My Years With Proust - Day 448

   "Why, what have you been talking about?" said Albertine, astonished at the solemn, paternal tone which M. de Charlus had suddenly adopted.

   "About Balzac," the Barton hastily replied, "and you are wearing this evening the very same costume as the Princesse de Cadignan, not the first, which she wears at the dinner-party, but the second."

   This coincidence was due to the fact that, in choosing Albertine's clothes, I drew my inspiration from the taste that she had acquired thanks to Elstir, who had a liking for that sort of sobriety that might have been called British had it not been tempered with a softness that was purely French.  As a rule the clothes he preferred offered to the eye a harmonious combination of grey tones, like the dress of Diane de Cadignan.  M. de Charlus was almost the only person capable of appreciating Albertine's clothes at their true value; his eye detected at a glance what constituted their rarity, their worth; eh wold never had mistaken one material for another, and could always recognise the maker.  but he preferred - in women - a little more brightness and colour than Elstir would allow.  And so, that evening, Albertine glanced at me with a half-smiling, half-apprehensive expression, wrinkling her little pink cat's nose.  Meeting over her skirt of grey crepe de chine, her jacket of grey eheviot did indeed give the impression that she was dressed entirely in grey.  But, signing to me to help her, because her puffed sleeves needed to be smoothed down or pulled up for her to get into or out of her jacket, she took it off, and as these sleeves were of a Scottish plaid in soft colours, pink, pale blue, dull green, pigeon's breast, the effect was as though in a grey sky a rainbow had suddenly appeared.  And she wondered whether this would find favour with M. de Charlus.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 1089

I don't know if I have anything particularly profound to add to this segment, although I'm having a very clear Jimmy Stewart Vertigo moment.

Judy: Couldn't you like me, just me the way I am? When we first started out, it was so good; we had fun.  And . . . and then you started in on the clothes. Well, I'll wear the darn clothes if you want me to, if, if you'll just, just like me.

Scottie: The color of your hair . . .

Judy: Oh, no!

Scottie: Judy, please, it can't matter to you.

Proust recounts Marcel's role in choosing Albertine's clothes: "This coincidence was due to the fact that, in choosing Albertine's clothes, I drew my inspiration from the taste that she had acquired thanks to Elstir, who had a liking for that sort of sobriety that might have been called British had it not been tempered with a softness that was purely French."  Is this an expression of the unquestioned patriarchy that pervades so much of Remembrance of Things Past (I'm dressing you because you are something I own) or just Marcel's jealousy which will end up with Albertine little more than a prisoner?  This seems to happen less today (although this may have always just been a class issue anyway) except in the bedroom where men still make very specific Victoria's Secret demands.  It matters not what what I'm helping you put on, but rather what I'm helping you take off.  Or is that an expression of the point above - is it still about the ruling patriarchy and a man's desire to dress/undress a woman because he owns her?  It can't matter to you . . .

My Years With Proust - Day 447

Ski having shown some determination to pursue the subject, M. de Charlus, his eyes starting out of his head, raised his voice and with a meaningful glance at Albertine - who is fact could not hear what we were saying, being engaged in conversation with Mme Cottara and Princess Sherbatoff - and the hint of a double meaning of someone who wishes to teach ill-bred people a lesson, said: "I think it's high time we began to talk of subjects that might interest this young lady." But I realised that, for him, the young lady was not Albertine but Morel, and he confirmed, later on, the accuracy of my interpretation by the expressions he employed when he begged that there might be no more such conversations in front of Morel. "You know," he said to me, speaking of the violinist, "he's not at all what you might suppose, he's a very decent boy who has always been very serious and well-behaved." One sensed from these words that M. de Charlus regarded sexual inversion as a danger as menacing to young men as prostitution is to women, and that if he employed the epithet "serious" of Morel it was in the sense that it has when applied to a young shop-girl.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 1088

Proust reveals more of the Baron's complicated relationship with his young lover Morel, and, for that matter, with his own sexuality.  M. de Charlus refers to Morel as "a very decent boy who has always been very serious and well-behaved."  As I'm reading it the use of the word "boy" is less jarring than the words "decent" and "well-behaved."  We've been discussing the Baron's attempt, either consciously or unconsciously, to isolate himself from his own actions and desires, to praise its expressions (or at least its perceived expressions) in the arts, while also treating it almost as an inert thing separate from his own experience.  To be fair, he was living in a very different age where being "outed" had tremendous implications, but, also, he was, in his way, being more open to his closest friends.  Proust also adds this observation: "One sensed from these words that M. de Charlus regarded sexual inversion as a danger as menacing to young men as prostitution is to women, and that if he employed the epithet "serious" of Morel it was in the sense that it has when applied to a young shop-girl."  Now, is this part of the same conscious or unconscious effort to distance himself from his own desire, or does he truly love Morel and feels some societally-engineered shame for his actions?

My Years With Proust - Day 446

   When M. de Charlus was not speaking of his admiration for Morel's beauty as though it had no connexion with a proclivity known as a vice, he would discuss that vice, but as though he himself were in no way addicted to it.  Sometimes indeed he did not hesitate to call it by its name.  When examining the find binding of his volume of Balzac, I asked him which was his favourite novel in the Comedie humaine, he replied, his thoughts irresistibly attracted towards an obsession: "Impossible to choose between tiny miniatures like Cure de Tours and the Femme abandonnee, or the great frescoes like the series of the Illusions perdues. What! you've never read Les Illusions perdues?  It's so beautiful - the scene where Carlos Herrera asks the name of the chateau he is driving past, and it turns out to be Rastignac, the home of the young man he used to love; and then the abbe falling into a reverie which Swann once called, and very aptly, the Triestesse d'Olympio of pederasty. And the death of Lucien!  I forget who the man of taste was ho, when he was asked what event in his life had grieved him most, replied: 'The death of Lucien de Rubempre in Splendeurs et Miseres.'"

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 1084

Yesterday we were discussing M. de Charlus and his own aquarium, not understanding, or caring, if anyone could see inside it.  I one time told a student that nothing is as self-evident as something that you are passionate about.  They were writing a paper about a topic that was near and dear to them and the topic was so essentially right that it was blocking them constructing an argument in defense of it.  That is, they couldn't think of a contradictory opinion to refute in advance because there was no possible contradictory opinion. I will often opine that Miles Davis was the greatest American genius of the 20th century.  Now, every right-thinking individual knows this to be true, but say I met someone who didn't agree with this accepted truism (although why I would talk to these simpletons is beyond me) it would still be incumbent upon me to prove my assertion.  I would play something from Sketches of Spain or Kind of Blue or Porgy and Bess or even his collaboration with Cannonball Adderley on Somethin' Else and construct a compelling argument (although I'd probably just play his cover of I Thought About You and drop the mike).  Cycling back to the question of M. de Charlus, is it simply that he is too firmly ensconced, and too happy, in his little world to understand that there was someone on the other side of the glass?  And, yes, it's a sad state of affairs that anyone would even have to envision the consequences of someone being on the other side of the glass.  Obviously, if it was sad then, it is a tragedy today.

Another way to think about this is that the Baron has commodified his desire, he has made it something other than himself. Proust tells us, "When M. de Charlus was not speaking of his admiration for Morel's beauty as though it had no connexion with a proclivity known as a vice, he would discuss that vice, but as though he himself were in no way addicted to it." Rather than the subject being too close to him, as I argue above, the opposite is true; he's turned the desire into a dissociated concept that he can discuss with an almost professional distance. I remember a female friend one time telling me, only half-jokingly, that she would never want to marry a gynecologist because she wouldn't want him to view her vagina as another item on the assembly line from work.  There is a dark side to creating that professional distance, and if M. de Charlus is turning his true desire into a commodity is he destroying it?

My Years With Proust - Day 445

Thus M. de Charlus lived in a fool's paradise like the fish that thinks that the water in which it is swimming extends beyond the glass wall of its aquarium which mirrors it, while it does not see close beside it in the shadow the amused stroller who is watching its gyrations, or the all-powerful keeper who, at the unforeseen and fatal moment, postponed for the present in the case of the Barton (for whom the keeper, in Paris, will be Mme Verdurin), will extract it without compunction from the environment in which it was happily living to fling it into another.  Moreover, the races of mankind, insofar as they are no more than collections of individuals, may furnish us with examples from extensive, but identical in each of their parts, of this profound, obstinate and disconcerting blindness. Up to the present, if it was responsible for the fact that M. de Charlus addressed to the little clan remarks of a futile subtlety or of an audacity which made his listeners smile to themselves, it had not yet caused him, nor was it to cause him, at Balbec, any serious inconvenience.  A trace of albumen, of sugar, of cardiac arythmia, does not prevent life from continuing normally for the man who is not even aware of it, while the physician alone sees in it a prophecy of catastrophes in store.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 1083

Proust is giving us another hint of trouble that awaits M. de Charlus in the future.  He is existing in his little world - a world that was unacceptable at the time - and he's losing sight of the fact that more and more people are seeing into that world.  As Proust tells us: "Thus M. de Charlus lived in a fool's paradise like the fish that thinks that the water in which it is swimming extends beyond the glass wall of its aquarium which mirrors it, while it does not see close beside it in the shadow the amused stroller who is watching its gyrations . . ."  He even lets us know who will play a role in that future trouble, Mme Verdurin, the "keeper" who "will extract it without compunction from the environment in which it was happily living to fling it into another."  We'll get to that moment soon enough I suspect.  What interests me at this point is whether M. de Charlus has just gotten sloppy in protecting his little world - or is he so arrogant that he doesn't think he can be touched - or has he simply stopped caring?  Maybe at that age it was easier to convince yourself that others couldn't see into our aquarium.  However, I suspect that we're still that delusional today, and, in fact, far more foolish because we live online all the time and seem to not understand what that means.  I'll share only one of dozens of examples I could share (although I'll speak as opaquely as possible in recounting the story).  If you're on Twitter you know that occasionally Twitter sends you emails suggesting people that you might want to follow (including repeatedly trying to convince me to following @scuddertravel, that is, me) or just sharing emails from people that "it" (some computer program) thinks might interest us.  One time it sent me a picture of a beautiful naked woman posing for what was obviously as selfie.  My initial thought: "Wow, thanks, Twitter, for just sending porn to my inbox.  WTF?"  But then I realized that I thought knew the person, and, sure enough, after clicking on her link I realized that I did in fact know her.  First off, understand that I'm not criticizing whatever she was posting online because everyone is the master of their own fate, and if she was exploring her own sexuality then more power to her.  What I found interesting is that she provided no information on her Twitter homepage - no name, no location, no identification of any organizations - she didn't follow me and I didn't follow her (and didn't even know that she had a Twitter account) - but somehow Twitter "knew" that we were at least marginally linked and thus "it" (again, some computer formula) decided that I might find this interesting.  This also meant that everyone within the broad Venn diagram that makes up our lives probably also received the picture.  Again, it wasn't as if the Internet raided her personal computer and published the picture against her will - and she was easily of age and free to do what she wanted - but she didn't include her real name on her Twitter page so I'm assuming that she considered that a completely separate side of her personality, another self, but obviously Twitter wasn't making that subtle distinction.  And certainly I've mentioned things on social media, including this blog, about myself that I probably should have kept to myself.  So, are we (and that we includes me) just as sloppy or arrogant as M. de Charlus?  Or, have we just given up as well?

My Years With Proust - Day 444

   But soon, without any need to be guided by the charitable Mme Cottard, the faithful had succeeded in overcoming the qualms which they had all more of less felt at first on finding themselves in the company of M. de Charlus.  No doubt in his presence they were incessantly reminded of Ski's revelations, and conscious of the sexual abnormality embodied in their travelling companion.  But this abnormality itself had a sort of attraction for them.  It gave to the Baron's conversation, remarkable in itself but in ways which they could scarcely appreciate, a savour which, they felt, made the most interesting conversation, even Brichot's appear slightly insipid in comparison.  From the very outset, moreover, they had been pleased to admit that he was intelligent.  "Genius is sometimes akin to madness," the Doctor declared, and when the Princess, athirst for knowledge, questioned him further, said not another word, this axiom being all that he knew about genius and in any case seeming to him less demonstrable than everything relating to typhoid and arthritis.  And as he had become proud and remained ill-bred: "No questions, Princess, do not interrogate me, I'm at the seaside for a rest.  Besides, you wouldn't understand, you know nothing about medicine." And the Princess apologised and held her peace, deciding that Cottard was a charming man and realising that celebrities were not always approachable.  In this initial period, then, they had ended by finding M. de Charlus intelligent in spite of his vice (or what it generally so named).  Now it was, quite unconsciously, because of that vice that they found him more intelligent than others.  The simplest maxims to which, adroitly provoked by the sculptor or the scholar, M. de Charlus gave utterance concerning love, jealousy, beauty, because of the strange, secret, refined and monstrous experience on which they were based, assumed for the faithful that charm of unfamiliarity with which a psychology analogous to that which our own dramatic literature has offered us from time immemorial is clothed in a Russian or Japanese play performed by native actors.  They might still venture, when he was not listening, upon a malicious witticism at his expense.  "Oh!" the sculptor would whisper, seeing a young railwayman with the sweeping eyelashes of a dancing girl at whom M. de Charlus could not help staring, "if the Baron begins making eyes at the conductor, we shall never get there, the train will start going backwards.  Just look at the way he's staring at him: this isn't a puffer-train but a poofter-train." But when all was said, if M. de Charlus did not appear, they were almost disappointed to be travelling only with people who were just like everybody else, and not to have with them this painted, paunchy, tightly-buttoned personage, reminiscent of a box of exotic and dubious origin exhaling a curious ordour of fruits the mere thought of tasting which would turn the stomach.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 1074-1075

M. de Charlus continues to fascinate not only Marcel but also the broader "smart set" of society.  Proust notes, "In this initial period, then, they had ended by finding M. de Charlus intelligent in spite of his vice (or what it generally so named).  Now it was, quite unconsciously, because of that vice that they found him more intelligent than others." At the same time they certainly had no trouble harboring homophobic beliefs about him.  "They might still venture, when he was not listening, upon a malicious witticism at his expense.  'Oh!' the sculptor would whisper, seeing a young railwayman with the sweeping eyelashes of a dancing girl at whom M. de Charlus could not help staring, 'if the Baron begins making eyes at the conductor, we shall never get there, the train will start going backwards.  Just look at the way he's staring at him: this isn't a puffer-train but a poofter-train.'"  Yes, the complexity and perversity of the human mind wherein it, even among folks educated enough to be more discerning, can ably contain both extreme views.  However, are they polar opposite views?  I'm flashing back to the concept of the "magic negro," which I learned from my friends in Folklore studies.  You see that character all the time in literature and especially in cinema (think of The Matrix), the marginalized minority character who yet, oddly, because of their marginalization contains some essential knowledge or greater truth that is beyond the understanding of the majority characters.  Truthfully, I don't know enough about the concept to speak more intelligently about it, and clearly I need to go pester my friends Steve and Kerry and pick their brains.  On the one hand I want to think that it's nothing more than a conscious or unconscious desire to make up for the lack of giving such characters a bigger role in the narrative.  However, on the other hand I suspect there's also something more profound going on, which may also bring us back to one of our favorite discussion topics: the need to exoticize our lives, in this case by exoticzing the lives of others.  Following this logic (or in my case, my consistent lack of logic) would M. de Charlus exist as the "magic homosexual" in the story?

My Years With Proust - Day 443

   "We felt we simply must come and keep you company, Monsieur," Mme Cottard said kind to the Baron, "and not leave you alone like this in your little corner.  It is a great pleasure to us."

   "I am greatly honoured," the Baron intoned, bowing coldly.

   "I was so pleased to hear that you have definitely chosen his neighbourhood to set up your taber . . ."

   She was going to say "tabernacle" but it occurred to her that the word was Hebraic and discourteous to a Jew who might see some innuendo in it.  And so she pulled herself up in order to choose another of the expressions that were familiar to her, that is to say a ceremonious expression: "to set up, I should say, your penates." (It is true that these deities do not appertain to the Christian religion, either, but to one which has been dead for so long that it no longer claims any devotees whose feelings one need be afraid of hurting.) "We, unfortunately, what with term beginning, and the Doctor's hospital duties, can never take up residence for very long in one place." And glancing down at a cardboard box: "You see too how we poor women are less fortunate than the sterner sex; even to go such a short distance as to our friends the Verdurins', we are obliged to take a whole heap of impedimenta." . . .

   . . . Mme Cottard, after a moment or two, hit upon a subject which she felt to be of more personal interest to the Baron.  "I don't know whether you agree with me, Monsieur," she said to him presently, "but I am very broad-minded, and in my opinion there is a great deal of good in all religions as long as people practice them sincerely.  I am not one of the people who get hydrophobia at the sight of a . . . Protestant."

   "I was taught that mine is the true religion," replied M. de Charlus.

   "He's a fanatic," thought Mme Cottard.  "Swann, until towards the end, was more tolerant; it's true that he was a convert."

   Now the Baron, on the contrary, was not only a Christian, as we know, but endued with a mediaevel piety.  For him, as for the sculptors of the thirteenth century, the Christian church was, in the living sense of the word, peopled with a swarm of beings whom he believed to be entirely real: prophets, apostles, angels, holy personages of every sort, surrounding the incarnate Word, his mother and her spouse, the Eternal Father, all the martyrs and doctors of the Church, as they may be seen in high relief thronging the porches or lining the names of cathedrals.  Out of all these M. de Charlus had chosen as his patrons and intercessors the Archangels Michael, Gabriel and Raphael, with whom he discoursed regularly so that they might convey his prayers to the Eternal Father before whose throne they stand.  And so Mme Cottard's mistake amused me greatly."

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 1072-1074

Mme Cottard is trying, and failing pretty magnificently, to navigate through the difficult worlds or religion and religious identity.  She appears to assume that M. de Charlus might be Jewish, which is why she self-edits and drops the word tabernacle and replaces it with penates.  The penates were the Roman gods associated with home and hearth, and every house would have had a small altar associated with them.  Essentially, all that Mme Cottard is trying to say to the notoriously prickly M de Charlus is "welcome to the neighborhood" or at least "congrats on the new house," but she, in an initial effort to say this cleverly, discovers that she has entered into a dangerous terrain.

There are several things that I find interesting in this section, probably the least of which is Mme Cottard referring to men as the "sterner sex."  People of a certain generation, and I sadly fall into that category, will sometimes clumsily refer to women as the "gentler sex."  I will sometimes say it, although I'm usually saying it in an ironic fashion when talking about some of my more kick-ass female colleagues.  Well, if there's going to be a "gentler sex" then I guess we need some nomenclature for men, and I suppose "sterner sex" makes more sense than "rougher sex" (the seeming parallel to "gentler sex"), which has obvious connotations both perverse and tragic.

How one responds to another religion is always fraught with potential for, at best, amusement or, at worst, misunderstanding and hate.  When we were in India recently I felt compelled to pull a couple of students aside and explain to them that they were acting like insensitive idiots.  We were visiting the Ellora caves and examining the series of reliefs that surround the massive temple when the miscreants in question started mugging next to statues of Krishna.  I motioned them off to a quiet corner and asked them if they would go into a Catholic Church and take selfies of themselves mugging with statues of the Virgin Mary or Jesus.  They were stunned and more than a bit embarrassed, and said that of course they would not do something so inappropriate.  I then asked them if they had somehow forgotten that Hinduism is a living religion, and not just a collection of ancient statues, and how they had managed to insult almost every Indian who walked by us - in addition to reaffirming the opinion that the rest of the world has that Americans are complete idiots.  Being at heart good people (if generally witless reprobates), my students were sincerely remorseful.  So, there are countless examples of clumsy insensitivity, but, sadly, there are way too many examples of hatred.  We've talked a lot recently about the growing Islamophobia in the US, which obviously transcends mere ignorance to encompass the rich vein of racism that runs right beneath the surface in America.  There was a time growing up as a white man in dreadfully racist Indiana that I didn't want to think that everything in the US was really about race and racism, but, you know, in the US everything always seems to come back to race and racism.  It doesn't mean that it can't be cured, or at least improved, by working to alleviate ignorance, but it's much more difficult to simply wipe away virulent racist hatred.  So much of Donald Trump's appeal to a certain group is the alt-right terror at America becoming a minority white nation.  Granted, I'm an optimist, but, after the requisite ugly period, this will make the US a much better place because the more diverse neighbors we have (yes, even Muslims) we will actually discover that we share a common humanity.  However, we need to get there first.  Trump's call for a wall has nothing to do with jobs or security, but instead an alt-right wet dream of keeping America as white as possible for as long as possible.

Happily, there is also the other side of things, which often takes on the comical nature of a more tolerant, and oftentimes more educated, segment of the population giving you a certain intellectual street cred for being a member of a religion that the intolerant crew finds abhorrent.  I remember being in China once and we were visiting a Buddhist temple.  Now, Buddhism is considered one of the "cool" religions, and I generally agree, irregardless of that unfortunate shoving match I had with the Buddhist monk that time, but the less said about that the better.  Anyway, at the temple a Buddhist devotee was in the middle of doing something like ten thousand prostrations before a statue of the Buddha. It was a very impressive and also exhausting effort, as you might imagine, and the woman was wearing oven mittens to reduce wear and tear on her hands.  My college professor colleagues were suitably impressed, but I also found it unsettling in a way - not so much her efforts, but our response to her efforts.  I found myself pointing out that if the woman were a Southern Baptist wearing oven mittens to pray ten thousand times to Jesus they would consider it the height of hillbilly foolishness and extremism, but because she was a follower of a cool religion it was laudable.  All I managed to do was seal my reputation as a curmudgeon.  In a similar fashion, as more of my friends find out about my conversion to a faith which has become kind of oddly cool to a certain segment of the population because of it is so passionately hated by another segment of the population, my friends will congratulate me for my choice, which is, I think sweet.  However, I'm sure if I told them that I had found Jesus and started attending a local evangelical church (if there are such things in Vermont, maybe in the NEK) they'd probably never talk to me again.

My Years With Proust - Day 442

But as just deaf-mutes detect, from a movement of air imperceptible to other people, that someone has approached behind them, so the Baron, to apprise him of people coldness towards him, had a veritable sensory hyper-acuity.  This, as it habitually does in every sphere, had engendered in M. de Charlus imaginary sufferings.  Like those neuropaths who, feeling a slight lowering of the temperature, and deducing therefrom that there must be a window open on the floor above, fly into a rage and start sneezing, M. de Charlus, if a person appeared preoccupied in his presence, concluded that somebody had repeated to that person a remark that he had made about him.  But there was no need even for the other person to have an absent-minded, or a sombre, or a smiling air; he would invent them.  On the other hand, cordiality easily concealed from him the slanders of which he had not heard.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 1072

As Cites of the Plain is drawing to a close I found myself reflecting on how thoroughly Proust's fascination with M. de Charlus has dominated this volume.  In this passage Proust is trying to help us understand how readily the Baron took offense to slights or, more correctly, perceived slights.  I'm thinking about my posting from a couple days ago in regards to difficult women I've been associated with (and I'm sure, quite correctly, that they would identify me as a difficult man, which may be redundant) who would have rivaled the Baron in their ability to search out perceived slights with extraordinary ease and proficiency.  For some reason I keep coming back to the chapter in Forty Studies That Changed Psychology on cognitive dissonance, that unconscious process where you change your actions or your words to alleviate the dissonance caused by the existence of two painfully contradictory concepts in your mind at the same time.  Can you have so much self-loathing that you only deal with it by placing that hatred in the minds of others?  I have a million flaws, but I generally don't care what others think about me, or at least I don't take great umbrage at their actual or perceived hatred or disdain for me (although that will certainly change as I grow older; I won't handle being politely ignored or pitied very gracefully).  I wonder if this all might be also relate to active/reactive.  I tend to be a very forceful personality (as my friends opine/lament, a force of nature), which puts people on the defensive and thus they are reacting.  If you are a more reactive personality are you osmotically allowing other people to take the leading role in determining your relationship, and thus you naturally are angered by their role in defining who you are?