Lapses

We can see nothing; then, all of a sudden, the exact name appears, and quite different from what we thought we could divine. It is not it that has come to us. No, I believe, rather, that, as we go on through life, we spend our time distancing ourselves from the zone where a name is distinct, and that it was by the exercise of my will and my attention, which enhanced the acuity of my inward gaze, that I had suddenly penetrated the semi-darkness and seen clearly. At all events, if there are transitions between forgetfulness and memory, these transitions are unconscious. For the intermediate names through which we pass, before finding the right name, are themselves false, and bring us no closer to it. (from Sodom and Gomorrah)

I've been forgetting a lot of names lately. Mostly those of actors. I couldn't think of Rip Torn's name for several days or, later on, Isabelle Adjani. Why not consult the IMDB, you might say. Of course, while attempting to retreive these names perfectly unsuitable syllables came to mind. It was like hitting a brick wall. Then, suddenly, the name appeared and, though it was as if the truth had finally shown itself, the name was totally foreign to the concept I had of it when I was stumbling in the dark.

My first fear is that, like my mother, I have early onset Alzheimer's. There is now a test that determines whether one has the disease or not. I don't think I'll take it. How would that information help me now?

Maybe it's my age. I remember talking with a Classics professor years ago who told me the story of a successful businessman who had retired and enrolled in Ancient Greek lessons. He was determined to blaze through his studies in a firestorm of glory just as he had built himself from the bottom up on Wall Street. However, he just could not commit the required declensions to memory and, instead of A's, he barely earned C's. There is a certain age past which it is close to impossible to become proficient in Ancient Greek or Latin, the professor concluded.

I hope that's not the case. Though I played hopscotch with different graduate programs through my twenties and early thirties, I still have a yen to really master Latin the way I never have. I even bought the first volume of Harry Potter in Latin but haven't sat down to decipher it yet.

There is a part of me that is elated not to be in graduate school anymore and to be able to enjoy books for the plot and the suspense and the characters instead of tearing them apart with scissors or, as that dreadful phrase goes, "unpacking their meaning."

I haven't written much this past month. It's been full of ups and downs with my parents and their health. Yet I'm committing to five blogs a month from now on instead of the usual three. Sodom and Gomorrah is already moving in more interesting directions than the overly starched Guermantes Way, and I hope there will be much to discuss--even if my mind is a sieve. But memory is a complex affair that Proust keeps returning to, telling us there as much to learn in forgetfulness as in remembering (and searching for) the past.     
  

Black Swann

Sodom and Gomorrah, the fourth volume of In Search of Lost Time, begins with Marcel spying on the Baron de Charlus and the shopkeeper Jupien as the two men share a quick afternoon tryst.

For, to judge by what I heard in the early stages from Jupien's, which was simply inarticulate sounds, I assume few words were uttered. It was true that these sounds were so violent that, had they not constantly been taken up an octave higher by a parallel moaning, I might have thought that one person was slitting another's throat close beside me, and that the murderer and his resuscitated victim were then taking a bath in order to erase the traces of the crime.

On the one hand, despite the narrator's judgmental curiosity, the scene is as open and natural as society life is fundamentally false and repressed. On the other hand, there are definitely some sinister undertones to this "love scene."

In the next section of the book, what lurks underneath the pageant of nobles at the Princesse de Guermantes' well-appointed party and isn't allowed the light of day becomes warped and threatening.

As she walked beside me, the Duchesse de Guermantes allowed the azure light of her eyes to float in front of her, but undirected, so as to avoid the people with whom she was not keen to come into contact, but whom she could sometimes make out in the distance like a menacing reef. 

Proust calls homosexuals "inverts," as if to emphasize that whatever is not expressed turns on itself.

I couldn't help but think of this as I watched the film Black Swan yesterday. Natalie Portman plays Nina Sayers, a prim ballerina who is adept at technique yet lacks the dark sexuality that the role of the Black Swan requires. Nina has no self-knowledge and she is imprisoned by an adolescent desire to be perfect. What she leaves unexpressed festers in real and imagined wounds that reach what a friend of mine called Grand Guignol for the film's over-the-top violence. (The Grand-Guignol was an actual theater in Paris that opened in 1897 and featured gory horror plays.)

Nina has a claustrophobic home life, surrounded by girlish stuffed animals and an overbearing mother. What's more, the ballet world is self-punitive. We see her strenuous exercises at the barre, and we hear the popping crunches of her toes, and yet these are scenes of self-starvation and a turning-against herself.

Watching Black Swan was a cathartic journey. When Nina morphs from an overprotected, innocent young woman to a mature force of darkness, there is a final release to all of that pent-up emotion. It reminds me of the emptiness of striving for perfection...just as the people at the Princesse de Guermantes' party fight tooth and nail to make their way into the inner sanctum, the creme de la creme of society, only to pose as total strangers to themselves.   

Memoir or Novel?

Just as essayist and memoirist Andre Aciman wrote of his experience of reading Proust: "The seductive power of a novel such as the Search lies in its personal invitation to each one of us to read Marcel's life as if we, and not Marcel, were its true subject."

Mention of Proust brings us back around to the question of genre. What special reach or access does memoir have that the novel does not? Given the enormous suppleness and variability of fiction, the answer can only have to do with the reality status of the subject matter. What gives memoir its special title--and, I think, its growing rather than diminishing place in our literary culture--is the constraint of the actual.
--From The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again by Sven Birkerts

As I have been reading Proust, I've also been preparing a memoir. It's a coming-of-age story about a difficult period in my life. (Hell, who doesn't have a difficult coming-of-age story?) Along with a few examples of involuntary memory (mostly olfactory), I've ransacked the journals I kept for years, mining for the "truth."

Why not write a novel? And why didn't Proust just make the Search a memoir? After all, the narrator refers to himself as "Marcel" at times. Some of the details--such as the famous madeleine episode in which the taste of the big toe-sized buttery pastry dipped in tea evokes an entire lost world--are so immediate that they have to have been experienced by the author. It's like listening to a song and wondering if the sorrow of the country crooner has really been lived or if it's just another conventional ditty about drinking and parting and feeling like your heart might bust open.

I think that to the novelist, it's easier to tell the truth with the broader brush of fiction than it would be if he or she wrote a memoir. Kafka wasn't a bug; Flaubert wasn't an adulterous woman. But what these authors could say about the human condition surpasses what they could probably convey with the stuff of their daily lives.

To the memoirist, fiction is for those who choose to wear a mask. It's from the rubble and confusion of life that the memoirist shapes a narrative. The "truth" of date, time, place--and the people we were and the people we have become--allows for a stark investigation into the beautiful strivings we have as human creatures into the realms of death, sex, and love. The memoir earns its immediacy like a needle pricking the surface of a finger and drawing blood. Yet the memoirist also uses the novelist's tools of detail, description, structure, etc.

I'm glad that the Search is a novel because its that much more universal--and yet the point of view is distinctly that of the memoir. We are nodding off when the adult Proust is struggling with sleep, and we wait for his mother to come kiss him goodnight just as the young Proust cannot find solace in his empty bedroom. Throughout the Search there is a double take that works well in memoir. We see the author as the protagonist and also the current narrator who leads us by hand through the things a child can't understand. In the end, this is the great appeal of the Search--it is both literal in time and place and weaved from dream life, random impressions, and a sense of eternity.