Issue #338: Reading Proust in Soviet Prison Camps
I like competition. Usually I am writing about things like Magic: the Gathering or 2D fighting games. But, as my devotion to NBA basketball suggests, I also like “normal sports.” The Olympics is always a great event for me because it encapsulates the normal and the abnormal. This year, the summer games will host a breaking competition, terming correctly what is more commonly known in the U.S. as “break dancing,” one of the five elements of hip-hop. Breaking is paradigmatically American, the practice originating in the United States. But I am excited to see it on the world stage with some level of cultural awareness intact. While the practice has been described erroneously enough that “break dancing” has supplanted breaking as a description, I appreciate some of the more judgmental descriptions of what’s wrong with the conflation. From the Hip-Hop Dance Conservatory by way of Wikipedia:
Breaking or b-boying is generally misconstrued or incorrectly termed as "breakdancing." Breakdancing is a term spawned from the loins of the media's philistinism, sciolism and naiveté at the time. With no true knowledge of the hip-hop diaspora but with an ineradicable need to define it for the nescient masses, the term breakdancing was born. Most breakers take great offense to the term. Breaking is an unstructured and highly improvisational element that began in the South Bronx. Contrary to what most believe, it does not have direct West African roots or capoeira (only hip-hop music does.) Socio economically depreciated areas of the South Bronx had no contact with these other art-forms, because they could not afford to venture out to see shows or take classes. Ask early founders, and they will tell you they developed their skills themselves on the streets of the South Bronx. Elements of capoeira were introduced close to a decade after breaking was established as it's own art-form, allowing the incorporation of several other hip-hop dance elements. A basic routine will include an uprock, a transition into downrock, a display of power moves, and finally a climactic freeze (shown in the pictures above and below.) During the early 80's the Rock Steady Crew became very popular for their role in the movie Flashdance. This was the first step to the commercialization of hip-hop dance. Commercialization was solidified through the widespread use of breaking on television with a crew called NYC Breakers. Today Rock Steady Crew, Dynamic Rockers, The BLADE Academy, B-Boy NYC, our conservatory and a few others are working to educate the public on the true origins of hip-hop dance and ameliorate the misinterpretation of hip-hop through the media.
The Olympic committee, it seems, is intent on being neither philistines, sociolic, nor naive. They even term participants in the breaking event “b-boys” and “b-girls.”
USA basketball has been fine, but my favorite event so far has been the 100m butterfly swim. In that event, Torri Huske secured her first individual medal after a heartbreaking loss in the Tokyo summer games.
The emotion in Huske’s face is palpable and I love seeing the comradery between her and Gretchen Walsh, teammates in their representation of USA but individually in competition in each other for the best result. Swimming is also exciting because of how short some events, like the 100m butterfly, are. The margins of error and improvement are small and each modest gain is the proof positive of a disproportionate amount of effort put into shaving a second off a world record time. I won’t soon forget Huske’s win, even though it only took 55.59 seconds.
I watched plenty this week other than the Olympics. Yesterday, the Criterion Channel live streamed Bertrand Bonello’s 2023 film, The Beast. I really enjoyed the film and the communal aspect of it being live streamed without recourse to pause, rewind, or otherwise. It’s also a funny film to choose to stream in this ephemeral way. The movie has multiple instances of strange distortions to the film that look like the degradation of streaming video over a compromised internet connection. I wonder if the Criterion programmers took that into account when planning for the streaming event.
The Beast is not what it appears to be. It begins with an arresting scene of Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) in front of a green screen, one the size of an entire stage set, performing some action following the voice of a director. Gabrielle moves throughout time, exploring various “past lives” during which she looks the same (it’s Léa Seydoux, so why not) and has the same name, Gabrielle.
I’m not familiar with Bonello’s work, but here he is Lynchian with all the enthusiasm Lynch’s work demands. He also, unexpectedly, evokes Spree (2020), tracing some ideas across past, present, and future settings. The Beast will be available on Criterion Channel on August 1st, so I recommend watching it then.
Earlier today, I watched the first episode of the new Code Geass anime, Rozé of the Recapture (2024). It’s got guys in masks and mind control powers, so I’m digging it so far. I’m more upset that nobody mentioned this to me before I discovered it today. It’s already six episodes in.
There’s also a few housekeeping items to highlight:
Paradox Newsletter has a new web address. You can get access the publication more easily than ever at paradoxnewsletter.com. All the old links will still work, though.
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As for today’s edition, I finally circled back around to Kinds of Kindness (2024) as it relates to the idea of disavowal from last week. I also have some remarks on what I expect to be a long reading journey.
Disordered Order in Kinds of Kindness
Intentionally, I went into Kinds of Kindness (2024) having no idea what it was about. I had no idea it was a tripartite film with the same actors in multiple roles and seemingly unconnected stories, each bookended with their own title and closing credits. The movie ostensibly consists of three separate parts, “The Death of R.M.F.,” “R.M.F. Is Flying,” and “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich.” You might think, given his privileged position in the title, that R.M.F. is a character who receives a fair amount of screen time or is the protagonist. He is the only consistently titled character — his name is simply R.M.F. in each vignette, if that isn’t obvious — played by Yorgos Stefanakos, a non-professional actor and friend of director Yorgos Lanthimos and screenwriter Efthymis Filippou.
The separate titling, structure, and plots suggest, however, that the sections of the film are more disconnected than they actually turn out to be. While I am sure there will be no shortage of people trying to arrange the plots in relation to one another, each segment has a tremendous amount in common among the ideas at issue. The films follow people whose lives are disrupted and thrown into disarray, each character (played by Jesse Plemons or Emma Stone) falls into the archetype of Paul Schrader’s person falling apart. But what distinguishes Lanthimos and Filippou’s approach to this character archetype is the normalcy that is ruptured. The order of each character’s life is, in fact, disordered in the first place.
Lanthimos draws deeply from the philosophical well that defines his career in Kinds of Kindness. Each segment of the film has lengthy scenes in hospitals, recalling The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017). The characters of Kinds of Kindness are imperiled, with lives rapidly degenerating or subject to risk of harm.
One of the film’s early climaxes involves Plemons as Robert on Perdido Street attempting to stage a car accident that would send him to the hospital and kill the other driver, R.M.F. Lanthimos spends plenty of time lingering on the street sign, signaling “Perdido” as an operative word for the text as a whole. At once, he evokes the Juan Tizol jazz standard (made famous by Duke Ellington) and the various English translations of the word: “lost,” “missing,” “astray,” “abandoned,” “tainted,” and “indecent.” Each section of the film deals with the idea of a “taint” or “contaminant” that results in exclusion from a chaotic status quo. For Robert, it’s his lack of commitment to Raymond (Willem Dafoe) that lead him to be on the outs. For Liz (Emma Stone) and Daniel (Plemons) both, it’s their marital disjunction fueled by paranoia and a lengthy span of isolation from normal life. For Emily (Stone), it is the inability to fully submit to the regime of a capricious cult leader (Dafoe) which results in her excommunication based on a supposed contamination from malevolent fluids.
Robert, Daniel, and Emily each hold a different irrational belief with absolute earnestness. These beliefs, however, are shown by the film to be true, even as they are doubted by those around them and seem self-evidently absurd to the audience. This is most clear in the latter two films, “R.M.F. is Flying” and “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich.” In “is Flying,” starring Daniel and Liz, Daniel is convinced that the Liz who returns after being missing for an extended period of time is an imposter. Daniel torments Liz with the same volatility as Raymond in “The Death of R.M.F.” But, in an eleventh hour twist, another Liz returns seemingly validating what appeared to be, on the part of Daniel, a sadistic delusion.
In “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich,” Dafoe’s cult leader character Omi sends Emily to find a woman with the ability to bring people back from the dead. This quest seems as fantasmatic as the belief in contaminating “fluids” that requires cult members to only drink Omi and Aka’s (Hong Chau) tears. After Emily’s excommunication from the cult, she does indeed find a woman with the power to revive the dead, Ruth (Margaret Qualley).
Both Daniel and Emily lead a life governed by a profoundly bizarre set of assumptions, casting them in the light of contemptible pathos in the eyes of an enlightened, rational audience. The two characters represent the other side of 1, formulated by Octave Mannoni as “I know well, but all the same…” (Zupančič, Disavowal 1). Daniel and Emily disavow not their fetish, but in fact act in accordance with knowledge that forces them to disavow what appears to be reality. Daniel and Emily deny observable fact in favor of conspiratorial belief that overturns the obvious: the person that appears without exception to be Daniel’s wife Liz is indeed Daniel’s wife Liz or the assertions of a cult motivated by sexual hegemony that likewise have no evidence to support them should be treated as false. The two act in accordance with their obscure fetish as the guarantor of a secret, unverifiable knowledge. Instead of resorting to the “but all the same” that represses knowledge of the contrary to facilitate a behavior contingent on belief, belief substitutes for knowledge and determines how Daniel and Emily will act.
In this epistemic construction, Lanthimos reveals what Zupančič describes as the “obscure and ‘unreasonable’ side” of knowledge (1). Zupančič writes:
‘Irrational’ mistrust in science often has a displaced rationale; it appears as a displaced mistrust of capitalism, a denunciation of capitalism by proxy. (3)
In the case of Lanthimos’s characters, however, their denunciation is of the conditions of normal life which they distrust. Specifically, domestic life. Daniel fails as a husband in his abuse of the faux Liz, Emily is the subject of abuse at the hands of her husband leading her to yet another form of displaced abuse, doled out to all cult members, perpetrated by Omi and Aka. Robert, in “The Death of R.M.F.,” seems to be in slightly different circumstances in contrast to Daniel and Emily. Nonetheless, the same ideas percolate. Robert has married his wife through a protracted deception organized by Raymond, and Raymond’s power over Robert is exerted in the same form as Omi and Aka’s power over Emily. Robert seems to be, momentarily, the only “sane” character in that he comes to distrust the absolute power over an ordered and orderable world Raymond claims to command. But Raymond does indeed have such power as Robert’s life falls to ruin as soon as he rejects Raymond’s commands. In the same way, Robert is brought back around to the obscure unreason of knowledge. Robert knows something that can’t be true, but nonetheless is.
This unbelievable truth is coincident with the floating signature of kindness, from the film’s title, that comes in different kinds. The same is true of the character R.M.F. His name, specifically, is the arbitrary signifier that unites the film, itself undefined and attested to by Lanthimos to be meaningless or without reference. Of course, it’s lack of descriptivity does not preclude it from having meaning, but its meaning only exists as a nexus points between three ostensibly separate works. “Kindness” has the same evasive signification, as each character commits various moral atrocities with the justification of doing so on someone else’s behalf. Robert acts for Raymond’s benefit, Daniel for the sake of the real, still absent Liz, and Emily for the sake of her daughter. Among them, Emily’s motivation seems to be the most sympathetic, though her daughter would be no more safe within the cult than she is with her abusive father.
Kinds of Kindness presents to its audience a set of poignant signifiers with elusive, incoherent meaning. The knowledge of the characters that precipitates their actions and the form of the film itself confronts the viewer with deeply uncomfortable ambiguity. This is no more evident than in the film’s final moments. Though “The Death of R.M.F.” and “R.M.F. is Flying” seem to have some correspondence to the events of the shorts they title, “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich” is a bizarre outlier. In the adventures of Emily, there is no R.M.F. and no sandwich. The title only comes to take on meaning in the final moments of the entire film, when R.M.F. enters the scene to eat a sandwich from a take out restaurant on a set of outdoor benches.
Nothing in Kinds of Kindness is consistent, but everything is tangentially related to everything else. Lanthimos strains cinematic logic to degrade the determinations of the signifier. To that end, the film is a rousing success.
Adventures with Proust
Back in 2015, I read Swann’s Way (1913). I read it on my Kindle in the original translation by Scott Moncrieff. No Terence Kilmartin update, no William C. Carter notes, no readers guide, no critical commentary, no nothing. This seems to me to be the worst possible way to experience Marcel Proust’s Á la recherche du temps perdu. On an ebook reader, no less, the text becomes weightless in as much as its signifiers weigh heavily on the reader without assistance. The relationship a reader has to an unadulterated unrevised unannotated English translation of Proust is like the relationship of an airplane passenger to a flight where one simply stares into space. Some mediation may be necessary, perhaps, to make good use of the time. I do remember that original reading experience very well, however. I spent much of it laying down on my mattress (on the floor, of course) in my ground level Allston studio apartment. The austere conditions of my first reading remind me of Proust’s agonal posture in the course of writing Á la recherche. In his lectures on Proust, Józef Czapski recounts:
[Proust] would write in the most awkward position imaginable, lying in bed, propped up on his right elbow, as he claimed in his letters, “writing for me is an agony.” (19)
The vivid sense memory of a circumstance in which one reads is itself Proustian. He writes in the opening chapter of Swann’s Way:
My body’s memory, the memory in its ribs, knees, and shoulders, would bring forward for inspection one after the other some of the different bedrooms in which it had slept, and all the while, as though being moved about by frantic scene-shifters shuffling in the dark, the invisible walls changed position to fit each of the rooms as I imagined it. (4)
This quote is Proust as translated by James Grieve, rather than Moncrieff. And a hard copy published by the New York Review of Books last year, the one I am now reading. From this new starting point, I aim to finish Á la recherche, beginning with the first two novels Grieve translated before his death. Eventually, I’ll move on to the enormous Yale University Press publication with the Moncrieff translation supplemented with Carter’s notes.
So far, so good. I have really enjoyed the Grieve translation, though some dispute its accuracy in comparison to Moncrieff. He really nails some of Proust’s most memorable bits:
[T]he tyranny of a rhyme-scheme can force a good poet to write his best lines (22)
One of the major themes from start to finish of Á la recherche is the relationship of the populous, and the critic, to art. The critic could be Swann himself. For his stoicism, he is judged by the narrator’s provincial great-aunt as “avoid[ing] serious subjects of conversation” (15). Proust repeatedly mocks the attitude of those who assess art without the appropriate disposition and discernment. Swann better fits Proust’s model of the great critic, as he laments the attention to the newspaper over “books which have really essential things to say” (24):
The way people eagerly open their paper every morning makes you want to change things a bit and put in something like, say, the … Pensées Of Pascal! (24)
Proust is either optimistic about the status of his project or self-critical as he puts these words in the mouth of Swann. Because it is, of course, Á la recherche that has been elevated to the status of a novel that communicates something essential about the experience of human memory. And, indeed, the novel is also a status symbol on the shelves of the urbane, cultured person. Swann jokes about a “leather-bound tome you read once in ten years,” an imposing decoration meant to reflect one’s status.
It is precisely Swann’s stoicism when assessing art, which the narrator’s great-aunt mocks him for, that characterizes his capacity for aesthetic judgement. In Józef Czapski’s reading, Proust admires the critic who is not effusive in their praise:
In Le Temps retrouvé, Proust mocks enthusiasts overcome by music, incapable of refraining from making overwrought gestures that expressed their admiration. (25)
Czapski’s Lost Time (1987) lectures have been my companion through this early portion of Swann’s Way. A Polish painter, Czapski delivered these lectures while imprisoned in Gryazovets in 1940 and 41, with “neither a library nor a single book on my subject” (5). Eric Karpeles recounts in the introduction for Lost Time:
On September 1, 1939, German armies crossed Poland’s western and northern fronts on land and in the air, followed on September 17 by nearly a million Soviet soldiers violating nine hundred miles of Poland’s eastern frontier. According to the terms of the covert treaty, the Nazis rounded up rank and file military prisoners for slave labor while the Bolsheviks laid claim to the Polish Army’s officer class, soon to be slated for execution. (xii)
Stalin’s Russia executed “roughly twenty-two thousand Polish officers and cadets[,]” with only the near-four hundred prisoners at Gryazovets spared with seemingly no rhyme or reason (xii). Karpeles describes the goal of the Russian captors as “destroy[ing] any vestige of Polish identity these men clung to, to expunge any trace of freethinking in them, whether political, intellectual, or personal” (xx). This is a familiar strategy for any occupying force, from the suppression of various West African cultural traditions by the enslavers of the Maafa (Beloved Vintage ed. 74) to the United States prohibition of Japanese cultural objects during the internment of Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals from 1942 to 1946 (Citizen 13660 83, 108).
If what I term “cultural assassination” was the goal of the Russian camp wardens, the exercise of examining Á la recherche through the recollection of Czapski stood as a bulwark against it. Czapski has some idiosyncratic readings of Proust. He relates Baron de Charlus, “chained to his desires like Prometheus to his rock” (61) to Pascal, no doubt recalling Swann’s comment. This is a connection by way of antagonism, as Czapski recounts Pascal as having “ridiculed not only the offending senses he rejected, but all the senses” (57) in contrast to Proust, who wrote:
a book that seems entirely devoted to the study of the senses, that contains thousands of pages written by a man who relished the sensory joys of the earth, who knew how to enjoy everything to the furthest extent possible in a way that was passionate, refined, and fully aware. (57)
Czapski’s most passionate support for the connection comes from his reading Proust’s novel as the “apotheosis of all life’s fleeting pleasures” that “leaves us with a taste of Pascalian ash in our mouths” (57). Indeed, the prisoners themselves are locked between the poles of Proust and Pascal. On the one hand, the memories of better times and sense pleasures sustain them in the course of their imprisonment. On the other, one must come to resent their senses if all they provide is torturous pain as a result of that imprisonment.
The evocation of Polish culture in relation to Á la recherche comes primarily in two places. First, Czapski reflects on the Polish translation of Proust:
From the moment his Polish translation appeared, people in Warsaw loved to repeat the joke that the French should just translate Proust back into French from the Polish translation; then at least he would become hugely popular in France. (33)
The reason for Proust’s Polish popularity is, as Czapski states, the result of the translator Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński. Czapski gives an account of Boy-Żeleński’s approach, “It’s wrong to sanctify a writer—one has to edit him in a manner that makes him most readable” and quotes him as saying “I sacrificed the precious for the sake of the essential” (32).
Just as in the case of the translation, the notion of “resurrection,” a watchword for Czapski, suggests the possibility of something rising from the (Pascalian) ashes of Czapski’s imprisonment. He relates Proust to the examples of Żeromski and Conrad as different avenues for artistic expression, Żeromski focused on “reawakening consciousness in [his] compatriots” (55) whereas Conrad seemingly sacrifices an overbearing representation of Polish politics and identity to the end of offering “indispensable nourishment for the younger generation” (55). Czapski, too, contrasts Á la recherche with Tolstoy’s Resurrection (1899), putting Proust on the side of Conrad as one who, by aspiring to the height of artistic achievement, “strengthens the radiance of [their] ideas” (56).
The resurrection to which Czapski alludes2, according to Karpeles’ reading, is a Proustian revival of one’s subjectivity through sense memory. Karpeles writes, “involuntary memory is in itself a kind of resurrection” (xix) and poses this process as the answer to the question of reading Proust in a context so vastly different from the one it depicts:
Who, from the outside, would ever conceive of Proust’s stories of the supremely privileged as a subject suitable for an audience of famished, lice-ridden, frostbitten prisoners of war huddled together in bombed-out buildings? (xviii)
This, of course, is the essential gambit of Proust himself in his stating of Swann as the reader who puts such a high value on “books which have really essential things to say.” Czapski is not the only writer to recount the experience of doing literary criticism of Proust in prison. Varlam Shalamov did the same in his short story, “Marcel Proust” (1966). Karpeles quotes from the story, “‘Proust,’ he wrote, ‘was more valuable than sleep’” (xxiii).
What Czapski and Shalamov share is a conviction in “the perpetuity of great art” (xxxi). Proust’s wide readership is a testament to that longevity. Czapski’s novella-length study of transcribed lectures are proof positive of the capacity of a work to speak far beyond its context or ostensible time-constrained audience group.
What Proust demands from his reader is the time one might search for in the wake of reading. If Proust’s prose is precious (Czapski 33), as time is, one wonders which weighs more upon the scales of value.
Weekly Reading List
Boston area (Dorchester) rapper and acquaintance of the letter Cousin Stizz has released a new album with a great acronym title: GABOS (Game Ain’t Based on Sympathy) (2024). I’m a big fan of acronyms. In 2014, I tried to convince everyone I knew that SWAG was an acronym: Still Winning At the Game. Didn’t really take off. GABOS might make it, though. The album is good.
Dmize is the greatest Puerto Rican and Dominican NYHC band and among the greatest of all time. DIY label Streets of Hate has re-released their classic demos in a collection for CD and streaming, Backlash. The SoH product listing says “DMIZE IS THE BLUEPRINT TO ALL THIS SHIT…. [sic]” and there should be no question about that. Just think about their name for one second. They strictly improved how cool the word “demise” looks by dropping the “e” and replacing the “s” with a Z. They haven’t lost a step in the art department, either. Steven Huie’s art for them last year is so good:
As for the music, it’s in the style of crossover influenced hardcore that has produced the greatest records committed to vinyl. Or CD, as is the case here.
You can buy Backlash here.
Takedown Records released the demo from Done Deal last year. Soon after it released, singer Christopher Oropeza passed away. In his memory and to celebrate the excellent music from the band, Takedown re-released the demo on vinyl along with live recordings from the band’s first and last shows with Chris.
When I first heard this demo last year, I thought it must have come out in the mid 2000s. That’s a high compliment, Done Deal is OS. The snare sound on the recording is ridiculous. The songs are journeys, with a mix of tempos and rhythms all coming together in some superlative “beatdown” hardcore. But there’s nothing generic here. This is like if aliens invaded, listened to the Swear to God demos, Merauder, 25 ta Life, and Crown of Thornz, and then wrote four songs.
Buy the demo re-release from Takedown Records here.
When I was in high school, I read Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album (1995). I remember liking it a lot, but it’s all I’ve read from him. I have been reading his Substack here and there, though, and enjoying it. This edition is particularly interesting because it is a guest post from Darian Leader, a clinical psychoanalyst and psychoanalytic theorist.
The essay is fine, but I found the comments even more interesting. There is such tremendous focus on the perception of Freud’s status as “pseudoscience” based on the non-falsifiability of his claims. It’s funny to me that Kureishi would get a guest post from Leader after having cultivated an audience like that. Thank god for all of you reading who aren’t champing at the bit for empirical proof of the unconscious.
There is an endless feedback loop when a listed hierarchy from a supposed authority pops up online. It’s a brilliant thing to do if your goal is to generate controversy and ad revenue. Crispin uses the New York Times list of books as an example, but Apple Music’s “100 Best Albums” list had the same effect. And, just as the New York Times list inevitably will be, all discussion of Apple Music’s list has been forgotten.
Until next time.
You can read this piece as a companion or continuation of my writing on disavowal last week, as I once again draw liberally from Alenka Zupančič’s new book Disavowal (2024).
Czapski writes about the potential for literature to bring life to its subject, “It’s he, and he alone in this crowd, who will make them all come to life again” (27).