My Year With Proust - Day 194

   "My impression, to tell the truth, though more agreeable than on the earlier occasion, was not really different.  Only, I no longer confronted it with a pre-existent, abstract and false idea of dramatic genius, and I understood now that dramatic genius was precisely this.  It had just occurred to me that if I had not derived any pleasure from my first encounter with Berma, it was because, as earlier still when I used to meet Gilberte in the Champs-Elysees, I had come to her with too strong a desire.  Between my two disappointments there was perhaps not only this resemblance, bur another, deeper one.  The impression given us by a person or a work (or an interpretation of a work) of marked individuality is peculiar to that person or work.  We have brought with us the ideas of 'beauty,' 'breadth of style,' 'pathos' and so forth which we might at a pinch have the illusion of recognising in the banality of conventional face or talent, but our critical spirit has before it he insistent challenge of a form of which is possesses no intellectual equivalent, in which it must detect and isolate the unknown element.  It hears a shrill sound, an oddly interrogative inflextion.  It asks itself: 'Is it good? Is what I am feeling now admiration?  Is that what is meant by richness of colouring, nobility, strength?' And what answers it again is shrill voice, a curiously questioning tone, the despotic impression, wholly material, caused by a person whom one does not know, in which no scope is left for 'breadth of interpretation.' And for this reason it is the really beautiful works that, if we listen to them with sincerity, must disappoint us most keenly, because in the storehouse of our ideas there is none that responds to an individual impression."

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, pp. 45-46

I feel that I should have required my students in Aesthetic Expression to read Remembrance of Things Past.  Of course, I am starting to feel the same way about Concepts of the Self.  If the students complain about reading a two-hundred page novel (and, truthfully, if a novel is only two-hundred pages is it even a novel), I'd love to hear their response to reading a three-thousand two-hundred page novel.  And I'm not kidding, I would love to see their response; the pain would be tangible, and delicious.  Proust asks, "Is it good?  Is what I am feeling now admiration?  Is that what is meant by richness of colouring, nobility, strength?"  I think that most of Aesthetic Expression is an attempt to give the students the intellectual tools necessary to ask that question, and hopefully to begin to answer it.

Now, I could, I suppose, quote all sorts of famous people in regard to this question, but maybe for now I'll stick with my own clumsy definition.  I've often thought that one way to think about the concept of genius is that once you've witnessed it you end up feeling both bigger and smaller at the same time.  You feel smaller because you've just seen something that you know is so far beyond your ability to produce that it is almost laughable (as Homer would say, "why me laugh?").  At the same time, I think you feel bigger (again, from the Simpsons, "a noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.") because you've learned something profound about the human condition and thus you're brought into contact with a much broader intellectual and cultural and moral world.  All this made me think of times, especially early ones, when I had this experience.  I know I've talked at length about reading Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio and W. Sumerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence when I was around fourteen and that, not only were these works that adults read (and thus I never read anything age appropriate again) but that they were hinting at things that were utterly profound, and I think this brings us back to the question of "Is it good?"  I know I just shared this clip yesterday, but the last few minutes of The Deer Hunter just destroyed me.  Not only because it is heart-breaking, but because it was so complex and was completely content to ask more questions than it answered.  While everyone was going crazy over Jaws or Star Wars (both of which were films I liked) I just suddenly felt that you couldn't take movies like that seriously anymore.  The other fairly early example would be seeing Blue Velvet in the theater, which from the first scene to the last had me completely engrossed.  I know it's often criticized, and some of my good friends just loathe the film, but I think it's brilliant and completely changed cinema.  It was one of those films where you walked out and went immediately for coffee and talked through the film for three hours, and then made plans to see it again immediately.  It launched my now three decade old strike against the Academy Awards for their failure to nominate it, although the Academy has somehow survived without my support.