[MUSIC PLAYING]
I'm Robert Harrison for entitled "Pendous."
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Let's get a 21st century groove going before we head back
to the long 19th century.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Yeah.
Steve Hunter giving us the vibe.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The show is called entitled "Pendous."
So here we go with one of mine.
Am I nor the opinion to be sure?
[MUSIC PLAYING]
150 years ago, on July 10, Jean Clemoss-Pust
gave birth to a boy whom she would go on to cuddle and pamper,
nurturing in him a ferocious egotism that she would be forced
to indulge, negotiate, and manage.
She instilled in him a love of the arts,
and upon her death in 1905, she'd be stowed upon him a vast
fortune, all of which enabled her son to become the towering
literary figure we know today as much as it was.
Whoever loves poo seven volume opus in search of lost time,
owes Jean Clemoss a big debt of gratitude for bringing
much said into the world, and for putting up with his
important demands on her devotion during his childhood
and youth, which much said so fondly remembers in that
sprawling, uninhibited novel.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
In search of lost time is not for everybody,
and I include myself in that category.
Back in college, I had a professor who, when I expressed
frustration with the book's vagaries assured me that I
would grow into poost if I just stuck with him long enough.
Well, even professors can be wrong at times,
and after decades of periodically returning to poost to give
him another chance, I now know that I will never fit into the
gauzy mantle of that novel.
It's an exquisite fabric to be sure, but I feel awkward and even
ridiculous when I put it on.
As for its prose, it has that spongy, honey taste of a
blend, which I personally find slightly sickening.
Nor am I enraptured by poost's highly touted
ruminations on time, memory, and a higher order of reality
glimpsed in moments of heightened sensation, to each
his own, I suppose.
Poost has many August venerators whose entitled opinions I
respect, but don't share.
When I hear George Steiner, whom I greatly admire, say, as he
did in an interview that, quote, "poost has expanded the
possibilities of human consciousness as very few have done,
Shakespeare and Dante maybe, but not many others.
I can only shake my head and wonder what kind of sorcery is at
work here, or what is it that I'm missing."
It's not that I don't understand why some people love
poost and why the world of comb-re and chance them, or why
the 4,000-page novel can become addictive.
I do.
In search of lost time has the one salient feature of any
literary masterpiece.
It is unique.
There's nothing remotely like it.
It's written at the edge of sleep.
It slows down the pace of thought and perception.
It lulls you with the undulating waves of its liquid,
languish prose.
It has a distinctly musical effect on readers.
The cadence of its sentences, the recurring melodies or
thematic motifs, and the way its successive volumes represent
so many movements of a unified composition, all this makes for a
kind of symphony and words.
I also get that the novel opens its doors and invites you
into the glittering world of the Bele-pok in France, which,
along with the 19th century, came to an end with World War
One.
Even today, in our wholly altered historical reality, many
among us can't resist the allure of an defeat and self-in-close
society populated by rich people, artists, and aristocrats.
As well as their servants, of course.
You have to have the servants.
I think I read somewhere that Downton Abbey may be having a
seventh season.
Oh my.
Then there is Marcel, the narrator author, who passes through the
external facades of the novel's characters into their inner
psyches.
Somewhat like Pus contemporary Henry James did with his
characters.
The difference between Pus and James, however, is that James
maintained a certain tact and reserve toward his characters,
allowing them to withdraw behind veils of discretion.
A Jamesian character tends to retreat into indeterminacy and
medicines, while a Prustian character tends to get exposed to
one degree or another.
Which is fine.
I have nothing against narrative in discretion.
My problem with Pus is that Marcel aggressively draws you the
reader into the deeper recesses of his own idiosyncrasy.
He doesn't invite but drags you into his confidence.
In psychology, this is called annexation.
Pus and nexus his reader by disclosing the most private aspects
of his selfhood and thereby forcing you into intimacy with him.
So yes, I understand the bewitching appeal of Marcel Pus.
Yet when I read him, I feel like the person in Ezra Pound's
poem endurance who says, "I am homesick after my own kind."
Which is a roundabout way of saying, "I don't share much sense
sensibility.
I would not want to spend an evening with any of the novels,
two thousand characters, and among all the dead authors I would
like to meet in person if I could, Pus ranks near the bottom of
my list.
If only because I think Samuel Beckett was right in his
scintillating short book on Pus, when he wrote a "two tendencies
highly developed in Pus, his domination complex, and his
infantilism."
That's a combination I can do without.
I would rather sit on the deck of the Nelly and listen to
Marlowe spin his yarns than sit at the table of the Bez view
as.
Question, "Is in search of last time a novel from which you
could not remove or alter any of its constituent parts
without visualiating the whole?"
I'm not sure.
I tend to believe that by streamlining large portions of it
and reducing it to maybe half its size, one could improve it
considerably or at least render it less tedious.
Yet maybe the genius of Pus' novel lies precisely in its excess
and overflow, like Moby Dick or Finnegan's Wake, and maybe
by condensing it one would in fact denature it.
I certainly would not want to tinker with it.
That's for sure.
For all its stylistic and descriptive expansiveness in search of
last time remains from the psychological point of view at
least, a claustrophobic novel.
I'm referring here not so much to the confined social world
of the swans and the Git Mounds and so forth, but to the passion of
jealousy that marks the novel's center of gravity.
For Pus' and his narrator, love and jealousy are interchangeable terms.
Love has only one modality, the compulsive desire to gain full
possession of the loved one.
Not simply of the loved one's body, but of her devotion,
attention, and innermost desires.
In Pus' mental universe, only the torment of failing to
achieve such possession counts as love.
Marcel declares in propositional form, "We love only what we do not
wholly possess."
So much of Pus' novel, wallows in the murky depths of this
self-devouring and other devouring passion for possession.
We see it at work with swan, the bachandha chadlus, and
Marcel himself.
Marcel would never understand the sentiment in rain or
rilke's slumber song, "Where the Speaker," comparing his
beloved to a book asks, "Will you be able to sleep without my
closing you and leaving you alone with what is yours?"
By his own admission, Marcel desired total and exclusive possession
of his mother when he was a child.
Later in life, he carried over the same vampiric desire into
his relationships with women, above all albedine.
When he believes he is taking possession of albedine,
Marcel starts losing interest in her.
When he once against suspects, there is something in her
that eludes and excludes him, his passion gets re-inflamed.
The only time he is at peace without a bachandha is when she is a
sleep beside him as a smooth surface of physical presence
without secrets or hidden depths, or so he believes.
Because in reality, the other is never so far out of reach
as when he or she is asleep as rilke's slumber songs
exist.
In his purest manifestation, jealousy seeks possession
through penetration.
Again, not so much sexual penetration, but a penetrating
knowledge of the inner being of the loved one.
This knowing gaze into the interior is always denied to the
jealous person, since none of us can ever know another from
within.
That is to say, no, the other subjectively.
That's why much said goes to such extreme lengths to empirically
discover where and with whom and in what manner are the
bachteen spends her time when they are not together.
This is a failing proposition.
For while external facts may tell us whether we have been betrayed,
they will never give us access to the inner psyche of the
person who inspires in us a pathological desire for total
possession.
And Pus was clear of why not to realize this.
That's why in search of lost time ends up sublimating the
psychology of jealousy into a metaphysics of unknowability.
We can never know or truly commune with the other.
If Pus had stopped there, we could say that he learned a valuable
if rather obvious lesson.
Yet he went further and put himself and the rest of us in a
hermetic box, I quote him, "Man is the creature who cannot come
forth from himself, who knows others only in himself and who,
if he asserts the contrary, lies."
That statement tells me all I need to know about why I will never
grow into post.
Why I will always feel suffocated by his novel and why I can live
without the sublimated solipsism that he called arts redemption
of reality.
I'm happy to assert the contrary of that statement and leave it to
the gods to decide whether I lie.
To assert that is that I am someone who exists outside myself,
that I come forth from myself day in and day out and that I know
myself through others rather than no others through me.
In some, I live extatically.
And that's why from here on out, I will no longer revisit the
shadow world of post masterpiece.
I'm Robert Harrison and I hereby declare an end to our year
long hiatus and the beginning of a new season of entitled
opinions.
We have a number of new shows coming your way in the weeks ahead,
so stay tuned and spread the word, take care.
[Music]
[BLANK_AUDIO]