The Weather in Proust (Series Q) - Softcover

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822351587 ISBN 13: 9780822351580

Verlag: DUKE UNIV PR, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

The Weather in Proust gathers pieces written by the eminent critic and theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in the last decade of her life, as she worked toward a book on Proust. This book takes its title from the first essay, a startlingly original interpretation of Proust. By way of Neoplatonism, Buddhism, and the work of Melanie Klein, Sedgwick establishes the sense of refreshment and surprise that the author of the Recherche affords his readers. Proust also figures in pieces on the poetry of C. P. Cavafy, object relations, affect theory, and Sedgwick's textile art practices. More explicitly connected to her role as a pioneering queer theorist are an exuberant attack against reactionary refusals of the work of Guy Hocquenghem and talks in which she lays out her central ideas about sexuality and her concerns about the direction of US queer theory. Sedgwick lived for more than a dozen years with a diagnosis of terminal cancer; its implications informed her later writing and thinking, as well as her spiritual and artistic practices. In the book's final and most personal essay, she reflects on the realization of her impending death. Featuring thirty-seven color images of her art, The Weather in Proust offers a comprehensive view of Sedgwick's later work, underscoring its diversity and coherence.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950-2009) was Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Epistemology of the Closet, Between Men, and A Dialogue on Love. Her books Touching Feeling; Tendencies; Fat Art, Thin Art; Novel Gazing; Gary in Your Pocket; and Shame and Its Sisters (co-edited with Adam Frank), are all also published by Duke University Press.

Jonathan Goldberg is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of English and Director of the Studies in Sexualities Program at Emory University. He is the author, most recently, of The Seeds of Things.

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The Weather in Proust

By Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5158-0

Contents

Editor's Introduction.............................................1The Weather in Proust.............................................42Cavafy, Proust, and the Queer Little Gods.........................69Making Things, Practicing Emptiness...............................123Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes.....................144Affect Theory and Theory of Mind..................................166Anality: News from the Front......................................183Making Gay Meanings...............................................190Thinking through Queer Theory.....................................206Reality and Realization...........................................217Figure Credits....................................................219

Chapter One

The Weather in Proust

I

Early in the fourth volume of A la recherche du temps perdu, Proust's narrator goes to a party at the home of the Prince de Guermantes, where he sees a fountain designed by the eighteenth-century architect Hubert Robert. His description of the fountain is one of the novel's (admittedly many) descriptive set pieces:

It could be seen from a distance, slender, motionless, rigid, set apart in a clearing surrounded by fine trees, several of which were as old as itself, only the lighter fall of its pale and quivering plume stirring in the breeze. The eighteenth century had refined the elegance of its lines, but, by fixing the style of the jet, seemed to have arrested its life; at this distance one had the impression of art rather than the sensation of water. Even the moist cloud that was perpetually gathering at its summit preserved the character of the period like those that assemble in the sky round the palaces of Versailles. But from a closer view one realised that, while it respected, like the stones of an ancient palace, the design traced for it beforehand, it was a constantly changing stream of water.... [Its] continuity, apparently complete, was assured, at every point in the ascent of the jet where it must otherwise have been broken, by the entering into line, by the lateral incorporation, of a parallel jet which mounted higher than the first and was itself, at a greater altitude which was however already a strain upon its endurance, relieved by a third. From close to, exhausted drops could be seen falling back from the column of water, passing their sisters on the way up, and at times, torn and scattered, caught in an eddy of the night air, disturbed by this unremitting surge, floating awhile before being drowned in the basin. They teased with their hesitations, with their journey in the opposite direction, and blurred with their soft vapour the vertical tension of the shaft that bore aloft an oblong cloud composed of countless tiny drops but seemingly painted in an unchanging golden brown which rose, unbreakable, fixed, slender and swift, to mingle with the clouds in the sky. (4:75–76)

This conspicuously emblematic description seems to offer a crux for articulating a number of issues—architectonically as well as thematically important ones—in A la recherche du temps perdu. Hayden White has analyzed this paragraph as a miniature demonstration of the tropes of historiographic rhetoric tout court. Again, considered generically, the description represents a brash manifesto for the roman-fleuve, the fictional form in which destinies high and low are relayed and transmuted through a series of generations and where, for example, a single character may recycle under serial names or titles, while a single name or title can be forwarded by a series of distinct characters.

From the point of view of iconography, the Robert fountain links to earlier fountains in European literature, art, and landscape to invoke a tradition that is specifically Neoplatonic. Originating with Plotinus in the third century AD, the philosophical and spiritual discourse of Neoplatonism holds that, in Proust's words, "there exists but a single intelligence of which everyone is co-tenant" (2:195), toward the plenitude of which souls ceaselessly rise and merge, and from which they just as naturally fall and individuate. To quote Plotinus: "The cosmic content is carried forward to its purpose, everything in its co-ordinate place, under only one Reason-Principle operating alike in the descent and return of souls and to every purpose of the system." The Neoplatonic fountain offers an emblem for the possibility of non-oppositional relations of many important kinds: between pattern and contingency; the eternal and the ephemeral; the universal soul and that of the individual.

That Proust tends to have reincarnation on his mind is clear from his mention of it in the opening paragraph of his novel; and among the Neoplatonic associations of this fountain perhaps the most pointed, in the career of the individual water drops anthropomorphized by Proust in terms of their exhaustion and transmutation, involves a narrative of reincarnation. As Plotinus describes the reincarnation narrative, "The sufferer, all unaware, is swept onward towards his due, hurried always by the restless driving of his errors, until at last wearied out by that against which he struggled, he falls into his fit place and, by self-chosen movement, is brought to the lot he never chose." Among the series represented by this fountain is the possibility of souls' enacting serial lives.

And at the most literal level, the Guermantes' fountain, like any fountain, is a machine for animating and recirculating water. Simultaneously a spring and a fall, and with the narrator's repeated emphasis on the state-changes of condensation and cloud formation, it offers a stylized, artificial epitome of the unending processes by which water is propelled through its life-giving round of physical metamorphoses.

Both as a representation of the rebirth cycle and of the water cycle, then, the Guermantes' fountain, with all its eighteenth-century elegance, might be taken as representing a novelistic vision that combines flexibility with an extraordinary economy, in an endlessly mutable but ultimately closed system where what goes around comes around, where linear narrative is propelled through a perpetual recycling of elements, lives, positions, structures, and desires that honors the conservation of matter and energy, that operates according to law. In the framework of reincarnation, such a system might be called strictly karmic; in a more familiar Western mythology, Oedipal. But compelling as this vision may be, it is no sooner finely articulated than it goes wastefully, farcically off course. The full-scale weather system comes athwart the fountain's condensed and elegant version: as Mme d'Arpajon crosses the garden in search of her errant lover, suddenly "a strong gust of warm air deflected the jet of water and inundated the fair lady so completely that, the water streaming down from her low neckline inside her dress, she was as thoroughly soaked as if she had been plunged into a bath" (4:77). Sometimes things that come around don't go around, and vice versa.

The important question in Proust of how open systems relate to closed ones, or perhaps better put, of how systems themselves move between functioning as open and closed, seems like an invitation to explore some literary and psychological...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: DUKE UNIV PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822351587
• ISBN 13: 9780822351580
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Herausgeber: Goldberg Jonathan, Moon Michael
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande