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.
Sunday, July 17, 2011
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 19th 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"?
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 19th 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"?
Friday, July 8, 2011
The Proust Reader's Dilemma - Part 1
Telling someone you have read/are reading/plan to read Proust is somewhat fraught with difficulty, a tinge of anxiety accompanying one’s pronouncement, the fear a direct result of what might seem tantamount to announcing nothing less than social climbing ambitions. One is never sure if it should be proclaimed loud and proud or confessed light and slight. The fear of suggesting, inadvertently or not, one’s superiority to one’s non-Proust reading, more earthly-bound, Oprah‘s book club-loving peers can be difficult to keep at bay.
The Proust reader faces a dilemma: while it seems fair to assume that most appreciate the value of American egalitarianism, sometimes the lure of art, of complexity, of subtle probing, and, yes, a bit of cultural chauvinism (inextricable from all this, I think) prove too great a lure to resist. Alas, these are not American values--they are European generally and French particularly. One fears being judged insufficiently American; it was, after all, not too long ago in the political scene that American chauvinism beat its brawny chest in truculent challenge toward everything French. There are some grounds for American distrust of too much Francophilia, and much of it can be located squarely within Proust himself. The man was a huge snob, after all. The primary motivating factor, I venture to say, in his 3000-page tome was far from modest: to write something for the ages that would lift him up to the empyrean into the august ranks of Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and company. And as a European to whom social rank is a given, Proust would have no difficulty acquiescing (eyes blinking coquettishly, as if to say, “Yes, of course, and your point?“) to charges of rank snobbery and base social climbing—a brand of effete decadence all but unthinkable to an American.
Things are obviously complicated by the social, ethnic, and even biological. Proust, half-Jewish and homosexual, like so many before and after him, sought social respectability in a society that despised him on both counts. Such well-earned respect would be an almost ritual cleansing of the declassé origins from which he emerged, like taking the basest of metals and alchemically transmuting it to the most precious of precious stones.
But we Americans cannot display such naked ambition; our art must at some point speak to the masses. We suffer guilt over attempting to distinguish ourselves in almost any way but the material—we are a nation of immigrants, after all, most of us coming from the humblest of backgrounds (and I am certainly no different from others in that respect). This attempt to distinguish ourselves can manifest itself in even as apparently innocuous a way as reading Proust.
But mainstream culture dictates we are to like sports not books, and certainly not those of effete aesthetes expiring on the fumes of their own rarefied ruminations. We are to enjoy mainstream movies and mainstream fare, not Truffaut, truffles, or anything smacking too much of the esoteric. We are to be fascinated by the daily gossip mill surrounding Lindsay, Paris, and Kim; we are to celebrate the athletic prowess of Kobe and Tiger, even as we tsk-tsk dishonestly at their sexual and politically-incorrect escapades (while secretly envying their superhuman status). We are not to enjoy the life of the mind for its own sake. Such things are foreign to the essentially practical American sensibility, and, in their worst excesses, reflect nothing less than European decadence and debility, spiritual malaise and moral laxity. We are taught in school that everyone is the same in the eyes of the law (those of us with experience in the real world soon learn to question such platitudes). To boldly attempt to stand out from one's non-Proust reading peers is un-American and base: Pride goeth before a fall, our Puritan forebears would have warned. Such notions are those to which others from less enlightened lands still resolutely cling to—an established social pecking order, old guard notions and faith in names, blood lines, and pedigrees.
But here we have emancipation from the old European models. We have separation of church and state; we have a free market economy and the good old American ambition that goes along with it. If the model for European hierarchy is a castle on a hill surrounded by villagers below, the American identity would appear to be a department store of types—a mere elevator ride up to something higher and better above. The message would seem to be if you can’t make it here, it’s really no one’s fault but your own. We reject social stratification and embrace upward mobility; we dispute Christian essentialism and advocate the blank slate; we enshrine pop divas and devalue Shakespeare as a dead, white male for a dead, white male elitist Euroculture foreign to our shores. Social problems can be resolved, lives can be changed, lots can be bettered, as our pop psychologists advise; if they cannot, we just weren‘t trying hard enough. The past can be discounted or, better yet, forgotten entirely. American optimism trumps Old World cynicism, it is proclaimed in almost Pentecostal chants.
Now, none of this ambivalence toward status symbols and our place in the social hierarchy in an ostensibly egalitarian society prevents anyone from wanting to get into the best schools, land the best, highest-paying jobs, live in the most palatial of mansions, etc.--basically, to service the inner consumer-whore of our wildest youth-besotted dreams. Those who attain such heights may suffer the ill effects of lingering humanity, and attempt to assuage their guilt through philanthropy and good works. But those of us for whom such heights of material ecstasy seem remote and unattainable require other compensation, even if forced into the literary closet, as it were. Enter Proust.
The Proust reader faces a dilemma: while it seems fair to assume that most appreciate the value of American egalitarianism, sometimes the lure of art, of complexity, of subtle probing, and, yes, a bit of cultural chauvinism (inextricable from all this, I think) prove too great a lure to resist. Alas, these are not American values--they are European generally and French particularly. One fears being judged insufficiently American; it was, after all, not too long ago in the political scene that American chauvinism beat its brawny chest in truculent challenge toward everything French. There are some grounds for American distrust of too much Francophilia, and much of it can be located squarely within Proust himself. The man was a huge snob, after all. The primary motivating factor, I venture to say, in his 3000-page tome was far from modest: to write something for the ages that would lift him up to the empyrean into the august ranks of Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and company. And as a European to whom social rank is a given, Proust would have no difficulty acquiescing (eyes blinking coquettishly, as if to say, “Yes, of course, and your point?“) to charges of rank snobbery and base social climbing—a brand of effete decadence all but unthinkable to an American.
Things are obviously complicated by the social, ethnic, and even biological. Proust, half-Jewish and homosexual, like so many before and after him, sought social respectability in a society that despised him on both counts. Such well-earned respect would be an almost ritual cleansing of the declassé origins from which he emerged, like taking the basest of metals and alchemically transmuting it to the most precious of precious stones.
But we Americans cannot display such naked ambition; our art must at some point speak to the masses. We suffer guilt over attempting to distinguish ourselves in almost any way but the material—we are a nation of immigrants, after all, most of us coming from the humblest of backgrounds (and I am certainly no different from others in that respect). This attempt to distinguish ourselves can manifest itself in even as apparently innocuous a way as reading Proust.
But mainstream culture dictates we are to like sports not books, and certainly not those of effete aesthetes expiring on the fumes of their own rarefied ruminations. We are to enjoy mainstream movies and mainstream fare, not Truffaut, truffles, or anything smacking too much of the esoteric. We are to be fascinated by the daily gossip mill surrounding Lindsay, Paris, and Kim; we are to celebrate the athletic prowess of Kobe and Tiger, even as we tsk-tsk dishonestly at their sexual and politically-incorrect escapades (while secretly envying their superhuman status). We are not to enjoy the life of the mind for its own sake. Such things are foreign to the essentially practical American sensibility, and, in their worst excesses, reflect nothing less than European decadence and debility, spiritual malaise and moral laxity. We are taught in school that everyone is the same in the eyes of the law (those of us with experience in the real world soon learn to question such platitudes). To boldly attempt to stand out from one's non-Proust reading peers is un-American and base: Pride goeth before a fall, our Puritan forebears would have warned. Such notions are those to which others from less enlightened lands still resolutely cling to—an established social pecking order, old guard notions and faith in names, blood lines, and pedigrees.
But here we have emancipation from the old European models. We have separation of church and state; we have a free market economy and the good old American ambition that goes along with it. If the model for European hierarchy is a castle on a hill surrounded by villagers below, the American identity would appear to be a department store of types—a mere elevator ride up to something higher and better above. The message would seem to be if you can’t make it here, it’s really no one’s fault but your own. We reject social stratification and embrace upward mobility; we dispute Christian essentialism and advocate the blank slate; we enshrine pop divas and devalue Shakespeare as a dead, white male for a dead, white male elitist Euroculture foreign to our shores. Social problems can be resolved, lives can be changed, lots can be bettered, as our pop psychologists advise; if they cannot, we just weren‘t trying hard enough. The past can be discounted or, better yet, forgotten entirely. American optimism trumps Old World cynicism, it is proclaimed in almost Pentecostal chants.
Now, none of this ambivalence toward status symbols and our place in the social hierarchy in an ostensibly egalitarian society prevents anyone from wanting to get into the best schools, land the best, highest-paying jobs, live in the most palatial of mansions, etc.--basically, to service the inner consumer-whore of our wildest youth-besotted dreams. Those who attain such heights may suffer the ill effects of lingering humanity, and attempt to assuage their guilt through philanthropy and good works. But those of us for whom such heights of material ecstasy seem remote and unattainable require other compensation, even if forced into the literary closet, as it were. Enter Proust.
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