Let the Dead Bury Their Dead

Could anything be more bizarre than the now nearly hourly updates on where Tamerlan Tsarnaev will be buried?  I listen to a college radio station for the music and have to suffer through the students' garbled accounts of what they think a person purveying "news" would say--they are almost always unable to stumble through their own terse press accounts and if they go beyond the headlines ("Markets were up, today, in up trading" ) they usually get whatever they are reporting on backwards or broken. I can't say that I leave listening to WERS stupider than before--that is an honor reserved to NPR and shows like Marketplace which actively deform the news. But WERS reports on "stuff other people are reporting on" so it does serve as a window into "stuff people are hearing because its stuff other people are reporting on."

Let me be the first to say that I do not care to know what happens to the corpse of Tamerlan Tsarnaev. I don't care not because the guy was more heinous than other mass murderers--I felt the same indifference to the fate of the corpse of Mother Teresa. Its simply not my business and I think we'd all be better off as a people if we rose, as one, and said as much. Its.Not.Our.Business.  If land could be contaminated by the touch of murderers then the ground where Dick Cheney walks would be radioactive already and birds would fall dead from the sky as they flew over his golf outings.  I resent having Tsarnaev's body's fate thrust on me  as if all of us subscribe to the same ritualistic magical thinking as some lowest common denominator tea party trogledyte.  Its a corpse. Not a zombie. Dispose of it and lets move on. Or at least can we stop reporting on it as though he's Franco and we can't believe he's still dead?

Girls With Guitars

I spend way too much time on the bloggosphere but one of the reasons is that occasionally you come across something like this discussion and this comment by JL.

As I’ve mentioned here a few times before, I went to MIT. The reason I keep saying “like so many girls in similar situations” is because there are a lot of women at MIT with similar backstories. The other thing about being at MIT, at least in my subculture, was that a lot of the overtly negative treatment regarding my interests or appearance – not all of it, but a lot, including pretty much all from femme women, of whom there are also many at MIT – went away. For the first time I was making friends with women with traditionally feminine interests, and I noticed that a lot of them, in this environment, were facing negative treatment of their own. I also noticed that the life science majors – dominated by women – were treated by too many students as easy and frivolous, with jokes about people getting As by sleeping with TAs. I felt a lot of pressure, both internal and external, to pick a male-dominated major (I didn’t, though ironically I went into one for graduate studies). I met femme queer women who felt insecure or excluded in that community. I started engaging a lot more with wider geek culture, which can be pretty sexist. I learned what internalized sexism meant. I realized that a lot of those men who complimented women for doing masculine-coded things were sexist asshats who didn’t respect women in general, and I got tired of hearing “But I don’t mean you!” if I complained about people’s comments about women.
I remember the shock that I felt when I found out that a guy who had never been anything but respectful to me was sexually harassing several very femme women in my wider social group. My conversations with him had all been about locksmithing, and he had treated me, with my black tactical pants and my men’s t-shirts and my unisex-geek-ponytail, like a colleague, while treating them like meat.
I don’t think feminine women have it harder than masculine women or vice versa…I think we experience sexism differently, at least sometimes. Like I said, people acted like I was a freak and threw random homophobic slurs (years before I realized that I was bi and started identifying as such) at me, because I was breaking norms, and in the minds of some, that deserves punishment. Feminine women often seem to get treated in a way that reflects contempt toward femininity – a contempt that, as I’ve said, I spent years getting over. They aren’t breaking that norm, but their norm is considered frivolous, second-class, and sexually available.

This went straight to my heart as a woman and a parent because I have a beautiful daughter who is good at everything from classically feminine pursuits like sewing and clothes designing, dance and hospitality to Math, Physics, Biology, and Philosophy.  And yet she is refusing to even apply to MIT. Not because she can't do the work but because she fears, and I think rightly, being relegated to some kind of "also ran" status because she also loves History and English.   Those courses being seen as "guts" or "too easy" at the moment because they are seen as feminine even though when the schools were all male they were seen as quite masculine.

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.

By the Way I Admit That The Way I Write About Proust Is Boring

The first step to dealing with a problem is admitting it. There's something about writing about a topic every day that sucks all the verve out of it. Mr. Aimai has challenged me to find a way to write about Proust the way I talk about Proust to my children which is substantially more like Wonkette but run through a speeded up Alvin and the Chipmunks transformer. I'll give it a try.

Castes

The book is an ethnography of  co-located, interpenetrated, and even sexually reproducing but mutually incomprehensible communities--communities composed of men and women, ethnicities and religious communities, classes and occupations that live next to one another--even sometimes co-exist within the same household and family--but who continually misunderstand one another, fail to value one another properly, fail to speak the same language.  That's a horribly social sciency way of looking at it but he says it himself farirly directly in his account of Swann "the younger" (and what is that but a way of trying to fix Swann in a social space defined by his name and his status within a family?).

First of all: people are always understood, and understood best, in terms of their family setting--"knowing" a family socially is a highly significant marker but one only seems to know people within one's own generation and the knowledge of who they are and what they are seems to tail off significantly--just as the Narrator really only "knows" Swann's father through a half remembered story and family joke (M. Swann the elder  is remembered for saying "Its a funny thing, now; I very often think of my poor wife, but I cannot think of her for long at a time."  This is reduced, in the family phrasebook, to "Often, but a little at a time, like poor old Swann.")

During the Narrator's youth M. Swann the younger is a mysterious stranger who appears during the family's summer vacations in Combray.  But the child's ignorance of who Swann is is really only an echo of the adult's ignorance:

"For many years, during the course of which--especially before his marriage--M. Swann the younger came often to see them at Combray, my great-aunt and my grandparents never suspected that he had entirely ceased to live in the society which his family had frequented, and that, under the sort of incognito which the name of Swann gave him among us, they were harbouring--with the complete innocence of a family of respectable innkeepers who have in their midst some celebrated highwayman without knowing it--onef the most distinguished members of the Jockey Club, a particular friend of the Comte de Paris and of the Prince of Wales, and one of the men most sought after in the aristocratic world of the Faubourg Sait-Germain."

How is it possible, in a world of such formality where different doors and different bells are used to signal the arrival of people one "knows" from servants who one doesn't know, or strangers who must never be admitted to the house, that the family can welcome someone who they don't really know?

Our utter ignorance of the brilliant social life which Swann led was, of course, due in part to his own reserve and discretion, but also to the fact that middle-class people in those days took what was almost a Hindu view of society, which they held to consist of sharply defined castes, so that everyone at his birth found himself called to that station in life which his parents already occupied, and from which nothing, save the accident of an exceptional career or of a "good" marriage could extract you and translate you to a superior caste  M. Swann the elder had been a stockbroker; and so "young Swann" found himself immured for life in a caste whose members' fortunes, as in a category of tax-payers, varied between such and such limits of income. 

Given that Swann is supposed to be modeled, partially, on Charles Ephrussi, one of the wandering Jews from The Hare With the Amber Eyes and that Proust's family itself was "mixed race" with Proust himself rejecting Judaism for Catholicism this seems like a very funny, almost sidelong, reference to the blindness of French society to its own reality.  I recently read The Black Count which makes the same point through mere history: the most French of French writers, Alexandre Dumas, had a father who was half Haitian Slave and half French Marquis and the period of the Revolution was one of incredible tumult and social upheaval not merely for the aristocracy that it brought down but for the men and women who rose up and intermarried with the ruling class, the white race, and into "Frenchness." But just as Dumas's father and his military history and the statue commemorating him was disappeared from French military history and from the Square where the statue was placed so this aspect of French Society is invisible to Proust's family.  They know it, but they refuse to know it.

 One knew the people with whom his father had associated, and so one knew his own associates, the people with whom he was "in a position to mix." If he knew other people besides, those were youthful acquaintances on whom the old friends of his family, like my relatives, shut their eyes all the more good-naturedly because Swann himself, after he was left an orphan, still came most faithfully to see us; but we would have been ready to wager that the people outside our acquaintance whom Swann knew were of the sort to whom he would not have dared to raise his hat if he had met them while he was walking with us.  

The Narrator refers to the method of determining a person's place in society as a "social coefficient."  Its one of my favorite lines in the book.  For such a determinedly dreamy, sensual, writer Proust seems to rely heavily on images of money, numbers, tax-rates and real estate to place his characters on an invisible social map.  He says:

Had it been absolutely essential to apply to Swann a social coefficient peculiar to himself, as distinct from all the other sons of other stockbrokers in his father's position, his coefficient would have been rather lower than theirs, because being very simple in his habits, and having always had a craze for "antiques" and pictures, he now lived and amassed his collections in an old house which my grandmother longed to visit but which was situated on the Quai d'Orleans, a neighborhood in which my great-aunt thought it degrading to be quartered." (16-17)

A Little Less of this Convenient Aphasia

Here in the Boston Area one can still be shocked by the range of the bombing's impact. I just discovered, yesterday--so more than a week after the bombing--that I "know" a husband and wife who both lost a leg in the bombing. They live near me. I know their mother/mother-in-law from a women's political action group I work with.  I am also still encountering people who haven't seen me since the bombing and who need to relive it and unburden themselves of the part that people are still fixated on: the mystery of the evil.   Yesterday while I was downtown with Boston Children's Chorus one of the other mothers began bewailing the fact that the second bomber was "treated in the same hospital with some of his victims."  The room split between upper class/educated women (White and Asian) and working class/non white women--except the one who is half egyptian and married to an African American--on how much they priviliged a kind of sentimental urge over principle.  I was surprised to find myself not at all alone in explaining to the first woman, who was outraged by the Miranda warning and by the treating of the bomber at the hospital, that there are principles which need to be defended when you are talking about government action regardless of the sentiment of the mob or the victims.

But what struck me again in the coverage and the discussion, especially of the "evil" question--how could he? What kind of person would? How could he go to a party afterwards? Why don't they torture him to make him talk? is how compartamentalized people are about violence in this country.  Not only do they forget Columbine, and the shooting of Gabby Giffords, and the Aurora shooting and bombing event but they seem to forget (or never to have known) about the half dozen recent "discoveries" of bomb caches here in the northeast and the recent spate of bombing/arson shootings of firefighters.

Here's a couple:

A sniper killed firefighter Ryan Hummert, 22, and wounded two police officers in 2008 as they responded to a pickup and house fire in Maplewood, a St. Louis suburb. Later that year, a carjacker shot and killed off-duty St. Louis firefighter Leonard Riggins, who saw a car wreck and stopped to help, not knowing that the armed carjacker had crashed the car.
Roswell, N.M., Fire Chief Louis Jones, 46, died in March 2002 after responding to a house fire. As Jones approached the house, a man began firing, hitting Jones in the head and killing a paramedic. The shooter, a man with a history of mental illness, had set the fire, killed a neighbor, shot the neighbor's 3-year-old son and taken a 5-year-old child hostage before killing himself, according to a report from the Roswell Fire Department.

This was only brought to our attention because of the Webster shooting in which four firefighters were shot, two were killed, by some totally normal white guy with a grudge. I actually was looking for a set of "crazy domestic abuser found with enormous cache of weapons and explosives when wife turns him in" stories which I read in local papers up North (New Hampshire or Maine) a year or so ago but they were so far out of google range I couldn't find them.

This country is awash in guns and explosives and they are in the hands of some of the most mentally disturbed and morally bankrupt people we can imagine and most of them are fellow citizens, "natural born" Americans, and white people. But every one of these lunatics gets read his rights if he is arrested. And none of them are tortured.

Early Pavlov

"My sole consolation when I went upstairs for the night was that Mamma would come in and kiss me after I was in bed.  But this good night lasted for so short a time, she went down again so soon, that the moment in which I heard her climb the stairs, and then caught the sound of her garden dress of blue muslin, from which hung little tassels of plaited straw, rustling along the double-doored corridor, was for me a moment of the utmost pain; for it heralded the moment which was bound to follow it, when she would have left me and gone downstairs again.  So much so that I reached the point of hoping that this goodnight which I loved so much would come as late as possible, so as to prolong the time of respite during which Mamma would not yet have appeared."

This is an invocation of a state of longing and suspense, a description of a form of conditioning--"the sound of her garden dress...heralded the moment that was bound to follow"-- and a very Proustian layering of color, sound, memory and feeling in which one leads inextricably to the next. The Narrator holds each of these memories in tension--the sound is the color of the dress, the rustle is the size and style of the corridor itself.  And he remembers himself as almost preferring the tension of the moments before she appears, before the kiss because the joy of anticipation is preferable to the sense of loss he feels at the end of the moment when she goes away.

In this little vignette we see one of the oddities of the Narrator--I won't say of Proust because I try to keep the two distinct even though one can't help but want to read from one to the other (1)--which is that the Narrator's desire to hang on to things (people, experiences, names, images, feelings, memories) seems to predispose him to put off actually encountering the real thing about which he daydreams, or the thing he remembers because of the likelihood that it will disappoint him or that it will end too swiftly.  Here is a person who feels things so deeply that his feelings extend to the moments after and the moments before the impression, before and after the event. No wonder the Narrator's favorite person in his childhood is his Grandmother, for only the Grandmother recognizes that feelings and experiences extend out from the moment (or the object) and infuse the object or event with meaning:

"The truth was that she could never permit herself to buy anything from which no intellectual profit was to be derived, above all the profit which fine things afford us by teaching us to seek our pleasures elsewhere than in the barren satisfaction of worldly wealth. Even when she had to make someone a present of the kind called "useful," when she had to give an armchair or some table-silver or a walking-stick, she would choose "antiques," as though their long desuetude had effaced from them any semblance of utility and fitted them rather to instruct us in the lives of the men of other days than to serve the common requirements of our own.  She would have liked me to have in my room photographs of ancient buildings or beautiful places, But at the moment of buying them, and for all that the subjects of the picture had an aesthetic value, she would find that vulgarity and utility had too prominent a part in them, through the mechanical nature of their reproduction by photography.  She attempted by a subterfuge, if not to eliminate altogether this commercial banality, at least to minimise it, to supplant it to a certain extent with what was art still, to introduce, as it were, several "thicknesses" of art: instead of photographs of Chartres Cathedral, of the Fountains of Saint-Cloud, or of Vesuvius, she would inquire of Swann whether some great painter had not depicted them, and preferred to give me photographs of "Chartres Cathedral" after Corot, of the "Fountains of Saint-Cloud" after Hubert Robert, and of "Vesuvius" after Turner, which were a stage higher in the scale of art.  But although the photographer had been prevented from reproducing directly these masterpieces or beauties of nature, and had there been replaced by a great artist, he resumed his odious position when it came to reproducing the artist's interpretation.  Accordingly, having to reckon again with vulgarity, my grandmother would endeavour to postpone the moment of contact still further.  She would ask Swann if the picture had not been engraved, preferring, when possible, old engravings with some interest of association apart from themselves, such, for example, as show us a masterpiece in a state in which we can no longer see it to-day (like Morghen's print of Leonardo's "Last Supper" before its defacement)."(42-43)

But where the Narrator tries to push off the moment of consummation, for fear of the moment of loss, the grandmother accepts that the pleasure of "seeking"is not diminished by the moment of finding in some specific thing the "instruction" she finds profitable. On the contrary, although she seems to need to tunnel down below the everyday, behind the ordinary and the utilitarian she is satisfied--even when "the armchairs she had presented to married couples, young and old...on a first attempt to sit down upon them had at once collapsed beneath the weight of their recipients." (44)



 The rest of the family is rather unimaginative and emotionally flat footed.  In fact "my father had almost called her an imbecile on learning the names of the books she proposed to give me."(42) They see her romanticism, and that of the Narrator, as childish, absurd, and highly socially problematic. But this is perhaps only because they don't know about themselves what the Narrator and his Grandmother know: which is that every person has some such things that matter to them. Even "practicality" and "utility" and the idea of the "matter of fact"--of the "manly" and the "adult" need to be put in quotes and kept at a distance from the person. They are all things that we enact because we enjoy them, on some level, not because they are natural to us or a natural aspect of the thing itself.

(1)  I want to remind myself to write something about the idea of tension and longing for the Narrator and Proust becoming (perhaps) a natural part of human sexuality.  I think it will come, as it were, under the heading of spying, voyeurism, secrecy and society. There is a long and rather odd passage in the book, which has been traced by Painter to a real incident, in which two women enact a fetishized scene of literal iconoclasm, figurative parricide.  Proust refers to it as "sadism"and its clear that the scene is represented as making no sense to the Narrator (who is too young to apprehend it fully) while the writer himself is concealing under wraps the real history of the scene which is peculiar to his own relationship with his mother.