The Blanche du Bois Effect - Part 3

How strange that I should be called a destitute woman!  When I have all of these treasures locked in my heart.  I think of myself as a very, very rich woman!"

This fall from prominence with respect to the humanities has not, historically speaking, always been the case.  Prior to the second half of the twentieth century, an education was not to be considered complete without some considerable exposure to humanistic study.  Whereas nowadays, I would not be at all surprised if some graduates, greedily set on the capitalist highway, obtuse to the humanistic byways, have taken little to no courses in philosophy, art, literature and the like.   This is egregious error; while the capitalist mindset provides the physical basics, it offers little sustenance for the heart, mind, and soul.

So what was it that a humanistic education could give one?  The obvious advantage to humanistic pursuit lay in its emphasis on language, on vocabulary development and the contextual understanding that comes with it.  Also, a certain cultural broadening results from reading into the variety of life lived in every time and place known to man and the highs and lows of human experience.

English departments also used to teach old-fashioned grammatical analysis, largely abandoned in the last few decades in the rush to extirpate from the classroom that which stifled expression and did not produce effortless prose.  (This may be a correct and sensible conclusion with respect to writing finesse, but it bypasses the larger question of whether such emphases on objective analysis of the rudiments of language train the mind as a whole in systematic and analytic thinking necessary in so many fields of study and in so many ventures. Furthermore, by abandoning grammatical analysis, the field deprived itself of one of the few barometers of objective rigor available to it. Thus English as a discipline today is synonymous with a miasma of uncertainty, tentativeness, and unknowables.  The tragic error of so many in this field lay in their solipsistic mistaking of this central fact of their discipline for a universal trait of all others.)

Mitch:  I thought you were straight.

Blanche:  Straight? What’s straight?  A line can be straight or a street.  But the heart of a human being?

Above all, what humanists do, some recklessly, others shrewdly, is probe and analyze the murky undercurrents of human behavior, the underlying motivations and sub rosa drives, as it were, from which they extrapolate, infer, and imply.  What humanities people seem particularly predisposed to, beyond their apparent verbal facility, that more “what you see is what you get”-oriented math/science folk cannot (or choose not to) is instantly assessing the layers in a social context, the unstated motives, the hidden agendae, and making connections to other potentially contributing factors (to be sure, sometimes where they might not exist).  They are un-scientists, as it were, devoted to a view of life essentially not straight, not linear, but amorphous and not to be apprehended by logical-mathematical means, the stock in trade of the sciences.  In sum, they are insightful and perceptive, occasionally mystical, in ways that cannot always be rationally explained.  But they cannot coherently assemble these traits and their findings into a theory.  They cannot empirically demonstrate their observations and explanations -- i.e., they are essentially unfalsifiable -- relying on the intangibles of instinct and subtle sensitivity and a general consensus as to their veracity founded more on feeling than fact.  

I would like to argue that the humanities offer something beyond the tangible and somewhat practical effects made available by science:  the closest thing our secular culture has to religious training, to the development of a certain refinement and sympathy for the depths of despair and an appreciation of the heights of joy, for the value of compassion and sensitivity, for the aesthetic and emotional as valid, crucial life experiences.

In his seminal essay On the Idea of a University, Cardinal Newman describes higher education as a place for the teaching of "universal knowledge" rather than vocational training or research, where students may pursue a broad-based liberal education (the word university itself, ultimately derived from the Latin universus, implies that which surpasses the immediate and personal to encompass nothing less than the cosmos, or at least that which concerns all mankind).  The university promotes "formation of character" and nurtures "habits of mind" useful in lifelong endeavor, applicable to any situation.  Such unfashionable sentiments carry more than a whiff of quaint, old-fashioned notions of literature and the humanities in general as the moral educator of the culture.  (Who, outside of compulsory high school English class, reads the classics nowadays?)  Be that as it may, Newman’s sober assessment would seem to provide a sturdier (albeit antiquated) framework for discussion and imbue sober legitimacy on the notion of the validity of a liberal education.

And yet the taint of Williams’ fragile, voluble heroine lingers.  A hard-headed Stanley Kowalski realist might argue why resist the numbers?  They provide all there is to know that is worth knowing.  But what the Stanley Kowalskis of the world do not always recognize is that the materialist approach does not represent the one and only value in life.  It cannot account for the mystery, the love, the beauty, spirit, and soul that hold us in communion with this world and with the promise of something better to come--that which encompasses and embraces, nurtures and heals.

Mitch:  You might teach arithmetic.

Blanche:  Never arithmetic, sir! Never arithmetic!  I don't know my multiplication tables.  No, I have the misfortune of being an English instructor.  I attempt to instill a bunch of bobby-soxers and drug-store Romeos with a reverence for Hawthorne and Whitman and Poe!

Mitch:  Well, I bet that some of them are more interested in other things.

Blanche:  How very right you are.  Their literary heritage is not what they treasure above all else!  But they're sweet things.  And in the spring it's touching to notice them making their first discovery of love.  As if nobody had ever known it before.

Blanche does have her usefulness--she reminds us what a fragile thing it is to be human, to feel, to trust, to love.  Her tragedy lay in her unsympathetic environs and a culture that too soon discounted her reprobate ways and overlooked the sensitive, refined creature beneath.

Like Blanche and her rattle-trap streetcar, the humanities survive.  As Blanche might say, they provide a cleft in the rock of the world to hide in, one from which we can gain a better understanding of this life and a richer appreciation for its manifold joys, griefs, and wonders.  

Death by Puccini

In questa reggia is a fabulous aria.  I love its stark, fiercely enunciated opening salvo in which Turandot’s brief, telegraphic shrieks pierce the still night air around her—a cry in an operatic no-man’s land.  And then, as if a dream, the tale unfolds of her ancestress cruelly conquered by warrior kings.  A trance, a sing-song incantation ensues.  This was, it should be mentioned, the part of the aria that jazz artist Bob Belden explored in his controversial take on Puccini’s ice princess.  


Belden underlines the uneasy, subtle dissonance (almost atonality) of the first part of the aria, all too easily overlooked in the more extroverted, melodic mountain-climbing of the latter part.  The aria sways back and forth, the keys beneath Turandot’s chants anxious, unsettled over an abyss perilously yawning below, a portal to death and violence poised to open from which, like Pandora’s box of psychological horrors, the passion of the Turandot will emerge. 

And then come the stabs in the operatic firmament—Quel GRIdo e QUElla MORte!  That cry and that death!  And a solo shriek echoing throughout the house, this charge, this j'accuse de Turandot, shatters the uneasy calm after which the tune’s lush, florid yet ferocious strings swell belying Turandot's ice maiden appeal.  Mai nessun m’avra!  No man will have me!  When the reality is Turandot is alive and filled with frustrated passion.  No timid maiden she, here is a woman alive yet terrified by the overpowering forces within her, the lure of sex, the violence of love’s wrenching sock in the gut, the vortex swirl in which she loses Turandot and becomes the captive of the sex-soaked male who consumes her, driving her higher and higher, rage and terror yielding to love and gasps of full-throated ecstasy.  A fight, a duel this aria, a seduction, musical rape.  Tenor takes on soprano, man versus woman. 

The aria ends in a draw.  Turandot makes her case flagrantly, elaborately, operatic excess an embodiment of pain and rancor unleashed to its full, fierce splendor, but Calaf rises along with her, mirroring her vocal thrusts with tenor-tenacity.  As the chorus echoes excitement at the fray, the music recedes, like a tide at ebb, power in reserve, forces mustered.  And the riddles commence.    

The aria demands no more than a splendid singer to convince.  Those jabs, those piercing cries must carry, must overwhelm in a sheer wall of sound; fear must limn ostensible hate; passion must seethe amid the bombast.  Great Turandots have been few.*


  

Eva Turner - legendary English soprano.  Not the typical dramatic soprano with a rich, sonorous middle, Turner's voice was rather high-lying and frigid-sounding to these ears, not entirely inappropriate for the Chinese ice princess.  The high notes glistened while lower in her range the voice could sound somewhat stern and creaky, rather like a headmistress chiding her charges for bad grammar or tracking mud all over her newly washed floor.

Birgit Nilsson - La Nilsson's handicap was always her less-than-ideal Italianate emission.  Her voice sqawked where it should have caressed; rubati, portamenti, and legato were all Italian graces not in her arsenal.  But Turandot was different.  Italian Wagner, as it were, in the long, broad strokes of Puccini's soaring lines, the role's imposing tessitura proved no problem for Our Lady of Sweden. 

Eva Marton - no fewer than three commercial video documents exist of La Marton's Chinese princess.  The Met's 1988 venture shows her voice thickened and unsubtle while San Francisco c. 1992 shows a voice already coming apart with high note wobbling through which the proverbial truck could pass.  But Vienna 1983 showcases Marton at her best.  The role's high-lying range presenting no discernible problem, La Marton musters appropriately gleaming tones.  Even better, to my mind, she rivals Dame Gwyneth Jones as the best acted Turandot.  If the Met and San Francisco videos show a tired Turandot whose cruel edict presents no real psychological threat, in Vienna this is a neurotic, angry woman not to be messed with.

Ghena Dimitrova - My personal favorite among dramatic sopranos can be seen to her best advantage in the open air Arena di Verona, transformed into an arctic-looking ancient Peking, all the more sympathetic for Dimitrova's gargantuan, monolithic, icy Turandot. Her voice has never been heard to greater advantage--the acuti are resplendently full and throbbing, the middle is voluptuous, free of the wobble that later afflicted it, and the bottom notes threatening in the riddle scene. She is attired in a shapeless white gown; her black hair cascades to the floor in great sheathes. She looks like some primitive Kabuki-inspired vision of woman as temptress-destroyer, inhumanly confident and imposing. Her rival Marton may have the edge on Dimitrova in acting, but Dimitrova clearly sweeps the field with the sheer power, range, and ease of her voice. Madame Dimitrova is partnered here with the always reliable, if hardly inspiring, Nicola Martinucci--he looks a bit like an Italianate Sonny Bono outmatched by a physically and vocally grander Cher. 

Dame Gwyneth Jones - I love Dame Gwyneth, although, it must be said, hers is a voice that takes some getting used to.  At its worst squawky, raw, and wobbly, Dame Gwyneth's voice at its best could muster trumpeting laser high notes while keeping vocal unsteadiness at bay.  Her best attribute was the total commitment she brought to all her roles.  Dame Gwyneth was never an indifferent performer; she could never be accused of phoning in a performance.  Her best moments in this Turandot are frequently nonvocal--the long seething stare she shoots Calaf before launching In questa reggia--as if to imply, "How dare you challenge me!" 

There have been more Turandots in recent years tending toward the full of figure and full of voice to the more slender variety.  Jane Eaglen undertook the role for several years during her brief heyday but soon abandoned it--all considered, probably a wise decision.  Where Turandot's tessitura blossoms to thunderous acuti, Eaglen's voice narrows to a pinch.  Alessandra Marc was, during the 1990s and early 2000s, another notable exponent.  Possessed of a refulgent middle and shimmering top, Marc struggled to convey character and overcome the limitations of avoirdupois.  Both Madames Eaglen and Marc are of the heroic phenotype, something of a rara avis in our intensely visual, movie star-struck age. 

Two other Turandots of recent years reflect this shift.  Maria Guleghina has had her weight ups and downs, but her success seems in part to be based on statuesque appeal.  Of the divas mentioned above, only Dame Gwyneth Jones can be said to have evidenced the same.  Guleghina came to the role of Turandot somewhat late in her career, and the voice has suffered for it.  While still possessed of a warm middle of impressive volume, the high notes have become wiry and the chest notes weak.  Even more than Guleghina, Liese Lindstrom is something of a glamazon Turandot, one not possessed of a voice of significant girth but rather some thrust and an appropriately metallic timbre.  Hers is a lithe, visually striking Turandot, striking poses worthy of Erté.  But it is the voice that matters above all in this most cruel of parts, and one wonders how long Lindstrom's essentially lyrical instrument will hold out or whether it too, like Turandot's suitors, will be felled by her riddles.

*The diligent opera aficionado will notice that the obvious diva, Madame Callas herself, is nowhere to be found in the pantheon above.  La Divina was a sublime artist, but one, in this reviewer's opinion, whose genius flowered in the more hothouse subtleties and dramatic exigencies of bel canto than Puccini's broadly drawn battle of wills.  A great Norma, Violetta, and Tosca, Callas was not the ideal Turandot, a role requiring something of the blunt impact of a 747 taking off.  Callas offered psychological complexity, to be sure but was somewhat lacking in more elemental qualities of power and thrust. 

The Blanche du Bois Effect - part 2

Historical and cultural development are obviously complex phenomena, far beyond my layman’s ken. Nevertheless, I feel it incumbent upon me to assay the historian's awesome task and venture some possibly interrelated reasons for this current state of the somewhat lowered estimate of the humanities in the public mind:

1. Increasing mechanization and materialization in the West as a result of the Industrial Revolution. This dovetails neatly with American pragmatism.   America rose to prominence as an Industrial powerhouse in the 19^th century for its fearless conquering spirit and single-minded attention to mass-production. The American Protestant outlook favored none of the Catholic metaphysical, spiritualist mumbo jumbo; hard work paid off not by spiritual uplift but money in the bank.   Nominal Christians, we nevertheless distrust too much religious enthusiasm.   God rewards sensible minded folk who keep their enthusiasm a private affair and spend their hours in the sphere of human toil and material gain.

2. The success of empiricism and its concomitant materialist assumptions vis-à-vis the acquisition of knowledge. There can be little doubt that modern science is unthinkable without an essentially empiricist framework. None of the modern luxuries and freedoms would be possible without the rigor of testing hypotheses against data collected and sorted, analyzed and categorized.   We see this tendency influencing education reform nowadays with its focus on outcomes assessment, based on a business model which values that which works above all else.   Knowledge today is not sought from spiritual advisors but from empirical testing.   Not a day goes by when some study or other is not trumpeted in the press infallibly suggesting the truth as we have known it is flawed, incomplete, or flat out wrong.

3. The victory of the worldly over the spiritual as our inheritance from Renaissance individualism. Even those unwilling to divorce themselves from religious values would be hard pressed to put their faith entirely above when it comes to the settling of practical affairs. Today’s most valued professions are those of a worldly, physical nature: law, business, medicine, science. We have little to no room for the poet, the seer, the shaman healer in today‘s mechanistic-materialistic milieu.

4. Capitalism as the engine propelling forward the science & technology mill.   Marxism as a sociopolitical experiment has largely failed; there remains today no true challenger to the capitalist ethos. Mankind is engaged in a never-ending quest for material gain---more wealth, more power, more fame.   While the capitalist mindset provides the physical basics, it offers little sustenance for the heart, soul, or mind.

5. It should go without saying that our enslavement to technology is concomitant with the cult of the “new”--this manifests itself in not just material gain but also the new in a metaphorical sense--new fame (celebrities), new age (youth), new social customs (fads).  The capitalist machine thrives on convincing the consumer that what is needed to make life complete is something bigger and better than what came before when the truth is, as many studies have borne out, happiness levels off after a certain degree of material attainment.  What is needed is not more of the same but a new way of looking at the world around one.

6. Perhaps a result of the above materialist focus has been the death of the liberal education and the old medieval trivium: grammar, rhetoric, and logic as subjects useful in themselves went out well in the early days of the 20^th century.   Today I doubt even the Catholic schools teach them.   The materialist questions their practical relevance and easily dispenses with that which does not proffer immediate and quantifiable material gain.   School teachers in the 1960s tossed out grammar on the evidence of a few studies indicating (not conclusively, it must be said) it had little to no impact on writing remediation.  And logic nowadays is the otiose domain of the mathematicians and philosophers leaving specious rhetoric, that wily manipulator, as the sole province of the humanist.     

7. It must be admitted to a large extent that recent ridiculous excesses in the humanities have brought upon the field its own demise: specifically, political correctness and otiose critical theory. There was a time in the 90s when one couldn’t open a newspaper without some uproar over date rape debated, ethnic sensitivities offended, or multicultural hoopla paraded for all to see. The victim mentality, buffeted by moral and philosophic relativism favored by so much modern poststructuralist theory, replaced the old verities propounded by, to use the once fashionable jargon of the English depts., the Anglo, heterosexist, phallocentric old guard. The devotion of English depts. (formerly custodians of sensible and hardheaded moral authority) to obtuse, recondite French theorists, where erstwhile truth was fiction, perspective mere perception, was essentially at odds with clear-headed Anglo-American values.  In the end, it proved to be a grave misstep.  Science did not build its reputation by ignoring or dismissing the past but by building upon it and only discarding antiquated notions when they became barriers to understanding or when incapable of withstanding the scrutiny of empirical observation.  The combination of impenetrable, jargon-riddled prose and relativist (a)moralism was a recipe for disaster (most devastatingly realized in the Sokol Affair), convincing many that if they had doubts about the relevance of humanism before, recent events had all but confirmed them.   The prestige of the humanities has never recovered since.

It would be simplistic to put this in terms of the Stanley Kowalski hardheaded mindset triumphing over the Blanche du Boises of the world. The physicists and those of their ilk are not by necessity dull, insensitive brutes; similarly, not all humanists are silly airheads who mistake rhetorical excess for profound complexity.   But the comparison does yield a certain blunt veracity. The war waged, the victor emerged triumphant, dwarfing his poor, enfeebled humanistic relation in stature and public trust.

Stanley: Oh, you're the, a teacher, aren't you?
Blanche:  Yes.
Stnaley:  What do you teach?
Blanche: English.
Stanley: Oh, I never was a very good Engish student.

The Blanche du Bois Effect and the Utility of a Liberal Education - part 1

"A cultivated woman, a woman of intelligence and breeding, can enrich a man’s life--immeasurably! I have those things to offer, and time doesn’t take them away. Physical beauty is passing. A transitory possession. But beauty of the mind and richness of the spirit and tenderness of the heart--and I have all of those things--aren't taken away but grow! Increase with the years! How strange that I should be called a destitute woman! When I have all of these treasures locked in my heart. I think of myself as a very, very rich woman.” -- Blanche Du Bois in A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams

Every time I am asked what my college major was, a hesitation comes over me. I know what is coming. In making a pronouncement of English literature as my primary undergraduate field of study, I feel as though I am making a confession of some minor character flaw or mental defect. Like Blanche I feign a noble superiority, allowing my interrogator a slyly subtle glimpse to the wide-eyed panic beneath.  Thou dost protest too much.  The inquisitor invariably looks at me either quizzically as if to suggest why would someone want to major in that? of what practical use is it? do you want to be a high school English teacher? Or there are those whose physiognomy comes closer to suggesting some mild repugnance as if repressing an urge to flee to the far side of the room to avoid the humanistic contagion I have unceremoniously infected the air about me with. And then there are the worst lot--those whose smug self-assurance seems to imply you’re one of those “words people” without the slightest facility in numbers and complete disregard for hard facts, who rely on duplicitous rhetoric rather than real knowledge--that’s where the power is, you know. Verbal arcana are all fine and dandy but not really splitting the atom, are they? Not a cure for cancer. In short, you are counted among those charming but useless savants whose linguistic fancies constitute a world of their own without so much as a passing relationship to the world of cold, hard physical matter.

Blanche: I don’t want realism! I want magic! 
Mitch: Magic?
Blanche: Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I do misrepresent things to them. I don’t tell truth, I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be punished for it!--Don’t turn the light on! 

This state of affairs amounts to what I like to term the Blanche du Bois effect. Williams' most famous heroine and her numerous purple flourishes have become to my mind emblematic of a sort of identification of those who delve into humanistic pursuits as somehow ridiculously refined and pointlessly cultured in a world sadly lacking in either, entertaining in a quasi-improper sort of way but also a bit mad and in the end useless, impotent purveyors of rhetoric sans reason, sensibility in search of sense--or at least so it would appear, at least to the not inconsiderable number of Stanley Kowalskis in the world.  (In the same way, Marlon Brando's Method masterpiece of rough, brutish masculinity represented a challenge [and eventual cinematic successor] to the old guard acting represented by Vivien Leigh's tremulous, stylized, and deeply feminine British theatricality.)

Those of us foolish enough to put spirit and heart ahead of status and material goods are relegated to a quasi-court jester position within the pantheon of intellectual endeavor. We are the shy and euphemistically “sensitive,” “artistic” souls, for unless one can lay claim to inheriting the gifts of a latter day Shakespeare or Proust, the artist/wordsmith is about as sensible a vocation as counting the warp and woof of clouds in the sky.

Il Trovatore: From the Ridiculous to the Sublime

Il Trovatore gets no respect. It has become associated with a particular brand of operatic excess that eschews sense in favor of purely musical delights. This is the opera, after all, that the Marx Brothers memorably lampooned in A Night at the Opera. However, while the excesses of Trovatore cannot be ignored, I would venture to argue that the opera encapsulates what makes opera sui generis as an art form--that the sum of the various arts contributing to it--music, text, theater--is much more than their individual parts would seem to suggest.

First the ridiculous:

The chief complaint against Trovatore seems to revolve around its admittedly complicated plot straining credulity.  It is filled with melodramatic coincidences, mistaken identities, and gypsy curses: the noble Count di Luna and the rebel Manrico are sworn enemies both in love with the fair Leonora, torn between love and duty, but a secret known only to Manrico’s gypsy mother Azucena ties them together leading to tragic consequences for all, etc.

Perhaps Azucena’s fatal error seems the most farfetched of all.

Furthermore, some of the cultural values and gender stereotypes represented in Trovatore strike a modern audience as, to put it charitably, antiquated. The whole Spanish milieu of proud nobles and their ancient codes of honor can seem no more than macho posing, and poor Leonora, the fair damsel, is caught in the middle of this tug-of-war.

In musico-dramatic terms, the opera is far from polished and almost carelessly put together at certain points. The ending of the opera in which Manrico is carted off and executed as Azucena blurts out to the shocked Di Luna that he has just assassinated his own brother takes place in a mere seven seconds or so. Verdi sometimes sacrificed dramatic development at the altar of swift pacing (the same happens as late as Otello after Desdemona is murdered--I’ve always felt the resolution goes by too quickly).

And while possessed of a rough vitality, the orchestral fabric Verdi chose to clothe his plot contrivances in has been described, not unfairly, as one giant strumming guitar. Trovatore is far from the subtle scene painting seen in some of Verdi's later masterworks like Simon Boccanegra, Don Carlo, and Otello, and it lacks the intimate psychology of La Traviata, amazingly written concurrently with its rougher, bolder counterpart.

The sublime:

But despite the above, there is much to recommend in this opera. Verdi was one of the great melodists of opera. He held fast to Rossini's dictum that opera required nothing less than voice, voice, and more voice. Caruso allegedly commented that Trovatore required nothing less than the four greatest singers in the world to pull it off. To be sure, Verdi's melodic outpouring in Trovatore was unstinting, embodying all the ecstatic longing and pain and joy of love. We most surely see this in Leonora's soaring arias with their sweeping, arching phrases and delicate pianissimi. It is not for nothing that “D'amor sull'ali rosee” is the supreme test of a Verdian soprano.



The villainous Count Di Luna's “Il Balen” also presents opportunities for the baritone to show a soft, sweet yearning hitherto unseen in this staunch figure.



As a contrast, we have Manrico's “Di quella pira”--the quintessence of masculine bravado and impetuous tenor barnstorming. And, of course, the rousing Anvil Chorus, perhaps the prototypical opera chorus, that seems to originate in our collective unconscious.

More substantially, however, Verdi weds his melodic gifts with supreme musical dramatization--la parola scenica. This is what ranks him among the great opera composers, in my view. Azucena's “Condotta ell'era in ceppi” is a classic example.



In this tortured gypsy's narrative, what seemed implausible and even risible from the outset and which serves as the dramatic motor of much of the plot is transmuted by Verdi's genius into something powerful and raw. Azucena seems almost numbly deliberate at first, then, as wispy strings reprise “Stride la vampa,” she slowly unravels, accelerating inevitably toward the terrible revelation in a powerful explosion of grief and terror before subsiding back into numb oblivion and obsessive revenge-plotting which mark her throughout the opera. We are witness to nothing less than the disintegration of identity amid an implacable grief. In this passage, Verdi renders Azucena as an object of Aristotelian pity and terror--a truly tragic, obsessed figure. Her potent suffering transcends the material, as our rational objections to the plot fall away into niggling insignificance. This narrative elevates Trovatore, placing it among the great operas and goes a long way toward explaining why, despite its flamboyant excesses and plot convolutions, it endures to this day.

The Proust Reader's Dilemma - Part 3

And yet if the snob is blessed with any sense of self-aware irony, he must realize his is a tenuous position and that American values of extroverted egalitarianism benefit him as much as anyone else. Moreover, in his more candid moments, he surely must admit futility as one inevitable result of all such cultural excursions, glittering and transporting though they may be, given their essentially narrow appeal and application. To be an American snob is a conundrum indeed.

On the one hand, many, no doubt, embark upon their Proustian voyage for nothing less than enlightenment, for insight into the foibles of humanity and the sheer aesthetic pleasure of art. At its best, art transports us; one feels etherealized, elevated above all this base matter: vita brevis, ars longa. True art asks (and perhaps provides an answer) to the essential question of what is the point? Of life? Love? Death? Of Art itself?  But these are impractical questions best answered by those in ivory towers, our stern American forebears would tell us. Or better answered in the guise of tried and true Christian ideology than in the quicksilver, inconstant inspiration and insight provided by art. But in our modern world without God where religion is demoted to a quaint child’s fiction, how does one sustain hope? For Proust, the answer was that art itself made its own meaning--hardly new. He sought answers in an art that halted the inevitable decay of time, of time’s consignment of the young and beautiful to the grave of oblivion, that which froze what was extraordinary in a moment imbued with the breath of eternal life.

And yet the very pragmatic question remains of what exactly is one to do with all this Olympian refinement, after all? Spend hours in some beatific trance proferred by the hard, gemlike flame of experience, as Pater counseled? Few have the time nowadays or the diligence for such vocations; furthermore, American emphasis on the practical and prosaic ensures a guilty conscience to be the end result. Why read Proust when one can achieve? Improve others’ dejected lot? Make real changes to the plight of our fellow man?

Perhaps one should make a distinction between those who come to art for insight and those who come to it for an appearance of insight--i.e., the snob. One can further distinguish between the out snob and the closeted snob, the second of whom suffers pangs of guilt over his snobbish occupations and confesses his aspirations in tentative lurches toward embarrassed self-revelation. He is timid about admitting his love of Proust, the opera, the poetry of John Donne--of wanting to know those worlds with their subtle machinations and refined etiquette so far removed from our less rigidly classist American one. One risks being seen as too fey, too fruity, insufficiently masculine and rugged, inappropriate refinements given the crass crudity of the world surrounding us.

In his pivotal treatise on the plight of the snob, Joseph Epstein notes that the snob is essentially an impotent, insecure bystander in the American cultural circus ruled by extroverts and not aesthetes, who can do nothing to console their nagging sense of inferior status, and can only blend in with the callow crowd. They must allay their anxious frustration with their Proustian, Jamesian, or Miltonic sorties, by furtive evenings at the opera, skittish afternoons in sterile art galleries. Like Proust, they may be compensating for some perceived defect or attempting to legitimize their own humble origins through exposure to and appreciation of all this high toned culture. Others of his stamp understand intrinsically but to the uninitiated few such endeavors are confessed shamefacedly, if at all. In the end, his is a marginal role in society--the high priest of art and culture to a culture more and more deaf to his direst mumblings, a voice too dim, too obscure to be heard above the shrill pop culture din.

Groucho Marx allegedly said he would never join a club that would accept him as a member; the guilt-ridden, begrudging snob is similarly paradoxically self-annihilating. Only the best for him but if the best is vouchsafed to him, was it really the best after all?  He would desire others to view him so, all the while fastidiously harboring his doubts.

The Proust Reader's Dilemma - Part 2

Reading Proust is in some ways the best of social compensations for a variety of reasons.

1. Exclusivity. Few read him nowadays, although many claim to (perhaps not all 3000-pages but at least Swann’s Way). His name still very much carries cachet in all the swank circles. We all long to belong to the best of clubs, but since few of us are granted admission, we can at least belong to the clubs that they who dare to reject us could never get into, can reinvent the game on our own terms, rejecting their shallow lot as beneath our older, wiser selves (or so we'd like to believe).

2. Mt. Everest of a Climb. Yes, 3000 pages of painstaking analysis and the subtlest of commentaries. And a panoply of characters, high and low, rich and poor, beautiful and ugly, representing a slice of fin-de-siecle France and a moment perched on the cusp of the modern. To complete all 3000 or so pages of this literary marathon and keep this endlessly rich cast of characters straight is an accomplishment to which few can lay claim.

3. Those sentences. There’s something immensely gratifying about reading a sentence that goes on for three or more pages, keeping track of syntactic sinews tortured beyond easy recognition, and resisting the lure of prepositional phrase decoys seeking to mire one in a befuddled barrage of pronouns with no clear antecedents, of modifiers delicately floating about unanchored to anything as rudimentary as, say, mere sentence structure, of signifiers in a free floating association sans signifieds. (The alleged longest sentence of all is devoted to Proust’s vivisection of the homosexual.) Proust teases out his analysis in small syntactic miracles, balancing acts of forestalled commentary, of subjects dissociated from verbs, gently unfolding, sensitive to every nuance, bringing to light objects half-obscured in shadow. To follow all this, keeping the main thread of meaning unbroken, is no small feat, and the very stuff of which proud self-satisfaction is made.

4. A largely accepted Great Work of Art that is on some level just a gossipy tour of the demimonde and the underside of all that glamorous, social climbing fatuity. All Proust’s philosophizing and aesthetic musing and painstaking teasing out of the subtlest of will o’the wisps deepens the shallow into the valley of the profound while lifting his work into the realm of the magnificent. One feels glory reflected. If I cannot be great myself, I can at least bask in the glory of those select few imbued with the light of inspiration and genius.

5. Somewhat waning Francophilia. Once upon a time in the not-too-distant past, to be an elitist snob was almost synonymous with declaring one’s love for everything French. I’m not sure if that still pertains any longer. Signs of French insecurity of their waning status are surely evident—Anglicisms have been outlawed from the French dictionary (or so I have heard), enrollment in French language courses has declined (or so I have read) while other languages (Mandarin and, Heaven forbid, Spanish!) have ascended. But status-symbols of the old guard die hard, so perhaps French cultural cachet will once again assert its dominance, and we will all be reopening our Sartre while sipping our Dom Perignon and sampling our crepes coquettes.

6. Controversial subject matter. Any work so bold as to deal with the taboo endows its audience with a sort of reflected broadmindedness, a willingness to free oneself from the constrictions of the social and political hegemony of one's immediate, myopic environs and the follies of the past itself and fully embrace modern enlightenment. To wit, Proust’s work must lay some sort of post-Symposium claim to being one of the first modern great works of art ever to seriously and plainly broach the topic of what used to be quaintly termed uranism.  His analysis is, of course, painstaking and all-inclusive, as is his wont--perhaps too much so to truly render the narrator himself entirely innocent of suspicion. Straight men simply would not know so much about the infinite variety and psychological underpinnings of such an abhorrent topic in the 19^th century worldview. Only they of the initiate would be privy to such knowledge, it would seem, or would have considered it in such depth. (Of course, the narrator’s views [and Proust’s, by extension] on the homosexual were nothing to write home about--he thought it a malady, a curse to which none but the children of Israel had experienced anything similar.  Modern ethos instructs us to view this as self-loathing, closeted laceration.) In a broader sense, this focus on the homosexual functions as a sort of check on all the aesthetic philosophizing and preoccupation with the minutiae of rank and title in the novel, giving it an anchor in the realm of the real, albeit one to which few everyday readers would have any firsthand knowledge and perhaps limiting its appeal to all but an elite enlightened few.

These are all compelling reasons to embark upon the Proustian odyssey. But ambivalence persists. The snob must assert his superiority to his less-enlightened peers, even if only in the impervious sanctity of his sequestered, closeted world, which, true snob that he is, he sees as a bulwark against the crashing wave of modern philisitinism, and anti-intellectual American extroversion. His is a modern echo of the glorious boasts of yore, for in reading Proust do we not dare to read the reading that "with no middle flight aims to soar"?