Paris Before the War

Proust, why not, I'm tired:

Moreover, the name Guermantes existed for me in many forms. If the form which my memory had merely noted down as in an address book was not accompanied by any poetry, older forms, those which dated from the time when I did not know Mme de Guermantes, were liable to renew themselves in me, especially when I had not seen her for some time and the glaring light of the person with human features did not quench the mysterious radiance of the name. THen once again I began to think of Mme de Guermantes's dwelling as of something that was beyond the bounds of reality, in the same way as I began to think again of the misty Balbec of my early day-dreams as though I had not since then made that journey, or of the 1.22 train as though I had never taken it....Then the idea of reality returned as I entered the Duchess's hall. But I consoled myself with the reflexion that in spite of everything she was for me the real intersection between reality and dream.

It's a sign that you are reading a book so long that you have less read it than lived parts of it that I actually felt the way he feels about the name Guermantes, the 1.22 train, Balbec, before I even did the usual readerly solipsistic work of thinking about things that work for me that way. I don't have to think of women I knew of and then knew to feel the way Proust does about the duchess; I just have to think of Oriane de Guermantes, and I get enough of the sense of lost mystique to feel with him.

What is Oriane de Guermantes before we knew her, when all she was was a set of phonemes blobbed together that reminded us of a lantern projecting figures of long-dead nobility on the wall? Nothing, I suppose, the same way in which the people that we haven't met yet are, for us, nothing now. Young Proust, thinking of her at Combray, can't think of anything about her that he can say: this is what the Duchesse de Guermantes is. But there is nothing that he can say she isn't, and so she gets to be, as a name, free-for-him. The name Guermantes is for young Proust freedom, freedom as the condition of uncollapsedness. No possibility in her, in Balbec, in the 1.22 train, has collapsed into its own not-actually-having-been. What that is, I think, is the fullest form of freedom: not the negative freedom, that, say, Kant condemns (the freedom to do whatever one pleases), nor the positive-but-in-practice-soulless freedom that Kant really likes (the freedom to act noumenally in accordance with laws and so verbosely on). Both of those freedoms are actionable senses of freedom -- they sit open to action, and as such, they sit with their collapsability into an accomplished fact -- an unfree fait accompli -- as their most salient feature.

The downside to the fullest freedom we can feel -- Oriane before we knew her, Paris before the War, Williams College just before I graduated-- is that, of course, it can only be recognized after we know Oriane, after the War makes our bullfights and our lives in the brasseries seem so open and wonderful, after I graduate. The Duchesse de Guermantes whom we actually know -- incredibly stylish, sharp witted, more than a little superficial -- is a saturated object of knowing (to slightly alter topographical metaphors), a collection of possibilities filled in, closed off. And so with every damn thing: know more, wonder less, long for the haunting that those names had for us once, that little haunting that is the one proleptic taste of fullest freedom we can get our hands on. And to long for that haunting -- to be full of a yearning for the sensuous notion of the uncollapsability of everything that has gone before -- that is just what it is to be tired.

The Book Review Review

There was a big deal a few years ago, when the Detroit Tigers were all of the sudden good, when Jim Leyland had Pudge Rodriguez bat, for either the first time in his career or for the first time in a long time. That it was it was like when, smack first in the Book Review this week (subtitled "Democratic Vistas"), we get a facefull of roundup, this time a roundup of books about Obama by the guy who wrote my AP US History textbook. The leadoff roundup has all the benefit, really, of an extra essay, which is basically never bad. Brinkley gives a brisk rundown of books about the election, including one that he says is interesting but less prescient than it should be; the former because it is by Rahm Emmanuel and the latter because it is by 2005 Rahm Emmanuel. Which made me think: who is reading these election books? Don't the kind of people who would get these, just get newspapers instead? It seems to me like topical books like this need an angle on which to hang their hats, like Recent Book I Liked Imperial Life in the Emerald City: for years, it can be The Book about the Green Zone. I'm not sure that things bode well for books to be The Book about the Obama campaign, if they are being collected in a roundup by Alan Brinkley. But who knows.

The other democratic vistas all look either sobering or inspiring, just as they ought to; there's Gwen Ifill's book The Breakthrough, a book on the composition of Martin Luther King's Dream Speech, and a piece on a spate of books about FDR. Never one to shirk their Prime Directive, they also throw in a few otherwise-ly literary choices. And the essay, about William Buckley meeting Reagan, and the way they represented the battle between the brains and the brawn of the conservative movement, is intriguing. All in all a decent one, but still waiting to return to midseason form after the winter holiday.

What's the Story, Book Review?

So you can tell that I wasn't dicking around about that recommitment to this blog, I am posting again, in what I hope will be a new running feature in which I tell you what I think about the New York Times Book Review. For friendless book nerd, the New York Times Sunday Book Review is the most important thing that happens every week. It's got a lot going for it. It comes on Sunday, and what else are you going to do on Sunday? It combines book reviews, lists of best sellers to be indignant about, and, the piece de resistance, the Fun Essay About a Topic. This is the NYTBR equivalent of the New Yorker's Critic at Large pieces, which are basically little chunks of thinking out loud about books that are occasioned by Events. Lots of times, the Event is a biography or a movie or something. This week's fun Essay About a Topic is about a new translation of something, namely Kafka's first novel, Amerika. Adam Kirsch considers the weirdness of this, Kafka's first and unfinished novel, as the first spin of a spiral that "surveys the same spiritual territory but from a [progressively] more commanding height." As Adam Kirsch, who wrote this essay, notes, Amerika is the least commanding height; the Trial and the Castle would later encompass more of our guilt, and understand our complicity in a way that the more defensive Amerika fails to.

This Fun Essay About a Topic was a good one. As for the rest of the NYTBR, well, I will admit that this first week was not the best, and that I did not (ahem) technically read all of it. Or really any of it, apart from that thing about Amerika and the review of Downtown Owl by Chuck Klosterman, which failed to be totally excoriating and thus determined that I will end up reading Downtown Owl. Which leads me to want to say another thing about why the NYTBR on Sundays is so great: the reviews. What's so great about the reviews, you ask me, those are in every day excluding Saturdays! Well, I say, these aren't just any reviews. They are like the Judicial Branch reviews. Every day, Janet Maslin, Michiko, and those other guys show up lay down the book review laws. Then, once a week, in rolls the big shots, reviewing books that may or may not have been reviewed by the everyday guys, doing whatever they please. Interpreting the laws. So anyway, hopefully soon I will have more things to say about the reviews. But for now: don't necessarily avoid Downtown Owl.