Jeremy Hacker

As the semester winds down toward the end, and reflections surface more frequently in relation to the self-evaluation, I feel one of my last journal entries should focus on my experience with Proust this semester. I remember reading the introduction by Kilmartin feeling skeptical, and that I wouldn’t face any issues in reading this massive collection. The way he addressed Proust in a personal manner made me feel a little off-put, and I also began to be scared I’d be reading countless biblical-resembling psalm messages. After reading the first few hundred pages I felt similar to my 12 your old self rifling through War and Peace-absolutely confused by all the names, places, and style of writing. I read Tolstoy’s masterpiece 10 years later, and thoroughly enjoyed it, so I tried to keep in mind that Proust was something like Philosophy-you have to suck at it for a while in order to suck a little less at interpreting it.

One of my most vivid recollections of the earlier readings were the scenes of Cottard, and laughing in my hallway as I put his awkward figure toward someone I knew in real life. Another was when I was basking in the sun, reading Proust and noticing the cherry tree in my front yard losing its pink, milky white leaves. There was a certain appreciation in those seconds in trying to absorb the beauty of a moment which I think would have escaped me without Proust. As the weeks progressed, I began to manage my time better, realizing 30 pages generally took about an hour, which helped subside last minute reading. But, last minute reading was important to me because remembering over 200 pages is like trying to remember the entire Lord of the Rings series scene by scene.

I can’t tell which week it was, but the realization of Proust’s intention of how he creates each character, as impressions rather than creations, mixed with my newfound knowledge of the history and context this series takes place, struck me with awe in how genius writing this actually is. Putting aside all the beautiful philosophical and theoretical parts, I’ve felt myself drawn into an examination of my past, and examining my own self sense of importance slowly deteriorating. Of course this is not a fully life altering experience, and I plan on working through the whole text in the future, but it is a piece of literature well worth attempting in one’s life if they ever wish to take on an introverted examination of self identity.

The biggest impression I’ve gotten from this series is authorship, followed closely by identity and time (obviously), and there’s a certain inspiration in wanting to write that you get when reading this-the pressure to show the world your genius dissipates and you become more interested in sharing sensations.

If you haven’t read The Death of the Author by Roland Barthes, I highly recommend it in conjunction with Proust’s La Recherche, and should note that it only takes around 5 minutes to finish. In the essay, Barthes is explicitly detailing what theories Proust is analyzing through the narrator, those being the functions of the critic, author, and reader. Barthes argues that the symbol of the author rises with the modern age, and it is in this symbol that we falsely attribute the explanation of their work as belonging to the author. The argument is that it is language which speaks, not the author, and it’s through the author that this language can be performed. Failures of the critics, to Barthes, was that they held the author  as an epitomized figure who was thought to “nourish the book,” rather than being  “born simultaneously with the text.” (1) The consequences of this is that genius and talent a priori seems to fall, and is rather dependent on experience and tradition. Since language is ‘finished’, what the author composes has already been finished in a theoretical dictionary. One complaint toward the critic, is that once a text is given an author, a limit is imposed on that text which allows its composition to bear an ultimate meaning, thus allowing the critic to be victorious once they discover the author. When writing becomes an act without intending to assign a secret, it becomes a revolutionary activity, “an anti-theological activity.” (2) The final point Barthes brings up is, “Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author.” (3) So, with the death of the author, comes the birth of the reader, and it is only in the reader that literature is possible to exist and be deciphered.

One final note: it was nice to be able to understand this passage as a result from reading La Recherche. “Proust gave modern writing its epic. By a radical reversal, instead of putting his life into his novel, as is so often maintained, he made of his very life a work for which his own book was the model; so that it is clear to us that Charlus does not imitate Montesquiou but that Montesquiou – in his anecdotal, historical reality – is no more than a secondary fragment, derived from Charlus.” (4) How can we analyze the narrator’s plight of becoming a writer, reader, and critic with this essay in mind now, and also the separation of the public/private aspect of the artist?

Bibliography

1.) Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” 1967. Essay. 2.
2.) Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” 1967. Essay. 3.
3.) Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” 1967. Essay. 4.
4.) Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” 1967. Essay. 2.

“Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny (as contrasted with the hell of Swedenborg and the hell of Tibetan mythology) is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.” (1)

In trying to formulate something to say about time, I remembered an old essay I read by Borges called, A New Refutation of Time. Rereading it while maneuvering Proust was immensely enjoyable, because I originally read it with idealism and metaphysics in mind. Borges’ argument is directed toward Berkeley’s idealism, but I’m going to use it to examine In Search of Lost Time.

When I picture Proust’s narrator in the process of recalling his earlier years in Combray, particularly the scene with the madeleine, I imagine time as being compressed into the treat, waiting to be unlocked in the mind once tasted. Is the present the sum series of the past or is the past simultaneous with the present? It seems that if the past is simultaneous with the present, then there is no past, only the present, meaning there’s no present without the past, creating an endlessly circular paradoxical headache. I think Borges would refute the idea of time being compressed into a madeleine, which awaits being unlocked, but rather call it a reflection of the past. The subtle difference is that one lives again in the moment, while one reflects it, and to Borges time cannot be regained-it cannot be relived.

The second half of the first sentence I’ve quoted states a “desperation[s] and secret consolation[s]” in idealist notions of time. One is to assume the theory Borges is refuting claims time as not structured a->b, but rather something similar to the madeleine, existing in lumps and possibly eternally recurring. The madeleine then is a source of comfort, because it allows us to slip away from the rigid, unbreakable foundation of a linear sequence, which never breaks in its stretch toward the infinite. Ultimately, this desperation and consolation comes from the fear of death, for the human body is bound to die, and one must come to terms somehow with the acknowledgment of non-existence having once existed.

I find solitude in both Borges and Proust, and being the sort of agnostic, unsure-of-everything kind of person I am, I accept both notions presented here. It seems possible to regain those moments you hold on to dearly, to live in them and stow away the present. At the same time, I’m realistic and accept that time, relative, is a cold, merciless idea which seems inescapable, perhaps due to the dimension we exist in. We must come to terms with parting from ‘good times’, if only to see other good times, or maybe even fall on the bad.

1.)  Borges, Jorge Luis. “A New Refutation of Time.” Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings. Ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. New York: New Directions Pub., 2007. 233-234. Print.

In retrospect it seems nearly impossible to explain the fear I had of this particular sound. It confuses me why I never thought of it being an alarm clock, and I question now if that’s even what it was. I also wonder why nobody ever stopped this horrendous noise, because it would play through the middle of the night. Its first introduction to me was during a dream, in my childhood, in which I woke up crying and crawled to the corner of my room, fearful of moving and waiting until the sun came up. I spent a lot of my childhood on that floor, and continued this habit until my mid-teens. It became my safe spot, that furry, charcoal gray and black carpeted floor made in the early 90’s.

I would sneak into the living room in the middle of the night, after being awakened from this sound, and peek through the slits of the blinds, trying to stealthily unveil the source of evil emanating from this bleating, nightmarish rhythm. Just across the street was a streetlight, and its light shone heavily on the side of the house I slept in. Deep in my gut, I felt as if this sound was bellowing from the darkest parts of the night, fixating on torturing my sleep and introducing anxiety into my life.

When I was around 16 and living with friends and girlfriends, I always had to have a movie playing before I fell asleep. Silence and blackness terrified me, and I’d focus on the ringing in my ears so intensely that no amount of exhaustion would succumb to slumber. I’d go through phases of different movies, and their playback loops of the DVD menu would ingrain itself in my head. If I awoke early, but was too sleepy to turn the T.V. off, I’d fall asleep again and that loop would be incorporated into my dreams. It’s not hard to recall the Harry Potter or Shrek DVD menus to this day. It’s during this phase that my sleep phobia was its worst. I’d catch myself in the cusp of sleep’s grasp and a jolt of fear would surge through me as I thought I was dying. This incorporation of death and sleep began hard to shake off for many years.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the narrator in Proust’s “Search”, and I can’t help but feel linked to those moments in the bedroom where sleep becomes a giant in the corner. It’s funny how much you can remember of your past in reading someone else’s words, and in what arrangement words can be put so as to unlock the doors of memory. In a way it brings some relief knowing I’m not the only one who has/had a somewhat childish fear.

Arriving at the Vicenza airport 4 years after my first landing there, I recalled my initial fantasies of what the future would hold and compared them with the reality. The initial fantasies were unmet, but the reality was an unexpected journey that changed my life irrevocably in both good and bad ways. What I thought about when getting off that bus to fly home to Seattle was the friends I’d lost, that feeling of depression when great times come to an end, the nights downtown, the beautiful cities, and that I’d bury my involvement with the military as much as possible, taking it as but one experience and moving on. In watching most of The Sorrow and The Pity, a lot of recollections of my year in Afghanistan surfaced, coupled with other memories, and in thinking of writing these journal entries, I decided to bring up some of those memories for this class reluctantly.

When we landed in Afghanistan, the surrounding mountains and environment gave me what I retroactively can now call the most sublime (Kantian) moment in my life. We were all waiting for these supposed mortar attacks anxiously, for that moment we would no longer be cherries. A few days days later, two of my best friends died, and about 7 people were wounded, some severely. We stayed with the bodies over 12 hours to ensure they got back to the base, being shot at multiple times. When the explosives unit came, they showed us the footprints we’d made, crossing over a dozen bombs. It was like stepping in the one empty box in a  full 10×10 minesweeper game. I think about those footprints of mine often, and Salazar who was lying on one for about half an hour. A couple of people were shot those final moments before we finally managed to clean the place up. In the ride back to base I’d laid on someone’s leg wound on accident, in which he laughed and said “do you mind?” Moments before that my buddy Espinoza and I had machine gun rounds snap inches in-between our heads, scrambling in the dust trying to find cover behind the tires. It was pretty funny and terrifying, because I’d said we were going to get shot sitting like that just moments before. The reason I bring some of these moments up is that the group of 30 we’d come with had dwindled to less than 20 and we’d come closer than ever before since the 2 years we’d been together. The one person in charge of us turned out to be a coward which surprise us all greatly, and reminded me of the French who took the German’s side in France during World War II.

I understand that fear he probably was wrenched with, because he’d been blown up hours before and thrown meters away, and had to endure losing one of his soldier’s days within arriving. We had expected him to be courageous, to be that figure to hold our hands, but he abandoned us in despair, and I can’t possibly be mad. You can never gauge what a person will be like during moments of extreme stress, no matter what pre-established notions you have of them. It’s odd seeing someone so built and buff scramble around so afraid during a firefight.

The one thing I didn’t realize before joining the military, was the love these old veterans had for us young cherries. During those initial months in Afghanistan I realized how much I hated war, and how pointless being there was. I already had a semi-disgust for the military, but this cemented a deeper hate for those higher unknown powers at work in decisions for America. I am anti-war to this day, but in some sick way I’m glad I got to experience war firsthand. The reason I joined really fell on a love that fell apart which lasted a few years and my desire to go out in a bang. Rarely I came across people who actually wanted to be in the military, and if they did, they were almost always really, really patriotic. What also struck me was the intelligence most of these people I lived with had. Most weren’t academically smart, but had a high degree of street smarts. My branch of occupation was typically considered for the dumbest of the military, but a lack of intelligence and common sense would have gotten you moved quickly.

Once you deploy and then come home, you come across the cherries back at home who missed the deployment, and you see that innocence in their eyes and long for it. All you care about in training them is to make sure they’re  going to get the chance to also come home when it’s their turn to deploy. The burden lies heavy when you lose someone in your platoon, and is a constant, daily reminder.

Our leader rarely if ever went out on missions with us, and we never got replacements, having to do the full deployment with triple the amount of normal missions tasked out to each individual. He was one of the strongest (physically) person I’ve ever met. He won multiple wrestling tournaments and was an instructor at a prestigious combat school. We thought he’d be this badass dude that was going to protect us, but he spent most of the deployment in the gym. My squad leader was an Iraq vet, tiny and skinny, and smoked a pack a day. The first firefight I was in, our platoon send the 6 of us out to deal with it, being the golden squad of the platoon. It started with them shooting at us in their dried up river bed systems-wadis. Our platoon set up an L, and we went out the side, and crossed this small empty field. They started laying into us with machine guns, less than 150 meters away. I remember using blades of grass as cover, and firing my machine gun, feeling so proud that I was protecting my 5 squad mates as they had to retreat, running their asses off in the extreme heat. This skinny guy didn’t give a fuck, and had no break in clarity, while I was scrambling and disoriented. It took a few weeks to get the fighting down and not lose vision. Fighting in Afghanistan is hell. Not only do we carry hundreds of pounds of equipment, but we’re facing people wearing rags and familiar with the territory, able to blend in quickly with the locals. I don’t know if I killed anyone, but it gave me a shell shock feeling knowing friends with multiple kill counts. I asked myself why we were there daily, always wondering if I should just put up with the penalty of not fighting anymore. The punishments of abandoning your duty during a deployment is extremely severe. I decided to make it through, if only to do what I could to keep what little people we had left alive.

When we had the ceremony for the two that died, days into our deployment, while saluting the portraits of the fallen, a staff sergeant from another platoon yelled “Wombats” at the top of his voice (Wombats being our platoon name). I normally cringe at anything military related-wearing dog tags, salutes, marching, cadences etc.-but this yell was the most beautiful, tragic, and heart wrenching sound I’d ever heard in my life. Being a Wombat was something that had deep roots in our brigade, memories you hear while being smoked for hours down “the hallway”. If there’s any one strong moment in which post memory resonates for me, it’s the feeling of walking down those barracks hallways, recollecting the memories handed down to me-“this person died, this person went to Legion Co., that used to be my old room.” We had a creed that went, “pork chop pork chop, greasy greasy, beat that team, fucking easy easy, Gooooooo Wombats.” It’s from 3000 Miles To Graceland, and it was the weirdest shit ever. Whenever someone died on the base in Afghanistan, you would hear Taps being played, and salute the helicopter flying away with the body. I remember someone died a day before he was to fly home. The day our 2 friends died, we heard Taps over and over and over. During the summer, that song feels like it is endlessly playing. I remember thinking there was no point in believing I was going to come home, and the fear of death actually left me until I came home from Afghanistan. I remember rolling that phrase, “the fear” and “I lost the fear,” off my tongue all during the deployment. Once you lose the fear, you become comfortable there in its simplicity and seeing dead bodies doesn’t strike you as hard. The routine is just like any other place, except you don’t worry about bills, rent and debts.

A few days after the Wombats yell, I’d survived a near atomic explosion. They said it was the biggest vehicle suicide in the history of the war. It turns out that the semi carrying these explosives was turned around at my checkpoint, and decided to go around the wall and blow up at the side. I remember looking at the vehicle x-ray machine and then suddenly being hit by a massive shockwave. Everything went black and I reached my hand up to make sure my buddy Espinoza’s top half was still there. He crawled down the hatch and we asked each other if we were okay. We got on top of the vehicle and looked at the mushroom cloud next to us, amazed. There were tents everywhere, and I mean everywhere. The debris was as far as the eye can see. It killed a ton of people, but I never saw them, and we left that base a few days later to go to another base. Flying away I was struck with a hopeless, entrenching feeling of despair that we’d lost two amazing people for absolutely nothing, and I started to question that day if I was even alive. The rest of the deployment was a miserable grind, always waiting for an explosion which would take your legs off, or having to gauze a carotid gunshot wound.

Salazar’s mother flew to Italy for a lost soldier’s family get-together. The company gathered money for their flight to Italy, and then showed them around the city for a week. Horsley’s family didn’t come and wished to never speak to us. I talk to his brother every now and then, but other than that, I respect their wish entirely. Salazar’s mother is a wonderful woman. They have a daughter with cystic fibrosis, and I remember Salazar sending all his money to help with her surgeries. We had a toast to his mother, and my squad leader gave a heart-wrenching speech. He broke down in tears during it, saying he was sorry he couldn’t bring her little boy home. That is a guilt I can honestly say is with me every second of my life. I’m not sure how easy that is to get across, but the few of us Wombats left from the deployment all share that burden. When at “our” bar in downtown Vicenza, where the bartenders each had drinks named after us, I had a moment with a buddy where we looked at each other, nodded, and he said “me too.” We both were thinking of him, and it was comforting knowing my pain was shared. There’s something about losing someone in war that wrenches your soul harder than any other death I’ve ever witnessed. I think about the World Wars often and the immeasurable amount of pain the world took on from those years. My usual silence about my involvement with the war makes me relate easily to those old war veterens-it’s hard to speak of war to those who haven’t experience it. And most of all, it’s hard to speak of it when you are shamed of being a part of it, while being proud of those brave enough to have endured it with you.

The days of coming back to Italy, drunk and ecstatic, walking around the parks and taking the bus downtown, were blissfully peaceful. As time goes, it’s easier to feign normalcy, but the wounds of seeing such monstrosities stays in my memory, and reminds me of what mankind is capable of, and the importance in doing whatever it takes to strive for peace, no matter how ignorant and childish a wish of such is. As for my memories, I doubt I’ll ever talk about them as brief as this again, and when I die, I know they will no longer exist unless I’ve shared them.

There’s a scene in The Sorrow and The Pity in which the interviewer climbs down into the cellar of two former French Revolution fighters of World War 2. In prior shots we see these two ex-fighters working the field, suggesting them as peasants and being close to the land. Inside the cellar, one of them fills up multiple glasses of wine from a rustic looking barrel. They all sip the wine and the whole scene seems musty and cozily damp and dark. Despite this film being black and white, and somewhat grainy, my mouth waters at the sight of this wine, particularly homemade wine made in France, which has the stereotype attached to it of probably being superior tasting wine. Later that evening I’m in Safeway and decided to get red wine instead of my typical moscato or prosecco, which I usually mix with fruit juice. While circling the few aisles they have I’m confused by the prices of wine, which seem absurdly high. This is when I realize I was unconsciously being snobbish. I lived in Italy for the past four years, and the wine there is cheaper than water. I remember being confused the first time I saw the prices of the wine there, disoriented by the comma being in place for a decimal. At first I thought these wine bottles were in the thousands, but questioned why there were only 3 digits.

I lived in Italy for four years, in an apartment with a spiral staircase at the top of the complex, overlooking the city and Monte Berico. Now I’m at the Safeway cashier and it’s time to hand him my I.D., and without fail this fantasy surges to my mind, in which I imagine that he’s going to think I’m giving him a fake I.D.  It really, really annoys me at having to be carded. In the 10ish months I’ve been back to America, I’ve been carded every single time I buy alcohol, but in the four years I lived in Italy, and the multiple countries I travelled, I was carded 0 times. In a way it feels infantilizing. In this fantasy I always suppose the cashier wanting to land a kid whose trying to use a fake I.D. and quickly become nervous that it’s going to be me. I leave the store with my 15 dollar bottle of wine, which would probably be 2 euro in Italy, and look at the entrance of the store as the light to my key flashes red as it unlocks the door. A sudden memory flashes back of stolen beer, Harry Potter, and a watermelon.

Gigantic Hearts is a term I think of when you have an impossible to explain feeling of a particular moment in life, particularly good feelings which are embedded in a group of friends. I’ve only shared it with one other person, but she understood that nostalgic feeling I was trying to purvey. When I was 16 my parents finally divorced and my mother was set free. I was happy because I had the house without parental supervision, and a crew started to form of surrounding neighborhood kids. The real driving force behind what sparked Gigantic Hearts was a brother and sister moving into a house nearby. You read about these kind of people in coming-of-age stories, usually the main character who opens up the narrator’s eyes and sparks some kind of push to the protagonist’s boundaries. One of the first times I’d met the brother, he was playing an acoustic and singing random shit that popped in his head, in a two story house with absolutely nothing in it. I escaped to that house often, lying on the floor beside Stephanie. I’d been dumped by a girl I dated for around 3 years a few months before meeting Stephanie and the siblings, and felt extremely free, thinking it would do me good to just not give a fuck for a while. Every Wednesday this group would meet up at night and drink stolen beer, skipping school the next day. The way we stole beer was to drive to multiple Safeways in different cities past midnight, walk into the front door, and grab as many cases as we could hold and run out screaming back to the car. My buddy actually knocked one of the sliding doors off its hinges once, which I didn’t think was possible, imagining it would shatter. Sometimes instead of instantly stealing the beer we would scout around and walk through the aisles. I managed to collect the whole series of Harry Potter books by stealing them from Safeways. 

Today, as I look at the Safeway entrance and recall the stacks of cases of beer piled up to our ceiling which we called a byramid , I realize it’s the same store I stole a few watermelons from, and threw out in the middle of the intersection nearby. I live just minutes from here now, and it just occurred to me those events years ago. On these drives home from our stealing escapades, I would always get a melancholy feeling which latched onto my anxiety acutely. I would think that I would never have a group of close friends such as this again, and in a sense it became true. I wish I could go back in time to those sorrowful moments and shake myself out of that turmoil. The separation of our group was slow, and one by one time takes us to different places despite our wishes to remain in each other’s company. My anxiety eventually died away, and I never really met close friends, who lived carelessly and by the minute, until I moved to Italy a few years later.  Stealing beers and books is an odd memory to look fondly back on, but it’s the people whose company I was surrounded in I cherish the most.

Jeremy Hacker
Journal Entry #2
April 12^th, 2015

In Slavoj Zizek’s, Looking Awry, he claims, “The paradox of desire is that it posits retroactively its own cause, i.e., the object a is an object that can be perceived only by a gaze ‘distorted’ by desire, an object that does not exist for an ‘objective’ gaze.” (1) When looking at Swann’s love for Odette, we can see a similar desire arising which mimics this definition. In what was initially thought of as disgust, Swann has replaced with an artistic masterpiece which he transposed those early feelings into. In creating a want for Odette which was initially nowhere to be found, Swann has formulated this desire through a distorted view, one which eventually grows into a jealous, self-absorbed desire to conquest the Odette of his fantasies. In creating this desire, Swann comes to pass over glaringly obvious signs of which she does not share mutual affections. These desire glasses which Swann wears resembles one of the harsher facets of desire of which we’re all privy to. In lesser strengths, we’re subjected to desires of which we create realities that do not fit into an objective world or object. An easier way to think of this is that we become blind with passion and forget the things along the way in our quests for the end, golden goal. If we think about Swann’s formulation of this desire, I’m sure we can see similar aspects of behavior that resemble our own lives. We see something that makes us angry, cynical, or blasé about, but may find ourselves wrapped up with those feelings, and even sometimes wanting to reconstruct that object so as to fit harmoniously into our world. It is not necessarily a bad thing to desire, for desire is a good motivational tool and inspirational push. What we should be wary of, is entrenching ourselves into that obsessive, controlling behavior of which Swann takes on in his falsified love of Odette, in which he hasn’t fallen in love with the person, but with the desires he’s created.

Bibliography

1.)    Zizek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1992. Print.

Jeremy Hacker
Journal Entry #1
April 2^nd, 2015

In the winter quarter of 2015 I attended a 3 week lecture series held by historian Thierry de Duve, which focused mostly on avant-garde art and French history, particularly dealing with modernism. The one thing that struck me when coming across this passage from Proust, “But none of them would go so far as to say ‘He’s a great writer, he has great talent.’ They did not even credit him with talent at all. They did not do so, because they did not know. We are very slow to recognize in the peculiar physiognomy of a new writer the model which is labelled “great talent” in our museum of general ideas. Simply because that physiognomy is new and strange, we can find in it no resemblance to what we are accustomed to call talent. We say rather originality, charm, delicary, strength; and then one day we realize that it is precisely all this that adds up to talent.” (1), was that it closely resembled the way in which Manet’s art pieces were received by art critics around 1870. “More often than not, the critics judged that Manet could pull off successful morceaux, which, however, did not amount to tableau.” (2) A tableau in this context is a collection of successful parts, or, morceaux. In comparing Proust’s description of those judging Bergotte and the critics addressing Manet’s unsuccessful tableau, we see the timidness involved with judgment when something unique and new comes across our field of view, particularly forms of art which fail to meet what our memory of talented works are supposedly composed of. I think it’s easy to look in retrospect and tsk those who judge harshly, but I wonder at what lengths all of us may perform this somewhat harsh judgment toward something new and confusing. I imagine the rise of modernism, modern art in particular, came to fruition from the reflection of these unsure judgments and experimenting with notions of what makes art good, and whether it even matters. It’s in this respect of reflection that we see the genius of such modern artists as Manet, for they maintained a thin line separating themselves from traditional tableaus while still being able to be recognized as art worthy of examination.

Bibliography

1.)    Proust, Marcel, and C. K. Moncrieff. “Swann In Love.” Swann’s Way. New York: Modern Library, 2003. 137. Print.

2.)    De Duve, Thierry. “The Invention of Non-Art: A History.” Artforum Vol. 52, No. 6, Feb. 2014, 197. Print.