Orlando

Theory:
Irigaray: The Sex Which is Not One
Streit: Joyce/Foucault: Sexual Confessions
Sedgwick: Touching Feeling, Between Men

To be continued...