Food And Its Mysteries (Swann's Way p 130ff)

I've been bouncing around in different directions for a few months so I'm not quite sure where I am in Proust and I just decided to dive back in wherever and whenever and discovered one of my favorite passages: the part of Swann's Way where the Narrator describes the scent of Asparagus in his pee.

The Narrator really puts himself back in the position of the child for whom the most important part of the day is dinner, and the most mysterious and proximate part of the household is the kitchen.  As is typical for Proust, he goes back and forth between the literature of the narrator's age group, politics and the military,  and the reality of the sensual world so each can inform the other.

"At the hour when I usually went downstairs to find out what there was for dinner, its preparation would already have begun, and Francoise, a colonel with all the forces of nature for her subalterns, as in the fairy-tales where giants hire themselves out as scullions, would be stirring the coals..."  

The narrator describes the scene as though it were the tally of ships from Homer and remembers the "great array of vessels" each a "triumph" of "the potters craft" and he "inspects" the "platoons of peas, drawn up in ranks and numbered."  He slips between the language of war and that of childhood competitions because the peas start out a platoons and end up as marbles "ready for a game."  And then we get to the asparagus which are exalted thus:

"...what most enraptured me were the asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and pink which shaded off from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible gradations to their white feet--still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed--with an iridescence that was not of this world. I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form and who, through the disguise of their firm, comestible flesh, allowed me to discern in this radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades that precious quality which I should recognise again when, all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting as the fairies in Shakespeare's Dream) at transforming my chamber pot into a vase of aromatic perfume."

Nothing could be more lusciously real, you can see the "mauve and azure" and the little "white feet" and its all the more real because they are "still stained a little by the soil of their garden bed" and touched with an "iridescence" but, at the same time, these asparagus inhabit the realm of the fairies and sprites which peopled the world of Francoise and the child narrator.  These asparagus spears were really something else, something "disguised" which had "assume (d) vegetable form" but which were really numinous and both earthy and spirit formed.  When their "firm, comestible flesh" had been consumed, when the narrator has "partaken" of them (as of a sacrament) they return and "transform" the lowly chamber pot "into a vase of aromatic perfume."

The Little Note (Proust 29-30)

In the penultimate scene before the famous Maternal Kiss the Narrator goes to hell and back trying to hang on to an experience (his mother's bedtime kiss) which is denied him one evening when M. Swann is visiting at dinnertime.  This scene combines so many Proustian issues that you find yourself wanting to run sticky note footnotes all down the side or making a hyperlink out of every word.

One evening in Combray the routine of the Narrator's existence is disturbed by the arrival of the Swann, whose importance and simultaneous unimportance to the family the Narrator has already described.  The Narrator is focused on getting his night time kiss from his mother, in fact he  is so afraid of the real thing slipping away from him, of his apprehension (in the old fashioned sense of the term) not being enough to handle the evanescence of the experience, that he describes spending an entire family dinner, as a child, strategizing to get the most out of the one kiss he was permitted to give his mother in public. Art and the sacred, the workmanlike task of getting ready for the sitter and the determination of the artist to sacralize a single moment in time are all intermingled:

“And so I promised myself that in the dining room, as they began to eat and drink and as I felt the hour approach, I would put beforehand into this kiss, which was bound to be so brief and furtive, everything that my own efforts could muster, would carefully choose in advance the exact spot on her cheek where I would imprint it, and would so prepare my thoughts as to be able, thanks to these mental preliminaries, to consecrate the whole of the minute Mamma would grant me to the sensation of her cheek against my lips, as a painter who can have his subject for short sittings only prepares his palette, and from what he remembers and from rough notes does in advance everything which he possibly can do in the sitter's absence.”

To his horror the Narrator is sent up to bed without the longed for kiss and “set [s] forth without viaticum.” (29) The entire setting of this horror—the very scent of the staircase—become intertwined with the Narrator's sense of grievance and loss. This “made it perhaps even crueller to my sensibility because, when it assumed this olfactory guise, my intellect was powerless to resist it.” (30) The intellect, the will, is over come (as usual) by the sensual triggers associated with an emotional state. The experience becomes so tangled between sight, sound, smell, physical pain (“a toothache”), drama (“ as of a little girl whom we attempt, time after time, to pull out of the water,”) or even literature (“or a line of Moliere which we repeat incessantly to ourselves”) that the Narrator doesn't know whether he would prefer to be completely unconscious or fully conscious in order to allow his “intelligence [to] disentangle the ideas” and go from the imaginary, dream state to the reality of the actual toothache pain.

The Narrator describes the entire process of going to bed as digging his “own grave” and wrapping himself “in the shroud” of his nightshirt. He then “bur[ies]” himself in the iron bed. After this description of horror who can blame him for devising a “desperate stratagem” for he is a “condemned prisoner” and isn't he entitled to beg for mercy? Now he jumps from the prison metaphor to one that straddles his reality and what he perceives to be the experience of the servant, Francoise. The Narrator “had a suspicion that, in her eyes, to carry a message to [his] mother when there was a guest would appear as flatly inconceivable as for the door-keeper of a theater to hand a letter to an actor upon the stage.” Francoise is not only a door keeper and functionary, she is also an atavistic throwback to the Old Testament, a hierophant, or a disciple of a cruel mystery:

“On the subject of things which might or might not be done she possessed a code at once imperious, abundant, subtle, and uncompromising on points themselves imperceptible or irrelevant, which gave it a resemblance to those ancient laws which combine such cruel ordinances as the massacre of infants at the breast with prohibitions of exaggerated refinement against “seething the kid in his mother's milk” or “eating of the sinew which is upon the hollow of the thigh.” (30-31)

Francoise's code comes from somewhere unclear to the Narrator and his family—she's nothing but a little village peasant woman, after all, but the Narrator attributes her strict moral code, her conviction that there are things that are “done” and “not done” to something “latent” in her, something in her “past existence in the ancient history of France, noble and little understood, as in those manufacturing towns where old mansions still testify to their former courtly days, and chemical workers toil among delicately sculptured scenes from Le Miracle de Theophile or Les quatre fils Aymon.” *1

In order to bring his mother to his side, and successfully use Francoise as his messenger—a prefiguring of the many times the adult Narrator and his friends will have to resort to intermediaries to trick a love object into an assignation?--the Narrator insists to Francoise that it is not he who has requested to see his mother but the mother who has requested that the Narrator send her a little note to be delivered during dinner. Of course Francoise, who is often compared to a lower order or something primitive, “disbelieves” him for “like those primitive men whose senses were so much keener than our own, she could immediately detect, from signs imperceptible to the rest of us, the truth or falsehood of anything that we might wish to conceal from her.” But despite her animal nature and her preternatural senses when Francoise attempts to determine, just from looking at the sealed envelope, “to which article of her code she ought to refer the matter” she is stumped. In other words, when confronted with a written document whose meaning is hidden from her, she must fall back on obedience and carries the letter away. The educated child triumphs, momentarily, over the adult whose authority is merely circumstantial and dependent on her vague and atavistic code.

The Little Note

The Narrator's note goes down to his mother and now he imaginatively follows it. Although the “little note” is bound to make him a laughingstock in the eyes of Swann (who is at the dinner and already occupies an important place in the Narrator's imagination, standing in for society, for wit, for something bigger and more interesting than the rather stodgy and unpleasant father and grandfather) the Narrator's anxiety subsides. The little note “would at least admit me, invisible and enraptured, into the same room as herself, would whisper about me into her ear.” The dining room, the stage, the salon, the dance, society itself are all places where, in the future, the Narrator will find himself exiled from his love object and this is true for Swann as well, the Narrator's doppleganger. The lover can only imagine, from outside, the pleasures the lover is enjoying and in a typically Proustian clause that winds from place to place the Narrator throws in this bitter animadversion that his mother, in that “forbidden and unfriendly dining-room,” is enjoying “ pleasures that were baleful an of a mortal sadness” because “Mamma was tasting of them while I was far away.” These pleasures are described mysteriously as a dessert composed of opposites “the ice itself—with burned nuts in it” but this contradictory and rather chilly sounding dessert (ice cream?) is at once transformed, by the note being put into his mother's hand into an open door and a different experience entirely not “ice” and “burnt nuts” but “a ripe fruit which bursts through its skin,” because the knowledge that the note would be read “was going to pour out into my intoxicated heart the sweetness of Mamma's attention while she was reading what I had written.” The dining room here merely prefigures the places where a man, Swann, the Narrator, will later be denied entrance, or not invited. But the note itself bursts those boundaries, however temporarily, because while he imagines his mother is potentially about to read the note, or reading it “I was no longer separated from her; the barriers were down; an exquisite thread united us.”

We must end this section by agreeing with Francoise “Its hard lines on parents having a child like that.”

How often does Proust, in the form of the Narrator, refer to some notion of atavism, of the influence of geography, food, literature and architecture on the almost animal and unconscious mentality of people? Given his half Jewish status and the permanent “unfrenchness” of the Jewish immigrants to the French imaginary –so powerfully demonstrated in the Dreyfus affaire--you have to wonder whether Proust isn't describing a state of French Nature which he must (in his heart) believe can never be accorded to Jews, even if nominally they like others are part of the post Revolutionary French Ideal.

Film and Memory

I spent part of today listening to Martin Scorsese's National Humanities lecture "Persistence of Vision: Reading the Language of Cinema,"  It was an absolute tour de force and it reminded me, of course, of Proust. Partly that is because he was exploring the roots of cinema and discussing the work of Melies, the Lumiere Brothers, and Muybridge, among others at least one of whom is implicated in some of Proust's imagery in the early part of the book.  I have a strong, almost pathological, tendency to see Proust's issues everywhere but Scorsese's talk really is quite Proustian, both in its subject matter and in the way he approached it as a performance piece.  For one thing he combines autobiography and sensual memories of film (its sight, sound, smells, and social setting) with his analysis and for another he sees film itself as an instance of the centrality of the struggle to remember, to represent, to convey meaning to others which is at the heart of our human existence.  

I'll have more to say about Scorsese's beautiful talk after I get my hands on a written copy but I do want to recommend it and to point especially to the passages where he discusses the problem of representing, through directorial artifice, a particular viewpoint. What is exciting to Scorsese, to hear him tell it, is the history of the idea of the transformation of a still image into a meaningful story.  He begins with the cave paintings of Lascaux and moves on to the first films linking still photographs together.  He argues that the real art comes in cutting the flow of an event--of selecting it, framing it, leaving out what is extraneous, and then cutting between angles or scenes or even events in such a way as to leave a true picture not of what "really happened" but of a representation, an idea, of something important that exists in the mind of the director.  

But underlying the idea of a particular viewpoint is Scorsese's Proustian understanding that even that viewpoint--the movie, the image, is eventually subject to a kind of incorporation into the viewer--that it doesn't exist outside of its position in the mind and eye of the viewer.  He says (paraphrasing since I only heard this on the radio) that the people in one of the earliest films are dressed in the style of their period, they are enacting the present because they were filmed at the time but they are simultaneously an historical artifact, acting out (for us) something from the past.  Of course that happens to every film over time as it becomes a period piece, as what is important in it becomes not that it was faithful to the concerns of its day but as it becomes a representation to us of our shared past--perhaps the only access we have to our shared past.

And this is, in its way, what Proust is getting at in one of those tedious apparent digressions in the first 50 pages.  He appears to be merely setting the scene, describing the people in the Narrator's life in Combray, the people who came and went in the family house during the summers which were important to the Narrator because the little world of Combray was the entire world of a little boy.  But in giving his description of the visitor, young M. Swann, he ends up exploring the very nature not only of memory but of the apprehension and understanding of "the other" or, indeed, any other person.  You might think that we "know" a person as we know any other object--that we can see what they are about in exactly the same way we think we see a photograph and recognize its subject. But the Narrator says--not really. Just as I think Scorsese would say "not really" about how we think we "know" what a film is showing us about a past event.

Do people really exist at all, outside of our memories and our understandings of them? The Narrator says: no.  We "do not constitute a material whole" which is "identical for everyone" and which can be "turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will."  Rather we--and the people that the Narrator encounters, have a "social personality" which "is a creation of the thoughts of other people."  Proust goes so far as to challenge the idea that the very person that we meet in the street is really there, in any sense, outside of our notions of who it is we are meeting.  He says that even the seemingly simple act of "seeing someone we know" is "to some extent an intellectual process."  Really we encounter almost a cartoon like hollow shape and "we pack the physical outline of the person we see with all the notions we have already formed about him."  We "compose" (as in a piece of music or of writing) this person first of all "in our minds" and then impose him on the person we encounter.  We are so convinced of the rightness of our understanding that "those notions...come to fill out...completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose," to "blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice" that it is as if the physical person were no more than "a transparent envelope" into which we have poured our ideas of the person and which we regard favorably, as the person we know, because we are really regarding our own composition through the envelope.

Swann is both one of main protagonists of the novel, and also the main exemplar of the distance between the real person and the social person for the Narrator encounters Swann as a family friend with one set of attributes, but as he grows up and encounters Swann socially discovers an entirely different Swann.  The first Swann, the "family" Swann, is "constructed" by the family and for the family. This construction leaves out, because of "ignorance" a "whole host of details of [Swann's] life in the world of fashion." (20)  These things, known to Swann's other friends, "caused other people, when they met him to see all the graces enthroned in his face and stopping at the line of his aquiline nose as at a natural frontier."    For the Narrator's family this Swann doesn't exist, instead they fill up his face as if it were a blank space "divested of all glamour, vacant and roomy as an untenanted house" and they "plant in the depths of these undervalued eyes, a lingering residuum, vague but not unpleasing--half-memory and half-oblivion--of idle hours spent together after our weekly dinners, round the card table or in the garden, during our companionable country life."

Swann's "corporeal envelope" has been "so well lined with this residuum" that the family's "own Special Swann" had become "to my family a complete and living creature" regardless of the fact that he is, in fact, entirely made up and not quite faithful to the real Swann.  For the Narrator the two Swann's are two different people and "even now I have the feeling of leaving someone I know for another quite different person when, going back in memory, I pass from the Swann whom I knew later and more intimately to this early Swann."  The two Swanns are connected to each other almost incidentally, as if they are both acquaintances of the Narrator.  He can visit both, certainly-- but one only in memory.  And he must take his leave of the old Swann when he encounters the new Swann.  Rather than enriching his understanding of the new Swann he seems to feel that he must abandon the old.  I don't know whether we can say that this is true. I mean: obviously the Narrator/Proust sees that the two are the same person but as a writer he seems to hew to the notion that there are two (or more) people inside most of the characters and often his Narrator seems puzzled as to the motivations and histories of people with whom he seems to be quite familiar.

What does this have to do with Scorsese? Well, as I said I have to go back and read the talk as well as see the whole thing but he talks about film as being "shards of memory" [ETA: this is wrong. I just saw the speech and I believe his phrase is "pieces of memory," but I like shards better.] composed by the film maker and you can hear in his talk (and see it, I suppose, when one views it on the computer) the importance of abandoning the merely literal for a creation, a bricolage, composed of images, cuts, shifts in viewpoint, tricks of light and sound, sleight of hand and magic, changes in tempo and hundreds of other now new, now conventional, ways of representing a person or a scene.  At the end of this section of the book (if any section can be said to have an end, hell the guy could barely bring his sentences to an end) the Narrator has this to say about his own memories of the Young Swann:

"...when, going back in memory, I pass from the Swann whom I knew later and more intimately to this early Swann--this early Swann in whom I can distinguish the charming mistakes of my youth and who in fact is less like his successor than he is like the other people I knew at that time, as though one's life were a picture gallery in which all the portraits of any one period had a marked family likeness, a similar tonality--this early Swann abounding in leisure, fragrant with the scent of the great chestnut-tree, of baskets of raspberries and of a sprig of tarragon. (1)" (p21)  

 For me this passage is typically Proustian--he can't even describe a single person without resorting to locating that person in a certain time, a set of smells and images, of foods and relationships.  But you can also see it as typically cinematographic [ETA: In fact Scorsese does exactly the same thing in his description of going to the movies with his family in a description which figuratively walks the auditor to Scorsese's speech through the doors of the cinema with his family, on to the magnificent carpet, past the popcorn, through the doors and then, directing our attention backwards, away from the screen, we watch with Scorsese as he turns and sees the flickering light from the tiny window of the projection room.]  We can see that he is talking about a portrait gallery which seems the opposite of cinema since the pictures don't move but as Scorsese points out Muybridge's work illuminated motion through a series of still photographs taken one right after the other, each freezing the subject at a different point in time. In addition Proust's approach to the idea of the portrait gallery is one in which the portraits all look alike either because they are all of members of one family, or because being painted close in time they share a "similar tonality" --because everyone dressed alike during a given period? because the painter was the same painter? Because the style of representation was conventional? He doesn't say specifically but all of these might be what he means and this reminds me, again, of Scorsese's point that the film occupies, represents, and recreates both a past moment and a present moment (as we view it in the present and our experience of it is immediate).





(1)
Perhaps this is the source of my little love affair with Proust--because I read Proust at a psychologically important moment in my life, in isolation, in an utterly unfamiliar world--by kerosene lantern and by candle light, sometimes singing my hair as my own grandmother did when I let the candle on my chest get too close to my bangs.  Like Proust I read late at night and used books to combat homesickness and that feeling of being helpless as an invalid in a land where I could only imperfectly make myself understood.  Like Proust I felt myself to be eternally a "traveller" waiting for the inhabitants of a strange household to rise and begin the day and my choices of how I would spend my days were limited by strange customs and rules.  But underneath that similarity is still another--that both Proust and I were children in France. For him the "scent of the chestnut-tree [and] of baskets of raspberries and...tarragon."  For me? The scent of the oysters and seafood heaped up on the crushed ice in front of the restaurants, the wheeze of the special scent of French Trucks as they lumber by, cigarettes and coconut macaroons--these all whip me back to being 8 years old again and a stranger on the streets of Paris.