Surprised by Joy?

Wild Strawberries Ingmar Bergman (1957)

A film of dreams and memories, impending death and ugly truth, Wild Strawberries could easily have been another depressing, ponderous and miserable ninety minutes of heavy viewing. Certainly the very beginning of the film points in that direction: Professor Isak Borg is a curmudgeonly old man who declares at the very outset that he has cut himself off from all human contact because, as he puts it, relations with other people largely comprise “discussions about their character and behaviour”. 

Bergman wastes no time; this dose of misanthropy in the opening seconds is quickly followed by some casual misogyny – just for balance, I suppose: the Professor tells his long-suffering daughter in law that women should be banned from smoking and that their only permitted vices should be weeping, giving birth and gossiping about the neighbours.

Well on the way to misery, so. However, this film actually ends up being anything but miserable. The professor is forced to look at his life, to look at his intolerances, to face his shortcomings and his failures. The still from the movie above shows the old Professor facing his reflection in a mirror held in the hand of his one-time lover, Sara. This is the core of the movie - the professor learns how to live what little life he has left by learning from his past. Through flashbacks, dreams and meetings we learn that he was an over-serious, joyless youth; that he has had a failed marriage to an unfaithful wife; that his mother, still alive at the age of 96, lives and has lived on little more than bitterness and cynicism.

This is a joyful film but the joy is understated and very hard won. The external plot of the movie – a road trip from Stockholm to the town of Lund where he is to be present with an honorary degree at his university – mirrors the professor’s internal journey to his final acceptance of the importance and value of other people; men, women, his only child and, indeed himself.

Wild Strawberries is a surprising film. I had expected a horror show (it is Bergman!) and indeed the shadowy photography, macabre dream montages and the atmospheric score all work to present moments of tense gothic.  

Perhaps it is too positive to be anything more than a cul-de sac? No, I don’t think so because it avoids sentimentality, it does not disguise the decrepitude of old age and the proximity of the protagonist’s death reminds me that character reconstruction in the shadow of the grave, while welcome,  is work that should be done much earlier in life.

We spend a lot of time gazing into the mirror of the past in Ireland. I doubt much is learned though - I mean self-congratulatory guff about how the failings of the past are now over - the killing in the north, the abuse of women and children, the decades - long theocratic suffocation of thought, feeling, and action that followed 'independence', the venality of the ruling class, the tweedledum and tweedledee of centre-right versus centre-right post civil war politics, the socialist bale out of the banking sector at my expense - is just that - guff. I don't want to hear any more of that. Export.

Anaesthesia

Anaesthesia

Anaesthesia. Where would we be without it? In pain.  I want to write about the anaesthesia that masks truth. You can hide the truth from others; you can have the truth hidden from you. You can hide the truth from yourself. Indeed, we can all join hands and dance together in a collective waltz, which, for as long as it goes on (and these dances can last a lifetime), moves us all away from and keeps our minds off the ugly, dangerous, disgusting and painful truth standing solitary and partnerless in a dark corner.

And the radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools

tryin' to anaesthetise the way that you feel

A Minor Apocalyspse - Tadeusz Konwicki (1980) and [briefly] Casablanca - directed by Michael Curtiz (1942)

(The picture above shows a plaque commemorating the self-immolation of a Polish man, Ryszard Siwiec, in protest against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 - the novel A Minor Apocalypse has the build up to such an act as its central plot)

In Konwicki’s novel there are ludicrous levels of the kind of group deception I mentioned above. The narrator moves through his day (it is his final day as he has agreed to burn himself to death as a political protest) and hears some of the most ridiculous utterances in defence of the political status quo. The novel was written in the late nineteen-seventies and so Poland is under Soviet control. If Hungary 1956 and Czechoslovakia 1968 taught these benighted souls anything it was that the Soviets were not going loosen their grip on the vassal states east of the Brandenburg Gate. 

So, in this novel from occupied Poland life is miserable: buildings and bridges are falling down (literally), the gas and the water are cut off arbitrarily, the police stalk the sidewalks bullying their fellow citizens on a whim, the shops are empty (although there is a choice of 3 colours when it comes to petrol canisters!) and “everyone is on the take and everyone is stealing”. And to reiterate: the Soviets have enslaved the country.   

That is the painful truth.  Now the anaesthetic:

One character, an official in the state Censor’s office describes what happens to language under such circumstances:

“So, in our situation,” continued the philosopher, “allusions play a vital role. Not calling a thing by its name reveals what it is; allusions have suggestive power…The tension caused by the hunger for truth [is] artificially eliminated by a skilfully employed allusion. For that reason, allusions should not be repressed; quite the contrary, they must be encouraged, people must be taught to make more intelligent, more meaningful allusions. After a certain amount of time, people will prefer an allusion to the truth itself”

At another point a secret service agent tells the narrator that “we’ve given the oppressor the slip. We’ve outwitted him. We are free because we have imposed our own slavery”.  Just in case the narrator is any doubt as to what lies behind this ludicrous mask of sophistry the secret service agent injects him with a drug that amplifies his sensitivity to pain and proceeds to torture him.

Of course, the plot of A Minor Apocalypse has agony at its core: what could be more painful than being doused with petrol and burned to death? 

Perhaps having to swallow the daily insult of anaesthetic sophistry?

Obviously, I don’t have to read an obscure Polish novel to find a blueprint for how lies replace truth. If I could bear to listen to the news on TV I would have no shortage of material. But the argument goes the other way, too: if I can find evidence of sophistry anywhere then Konwicki will serve just as well as anything.

Besides there is something more in this novel and the fact that it was written under a communist regime makes this no surprise: an exploration of a kind of historical dialectic where truth is hidden and protected by lies, where subjugation itself is adorned as a dress rehearsal for revolution.

This dynamic is an audacious one. It is a risky business. To take part, its protagonists need heavy doses of credulity, fidelity, and determination – and that is only in relation to the promise of springtime. 

Who else but the utterly credulous, blindly faithful and steely determined could believe – not swallow – a line such as that expressed by one of Konwicki’s narrator’s associates (Rysio, the brother of the “Philosopher of Allusions”): “Slavery has always perished at the hands of slaves”? In other words, only through acting out the role of slave; taking on all that it has to offer, exceeding the remit of slave (just as the secret service officer claimed the Poles had done by enslaving themselves), can you prepare to overthrow your oppressor, can you prepare to assume power for yourself.

Sounds medieval – Christian, doesn’t it? Ignore the lies and put up with the abuse because one day, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but some day in the (probably posthumous) future life will get better. It’s obvious, too, that Casablanca should cross frequencies here. What else is “We’ll always have Paris” if it is not a tissue of pretty lies, an anaesthetic pill, a beautiful utopia to compensate the young men who were being sent off to die in World War Two in the days, months and weeks after they left the cinemas in 1942 and 1943?  You’d almost believe that Ingrid Bergman was waiting for you back home. Believe us, have faith, be resolute, young man, your time will come. All kinds of anaesthetics are needed in war.

In any case, the proponents of complicity in Konwicki’s novel are state-licensed opposition. Rysio is one of the sanctioned political opposition, paid by the state to criticise the state:

“They all get government salaries. It’s all one big provocation. Don’t you find it surprising that the years go by and they keep playing at protest, revolution, publication, demonstration, as calmly as peasants in springtime?”

From this tissue of lies emerges a narrator who is, by his own admission, mediocre. And yet the truth he has to tell, his advice on his last day, is useful, humble and above all, neither dialectical nor duplicitous: He offers cures for dandruff and constipation, explains how to cheat at cards and later, suggests reciting Pan Tadeusz during sex so as to prolong the act! 

Lead by his increasingly introverted and dissolving hero, Konwicki’s narrative takes scatological and fatastical detours that are reminiscent of the ‘Nighttown’ episode of Joyce’s Ulysses: He has sex with a Russian girl (whose name is ‘Hope’); he is lead into an underground dining hall where he witnesses a feast prepared for visiting dignitaries being ransacked; he happens upon a campfire gathering of fifteen women, all of whom he has in the past loved and narrowly escapes being lynched by them.

This narrator makes his way to the Palace of Culture where all of his current associates, friends and lover await. Snow has begun to fall (the snow begins in the middle of a reflection on time, passing, death – another reference to Joyce!], and the story ends just as he is about to burn himself to death. 

His life concludes in agony, by reaching for and pointing to truth, with ordinary, ugly confessions paving its last few minutes – no anaesthetic, no allusion, no dialectic or duplicity.

Thankfully the truth is never as painful as self-immolation.

What would I import or export to Ireland after reading this novel?

Konwicki’s sense of humour is perverse. Import.

Duplicity, sophistry, abuse of language. Export.

Konwicki’s love and respect for animals [the little dog following the narrator as he walks towards his death has replaced Bulgakov’s cat, Behemoth, as my favourite animal in 20^th Century Literature] Import.

The sincerity, honesty and simplicity of the love between the narrator and Nadhezdya. Import.

3 Examples of Pastoral

3 Examples of Pastoral

At its outset, in ancient Greece, the Pastoral mode was just writing about shepherds in the countryside. However, over the millennia of its development, Pastoral came to embody descriptions of perfect countryside scenes that implied criticism of the present through the elevation of that perfect countryside as representing a golden age.

I want to look at this mode in the Polish epic poem Pan Tadeusz, by Adam Mickiewicz,  Book 3 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Woody Allen’s film  A  Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy.

[Grant Wood's painting  American Gothic above has nothing much to do with this post - except that it reminds me of what I see when I look out my own - pastoral - window]

Pan Tadeusz  by Adam Mickiewicz (Poem  - 1834) & (Film, directed by Andrej  Wajda - 1999):

The Late Romantic Pastoral

Mickiewicz wrote this as an exile in Paris. He was homesick/lovesick for a Poland that probably never existed outside of his head and certainly hadn’t existed since the Russians, Germans and Austrians divided up the Poland – Lithuania Confederation for the last time after the failure of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.

The story begins as a paean to the late – feudal social harmony of the Polish – Lithuanian Confederation.  Everyone is in his place, the landscape is appropriately beautiful and love is the only cause of tension.  

This harmony is expressed by the Judge, the head of the Soplica family:

For the Judge at his home still the old customs kept

And never would allow that here anyone lacked

For age, birth, rank or wisdom the proper respect.

"By this order", said he, "homes and nations will flourish

And with its downfall, houses and nations will perish"

The opening book of the epic (and the opening scene of the film) has key elements of pastoral. The Polish countryside is a benign place, the seat of a golden age of happy peasants, benevolent lords, devotion to God and a surfeit of beautiful, bountiful women and handsome men.

However, before too long, conflict rears its ugly head. A property dispute between two noble families over a castle taken from one and given to the other by the Russians turns violent. So Poles are set against Poles but as soon as the Russians step in to stop the fighting, the two families unite against the common foe.

The Poles wait for Napoleon’s attack on Russia so that Poland can be liberated from the Russians. Eventually, they do and Pan Tadeusz decides that he’ll free the peasants: a true revolutionary.

Historically, of course, Napoleon lost and Poland didn’t become a state until 1918. And so this is a poem about the loss of nationhood and longing for it to be returned. It is an exile’s prayer. No wonder then that the Poland he imagines is desiccated and fantastic. 

Neither the women nor the territory nor the peasants in this poem have a will of their own. They are mute, passive and idealised. The language used to describe Poland/Lithuania is the language of longing for a lost love:

Lithuania, my country! You are as good health:

How much one should prize you, he only can tell

Who has lost you. Your beauty and splendour I view

And describe here today, for I long after you.

It is ironic that for all Mickiewicz’s longing the dream he longs for ignores the reality of what that dream is ostensibly about: Poland.

Actaeon and Diana from Book 3 Metamorphoses by Ovid  - The Vivid Pastoral  

2 Key themes of Pan Tadeusz (feminine beauty and hunting) remind me of the story of Actaeon and and Diana.  The Greek/Roman myth is far more alive for me, though.

For one thing the woman in the myth – Diana/Artemis - is perverse, independent, psychopathically vengeful whereas the woman in Pan Tadeusz – Zosia – is insipid, stupid and dependent.  

At the start of Pan Tadeusz the hero accidentally views Zosia in a state of undress.  She giggles and runs away, he falls in love and they eventually live happily ever after with Zosia telling her husband towards the end that she will defer to him in all matters that involve thinking or making decisions. Yawn. Zosia is insipid, stupid, and incapable of independent thinking.

What does Diana do when Actaeon accidently sees her in a state of undress? She turns him into a stag and he ends up getting eaten alive by his own dogs!

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not looking to meet either of these two women in the flesh but the contrast between Diana  and Zosia is clear. Diana is living – really living – in a vivid pastoral. Zosia is a prisoner of an exile’s antiseptic and ahistorical fantasy about a country that does not exist – no wonder she is insipid, stupid and dependent.

The hunting episode in Pan Tadeusz involves hunting a bear. Bear=Russia? I think so. Perhaps I am reading this too literally. At best, the hunting episode serves to show buffoonery of the hunters and the marksmanship of the ‘hidden’ hero of Jacek Soplica (disguised as a priest). I wanted the bear to win. Not because he may represent Russia; Jesus, no. I hate hunting. It's thuggery, plain and simple.

He doesn’t win.  I love the reversal of Actaeon and Diana. The hunter becomes the hunted. Not metaphorically; actually! Actaeon is turned into a stag and devoured by his own dogs.

If you have an imagination why not use it to its fullest extent?

A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy Woody Allen - 1982: The Hollywood Pastoral

This is a pastoral film because:

• It is set in a beautiful country estate – somewhere in New England
• It is set in the very early Twentieth Century - an almost inescapably pre-lapsarian period in Anglophone thinking.
• The countryside is a place of retreat from the city for the 6 characters’ lives in the city
• The philosophical ‘ether’ of the film – that of unbridled spiritualism – is an antidote to the materialism of the late Twentieth Century and more particularly, it is an antidote to the mindless garbage churned out by Hollywood as a rule.

This is a really sweet film. It opens with a speech by professor Leopold who disdains any reality that is not empirically verifiable.   Leopold is a genius. A late Nineteenth Century genius from the school of Pragmatist Philosophy, sure;  but a genius, nonetheless. Over the course of the film he abandons his philosophy and falls in lust with a promiscuous beautiful nurse (Dulcy)who is, very much not a genius.

Leopold dies at the very moment of orgasm with Dulcy, his spirit flies off into the woods to fly around with all the other spirits who die in exactly the same way.

As a pastoral alternative to any conventionally posited afterlife this could only have come from the head of Woody Allen.

Allen’s character is a crackpot inventor/Wall Street dealer who’s having a sexual crisis in his marriage that is not being helped by the arrival for the weekend at his country house of his ex-lover  and Leopold’s fiancée (Ariel, played by Mia Farrow).

His best friend – who comes for the weekend with the nurse, Dulcy – is also in love with Ariel and has in the past slept with Woody Allen’s character’s wife.

The erotic interplay between the characters has all of the excitement and magic but none of the psychopathy of the Actaeon/Diana myth.

If ever Woody Allen and Quentin Tarantino were to make a film together I think the psychopathy deficit could be made up!

Allen’s film has a lightness of touch that is impossible in an essentially political text like Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz.  Allen’s is an idyll that knows that it is an idyll. I think this is because its celebration of magic is really a celebration of the ‘magic of Hollywood’; in other words, cinema is always already magical and Woody Allen’s pastoral is pointing to itself as a golden age of possibilities that has not been lost; rather it has been neglected in favour of the lowest common denominator product of most popular film making.

Perhaps Pan Tadeusz has been a victim of the success of the Polish nation. If there were no Polish nation maybe there would be no background against which the blind spots of this poem/film as a piece of political criticism could be viewed?

So finally:  import or export? 

Pan Tadeusz: Well, you can keep insipid, stupid, dependent women and moronic, belligerent men.  You can keep fantasies about a golden age that take the place of reality. Export. 

Actaeon and Diana: I love strong women. Import.

A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy: Love and Magic are often treated as the refuges of the mentally deficient. For good reason? No! Import.

Dangerous Books and Observation

When is a book dangerous? When is it safe? 

Both We by Evgeny Zamyatin and Pornografia by Witold Gombrowich have been proscribed, banned, censored.  We, written in 1920, was banned by the Soviets. No surprise there: it is a polemic against totalitarianism. Pornografia, oddly, has only in recent years been withdrawn from Polish schools on the grounds that it was corrupting children.

So, two dangerous books, then.  I read both over the last week and, in so far as I can tell, I am still in one piece. But then again, I am not a dictator and, to be honest, I am probably already corrupted beyond redemption.

Both of these novels are about observation.

We describes a world where everything is visible, clear, open;  a world where people live in glass houses with glass walls, ceilings and doors; a world where there is no privacy of any kind. The ‘One-State’ wants to abolish imagination, love, individuality. The narrator discovers at one point in the novel that he has a soul and this is understood as an illness.

Pornografia is a novel of shadows and darkness. Much of the dialogue is fractured, the syntax hesitant, repetitive and deliberately inadequate. Even though it’s a novel about voyeurism the plot mostly unfolds outside the narrator’s direct view.  Usually description serves to obfuscate. The scene where the murder of an old woman is recounted is typical. The action is mediated through the muddled recollection and non-standard Polish of two peasants, the violence occurs in darkness, lit up only by a match on the ground that fails to illuminate anything of note. The murder is not investigated and the murderer is not given a narrative send off: he just disappears from the story.

If the characters of We live in a glass house, those in Pornografia  live in a cave.

We eventually describes an attempted revolution to overthrow the One State. The narrator is lobotomised and the heroine is executed but for all that it is a more hopeful text than its most obvious literary descendant: Nineteen-Eighty Four.

Pornografia is not an optimistic novel. It is set during the early days of World War Two. Poland is being overrun by the Nazis. Meanwhile the Polish Intelligentsia embodied by Witold and Fryderyk do nothing to stop this. Even Nero played the fiddle while Rome burned: what these two get up to is try to induce two 16-year old children to engage in sex acts! A natural response in a time of war?

Their explicit aim is to corrupt the boy and the girl; to encourage their sexual amorality. They don’t quite achieve this, though. What they do succeed in doing is to get them to take part in a cowardly, pointless double murder.

We is a novel about the horror that ensues in a world where thinking, feeling and imagination are forbidden.

In Ireland we have often tried to export people who do too much thinking, feeling and imagining.

Pornografia  is a novel about the horror that ensues in a world where thinking, feeling and imagination are deracinated,  perverted, and used to abuse and repress children.

Oh, if only we had been prepared to export those engaged in the abuse and repression of children!

Who'd be a Mother?

Ingmar Bergman – Persona

In Woody Allen’s Annie Hall the hero arrives 2 minutes late to a screening of an Ingmar Bergman film. He refuses to go into the movie because he is too ‘anal’ to tolerate having missed the start. The first two minutes of Persona are remarkable.  It starts with some really disturbing sounds and images – screeching violins, flashing lights, a single frame shot of an erect penis, repeated close ups of a hand being nailed to a cross – that make for very uncomfortable viewing.  If you can keep watching (and it is very hard to watch – perhaps not as hard as certain sequences in a film like Come and See – but this is not the feel good hit of the summer) the rest of the film is a surface into which the opening nightmare constantly threatens to irrupt.

So, ten years later than Bergman’s Summer with Monika, this is a nightmare of a film that engages with some of the same themes: motherhood and female sexuality. In addition it is a film about the dissolution of sanity and the psychological agony that goes with it.

The plot of the film is banal. An actress, struck dumb for some psychological reason that is not expounded is accompanied to a house on the seaside by a young nurse. The relationship between the women is, by turns, professional, erotic, violent, treacherous. The actress never really speaks and the nurse, after opening herself to her charge and having her secrets betrayed by her, hardens her heart against her.

There are themes of motherhood and failing at motherhood again. Where Monika exits the stage in Summer with Monika, the failure of the actress to be a mother is foregrounded in this movie. There is no escape from the fingers pointed and the voices raised by the nurse. The relationship between the two women becomes sadistic. The nurse harangues her charge ruthlessly, cruelly. The actress remains silent.

Why is the actress silent? She refuses to speak and plays most of the film just listening to the nurse.  At the beginning and ending of the film there is a framing shot of a young boy holding up his hand touching a barrier (window?) in front of what appears to be an enormous poster of his mother – the actress in the movie. So is this a movie about motherhood and its costs its failings? And if it is, then where can I bring its insights?

It doesn't seem to have any insights other than life is terribly painful. Mothers occupy the limits and core, the heights and depths, the fundament and the firmament – there is no other reality and the burden of that responsibility has taken its toll on the first lead.

I suppose the burden of motherhood is a heavy one.  More precisely it is an onerous one. Who wants to be a mother if the job description is so voracious? If, even in the best case, becoming a mother is an utter apocalypse into whose vortex all previous reality is devoured, who could take on such a job? The actress’ response – muteness, denial – reminds me of Sylvia Plath’s description of motherhood as ahistorical and all devouring:

I’m no more your mother

Than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow

Effacement at the wind’s hand

On the question of imports and exports, we should definitely import a system of publicly funded childcare.

Of course, Ireland has been exporting mothers for generations. Especially the unwanted ones: the poor ,the unmarried. What is this? A misogyny at the core of the national psyche?  Nothing more unusual, nothing more disgusting here than the time – honoured tendency to control, proscribe, limit, warn about female sexuality. Misogyny is part and parcel of policing what women can and can’t do with their bodies.

We should export this misogyny. I'm not sure anyone would take it off our hands, though!

Although very hard to watch, Bergman’s movie scrutinises insanity and exposes the loneliness and weight of motherhood – this fearless scrutiny is something we should import.

Summer's lease hath all too short a date

Ingmar Bergman – Summer With Monika

When I’m watching Ingmar Bergman I feel I should be watching how he’s filming his movie as much, if not more, than what is actually in the film. So, with his reputation preceding him what did I see in this film?

Sex. Well, not really, or, rather, not yet:

There are two young lovers in this movie who are, at first, full of life and naiveté. The girl, in particular, is a  force of nature, a force of adolescent nature. Even in Sweden adolescence had not been invented in the 1950s. So, without that space, indeed, without freely available contraception,  her youth  is curtailed by her sexuality; she gets pregnant and that defines the rest of her life in the film.

Bergman is playing around with the audience, though. What happens in the courtship that leads to the pregnancy is  nothing less than titillation. She is dangled in front of the audience as a sex symbol. This seduction of the audience implicates them in giving her this status.

It starts subtly:

A shot of a window and some potted plants fading out followed by a shot of the needle on a 78 getting to the end – finally the female lead, smoking and looking relaxed has tried on the tights given to her by her boyfriend. So, Bergman is showing the audience that they’ve made love; fine.

Even if Swedish audiences would have thought nothing of her promiscuity at the time, Monika’s character is, from now on, just sexual.

In one scene soon after, she is sexually assaulted in her workplace. Had the preceding scene showing her promiscuity legitimised this episode?

Well, after she gives birth, she rejects the child. The father is left taking care of  the infant while the mother moves on to another lover.

It is very hard to understand the forces that influence women in their roles as mothers. Bergman pre-liberates his heroine in this movie. Yes, she rejects her child but she has been so beautiful, so free, so tempting and tempted that Bergman brings us to see the world from her point of view and who can condemn her?

So, ambiguity? Shift the longitude a few degrees to the west to the Ireland of the 1950s and you would have hell; not ambiguity.  Women were punished horrifically for such transgressions in my country at that time.

We should have imported Bergman’s ideas. Our ideas were misogynistic, priest-ridden, disgusting.

Imports and Exports

“Imports and Exports”

In Ireland we have a history of imports and exports. We export what we don't want or need. We import what we do not have. Sounds like common sense, doesn't it?

Yeah - but we have been exporting people since the famine - we don't want them. Emigrate, please: that has been a recurring message to our children over the last 150 years.

We have exported women - especially pregnant women. every year, 5,000 unwanted pregnancies are exported to the UK. 

We export football; we export boys who play football. I'm not talking about Gaelic Football: that doesn't get exported: nope. Just the 'Garrison Game' and the proles who play it.  

So, I'm writing this blog to see (from the books I read, the films I watch, and the music I listen to) what I want to import and what I want to export!

Marcel Proust – In Search of Lost Time, Volume 1, Swann’s Way

This is a good place to start because Proust's narrative is about time - the thing I don't want to waste.

Simply put, this book is about a delicate, over-sensitive narrator’s memory of being a delicate, over-sensitive child and young man. It contains exhaustive descriptions of furniture, chapels, towns, flowers, and above all else, the contents of the narrator’s febrile mind and the terribly fraught relationships – familial, romantic and contractual – between the people the narrator remembers.

It is a modernist novel in the sense that its subject matter is this liminal space between consciousness and the outside world – which is not to say that it is a epistemological novel – Proust seemed content to describe this space; he does not really address the question of whether or if we can know anything through or of the media  of consciousness, perception or the material world. He does paint lots of pretty pictures. 

It is a Victorian novel, though, (rather than a modernist one) in its dense syntax and complex grammar – there are enough subordinate clauses in any given sentence to give a publisher a heart attack – but this is not a reason to not to read this novel.

The part of the novel that tells the story of Charles Swann’s unhappy love affair with Madmoiselle De Crecy (Odette) is depressing. It’s depressing because it is a love affair that brings out the worst in both characters – he is blind, duped, used, abject and spineless while she is vain, ignorant, grasping, deceitful  and cynical – and this is especially so in the catastrophic denouement of their marriage.

[It is jarring that ‘cynical’ and ‘canine’ share a common etymological root:  what creature is less cynical than a dog?]

For the character of Swann, music is a conduit to a deeper, more intense understanding of his  world, his lover and himself - particularly in the form of the notes of a musical phrase that is “the national anthem of their love” – I’ll test this Platonic idea  proposition in another blog entry. This is probably not the last time I’ll mention Plato.

The novel is of course, about time. Ever since science became the primary narrative in Western Society, metaphor has been a poor relation. Does metaphor have the right to explain time?  I think so. The lesson I’m taking from Proust brings me back to the reason for starting this blog. Life is infinitesimally short yet each second; each millisecond is full of meaning, full of life, full of pain and pleasure. How can I go on, dimly plodding on towards my ever approaching demise without opening my eyes, without trying to notice what is in front of me, without trying to remember?  I will be dead for a long, long time – I must try not to lose time.

[I like the way the Italians and French combine ‘wasting’ and ‘losing’ time – perdere il tempo/perdre du temps ]

I guess that we should import Proust's technicolour perception of every single moment - we are too careless, too stupid in this country  - but I guess there isn't really an appetite for truth on this little pile of North Atlantic mud.

I know that we should import respect both for metaphors and for science.