Literary Summits

Last night as we watched Inauguration wrap-up coverage, we saw Bryan Williams interview Robin Givhan, a style columnist, about Michelle Obama’s outfits yesterday. She gave a big thumbs up on the First Lady’s fashion sense.

Among all the things that people were buzzing about yesterday, the fact that the First Lady’s style was a major storyline points to the power of style.

Marcel Proust would have been proud.

Proust worships at the altar of style. I just finished “Swann’s Way” and in the closing section of “Place-Names: The Name,” the narrator has an extended reflection on the elegant women of his childhood who strolled along the paths in the Bois de Boulogne.

He remembers “the happy time of my believing youth, when I would avidly come to the places where masterpieces of feminine elegance were created for a few moments among. . . the pines and acacias of the Bois de Boulogne.” (441)

As Lewis Galantière writes in the introduction to my 1956 Modern Library edition, “Proust was reared in the Roman Catholic faith, but he was temperamentally and intellectually incapable of religious belief.”

It’s true, Proust talks a lot about churches, but not much about religious faith. “Faith,” “belief” and “unbelief” are terms related more to Proust’s esthetics – the beauty or ugliness of a thing or person – than to his ethics or metaphysics. Can you say “Sex and the City“?

Yet even this faith in fashion fades over time. By the end of the book, he laments the changing times and the loss of true elegance:

“I no longer had any belief to infuse into all these new elements of the spectacle, to give them substance, unity, life . . . . These were ordinary women, in whose elegance I had no faith and whose dresses seemed to me unimportant.” (442)

At a certain point, the narrator realizes he simply doesn’t care any more. The thrill of the new is gone:

“How could anyone contemplating these horrible creatures under their hats topped with a birdcage or a vegetable patch even perceive what was so charming about the sight of Mme. Swann in a simple mauve hood or a little hat with a single, straight iris poking up from it?”

(Which makes me wonder, What would Proust have thought of Aretha Franklin’s big-bowed beauty of a hat at the inauguration?)

Even when he’s lost his belief in this substitute religion, there is still the “attachment to the old things which our belief once animated, as if it were in them and not in us that the divine resided and as if our present lack of belief had a contingent cause, the death of the Gods.”

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Usually I think of winter as being quieter than the other seasons.

I just got a new hearing aid, so I’ve been noticing sound this winter. Christmas tunes, snow plows at night, and all kinds of lesser sounds – dog barks, cell phone ringtones, even paper rustling – these are filtering into my head with newly amplified intensity.

Today on the bus I finally finished “Swann in Love,” the middle section of Swann’s Way (Vol.1 of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time). Near the end of this section, the glum Swann is at a party trying to forget his lost love, Odette. Out of the blue, the salon musicians start playing a sonata that Swann had associated with the beginning of his relationship with Odette.

In that moment, his past love “assumed the disguise of this body of sound” and he was lifted up. “He no longer felt exiled and alone…” (361).

Proust goes on for the next three pages, working the metaphor from every angle. My favorite observation comes a page later, when he tries to describe the indescribable – to put music into words and explain the logic behind music’s emotional appeal:

“Swann had regarded musical motifs as actual ideas, of another world, of another order, ideas veiled in shadows, unknown, impenetrable to the intelligence, but not for all that less perfectly distinct from one another . . . .

“He knew that . . . the field open to the musician is not a miserable scale of seven notes, but an immeasurable keyboard still almost unknown on which . . . separated by shadows thick and unexplored, a few of the million keys of tenderness, of passion, of courage, of serenity which compose it, each as different from the others as one universe from another universe” (362-363).

Proust uses hundreds of words to get his point across, so sometimes it’s hard to follow what he’s getting at. But in some instances, like this one, he presents with clarity the jumbled thoughts that I never take the time to fully express.

The “immeasurable keyboard” of life – the life of sound – is huge. And the amazing world that comes to us through our ears is a gift. As my brain works to recognize the new sounds delivered by this little device, I realize that there are a “million keys” of sounds that I haven’t heard in quite this way.

But it goes beyond the basic mechanics of hearing. The mystery of music is that it can convey so much without words – whether tenderness, passion, courage, serenity – all the universes of the human imagination.

In J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, the Creation myth starts with sound, not light. And creation is an unfolding song. I think Proust may have enjoyed that thought.

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I’ve been e-mailing a friend who works in the creative sector. He has a million stories in his head and will be a brilliant author once he takes the time to get them down on paper.

I asked him what he would write if given a deadline. “Interesting question,” he wrote back. “I probably wouldn’t get much done [at work] if I didn’t have deadlines and the pressure of knowing I’ll have to show it in front of my coworkers — kind of keeps your eye on quality.”

Why do writers write? Because they have to? Because they have a deadline to meet?

[As I heard Clarence Page, op-ed writer for the Chicago Tribune, say at a conference this summer, “Nothing helps focus the mind like a firm deadline.”]

Maybe that’s the case for the professional writer who needs to put food on the table and a car in the garage. But for amateur writers, or the aspiring (but not yet paid) novelists and short story writers, there have to be other factors involved. I think it boils down to pleasure — or pain.

For some, writing is a release. It’s the chance to describe the world in one’s own terms, without someone else’s filter.

There’s a moment at the end of Part I of Swann’s Way where the narrator discovers the sublime pleasure of getting a thought out of his head and on to paper. He remembers an incident when he’s a boy, riding in the carriage with a doctor, and they pass by the two steeples of Martinville in the setting sun. The sight is breathtaking for the boy and he notes:

“As I observed . . . the sunlight on their surfaces, I felt that I was not reaching the full depth of my impression, that something was behind that moment.” (184, Davis translation)

The sight (and later, the silhouettes after the sun has set) “appeared to me in the form of words that gave me pleasure…” and he asks for a pencil and paper and sets out to describe the scene before it’s escaped him completely.

What he writes is not exactly fabulous prose — he compares the steeples to birds, then to girls playing in twilight, then to flowers that merge into “a single black shape, charming and resigned, [that] fade away into the night.”

But the effect that his act of writing has is what makes the incident memorable:

“[When] I had finished writing it, I was so happy, I felt it had so perfectly relieved me of those steeples and what they had been hiding behind them, that, as if I myself was a hen and had just laid an egg,  I began to sing at the top of my voice.” (186)

That’s why Proust writes. He experiences the world, he finds a way to describe it, and it’s there on paper for the rest of the world to see, even if his readers don’t see the same event the same way as he did. It’s innocent enough when he’s describing landscapes, but as he moves into Part II of Swann’s Way, I can see how his take on society and the characters in it is anything but conventional.

Salman Rushdie said in an interview on YouTube that writers are dangerous because they are subject to no one — they can show the world the way they see it, and that can be a threat for those in power.

And I get the impression now that I’m into Part II that Proust is working through some painful realities, trying to process battles that were fought in salons and restaurants. He wants to show the social spider web and the difficulties of negotiating a love that isn’t socially acceptable. Writing allows him to score points, to reframe the debate, to take it out of context.

It’s also clear that he refuses to go straight to the point — and that is his point. He might have won more readers if he stopped after the first 60 pages, but he has more — much, much more — to say. Like the boy narrator who refuses to obey his parents when they tell him to go to sleep without a fuss, Proust the author is unwilling to cut to the chase and advance the action without taking the long way around.

And, for Proust, therein lies the pleasure:

“And so the Meseglise way and the Guermantes way remain for me linked to many of the little events of that life which, of all the various lives we lead concurrently, is the most abundant in vicissitudes, the richest in episodes, I mean our intellectual life. . . . It is most especially as deep layers of my mental soil, as the firm ground on which I still stand, that I must think of the Meseglise way and the Guermantes way. It is because I believed in things and people they revealed to me are the only ones that I still take seriously today and that still bring me joy.” (187-188)

What brings you joy? Why do you write?

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If Proust and Jesus share anything in common, it’s that they both grew up in small towns.

In “Swann’s Way,” Proust has just turned his attention from his quirky family to the town of Combray itself. And that prompts me to ask, for no particular reason:

If Jesus wrote a novel, how would he describe his hometown?

Yesterday, in our weekly “Greek group” at work, we read the passage in Mark 6 about Jesus returning to his home town — and the incredulous townsfolk, being small-town people to the core, say to each other, “Isn’t this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of . . .?” They can’t believe he’d amount to anything because they know where he’s come from, and who “his people” are.

Similarly, in “Swann’s Way,” the narrator’s aunt could have been the one speaking in the Mark passage. Madame Octave is a rare bird who is both hypochondriac and insomniac (read: the life of any party) — who never leaves the house in Combray, the small town where little Marcel and his parents visit on holidays. Even though she’s physically confined herself, that doesn’t keep her from participating in the town gossip. She watches out her window, asking her maid Francoise to find out the latest on this or that person who has just walked by, and she even passes judgment on the dogs in town…

“One knew everybody so well, in Combray, both animals and people, that if my aunt had chanced to see a dog pass by ‘whom she did not know at all,’ she would not stop thinking about it and devoting to this incomprehensible fact all her talents for induction and her hours of leisure” (59).

Ah, so that’s what people did before TV. It reminds me of the few power outages we’ve experienced in Chicago — how people actually come out of their apartments and houses and talk to each other, from porch to porch. Especially on hot nights, it creates a stir. And in those moments, I’ve thought that this kind of thing would make our neighborhood a more cohesive place — people would actually know each other better and keep track of one another.

But when I read this passage about Combray, I also realize that too much time and not enough people can create a community that’s more than tight-knit — it can be downright snug, in an uncomfortable sort of way. The kind of place where Jesus “can do no deeds of power” because expectations are preset based on his class and his family background.

It’s maybe not a coincidence that immediately after describing the exchange between Madame Octave and Francoise that the narrator switches gears to describe the town’s church in great detail, describing the mystery, the power and the wonder that the place holds for him as a small child. He seems predisposed toward some kind of mystical experience. He describes the church in terms that show that it’s already a thing of the past, a relic that has lost it’s power to impress the general public — but it still captivates the young boy.

His grandmother talks about the familiar old stones of the church building as though they were living, and comments on the steeple, “My children, make fun of me if you like, perhaps it isn’t beautiful according to the rules, but I like [the steeple’s] strange old face. I’m sure that if it could play the piano, it would not play dryly.”

This same steeple is the town’s timekeeper — literally, chiming with the hours — and it’s a piece of the time that he’s trying to reclaim in the book. And the steeple becomes his point of navigation, his guide, “the dear departed form.” He writes, “I am still seeking my path, I am turning a corner . . . but . . . I am doing so in my heart . . .”

My point, if there is one, is that at the same time that Combray seems socially constricting, the memory of Combray’s church remains a guidepost. It stands for the things that have passed on, and for the people who are no longer there.

How does the saying go? Something like, “You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy” (?)

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