Recovering Your Story: Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Morrison

by Arnold Weinstein

Overview

“Great art discovers for us who we are,” writes eminent literature professor and critic Arnold Weinstein in this magisterial new book about how we can better uncover and understand our own stories by reading five major modern writers. Professor Weinstein, author of the highly acclaimed A Scream Goes Through the House, has spent a lifetime guiding students through the work of great writers, and in a volume that crowns his career, Weinstein invites us to discover ourselves–our perceptions, our dreams, our own elusive, deepest stories–in the masterpieces of modernist fiction.
Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner: the very names sound intimidating. Yet as Weinstein argues with wit and passion, the works of these authors, and of their contemporary heir Toni Morrison, are in fact shimmering mirrors of our own inner world and most intimate thoughts. Novels such as Remembrance of Things Past, Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, and Beloved allow us to explore the inner worlds of human feeling and bring us face-to-face with our own deepest selves and desires. Weinstein decodes these great novels, and he shows how to read them to understand human beings–the way our minds and hearts actually work. This is what Weinstein means by “recovering your story.”
Weinstein illuminates the complex pleasures woven into these peerless narratives. Beneath the slow, sensual cadences of Proust he finds an edgy erotic tension as well as a remarkably crisp depiction of the timeless world inside the self. Joyce’s Ulysses, in Weinstein’s brilliantly original reading, is a protean linguistic experiment that forces us to view both our bodies and our minds in a radically new–and hilariously funny–light. His analysis of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse circles back again and again on Woolf’s depiction of the importance of relationships in knowing the self. Faulkner, argues Weinstein, is at once our greatest tragedian and our darkest comedian, a novelist who captures both the agony and absurdity of consciousness in a time of social and moral disintegration. Finally, in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Weinstein explores the legacy of modernism in a contemporary novel, as Morrison brings the body into the literary picture, confronting how the body affects not only our fundamental concept of self, but also consciousness itself.
In this magnificent work of literary appreciation and exploration, Weinstein makes the astonishing discovery of the self as a part of the joy of reading great modernist fiction, even as he makes these powerful works understandable, accessible, indeed imperative for all adventurous readers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307431677
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	12/18/2007
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	512
File size:	729 KB

About the Author

Arnold Weinstein is the Edna and Richard Salomon Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University and the author of Vision and Response in Modern Fiction; Fictions of the Self: 1550-1800; The Fiction of Relationship; Nobody’s Home: Speech, Self, and Place in American Fiction from Hawthorne to DeLillo; and A Scream Goes Through the House: What Literature Teaches Us About Life. His audio and video lectures on world literature are produced by The Teaching Company. Professor Weinstein divides his time between Brown University, Block Island, Stockholm, and Brittany.

Read an Excerpt

Recovering Your Story

---

By Arnold Weinstein

Random House

Arnold Weinstein
All right reserved.
ISBN: 140006094X

---

Chapter One

marcel

proust

remembrance of things past

the world is the self

Marcel Proust's great classic, Remembrance of Things Past, is one of the longest novels ever published, comprising more than three thousand pages in the large-format, three-volume Random House edition. It weighs several pounds. You are not likely to carry it to the beach. When you open it up and start reading, you encounter a dense prose style, with lengthy sentences, ambitious metaphors, and little discernible plot. It appears to describe, in great detail, a bygone world: French society of the early twentieth century. For these reasons, you might well imagine that this book-whatever fame may be ascribed to it-is likely to be an arduous read, a massive project devoted to distant things, an impersonal act of labor.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Proust's epic novel actually resembles those exploration narratives of the Renaissance in which entire new worlds came into view, the accounts of Columbus, Vasco da Gama and Cortes, and others. But the New World coming into view here is you. And the energies that fuel this long book, page after page, are truly colonizing energies: They are out to lay bare the landscape of self, the new cartography of the human interior. Whereas the conquest of the New World was filled with blood and tears and racial conflict, Marcel Proust's grand exploration-larded though it is with scenes of incomprehension or jealousy-offers its readers a profound pleasure: the enlargement of oneself, the discovery of one's actual but never suspected contours and depths. And with this discovery comes a still greater second pleasure: a recovery, a possession of that which must be counted our very greatest good: our own life. Not some afterlife, but our life itself. There is nothing moralistic or judgmental about Proust's tidings, inasmuch as he does not indict the flesh or material things as such, in the name of some higher spiritual realm. On the contrary, the ringing, even frightening challenge of Proust's work is more insidious, for it says: We do not know ourselves, we do not possess our own estate, we do not grasp our own story. Against this absolute loss, all of our so-called possessions-wealth, career, even relationships-come across as weightless, as mirage-like. Remembrance of Things Past is dedicated to the pursuit of ultimate richness and treasure: our own life.

Therefore this long and heavy book is worth its weight in gold. It has an epic scope to it, yes, but, then, so too does your own existence. If you are able to read my prose, then you have been living for many many years already. Can you recall these years? Are they "yours"? And if you do have their outline still clear-dates, events, perhaps snapshots and scattered memories-can you access the pulsing feelings that went into them, that constituted their very life, your very life? If not-and for most of us, I think the answer is negative: We cannot retrieve this living past-where has it all gone? Is life just an hourglass in which all our doings and strivings simply-fatally-disappear into the bottom, sink into oblivion, never to return? If so, then you could say that the condition of living is that of being buried alive: of having the pith and marrow of life stolen from us by time itself, exiling us into a thin and unechoing present from which there is no reprieve.

One of Adrienne Rich's poems is entitled "Diving into the Wreck"; it is a Proustian title inasmuch as everyone's past is a wreck that needs diving into, is a cemetery of past lives that need resurrecting. Proust's utterly secular book is about that resurrection, that act of ultimate retrieval whereby we achieve our longitudinal form, our actual contours, our true measure. Here is a drama as passionate and significant as the great fables of the Bible and Shakespeare. How does Proust do this? In the pages ahead, I want to explore this great novel by bringing us further and further into it. As we penetrate into this fictional world, we shall see that we are also going further and further into the looking glass, and that the reaches and riches coming to light and life are our own.

proust upfront

Since I am attempting to map nothing less than a fictional universe, and since explorers need guidebooks, a preview of what is coming may prove of use. The first note struck is Proustian plenitude: a view of self that is not only huge but often despotic. The remarkable volume of things in this novel is at once amazing and counterintuitive, since whole worlds can emerge from tiny precincts, as is the case with the famous episode of the madeleine, which leads to the resurrection of the narrator's past, coming out of a teacup. What is despotic is the sheer egocentrism of the book, its principled willingness to explore to the outer limits what the world looks like when we can never get clear of ourselves, when we are always locked into our own perceptual system. It is not hard to imagine the ethical implications of such a philosophy.

Yet this massive project of portraiture turns out to be brazenly subversive, especially when it comes to negotiating Proustian prose; it all looks familiar and readable and clear-no narrative high jinks here-but in fact it is devious and riddled with surprises, requiring that readers be wary, but also rewarding them richly for their efforts. I term such writing "false-bottomed" in order to point out how dependent we are on "bottoms," on knowing what the truth is. Our focus on issues of perception and transformation-issues beautifully materialized in Proustian prose with its stunning metaphors and figurative logic-will lead into the more heated and explosive area of sexuality: its peculiar praxis in Proust, as well as its remarkable narrative presentation. Given that all surfaces in Proust end up being coats of many colors, it is not surprising that sexual behavior follows suit. What is surprising is the way in which these matters open up the fictional world, making it into something rich and strange; and the unsettling payoff of such a view derives from the challenge it metes out to our fixed assumptions, our complacent sense that we understand what is in front of our eyes. In Proust's work we begin to grasp the insidious effects of habit, the ways in which our take on life is pre-scripted and blinding; and we also learn about the kinds of surprises and horrors that can jump out of the box when habit is routed, when familiar things leap out of their skins, when perception gets clear of preconception.

Proust is never merely descriptive, and hence we need to measure the emotional and ethical ramifications of his worldview. Lying will be seen as a central activity, both in public and in private, leading to incessant deceptions, both large and small. But the familiar gambit of social climbing and societal charade pales in color and in vehemence when we ponder the human consequences of lying in the intimate sphere of erotic ties, and Proust emerges as one of the supreme theorists of jealousy: its pain, but also its odd grandeur, its outright novelistic character. The very possibility of love-at least of sustainable and reciprocal love-is on the docket in this long novel, as the narrator's ongoing relationship with Albertine richly illustrates. One often feels that Proustian psychology and Proustian diagnosis are withering and unflinching in their ceaseless exposure of illusion and naive belief, leaving us with a straitened and narrower picture of our affairs.

Yet we shall see that the polar opposite is true: Proust explodes the small notions we have about life-about our own lives-by illuminating our fuller reach and dimensionality, by recovering the longitudinal scale of human existence. To see ourselves and others in time is a mighty challenge, for it means transcending the snapshot images that daily life offers us, and it means factoring not only memory but also death into our equation. Nonetheless, this plenary vision is exhilarating rather than morbid, for it restores richness to our affairs, to our own story. Proust shows us what a long shadow we cast, and in doing so, he exposes the "cheat" of ordinary perception, suggesting that our conventional way of going about life constitutes a set of blinders, robs us of our treasure, misconceives the real shape of our fellows, substitutes false coins for true ones. It will surprise no one that Art is called upon to make good on this revolutionary project, but the art in question has little to do with some pantheon of great creators; on the contrary, every human being is embarked on the sole work of art that matters: possessing one's own life. Proust saw his work as a mirror for the reader, an opportunity to discover one's indigenous lines of force, one's untold psychic and emotional history, one's evolving form. Let us begin.

the madeleine

The most radical, magic moment in modern fiction occurs when a tired, middle-aged man dips a pastry, what the French call a "madeleine," into his cup of tea, and thereby recovers his past. This justly celebrated passage, recognized by many readers throughout the world (whether or not they have ever read Proust), epitomizes the French novelist's astonishing breakthrough, his revolutionary new conception of what a novel is, and why we might read it. Everything that the realist nineteenth-century novel stands for, is upended here, stood on its head. New vistas, on the order of new planets, are coming into view.

Consider, for a moment, what the great novels of the nineteenth century offer us: a form of historical portraiture. Balzac chronicles the "new" capitalist order in his Le Pere Goriot of 1835, in which the traditional allegiances of family and love are brutally torn asunder by the cash nexus. Dickens gives us his version of the same story in book after book, perhaps never more perfectly than in the adventures and misadventures of Pip in Great Expectations. Of course, such novels have memorable characters, but their mission seems to be one of social illumination, to reveal to a hungry and curious readership the real workings of their contemporary society. Stendhal's accounts of post-Napoleonic France map out with great acuity the new political horizons. Tolstoy tackles nothing less than the great Napoleonic wars themselves, in his saga War and Peace, in which individual subject, family, gesture, and fate are inscribed in the convulsions of Europe at war, of Russia under siege. These are all large-souled enterprises, bent on delivering a new kind of map, one that registers the tremors produced (in people and in societies) by changing values, by political upheaval, by social unrest. Readers flocked to these stories, which often appeared in serial form, in order better to grasp their own conditions. The novel was in its prime; you read this "walking mirror" to gauge your own circumstances by understanding the world around you.

Fast-forward to 1912, when Proust publishes Swann's Way (Du Cote de chez Swann): "What is going on here?" The rules of the game have changed, and the result is a complex, convoluted narrative whose bottom seems to have dropped out. "Where's the beef?" one might legitimately ask. What, where is the story? Capitalism, Napoleon, London and Paris and St. Petersburg have gone up in smoke. Stendhal's moving mirror is still there, but the depiction of society-Realism's central agenda-no longer matters, has disappeared from the page. In its stead, one encounters . . . a piece of pastry dipped in tea. Many readers in 1912, and many readers since 1912, have thought that Proust's book was absurdly narrow in its charge, too limited in its focus, locked into the thoughts and sensations of one (neurotic) figure, and hence locked out of fiction's supposed goal: to paint a picture of the world we live in.

Of course, Proust is doing exactly that, but in new ways: painting the world we live in. But that world is the self. Here is indeed the brave new world. Proust's mission, far from being narrow or solipsistic, is to show you that the self is a world, is the world we live in, the world we can never get out of, and-most provocatively of all-it is the world we do not know, the world we can live in and die in without ever knowing. But why a madeleine dipped in tea? Isn't this really too precious, too quaint, to yield anything on the order of this magnitude?

The best way to understand this question is to look at Proust's actual prose. The passage goes like this: The narrator raises to his lips a spoonful of the tea in which the morsel of cake has been soaked, and is suddenly transformed, metamorphosed, via a sense of pleasure so exquisite and overpowering that everything else in his life-his daily cares, his material and emotional circumstances-is eclipsed, annihilated in favor of this ecstatic feeling of deliverance, of salvation. How is this possible? he wonders, and soon enough, logically enough (even if incredibly), he understands that the madeleine has somehow wrought this miracle. But how? Why? A second mouthful of tea repeats the pleasure but yields no answer; a third mouthful yields less still; he then comprehends that the ineffable pleasure may indeed be inseparable from the tea-soaked pastry, but is of a different nature altogether, in short, an elusive something (an elusive "everything," he feels) that is lodged somewhere inside him, and to which this flavor-experience points.

But how to retrieve it? A great quandary, this: How to descend into your own depths and emerge with the secrets that are buried there?

Mustering all the concentration he can, the narrator seeks with all his might to bring this tantalizing, beckoning, precious, yet buried feeling to the surface. And fails. As if Proust wanted to show that the most faraway and unknowable planet for human beings to visit is their own inner self, existing an infinity of years from our present moment, yet somehow, miraculously, stirred and brought back to life here, through the senses, but only momentarily, and already fading. It is as if one glimpsed, far away on the inside, locked in the dark interior, a genie in the bottle, a genie who was signaling, a magic genie who wanted out: one's own genie. But the sight starts to blur, to recede, taking one's magic and salvation with it. The narrator tries with all his might to hold on, to bring it up.

And then it happens.

Continues...

---

Excerpted from Recovering Your Story by Arnold Weinstein Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Editorial Reviews

Weinstein, a professor of comparative literature at Brown, sets out to open up some of the great works of 20th-century fiction to the general reader. His decades in academia show: this is a teacherly account of the authors covered, and although the prose is mostly accessible and shies away from academic jargon, a reader must come to the book with some knowledge of concepts not usually discussed in general conversation: epistemology, jouissance and the Southern Code, to name a few. At first blush, the thesis of the book seems both restricting and reductive: that these novels help us discover "our story, our consciousness of things," as if the only reason to read were a narcissistic project of self-betterment. In fact, though, Weinstein's vision is far more generous. His claim, with other lovers of literature, is that fiction teaches nothing less than "how the heart lives, and how it dies. That is why we have art." At the heart of the project lies a very personal essay on the works of Virginia Woolf that both illuminates the methods and meanings of her novels while at the same time illustrating how they can speak to an individual reader's soul. (On sale Mar. 14) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Noted critic Weinstein (comparative literature, Brown Univ.) makes some of the most difficult authors of the 20th century accessible to the general reader in a volume that demonstrates not just knowledge but wisdom and sensitivity. Firm in his belief that reading is essential to the discovery of self, he focuses on eight novels of five eminent modernists: Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, James Joyce's Ulysses, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!, and Toni Morrison's Sula and Beloved. Weinstein brings much of himself to his readings of these works, and, in turn, he believes that art is not merely a reflection of life but a means by which we live more fully. As a result, his work is far removed from the typical guidebook that readers might expect. In fact, one need not have read these works at all to appreciate Weinstein's piercing ponderings. But one is infinitely more likely to want to read one of these admittedly complex narratives after being exposed to Weinstein's brilliant overture. An essential addition to all academic libraries and recommended for larger public libraries as well.-Anthony Pucci, Notre Dame H.S., Elmira, NY Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

The author of A Scream Goes Through the House (2003) again examines what art reveals about our psyches, this time focusing on the novels of four modernist writers and one late-20th-century successor. "These groundbreaking narratives seek to uncover the actual shape and texture of a life . . . its inside testimony of consciousness," states Weinstein (Comparative Literature/Brown Univ.) in the preface to his dense, closely argued work of literary criticism. In Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, people and even things are seldom what they seem; Proust's seven-part epic is a "false-bottomed suitcase" that constantly undercuts the narrator's (and readers') perceptions to show how subjective our notions of the world are. James Joyce's Ulysses plays every kind of game with the conventional novel to vividly recreate the complexities of the mind and the insistent demands of the body. In Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf enters into her characters' thoughts to remind us that "the self lives in and through others"; identity is a social relationship for her. William Faulkner's doomed white Southerners in The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom sometimes can't even distinguish between their inner torment and the brutal physical reality around them. While these writers plumb their characters' interiors, Toni Morrison blisteringly shows black people so maimed by the horrors of slavery that they fear to explore their memories at all: "the untold, unknown, unshareable personal story . . . has become, in Beloved, lethal." No brief resume can do justice to Weinstein's passionate examination of these seminal works, whose difficulty he acknowledges while persuasively contendingthat the authors had to break with 19th-century traditions in order to capture the ferment and instability of "life as we live it [without] an omniscient narrator."Weinstein's lengthy exegeses and analyses are not for the casual reader, but those who share his taste for challenging fiction will be moved by his love for books that "both shock and educate us about the scope and intensity of human feeling."

Kirkus Reviews