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.
Add comment August 31st, 2007
On Saturday March 17th I attended two afternoon panels, Text Work in the Digital Age, Part 2 and the Pedagogy and Textual Studies Round Table. In Text Work in the Digital Age, Part 2, Alice Gambrell, Sandy Baldwin, and Rita Raley all gave presentations that focused somewhat on the future of textual works. I was struck by the fact that most of these forward-looking textual projects were artistic in nature.
Alice Gambrell gave a fascinating presentation on the textuality of workplace media and its subversive uses by artists. A prominent example was David Byrne’s PowerPoint piece (2001-3). But she also referred to a collaborative project she had done a couple of years ago, the Stolen Time Archive, which shows that an archive is an argument that achieves certain effects. In that way, the role of the archivist is to use the archive as a tool for passing information along to others who will use it in unanticipated — and subversive — ways.
Sandy Baldwin had an interesting take on spam, noting that much of it tends toward the literary — an eliteness (i.e. 1337, or leet / “elite”) and a uniqueness that achieves its own erasure as spam. He was referring, as best I can remember, to the kinds of “nonsense” stories and poems that enter our inboxes randomly (or seemingly so) and the pleasure he derives from them. I was pleased to hear someone talking about this experience of textuality at such an important conference because some spam appeals to my sensibility as well as that of others. I think that particular experience of textuality — the randomness with which it goes to the reader (as opposed to vice versa), the mystery of its apparently automatic origin — in large part defines our time. One of the most beautiful haiku (sort of) that I’ve ever read came from a spammer who apparently put something through babelfish several times before disseminating it to probably thousands of individuals:
modern animal
walk appreciate key hoping article
myself black
Rita Raley brought to our attention several new media art projects that seek to improve online reading, develop new reading interfaces, experiment with translation (by machine), and can help us flesh out more fully the history of reading. Her assessment of the projects addressed the following elements.
I don’t seem to have notes on all the artists she discussed, so I’ll do my best to recount the more interesting ones.
William Gillespie’s Word Museum is a 3D environment and interface for creating word objects and sculptures. It’s about the transition between legibility and illegibility, looking at text as a sculptural object and reading it — or processing it — from all sides and angles.
jodi.org — a site (reminds me of absurd.org) that subversively expresses the hidden structures of a text. In commandeering the physical behavior of the browser, the site calls attention to the binaries of code/surface, source/interface, and depth/surface. The reader is made aware that code is a deep structure that substantiates a surface. Rita also remarked that works which include code with human language in the same space isolate the screen as a surface.
Ted Warnell’s code poem Lascaux.Symbol.ic similarly lays bare the conditions of textual production. The background horse from Lascaux (circa 15,000 BCE) calls our attention to the “writing on the wall” and the communicative, expressive, semiotic systems that reside in art. The hand evokes tactility, the interface, and presence/absence. It also looks mounted, meaning the cave wall is not the mounting of the painting/poem, as traditionally, but the background of the picture — thereby destabilizing the notions of foreground/background (reminds me of Cubism).
She also discussed several pieces by John Cayley, a London-based poet, translator, and book dealer who also works at Royal Holloway College, University of London, and has directed research at Brown University and UC San Diego.
The overarching theme of these experimental projects is legibility. They approach text as something to be contemplated rather than read. In that way, they’re more about processing text in non-traditional, unfamiliar ways.
This was a particularly stimulating panel that precipitated a lively Q&A session. The three presentations had in common a forward-looking attitude that implied — if it didn’t directly address — the future of reading and textual production. They all focused on issues pertinent to the projects and discussion that happen at the Institute for the Future of the Book, so I suggested that anyone who didn’t already know about it should check it out.
In the next post I will review the Pedagogy round table that also proved highly stimulating.
Add comment April 9th, 2007
First, to finish my entry on the Futures of Scholarly Editing II panel of March 16th. Peter Robinson’s demonstration of the digitized Codex Sinaiticus Manuscript was incredible. The Codex Sinaiticus, a 4th century manuscript with a four-column layout and impeccable handwriting, is one of the only surviving, complete, Greek bibles. Two goals of the project (among others that I failed to write down) are (a) to make a digital version that is as remarkable as the manuscript itself (it’s stunning) and (b) virtually to reunify all its leaves. No scholar has beheld the whole manuscript at once in over 2,000 years. The fragments are currently disbursed among St. Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt, the British Museum, the University of Leipzig, and the National Library of Russia, all of which are collaborating to produce the digital edition.
In order to make the digital edition as remarkable as the original, the interface is as functional as it is beautiful. A gamma image recognition system was used to link high quality images of the manuscript to the digital transcripts — down to the individual letter. Images can be floated over the transcripts in order to have a simultaneous supplement to the original. Now readers can search the centuries of corrections made to the manuscript by scholars over a period of 1,500 years, can add their own commentary to the edition, and can import and export their own bits. It is one of the first scholarly digital editions, I think, to incorporate social software into its design in order to enable discussion and collaboration.
All of this is done through a beautiful, beige, AJAX-y interface that one of the German programmers began to develop after he first saw Gmail (the digital MS previously had a highly functional but clunky looking HTML interface). The interface includes elements that can be picked up and dragged around to suit the ergonomic of the reader. And the functions, which allow the interaction between image, text, and other elements, are arrayed in an intuitive and logical manner. I was deeply impressed by the demonstration and left the room buzzing.
I began writing about the panels I attended on the 17th but there was so much to say that I’ve saved them for the next post.
Add comment April 5th, 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.
Add comment March 8th, 2007
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