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.

First Post - A Response to A Journal of the Arts' "Pauline Kael Revision"

I just happened to be searching the net looking for a quote I had read many moons ago by Pauline Kael and came across the following in a blog called A Journal of the Arts.
 
http://k09aw02.blogspot.com/2010/02/pauline-kael-revision.html

The post is entitled "Pauline Kael Revision: A Criticism of Kael's Criticism."  It's basically a refutation of many things Kael and her approach to criticism stood for.  I tried to post my response but was blocked or something, so I decided to post it here and voilá - instant blog. 

I think the writer is way off the mark here.  Let me enumerate for my patient readers. 

The author states:  "Her taste was for lowbrow art, her writing is anything but academic, and her opinions often differed drastically from much of the critical world."

Kael's taste was not necessarily in favor of "lowbrow art"--she appreciated high art as well (Ray, Bunuel, Renoir, etc.), just not all the snobbish sanctity that so often went along with it (insert name of trendy French director here) as well as how some used it to legitimize their liberal views and castigate anyone else's.  As for the second two points, yes, thank heavens.  Her direct, bold approach and feverish intensity hooked me early on, so unlike the sometimes stuffy, distant academic prose I slogged through through in my undergraduate years.  In fact, I venture to say she single-handedly kept my interest in letters alive during those years, in really connecting on a human level with a readership without condescending or underestimating their intelligence--she expected you to keep up with her lightning quick joyride through the annals of film and her subtle analysis of Godard, Truffaut, Peckinpah, et al.  Her iconoclastic opinions could be refreshing too--she was loathe to accept received wisdom and stood out for her willingness to champion the underdog and eviscerate the sacred cow.  Harsh terms, but as much as it is an art form, with all that that sloppily used term implies, criticism is frequently a blood sport.

Piu:  "Kael's vulgar, repetitive vocabulary does not bother me: the "whore" and the "trash" and the "horny" do not phase my teenage mind in the current era of violence and profanities."

Vulgar? Repetitive?  I can only say that someone who has neither read deeply nor understood la Kael (or whose "teenage mind" has not had the good fortune to experience much beyond the safe nest of home) could ever draw that underanalyzed conclusion from her work.  If she was vulgar (her response to her editor who wanted to withdraw one of her reviews on the basis of his friendship with the filmmaker in question: "Tough s--t."), it was refreshing in an era when genteel snobbery ruled.  At her height, Kael's prose was an exciting brio, a dizzying display of wit, style, encyclopedic knowledge, and shrewd observation.  It is true that in her later years her work appeared to decline somewhat--depleted of adjectives, seen it all before, running out of new ways of describing old cinematic tricks.  Easily forgiven given the awesome display of erudition and intellectual generosity so often on display in the bulk of her corpus.
  
Avvanti:  "Pauline Kael's snobbish and conceited attitude toward her audience is repulsive."

Another gross misreading.  Not so much snobbery (a reverse snobbery, it would appear, given the writer's above insistence that Kael was only interested in the lowbrow), I would say, but impatience with conventional attitudes toward art in general and filmmaking in particular.  Exasperated, yes, impatient, certainly, but snobbish?  Anyone who appreciates the inspired juvenile lunacy of National Lampoon's Animal House is surely no snob.

Allora:  "And although no one can contest Kael's love for film, she uses this admiration as a justification to speak as the most knowledgeable person in regards to movies. She writes, "But, oh, God, why isn't it better? Why isn't there the daring and the exaltation that our senses fairly cry out for?" speaking on behalf of all audience members and their senses, as if her opinion is that of a constant truth."

I don't think Kael ever purported to be speaking for everyone, only those who looked to the movies to inspire, move, and restore faith in human potential.  If she did exhibit a certain hubris at times, it was certainly well deserved--her memory of film is vast and impressive; in fact, I would venture to say she was the most knowledgeable person around in regard to movies, at least as far as a public readership goes.  I don't see anything amiss with asking or even demanding that filmmakers excite and challenge and not cater to audience wish fulfillment, to the easy path to success; she championed artistry in an industry which rewarded commercial success and regarded big moneymakers as de facto Best Pictures (and, yes, Oscar, I'm looking at you here).  Has the writer never felt the despairing isolation which comes from realizing that despite one's brains and talent the world might very well pass you by with nary so much as a glance while others of lesser gifts flourish?  

E dopo:  "In the opening paragraph, Kael admonishes educated audiences who enjoy foreign or experimental films, accusing them of using film for the wrong purpose. According to Kael, movies are intended for an escape "from the tensions of their complex lives and work," rather than for an appreciation of "movies as an art. This rule is extremely frustrating, begging the question of what right Pauline Kael has to decide what functions films should or shouldn't have, or how the public should perceive them."

Citing above Hiroshima, Mon Amour (Kael's review of which, perchance, I read only the night before, oddly enough), the author reveals her gift for misunderstanding.  Kael never said movies were intended as an escape from the tensions of life; she said educated people used art movies in an escapist way not really so far removed from how less educated types used popular films.  There is really not much difference between a popular filmgoer who goes to movies to have his worldview reassured, to see the same tired old middle class stereotypes and clichés of the valor of war, the timelessness of romantic love, and the indestructibility of American gumption acted out and that of a leftist liberal who expects to see in his foreign and arthouse films stale tropes of sinister corporate America, the seductive glamor of alternative lifestyles, and the sanctity of same sex households upheld.  Kael was actually in favor of a cinema which reflected life's complexities without laying on any clichés or sanctimony or liberal stereotypes.  It wasn't "a rule" either--Kael was not this type of writer.  She didn't codify anything--she disliked writers of this stamp (e.g., Kracauer and Sarris).  This type of rulemaking tends to close one off from the spontaneity of good filmmaking, which is what I think she loved most.  Re: the opinionmaking point, Kael refuted serious schools of criticism on the basic (I think inarguable) premise that at some point all taste is subjective, based on one's preferences and biases.  Any attempt to objectify it is fundamentally misguided. 

Incidentally, the quote I was looking for was something Kael said about not wanting to stand with elitist types but with the vulgarians instead.  It wasn't exactly that, I found out:  "There's no way I could make the case that National Lampoon's Animal House is a better movie than (Warren Beatty's) Heaven Can Wait, yet on some sort of emotional-aesthetic level I prefer it. One returns you to the slobbiness of infancy, the other to the security of childhood, and I'd rather stand with the slobs."  I believe this is from Reeling, but I'm not sure.  Funny how things change in memory.