{"id":318,"date":"2015-04-05T14:33:56","date_gmt":"2015-04-05T21:33:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.evergreen.edu\/losttimekekoa\/?p=115"},"modified":"2015-04-05T14:33:56","modified_gmt":"2015-04-05T21:33:56","slug":"close-reading-kekoa-hallett","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/losttime\/close-reading-kekoa-hallett\/","title":{"rendered":"Close Reading: Kekoa Hallett"},"content":{"rendered":"

On page 245, of Swann\u2019s Way<\/em>, we are introduced to the Duchesse\/Mme de Guermantes, a member of French royalty and future love interest of Marcel. Immediately preceding her entrance into the novel, the narrator has been constructing elaborate romantic fantasies of Mme de Guermantes based upon her royal pedigree, which can be traced back to the semi-mythical Genevieve de Brabant, various works of art (including the \u2018magic lantern\u2019 of his childhood), and the natural beauty of the Guermantes way. The intensity of these fantasies quickly overwhelm the young narrator and he must turn to his father\u2019s perceived ability to \u201ctransgress laws… more ineluctable than the laws of life and death\u201d for comfort.\u00a0 Failing at that, he falls into a morbid depression stemming from his inability to accept his own mortality which we can assume is narcissistic at its core because of the narrators ability to take impersonal encounters with death in stride, most recently, Aunt Leonie\u2019s, which he dealt with by teasing the grieving Francoise and enjoying long walks in the country.<\/p>\n

The first enocunter with Mme de Guermantes:<\/p>\n

\u3000\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>Suddenly, during the nuptial mass, the verger, by moving to one side, enabled me to see in one of the chapels\u00a0a fair-haired lady with a large nose, piercing blue eyes, a billowy scarf of mauve silk,\u00a0glossy and new and bright, and a little pimple at the corner of her nose. And because on the surface of\u00a0her face, which was red, as though she had been very hot, I could discern, diluted and barely perceptible, fragments of resemblance with the portrait that had been shown to me; because, more especially,\u00a0the particular features which I remarked in this lady, if I attempted to catalogue them formulated themselves in precisely the same terms–a large nose, blue eyes–as Dr. Percepied had used when describing in my presence the Duchesse de Guermantes,<\/em><\/p>\n

This is a strictly physical description in which the reader is given no sense of the grandeur and romance that has already been invested into this character. The pimple on her nose is an unattractive detail that strips Mme de Guermantes of her superidealized perfection. Then the narrator says to himself, \u201cThis lady is like the Duchesse de Guermante.\u201d He is, at this first instant, incapable of accepting a reality that disagrees with his fantasy.<\/p>\n

Now the chapel from which she was following the service was that of Gilbert the Bad; beneath the flat tombstones of which, yellowed and bulging like cells of honey in a comb, rested the\u00a0bones of the old Counts of Brabant;\u00a0and I remembered having heard it said that this chapel was reserved\u00a0for the Guermantes family, whenever any of its members came to attend a ceremony at Combray; there was,\u00a0indeed, but one woman resembling the portrait of Mme. de Guermantes who on that day, the very day on\u00a0which she was expected to come there, could be sitting in that chapel: it was she! My disappointment was immense.<\/em><\/p>\n

Mme de Guermantes is literally couched in the physical representation of her royal heritage in a spot reserved for her personage and the narrator still has to take a beat and go through this deductive process in order to accept the fact of her identity. Now struggling to reconcile this reality with his idealizations, the narrator realizes that he had, in his minds eye, stripped Mme de Guermantes of her humanity and elevated (it may be argued reduced) her into a work of art. The idolatry of art, otherwise the valuation of art and aesthetics as \u2018greater than\u2019 reality, is a central theme in Swann\u2019s Way<\/em>. Often we will find a character will be unsympathetic towards another character until such time as they can read into the other\u2019s plight an artistic\/historic allusion. From these recurrences, we infer a key motif in the work: Reality is valued in aesthetic terms.<\/p>\n

To the previous point, we have now met Mme de Guermantes unmediated by the powerful associations of her name and for an instant we see her as an ordinary character. The narrator must now resolve the discrepancy between Mme de Guermnates as a fluid and compliant emblem for eternal romance and beauty and Mme de Guermantes as just another mortal under \u201csubjection to the laws of life.\u201d He fails utterly and is completely unrepentant about this fundamental flaw in his perception of reality. Instead, we are treated to a lengthy passage in which the narrator indulgently details an entirely new elaborate romantic fantasy in which Mme de Guermantes falls in love with him for no discernable reason. We follow the thread of this fantasy to a reflection on his ambition to become a great writer, which predictably leads him to another morbid depression.<\/p>\n

But even if the narrator is blinded by his delusion, the text reveals the hypocrisy inherent in the narrator\u2019s paradoxical understanding of the world around him. The narrator treasures his obsessive fantasies, these romantic artifices, consciously constructed delusions, above all else, refusing to relinquish them even when squarely confronted with contrary evidence. Yet, if one follows the trajectory of these fantasies, they always lead to some melancholy pit and the remedies always come about absent of any self-conscious impetus. Proust ties spontaneous or unwilled memories or experiences with his deepest feelings of joy or enchantment. The things that give him true joy come unbidden and are usually banal or natural (the madeleine, the Hawthorne).<\/p>\n

These themes prefigure the novel\u2019s central investigation: the search for\/creation of one\u2019s true identity. Who am I? How can one even begin to recognize \u2018I\u2019? etc. Proust attempts to answer these questions by exploring the nature of memory, which he (we can confidently assume) believes crucial to the nature of identity. But in this exploration, we see that memory is very rarely honest. Furthermore, it is not even benign. Memory is outright seditious, undermining our attempts to know other people, places, and ourselves by superimposing the colors of our own secret (even to us) desires upon every image that we see. This brings the validity of the entire Combray section of the novel into question as it composed largely of personal recollections of Marcel, as opposed to \u2018Swann in Love\u2019 in which the narrator seems to switch into an omniscient third-person. Marcel\u2019s memories are simply not reliable. He plays with temporal relationships the same way that the Impressionists would play with relationships of light and color in order to achieve an image more accurate to his feelings than to objective reality. The final question we arrive at from this is: Does that matter? That is to say, does it matter as to the construction of an individual\u2019s identity whether or not that individual has knowledge outside of the sphere in which his identity colors and alters all information? Proust has demonstrated that perception is suspect to a myriad of foibles and follies and that everything we know must first be mediated by that flawed perceptive organ and therefore is suspect of all the same foibles and follies.<\/p>\n

Even the simple act which we describe as \u201cseeing someone we know\u201d is to some extent an intellectual process\u2026 (Pg. 23)<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u2026like every attitude or action which reveals a man\u2019s underlying character; they bear no relation to what he has previously said, and we cannot confirm our suspicions by the culprit\u2019s own testimony, for he will admit nothing; we are reduced to the evidence of our own senses, and we ask ourselves, in the face of this detached and incoherent fragment of recollection, whether indeed our senses have not been the victims of hallucination\u2026 (Pg. 177)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On page 245, of Swann’s Way, we are introduced to the Duchesse\/Mme de Guermantes, a member of French royalty and future love interest of Marcel. Immediately preceding her entrance into the novel, the narrator has been constructing elaborate romantic fantasies of Mme de Guermantes based upon her royal pedigree, which can be traced back to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1172,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/losttime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/losttime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/losttime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/losttime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1172"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/losttime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=318"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/losttime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/losttime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/losttime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/losttime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}