Le Monde 100: The Trial

When I was building a certain house, I employed an engineer whose low rate was just what was needed for the budget of the project. However, the engineer was not one who was accustomed to houses people lived in, but rather large commercial projects where there was deep involvement with the government and it's standards.

When the time came for us to actually follow his engineering plans, they were so cryptic that they were essentially impossible to interpret.

When confronted with the impossible nature of his plans, he stated that the typical policy of engineers in NYC was to PURPOSEFULLY make plans complicated on the premise that it would discourage the government building department from looking too closely to the plans and just stamping them approved, freeing the engineers to then properly draft the real plans for construction.

This process showed how defanged the government could be and how the Law as a concept with all it's purpose and intentions would conflict with the patience and capabilities of its very human agents.

This is the same situation that Franz Kafka faces in his book The Trial.

I couldn't help but contrast the story in The Trial with the story of Socrates in the Crito.

Socrates submit himself to the Law to the point of execution even when he disagreed with the verdict of the Law. When presented with the opportunity to escape from his prison, Socrates rejected it on the grounds that by doing so he would in effect be destroying the Law that he had taken advantage of his whole life. How could he only take advantage of the Law when it suited him and reject it when it didn't suit him. Therefore, he patiently accepted the ideal presented by the Law.

What Socrates story leaves out, though, is the awful journey one often has to take to both understand and engage with the Law.

In The Trial, Kafka paints a portrait of a vast bureaucracy that a man accused has to deal with on a nebulous criminal charge, where no authority that he encounters seems to have enough authority to handle his case thoroughly. He is never given the dignity of a clear cut judicial action that he can face with confidence as Socrates did, leaving him in a legal limbo that is both draining to his soul and society. The Law no longer is a true voice of the people but rather the voice of a schizophrenic, unpredictable and narrow-minded in it's regard to the average citizen.

The Law forces lawyers and priests and all who give counsel in the face of such an unbending structure to advise incredible compromise.

Says the Priest to Josef K., the protagonist, "you don't need to accept everything as true, you only have to accept it as necessary." "Depressing view," said K. "The lie made into the rule of the world"

It's never a pretty thing when the rubber of ideals hits the road of reality.

Now, for a bit of levity, we turn to The Little Prince!

Le Monde 100: Swann's Way: Swann in Love

After finally polishing off the rest of Swann's Way, I found my outlook transforming from reading out of a sense of duty to Man is Men to sincere interest and delight once I got on board with Proust's style.

Proust takes the concept of the formation of experience, which he illustrates through the Narrator's bedtime experiences in Overture and Combray, and shows how love wreaks havoc on one's construction of reality in the largest part of the book, Swann in Love.

Swann goes on an emotional roller coaster as he navigates his relationship with a courtesan, who loves him one day and spurns him the next. Swann jumps through hoops trying to make sense of his obsession with her and comes face to face with the concept of cognitive dissonance much like the Fox and the Grapes, where the fox, after trying so hard and failing to reach the grapes that are high in a tree, deems them as sour anyway. He must alter his sense of reality in order to suit the actual reality.

But what this really goes into is how our memories are not made out of exact mirrors of stretches of time but are rather like a book or movie, where only the moments that fit our ideal of the memory are archived together in our mind to formulate the experience.

A friend of mine went on a long road trip with his wife across America for their 10 year anniversary. He told me that they fought the whole way and squabbled and squibbled non-stop, leading him to wonder if the trip was a good idea. But, after the trip, when they sat at home reflecting on the month long excursion, they felt it was the best trip of their life! They expunged all the bad moments and strung together all the good ones, making them the building blocks of that experience.

This is exactly what Swann did with his courtesan, Odette:

"Rare as they became, those moments did not occur in vain. By the process of memory, Swann joined the fragments together, abolished the intervals between them, cast, as in molten gold, the image of an Odette compact of kindness and tranquillity, for whom he was to make, later on (as we shall see in the second part of this story) sacrifices which the other Odette would never have won from him."

This book is worth the work. So, now, for all who are following along or wished to forgo Marcel Proust's long winded nattering, on to The Trial by Franz Kafka!

Le Monde 100: Swann's Way - Combray

Finishing the second part of Swann's Way leads me to, if not agree with, but, at least understand Evelyn Waugh's assessment of it as "raving" and Marcel Proust as a "mental defective," especially in the light of the pages and pages of prose that shoulder aside any real concern with plot. There is a desperation to Proust as he has a single minded obsession with triggering memories and experiencing the purest sensation of the initial recollection of a long forgotten moment.

Proust realizes that memories are subject to the Law of Diminishing Returns as each subsequent recollection of any long-lost moment will gradually wane in its ability to impart ecstasy. So the sheer size and depth of his description of detail is a method in itself to preserve those sentimental moments.

He literally lays out this cathartic need to preserve through writing due to the unpredictable instability of the human mind when dealing with the onset of an obsession over the future of the memory of three steeples against the backdrop of Combray. He writes down a long description of the scene after which he writes, "I had finished writing it, I found such a sense of happiness, felt that it had so entirely relieved my mind of the obsession of the steeples, and of the mystery which they concealed, that, as though I myself were a hen and had just laid an egg, I began to sing at the top of my voice."

So, basically all 1.5 million words of Remembrance of Things Past are simply a long series of laid eggs.

But, who doesn't love eggs? Proust pushes out some amazing orbs of writing such as

"but what fascinated me would be the asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and rosy pink which ran from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible changes to their white feet, still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed: a rainbow-loveliness that was not of this world. I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form, who, through the disguise which covered their firm and edible flesh, allowed me to discern in this radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades, that precious quality which I should recognise again when, all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting as the fairies in Shakespeare's Dream) at transforming my humble chamber into a bower of aromatic perfume."

And that's just asparagus!

Now, shall we push on through the rest of this book that suffers from the literary equivalent of gigantism? Let's!

Le Monde 100: Swann's Way: Overture.

I admit my sole connection to Proust before starting Swann's Way (the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past) was this:




Whatever sense of ambling I had with The Stranger must now be stripped away as Remembrance of Things Past is the the longest novel in history with about a million and a half words in its seven volumes. Furthermore, where The Stranger was such an easy read due to Camus' hardboiled writing style,which stemmed from his lack of sentiment, Proust is sentimentality incarnate, where every emotion and every feeling is walked up and down the boulevard as if there were no word for urgency in his world.

Reading Swann's Way feels like reading an auto manual where every part on a diagram is exploded and then frozen in place in order to get a full view of every piece.

Proust gives the same treatment to the formation of memories.

What is so interesting about Proust the fact that he can remain engaging even though nothing really happens in his story. He describes the brief moment of displacement that one feels upon waking that he uses as a blank canvas to inject an exploration of his entire life. In that moment, one has no context as to where one is or when one is living allowing for a brief period to be wherever or whenever a person wants to be. It's like a momentary Nirvana where only the Self exists.

The introduction of Swann has a similar effect on the Narrator's family as seen in this passage:

"And so, no doubt, from the Swann they had built up for their own purposes my family had left out, in their ignorance, a whole crowd of the details of his daily life in the world of fashion, details by means of which other people, when they met him, saw all the Graces enthroned in his face and stopping at the line of his arched nose as at a natural frontier; but they contrived also to put into a face from which its distinction had been evicted, a face vacant and roomy as an untenanted house, to plant in the depths of its unvalued eyes a lingering sense, uncertain but not unpleasing, half-memory and half-oblivion, of idle hours spent together after our weekly dinners, round the card-table or in the garden, during our companionable country life."

The man is blank enough to be whatever you want him to be.

Overture, which is the first part of Swann's Way ends on another moment where the Narrrator eats a tea-soaked Madeline - an experience that he had not had for decades, making it a pure memory (rather than a memory of another memory) and a gateway to other pure memories. Thus, setting the stage no doubt for the rest of the book.

Are you still with me? Congratulations! But, have no fear- Swann's Way, apparently, is quite self contained. So we shan't read all seven volumes.

(Unless, of course, a chorus of voices compels me.)

Le Monde 100: The Stranger - The Rest of the Story

A wise friend of mine recently signaled the immense task that potentially lay before me in blogging the Le Monde 100, which, while obvious in its scope, is seductive in its appeal to the perfectionist in me- a list to be "knife and forked" as Katie puts it.

But, The Stranger is a little more than an 100 pages long. One can potentially read this in an evening. With Remembrance of Things Past, one of the longest. Books in history, looming on the horizon, it has been determined that my current pace is far too slow.

So, without further ado, my thoughts on the rest of The Stranger by Albert Camus.

This book is called The Stranger because of the indifference of the protagonist, Meursault, to the rest of the world. His attitude toward his entire life and those he likes or even loves is the same as one would have toward an unknown person walking down the street.

The second half of the book deals with the ramifications of the final scene of the first half of the book where Meursault commits murder without an actual motive in an action that was more or less a reaction to an assault on his senses by the Sun.

This scene of the murder is, like the funeral of Meursault's mother, awash with the description of his sensory experiences. He does not comment at all about the morality of the moment or any feelings toward his victim.

His victim pulled out a knife but it was the reflection in it's blade that actually assaulted him. He describes his enemy not as the man with the knife but the sun's rays as a "scorching blade" that "slashed at his eyelashes" and "stabbed at his stinging eyes." His actions have no meaning outside of his body. The consequences of his actions mean nothing compared with his sensory intake.

The ensuing trial and jail sentence highlight and force him to verbalize his innate philosophy. He rails against religion and God, decrying the meaning of life since all men die. Only at the end of the book, as he heads to the guillotine, does he have some closure in reconciling the state of his existence with his impending non-existence. By forsaking hope, he becomes the embodiment of the indifferent universe that he had formerly raged at. He sees it now as "like a brother."

Camus is an atheist and this book reflects his lack of faith in higher being to give purpose to the universe. But, these sentiments actually mirror Soren Kierkegaard's philosophies as well as to the inherent absurdity of being human albeit in the context of faith and belief in God.

I can't help but think that one's belief or construction of personal meaning comes down to personality type. Every few years, I get caught up in the Myers-Briggs personality tests, which has a strange predictable nature as to extracting the forces inside the mind. The difference between being an external and and an internal person may have a great bearing on whether someone is a so-called "Stranger" in society or not. Internal people live in their own heads and contemplate purpose individually. They expend energy in interaction with people as opposed to external people, who are energized in their interaction with people.

For many, purpose is what comes after the equal sign in the equation of their life, whereas purpose may actually be what comes before.