a bonobo humanity?

I’ve almost finished reading Swann’s Way, for a reading group I’m a member of, and it’s not my first time. I even read Du côté de chez Swann as part of Honours French at university, which I never finished – Honours, that is, not the Proust. Anyway, my first reading of Proust was almost fifty years ago, when I was keen to be a connoisseur of the finest literature available, according to the cognoscenti. However, I never quite got through Le Temps retrouvé, finding it all a bit much – and now, having exposed myself for the third or fourth time to Proust’s celebration or exposé of the parasitic upper class of Combray, wherever that is, I feel I’ve had more than enough. After all, I grew up in working-class Elizabeth, South Australia, a slightly different environment. I was beaten up a couple of times, I was twice hung by my feet from the top of a two-storey stair-well by my schoolmates, I was slapped across the face by my headmaster for chewing gum in his presence, which led me to quit the school forthwith, as a 15-year-old, and over the next few years I worked on a farm (for one day), on a demolition team (for a week), in two washing machine factories, in a factory constructing mobile classrooms, in a wire-works, at a plastic pipe-making factory (in the office that time), at a steel tubemaker, in a hospital enticingly titled The Home for Incurables, as a kitchen hand in a French restaurant, and, much later, in a printing press. And somewhere amongst that, at the latter end of all these travails, I managed half an honours degree in French (I dropped out) and then an honours degree in English, together with some basic teaching qualifications.

Perhaps I got carried away with reciting all that, but at least it makes the obvious point that my background is somewhat different from that of Proust, or Monsieur Swann, to whom coachmen or stockbrokers are at a level below which it’s scarcely possible to imagine.

So, Swann seems very aptly named, as he seems to spend all his time swanning about from salon to salon, with his not quite so refined mistress Odette in tow, all the time wondering whether she should be traded in for another model, for she’s never quite up to the mark. For Swann is the ultimate connoisseur of – well, things one should be connoisseury about – like sonatas and bas-reliefs and reredos. Women, though, are a problem for the cognoscenti, as they’re so changeable, unpredictable, ungraspable, so subject to ‘experience’. So wilfull, even in spite of their relative poverty, their dependence, their ignorance…

This first volume of Proust’s lengthy work was published in 1913, just around the time that carriages were gradually being reduced to cars. It would still be a long time, though, before mistresses became anything remotely like masters. In fact we’re still awaiting that transformation, and watching out for signs. We don’t quite know how long it took in the bonobo world, but it was surely a collective effort. So when, in coming to the section where Swann, in questioning Odette about her private life, especially vis-a-vis her female friends, is given hints about intimacies that disturb, but, I suspect, also enthral him, I reflect on that creeping, tantalising, exhilarating transformation that may have come about in the Congolese jungle when those female chimps-becoming-bonobos huddled together, sharing their fruits and nuts, slipping them from mouth to mouth, tasting each others’ saliva, rubbing and exciting each other, so gently at first, clinging to each other and, just feeling…

Humans, of course, are not so gross. Research tells me that when bonobo females are harassed by a male, usually sexually, they’ve been known to bite him somewhere in the sexual arena, putting him out of action for weeks or even months at a time. All of which makes me think of Swann pestering Odette about a private life which is obviously no business of his…

It’s interesting that, in the version of Swann’s Way I’ve been reading, which seems to be from 1992 (it’s complicated – described as ‘The new, fully revised and updated edition of the Scott Moncrieff and Kilmartin translation’, and then ‘revised in translation by D J Enright’, with different dates mentioned), I came across a reference to a French writer very different from Proust, both stylistically and in general outlook. It appears on page 467 of the 513-page first volume of In Search of Lost Time. Another five volumes must be read. Allow me to quote:

The name of Parma, one of the towns that I most longed to visit after reading the Chartreuse, seeming to me compact, smooth, violet-tinted and soft, if anyone were to speak of such or such a house in Parma in which I should be lodged, he would give me the pleasure of thinking that I was to inhabit a dwelling that was compact, smooth, violet-tinted and soft, that bore no relation to the houses in any other town in Italy, since I could imagine it only by the aid of that heavy first syllable of the name of Parma, in which no breath of air stirs, and of all that I had made it assume of Stendhalian sweetness and the reflected hue of violets.

Apologies if this quote seems a bit long-winded, but after all it’s only one sentence, and arguably one of the shorter sentences in the book. And that’s the point. Stendhal, the author of La Chartreuse de Parme, Le Rouge et le Noir, De L’Amour and other works, is a writer very dear to me, more than just a favourite writer, and his style has a ‘less is more’ element, especially when treating of affairs of the heart. His female characters are powerful and often unfathomably complex, and generally unattainable. There are passages in his work where the short sentences are like a punch to the heart, making it hard to continue. I’ve had this experience personally, and it has made me reflect on the power of words when effectively used. So I don’t know quite what to make of Proust’s ‘Stendhalian sweetness’ except to say that, for me, it completely misses the mark.

Stendhal and Proust, a fascinating contrast. Both were aesthetes, we might say – Stendhal wrote about Italian art and music (he lived most of his adult life in Italy, finding the French to be overly bourgeois – ‘bourgeois assez plat’ was one of his favourite put-downs), and claimed to be energised by Italian forthrightness and exuberance. Of course, he was very much of the bourgeoisie himself, his father being a prominent land-owner, advocate and one-time mayor of Grenoble, though interestingly, he disliked his father and adored his mother, who died in childbirth when he was seven. But he was also, in his youth, much enamoured of Napoleon, and spent his early adulthood in the military, as much to ‘see the world’ as to ‘fight for the fatherland’.

So, to his feminism – avant la lettre – which is the facet that has most drawn me to him. Simone de Beauvoir wrote highly of him, and of his depictions of complex, rebellious women, and described him as a feminist writer. His female characters are also politically active, insofar as it was permitted at the time, and action, so generally missing in Proust’s oeuvre, is of course a feature of early 19th century western Europe, the era of Napoleon, in contrast to the early 20th century background of Proust’s first volume. And Proust is also obsessed with class, without ever being forth-right about the issue. In fact I’ve never read any work that is so saturated in class concerns as that of Proust. Of course, the French have this tu/vous dichotomy, which has equivalents in a number of other cultures, but I was bemused by a passage near the beginning of ‘Place names: the name’, which made me wonder about what a strange other country the past can be. The young narrator has become a playmate and impassioned admirer of Gilberte, who happens, as we later learn, to be the daughter of Charles Swann and Odette de Crecy, the apparently unequal lovers of ‘Swann in love’. So, I was struck by this passage:

      And there was another day when she said to me: “You know, you can call me ‘Gilberte’. In any case, I’m going to call you by your first name. It’s silly not to.” Yet she continued for a while to address me by the more formal ‘vous’..

This struck me as bizarre – they’d been playing together, and with other children, for weeks or more, without using first names? What did they call each other? ‘Hey you’? ‘Spunkbutton’? ‘Fuckwit’?  Is there a place where kids can play together regularly for weeks on end without mentioning each others’ names? Maybe, but surely not on this planet…? This, too, seemed to have something to do with class, but I can’t quite work it out.

So, having finished this 513-page first volume of In Search of Lost Time, which I seem to remember having read before, at least most of it, in French and in English, I’m wondering if I have the patience to go on. I’m much more into non-fiction these days, and yet… I think maybe I’ve been a bit harsh on Proust, and… I like to see things through to the end. I really don’t know…

—————

So, having read more than a third of  ‘Within a budding grove’, the second volume of some translator’s version of In search of lost time, I’ve decided I’ve had enough. Here’s one passage – among many – that irritated my 21st century sensibility:

… she [Odette] would say, “Yes, I like this room; I use it a great deal. I couldn’t live with a lot of hostile, pompous things; this is where I do my work” (though she never stated precisely at what she was working, whether a picture, or perhaps a book, for the hobby of writing was beginning to become common among women who liked to do something, not to be quite useless)…

I should point out, if it needs to be, that this perfectly describes Proust’s hobby as well, and that he would surely have been aware of such English hobbyists as Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes, and the enticingly named Fanny Burney, whom one female literary enthusiast recommended to me in a pub years ago as ‘the best of all that lot’.

But needless to say, there are no female intellectuals in anything I’ve read so far in Proust, and I’m not holding my breath… But of course, he’s ‘of his time’. More annoying are the interminable sentences with their many subordinate clauses, leading to a ‘punchline’ which, for its power and even its meaning requires you to go back to the first few words of the sentence, which, likely as not, are a hundred or so lines earlier. This is, presumably, Proust’s complexity, his nuance, his intellectual richness, and if you don’t appreciate it you’re just a dumb-ass, permanently excluded from ‘the happy few’. So, I hereby exclude myself…

References

In Search of Lost Time: Volume 1: Swann’s Way, by Marcel Proust

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stendhal