11/01/2005
Joshua Landy on Marcel Proust
Joshua Landy is Associate Professor of French in the Department of French and Italian at Stanford University. He was educated at Churchill College, Cambridge University where he received a BA in French and German and an MA in French, and at Princeton University where he received a PhD in Comparative Literature. At Stanford he teaches […]
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This is KZSU Stanford.
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Welcome to entitled opinions.
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My name is Robert Harrison.
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And we're coming to your live from the Stanford campus.
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Let's start with a quote from the founder of Modern Philosophy,
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who wants upon a time wrote a book called Discourse on Method.
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How's this for methods?
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If you're lost in doubt and confusion and don't know what to do or where to turn,
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quote, "I would imitate travelers who finding themselves lost in a forest,
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ought not wander this way in that, or what is worse, remain in one place,
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but ought always walk a straight line as they can in one direction
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and not change course for feeble reasons.
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For by this means if they are not going where they wish,
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they will finally arrive at least somewhere where they probably
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will be better off than in the middle of a forest.
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Ah, Descartes, you have to love him.
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How could you not love someone who says to know people's true opinions,
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you ought to observe what they do rather than what they say.
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Not only because few people are willing to say all they believe,
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but also because many do not know what they believe.
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Since believing is something different from knowing that one believes it,
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the one often occurs without the other.
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That's the problem, isn't it? What does it mean to believe something?
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What does it mean to know that one believes it?
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What does it mean to believe something you know is not true?
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The devil, my friends, is in our self-deception.
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We believe and make believe with barely a hair of distinction.
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We say one thing and mean another, mostly without ever being aware of it.
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What lies at the bottom of this strange capacity we have to deceive ourselves?
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These are questions that in my humble yet entitled opinion,
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literature is better equipped to engage than philosophy.
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Philosophy and literature are bound together the way two lovers are bound together
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while maintaining their difference from one another.
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Philosophy does a good job of unsettling us and raising doubts in us.
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In fact, the moment we no longer feel unsettled, we are no longer really thinking.
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But philosophy raises doubts in order to dispel them.
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Philosophy promises to lead us out of Descartes' forest of perplexity,
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whereas literature helps us to become familiar with the forest,
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and to learn our way around it.
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Philosophers tend to believe the forest of error has a perimeter
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and that there's a way to get outside of it.
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Literature reminds us that life itself is a forest of uncertainty,
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which has no perimeter except maybe death.
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Now, I'm as devoted to precision, objectivity, and science as the next person.
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Science is fine when you're looking away from yourself at the world of nature.
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It's when you turn the gaze back on yourself and try to make sense of human motivation.
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That's when you realize that there's a region of the soul, a region of unlikeness, a gust in call it,
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where x doesn't mean x and y doesn't mean y, except provisionally,
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where things both are and are not what they seem,
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where the thesis entails its antithesis and where attraction mingles with revulsion.
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It's in this region of unlikeness that literature takes up its abode.
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It's the very voice of this region.
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I'm talking about literature folks.
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Listen up. This isn't a radio show you can listen to,
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distractively. What's that? Psychology, you say?
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Nine, nine, nine. This is not a matter for psychology.
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Psychology wants to be a science.
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It refuses to laugh at its own punchlines.
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No, literature and literature alone takes us into the region of unlikeness in all its strangeness.
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It doesn't approach it externally, armed with theories or methods or concepts.
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It places us there, abandons us there, forces us to become self-reliant in the midst of the weirdness.
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The weirdness of not knowing exactly who you are or where you stand,
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or what the story is all about, or how it's going to end.
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With literature there's no such thing as conclusive interpretations.
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How could there be if you can't stabilize the reference of a symbol, a metaphor, an illusion, an allegory?
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Literature has the power to impregnate words with silence, implication, irony, and multiple meanings.
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Amazing. That's what literature is.
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It keeps us in a maze of the equivocal and indeterminate.
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Literature is the way we are, opaque with respect to the deeper recesses of our being.
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The act of reading it makes the same sort of demands on us that life does.
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Namely, to make sense of things where any number of meanings are possible,
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and where a final meaning is lacking.
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How can we presume to ever know ourselves if we don't know how to read?
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I mean read carefully, complexly, alertly, with the light-footedness of a dancer instead of the heavy plot of the logician.
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We live in an age that hates ambiguity and militates against uncertainty.
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The more complex the world becomes, the more we seek out easy simplifications.
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We want a clear distinction between good and evil.
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We want a judge before we understand.
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Literature doesn't let us get away with that.
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At least not when we meet it on its own terms.
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I think it's because we're so much in favor of anything that reduces and simplifies that most of us these days prefer movies to books.
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The difference between a book and a movie is the difference between a cube and a square.
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If you cast a light on a cube and project its shadow against a wall,
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you reduce it from a three-dimensional object to a two-dimensional square.
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While the square is comprehensible from the perspective of the cube, the reverse is not true.
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The square cannot comprehend the cube's third dimension.
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The same applies to books and movies.
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Movies, for the most part, take the cube of literature and project it onto a screen where it becomes a square.
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And we sit there in the projection hall like Plato's Prisoners in their cave,
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watching shadows flicker across the screen, and we're content with the show.
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Literature, which gets inside our heads, is sometimes two-three-dimensional for us.
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This show my friends entitled "Pinions Declares War on Reductionism and Simplification."
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That doesn't mean that we don't every now and then fall into those vices ourselves.
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But the aim here is to seek out the wisdom of uncertainty and to put ourselves squarely into the region of unlikeness.
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No, not squarely, but cubally.
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Today we're going to do just that with Joshua Landy, my friend and colleague from the Department of French and Italian here at Stanford,
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who last year published a brilliant book titled "Philosophy as Fiction, Self, Deception and Knowledge" in much so post.
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Josh, welcome to the program.
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Thank you, Robert.
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Josh, I think it's evident from the title of your book that some of the issues I've been ranting about, because it is a rant,
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or of special concern to you as well.
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So let me ask you, do you agree not completely, of course, but at least in part with some of the claims I've been making about literature?
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Absolutely.
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I would even go so far as to say that walking in a straight line may be the quickest way to get out of a forest,
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but maybe that's not the best thing to do with the forest.
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What would be the best thing to do with the forest?
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At least if the forest is literary, if the analogy holds, then perhaps you want to walk around in it a little bit,
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and perhaps you want to learn something by experience.
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We don't nearly want to know what the quickest way is from one edge of the forest to the other,
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but we want to learn how to exist in the forest, how to react, what there is to be gained from that encounter,
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which I think gets back to your idea that what we stand to gain from our engagement with literature is not a set of straightforward facts and claims and beliefs and scientific data,
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but instead some kind of know-how.
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We're learning how to read, and as a result we're learning how to read ourselves.
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Yeah, and when you talk about the forest, we meet it analogically, obviously, or metaphorically.
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One of the claims I made is that there are forests of literature, every time you open a book of literature,
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you have to learn how to read that book really from scratch, because you can spend two years reading Moby Dick and learning how to read that book,
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but then you switch to another book, and it's a whole new forest, as it were, and you have to find your way around really on your own.
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And one of the claims I was making is that literature is that forest, but also life itself is something that we're thrown into and not clearly.
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There's any way out of the constant recurrence of doubts and perplexities and need to make decisions where there's no ultimate foundation on which you can rely for the co-agency of your acts and absolutely.
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I think that you can do better or worse, and maybe you would slightly punt company there, but can you get everything absolutely right all the time?
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That seems elusive at best.
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So then what you're getting from your experience of reading is some kind of training in how to read situations, how to read into those situations what the best course of action is given, what it is you know about yourself, and there is where yourself does actually come to it.
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You better know something about yourself before you get involved in those tricky situations.
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Always you really aren't going to have a compass with which to navigate.
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Yeah, I agree with that, and I try to tell my students I'm sure you do, and everyone who teaches literature is that reading a text is what you're doing every day in your relations with others.
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Every time you watch a news program or hear a political speech or engage in any kind of social interaction, these are all coded forms of communication that require an interpretation.
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Exactly.
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And to get back to your analogy of the great works of literature, there are certain situations in life possibly the most interesting situations, the most valuable situations, but which you do not know the rules in advance.
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So it may well be that the experiences that we can gain the most from, the most valuable for us are the ones in which we have to figure out the rules as we go along.
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So I wouldn't say that every work of literature has its own set of rules and requires us to learn how to read it, but I would say that great works of literature do that.
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Great work of literature change the rules.
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I think what we're going to talk about, Bruce, in a moment, and I think that's a great example.
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Here's a book in which you have to figure out how to read this.
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It doesn't present itself as something that's easily readable.
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And as a result of learning how to read that, you then learn a new way of reading life.
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But not only a new way of reading life, you get you gain practice in just figuring out new sets of rules for new situations.
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Now, definitely, who has ever known what the rules are for a love affair when you have it, when you haven't been involved.
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Or even if you've had multiple ones, each one presents a challenge and a new hermeneutic situation, oh, now come on.
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I just saw that we lost half of our audience.
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I lose the word hermeneutic.
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Why is it that they can go and hear all the scientific mumbo jumbo and never bothers anyone.
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But a literary person, there's only a user word hermeneutic and they think that I don't know what that word is too big.
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Let's go off.
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The experience of having to learn a new in a new situation all the time is what we're in.
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This is why I think literature might be the opposite in some sense, or maybe even a more effective kind of self-help manual.
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This obsession that we have with self-help manuals, I think it testifies to the fact that we, that life requires
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a kind of guidance and help for these situations.
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But I tend to agree with you that learning to read a complex work of literature is the best pedagogy available to us when it comes to the human situation.
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Well, this is what the Greeks understood.
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I mean, it's not about learning a set of facts.
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It's not about picking up a self-help book and learning that it's better for you if you do X or you do Y.
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It's about practice.
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It's about training.
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In order to get better at doing this thing called life, you don't just need a set of facts.
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You need a set of procedures.
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You need a method.
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So that extent they caught was right.
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Well, he's right.
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But is there any such thing as a method for what we're talking about?
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I tend, I at least thought that I was suggesting that no, there's no reliable method that you can apply time in and time again, but that you have to find your way.
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You have to get comfortable.
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First, you have to make yourself at home in the realm of the complex, the ambiguous, and the indeterminate, and not let it frighten you.
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And then you can start finding your way here, which, once you're out of that situation, you're going to need another set of rules and guidelines, but at least you know what the game is all about.
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Maybe we should refine and say you need a set of methods.
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Each geared to a particular situation, and then in addition to that, you need the ability, the mental capacity to produce new methods as situations require.
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So we talked about posts that book that you wrote last year, a really fantastic book on one of the major novelists of the 20th century.
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You call them a 20th century author.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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And then you kind of straddle.
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I mean, he is, I suppose, he inaugurates a 20th century.
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Right.
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I mean, yeah, the books are written from 1913 to 2002.
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So we can call them 20th century.
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Also, even though, as you say, he definitely has one foot still in 19th century.
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Well, the title of the book is In Search of Last Time.
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In Search of Last Time is the translation of "Allegosiaashtigtompaldu."
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Yeah.
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And he's trying to recover what kind of time is it that he's in search of?
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Well, deep time, I mean, because it's a psychological novel, largely, you know.
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Right.
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It's a first person novel.
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So it's a book that presents itself as an autobiography, but the character writing is fictional.
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And it's in part a, what you might expect, not about, but if you're going back and revisiting the past and resurrecting all memories and all that kind of thing.
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But it's in part also a very analytical novel, so that the character who's telling the story is constantly commenting on it and trying to draw some conclusions about the nature of the mind.
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And of course, yes, time.
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So he's in search of last time, which certainly means memories going back and just remembering things.
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Simple as that.
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But he's also in search of the nature of time.
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If you want to understand what time is, what time does.
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Right.
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Well, his search of Last Time, which is his own personal past, takes him.
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We're talking about that he is a 20th century writer, but he's trying to recover memories that connect him back to his childhood and his childhood to his parents and even grandparents.
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So in a sense, would you say that there's a very 19th century kind of world that has been lost to him and that he's trying to at least detect the traces of in his own memory?
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Maybe you could say that of, of, of, Bruce, if not over the character.
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There is a sense in which the world of Bruce novel is a world in the process of changing.
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It's the moment at which all of these 19th century institutions are really on the way out.
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So all the Balzac type stuff, the life in the salon, the high class, the social world is pretty much fading out and of course, World War One, which happens in the middle of Bruce writing this novel, is pretty much the death nail for that.
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I'd say that from Bruce's point of view, it's at the search for a collective past, if you like, or a relationship to the past as well.
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This novel is actually a series of novels. It's that correct. It's a multi-volume, very long. I mean, how many volumes?
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It depends on which edition. The current English edition is in six volumes, the French edition is in seven.
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It's in three dozen, really matter. The point is it's a more or less 4,000 page novel. So anyway, you slice it up. It's pretty substantial.
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And I can, can one read them discreetly, or is it really all one continuum? It's a continuum and it's a problem when you are trying to get people to read it.
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People want to know what they could do. They don't have the time. They get through all 4,000 pages. It took me seven years. So I feel sympathetic to people who don't feel they have the time.
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They're, I mean, I'm extremely happy to say that all kinds of Bruce reading groups around the country whose purpose is basically to give people a forum for getting through the whole thing.
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You can just about get what's going on by reading the beginning and the end. But even though you're really missing an awful lot.
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So that's, that's a continuum. Yeah, that would be like the two-dimensional square versus the cube. If you want the game.
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You'd like us, you have to go through the 4,000 pages. You do. And for, for a reason among others, it's very curious, which is that a lot of people just read the first volume, especially if they're reading in the class.
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The first volume ends with the narrator producing a beautiful carefully crafted and very convincing statement about the nature of time. And it's a very pessimistic statement.
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He says that houses and avenues are as fugitive as the years. You can't get time back. Now, if you just read this volume, since that's the end of the volume, you might think, oh, that's the ultimate statement.
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That's the definitive statement on time. Of course, if you get to the final volume, you realize this is the opposite of Prisone View. And he wrote an electorate with his friend, too bad for the reader, if he takes this from my own opinion.
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Right.
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Well, I, so that's one reason it's a modernist. That's one reason it's the 20th century novel because it's going to play tricks on you of that nature.
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Now, I have a lot of questions I'm going to ask for to put them in a sequence here. First is between that first and the last volume, obviously he's not only changed his mind, but he's undergone a revelation about the recuferability of lost time.
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How does that come about? What are the experiences that lead him to changes mine?
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Well, there's the infamous Madeline. Why infamous, no famous.
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Let's remind people about the scene, this famous, I guess even people who don't know anything about post have heard about the famous or infamous Madeline scene.
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Can you recapit? It's such a beautiful scene. To the, the set up as a false, you have a middle aged man lying half asleep in bed and tossing in terms of the same thing.
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Tossing and turning and remembering vividly various places that he has lived in during his life, and particular times that he was in bed, all the various bedrooms that he's that he slept in.
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And he is aware that all of this particular childhood memory of being in bed or going to bed in Compley, which was the, is childhood holiday home, all he can remember is one thing, one scene.
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The drama of going to sleep, the drama of the goodnight kiss, his mother wouldn't kiss him goodnight and so on.
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Now, this goes on for a long time, for a very long time, that's all he can remember of his childhood going to sleep drama.
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That's all he can remember of Compley. But one day, he is offered a cup of tea, a design, and a Madeline, and he dips the Madeline the tea, and he has an epiphanic experience.
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And he realizes that the experience is the memory of Compley flooding back to everything comes back.
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So no longer can he only remember this drama of going to sleep and waiting for his mother to kiss him goodnight.
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He can see all the people in Compley, all the houses, all the fields, everything.
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| 00:23:27.000 |
So it turns out in fact that memory is recoup, lost time is recoupable, not just in the form of dry snapshots, but in this very vivid, alive, sensual form.
|
| 00:23:42.000 |
Yeah, and of course this is the great example of what he calls involuntary memory, versus voluntary memory.
|
| 00:23:50.000 |
His limitations, you can't only go so far with it, the Madeline episode, shows how involuntary memory is something that's really outside of conscious control.
|
| 00:24:05.000 |
Exactly. It's tied to the senses. What is it about the Madeline that is it the...
|
| 00:24:12.000 |
You claim that he never actually eats the Madeline.
|
| 00:24:16.000 |
And the proof never ate a Madeline. Of course never ate a Madeline, but he never had an epiphanic experience with a Madeline.
|
| 00:24:22.000 |
And that's actually more or less taken for granted these days.
|
| 00:24:26.000 |
But what's really funny about it is that the second generation of biographers then said, "No, no, it wasn't a Madeline. It was a piece of toast."
|
| 00:24:34.000 |
But there's no greater evidence for that.
|
| 00:24:37.000 |
Anyway, the point is not what proofs himself ate or did not eat.
|
| 00:24:42.000 |
The point is to understand what's underneath is, what's so great about involuntary memory.
|
| 00:24:47.000 |
And it is the kind of memory that isn't connected to the conscious mind.
|
| 00:24:52.000 |
The conscious mind files things the way neatly.
|
| 00:24:55.000 |
And you can access them. Those that you haven't forgotten obviously.
|
| 00:25:00.000 |
And there are connected in these logical ways to other things that you need, the handles you need to pick them up by.
|
| 00:25:05.000 |
Involuntary memories are buried. They just passed unnoticed.
|
| 00:25:09.000 |
Notice you didn't have things to connect them up to. What they get connected up to were just senses.
|
| 00:25:14.000 |
It was just things like taste of something, the smell of something.
|
| 00:25:17.000 |
And what's required is then for you to have the same sensory experience.
|
| 00:25:23.000 |
And then the memory comes back.
|
| 00:25:25.000 |
Now what's interesting about that? Well one of the things that's interesting about that is that it suggests that you can become again the person that you were.
|
| 00:25:31.000 |
It's not just memory. I mean, in a way it's a bit of a misnomer.
|
| 00:25:35.000 |
It's not just I remember doing this. I am that person again.
|
| 00:25:40.000 |
The narrator describes feeling exactly the same way that he did then,
|
| 00:25:44.000 |
like down to the plans he has for the next day.
|
| 00:25:47.000 |
He feels the desire to go out and play with Jibaph to whatever it is.
|
| 00:25:52.000 |
And so part of what's so fascinating about that is what it suggests about the nature of the self.
|
| 00:25:59.000 |
And at the nature of memory, this is crucial.
|
| 00:26:05.000 |
When people tend to believe that memory is a psychic faculty.
|
| 00:26:10.000 |
And that is something that takes place inside the mind.
|
| 00:26:13.000 |
And I'm sure that's true, but it's not the whole story.
|
| 00:26:17.000 |
The fact is that the biggest part of our memory is outside of ourselves in the world.
|
| 00:26:24.000 |
And in things and places and the mudland.
|
| 00:26:30.000 |
Do you mean that literally?
|
| 00:26:32.000 |
Yeah, right, of course. I mean it literally.
|
| 00:26:34.000 |
Yes, because or at least in this correlation between memory and the world,
|
| 00:26:39.000 |
if I go back to where I grew up as a child and if they have destroyed a neighborhood,
|
| 00:26:48.000 |
they have taken away my memory, possibility of memory forever.
|
| 00:26:56.000 |
Or I have argued, you know, when it comes to big things like forests,
|
| 00:27:00.000 |
you know, and the whole problem of deforestation is that there's such a reserve of cultural memory associated with certain things like forests or cities,
|
| 00:27:10.000 |
particular places that our memories are actually reside in the things themselves.
|
| 00:27:17.000 |
Or at least reside to such an extent that without their being there, they no longer can stimulate or create the access that we might be able to have to the deep memory itself.
|
| 00:27:29.000 |
And that's why changes and transformations in the world are really transformations in our memory.
|
| 00:27:37.000 |
Yes.
|
| 00:27:38.000 |
And this is one of the discoveries. I don't know if it's a pristine discovery.
|
| 00:27:42.000 |
And here we want to talk also about the extent to which he relied on certain philosophies in order to articulate these ideas.
|
| 00:27:52.000 |
Many people have argued that the French philosopher, Henri Beckson, whose lectures he actually heard earlier on that this novel,
|
| 00:28:02.000 |
in many ways, transcribes into a literary genre, theories that come from Henri Beckson.
|
| 00:28:07.000 |
And theories of memory in particular, do you agree with that? No, you don't.
|
| 00:28:13.000 |
I doubt.
|
| 00:28:14.000 |
The first relationship with the philosophy is somewhat vexed.
|
| 00:28:18.000 |
And I totally just to be very quick about it.
|
| 00:28:21.000 |
I tend to think that although he had some education in philosophy, he pretty much made a lot of it up.
|
| 00:28:27.000 |
When it came to, and there are times when he'll just end up in a position that we recognize as a position of such and such philosopher.
|
| 00:28:34.000 |
But I think he in most cases, they're autonomously. When it comes to Beckson, I think he was really interested in the ideas.
|
| 00:28:41.000 |
But I think he actually ended up turning them upside down.
|
| 00:28:45.000 |
So that when Beckson, for example, says that our own selves appear to us to be a series of discrete instance.
|
| 00:28:55.000 |
So that we appear, in life it appears, to be a series of discrete instance like the cells of a cinematic movie.
|
| 00:29:06.000 |
Beckson thinks that's an error.
|
| 00:29:09.000 |
We're getting it wrong. Life isn't really like that.
|
| 00:29:13.000 |
Perst thinks life really is like that.
|
| 00:29:15.000 |
So he's clearly inspired by these various ideas, but he's going to end up in his own positions.
|
| 00:29:22.000 |
And likewise, people have argued that he was a showpanowery and thrown through.
|
| 00:29:29.000 |
And I know that you don't agree with that either.
|
| 00:29:32.000 |
And one can take even more philosophers, I suppose.
|
| 00:29:35.000 |
Yes.
|
| 00:29:36.000 |
The interesting question is, even if he were completely devoutly committed to a philosophy, the fact is that he wrote a novel.
|
| 00:29:47.000 |
And something that has to be something at stake in that difference.
|
| 00:29:52.000 |
Absolutely. I mean, it gets back to your opening remarks.
|
| 00:29:55.000 |
Yes, even if you were, even if this were the world's greatest dramatization of Beckson's philosophy, what's the point?
|
| 00:30:04.000 |
Some people have suggested that it's just boring to read philosophy, so people like to read novels.
|
| 00:30:11.000 |
It's the old sort of sugared pill idea.
|
| 00:30:13.000 |
I think there's much more at stake here, and I think it gets back to the idea of being stuck in a forest and getting something out of being stuck in a forest.
|
| 00:30:23.000 |
We're not just reading this novel because it has some philosophical insights to impart.
|
| 00:30:28.000 |
We're reading it because the experience of reading it is supposed to be enlightening, enjoyable, stimulating, perplexing all of those things that are uniquely available to the novel.
|
| 00:30:40.000 |
Right.
|
| 00:30:41.000 |
It gives flesh to the otherwise abstract concepts that may be subtended, but as we know, when things become, become flesh, they take on a life of their own, which is no longer reducible, maybe to the initial concepts that might have even inspired.
|
| 00:31:00.000 |
But I'd even steer away from the flesh and body metaphor because I don't want to be suggesting that you have a philosophical skeleton, then you just hang some novelistic flesh.
|
| 00:31:15.000 |
My suggestion is that as you were putting it earlier, we're supposed to get a bit lost in there.
|
| 00:31:21.000 |
There's supposed to be something to be gained from the experience of fighting our way to knowledge or at least provisional certainty, hiding our way to a shape we can impose upon this massive information that is superior to just being given it.
|
| 00:31:42.000 |
So that's what they can't do. He gives you a little bit about how he has perplexed, but mostly what he's giving you is how you get out of it.
|
| 00:31:51.000 |
And the result of what you have what you get out.
|
| 00:31:55.000 |
But process is giving you is the experience of being in and then maybe coming out at the end, but you are supposed to work for your salvation.
|
| 00:32:05.000 |
Well, I want to also express some of my own, well, as a taste of reservations about Pus, but before we do that, Josh, I know knowing you to be a great lover of single mama.
|
| 00:32:21.000 |
And since we're talking here about the magical power that TAS can have, I actually brought along a bottle of single malt called "brewic ladic".
|
| 00:32:30.000 |
I don't know if you know it. This is a beautiful looking bottle. Well, if you don't mind, we can just taste it and see if some Pus, Ian, inspiration, fall out of it.
|
| 00:32:43.000 |
So we're not drinking off. Is it really just tasting? Yeah, that's right. There you go.
|
| 00:32:54.000 |
Alright, well, actually why don't we call David in here, David? Are you out there? David Lummis is the assistant producer of this program.
|
| 00:33:03.000 |
And he is the one who makes it all happen. He's the one who records a show, puts it on the webpage.
|
| 00:33:11.000 |
He's the one who got it podcasts and iTunes. And he deserves a drink. And he deserves a drink, not only for that, but also because he just passed a PhD exam today with flying colors.
|
| 00:33:22.000 |
So we will also congratulations. Go to India, to us to you. Tell me what you think?
|
| 00:33:31.000 |
That is a beautiful whisking. Now, meet your approval, David. Yes, it does.
|
| 00:33:37.000 |
Alright. Now, I can't have an involuntary memory experience over this because not enough time has passed since the last time I had a whisk.
|
| 00:33:46.000 |
If you want to have an involuntary, you better stop drinking this for, say, 10, 15 years.
|
| 00:33:52.000 |
And then your mother didn't kiss you with whiskey on her breath. Isn't that...
|
| 00:33:57.000 |
I think that we said we weren't going to talk about that. Well, come on. Isn't it gin that the baby much-sellers,
|
| 00:34:04.000 |
remember his mother's breath when she comes to kiss him good night?
|
| 00:34:08.000 |
There she has gin and cigarettes. You know, talk about the involuntary memory.
|
| 00:34:14.000 |
So you said you had some reservations about, about Prust. Yeah, you know, it's a question of taste again since we're talking about taste.
|
| 00:34:23.000 |
I feel better disposed to him now that I had my little taste of everything's better.
|
| 00:34:28.000 |
But come on, Josh, let me ask it this way.
|
| 00:34:32.000 |
Why should I read a novel where the open the first volume and the guy goes on for many pages describing the bell tower of the town of Kombre in excruciating torturous detail?
|
| 00:34:46.000 |
And apparently it's not for any other reason than just to talk about that bell tower page after page after page.
|
| 00:34:55.000 |
But you're like Moby Dig. Well, I feel like with Moby Dig the descriptive effort has its own fascination.
|
| 00:35:06.000 |
And I can't tell you why it has its fascination for me rather than, you know, the bell tower of Pust.
|
| 00:35:12.000 |
It could be a question of sensibility, maybe there's something about whales and the sea that...
|
| 00:35:17.000 |
It's the kind of other world, yeah. You're certainly not alone.
|
| 00:35:20.000 |
First of all, the hardest time trying to get this thing published and the reaction of one of the initial readers was just this.
|
| 00:35:27.000 |
He was exasperated having read 700 manuscript pages. He said, one still has no idea, none of what it's about.
|
| 00:35:36.000 |
Impossible to know anything about it, impossible to say anything about it.
|
| 00:35:40.000 |
And you're right. It's not always clear what this elaborate, this plethora of information is to put in the space.
|
| 00:35:49.000 |
It's supposed to be doing for us. Now, I happen to think, theoretically, that maybe it could have been a bit short.
|
| 00:35:57.000 |
But I also happen to think that it couldn't have been too much shorter because I think that for one thing, the novel is rehearsing for us analogically.
|
| 00:36:10.000 |
The experience of involuntary memory. And in order to do that, it has to bombard us with a number of events, only some of which,
|
| 00:36:18.000 |
are going to be recalled towards the end of the novel. And so those events get buried under this avalanche of it turns out later irrelevant information just so that they can be brought back up to the surface, which is exactly the same kind of mechanism by which involuntary memories come back to the surface of our past.
|
| 00:36:40.000 |
Let me ask you personally, I mean, how did you go through 4,000 pages? What is it about the book that you find compelling?
|
| 00:36:48.000 |
And this is a question for you. I know there's something there. I know our friend Tom Xi and who comes from a completely different kind of world than the one that's described.
|
| 00:37:01.000 |
I just love this book to death and therefore it must have something there to compel. But what is it for you that I want to say, I want to say, you know, one day Robert, you'll get it too.
|
| 00:37:14.000 |
But to me, I've been saving it for my old age, and maybe a little more wisdom.
|
| 00:37:20.000 |
But I think actually it would be in keeping with Prus own view if you never enjoyed Prus writing because it is a Prus vision is a perspectiveist vision.
|
| 00:37:33.000 |
On Prus view of the world, people are different and it may well be that you never connect with this book. But let me, okay, but having said that, I think explain what it is that grabs me about it.
|
| 00:37:45.000 |
And I think grabs a lot of people, maybe even Tom Xi and who should ask him. And then it's just to try to get him on the program he's on leave will get him. Okay, then asking about Prus.
|
| 00:37:55.000 |
These four pages, however interested or otherwise we are in steeples, they have an imitable Prusian style.
|
| 00:38:06.000 |
And I think it's that style that really come to its people. I think it's also the brilliance of the ideas because there are ideas, you know, that's new.
|
| 00:38:14.000 |
But it's the style and there's something strange and magical about these endless sentences.
|
| 00:38:20.000 |
It's not just four pages, it's four pages of pretty long sentences. I mean there's one sentence in the novel that itself is four pages long.
|
| 00:38:29.000 |
Right. So not just saying that again.
|
| 00:38:31.000 |
I, you know, our listeners need to be warned that there is a sentence in the book that's four pages long. Yes.
|
| 00:38:40.000 |
It's probably the longest sentence in history of literature. Well, I suppose depending on how you count some things in Joyce.
|
| 00:38:46.000 |
Yeah, but it's pretty long. And there's something in cantatree about these sentences.
|
| 00:38:55.000 |
Why don't we read one Josh if you don't mind. Yes.
|
| 00:38:58.000 |
You have a great appendix in your book where you lay out some of these sentences and do it. You almost vercify them in order to show their complexity and the other analysis.
|
| 00:39:07.000 |
So you know, choose one and just read it to us in English if you don't mind.
|
| 00:39:10.000 |
Well, read one that's relatively short but still really hard. Okay.
|
| 00:39:15.000 |
How could I have guessed then what I was told afterwards and of whose truth I have never been certain?
|
| 00:39:22.000 |
Andre's assertions about anything that concerned Albertine, especially later on, having always seemed to me to be highly dubious.
|
| 00:39:29.000 |
Four, as we have already seen, she did not genuinely like my friend and was jealous of her.
|
| 00:39:34.000 |
Something which in any event, if it was true, was remarkably well concealed from me by both of them.
|
| 00:39:40.000 |
The double team was on the best of terms with morale.
|
| 00:39:46.000 |
I think I need a little...
|
| 00:39:50.000 |
All right. What do you make of that?
|
| 00:39:54.000 |
Well, let me set this up.
|
| 00:39:57.000 |
What's going on here is that you have the character, often called Marcel's. We're calling myself.
|
| 00:40:03.000 |
In love with women in Albertine.
|
| 00:40:06.000 |
And Albertine is a little elusive and quite possibly unfaithful.
|
| 00:40:12.000 |
And he's a very jealous lover. And what he does in order to try to find out whether his suspicions are justified is to interrogate various people about her and send people out to just buy on her.
|
| 00:40:25.000 |
And two of his sources are morale and Andre.
|
| 00:40:30.000 |
But what's going on in this sense is that he is doubting information he got from morale.
|
| 00:40:35.000 |
So morale tells us something about Albertine.
|
| 00:40:39.000 |
But can he rely on that? Well, it turns out that morale is actually friends with Albertine.
|
| 00:40:44.000 |
So if he's friends with Albertine, then he can't trust that.
|
| 00:40:48.000 |
Okay. But hang on. He gets the information about that from Andre.
|
| 00:40:53.000 |
And Andre is jealous about Albertine.
|
| 00:40:56.000 |
So maybe he can't trust that. So maybe he can't trust the fact that he can't trust morale.
|
| 00:41:01.000 |
And then so we're back in square one, but he doesn't just say to us,
|
| 00:41:05.000 |
Well, we're back in square one. He goes through the process he puts us in the forest.
|
| 00:41:11.000 |
For sure. Why don't you read it again?
|
| 00:41:14.000 |
How could I have guessed then what I was told afterwards?
|
| 00:41:17.000 |
And of whose truth I have never been certain?
|
| 00:41:19.000 |
Andre's assertions about anything that concerned Albertine, especially later on, having always seemed to me to be highly dubious.
|
| 00:41:26.000 |
For, as we have already seen, she did not genuinely like my friend and was jealous of her.
|
| 00:41:31.000 |
Something which, in any event, if it was true, was remarkably well concealed from me by both of them.
|
| 00:41:37.000 |
But Albertine was on the best of terms with morale.
|
| 00:41:41.000 |
So we're talking about the forests of uncertainty and perplexity where you don't know where you stand,
|
| 00:41:46.000 |
no, no, how to go.
|
| 00:41:48.000 |
Jealousy is the perfect kind of situation where the jealous self is in always haunted by doubt and suspicion
|
| 00:41:59.000 |
and is tortured by the fact that there is no certain knowledge.
|
| 00:42:03.000 |
No, it's always a doubt.
|
| 00:42:05.000 |
Absolutely. And how is much, how does much said live out his jealousy?
|
| 00:42:11.000 |
What's the particular signature of his jealousy that might make him, as the main narrator here,
|
| 00:42:21.000 |
the voice for a certain insight into the self on the part of its author?
|
| 00:42:30.000 |
I mean, how does he, I don't want to say, how does he psychologize jealousy?
|
| 00:42:33.000 |
How does his post-psychologize jealousy?
|
| 00:42:35.000 |
But what does the experience of much said's jealousy tell us about some of the issues we were raising at the beginning about a self deception, for example?
|
| 00:42:44.000 |
Well, I think it is, you're absolutely right, the paradigm case.
|
| 00:42:48.000 |
It's not that all knowledge is withheld from us, but knowledge of the interior states of the person that we love is, according to
|
| 00:42:59.000 |
the most single, most evasive tabernager is. You just cannot, you can never know for certain what is going on inside that person's head,
|
| 00:43:09.000 |
partly because you want to know it too much, partly because all possible sources of information are unreliable.
|
| 00:43:16.000 |
People, either they're your friends, so they don't want to hurt you, or they're your enemies, so they'll hurt you.
|
| 00:43:21.000 |
And your own brain doesn't have the capacity, doesn't have a special organ, which would hone in on truths and say, "Ah, those are the truths."
|
| 00:43:31.000 |
And hone in and lie and say, "They're the lights."
|
| 00:43:33.000 |
All you have, this is, I think, what a proof's greatest insight to all you have, is one mechanism for generating the most pessimistic version possible,
|
| 00:43:45.000 |
and another mechanism for generating the most optimistic version possible. That's all you have.
|
| 00:43:50.000 |
So the jealous man is just going to flip between these two hypotheses and never get out of that particular forest of perplexity.
|
| 00:44:00.000 |
In his relation to the other. That's right. That's what's jealous of.
|
| 00:44:03.000 |
In relation to the other human being about whom you care, where you have a vested interest in how it turns out.
|
| 00:44:10.000 |
But we can push that even more radically and ask the question, even if Al-Befteen were to say in all sincerity, I love you much said.
|
| 00:44:22.000 |
There's always a question, does she know herself? Does she know what she's saying when she says that? Does much self know what he's doing when he thinks he loves her?
|
| 00:44:33.000 |
Right. And I think you point out that at a certain point he said, "When I was not jealous, life with Al-Befteen was boring. When I was jealous, it was miserable."
|
| 00:44:46.000 |
Right.
|
| 00:44:47.000 |
So maybe this self engineers or engenders its own jealousy in order to keep a passion going.
|
| 00:44:55.000 |
This is perverse, again, I don't want to call it psychology. This is a perverse form of a self making itself do things and keeping it secret from itself.
|
| 00:45:08.000 |
So that a certain story can keep going.
|
| 00:45:11.000 |
Yes, absolutely. And one of the most fascinating moments for me is the moment at which Marcella actually has the opportunity to put his doubts to rest and refuses to avail himself.
|
| 00:45:24.000 |
Let's talk about this scene. So this is a scene in which, well, as we've said, Marcella is in love with everything he suspects her in fidelity.
|
| 00:45:34.000 |
In this scene she's asleep and her kimono is lying over an armchair and he knows that's where she keeps her letters.
|
| 00:45:42.000 |
So all he has to do is take one step across the room, pick up the kimono, go through the letters and maybe you'll have some direct evidence.
|
| 00:45:50.000 |
But he doesn't. He just decides no. And he doesn't actually explain why.
|
| 00:45:58.000 |
And where this jealous lover who's so relentlessly pursuing information about everything going and grilling all his friends, having people follow her or all his surveillance, why doesn't he do the one thing that would instantly put the seal on the question?
|
| 00:46:16.000 |
Well, clearly the reason he's not looking at her letters is because he doesn't want to know. And I think this gets back to your point that he's keeping this story going by preventing himself as a part of him.
|
| 00:46:29.000 |
Maybe a part that he's not fully aware of that is keeping this story going by keeping things in suspense.
|
| 00:46:36.000 |
But then you might ask, why does he send all of these spies out if he doesn't want to know?
|
| 00:46:41.000 |
And the answer there is, well, clearly he must hope that these spies will fail.
|
| 00:46:49.000 |
And indeed it turns out in the novel that the people he picks to do the surveillance and amptying are people who he could pretty much count on not to give them the truth.
|
| 00:47:02.000 |
So there is, I don't know if I'd call it perverse, but there are very convoluted mechanisms by which desires sustains itself.
|
| 00:47:09.000 |
Here it is, is sustaining itself by sending out a bunch of people to gather information in the knowledge that they won't, just so that you can convince yourself you're doing everything you possibly can to find the information.
|
| 00:47:21.000 |
So that you can keep yourself in this illusion. And thus keep the story going.
|
| 00:47:27.000 |
The illusion plays a big role in your interpretation of post, and I think there's a Nietzschean inspiration to that, where the,
|
| 00:47:38.000 |
it really has to do with the question of knowledge. What is it that drives us to know?
|
| 00:47:44.000 |
And what relationship does knowledge have to desire? Or better, who is in control of the show?
|
| 00:47:52.000 |
Is knowledge just an instrument in service of desire? And if so, is there something about desire in certain situations that doesn't want to know the ball truth?
|
| 00:48:11.000 |
And therefore we'll use, we'll use, you know, the instrument of knowledge in order to conceal something from itself rather than reveal it.
|
| 00:48:22.000 |
Yes. And this I think relates to Nietzsche's doctrine of the will to knowledge, and Nietzsche was radically suspicious of everything that human beings were believing about themselves.
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| 00:48:36.000 |
And ask whether the will to knowledge did not have at its core a kind of nihilistic drive that somehow not too much knowledge leads to the radical disenchantment of the world.
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| 00:48:51.000 |
And demoralizes us and it no longer works in favor of life, but actually is a life denying thing.
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| 00:49:01.000 |
This will to ignorance, you talk about a will to ignorance in much said, then you see that in Nietzschean terms, absolutely.
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| 00:49:08.000 |
Wow, there's so much there. Yes. Let me just take the last part of your point.
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| 00:49:17.000 |
Is clearly the case in proof as in Nietzsche that some kinds of truth are not compatible with life, or at least with happy life. Some kinds of illusions require sustaining.
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| 00:49:31.000 |
And then you're, if you're a smart kind of person, you're going to have to figure out strategies for protecting yourself from the truth about certain kinds of things.
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| 00:49:40.000 |
So I think, yeah, I think that Bruce ends up in positions that are quite close in some ways to those of Nietzsche, even though he barely knew anything about Nietzsche.
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| 00:49:51.000 |
But yeah, I mean, this is fascinating. The issue of self-deception is a fascinating one in relation to the novel, because on the one hand, self-deception can be a really bad thing.
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| 00:50:01.000 |
And part of the novel is about this character of a coming certain kinds of self-deception, coming to know himself.
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| 00:50:09.000 |
Part of what we have to gain from experiences like involuntary memory is knowledge of ourselves.
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| 00:50:14.000 |
So knowledge of ourselves is supposed to be vital. And I guess again it gets back to what we're saying earlier.
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| 00:50:19.000 |
If you want to know how it is you're supposed to comport yourself in a world without bearings, you better know yourself.
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| 00:50:26.000 |
So that's one aspect of it. At the same time, too much knowledge of the dangerous thing.
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| 00:50:32.000 |
You speak about, I think the term is second order ignorance. Is that second order will to ignorance, yeah?
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| 00:50:38.000 |
The second order will to ignorance. And you extract that from the Albedtin Kimono, singing nine.
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| 00:50:49.000 |
What do you mean by the second order of will to ignorance?
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| 00:50:51.000 |
That the idea there is that there is a desire to be ignorant of our own ignorance.
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| 00:51:01.000 |
So it's not just a desire to be ignorant, a world to illusion, but it's also a desire to driving that one.
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| 00:51:11.000 |
So it's a desire not to know that there's anything more to be known.
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| 00:51:16.000 |
And that's the only way I claim that you can protect yourself from knowledge. Because if you're a little bit inquisitive, and you let that inquisitiveness run free in the wrong or right places,
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| 00:51:29.000 |
which is where you look at it, you might find something and I want to find.
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| 00:51:32.000 |
The only way to prevent that is to challenge inquisitiveness into the wrong places.
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| 00:51:39.000 |
Make sure you're always looking in a place where you could never conceivably find anything damaging.
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| 00:51:46.000 |
Which is of course what Marcel does when he sends out all of these completely untrustworthy spies.
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| 00:51:52.000 |
Desire is really the devil. Or the devil hurts what keeps the story going.
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| 00:52:00.000 |
It's what we're all about. And this is what I suppose I was trying to say, maybe didn't say in the opening rant that
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| 00:52:08.000 |
literature descends into the very essence of it and speaks from out of this desire.
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| 00:52:16.000 |
And it follows all its, I don't want to use a perverse again, but all is kind of meandering,
|
| 00:52:24.000 |
contradictory ways in which it operates. And ultimately I think nothing is as opaque as human drives and human desire.
|
| 00:52:35.000 |
Not just erotic desire, but I think one can take what we were talking about in terms of peace and jealousy and ask the
|
| 00:52:43.000 |
Nietzschean question of our society at large, which is in the West, has been driven by the Wilton knowledge for a long time.
|
| 00:52:54.000 |
Especially, I mean that's why I began with Descartes. I mean he's the one who set out to try to know with certainty
|
| 00:53:02.000 |
what could be known and to find a reliable foundation to distinguish the truth from the false. And so, and he, through him and others,
|
| 00:53:11.000 |
I go to the whole scientific era, the investigation of the world of nature.
|
| 00:53:16.000 |
Nietzsche was already suspicious about where this Wilton knowledge in the West could lead us and was asking what lies under,
|
| 00:53:25.000 |
what's the drive underneath it.
|
| 00:53:28.000 |
And I'm wondering if even a century, century and a half since Nietzsche was already suspicious, whether it's not become more clear that there's something sinister, maybe at times, maybe the death drive, I don't know.
|
| 00:53:43.000 |
But we've talked about on previous programs with other guests, you know, that, the technicality and technology and the, there is clearly something driving it, which is not just a kind of impartial
|
| 00:53:57.680 |
will to know out of sheer curiosity to know the truth.
|
| 00:54:00.900 |
No, we always have a vested interest in,
|
| 00:54:03.240 |
uh, trying to find out the truth.
|
| 00:54:05.860 |
Do you think there's a, at this larger kind of social societal
|
| 00:54:10.880 |
level that we could use a little, um,
|
| 00:54:14.660 |
those are reminding about these issues that maybe, uh, we
|
| 00:54:20.520 |
should put limits on what we want to know.
|
| 00:54:22.440 |
Maybe we should cultivate a second order of will to
|
| 00:54:25.640 |
ignorance and that we would maybe all be better off than,
|
| 00:54:29.160 |
uh, than this kind of disenchanted, uh, array of facts.
|
| 00:54:36.000 |
Well,
|
| 00:54:36.400 |
Nietzsche actually thinks that the scientists are, uh,
|
| 00:54:39.680 |
are self-deceived in precisely that way, but badly, that is to say,
|
| 00:54:44.440 |
uh, they too are looking, they're asking their own questions.
|
| 00:54:47.880 |
They too are looking for knowledge in the wrong place.
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| 00:54:50.640 |
And they are distracting themselves from the real questions,
|
| 00:54:54.720 |
which are questions of value by looking at the less interesting questions,
|
| 00:54:59.720 |
which are questions of fact.
|
| 00:55:00.960 |
So it, I mean, that's, that's a partial, partial Nietzsche in response,
|
| 00:55:05.920 |
uh, which is not to say that they would be necessarily driven by a perverse
|
| 00:55:10.480 |
desire, but it would mean that other questions need to be asked.
|
| 00:55:14.440 |
And it may well be, and I think you're absolutely right.
|
| 00:55:16.880 |
Uh, people need to be constantly reminded of this.
|
| 00:55:19.400 |
Um, it may well be that there are times when truth is not the thing we
|
| 00:55:24.560 |
want. Oh, many times I would say, yeah.
|
| 00:55:27.440 |
So sometimes, yes.
|
| 00:55:28.720 |
And I think that one of the beautiful things that Bruce novel does,
|
| 00:55:32.120 |
uh, and I don't want to give the impression that it's all a forest, uh,
|
| 00:55:36.440 |
is to distinguish between certain, uh, facts that we can have and should have,
|
| 00:55:42.120 |
uh, certain, uh, fact that we could have, but probably don't want to have.
|
| 00:55:48.720 |
And, uh, certain areas where really what's, uh, what's required is a certain
|
| 00:55:53.640 |
kind of creativity or imagination of making things up.
|
| 00:55:56.840 |
And we have to make those distinctions and maybe yes at a broader cultural
|
| 00:56:02.240 |
level.
|
| 00:56:02.520 |
Yeah.
|
| 00:56:05.160 |
And, uh, that's where I'll 15 becomes something of a, um, uh, of an emblem,
|
| 00:56:09.760 |
at least, you know, for me is that, and his relation to her.
|
| 00:56:13.320 |
I mean, do I know really what I want at heart and you've convinced me in
|
| 00:56:18.760 |
this hour that that's a question that proves as, you know, deeply
|
| 00:56:23.440 |
as you can.
|
| 00:56:24.440 |
And this, uh, moment where he has the Kimono, all those letters in there and his,
|
| 00:56:29.360 |
uh, final decision, not to go and put, provoke the moment to its crisis,
|
| 00:56:38.920 |
go for the revelation that there is a wisdom there that I think has, uh,
|
| 00:56:44.840 |
uh, lesson to bear on maybe, uh, you know, for us.
|
| 00:56:48.360 |
Absolutely not regard.
|
| 00:56:50.560 |
You know, I'll be a team.
|
| 00:56:51.600 |
She's, uh, I think she's a great character.
|
| 00:56:54.200 |
And she might only be a character in a book, but, um,
|
| 00:56:57.720 |
you know, characters have their own reality.
|
| 00:57:01.680 |
And I, you know, it could be that she's out there listening to this show.
|
| 00:57:04.440 |
So in order to wrap it up, why don't we just dedicate a song to
|
| 00:57:07.480 |
I'll be a team and thank you, uh, for this hour about post.
|
| 00:57:13.560 |
I want to remind the listeners that coming up is Decca with her show at the
|
| 00:57:17.800 |
cafe Bohemian followed by the bod.
|
| 00:57:19.760 |
And after that, uh, sports night, but now we're going to leave you with this
|
| 00:57:23.720 |
song for Albedtina.
|
| 00:57:25.760 |
[MUSIC]
|
| 00:57:34.760 |
[MUSIC]
|