Literature

Yesterday I had lunch with Catherine Driscoll who was here in New York for a conference. She’s a visiting fellow at Duke and Princeton this semester, and we were chatting a bit about the differences in disciplinarity, Theory and I guess grad student attitood in the various locations we’re familiar with. (Disclosure: I’m part way through I Am Charlotte Simmons, something I bought for the plane trip en route to North Carolina, and I wanted to know how far off the mark the spoof of Duke really is). We also talked about my book a bit, given I’m up to the eyeballs writing & thinking about this defence/ description of cultural studies. For a brief comedic moment Catherine said something that I’ve been thinking about ever since: ‘Sometimes I wonder what the hell was so wrong with literature anyway?’

I’m thinking about it even more since (I can’t believe I’m about to write this) I went to Eve Sedgwick’s Proust seminar this evening at the CUNY Graduate Center. It’s hard for me to explain how I feel in response to this opportunity, but I’ll share what I can. The class is reading Swann’s Way, and I take it that they’ve actually read a bit more before this volume. And they’re reading it with Melanie Klein: Her Work in Context by Meira Likierman as well as Sedgwick’s edited collection of Silvan Tomkins’ writing. It’s been a while since my rather amateurish devouring of this particular Proust text (the only one I’ve read) so I didn’t contribute to the discussion so much as attempt to imbibe the whole “experience”. I must say I was quite transfixed by the students’ confident declarations of “I was struck by” and “I was aware of…”. This is a graduate course after all, and the participants are deeply immersed in habits and rewards I haven’t shared, but still the passion of the grad students in this country does not cease to stagger me (NB I will be writing more about Chapel Hill as soon as I can). That said the style of the class made me terribly nostalgic for my undergraduate days, when going to a tutorial meant spending an intense and dedicated amount of time spinning meaning in lots of directions for the sake of pleasure and speculation. Then there was always an ultimate goal, cunningly crafted by a good teacher, that the class would lead itself to a point whereby it could recognise it had been helped to discover the author’s unique genius. From a cultural studies perspective, I tend now to hesitate before using words like “unique” and “genius”, sometimes even “author”; but I’m a bit tired of pretending to deny that I believe some of these things exist. That’s I guess why I spend so much time in my book trying to describe a theory of textual voice - how an individual writer can grab you and mesmerise you with their style and approach.

Anyway, tonight Sedgwick assembled an intricate theory of snobbery that she discerns in Proust’s work - a theory which not only gave the students a better sence of the culture Proust was writing from but also an insight on how such considerations might resemble parts of their own contemporary and more familiar cultures. On the one hand she claimed snobbery is easily captured in the phrase “it takes one to know one” (and here she did a comparison with homosexuality, and the similar social stigma or capital attending its attendant recognitions). But she expanded this to suggest that snobbery is how we understand whether or if we are happy with our positions in life. An intricate combination of self-hatred and self-ignorance typifies a sensitivity to snobbery. It’s that sense of never feeling as though your own experience could ever be “real”, or “reality” - that such a privilege lies with other people. So snobbery is projected onto other people, and yet is always disavowed by the snob.

I’m not doing much justice to this, but given how quickly they all seemed to understand it, I’m now beginning to wonder where the students saw themselves in this same framework. Damn you, cultural studies self-reflexivity default mechanism. I’ll be back next week to see what more I can adduce.