Posts filed under 'proust'
While reading Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History, it occurred to me that the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive should do the same within itself. The first step this Winter will be to complete a major information overhaul, marking up and encoding all passages and images rigorously in XML. Then, dynamic real-time visual tools can be used to illuminate the Recherche, narrative, and the manner in which archive users have been interacting with the novel.
Moretti’s use of graphs to illustrate the publishing data about the novel in different times and locations throughout history shows fascinating patterns about its system of subgenres, its rises and falls, and the relationships it bears with politics and economics. Such models could be applied to the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive, but for purpose of illuminating its internal relationships. Graphs could be used to show various aspects of the church motif and how they are patterned throughout the work. Would, say, the rises and falls of particular associations tell us anything about the novel’s exploration of memory or subjectivity, especially anything that might not be obvious in Proust scholarship hitherto? If so, what do these patterns tell us about narrative itself, and of the motif as an element of narrative?
The mapping techniques that Moretti applies to certain English novels reveal interesting patterns in their plot elements, such as the consistency in which certain types of plots form distinct rings around the geographical center of the action. What would we learn from maps of churches in the Recherche, and how they relate to its exploration of subjective memory, national memory, local memory, memorialization through architecture, archives, and narrative? Would the regions of France, their churches, and how the churches signify within the narrative tell us anything new about the Recherche?
Perhaps even trees dealing with associations, categories, or motifs could tell us a lot about the church motif and its operation within the whole narrative.
As well, these kinds of tools could be used to illuminate the relationships between critical discussion on the blog and the text and images in the archive. Which passages get the most attention? The least? Which associations and image properties are most or least discussed? How do these change over time?
A unified, dynamic, and interactive visualization section of the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive could potentially show so much about the Recherche and narrative that has not yet been seen. It could prove to be a new method of inquiry into the novel, Proust, narrative, literary scholarship, and more.
Here are some basic relationships that a visualization application could explore:
Graphs
- Association by pagination location in the novel.
- Association by chronological location in the narrative.
- Association by chronology of composition (would require extensive textual scholarship).
- Association by church.
- Blog categories by association, and/or by image property, and/or by church.
- Real, fictional, and hybrid churches by location in the novel, in the narrative, by image type, etc.
Maps
- Geographical locations of churches.
- Geographical locations of associations and churches.
- Geographical locations of associations by churches, broken down by real, fictional, and hybrid churches.
- Character by geographical location, church, associations, and image properties.
- Any of the above by critical categories in the blog.
Trees
- Breakdown schema of how real and hybrid churches are used in particular associations (say, romantic love or the subject/object distinction).
- Schema of how blog categories explore certain associations or image properties.
- Schema of an image property and the kinds of associations it tends to appear with.
As a note for a future post, in order to make the data more effective in visual applications, a rigorous categorization of the associations (which are non-categorized) will probably be necessary.
November 17th, 2008
I was originally going to post a handful of videos derived somehow from Proust’s work but ended up finding much more — and of better quality — than expected. For now, I’ll post a few musical interpretations. What’s interesting is that almost all of them involve a prominent visual component that constitutes its own narrative. Much of the video out there either parodies, idolizes, or has nothing to do with Proust.
August 31st, 2007
A post by Valter at a blog called Surreal Documents: Doctrines, Fine Arts, Ethnography, Variety got me thinking about Proust in the context of modernist novels in general:
[Proust] thus likened the work of a writer to a architect, organizing the least parts of the text into an interdependent whole. Both Proust’s text and the cathedral are the products of a synthetic spirit, binding together diverse domains of knowledge into a coherent edifice. Panofsky: “The classical cathedral, in its imagery, seeks to embody the totality of Christian knowledge, theological, natural, and historical, by putting everything in its place and by suppressing whatever no longer found a place“. For Proust, the cathedrals of France were not only the most beautiful monuments of French art, but also the only works of art which still lived a life of completeness (”…leur vie intégrale…“).
What Proust’s novel shares with many others of its generation is precisely what Valter calls a “synthetic spirit.” Modernist prose is often fragmentary in style, which might give the surface impression of an analytic spirit. But the poetic structuring of those fragments forms a new kind of synthesis that many modernist writers were trying to discover.
Interestingly, so many novels of the early 20th Century, especially during and after the Great War, contain Edenic imagery as a cry for unity and integrity in the face of the anxieties and upheavals of the time. Virginia Woolf’s The Waves features the house at Elvedon where the children grow up, disperse into the world, and to which they long to return. William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury tells the tragic history of the Compson family after the downfall of the Old South; only their African-American maid, Dilsey, is able to transcend the vanity of modernity through singing at church, an activity that connects her to the Old South. Many similar elements can be pointed out in Joyce, namely the close relationship of the Eden and Einstein motif clusters (i.e. the synthesis of time/space in the eventual unity of Shaun/Shem, tree/stone) of Finnegans Wake.
Proust’s composing the Recherche like a cathedral fits with the general conception of the novel genre as a synthetic whole — one whose poetic structure connects disparate parts such as personal/historical past/present in one experience. And it uses all the media available to the novelistic imagination to do so, which correspond to those presented in churches: pictorial images, sculptural images, narrative, music, interior and exterior emplacements, even food.
A search in the archive on the Novel association recalls a passage that metaphorically compares the notions of architecture, churches, the novel, and the sources of modern European life.
It was, this “Guermantes,” like the setting of a novel, an imaginary landscape which I could with difficulty picture to myself and longed all the more to discover, set in the midst of real lands and roads which all of a sudden would become alive with heraldic details, within a few miles of a railway station; I recalled the names of the places round it as if they had been situated at the foot of Parnassus or of Helicon, and they seemed precious to me as the physical conditionsâ€â€in the realm of topographical scienceâ€â€required for the production of an unaccountable phenomenon. I saw again the escutcheons blazoned beneath the windows of Combray church; their quarters filled, century after century, with all the fiefs which, by marriage or conquest, this illustrious house had appropriated to itself from all the corners of Germany, Italy and France; vast territories in the North, powerful cities in the South, assembled there to group themselves in Guermantes, and, losing their material quality, to inscribe allegorically their sinople keep or castle triple-towered argent upon its azure field. (3 1 1 7-8)
Unfortunately, I don’t have time to expand on this further so I will have to return to it soon.
July 31st, 2007
Couldn’t help but post this, from YouTube.
June 21st, 2007
Today was the first day of panels and plenaries at the conference of the Society for Textual Scholarship, held at NYU. I attended a plenary and a panel in the morning and demonstrated the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive in the afternoon. I’ll only summarize what happened here but will elaborate in more detail later on.
The plenary was titled, “Book History, Textual Criticism, and Bibliography: Relating and Distinguishing the Sub-Disciplines.” Since I entered late, I can’t really summarize it, but it seemed to be about defining the discplinarity of book history. Ezra Greenspan talked about how book histories tend to have a national focus — the history of the book in China, India, the nations of Latin America, etc. — and that there needs to be a transnational focus on geographic trends. He also mentioned that his journal was the first, during the early 90s, to use GIS to map trends in book readership and distribution.
David Greetham asked an astute question about why the term “book” in “book history” seemed to have been ignored. Given the contextualization of studying books as objects in their national, economic, political, and cultural contexts, does it matter whether the book has a substantive essence of its own? What could be the influence of the book itself on its own history?
There was also a palpable disdain of digital text and electronic editing. One audience member mentioned his project that seeks to digitize the papers, letters, notes, and other artifacts of a Canadian writer and make them accessable through a website. He raised the intensely interesting question of how his project relates to the sub-disciplines of book history. There was virtually no response from the panelists, though Katherine Harris, a digital archivist in the audience, made an attempt to further the conversation.
After the plenary I thoroughly enjoyed the panel “The Modernist Material Text: Gender, Politics, Versions,” composed of four grad students from U Michigan. Russell McDonald talked about D.H. Lawrence and cross-gender collaboration. Jenny Sorenson analyzed Virginia Woolf’s play on genre and material text in Flush (a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel). Olivia Bustion discussed gender and priority in versions of three early poems by Marianne Moore. And Jamie Olson focused on cosmopolitanism in Seamus Heaney. All the papers were very good, and I especially liked the Woolf one for its smart discussion of genre.
Questions of genre were prominent in the Q&A during my own panel in the afternoon. It was a fascinating mix. Karsten Kynde and Kim Ravn of the Soren Kierkegaard Research Center demonstrated their archive of Kierkegaard’s papers (http://sks.dk). Jennifer Stertzer, an archivist at UVA, addressed the issues faced during the digitization of George Washington’s papers. Those two presentations contrasted nicely with this site, which archives a motif of the Recherche as opposed to the disparate materials of writer.
The moderator, Peter Robinson, at one point challenged the notion of whether this is really an archive. I thought it was a great question because this site aims to do exactly that (among other things): apply the archival model in such a way that its nature becomes exposed and directly questioned. Can this site be considered an archive if what it collects and makes available are the instances of a narrative motif and images associated with it? I think the answer is yes, as did the audience, to my delight.
After the panel finished I had a really good conversation with a junior faculty memember at my alma mater, Providence College. William Hogan made some interesting points on how this site isn’t quite an archive, not quite an edition, but it’s somewhere in between and more Internet native than the other resources available.
I’ll have more to say on this soon. Time to get some sleep.
March 16th, 2007
Two Fridays ago I went out to celebrate my friend Terry’s dissertation defense. It was a night of great conversation, and among the new acquaintances I made was Marsha Fulton, an art historian currently teaching gothic and romanesque architecture (among other things) at SUNY New Paltz.
Our discussion caused me completely to reread a couple of major sections of the Recherche.
Apocalypse
Marsha explained that the flourishing of romanesque architecture in France during the 10th and 11th Centuries was characterized by two different climactic events. During the 10th Century there was widespread fear that the world would end, so romanesque churches were built in expectation of the apocalypse. When that didn’t happen, in order to thank God more and more churches were built during the 11th Century on a larger scale and with greater ornamentation. They began in the romanesque style and later evolved into the gothic.
The fact that churches were sites where people mapped apocalyptic associations reminded me of the same during the WWI section of the Recherche. At least that’s what I thought it reminded me of. But when I did a few searches in the archive to find some passages to write about, I discovered that Marcel the narrator and his contemporaries are somewhat indifferent to the destruction of cathedrals. They are more concerned with the destruction of what cathedrals represent, which differs for various constituencies.
A search on the War association brought up the best apocalyptic results.
Mme Verdurin had visited Venice during the war, butâ€â€like those people who cannot bear sad talk or display of personal feelingsâ€â€when she said that “it” was “marvellous” she was referring not to Venice, or St Mark’s, or the palaces, all that I had so loved and she thought so unimportant, but to the effect of the searchlights in the sky, of which searchlights she could give you a detailed account supported by statistics. So from age to age is reborn a certain realism which reacts against what the previous age has admired.) (6 1 1 51)
[Painting: Searchlights, WWI, Venice; by Giulio Aristide Sartorio; original here.]
This passage I remembered well for its expression of a modern(ist) attitude toward cathedrals and monuments of the past. The experience of Mme Verdurin, the avante-garde salon-keeper, is anaesthetic, much in contrast to the intoxication of Marcel’s reveries about St. Mark’s and the church of Combray. However, even the passages I thought would contain a more cataclysmic sense of what was lost with the destruction of great cathedrals are actually somewhat muted.
For example, during a conversation between Marcel and Charlus, the Baron compares the destruction of the church at Combray — which literally embodies his family history — with the destruction of Rheims and Amiens. He says that if the statue of St. Firmin at Amiens has been broken, then “the loftiest affirmation of faith and energy ever made has disappeared from this world.” Marcel quicky chastizes him for confusing real faith with a symbol of faith.
“And I adore certain symbols no less than you do. But it would be absurd to sacrifice to the symbol the reality that it symbolises. Cathedrals are to be adored until the day when, to preserve them, it would be necessary to deny the truths which they teach. The raised arm of St Firmin said, with an almost military gesture of command: ‘Let us be broken, if honour requires.’ Do not sacrifice men to stones whose beauty comes precisely from their having for a moment given fixed form to human truths.” (6 1 1 154)
[Photo: statue of St. Firmin, left porch, Cathédrale Notre-Dame d'Amiens; by Deborah Fulton, November 2003; original here.]
I’m struck here by the unease with which Marcel greets Charlus’ admiration of the art instead of the men who fought and died to preserve the French nation. The importance of the cathedral here is not its status as priceless art-object but the real people it “stands for”. In the archive, the passage is paired with the famous, iconic image of the woman with a sword, using the destruction of Rheims to rally the public. The emotional rendering of the burning cathedral and its protector is like the “loftiest affirmation of faith and energy” that Charlus admires in the statue of St. Firmin. Obviously the medieval statue and the early 20th Century poster are both propaganda. But what’s interesting is the repurposing of the iconic image for the new context.
Juxtaposing the government poster of Rheims with a documentary photograph of its porch during the same period can illustrate the cognitive divide between Marcel and aristocratic and upper-class characters like Mme Verdurin and Charlus. Both images here are from the Library of Congress online archive.
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No image is free of political influence or effect, but the more realistic photograph on the right is a matter-of-fact presentation of the same familiar ediface that represents France. Marcel’s patriotism seems a little less grounded in idealism and more in realism. When reflecting on the character of different social groups during the War, he excoriates the “vile shirkers like the arrogant young man in a dinner-jacket” he saw at Jupien’s brothel, who are “redeemed by the innumerable throng of all the Frenchmen of Saint-André-des-Champs, by all the sublime soldiers and by those whom I rank as their equals, the Larivières,” Françoise’s rich but low-class cousins (6 1 1 226). There is a profound — almost apocalyptic — sense of the failure of the governing classes, of “the sky falling”.
An even more “truly” apocalyptic effect is conveyed by a photograph of Rheims that, rather than focusing on the iconic cathedral, presents a panorama of the town that includes the ruined towers. The photo is also from the Library of Congress.
Pilgrimage
Marsha also explained to me that the flourishing of romanesque architecture in the 11th century coincided with a boom in pilgrimages. A vibrant tourist industry brought travelers on long walking trips where the effect of visiting churches in towns along the way reached a crescendo at the large cathedral that was the end point. This was done (as far as I can remember) largely to thank God for not destroying the world at the turn of the century, but also for a host of other reasons. She made me want to reread the Canterbury Tales.
As she talked about this, I was immediately reminded of the scenes at Balbec in which Marcel and Albertine cruise the Normandy roads in his new car visiting (and painting) old romanesque churches (roughly 4 2 3 535-70). This series of events is a kind of pilgrimage that stops at churches but is really about exploring the mysteries of love, absence, Albertine, beauty, technology, modernity, and other motifs.
As often as not I went no further than the great plain which overlooks Gourville, and as it resembles slightly the plain that begins above Combray, in the direction of Méséglise, even at a considerable distance from Albertine I had the joy of thinking that, even if my eyes could not reach her, the powerful, soft sea breeze that was flowing past me, carrying further than they, must sweep down, with nothing to arrest it, as far as Quetteholme, until it stirred the branches of the trees that bury Saint-Jean-de-la-Haise in their foliage, caressing my beloved’s face, and thus create a double link between us in this retreat indefinitely enlarged but free of dangers, as in those games in which two children find themselves momentarily out of sight and earshot of one another, and yet while far apart remain together. I returned by those roads from which there is a view of the sea, and where in the past, before it appeared among the branches, I used to shut my eyes to reflect that what I was about to see was indeed the plaintive ancestress of the earth, pursuing, as in the days when no living creature yet existed, her insane and immemorial agitation. (4 2 3 558-9)
The new experience of automobile travel is a search for origin and purity, though marked by the apparent aimlessness and whimsy of modernity. Interestingly, the only direct references pilgrimage (in the archive) come from aristocratic characters, Orianne and Charlus. They speak impatiently of making pilgrimages to Paray-le-Monial and other tourist destinations. The impression they give is that visiting old churches is done for bland relaxation and art appreciation.
Contrasted with the profane attitude of the modern elite, however, is that of intellectual/creative characters like Marcel, Swann, and Elstir. It is Swann who in the appropriately titled Swann’s Way sets Marcel’s imagination on the path toward the Persian-influenced church at Balbec and St. Mark’s in Venice. Those two churches, mixed with his early reveries in the église Saint-Hilaire and his contemplation-in-motion of the twin steeples of Martinville, awaken his vocation as a writer and set the reference points that shape his life and the changing modality of his meditations (and re-meditations). Observations of churches at different points of the narrative form a network of events that bear a synecdochic relationship to the Recherche as a whole. The pilgrimage ends on the final page when he sees the eighty-three-year-old Duc de Guermantes as one of those men who “never cease to grow until sometimes they become taller than church steeples, making it in the end both difficult and perilous for them to walk and raising them to an eminence from which suddenly they fall” (6 1 1 532).
Thus the plot-device of the pilgrimage, alternately implicit and explicit, has a wide-ranging valence within the narrative. It bears upon it the church motif, which acts as a lightning rod to highlight disparate characters’ reponses to the Great War, to modernity, to homosexuality and decadence, to the cognitive faculties as they negotiate subject and object, and much more. It is also one of the main reflexive metaphors of the Recherche. It embodies the journey with its endpoints in the past and future, and changes as the nature of the journey changes at its different stages.
And it ends, as the West ends, with an apocalypse. The images presented here attest to the great “cataclysm from above”: the search-lights over WWI Venice, St. Firmin’s upraised arm, the government-produced fire and brimstone above Rheims, the artillery-produced fire and brimstone around and below it. The end of Marcel’s journey, however, is not a revelation of ultimate or divine purpose — far from it — but of the processes of history and human purpose.
March 8th, 2007
In the final pages of In Search of Lost Time Marcel the narrator says of his intended book that he would “build it up like a church†(VI.507). He would also stitch it simply like a dress, regroup his forces like a general conducting an offensive, endure it like a medical regime (VI.507-9). But the book that he has written over the six volumes leading to this point features the church motif more prominently than the others mentioned in these ending pages. In fact, the connection between self reflection and churches is prefigured on page one, where Marcel begins the story by explaining his nightly shift between waking and sleep.
And half an hour later the thought that it was time to look for sleep would awaken me; I would make as if to put away the book which I imagined was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been reading, but these thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was the immediate subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V. (I.1)
The apparent blending of subject and object “did not offend [his] reason†(I.1) and became the major motivation for his search of Lost Time. One critical aspect of this passage is that it establishes the conflict between perception and imperceptible reality, of which Marcel’s other conflicts are types (i.e. questions of Albertine’s fidelity and sexual orientation, the nature of Time, the relation of self to nation). The church and quartet are significant here in that they embody and document time itself. Time and harmonics are the essential elements of the art of music, the bringing to life of a continual emotional present that can be re-performed but never duplicated. An old church brings to life the presence of the past and is a supreme exemplar of the general in the particular. It also incorporates many arts — architecture, sculpture, stained glass, painting, tapestry, music, narrative, fashion, even food and drink — and combines their special effects to express the whole of human experience. It is therefore not surprising that the narrator concludes that books of the magnitude he will undertake are never complete: “How many great cathedrals remain unfinished!†(VI.508).
There are many motifs that contribute to the rich texture of the Recherche, yet the church is probably the most frequent and consistent throughout. A motif is a recurring thematic or structural element in any art, especially music, architecture, painting, and literature. In addition to manifestation through plot and character, motifs can be embodied in place or time. The recurring elements that unify Proust’s novel — the Madeleine, the Japanese paper game, the little phrase of Vinteuil’s sonata, the parish church at Combray, to name a few — allow for the modulation of themes and function like motifs in a piece of music but also like the pan-aesthetic motifs of a church. Churches fulfill several functions in the novel ranging from elements of setting to objects of discourse, and they embody both place and time. Just consider the import of the first time Marcel sees Mme de Guermantes in the church at Combray, his meditation on the twin steeples of Martinville, or all the love fantasies he has before the commencement of his relationship with Gilberte. For these reasons the church motif seems a sufficient subject for a large-scale study.
The current mission of this archive is to provide textual and visual material to enhance analysis of the Recherche and the study of the nature of narrative. The relation of some of the materials might not be clear, but the purpose here is not so much to track down original references (though there is a lot of that) as it is to provide thought-provoking experiences. Anyone who is seriously interested in working with Proust or the topics pertinent to this archive (see the categories list in the sidebar), or on the archive itself, is encouraged to contact me at jdrouin@gc.cuny.edu.
February 8th, 2007
