The disgraced ambassador, the civil service chief forced into retirement, the man about town given a chilly reception, the lover shown the door sometimes spend months examining the event which destroyed their hopes; they turn it over and over like a bullet fired they do not know from where nor by whom, almost like a meteorite. They want to know what the strange device is made of that struck them down so suddenly, whose ill-will it embodies. At least chemists can turn to analysis; sufferers from an unknown disease can call in a doctor. And criminal cases are more or less clarified by the examining magistrate. But the disconcerting actions of our fellow-men rarely reveal their motives.

Labels: love, proust, readingproust, relationships

Though we think our thoughts are ours by choice, and our ills a mere consequence of our own recklessly unhealthy life, it may well be that, just as papilionaceous plants produce a seed of a certain shape, our family hands down to us the ideas which keep us alive, as well as the illness which will cause our death.

— In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, Penguin 2002, p469

Labels: readingproust

These few days in Oxford have been completely frustrating. I have been surrounded by seemingly endless wittering about topics — and they are barely even topics — of intensifying irrelevance. What really is this thing, conversation? And why am I so far off from it at the moment? Is it a simple case of me having changed and moved on from people I once found interesting and engaging? Am I just becoming more intolerant and misanthropic?

Sorry to go on about the Proust, but The Guermantes Way has been a real eye-opener so far as the dynamics of power implicit in conversation goes. This installment of the novel deals with French high society life in the nineteenth century, and the overriding (intentional) impression is that it was (is always) vacuous, and that the "conversations" which take place are empty, involving no human transaction or exchange, but rather acting as a currency for the conferment of cultural and social capital. It is this self-serving nature of conversation which has struck me this week, although it has troubled me for some time. It is particularly troubling as it seems to affect people I am either formally or genuinely very fond of. What do you do when faced with someone who is unable to stop talking? Or worse, unable to stop talking about himself? Or worse still, unable to stop talking about a succession of other people?

Even in the few opportunities for interjection I get during "conversation" with my aunt, my themes are not developed or pursued; for example, this evening I stated that I had been to the synagogue with a friend some weeks ago, and she took this as an opportunity immediately to tell me about *her* experience in a synagogue, rather than to enquire sincerely about *my* experience. I am sure this is unintentional — but it is also stupid and unnecessary. It demonstrates a lack of imagination, an assumption that there is nothing to learn from what I have to say, but rather knowledge and experience only to be conferred, given to me. But as we shall see, this is no true gift.

Similarly, at lunch with a friend today, the first 30 minutes of our meeting seemed to consist of a long-winded rehearsal of all the things that had happened to him in the last three months, mainly structured around the loss of one of his teeth. At least if people had read more Freud they might have tried to repress this loss of teeth and hence not to bore me with its details. Don't get me wrong; I don't actually have any problem with talking about this kind of thing. Indeed, I accept and embrace small talk — but it exist for a specific function and becomes pernicious as soon as it exceeds these very limited parameters. It is not that I do not want to hear about my friend's teeth, or that I think they are a priori unsuitable or unworthy things for conversation. Contrariwise: it is precisely through talking about these apparently trivial things that relationships are and should be built, that limits of intimacy are set, that we form between us an interpersonal history and knowledge-bank which distinguishes this particular relationship from other particular relationships and from that general mass of potential relationships we associate with The World Out There. No, it is not the content of the "conversation" which troubles me, but rather the manner in which it is conducted, or more specifically, the dynamics of power which are at work. Power need not be executed in any formal or deliberate way; power can be passive, implicit, unintentional, inherited, imagined.

Being faced with the kind of person who will happily talk at you for prolonged periods of time about their own life without thinking to inquire about yours, there are two possible strategies. The first is to initiate a form of conversational competition, where, having sensed the initiative that the one interlocutor has taken, the other takes his first opportunity for interruption, pounces upon it forcefully and, continuing in this vein, creates a more quickfire and dynamic conversation as a result. I acknowledge that this course of conversation can have social merits, but only if it is genuinely consented to by both parties. For me, it is something I am incapable of (and unwilling to do), partly because it is generally not in my character, partly due to my stutter, but more fundamentally because I don't think it is a very healthy way to conduct a relationship: the implication is a constant vying for power, a constant clamouring for attention, a repeated cry for legitimation, and real friendship, it seems to me, is the antithesis of all of these things.

The second strategy is relative silence (save for the odd affirmative "yes" or indeterminate grunt), a pattern which must logically be maintained until an inquiry about the other's life or thoughts is made (an inquiry which may never materialise), the person runs out of things to say (unlikely) or the meeting comes to an end. There will be opportunities to chip in with more substantive contributions, but these will always remain a response to the primary stimulus offered up, allowing, demanding the immediate return of initiative to the initiator. When and if the inquiry is made — that the other is asked his or her news — the damage has already been done, because the talkative person finally making this inquiry has already revealed his insincerity by prioritising his own news. The response, then, ends up being equally insincere, since what the inquirer sought to open up by his spiel — frank, honest, dynamic conversation — has really been closed down by the imbalance of power and lack of consent implicit in enacting this honesty.

Before this post reaches Proustian levels of convolution, however, let me return to the concrete. These frustrations really got to me today, and I seem increasingly to be adopting a policy of near-silence, not as a long-term ethical solution to situations like this, but rather in the short-term, pragmatic hope that the people who surround me wittering away irrelevantly will realise I am for the moment completely unconcerned by what they are saying, and therefore stop talking, before I lose my mind. This is wishful thinking though, because for anyone who substitutes an overabundance of spoken words for a castrated ability to think, empathise, or otherwise imagine the feelings of others, the only possible resolution of the intolerable emptiness of sonic space is an immediate reinscription of that circular and inexhaustible logic of wittering. Such absolute intolerance of silence is really an intolerance of the possibility of death, of that ultimate loss of speech and individuality; in such logic, silence, emptiness, nothingness, is always seeping in like spilt ink at the edges of a page, and the printed words must work ever harder to stem that inevitable flow of non-existence.

So where do we go with this thing, conversation? Is it doomed? No, not at all. I just think most people are unable or unwilling to do conversation effectively. If we consider conversation as an exchange of gifts, we can take any analogy of giving and receiving and find it informative. The priority is always with the gift; the priority is to give, and not to receive. When it comes to conversation, the gift is the question, the enquiry. Of course, a conversation consisting only of enquiries would be nonsense, just as Christmas presents remaining wrapped as a result of the "selfless" refusal of their addressees to receive them would be an absurdity. But nevertheless, receiving is secondary to giving. Yes, in conversation, we must all respond, accept and receive the gift of the question by answering it, but the priority and meaning of conversation is contained exactly in the question, in the inquiry: how are you? As soon as the inquiry becomes cliché or automatic, insincere, a path laid only to enable the possibility of the return, it has ceased to be a gift. What is the real crime of the witterer? It is to deny her interlocutor the opportunity to make the inquiry. Ultimately, this is meaningful because by striving for this kind of equality, by prioritising the other, we share that silence the witterer seeks to destroy with noise; in so doing, we each define ourselves as mortal creatures — and as such, only as such, can we be friends.

Tags: proust, marcelproust, marcel, conversation, friendship, gift, death, exchange, giftexchange, wittering, silence.

Labels: metathought, proust, readingproust, relationships

It is the wicked deception of love that it begins by making us dwell not upon a woman in the outside world but upon a doll inside our head, the only woman who is always available in fact, the only one we shall ever possess, whom the arbitrary nature of memory, almost as absolute as that of the imagination, may have made as different from the real woman as the real Balbec had been from the Balbec I imagined; a dummy creation which little by little, to our own detriment, we shall force the real woman to resemble. [368]

Tags: proust, marcelproust, love.

Labels: proust, readingproust

Today was a day of mourning — a mourning for time, lost time, and accordingly I hit the Proust again on the train. At the end of Part I and the beginning of Part II of The Guermantes Way, Proust describes the day he/his protagonist is out with his grandmother the day she has a stroke. This section of the Proust really moved me. Considering that the book is the definitive work of overstatement and redundancy, there is something very understated about the way the (308-page) first part ends:

She smiled at me sadly and gripped my hand. She had realized she had no need to hide from me what I had guessed straight away, that she had had a slight stroke.

At the start of Part II, he persuades a doctor (who is in a rush to meet the Minister of Commerce for dinner) to examine her (nonetheless). Outside the room, the doctor explains

"There is no hope for your grandmother [...] The stroke was brought on by uraemia. Uraemia in itself is not inevitably fatal, but this seems a hopeless case to me. I don't need to tell you that I hope I am mistaken. And with Cottard [the family doctor], you're in excellent hands. Now if you'll excuse me,"

And he graciously offered me his hand. I had shut the door behind me, and a footman was seeing us to the hall, when my grandmother and I heard angry shouting. The maid had forgotten to see to the buttonhole for the decorations. This would take another ten minutes. The Professor raged away as I stood on the landing gazing at my grandmother, for whom there was no hope left. Each of us is very much alone. We set off back home.

What a fascinating interjection from Proust: "Each of us is very much alone." It is still not clear whether it is really Proust writing for himself, or for a different, nameless protagonist. Either way, now and then we glimpse through the thick texture of this novel the profile of an author and his priorities in a remarkably lucid way. I remember making the same observation towards the end of Albert Camus' L'Etranger: in the final few pages one is aware of Meursault turning into Camus as the author of the work reveals his hand, and makes in a very blunt way the kind of straightforward statement that the foregoing mass of chapters has sought to demonstrate incrementally.

Proust continues:

We make a point of telling ourselves that death can come at any moment, but when we do so we think of that moment as something vague and distant, not as something that can have anything to do with the day that has already begun or might mean that death — or the first signs of its partial possession of us, after which it will never loosen its hold again — will occur this very afternoon, the almost inevitable afternoon with its hourly activities prescribed in advance. We look forward to our daily outing as a means of getting our month's supply of fresh air; we have hesitated over which coat to wear, which cabman to hail; we are in the cab, the whole day is spread before us, a short one because we need to get back home early enough for the visit of a friend; we hope that it will be as fine again tomorrow; and we have no suspicion that death, accompanying us in some obscure way, has chosen this very day to make its appearance, in a few minutes' time, roughly at the moment when the carriage reaches the Champs-Elysées. Perhaps people who are normally haunted by the fear of the utter strangeness of death will find something reassuring about this kind of death — about this kind of initial contact with death — in that it assumes a known, familiar, everyday character. It has been preceded by a good lunch and the same sort of outing that is made by perfectly healthy people.

Although a little earlier, Proust relates the hilarious but tragic anecdote told by the Marquise in the park where his grandmother falls ill:

"My customers keep me in touch with what's going on. I mean, there's one of them went out just now, can't have been more than five minutes ago; he's a judge, and a high-up one, I can tell you. Well!" she broke out heartedly, as though she would have driven home her assertion with violence, had any agent of authority shown signs of challenging its accuracy, "he's been coming here fore the last eight years, I'm telling you, every single day God made, on the dot of three, always polite, never raising his voice, never dirtying a thing. He stays half an hour or so reading his papers while he spends a penny. Then one day he didn't come. I didn't notice it at the time, but that evening I suddenly thought: 'That gentleman didn't come today, did he? Perhaps he's dead.' I get attached to people when they behave nicely and it gave me quite a turn. So I was really glad to see him come back the day after. I said to him: 'Monsieur, nothing bad happened to you yesterday, I hope?' And he told me straight that nothing had happened to him, it was his wife that had died, and it had upset him so much he hadn't been able to come. Of course he looked sad — well, you know, people who've been married twenty-five years — but even so, he seemed pleased to be back. You could tell that his little routine had been quite put out. I tried to cheer him up. I told him: 'Monsieur, you mustn't let yourself go. You keep coming here like you did before. It'll take your mind off things a bit, in the sad state you're in.'"

This made me laugh on the train: I could imagine any north Mancunian shopkeeper conducting just this kind of absurdly frank conversation.

Yes, today has been a day of mourning. The last few days have been full of ghosts as little passages of time can be disproportionately full of ghosts — they appear in our dreams by night and reappear in human form in the people we pass in the street, and we can't be sure whether they were real or not. Mourning, for the relationships I have come close to having but lost as if they never were. Mourning, for the deaths I was not allowed to share in. What has come of this year of lost time?

Tags: proust, marcelproust, death.

Labels: proust, readingproust

April is here again, and soon I'll be sitting through the last two taught lectures of my academic career, notwithstanding failure or teacher training — the two not necessarily being identical. I've the luxury of being completely relaxed about my work at the moment, because my averaged marks place me firmly in distinction territory. This I am very happy about, although I'm trying to guard against complacency by getting through some reading before term resumes on Monday. I'd be pretending, however, if I said I'm not reflecting a little as I approach the milestone of completing taught education.

My MA has certainly spanned two transformative years — and, courtesy of a meltdown or two (a breakdown is a breakthrough), I feel a very different person, with very different priorities, from the one who was taking his Finals in that hay fevery May of 2005. I have learned a great deal, both through my course and through the experience of living the last two years. The extreme cynicism about academia I felt when I graduated has diminished slightly — but only slightly — through having met and got to know a small number of thoroughly human and intellectually excellent people, without the presence of whose like I would still despair unequivocally for higher education. Taking time out last year really was a transformation. Alain de Botton may have his detractors, but he is certainly right that reading Proust can change your life. Through taking time, allowing time to do its healing work, and letting Proust guide me through the treacherous yet tactile and tender world of human contact, I feel enriched and like I have spent time with myself in ways I never knew were possible.

Academically, it has been fascinating to be immersed in massive and topical issues — such as the history of the Iranian Republic. Conversely, though, I have found myself shying away more from direct debates about the issues I have studied; particularly, I have found it more difficult to write about topical issues on this web site. This is the case, I think, not because I have decided the views and audience of others is not worth seeking, but rather that the scale of the narratives and histories at hand reveal themselves to be so multifarious and vast that it becomes intolerable to do an isolated event the injustice of a decontextualised treatment in a short blog post. It is certainly the case — or at least it should be the case — that modesty towards a subject rise in direct proportion with knowledge of it. The threatening problem always at the margins of this equation is depolitication through a lack of discussion, through pathological feelings of inferiority towards a subject which evacuate knowledge of its chief virtue: utility.

Since I have no less cynicism towards any other area of life or possible choice of career than the academic, for the moment I am hoping to continue with PhD research. I just hope that the next three years will offer similar transformation and that this conundrum of obscurantism and depoliticisation — which devours so much scholarship — will not devour me, but rather regurgitate me as a person able to offer something to the world and those around me.

Tags: university, study, academia, phd, doctoral, doctorate, academy, transformation, proust, manchester.

Labels: readingproust

The essay I'm working on at the moment is about to hit the 5,000 word mark, so that's good news. Just 1,000 words a day for the next 14 days and everything will be complete! I'm hopping on a train Monday lunchtime and will hopefully get lots of reading done while away; I'm currently trying to read a book a day, which is getting a bit intense. When I finally get around to re-reading Rosenzweig, I think I'll be reducing to a page a day...

Notes to self and things I might even actually get around to writing about:

• Respond to Minifig regarding Richard Dawkins
• Respond to Paddington regarding Lacanian psychoanalysis
• Finally get round to the next instalment of Proust
• Take more photos
• Recognise the fact that my grandma is in a bathing machine and not atop agricultural machinery.
• Much more etc.

Good day to you.

Labels: essays, readingproust

Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.

—André Gide

Those (few/one) of you with anything like a regular affection for this blog will not have let pass you by the fact that I have not updated you on my Proust reading since June. For this I apologise; I am still reading it, and indeed have made it substantially further since my last report, but progress is slow since I have so much reading to do for university again. I'm nearing the end of the third volume now, and I hope to write about it soon.

Although the way Proust writes about life enriches the experience of living it, and empowers us to notice and value so much that we would normally dismiss or take for granted, it is also a profoundly cynical work which is soaked in resentment of the inhumanity of (particularly high) society and of social behaviour. The brief biography at the start of each volume of In Search of Lost Time states that "his growing disillusionment with humanity caused him to lead an increasingly retired life" after 1899. The antipathy between Proust and society is perhaps best illustrated by the famous encounter between him and James Joyce in 1922, here recounted by the latter (quoted in Alain de Botton's book on Proust):

Our talk consisted solely of the word 'non.' Proust asked me if I knew the work of so-and-so. I said 'non.' Our hostess asked Proust if he had read such and such a piece of Ulysses. Proust said 'non.' And so on.

On the one hand, I am increasingly sympathetic to Proust's cynicism. I'm back in Leicester and have met up with two old friends in the last twenty-four hours, each of whom takes extremely little interest in anyone apart from himself; last night, as a little game with myself, I resolved not to proffer anything about my own life's events, thoughts, or disasters, until I was actually asked. It was forty-five minutes before it was necessary for me to speak in any meaningful way, and even then the questions that came were stock ones about church, unimaginative, disengaged questions read out from a mental script of what he thinks it means to be sociable. I know he plans conversations because I've compared notes with others. Similarly, today over lunch with my other friend, I was aware of my 'presence' there (although it was nothing of the sort) was little more than as facilitator of the charade he likes to put on for the bar staff. Perhaps you should just get better friends, I'm sure you're thinking, and you'd be right.

But that's not all. Every encounter, or at least with very few exceptions, is full of cross-purposes, self-interest, duplicity, lies, jealousy, exploitation, insincerity, dishonesty, disloyalty and betrayal. (Can you tell I've been spending more time in university corridors?) University is just one backstabbing after another, an assault so routine that nobody thinks anything of it. The atmosphere is one of complete suspicion in which there is unrelenting undermining and attempted assassination of each other's character as well as just their work. Substantive assassination of the latter would be acceptable, but the inability to separate the personal from the professional, on top of being highly unsavoury, also betrays a major weakness in the critical and intelligent faculties of all implicated.

On the other hand, I am aware that this account of mine, and surely that of Proust too, is hyperbolic, and involves wanton negativity. The problem with cynicism is that you come to see only the bad side of things to the exclusion of what is good in relationships and what is good in the university corridor. Even worse, cynicism sometimes means seeing the bad that it creates ex voto. And in any event, is difficulty, betrayal, or disloyalty a justification in itself for a withdrawal from encounter? Surely not, but I think it means we have to find a new way of encountering. My cynicism is currently running at Proustian levels of saturation. But I am seeking a new way to relate. Your suggestions are welcomed.

Tagged: proust, marcelproust, insearchoflosttime, alarecherchedutempsperdu, cynicism, friendship, betrayal.

Labels: metathought, readingproust

I'm down in Oxford with my laptop, visiting my aunt and helping out with the family archives. This mainly involves scanning the thousands of photos and documents that my dad got together in the course of his research. There are a lot of photos of my grandmother Margot Hughes, whom I never knew. It's clear why there are so many photos; she was stunningly beautiful. This photo in particular leapt out at me, transporting me back into the second volume of Proust (In the shadow of young girls in flower). The coquettish pose and deliberately vacant smile seem to contradict the agricultural machinery (I presume that's what it is, although I've no idea what they were doing there), producing a timeless image of feminine playfulness and thus drawing us into the moment, full nevertheless of mortality, corporeality, and the knowledge that this is a photo of a woman who grew old, lost her beauty, and died. To add to the complication of this photo is the knowledge that my grandma became a concert pianist.

A truly beautiful photograph, which reminded me of, and instantly made me understand, the moment in the film One Hour Photo where Sy the photo guy buys an old photograph at a junk stall to construct for himself a genealogy that he lacked. A photograph, too, so full of romance and love of the human that, still fresh in my mind, it jarred intolerably with a damning report on Channel 4 News about the criminalisation of youth, the absurd authoritarianism of ASBOs for the under-10s, and a political culture which is increasingly stifling free expression and the joy of being alive.

Tagged: photo, photograph, genealogy, margot, hughes, margothughes, asbo, channel4, news, channel4news, authoritarian, authoritarianism, britain, uk, children, youth, life, death, age, love, proust.

Labels: readingproust

I feel I should apologise that the last few weeks this website has been reduced to an advertising board for the various things I've been up to. Never fear! I heard the other day that I will be resuming university in a couple of weeks, so more substantial posting should resume soon too. And I've not forgotten about the Proust... things are on the way, and stuff.

Labels: readingproust

Probably not much posting for a couple of weeks; leaving to sing at Southwell Minster in an hour or so (don't forget — come to our concert on Friday night if you can!), then off with family to Allonby in West Cumbria, almost exactly a year since I was in West Cumbria for very different reasons. There will certainly be lots of photos, and it's just possible that we'll find an internet cafe somewhere, but in the meantime I implore you to read some great blogs and get reading Drift: the novel. Incidentally, I've finished reading the second volume of Proust, and my aim is to finish the third on holiday, so be ready for a Proustian blitz when I'm back. Bye for now, and enjoy August!

(And here's some more information about the Bishop's Consort!)

Update

Turns out we have a website. Go and visit it!

Tagged: stephenmoore, jameswilkinson, bishopsconsort, away, holiday, drift, driftthenovel, proust, cumbria, southwell, southwellminster

Labels: music, readingproust