Within A Budding Grove – In Search of Lost Time 2 – Marcel Proust

 

There is a genre in modern fiction called “Coming of age”, designed presumably to appeal to the “Young adult” whose type ought to feature among such a tale´s characters. But, like most genres, authors who regularly tread the potentially formulaic tramlines of readers´ expectations are themselves usually somewhat beyond the age of consent and are therefore transporting themselves via imagination or memory into an experience they may have experienced in their own past, had related to them or simply imagined as an ideal of a type, itself possibly even dysfunctional, since not every ending is happy.

We all fall in love. Even ugly people fall in love, often successfully and rewardingly. Socially perfected beauty often languishes in regretful unhappiness, having made a false or compromised choice. Imagined “young adults” can relive the irony of wrong decisions and false assumptions, but only when directed from a distance of years that have taught by experience. At the time, a whirlwind of experience and emotion, a cake-batter of hard and soft, liquid and solid awaits mixing, let alone baking, and it has generally been licked and gobbled by eager fingers well before it ever approached an oven. It is only after the event that we can reassess how much of each ingredient we actually added and whether, had the mix ever been properly prepared, it might have been eventually tasty.

What is often lacking from tales of “Coming of age” is any truthful assessment of how the first person is externally perceived. Perhaps we all possess enough arrogance to think we can judge others from a position of permanent personal neutrality, from a vantage where we ourselves are exempt from the processes we apply to the rest of humanity. But not so Marcel Proust, whose second volume of  “A la recherche de temps perdu” – “In search of lost time” is essentially a stream of consciousness “coming of age”, a tale of long adolescent summer holidays at the coast in Balbec, of chance encounters along Paris boulevards and of contractual sex to pass the time. This is fiction of its time. A modern reader, to partake of any experience on offer, must be willing to cast off the shackles of contemporary mores, to ignore the imposed correctness of our age and be willing to enter into both the culture and the values of its author, as he flits and flirts from one potential assignation to the next, equally convinced, each time, that this one will be for real, but forever replete with doubt and question as to whether anything might ever come of anything. At least Marcel Proust, from the privilege of his own maturity, is under no illusions of how his own first person may have appeared to those young women, maidens perhaps, whom he pursued.  

In my case, what was physically evident might equally well have been due to nervous spasms, to the first stages of tuberculosis, to asthma, to a toxi-alimentary dyspnoea with renal insufficiency, to chronic bronchitis, or to a complex state into which more than one of these factors entered. Now, nervous spasms required to be treated firmly, and discouraged, tuberculosis with infinite care and with a ‘feeding-up’ process which would have been bad for an arthritic condition such as asthma, and might indeed have been dangerous in a case of toxi-alimentary dyspnoea, this last calling for a strict diet which, in return, would be fatal to a tuberculous patient. But Cottard’s hesitations were brief and his prescriptions imperious. “Purges; violent and drastic purges; milk for some days, nothing but milk. No meat. No alcohol.” My mother murmured that I needed, all the same, to be ‘built up,’ that my nerves were already weak, that drenching me like a horse and restricting my diet would make me worse.

The author is hardly the epitome of physical perfection, but he is nonetheless undeterred in his pursuit of young ladies. It´s not every teenage youth, however, who can always call on the services of a full-time maid for support. And not many of the contemporary variety would admit the need for that support.

Sometimes my mother would stroke my forehead with her hand, saying: "So little boys don't tell Mamma their troubles any more?" And Françoise used to come up to me every day with: "What a face, to be sure! If you could just see yourself! Anyone would think there was a corpse in the house." It is true that, if I had simply had a cold in the head, Françoise would have assumed the same funereal air. These lamentations pertained rather to her 'class' than to the state of my health. I could not at the time discover whether this pessimism was due to sorrow or to satisfaction. I decided provisionally that it was social and professional.

And did it matter what the first person actually looked like, whether health, bodily attributes or even integrity were in adequate supply? There were, after all, copious examples of birth-right being sufficient in itself in order to secure a man´s desired married bliss alongside desirable beauty.

 (This man's wife, incidentally, had married him against everyone's wishes and advice because he was a 'charming creature.' He had, what may be sufficient to constitute a rare and delicate whole, a fair, silky beard, good features, a nasal voice, powerful lungs and a glass eye.)

And I ask you, what in the world can he see in her? He must be a bit of a chump, when all's said and done. She's got feet like boats, whiskers like an American, and her undies are filthy. I can tell you, a little shop girl would be ashamed to be seen in her knickers.

In speaking, Albertine kept her head motionless, her nostrils closed, allowing only the corners of her lips to move. The result of this was a drawling, nasal sound, into the composition of which there entered perhaps a provincial descent, a juvenile affectation of British phlegm, the teaching of a foreign governess and a congestive hypertrophy of the mucus of the nose

An age with different values and assumptions is what we must enter. We may not always feel at home. In fact, given the rarefied upper strata of society that we the readers are expected to inhabit, we may rarely even feel we belong and be constantly aware of a desire to head for the exit. The experience is always challenging, not because it questions our presence, but merely because it takes us to places we feel we ought not to be. But there is complexity in this culture that a casual glance will not reveal. It is only when we engage with this shared experience that we begin to feel that the assumptions of our own age are not in the end very new.

"I've no intention of making fun, I assure you. Well, to continue, she went up to one of these black fellows with 'Good morning, nigger!'… " "Oh, it's too absurd!" "Anyhow, this classification seems to have displeased the black. 'Me nigger,' he shouted (quite furious, don't you know), to Mme. Blatin, 'me nigger; you, old cow!'" "I do think that's so delightful! I adore that story. Do say it's a good one. Can't you see old Blatin standing there, and hearing him: 'Me nigger; you, old cow'?" I expressed an intense desire to go there and see these Cingalese, one of whom had called Mme. Blatin an old cow. They did not interest me in the least

And it is not only the ideological baggage of the age that surrounds us. It is also the physical reality of stuff, stuff we accumulate, stuff we assemble as definition of our personality, as adjunct to personal history. And we are all prisoners of fashion, locked in cupboards of clothes we never wear, perhaps should never have bought, garage shelves of redundant gadgets, now rusting or moulding until we attempt to salve a guilty conscience and cart them off to a charity shop where someone not of our own social or economic class might patronisingly “make use of them”. And it is our age, not that of Marcel Proust, that claims to be “aware” of threats to the planet’s resources. And we assume it is our own age that seeks something deeper, more abstract, more refined, more lasting… Are any of us willing to admit how utterly materialistic we are?

However it may be, always when I think of that drawing-room which Swann (not that the criticism implied on his part any intention to find fault with his wife's taste) found so incongruous - because, while it was still planned and carried out in the style, half conservatory, half studio, which had been that of the rooms in which he had first known Odette, she had, none the less, begun to replace in its medley a quantity of the Chinese ornaments, which she now felt to be rather gimcrack, a trifle dowdy, by a swarm of little chairs and stools and things upholstered in old Louis XIV silks; not to mention the works of art brought by Swann himself from his house on the Quai d'Orléans - it has kept in my memory, on the contrary, that composite, heterogeneous room, a cohesion, a unity, an individual charm never possessed even by the most complete, the least spoiled of such collections that the past has bequeathed to us, or the most modern, alive and stamped with the imprint of a living personality; for we alone can, by our belief that they have an existence of their own, give to certain of the things that we see a soul which they afterwards keep, which they develop in our minds.

Alas, what he was saying, how little, I felt, did it apply to myself, whom all reasoning, however exalted it might be, left cold, who was happy only in moments of pure idleness, when I was comfortable and well; I felt how purely material was everything that I desired in life, and how easily I could dispense with the intellect.

A recurring theme in Proust is reference to art and music. Likening characters to faces in paintings gives physical form to the words that inhabit the page and musical harmonies may give clue to personality.

…in Luini’s fresco, the charming Mage with the arched nose and fair hair, to whom, it appeared, Swann had at one time been thought to bear a striking resemblance.

…or in piano-playing, which she did not like to be too finicking, too laboured, having indeed had a special weakness for the discords, the wrong notes of Rubinstein.

…and when the narrator offers an assumption of is age, we realise how particularistic are all assumptions of any age. Personally, I have little time for the idea that scientific knowledge is a mere social construct subject to change. Researched and documented “laws of nature” are always incomplete and always specific to the conditions that apply to their relevance. Gravity was not contradicted by relativity, but the ranges of its applicability were more fully appreciated. If we read pre-relativistic science that might assume gravity’s concept to be universal, we suffer contradictions similar to those we experience when we read a different work written in a time when the workings of mass-attraction were not quantified. How we apply this knowledge, our appreciation of its relevance to our lives, this is perhaps always governed by a combination of fashion and our personal misunderstanding of the concept. In a different age, however, such adherence to social or personal norms might be quite confusing, certainly surprising.

In view of the dampness of the air I had taken rather more caffeine than usual.

But back at the plot, if such a diversion might be admitted to the detail of such a life, this coming-of-age young-adult is really hot on chat-up lines. He is utterly smitten by M. Swann´s daughter, Giberte. He seeks out her company, diverts from his route through Paris just to walk the street she has trod, cranes his neck at the promise of the merest glimpse of her presence. And then, when presented with a drawing-room audience with the heart-racing object of his desire, issues the hottest chat-up line that Hollywood might ever have dreamed up.

“I thought, the other day, that the clock was slow, if anything.”

His affections move on, eventually, his ardour unrequited, his memory perhaps scarred for its entire adulthood. One learns to live with such disappointment, to cope with the imperfection of reality. But memory is permanent, even if the events that created its existence never actually happened. And when they did, the power of memory to transform the future is immense.

…the mother whose son has gone to sea on some perilous voyage of discovery sees him in imagination every moment, long after the fact of his having perished has been established, striding into the room, saved by a miracle and in the best of health. And this strain of waiting, according to the strength of her memory and the resistance of her bodily organs, either helps her on her journey through the years, at the end of which she will be able to endure the knowledge that her son is no more, to forget gradually and to survive his loss, or else it kills her.

And without doubt we are conscious of this process by which the formation of future-determining memory via experience comes about as it actually happens, as it chips away at the as yet unmade block that is our forming self. We can change. We often do. We can take things for granted. We can shift our allegiances. We can ignore certain consequences, whilst being obsessed with others, just like here when our narrator appears to be thoroughly concerned with the effects that affection transfer might have in relation to Giberte, but not even to consider the consequences of his actions upon the lives of those he says he does not love.

… for when evening came I was always too wretched to stay in the house and used to go and pour out my sorrows upon the bosoms of women whom I did not love. As for seeking to give any sort of pleasure to Gilberte, I no longer thought of that; to visit her house again now could only have added to my sufferings. Even the sight of Gilberte, which would have been so exquisite a pleasure only yesterday, would no longer have sufficed me. For I should have been miserable all the time that I was not actually with her. That is how a woman, by every fresh torture that she inflicts on us, increases, often quite unconsciously, her power over us and at the same time our demands upon her. With each injury that she does us, she encircles us more and more completely, doubles our chains - but halves the strength of those which hitherto we had thought adequate to bind her in order that we might retain our own peace of mind.

But then, we find him truly conscious of that which surrounds him. Its reality, or perhaps its invented memory, is both vivid and permanent. There is no doubt here that the detail comes via later reflection, since the teenager´s ability to apply musical notation to sensory input was probably developed long after this particular journey, years after music became comfortable under the fingers and some time after reflection revealed the detail of exactly how it worked.

I was surrounded by the soothing activity of all those movements of the train which kept me company, offered to stay and converse with me if I could not sleep, lulled me with their sounds which I wedded - as I had often wedded the chime of the Cambray bells now to one rhythm, now to another (hearing as the whim took me first four level and equivalent semi-quavers, then one semi-quaver furiously dashing against a crotchet); they neutralised the centrifugal force of my insomnia by exercising upon it a contrary pressure which kept me in equilibrium and on which my immobility and presently my drowsiness felt themselves to be borne with the same sense of refreshment that I should have had, had I been resting under the protecting vigilance of powerful forces, on the breast of nature and of life, had I been able for a moment to incarnate myself in a fish that sleeps in the sea, driven unheeding by the currents and the tides, or in an eagle outstretched upon the air, with no support but the storm.

And such is the power of this process of filtration and reinterpretation of experience by memory that when it clearly expresses the views of later years, it appears to be in the mind of the teenager at the heart of the story. It is a context in which we appreciate, via reflection in later solitude, what became of the life, how it came about, how it was formed.

Nine tenths of the men of the Faubourg Saint-Germain appear to the average man of the middle class simply as alcoholic wasters (which, individually, they not infrequently are) whom, therefore, no respectable person would dream of asking to dinner. The middle class fixes its standard, in this respect, too high, for the feelings of these men would never prevent their being received with every mark of esteem in houses which it, the middle class, may never enter.

"After all," I said to myself, "possibly the pleasure that its author has found in writing it is not the infallible test of the literary value of a page; it may be only an accessory, one that is often to be found superadded to that value, but the want of which can have no prejudicial effect on it. Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were written yawning."

Pleasure in this respect is like photography. What we take, in the presence of the beloved object, is merely a negative film; we develop it later, when we are at home, and have once again found at our disposal that inner darkroom, the entrance to which is barred to us so long as we are with other people.

That our words are, as a general rule, filled, by the person to whom we address them, with a meaning which that person derives from her own substance, a meaning widely different from that which we had put into the same words when we uttered them, is a fact which the daily round of life is perpetually demonstrating. But if we find ourselves as well in the company of a person whose education (as Albertine's was to me) is inconceivable, her tastes, her reading, her principles unknown, we cannot tell whether our words have aroused in her anything that resembles their meaning, any more than in an animal, although there are things that even an animal may be made to understand.

And so we are condemned to live the only life we have, largely unaware of how it is perceived by others, eternally ignorant except by speculation of what it might have meant to ourselves. We do not choose our self. Neither do we choose our place or time of birth, though for some the details of death are an option. Transporting ourselves into another mind, in another place, inhabiting a different time reminds us of the minimal control we have over our destiny, of the very events that might befall even the most ordered existence. But certainly what does happen forms experience which we can either ignore, hoping the next is what we always wanted, or we can store it in a file of memory, so that later in life we can revisit that place and perhaps reinvent it, thus transforming our existence into the life we thought we deserved. Only then, perhaps, has that young adult truly come of age.

Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers by Paul Rosenfeld

 

Tastes change. Fashions change. Presumptions, through whose refracting prisms each new age interprets its aesthetics, also change, but usually unpredictably because we absorb the restrictions without being conscious of their control. It’s probably called culture, and perhaps we are all imprisoned by its inherently commercial pressure. And we only rarely perceive change in our ability to respond to stimuli, often surprisingly perceived when we remove our experience into a different culture, a different aesthetic and possibly another time. This is precisely why exploration of criticism from the past can be so rewarding and, in a way that the writing would never have achieved in its contemporary setting, challenging. It was this kind of experience that flowed from every page of Paul Rosenfeld’s Musical Portraits.

These “Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers” were published in 1920, having previously appeared as occasional pieces elsewhere. A hundred years on, of course, the first challenge is the meaning of the word “modern” in its title, especially when the presented list of composers starts with Wagner and finishes with Bloch. Personally, I have nothing against classifying Bloch as “modern” in the 1920s, but the inclusion of Wagner is surely pushing the definition, since he had already been dead for over 35 years.

Reading Rosenfeld’s text, however, one quickly understands Wagner‘s inclusion. For the writer, Wagner’s work created the cusp between the feudal and modern worlds. His stature and influence was still so great, his achievements still considered so monumental, that this work of critical appraisal just had to begin with his name. Rosenfeld sees his music dramas as manifestations of a new industrial age, reflecting the unprecedented might of the new coal-powered civilization.

Strauss, Richard, of course, comes next. Pure genius, he is judged, at least on the evidence of his early symphonic poems, which approached a realization of the Nietzschean dream via colours that suggested impressionist painting. By the time we reach Salome, however, he had become “a bad composer”, “once so electric, so vital, so brilliant a figure” had transformed into someone “dreary and outward and stupid”. Rosenkavalier is judged “singularly hollow and flat and dun, joyless and soggy”. One must recall that this was 1920 and that Richard Strauss still had over 20 years of creative life remaining.

Mussorgsky’s “marvelous originality” was an expression of the true nature of Russian folklore, culture and peasant life. Liszt, on the other hand, was offering work like “satin robes covering foul, unsightly rags”, “designed by the pompous and classicizing Palladio, but executed in stucco and other cheap materials”. The impression was vivid, but the substance close to zero.

Berlioz, on the other hand, had grown in stature. His music was judged barbarous and radical and revolutionary, “beside which so much modern music dwindles”. He was the first to write directly for the orchestra as an instrument.

Cesar Franck suffers the ignominy of having a good part of his section devoted discussions of Saint-Saens. He can be gratified, however, that the author judges his work greater than that of this more famous composer, who seemed to seek only an increase in opus numbers. Franck’s own music  is seen as an expression of the silent majority, those who feel “forsaken and alone and powerless”, the army of society’s workers. The basis for this is that Franck had himself to work for a living.

Claude Debussy, by contrast, already seems to Rosenfeld to have achieved the status of a god, so elevated by aesthetic and achievement from the rest of humanity that it could hardly be considered he had ever composed a bad note. The piano of this most perfect living musician, becomes “satins and liqueurs”, his orchestra sparkling “with iridescent fires ... delicate violets and argents and shades of rose”.

Ravel is something of a problem child, certainly impressive, but whose judgment is not quite trusted, no matter how engaging it might sound. “Permitted to remain, in all his manhood, the child that we all were”, he seems to receive a pat on the head to encourage him to try harder.

Borodin, a true proud nationalist, suffered from “flawed originality”. But his music, like an uncovered, uncut piece of porphyry or malachite is perfect in its natural, unpolished state. Rimsky-Korsakov, on the other hand, is merely decorative and graceful, but also vapid, whilst Rachmaninoff offered product that was “too smooth and soft and elegantly elegiac, simply too dull”. It was the music of the pseudo-French culture of the Saint Petersburg upper crust.

Scriabine, however, “awakened in the piano all of its latent animality”. He wrote music that “hovered on the borderland between ecstasy and suffering”, probably bitter-sweet to the layman. But Strawinsky was the ultimate realist. A product of industrialization, he produced “great weighty metallic masses, molten piles and sheets of steel and iron, shining adamantine bulks”. So real were the impressions in his music that one might even smell the sausages grilling at Petrushka’s fair.

Four contemporary “German” composers are thoroughly dismissed, Strauss being bankrupt, Reger grotesquely pedantic, Schoenberg intellectually tainted and Mahler banal, despite the fact that only two of the four were actually German. Specifically, Mahler’s scores were “lamentably weak, often arid and banal”. It seems that much of Rosenfeld’s criticism arises out of an inquisitorial distrust of Mahler’s sincerity in converting from Judaism. The music of Reger, the author judges, is unlikely to suffer a revival and the composer himself is described as being like a “swollen, myopic beetle, with thick lips and sullen expression, crouching on an organ bench”. Let us say no more. Schoenberg is a troubling presence, formalistic and intellectual. He smells of the laboratory and exists in an obedience to some abstract scholastic demand. We are still discussing music, by the way.

Sibelius personifies nationalism, Finnish nationalism, of course. As it emerges from its domination under the Russian yoke, Finnish identity suddenly realizes it has a beautiful landscapes, meadows and forests.

Loeffler, surprisingly, gets a full entry. Perhaps it has something to do with his opting to live in the United States. Ornstein will be a name that is perhaps unfamiliar to 21st-century music lovers. At the time he was a brilliant 25-year-old pianist who was embarking on the composition of tough, rugged scores. And finally Bloch is praised for introducing non-European and oriental influences into western music. He is praised for retaining his Jewish identity and culture, which suggests that Mahler might have got off with lighter criticism had he not rejected the faith and thus have allowed they author to note the similarity of that composer’s clarinet writing to klezmer.

Opinion in the words of Paul Rosenfeld often presents a florid display, mixing prejudice and observation, and pre-judgment with insight. He describes his appreciation of these twenty composers through the distorting lens of his own aesthetic, derived from the assumptions of his age. Reading this short, concentrated work, we soon appreciate that we are doing the same. Only the language and the presumptions are changed.

Light of Evening by Edna O’Brien

 

The Light of Evening by Edna O’Brien is a deceptively complex book. It deals with relationships between two women, Dilly and Eleanora, who live very different lives some years apart. They are both women, but they come from different generations. They are both Irish, but they seem to belong to different countries, as well as different eras. They both leave their homeland to seek fortune, but on wholly different terms and to different places. They both seem to stumble into relationships with men, some of which involve marriage, and cope in partially successful ways with the challenges posed by maintaining the terms of engagement. The complications in the relationship between the two women, Dilly and Eleanora, arise because they are mother and daughter.

At the start, we meet Dilly, the mother, who is in hospital in Dublin. Her years have advanced. She is seriously ill and about to undergo a procedure. Her youth flashes before her sedated eyes. She travels from Ireland to the United States and we follow a developing life in New York as it moves from promised opportunity to promised opportunity, only to find that reality usually imposes its surprisingly mundane results. Wiser, but only marginally richer, Dilly soon finds herself repatriated for family reasons.

We meet Eleanora via scenes from her marriage. She too has left Ireland, but she has personal reasons and she has pursued education. She seems to be in control, at least potentially in control of her life options. She is apparently free to choose and we see her relocate for professional rather than menial reasons. But she seems to spend as much of her time and energy analyzing her relationships with men as pursuing her professional goals. The turns in her life are unpredictable, often unfathomable. They have a gloss of normality imposed by obvious consumption, personality created by likes and dislikes and achievement realized through opportunity. It is a life that presents a vivid contrast to the life of Dilly, whose own journey was imposed by a need to make a living first and a personal space second.

But the real complication arises because these two women, doing what women do a generation apart are mother and daughter. Letters exchanged form a major part of the book’s substance, specifically letters between mother and daughter. These letters often do not appear to say very much, but then that becomes a crucial point in the narrative. Deceptively simple, they can also deceive by not saying what the writer wants to say, by not communicating what the reader wants to hear.

Overall the plot of Edna O’Brien’s novel dwells almost exclusively on the nature of the relationship between mother and daughter, the difference and similarities that make their lives. It travels the world that surrounds their different generations, drawing sharp contrasts but also recognizing remarkable similarities. It’s a book that walks well-worn paths, but arrives at new experiences for the reader. Rather than the substance of life, it is the spaces between, whether large or small, that captivate. And, by the end, we realize that for all our complications, we individuals are generally ruled by self and can often be driven by quite mundane, but devastatingly relentless material concerns.

Swann’s Way – In Search of Lost Time Volume 1 Marcel Proust

 

Imagine a collage, an assemblage of the entire output of august artists, especially those of fin-de-siecle France, those one-time upstarts and latter-day establishment pillars we have since learned to label “Impressionist”. Imagine too this vast canvas repeated in multiple shades, so that not only does it present to the eye a vast, near limitless, expanse of colour, of detail, of form, of fine ladies in finer drapery, of gardens replete with blooms of every season, of carriage-jammed Paris streets shining through murky wet evenings, of multi-coloured lilies afloat on a surface of quiet lakes or stilled streams of rural France, of dancing girls performing their ballet or rehearsing their slender limbs in outline at the bar, but also it revisits every view from multiple angles in different colours, at different times, from different perspectives with different impressions. We seem to see the same things repeat, repeatedly, but always different, always changed, always vivid. And imagine this presented not only in the bright colours of the original, but also the imposed hues of vividly recalled memory that knows every scene, but cannot fix exact date, time or form, so that they re-form truly solid, living structures reconstructed from what the original eyes only partially recorded. And then close those eyes, so that the images can be drawn from their memories, those indelibly, but perhaps inaccurately filed images that we have collected inadvertently by virtue of the unfinished act of living. And then we share that experience.

And then, in the words of the author, himself, so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die.

But the imperative is that we must try. We have but one chance shot at this moving target we call ‘life’ and our aim is, by its very nature, wayward. We remain forever unsure of the boundary between what we remember and what we imagine, especially when one merges into the other in that uncontrolled manner, that imposed confusion of blurred edge that inevitably results when we attempt to focus on a passing image and have only a memory of its momentary impression on the mind to recall whatever detail it shed.

And the result? The result is a passing stream, an ever-changing, forever variable vista that always comprises the same view, the same solid objects that once, or perhaps still, peopled its banks. And, from the distance of time, who can ever be sure what we felt? Who can be sure of motive, of consequence, of intention or stratagem? Who can testify that those remembered words were spoken in love, hate, respect, derision, criticism, praise or merely to pass the time we now realise we never had? It is irony that perhaps lasts longest, as in an invitation to dine with an acquaintance of the family, M. Legrandin?

Only the day before he had asked my parents to send me to dine with him on this same Sunday evening. "Come and bear your aged friend company," he had said to me. "Like the nosegay which a traveller sends us from some land to which we shall never go again, come and let me breathe from the far country of your adolescence the scent of those flowers of spring among which I also used to wander, many years ago. Come with the primrose, with the canon's beard, with the gold-cup; come with the stone-crop, whereof are posies made, pledges of love, in the Balzacian flora, come with that flower of the Resurrection morning, the Easter daisy, come with the snowballs of the guelder-rose, which begin to embalm with their fragrance the alleys of your great-aunt's garden ere the last snows of Lent are melted from its soil. Come with the glorious silken raiment of the lily, apparel fit for Solomon, and with the many-coloured enamel of the pansies, but come, above all, with the spring breeze, still cooled by the last frosts of wirier, wafting apart, for the two butterflies' sake, that have waited outside all morning, the closed portals of the first Jerusalem rose."

The question was raised at home whether, all things considered, I ought still to be sent to dine with M. Legrandin.

Irony, then, leaves its mark, but not as deep as the scars left by the cuts of young love, obsession or jealousy. In a vast, detailed and probably reconstructed memory of M. Swann’s relationship with Odette, a woman he initially likens to an image from a Botticelli painting in the Sistine chapel, we share the heart-racing exhilaration of a man becoming obsessed with the sensual beauty of a desirable and available woman, we euphemistically accompany him in adjusting the flowers that decorate her bodice and then we suffer the gnawing, destroying doubts about her motives that grow out of an all-embracing, near-destroying jealousy.

There is, of course, much socialising. It would not be far from the truth to observe that these people spend more time worrying about whom to include and whom to specifically and justifiably exclude from a guest list than they do at work, in their beds or on the road. And the decisions are usually based on class, that universal categorising and branding of quality that seems to suffuse and smother human society in whatever age and every place, the very quality that revolutions might occasionally but unsuccessfully seek to eradicate. And what happens at these gatherings remains primarily social, whatever the focus of the soiree.

If the pianist suggested playing the Ride of the Valkyries, or the Prelude to Tristan, Mme. Verdurin would protest, not that the music was displeasing to her, but, on the contrary, that it made too violent an impression. "Then you want me to have one of my headaches? You know quite well, it's the same every time he plays that. I know what I'm in for. Tomorrow, when I want to get up - nothing doing!" If he was not going to play they talked, and one of the friends - usually the painter who was in favour there that year - would "spin," as M. Verdurin put it, "a damned funny yarn that made 'em all split with laughter," and especially Mme. Verdurin, for whom so strong was her habit of taking literally the figurative accounts of her emotions - Dr. Cottard, who was then just starting in general practice, would "really have to come one day and set her jaw, which she had dislocated with laughing too much.

And this is a place and time where no-one lives life by halves, where no person is ever truly reticent in expressing emotion, even when that which is quite sincerely expressed may, at some later date, convey at least the partial sensation of over-statement. She had been taught in her girlhood to fondle and cherish those long-necked, sinuous creatures, the phrases of Chopin, so free, so flexible, so tactile, which begin by seeking their ultimate resting-place somewhere beyond and far wide of the direction in which they started, the point which one might have expected them to reach, phrases which divert themselves in those fantastic bypaths only to return more deliberately with a more premeditated reaction, with more precision, as on a crystal bowl which, if you strike it, will ring and throb until you cry aloud in anguish to clutch at one's heart.  

Viewing this vast, sewn together patchwork of art, this mixture of people thrown together by time and the filter of memory, may at times feel like making an ocean journey by small boat, rigged with too scant a sail, a boat that, often becalmed, seems to drift. The real trick, undoubtedly, is to relax and go with the flow. That’s life, it seems.

It’s all in the detail – Madama Butterfly in Valencia

Puccini’s Madame Butterfly is a very well-known, much loved, and indeed popular opera. The genre is replete with femmes fatales, Butterfly, Tosca, Manon, Carmen, Lucía, Violetta and Katya, just for example, who get it in the end, so one might think there is nothing much to see in terms of new perspectives when such a familiar work with such a well-worked theme is staged. Opera lovers, however, will confirm that there most definitely is!

Audiences tend to fall into two distinct groups, those for whom any diversion from their own preconceptions signifies the end of civilization, and those for whom radical interpretation is a welcome challenge to the establishment. There is another perspective, however, in which directors, via minor changes to staging, can completely transform the way we understand these often rigidly interpreted stories. Such was the success of Emilio Lopez, the director of the recent production in Valencia. His 2021 staging of Butterfly will be broadcast on Opera Vision on Sunday 19 December and will be available through that website for some weeks. It is successful on several levels, one of which is revelatory.

Let’s start with the term verismo. That certainly applied to the way Puccini approached his work and it implies that the setting should not be palatial and that characters might be depicted as everyday folk. We may assume that the composer never experienced the mid-19 century Japan of the opera’s setting, so if verismo applies to Butterfly, then it applies principally on an ideological level. That said, the opera’s potential for costume drama usually so overcomes designers and directors that even recognition of verismo in the result is obscured. In other words, everything gets pretty before it can become credible. And it is verismo that suffers.

In act one, Cio-Cio-san describes how she is from a poor home and became a geisha because of lack of opportunity. The ceremonial dagger which she eventually uses to take her own life was presented to her father by the Mikado with request that he use it on himself. We must assume that Butterfly’s family were thus already in disgrace. She then compounds this disgrace by rejecting her cultural and religious traditions, an act that uncle Bonze condemns, prompting her friends and community to reject her, all except Suzuki of course. The fact that Puccini then takes us into the love scene of the wedding night often obscures this rejection. In the Valencia production, a backdrop that had featured cherry blossom becomes the starry night of the couple’s ecstasy, but it does so by melting like celluloid in an overheated projector, implying that the comforting blossoms of the past have been destroyed. The starry night persists into acts two and three, but thus becomes a symbol of continued isolation and of Butterfly’s insistence, nay imperative to live in the past.

Cio-Cio-san often comes across as a meek and thus stereotypical Asian woman, who has never even practiced the word “boo” with geese nearby. As a result, she often becomes the single-, even simple-minded naïve devotee of Pinkerton, despite the fact that, as a geisha, she must have had experience of the fly-by-night sailor. The supplicant image endears her to audiences, perhaps, but strips her of the identity and individuality she certainly has, otherwise she would never have pursued her own, private wishes so single-mindedly.

The point is she does not have a great deal of choice. She is poor. She is a geisha. She has done her job. Pinkerton offers her a way out, which she, perhaps naïvely accepts. But once she has made the commitment, she cannot go back. She wants to please him, but by doing so she suffers the rejection of her own community. But she has to go through with the risk.

In Valencia, Emilio Lopez recognizes that Cio-Cio-san is living in poverty. Ignored by Pinkerton for three years and still rejected by her own community, she and Suzuki live amidst decay and grime. The temptation to portray Butterfly still in full, opulent geisha regalia makes no sense and is avoided convincingly in this production. Suzuki confirms this poverty in the libretto. What too often comes across as blind faith on Butterfly’s part now becomes necessity, imposed by her community because of her rejection by and of them. She can’t go back. She has no other option. This is an element of verismo in the opera which directors often tend to overlook.

But in this Valencia production, the real surprise comes at the end. Pinkerton has returned but has refused to see Butterfly. He storms off because he cannot take it anymore... He does want the child, however. His new American wife and Sharpless are told by Butterfly to come back in half an hour to take the child. Note that Pinkerton has not heard her request.

Butterfly has her own plans, however, plans that involve using that ceremonial weapon her father used to kill himself. The elements are clear. Butterfly kills herself, the voice of Pinkerton returning is heard. Or perhaps not…

The usual way to treat this is to have Butterfly stab herself on the orchestral tutti and then for the sound of Pinkerton’s voice to be heard as she dies. If Pinkerton is not seen, it could be argued that he really was nasty all along and that Cio-Cio-san is imagining the voice, still therefore deceiving herself. If he does appear, then his character is rather let off the hook. If only Butterfly had delayed, then the ecstasy of the starry night might just have returned. But then she had already waited three years…

Sometimes Cio-Cio-san hears the voice and then stabs herself. Again, we have her imagining the sound as a possibility, but we then also have the possibility that she is suffering a form of self-loathing the result of the rejection. Again, this approach internalizes Butterfly’s suffering.

In the Valencia production, the orchestral tutti arrives with dagger drawn, but Butterfly turns to face the entrance to her house when she hears Pinkerton’s call. She waits for him to appear and recognize her and then she kills herself.

The effect is to transform her suicide into an act of defiance. She knows the child will be cared for. She has been rejected by her society and by Pinkerton. She is alone and has no future. But she is now also determined that he will not possess her, and she wants to demonstrate her contempt. You will not possess me as chattel, she thinks. And thus, her character is transformed from the meek and mild recipient of tragedy into a defiant individualist, albeit a dead one. At least she has asserted her own position. It’s different and surprising, which illustrates beautifully that sometimes the most radical transformations are achieved via detail.

 

The Witch of Portobello by Paulo Coelho

 

The Witch of Portobello is a novel by Paulo Coelho. Perhaps already there is already a divide. There are readers, many of them, for whom the author conjures a world of another universe, perhaps, where, inside the unknown but knowable self, anything can be discovered. Equally, there is another group for whom this platitudinous pseudo-religious self-discovery approaches the nauseous. First, the bones of plot.

Sherine Khalil was abandoned at birth by her Romanian gypsy mother, at least partially because her father was a foreigner. Whether these origins, a rejection born of a persecuted minority in a context of political oppression are relevant is an academic question, because we spend so much time inside Sherine‘s head, albeit from outside, that we often lose sight of any wider context.

Thus abandoned, the baby girl is adopted by a middle-class Lebanese couple and brought up amid the political turmoil of the Middle East in general and Lebanon’s war in particular. Neither scenario is examined in the book, though they are cited as possible influences on Sherine’s development, though specific consequences seem not to figure. Sherine renames herself Aurora, is brought up a Christian and has visions.

Aurora goes to London and university to study engineering, but drops out, marries and has a child, because she realizes that is what she really wants. The marriage breaks down and she attains the status of a single mother, a status she seems to claim as an act of martyrdom. She does several things to make ends meet before becoming an estate agent in Dubai, an activity that proves lucrative.

But throughout, there is a side to Aurora-Sherine‘s personality that is not of this material world. She associates with the Virgin Mary, the mother, and with Santa Sophia and other phenomena. By the way, we can always tell if an emergent concept is both real and transcendental because we may note it always has a capital - letter even in speech. I digress…

Aurora returns to London and becomes associated with an apparently blasphemous sect based in Portobello Road, though what she is selling, apparently, is not secondhand. Amidst all the navel gazing and self-realization via universal personal discovery, there is space for religious difference. Fingers are pointed. Accusations are made. Let’s leave it there.

Sherine-Aurora’s story is told by a series of people who knew her. Criticism of the work arises because these reminiscences by different people do not really offer the different perspectives that might be expected. None of these people for instance dismiss Aurora’s claims about herself out of hand. In some ways, they are all converts.

Personally, I have just used this form in my own novel, Eileen McHugh, a life remade, so perhaps I am over-conscious of the of its potential shortcomings. For me, however, these different testimonies to the life of Sherine-Aurora were just two consistent to convince a reader they might be the recollections of a varied group of people with different memories and interests.

I began by defining to apparently opposing reactions to Paulo Coelho‘s work. Obviously, I am in the latter group, so why might I choose to read this book? Well, I read it in Spanish as a way of developing my fluency in the language. Personally, it was a means to an end and, as such, the book delivered, its calculated simplicity of style and associated simplicity of language suiting my linguistic goals perfectly.

And, in facilitating my personal goals in this way, this opening up new possibilities for my own self-expression and discovery, it may just have delivered on the message of self-realization I have apparently been keen to dismiss. It becomes an illustration of whatever an artist may have intended in creating a work, it is eventually what the recipient experiences that endures. Perhaps there is always an element looking within when we experience our universe.

La Ciudad de las Bestias (The City of Beasts) by Isabel Allende

 

La Ciudad de las Bestias (The City of Beasts) is a novel by Isabel Allende. I read it in Spanish, without consulting reviews or doing any prior research. It was only later that I realized the book was originally conceived as a ‘young adult’ novel. I apparently do not qualify, largely on the latter half of the target. I am clearly still young enough, because I found the book to be an engaging, if rarely challenging read. First the bare flesh of the work.

We start in New York with the book’s real weak spot. Alex is on his way to stay with his grandmother because his mother is ill. We see him get involved with a young woman who robs him. His flute - yes, flute - was in the lost bag. We think we are about to embark on an urban tale of misfits, crime and precarious living. We are not. The first section is really a vehicle to introduce the reader to Kate Cold, Alex‘s grandmother, who is an eccentric writer on indigenous peoples in the Amazon, an anthropologist perhaps, who also just happens to have her husband’s flute, which forms the perfect replacement for Alex‘s lost instrument.

And then they set off up the Amazon. Grandma Kate is on a mission to encounter lost tribes and Alex accompanies. What happens in The City of Beasts is more important than how it happens, so this review will not describe detail events. But listing the elements is giving nothing away.

On the expedition we have an academic who seems to know everything about his subject, which happens to be indigenous Amazonians, except of course he does not know how to accept criticism or contradiction. There is a young girl, Nadia, who is a few years younger than Alex, who of course bonds with him. There’s a capitalist who wants to exploit the land inhabited by indigenous peoples. He cannot do this while they are still in residence, so he has devised an ingenious way of protecting the people which is eventually a way of getting rid of them. Alex and Nadia of course uncover the plot.

Alex and Nadia are eventually taken by the People of the Mists and they travel through jungle, mountains and caves, to experience ritual and tradition. They encounter fabulous beasts that do not spell smell too good. They learn that all that glitters is not gold, even in El Dorado, and apparently come to appreciate what it must be like to live as a hunter gatherer.

What is striking about these two young characters is their consistent application of rational thought to everything that happens to them. Whereas received opinion or generally adults talk seriously of magic and myth, Alex and Nadia think things through and always unearth the plausible that just seems to have passed by everyone else. That is probably because their vested interest always takes precedence, and these vested interests are better served by continued obfuscation.

The City of Beasts in Spanish was a learning experience. It was also worth reading. There is still room for more magic by the end.