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.  

The Sense of Relief

Well, at this point in the social calendar, when anyone invited the Duchesse de Guermantes to dine--with great urgency, in case she was already engaged--she would turn down the invitation with the one excuse that no society person would ever have thought of: she was about to set off on a cruise--"Quite fascinating, my dear!"--of the Norwegian fjords. Society people were thunderstruck by this, and, without any notion of following the Duchesse's example, nevertheless derived from her project the sense of relief you get when you read Kant, and when, after the most rigorous demonstration of determinism, it transpires that above the world of necessity there is the world of freedom. (from The Guermantes Way) 

I remember the sense of relief I felt several months ago when I realized that I wasn't bound to live the life I was supposed to live. I needn't worry about the ruler of life and being within the exact centimeter of where society dictates one should be (in a menacing way at times) when it comes to studies, career, marriage, children, etc. Even in these liberated times, even in Lower Manhattan, there is constant pressure to conform.

When I was in high school, I assumed I would have four children and home school them all while my carpenter/poet husband fed the fireplace each evening in our renovated farmhouse in Vermont. I'm not sure where this fantasy came from, yet my life veered off the tracks by the time I started college. I've spent years trying to catch up, yet I've also abandoned false expectations. At this point, I may never have children. And 40 isn't a death knell.

I remember sitting in the back of a church on a wooden pew several years ago. I was attending a 12-step meeting. (I won't say which one.) One distraught woman was sharing and she had a catch in her voice. At the end of a litany of complaints and miserable happenings in her life, she finished with a sob. "And I'm thirty-seven!" she said. That was code for: "And I'm not living the life I was supposed to live! Feel sorry for me!"

I love unconventional women such as Heloise (the learned Parisian woman from the Middle Ages who loved and lost her beloved Abelard and ended up a nun with embers of passion still burning in her loins and in her letters) and Frieda Kahlo (the Mexican painter who expressed herself and her narrative of physical suffering in graphic terms and lived life without worrying how people would peg her).

Who knows where I'll be in ten years? I may be in Paris; I may be in Rome. I may be meditating in a small town in India. I may be happily married; I may enjoy my solitude. I may have a second act that will make up for everything before it.

Wherever I am and whatever I am doing, I will try to abandon the ruler. Because, according to the ruler, I'll never measure up.

I hope I have plenty of friends and lovers and dogs and cats. I'll shred my college newsletters that bring glorious tidings of what everyone has been up to and use them as mulch for my garden. Isn't it a relief to finally understand that you have and are everything you need to have and be?   

Down and Out

Madam Monce: "Salope! Salope! How many times have I told you not to squash bugs on the wallpaper? Do you think you've bought the hotel, eh? Why can't you throw them out the window like everyone else?"

...the walls were as thin as matchwood, and to hide the cracks they had been covered with layer after layer of pink paper, which had come loose and housed innumerable bugs. Near the ceiling long lines of bugs marched all day like columns of soldiers, and at night came down ravenously hungry, so that one had to get up every few hours and kill them in hecatombs. (Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell) 

I thought that in honor of the holiday season and the news that the chasm between the rich and the poor is larger than its been in decades, I would take a break from Proust's drawing room dramas in The Guermantes Way, and focus on those who are prey to creepy crawlies. (Though, I must admit, Orwell awakens a certain pleasure in the grotesque.)

Last Saturday, while so many were going hungry, I joined a luncheon at the Scandinavia House, with an open buffet table creaking under the weight of a variety of Nordic delicacies, from herring to pork meatballs to gingerbread, and then plenty of steaming glogg to go around. (Of course, I'm a fun-loving teetotaling vegan, so I focussed on the mashed potatoes.)

Yesterday, I attended Meet Me at MOMA with my mother and, as we were looking at the controlled chaos of an early Jackson Pollack and talking about the postwar art world, one woman said she couldn't bear to read the front page of the newspaper anymore. "I know," the young guide replied, "I was an activist when Bush was in office and now I just don't want to pay attention to politics at all." That numbness can be felt everywhere.

The holiday season lends itself to gloomy reminiscences along with its good tidings.

In the "search of lost time" corner--I realize that often we must act (feel the fear and do it anyway!) when an opportunity presents itself. That moment only lasts a split second before it's lost forever.

It's been an entire decade since I missed a chance to have a relationship with someone I still have feelings for and, I'm afraid to admit, someone I google from time to time. Talk about a phantom in the machine...he is so close, yet so far. To cultivate this thorny regret is unnatural but strangely satisfying in a compulsive way, like emptying the lint filter in the dryer or reading US magazine.

But enough of that! This is the season of birth and beginnings. It's been so cold. I fear for those with empty stomachs and nothing to protect them from the elements. I'm grateful for everything in my life--even that black L.L. Bean coat I wear that looks like a burqa and the gloves I bought yesterday on a street corner.

In spite of all the fear and all the lack, there's a certain solemn magic to the season as in this spiritual by Jay Althouse:

Whisper! Whisper! Tiny baby in a manger lay.
Whisper! Whisper! Baby born today!
Whisper! Whisper! Tiny baby, he sleep in the hay.
Whisper! Whisper! Baby born today.  

Men Who Write About Women

Can male novelists portray female protagonists convincingly?

This is the question I had in mind when reading Proust and Larsson side by side for the past couple of weeks. To compare Larsson's Lisbeth Salander to Proust's character the Duchesse de Guermantes is to compare an alienated, fiercely boyish outcast to a voluptuous social insider, privy to the upper echelons of Parisian high society.

Lisbeth, with her piercings and tattoos, has odd looks compared to the more conventionally beautiful Duchesse de Guermantes, whose eyes "captured like a picture the blue sky of an afternoon in the French countryside, broad and expansive, drenched in light even when there was no sun." Instead of old t-shirts with quirky statements printed across them and leather pants, the Duchesse wears a "ballooning skirt of painted blue silk."

Yet, Salander has a strong moral code that leaves the petty-minded Duchesse in the dirt. "I thought at least that, when she spoke, her conversation would be profound and mysterious, strange as a medieval tapestry or a Gothic window," Proust writes. Instead, "'What a bird-brained woman!' I thought to myself, still smarting from the icy greeting she had given me. 'So this is the woman I walk miles to see every morning, and out of the kindness of my heart!'"

Does the male author's sexual orientation help or hinder him when conjuring up his female characters?

Proust, as a homosexual, is often accused of having created female characters by simply prettifying the men in his life. In fact the (heterosexual) English critic Cyril Connolly wrote in his 1938 book Enemies of Promise that "homosexual novelists who are able to create mother-types and social mother-types (hostesses) and occasionally sister-types (heroines) have trouble with normal women and may often make them out worse or better than they are."

Hogwash! Think of Henry James' Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady or Michael Cunningham's Clarissa Vaughn in The Hours--the first two examples that come to mind. They may be heroines, not "normal women," but they are characters I've lived in.

As Edmund White wrote, "It would be a mistake to see all of Proust's women as disguised men...some of the female characters are unquestionably, quintessentially womanly, such as Odette...or the Duchesse de Guermantes or the actress Berma."

Is Larsson's Lisbeth Salander a man disguised as a woman?

Luisita Lopez Torregrosa writes for Politics Daily, "She's set a new standard: a lesbian/bisexual geeky girl with a bad attitude, a knack for violence, a steel-trap mind, and best of all, she's not a vampire. Could it be that androgynous, industrial-strength macho girls will become role models for women in the second decade of the 21st century?"

And what does it mean that it took a man to create a 21st century feminist icon?

Maybe it shouldn't come as a surprise that a Swedish man created Lisbeth, as Nordic countries like Sweden are the most egalitarian when it comes to gender roles. You wouldn't have a character like Lisbeth spring from a more traditional society like Nigeria or Pakistan or India.

That brings me to a question from Gender Studies 101: What does it mean to be a woman? Does womanhood=motherhood? Pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding...these are foreign territories for me. Am I any less a woman?

At forty, I am "unmarried and childless," which sounds like a wail of misery, but really suits me for the moment. Am I a spinster or a bachelorette? The origins of the word "spinster" go back to the Middle Ages when women who spun wool were able to support themselves on a decent wage. "Bachelorette" brings up images of reality television shows with ten women piled high in a hot tub vying for the attention of the alpha male.

Neither am I Eleanor Rigby who "picks up the rice in a church where a wedding has been" and "waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door...who is it for?"

Still, I yearn to find...someone. The tenderness of a long partnership.

In sum, I don't identify fully with either character. I am neither an aggressive loner like Lisbeth nor conventionally "womanly" in conduct or appearance like the Duchesse. Yet I find these female characters compelling enough to keep reading, no matter that they leapt out fully formed from the minds of men.          

Can Proust Compete with Larsson? Part One

The telephone was not so commonly used as it is today...I found it too slow for my liking, with its abrupt transformations, this admirable magic that needs only  a few seconds to bring before us, unseen but present, the person to whom we wish to speak...suddenly transported hundreds of miles (he and all the surroundings in which he remains immersed) to within reach of our hearing, at a particular moment dictated by our whim. And we are like the character in the fairy tale at whose wish an enchantress conjures up, in a supernatural light, his grandmother or his betrothed as they turn the pages of a book, shed tears, gather flowers, very close to the spectator and yet very far away, in the place where they really are. (The Guermantes Way)

I've seen it everywhere, its florescent cover bobbing all over the subway system like bait on a hook, rocketing to the top of the bestseller lists, even for sale at my neighborhood Duane Reade. I'm talking about Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. During the short time it took to read it, I was zoned out on an adrenaline rush that made me feel keenly alive--over caffeinated, really--and focused outwards as if on autopilot. It was closer to the experience of watching a movie than reading Proust. Its simple, uncluttered prose meant that nothing distracted me from the thrill of surging forward, pedal to the floor--so far from the experience of savoring Proust's dizzying verbosity.

And there's nothing wrong with enjoying a Larsson novel. I remember a former writing teacher quoting Kurt Vonnegut as saying, "All writers are in the entertainment business." But why can't I find Proust at my local Duane Reade, sandwiched between the deodorant and the plastic containers of caramel popcorn?

Proust wrote about a time in which the telephone seemed fantastical. Larsson's protagonist, Lisbeth Salander--an expert computer hacker and shit-kicking Goth gamine--experiences life with a technological immediacy that would be absolutely foreign to Proust. In fact, I think that if Proust had picked up a copy of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, it would be a full-on assault on his senses.

Not that the accelerated pleasures of reading a thriller only date from the invention of the internet. Certainly there was tabloid journalism and many other "low brow" sensationalist entertainments a century ago.

But can Proust compete today with an opponent who speaks the language of the 21st century?

There are certain authors who know us better than we know ourselves. Technology may have changed, the average person has the attention span of a gnat on crack, but Proust relates to the stories we tell ourselves about life and love, our innermost secrets, in a way that Larsson, with his appealing tattooed heroine, doesn't come close to.

Today, a friend (an extremely well-read friend, by the way) compared reading Proust to drinking molasses. I think this verison of Proust as stuffed in mothballs is dangerous. My life is so much richer with Proust in it. (And I probably only retain 10 percent of it my first time through!) He may be a difficult pleasure, you wonder why he carries on about one topic or another, but then there is a dazzling moment when everything is laid bare--the stunning beauty of life when one accepts it as it is, and then transcends it, into a dreamlike state. It's a different kind of pleasure than reading Larsson, but no less contemporary and immediate.   

Franzen and Moore

I attended a reading at the 92nd Street Y last night. Jonathan Franzen (Freedom) and Lorrie Moore (A Gate at the Stairs) took the stage.

Moore's editor introduced her in ravishing terms as the literary "it girl." "Only a fool would take the stage after that kind of introduction," Moore opened. "I am the warm-up act for the lovely and brilliant Jonathan Franzen." She performed a short ditty on this topic (that I imagine she had scribbled on a damp cocktail napkin on her flight from Wisconson), ending with a few rounds of "We Shall Overcome." Like the voice of her novels and short stories, Moore was both nutty and sophistocated in her keen love of the absurd. Then she read aloud dreamily, giving a refreshing, ironic lilt to every line she read.

In his introduction, the visibly nervous Jonathan Galassi (an editor I admire for his translations of Eugenio Montale's poems) stressed the theme of marriage throughout Franzen's work. He remarked that Franzen had started his career wanting to change the world, and has ended up trying to capture it, represent it.

Franzen bounced on the stage with his satchel like a tardy schoolboy. Murmuring that he should have marked his place earlier, he finally opened to a fresh scene at the middle of his novel. He read this excerpt while punching the air with obvious relish. For the record, there wasn't anything smug about him.

It was in hearing them read aloud that I could see the sheer beauty of their words, suspended in the air like poetry. It made me want to go back and reread their novels more slowly (three pages a day) instead of the binge-like way I had plowed through them initially. In fact, I wish I could do all my reading this way, hovering over each phrase like a shuddering butterfly.

When answering questions from the audience, Franzen would stutter a bit at first as he organized his thoughts. Both seemed flummoxed by the inanity of the questions. At the announcement of each question, they both rolled their eyes  and gave a hollow chuckle.

Q: How do you know how to end your books? Moore was eloquent on this topic. The end of a short story arcs back towards the beginning like a radiant light, she said, while the end of a novel looks forward to a future continuation of its events.

Q: Is it a challenge to write about contemporary society? Both books take place around 9/11. Writing about contemporary events was not a challenge, they both concluded, but a necessity. "It would be harder to write about the 18th century," Moore said. What's more, it's a challenge to write, period.

Q: Why are Midwesterners so funny? Apparently, all of the late night talk show hosts are from the Midwest.

Then the reading was over and they both disappeared from the stage to thunderous applause, presumably to marinate briefly in these celebratory juices before returning to their lairs as ordinary scribes, back to page one.