Monday, August 27, 2012

Proustian thoughts

Cross posted from my Proust blog

Two twists today. First this post in coming up on Monday; I won't even pretend I'm writing on Sunday. I just have too many things to do Sunday so all Proust posts will appear on Monday from now on and be cross posted to my other blog, although I may continue to date them to Sunday. Second thing, I'm going to talk about Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

I just finished it last night—it's long been on my list of books I ought to read but had no enthusiasm to actually read. Having finished it, I think my lack of enthusiasm must have been driven by my having some sense that this is one of those novels inevitably assigned by the kind of English teacher who ought to be driven out of the profession.

If you read it at the surface level, it is very much their sort of book. It seems to be a simple moral tale pushing a pretty conventional liberalism that everyone can get behind. It also has that gift of pushing views that everyone can instinctively agree with while feeling terribly much like they are being terribly unconventional. It does this in two ways ...

Before I go on, if you haven't read this novel you probably want to stop reading right here.




... first of all the major moral turning point seems to be the Fascist sympathies that develop into Nazi sympathies of the Miss Jean Brodie who gives the novel its name. Who would hesitate to condemn a Nazi? Second, the book subversively encourages us to distrust the teacher, which must give a real thrill to the sort of teacher who would put this novel on a Grade 11 or 12 or undergraduate reading list. "Don't trust me, use your own critical faculties," the teacher daringly says, forgetting that she set the whole curriculum up and that her poor students get to do a rushed reading and then get one, maybe two class sessions on a novel that she has much more knowledge about and has had much more time to prepare than they do. She pretends to be giving them freedom when the whole discussion is just as loaded in her favour as a Vegas crap game is loaded in the house's favour.

But I have a question for all of you folks who have read the novel: Can we trust Sandy? Or, to put it much more bluntly, what if Sandy, later known Sister Helena of the Transfiguration, is a lying liar-head who lies?

Here, for example, is (as far as I can tell from Googling) a pretty conventional reading of the novel in four quotes:
  1. As the story develops, one member of the set, Sandy Stranger, emerges as a central figure. Her changing perception of Miss Brodie colors the reader's understanding of the schoolteacher's character and significance.
  2. This is an important step in her relationship with Miss Brodie, who, from her first lessons, encouraged the belief among her pupils that her own opinions were facts.
  3. Similarly, Sandy's gradual realization that Miss Brodie's opinions are not only subjective but often dangerous leads her to lose faith in this mentor and ultimately betray her.
  4. This manipulative style of teaching is made more remarkable by the fact that Miss Brodie claims to be using a very different style. Her familiar refrain about education is that it should be "a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul," not "a putting in of something that is not there".Similarly, Sandy's gradual realization that Miss Brodie's opinions are not only subjective but often dangerous leads her to lose faith in this mentor and ultimately betray her.
But what if that is exactly backwards?
  1. What if, Spark cleverly uses the dominant consciousness of the Eleatic, I mean Sandy Stranger to colour the readers perceptions in ways that obsure reality?
  2. What if she lets us quietly assume for ourselves that Sandy/Helena's opinions are facts?
  3. What if Sister Helena is really trying to justify her own betrayal of Jean Brodie that was really driven by her inability to make her one-time lover Teddy Lloyd take her as seriously as he did Jean Brodie?
  4. What if Sandy/Helena is such a good student of Jean Brodie that she surpasses her in the ability to manipulate others?
A few hints why this might be so:
  • Although it is also commonplace to say that young Sandy is exposed to Calvinism through her upbringing in Edinburgh, the text lets slip at one point that the opposite is the case. Sandy has been raised by modern people who quite explicitly deny her access to Calvinism and she has to go out of her way to learn about the God who resembles the authorial role in a novel.
  • Sandy is prone to fantastic imaginings all of which turn around Jean Brodie. At one point a mysterious character who strongly resembles one of Sandy's imaginary characters named Joyce Emily. She barely touches anyone's life, to the point that the memorial service for her death is just a tossed of detail that no one discusses.
  • Joyce Emily is supposed to have died because Jean Brodie convinced her to go to Spain and fight on Franco's side. Think about this one for a while: a teenage girl is supposed to have run away from her home in Edinburgh in the 1930s and made her way all the way to Spain to fight!!!! for Franco. Does that sound even remotely credible? And remember that this appears in the novel as a minor, almost incidental, detail. Teenagers do do incredible things sometimes but suppose that young Joyce Emily had made it all the way to Spain only to be killed, don't you think that much more fuss would be made over such a girl than a perfunctory remembrance service?
  • The death of Joyce Emily is Sandy's supposed justification for betraying Jean Brodie. That is odd because we have a novel that is otherwise just drenched in sex and where we have endless foreshadowing that Jean Brodie's downfall will be over a matter of sex. Jean Brodie's politics, meanwhile, flat along in the background as merely an odd quirk before very suddenly and mysteriously flowering into her getting an innocent girl killed.
  • Note also that we learn that Sister Helena later meets other fascist sympathizers in the Catholic church whom she describes as much worse than Jean Brodie. How exactly were they worse than a woman who supposedly got an innocent girl killed?
  • Sister Helena's book is called The Transfiguration of the Commonplace* and she clings to the grille when people visit her at her convent in a way that suggests a prisoner rather than someone freed.

I could go on but won't.

I hesitate in advancing this thesis just in case it's a commonplace in the better English classrooms but it seems to be that that is Spark's really intention. When we first meet Sister Helena she is an adolescent girl named, wait for it, "Sandy Stranger"! This from a woman whose first novel was about a woman who slowly comes to realize that she is just a character in a novel. Not surprisingly, the public found that a little daunting. But why not write another story about a woman who is just a character in a novel only never let the cat out of the bag. Most people can read it at face value while a few spot the joke and get to laugh up their sleeve through a few English classes before, wisely, writing their term paper about something else so as not to shake up their teacher/professor too much.

What can we learn from this?

First, I'd suggest that, for the late twentieth century, the Fascism played a role not unlike  the Dreyfus Affair did in the first have of the twentieth century. Both are affairs that seem remarkably clear-cut in hindsight.  Both are events that liberals have relentlessly used to separate sheep from goats after the fact. But both were once far muddier. There were, as Proust likes to remind us, moral imbeciles who supported Dreyfus and good people who opposed him. I don't think many people have had the courage to say so, but similar issues arise when considering attitudes towards fascism in the 1930s. Lots of good people failed to see the dangers.

Second, I think that Spark is doing something somewhat Proustian here. She is revisiting and reconstructing her past. What she has done that Proust did not do, is to allow art to overflow reality. In Proust, reality keeps failing to live up to art. Here art becomes a way to vanquish reality.

Let me explain what I think is happening here.

Muriel Spark is remembering a dominant figure from her adolescence. She is remembering a woman who had a commanding presence and was sexually powerful at a time when she was neither of these things. This woman was a rival, we might even say a mimetic rival. As an adult she is trying to deal with these memories and even to justify her moving beyond her teacher but this moving beyond feels like a betrayal. It will always feel like a betrayal.

So she makes a fictional story about it which turns on an actual betrayal. She makes up a fiction that just can't be taken seriously. Sister Helena is not an unreliable narrator, she is an unreliable consciousness. And here we depart from Proust, for Spark's point, it seems to me, is that when people are gone, all we have left is our stories about them. There is no special experience—no Madeleine, no Hawthorns in bloom, crooked paving stone—that can ever bring these things back. Lost time is forever lost and we cannot erase our sins by cleverly recreating a time of innocence.


* Corrected, an earlier version had the wrong title.

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