2
THE EDUCATION OF YOUNG GIRLS
Denn gründen alle sich nicht auf Geschichte?
Geschrieben oder überliefert!—Und
Geschichte muss doch wohl allein auf Treu
Und Glauben angenommen werden?—Nicht?
Nun, wessen Treu und Glauben zieht man denn
Am Wenigsten in Zweifel? Doch der Seinen?
Are all of them alike not based on History?
Whether written or traditional!—And mustn’t
History be accepted on Trust alone,
And on our beliefs? Is it not so?
Now, whose Trust and whose Beliefs would someone be
Least likely to doubt? Surely his own people’s?
—Lessing, Nathan the Wise
ERICH AUERBACH WROTE Mimesis during the mid-1940s, in Istanbul, safely hidden away from those who, back in his German homeland, would have hunted him to destruction—that metaphor, however melodramatic it may seem, being one that has been difficult for me to avoid since the period some fifteen years ago in which I was researching my book about the Holocaust, during which time, I well recall, one of the survivors whom I was interviewing shook his head in frustration over his inability to adequately convey to me the “feeling,” as he put it, of being the object of German persecution. “You don’t understand,” this elderly Pole had said to me as we sat in the living room of his apartment in Bondi Beach, Australia. “One minute we were middle-class people, doing ordinary things. Take your uncle, for example! I remember how he with his four daughters was always complaining about the school fees—educating those girls wasn’t cheap, I can tell you! And then the next minute we were being hunted like animals. Anyone could kill us, you see. You weren’t a person anymore.” Each day Auerbach would leave his home and go to work in the rather elaborate old mansion where the literature faculty of Istanbul University was now housed, the ornate edifice with its spectacular views of the Sea of Marmara, of which his friend Spitzer left his charming description even while deploring the University of Istanbul’s lack of an adequate library. Meanwhile, W. A. A. Van Otterlo was working away in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands on the papers about Homeric ring composition that together were destined to become the definitive scholarly statement on this technique for generations—working, it should be said, under dire conditions that worsened as the war drew on, culminating in the “Hunger Winter” of 1944–45, or, as one Dutchman I interviewed called it, the “Tulip Winter,” because during that season starving Dutchmen would dig up the bulbs of the flowers for which their country is famous and eat them. Of the varieties of ring composition that Van Otterlo analyzes in his work, there is one that he calls “inclusive.” In the inclusive ring technique, a lengthy digression—a “more or less self-contained passage,” as Van Otterlo puts it—is set inside a hollow or niche that has, as it were, been carved out of the main narrative, the opening of any such niche marked in the text by means of a certain formulaic line or scene that triggers the digression. Once the digressive passage has reached its conclusion, the line or scene is repeated to mark the closure of the circle, the completion of the ring.
My interest in circles, rings, and inclusive narratives of the kind that both Auerbach and Van Otterlo labored to analyze during the war years bemuses me, since the fact is that I have always had a horror of enclosures of any kind. There were certain games which, as a child, I found hard to play because they involved hiding in narrow spaces—closets, basements, the warm spot behind the furnace in the cellar that, for my siblings and cousins, was a favored spot for concealment during the games we sometimes played. Whenever I had to crouch in such spaces I would begin to sweat profusely and to breathe abnormally quickly, as the flesh along my neck tightened: the signs, as I would learn only later, of a panic attack. I am claustrophobic. On summer nights when I was twelve or thirteen or so, all of the neighborhood children my age and slightly older would play a game we called “monster tag,” a version of hide-and-seek that would spread over the ten properties that constituted our neighborhood, five houses on one side of the street, together with their front and back yards, and five on the other, and which would involve all the neighborhood children who were willing to play. This game would begin just as the day was ending and the last glimmers of daylight were becoming indistinguishable from the first wash of evening—the time of day that the French charmingly if a bit mysteriously call l’heure entre chien et loup, the hour between dog and wolf. At the beginning of the game, some of us—it was always the same group of ten kids or so—who were called “hiders,” were given a certain amount of time to conceal ourselves from the other children, who were called the “hunters.” The hiders would cram themselves in porches and sheds and garden beds, fashioning ingeniously camouflaged blinds in the same way that, in real life, hunters do, using the ample vegetation that adorned the houses on our block, or squatting underneath lavish oak-leaf hydrangeas that were watered by crisscrossing hoses which snaked along the lawns in all directions, some parallel to one another, others looping back on themselves in huge circles; or, if the hiders were particularly fearless, wedged among the feathery cypresses that surrounded Mrs. Isaacson’s property at the end of the street. These trees had been planted by her husband when all these houses were new, fifteen years earlier; since then, Mr. Isaacson had died but the cypresses had flourished, growing to obscure first the ground-floor windows and then the windows of the upper story of the Isaacson house, giving the place a furtive, even sinister air, as if the growth of the trees had been meant to obscure whatever was happening behind the blinded windows. But there was probably only the sorrow of the dark-haired widow and her gentle, tall son, Robbie, whom we would shyly greet every day in the late afternoon as he walked his enormous German shepherd, Lady, which, people said, was half wolf. Some time early in the 1970s, as I remember it, the town issued an order to take down Mrs. Isaacson’s cypresses because they had created a dangerous blind spot for drivers making the turn at the bottom of our street, but she took the county government to court and made them replant the cypresses in a less dangerous configuration at their own expense, her argument being that, because her late husband had planted them, they constituted a memorial, and who would want to desecrate a memorial? For this reason, I associated cypresses with death during my childhood, never guessing, then, that there is in fact a long-standing cultural association between that species of tree and funerals, graves and cemeteries.
That association, as well as my fear of being enclosed, contributed to my intense aversion to our summer games of monster tag. Often when I was chosen to be one of the “hiders”—I was never a “hunter”—I would furtively make my way back to our house and go inside, deliciously freed of the responsibility to conceal myself. But of course, it is not always possible to free oneself from the obligation to enter small spaces. Since those childhood days, I have experienced moderate to extreme anxiety when required to be in certain closed environments: the cabins of small aircraft, MRI machines, elevators.
For this reason it is easy to imagine the horror I experienced when, at the end of the many travels I mentioned earlier, the investigative journeys I undertook when writing my book concerning the fates of my relatives during the Holocaust, I was able at last to locate the underground hiding-place in which two of those relatives, my great-uncle and one of his four daughters, had been concealed for a period of time, hidden by two neighbors after Bolechów was overrun by the Germans late in the summer of 1941—the beginning of the period when, as the survivor I interviewed had put it, Jews were being hunted down like animals by the Nazis and their local collaborators. When the hiding-place was revealed to me in July 2005—a subterranean chamber about eight feet below ground level, accessed by a trap door, measuring perhaps six by three feet—I naturally felt obligated to go down into it since this, I realized, was as close to a memorial as they would ever have, unlike their luckier American relatives who had emigrated from Poland before the war and all of whom now repose together in a vast Brooklyn necropolis called Cypress Hills. During the awful minute I spent down there where my uncle and his daughter had been hidden, it occurred to me to wonder whether claustrophobia, like certain other kinds of anxiety disorders, might have a genetic root, and hence whether, during the unknowable period of time that my two relatives were forced to hide, they had to endure, in addition to the other terrors they were suffering, the fear I knew so well.
Another occasion on which it was impossible to conceal my phobia was in June of 2011, when my father and I were on the Odyssey cruise. At a certain point we stopped at Malta, where, according to an old tradition, the nymph Calypso held Odysseus captive as her love-prisoner, turning him into a nobody, a man with no country or family or renown, by hiding him from all the world; such concealment no doubt having come to her naturally since her name is, after all, derived from the verb kaluptein, “to hide.” This anonymizing captivity, according to Homer, went on for seven years until Zeus himself, yielding to the entreaties of Odysseus’s divine patroness, Athena, sent his son Hermes down to Calypso’s island with orders for the nymph to set her mortal lover free. The island is described as being in the middle of the sea, as far from humanity as one could imagine: extremi hominum, as one learned admirer of the Odyssey would put it many centuries later. Homer’s description of the cave in which the hero’s identity has been swallowed up goes well beyond the conventional and, it must be said, rather unimaginative adjective used for this and other caves in his epics: glaphyros, hollow. The first thing we hear about Calypso’s home is in fact that it is mega, great, and the description that follows suggests that it was a capacious space scooped out of the living rock. This hollow, we learn, is filled with luxurious furnishings, heated by roaring fires whose aromatic smoke perfumes the whole island. Like Odysseus, whose prison this space is, the cave itself is “hidden,” surrounded by cypresses and other trees, their branches filled with the nests of owls and other birds, the whole property watered by streams that crisscross meadows filled with violets and parsley and “flow with bright water hard by one another, turned one this way, one that.” Despite the presence of some sinister elements—the nocturnal birds, the plantings of trees associated with death—the scene has an extravagant, wild beauty. It is a sight so gorgeous that even a god like Hermes, Homer says, can’t help but admire it when he arrives, as dumbstruck as a mortal.
But in real life, as I discovered, the cave is tiny and its environs unremarkable at best and bleak at worst: a yellow-brown rockscape parched by the unrelenting sun, the baked stones cruelly hard on the sneakered feet of tourists such as the small group from our ship that, that June day in 2011, straggled down the thirsty embankment that led to the entrance of the cave. As we approached, a familiar clamminess began to prickle along my neck. The entrance itself couldn’t have been more than two feet wide, a gash in the face of the rock. I stood there, refusing to go in, at which point my father, in an uncharacteristic display of physical affection, offered his hand to me, a gesture that so surprised me that I found myself taking comfort from it and acquiescing before I had time to ponder why he had done it. Hand in hand, we pushed our way through. But once I was inside the panic rose in my throat. The space inside is not mega. It was hard to imagine that this could have been the model for the opulent abode described in Homer’s text. Out of an obscure sense of duty I lingered for a few seconds and then scrambled out—with precisely the same feeling of relief, I only later realized, that I had experienced a number of years earlier, in Ukraine, when I emerged from the underground chamber in which my relatives had been forced to remain perfectly still for an amount of time we still do not know.
“CALYPSO WAS INCONSOLABLE after the departure of Ulysses,” a famous text tells us about the aftermath of Odysseus’s departure from her cave. The beauty of her island, this narrative goes on, “only brought to her mind the sad memory” of the departed hero. But the text I am quoting is not the Odyssey, which in fact has nothing to say about Calypso’s feelings after the departure from her hollow cave of the lover to whom she had offered immortality if only he would remain with her; an offer that he refused. “Calypso was inconsolable after the departure of Ulysses” is, rather, the first sentence of a late seventeenth-century French novel that was based on the Odyssey, one of many literary adaptations over the centuries for which Homer’s epic served as a model. What is curious about this text is its ingenious design: for although it invents a number of new episodes for Homer’s characters, it is so constructed that these inventive digressions function as an insert into the text of Homer, one that in no way disturbs or interferes with the action of the original—as if the Odyssey itself were a cave, a series of vast hollows in which new digressions and narrations and adaptations could be hidden.
This technique is itself an ancient Greek one. For instance, in Herodotus’s Histories of the Persian Wars—the wars waged by the Persian emperor Darius against a coalition of Greek city-states between 490 and 479 BC, the conflict that led to the famed Battles of Marathon and Thermopylae—there is a book-length digression about the land of Egypt, its mores, histories, architecture, and manners. Why does Herodotus pause to provide this vast excursus? Because Egypt was part of the Persian Empire at the time of the wars, and for that reason was worthy, in the historian’s eyes, of this fabulously lengthy narrative detour. Nothing is left in obscurity. The “Egyptian logos” (narration or tale), as it is known, is the largest by far of many narrative cul-de-sacs to be found in the Histories, each illuminating some aspect of the principal narrative, to which, eventually, it returns—although it must be said that for many modern readers Book 2, the Egyptian tale, is so long, so absorbing in its own right, that it becomes easy to forget about the Persians and their wars with the Greeks.
The novel that opens with a reference to Calypso was composed in the 1690s by a French churchman and theologian called François de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon. Born in 1651 into an aristocratic family who held their seat in the southwest of France, near the Périgord, Fénelon was the last of twelve children, and therefore destined from the start for a career in the church, a fate that rendered him ineligible for the dashing pursuits of various of his male relatives—a cousin, for instance, who died valiantly in 1669 as a member of the European forces aiding the Venetians at the Cretan stronghold of Candia, modern-day Iraklion, against the Ottoman Muslims who besieged that city for twenty-three years, the second-longest siege in recorded history, one that makes the Greeks’ siege of Troy seem almost casual in comparison; or an older brother who distinguished himself while fighting against the Ottomans during the so-called Morean War in the 1680s, another of the many theaters in the “Great Turkish War,” the seemingly endless conflict between the Christian Europe and the Ottoman Empire, West and East, that ran throughout the seventeenth century. However destructive it was, this confrontation between cultures seems at least to have fired the younger François’s creativity. As one of Fénelon’s biographers has put it, the Orient and Occident, seemingly opposite, came together as one in the imagination of the future author, l’orient et l’occident se réunissent: something that was not, it seems safe to say, happening in the real world.
While still a small child, as far as we can surmise, François was tutored at home in Latin and Greek, the latter language in particular having captured his fancy. He was ordained as a priest in 1677, at the age of twenty-six. Only two years later he attained his first major advancement, having been asked to run a school called the Institut des Nouvelles Catholiques, an institution whose curriculum was designed to educate as devout Catholics the well-born daughters of Protestant parents who had recently converted to Catholicism. It is hard not to think that these girls’ parents were wise, since just a few years after Fénelon took over at the Institut Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, that far-sighted decree which, not quite a century earlier, had established toleration for the Huguenots; as a result, the Protestant religions were banned and their practitioners subject to harassment, violence, and forced conversion. The foresight shown by the parents of Fénelon’s charges at the Institut des Nouvelles Catholiques always makes me wonder about some people’s capacity for a certain kind of prescience, an ability “to see the handwriting on the wall”—a phrase that became familiar to me over the years of my childhood and adolescence since it recurred in my family’s ongoing and fruitless discussions of the decision-making processes, and ultimately the fates, of our relatives in Poland, who had, all too clearly, been unable to “see the handwriting on the wall,” which is why they remained first in their small town and finally in those dark hiding places. I sometimes wish I had known, when I overheard these conversations as a child, the origin of this expression, since had I done so I might well have disputed my family’s use of that particular term in the story of my relatives. For the phrase comes from the Book of Daniel, which relates how, at a great feast, the Babylonian King Belshazzar saw a disembodied hand writing on the wall of his palace as he drank from golden vessels that had been looted from the great Temple in Jerusalem by his father, Nebuchadnezzar, who had destroyed that temple and enslaved the Jews, forcing them into their long Babylonian exile. Belshazzar’s wise men were unable to read the writing on the wall, but the Hebrew sage Daniel could, and saw that it was a message of impending doom: and indeed that very night Belshazzar was defeated and killed by the conquest-mad Persian emperor Darius . . . Had I known all this when I was a child, I would have pointed out that the inscrutable message in the Bible is intended for evil men, whereas our relatives had been innocent. Surely in their case, I like to think I would have argued, the handwriting should have been clearer, its meaning less opaque than it was to the unbelievers.
The French Protestants who hadn’t seen the handwriting on the wall either stayed and suffered the consequences which I have mentioned or fled France for other countries: England, the Netherlands, and of course Prussia, where Duke Friedrich Wilhelm welcomed the weary and traumatized émigrés by building for them an educational institution of their own, the Französisches Gymnasium, the Lycée Français, where, so many years later, Erich Auerbach would learn Greek.
Fénelon’s special interest in education was made evident in the publication of his Treatise on the Education of Young Women, published in 1687. That work, along with his other attainments and of course close friendships with important courtiers, one of whom, the duc de Beauvilliers, was responsible for the upbringing of the King’s grandchildren, would help to earn the brilliant pedagogue-priest the greatest possible mark of esteem. Two years after the publication of the Traité de l’éducation des filles he was named tutor to the seven-year-old duc de Bourgogne, the Duke of Burgundy, the eldest grandson and, thus, eventual heir of the Sun King. It was for this boy that Fénelon—who, in recognition of his talents, to say nothing of his usefulness to the royal family, was eventually made an archbishop—began to compose a series of ethically instructive tales based on Homer’s Odyssey. These were eventually collected and published in book form in 1699 as Les aventures de Télémaque, “The Adventures of Telemachus,” the novel I referred to earlier, which begins with Calypso in her cave. This immensely popular work would earn its author lasting literary fame throughout the world, although it was also to seal his catastrophic fall from grace at Versailles.
Les aventures de Télémaque comprises eighteen chapters, or “books.” Its hero is Télémaque, Telemachus, the son of Odysseus (or, as we must call that character here, Ulysse): the young man who is also the hero of the first four books of the Odyssey, the books in which the youth is inspired by Athena to leave home for the first time and go abroad in search of information about his long-lost father. In Homer’s epic, Telemachus sails home to Ithaca from Sparta, where he has spent a strange evening listening to Helen of Troy and Menelaus, the cuckolded husband to whom she has long since been reconciled, as they reminisce about the war in which they played such key roles. In Fénelon’s expansion of Homer’s original, however, the young man seeks out further adventures after his Spartan sojourn. Despite the warnings of the companion whom Fénelon gives him—a sage old man called Mentor, who is, in fact, Minerve, Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom (Homer’s Athena) in disguise—Télémaque insists on sailing to Sicily, where he is nearly killed by Trojan refugees who still harbor a grudge against the Greeks. This is the first in a series of dangerous adventures that, over time, educate the youth in the ways of the world, in statesmanship and war-craft, in friendship and loyalty, and which lead him, eventually, to be shipwrecked on the island of the nymph Calypso. Télémaque’s recitation of all that has befallen him—the narrow escape from Sicily, captivity in Phoenicia and on Cyprus, temptations by Venus, goddess of love, an adventure in Crete, whose laws he studies and whose king, Idoménée, serves as a model of bad kingship throughout Fénelon’s text—so enchants Calypso that she develops an obsessive passion for him, which eventually drives him from her island. Further adventures follow, each one leading to the enunciation of edifying morals about the dangers of greed, egotism, dishonesty, and erotic indulgence. It is only after he learns these lessons, after he understands that “a king is worthy of commanding and is happy in his power only inasmuch as he subjects it to reason,” that Télémaque returns home to Ithaca at last.
In the episodes that make up the eponymous exploits of Les aventures de Télémaque, the erudite author self-consciously echoes details of the Odyssey in a way that is clearly designed to bring a knowing smile to the lips of connoisseurs of Homer. Calypso, for instance, is slyly transformed in the opening pages into a double of Homer’s Odysseus. Just after Ulysse leaves her enchanted island, Fénelon writes, the nymph falls into a state of despondency, standing “immobile by the sea shore which she wetted with her tears; and she was always turned to face the shore where the vessel of Ulysse, braving the waves, had disappeared from her sight.” Those familiar with Homer’s poem will remember the first glimpse that the epic gives us of its hero, at the beginning of Book 5: “sitting by the seashore weeping, as was his wont, / Wracking his heart with tears and groans and grief. / He would gaze across the barren sea and shed his tears.” But as the Frenchman’s narrative progresses, it becomes clear that entire episodes from Homer’s epics are being (as it were) remodeled. Like Achilles in Homer’s Iliad, Télémaque receives a marvelous shield, described at great length and in exhaustive detail, that is fashioned for him by Vulcan, the blacksmith god; and like Odysseus in the Odyssey, the young hero endures a harrowing descent into the land of the dead, where he beholds a panoply of famous heroines and heroes whose sins or triumphs are the object of further instructive moralizing.
Still, for all the cunning resemblances, there are striking differences. Not the least of these is Fénelon’s increasingly original portrayal of Calypso. In Homer, the nymph is rather sympathetic, showing admirable backbone when confronted with the gods’ demand that she give up her lover—a divine order that, with equally admirable pragmatism, she chooses to obey. (As she does so, she articulates a startlingly modern complaint about the gods’ double standard for sexual behavior: male divinities get to keep their mortal lovers, she complains, but goddesses always have to give theirs up.) But in Les aventures de Télémaque, this alluring and clear-eyed character becomes a symbol of female passions run amok, less a character from Greek epic than one of the heroines of the tragedies of Racine (a writer whom Fénelon knew): a vengeful, tormented, desire-maddened woman who will stoop to anything to punish the youth who has proved immune to her charms—and an exemplar, as no doubt even the young duc de Bourgogne could perceive, of the kind of female that virtuous young princes ought to avoid. Like Homer’s Odysseus, who while proclaiming his fidelity to his wife all through the Odyssey nonetheless manages to slake his appetites for female companionship, Fénelon’s text manages to display an allegiance to “home” while meandering far from it, the allegiance showcasing his literary erudition even as the meanderings constitute a tribute to his creative inventiveness.
It is difficult not to think of this business of wanderings and returns, of points of departure and distant divagations, when encountering a passage that comes early in Fénelon’s tale: the description of Calypso’s cave. In Les aventures de Télémaque, the nymph’s abode is not concealed by funereal cypresses, as it is in Homer, but rather is conspicuously located on the slope of a hill, from one side of which can be seen the sea glittering below, while the other side looks out onto a stream dotted by islands. These islands, the author observes, are demarcated by canals
which seemed to play amid the countryside: some rolling along swiftly with their clear waters, others with their placid, sleepy waters, and still others doubling back on themselves, by means of long detours, as if to return to their source, as though incapable of leaving those enchanted banks.
There are streams running near Calypso’s cave in Homer, but these are barely described by the poet: “one turned this way, the other that.” Fénelon’s scene-setting is more elaborate. Given the twofold relation of the Frenchman’s text to Homer’s—at once imitative and inventive, both paralleling and diverging from its model—the canals in Les aventures begin to strike you as heavily symbolic. For narratives, too, move like streams. Some, as we know, roll along swiftly, while others barely move; still others, despite the lengthy detours they take, end up just where they started, yearning to return to their source.
That last stream in particular is interesting. In the earliest printed versions of Les aventures de Télémaque, the work is described as being the suite du quatrième livre de l’Odyssée d’Homère, the continuation of the fourth book of Homer’s Odyssey. But suite, continuation, suggests an open-ended trajectory—a vector that moves, like the first of Fénelon’s streams, rollingly and freely ahead; whereas the narrative in Les aventures de Télémaque turns out to have a very different shape. At the end of Homer’s Book 4, Telemachus has come to the end of that memorable evening of storytelling and reminiscing by Menelaus and Helen; at this very moment the epic abandons him, turning first to the plotting of the Suitors and then to Odysseus, whom we meet at last in the next book, Book 5 (the very passage in which we see Odysseus weeping by the seashore). It is not until Book 15 that the son’s story is picked up again, when we see him leaving Sparta on his way home to Ithaca: in the final lines of that book, Telemachus disembarks on an out-of-the-way shore of his native island and makes his way to the hut of the swineherd Eumaeus, where, in the next book, he will meet his father. It is within this enclosure hollowed out of the plot of the Odyssey, bounded by Book 4 on one side and the conclusion of Book 15 on the other, that all of the action of Les aventures de Télémaque take place. Which is to say that, inventive and digressive as it can be, Fénelon’s novel ends by returning to its source, landing Télémaque exactly where he needs to be for the plot of Homer’s poem to snap into place and lead the son to the father. And in fact, the climactic moment of father-son reunion described in Book 16 of the Odyssey is precisely where Fénelon’s adaptation ends. In the closing lines of the archbishop’s novel, Minerve gives her charge a final word of advice and then flies off, leaving Telemachus and his companions to return home to Ithaca where, according to the final sentence of Fénelon’s novel, il reconnut son père chez le fidèle Eumée, he recognized his father in the home of the faithful Eumaeus.
And so what looks like a meandering plot in Les aventures de Télémaque—a series of incidents that, you often feel, could keep on going as long as the archbishop’s capacity for invention remained unexhausted—is, in fact, a tightly bounded circle. As with the last of the streams that flow near Calypso’s abode, there are wanderings, longs détours; but in the end they are not turnings-aside, dé-tours, but turnings toward—revolutions that bring us back to where we began, the source: in this case, the Odyssey itself, the wellspring of the narrative that Fénelon has ostensibly invented. Wherever it may lead, whatever fanciful inventions it contains, the archbishop’s fantasia on Homeric themes points to the potentially infinite number of circles that can be drawn within a single ring.
ON THIS PSEUDO-ODYSSEAN armature Fénelon hung the ethically instructive material for which the book became famous—and, for himself, dangerous. At the close of the seventeenth century it did not require an Odysseus-like cleverness to discern in the text’s many lectures (often put in the mouth of Minerve) on good kingship—to say nothing of the devastating portrayal of Idoménée, the Cretan king who, whatever his good intentions, is repeatedly criticized for his pride, his susceptibility to flattery, his vanity, and his penchant for expensive wars and costly luxuries—a bitter critique of the Sun King himself, who is alluded to at one point by means of a striking metaphor. “These great conquerors,” a character observes, “always depicted so gloriously, resemble those rivers in spate that look majestic but which ravage the fertile lands they are meant simply to water.” Louis, no fool, was enraged, and in 1699, soon after the novel was published, Fénelon was sent packing to the diocese of which he was titular head, far in the north of France, a bleak and cold place that was particularly hard on the aging southerner, who in a letter to a friend soon after he arrived at this unfriendly destination described himself as being extremi hominum, at the extremes of human habitation—“more Germany than France,” as the archbishop bitterly put it. Meanwhile, at Versailles, his supporters at court mourned his absence. In a sympathetic account of the clergyman’s disgrace, the diarist Saint-Simon compares the grief of Fénelon’s friends at Versailles to the mourning of the ancient Jews for Jerusalem during the Babylonian Captivity, that period of exiled enslavement following the destruction of the Temple. The lamentations of Fénelon’s partisans, their constant hope of his return, were compared by the diarist to “the way in which that unhappy people still wait for and sigh after the Messiah.” In a portrait made before his downfall, the archbishop has an elongated but kindly face, the high hooked nose, with its sharp tip, and the rather pointed chin offset by the warm dark eyes, whose brows are raised in what can strike you as an attractive frankness—an openness to questions, to possibility, not always present in the faces of high clergymen. It is the patient and generous (if slightly weary) face of a good teacher. It is sad to think of this face gazing down at a sheet of paper on which the words extremi hominum have just been written.
Whatever irritation it may have caused Louis, Les aventures de Télémaque was an instant success. Throughout the eighteenth century it was the most widely read book in France and, very possibly, in all of Europe. It was said that, until the publication of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, in 1774, Télémaque had no rival in book sales apart from the Bible. It appeared in so many translations that, as one modern scholar has noted, “the exact count of its European translations has yet to be made.” It was translated into Latin verse at least twice. The profusion of bilingual editions—Italian-French, German-French—suggests, among other things, that in time Fénelon’s text had come to serve as a kind of French-language textbook for foreigners, thereby fulfilling the archbishop’s pedagogical aims in ways he cannot have foreseen. Above all, the novel’s anti-authoritarian stance and apparent endorsement of universal brotherhood endeared it to the great minds of the Enlightenment. Voltaire praised it as not merely a highly entertaining work of fiction but as a roman moral; Montesquieu described it as “the divine book of this century.” It was a favorite of other leading lights, from Rousseau (the protagonist of whose own educational-treatise-as-novel, Émile, or On Education, happily devours Fénelon’s novel) to Thomas Jefferson, the remarkable polymath who was president of the United States of America from 1801 to 1809, an accomplishment he considered less important, if one is to judge from the fact that he neglects to mention it in the epitaph he composed for his funerary monument, than was his founding of the University of Virginia, which he did take care to mention in that memorial text, and which was the institution that I myself attended; that university being founded on the most idealistic pedagogical principles, principles that derived, in part, from Jefferson’s devoted reading of Les aventures de Télémaque, and which, therefore, I suppose I myself may have absorbed in some small way.
LIKE HOMER’S ODYSSEUS, Fénelon’s novel presented different faces to different people. Each era, it seemed, saw in Télémaque a reflection of itself. To contemporaries it was a critique of the Sun King: the reading of Louis himself. The Enlightenment philosophers who so admired the book saw in its stalwart anti-authoritarianism, its refreshing emphasis on the happiness of the people, and its assertion of the principle of universal brotherhood, tous les peuples sont frères, et doivent s’aimer comme tels, a foreshadowing of their own movement. During the 1780s Les aventures was read as a prescient forecast of the Revolution; one pamphlet that circulated at the time was called “Fénelon at the Estates-General.” Half a century later—just around the time when the term Bildungsroman was coined by the German philologist Karl Morgenstern, a pupil of Friedrich August Wolf, the Homer scholar who founded the modern discipline of philology—the novel’s depth of feeling and tender portrayal of the master-student relationship won him new admirers: Stendhal, Sainte-Beuve, Jules Lemaître. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Fénelon and his book were featured in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, in which the author of Les aventures de Télémaque, along with Madame de Sévigné and Racine, appears as part of a sacred trio of seventeenth-century authors to whom the narrative often alludes. In the second volume of Proust’s immense novel, for instance, the touching character of the grandmother, a great aficionada of Madame de Sévigné in particular, declares that she is full of envy for those who had the privilege of being educated by Fénelon—although it is to be assumed that she is referring in this instance to the duc de Bourgogne and his brothers rather than to Fénelon’s students at the Institut des Nouvelles Catholiques, those young girls whose families, buffeted by the tides of politics and religious controversy, had been able to see the handwriting on the wall.
If Fénelon’s novel exemplifies one aspect of what I have called the “optimistic” possibilities of narrative—that is, the possibility of infinite digressions within an existing story, of a potentially endless series of smaller concentric circles nested within a larger one; as if Calypso’s hollow cave contained a series of smaller hollows—Proust’s novel shows us the other optimistic vista. In Search of Lost Time suggests that a vast series of digressions could themselves form the largest imaginable ring, one that embraces all of human experience.
The novel famously begins with a description of two digressive possibilities, two “ways” leading to two discrete geographies, each constituting a side, or côté, of the Narrator’s mental map: the two possible directions in which one could take a walk upon leaving his Aunt Léonie’s house in the country town of Combray, where he and his family spent their Easter holidays. When he was young, the Narrator muses, these two côtés seemed to be not merely discrete but opposite to each other:
For there were, in the environs of Combray, two “ways” which we used to take for our walks, and so diametrically opposed that we would actually leave the house by a different door, according to the way we had chosen: the way towards Méséglise-la-Vineuse, which we called also “Swann’s way,” because, to get there, one had to pass along the boundary of M. Swann’s estate, and the “Guermantes way.”
Swann’s way, as the Narrator observes, strays past the country home of the Jewish socialite and art collector Charles Swann, a family friend whose obsessive love for the courtesan Odette de Crécy provides a template for the Narrator’s later passions, one of which, during his adolescence, will be for the young daughter of Swann and Odette, Gilberte; and the greatest and most obsessive of which, for a young woman called Albertine Simonet, will eventually preoccupy entire volumes of the novel. (One of these is called The Prisoner, a title that could well be used for Book 5 of the Odyssey.) The Guermantes way, on the other hand, leads to the country seat belonging to the supremely aristocratic family with whose manners, lives, and activities the Narrator is equally obsessed.
As many critics have observed, each of these ways is highly symbolic of a discrete set of themes—themes that, by means of fantastically elaborated series of narrations and digressions, are exhaustively treated in the course of the novel’s four thousand pages. Swann’s way evokes the world as it is: the strivings of the upper middle classes (one exemplar of which, a character comments, “is a greater liar than Odysseus, the greatest of all liars”), the Dreyfus Affair, politics, diplomacy, international affairs, religion, the demimonde, sex; and also, by association with a series of creative artists whose existences brush against those of Swann and the Narrator and his family, the life of the mind, the world of art, music, and literature. The Guermantes way, by contrast, represents a kind of myth—of aristocratic society, of history, of French national and cultural identity and ideology as represented by a rarefied distillation of that society’s manners, clothes, attitudes, and attributes. In the passage about the two ways which I have just quoted, the Narrator refers to this myth as an ideal, although his increasing exposure to the Guermantes and their set begins to erode that ideal, as it becomes clear that this “way” shares many characters, qualities, and attributes with the other “way”—a tantalizing hint that the two ways may be not so much opposite poles on a line than two arcs of the same circle. This possibility is very far from the mind of the Narrator in his childhood, of course, when, as Proust writes, “to ‘take the Guermantes way’ in order to get to Méséglise, or vice versa, would have seemed to me as nonsensical a proceeding as to turn to the east in order to reach the west.”
The unexpectedly vast embrace of the novel, the ultimate unity and purposefulness (as the Narrator will perceive following a revelation late in the final volume) of a narrative that so often seems meandering and digressive, is enacted in miniature at various points throughout its seven volumes, as if to reassure the discerning reader that there is in fact a plan at work, even though the totality of that plan will not be perceptible until the final pages of his novel. An excellent example of this phenomenon can be found in the second volume, À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, “Within a Budding Grove,” which covers the period of the Narrator’s adolescence and awakening sexuality. Beginning in Paris with the young Marcel’s immature crush on Gilberte Swann, this installment eventually takes him to the Normandy seaside resort of Balbec, where he is drawn into a circle of vivacious young girls—the “budding young women” to whom the title refers. One of these girls is Albertine, on whom, as a scene toward the end of this volume makes clear, the Narrator decides to settle his affections as the result almost of a whim, a decision whose seemingly arbitrary origins will strike the reader as ironic, given the impact Albertine will have on his life and the huge role that the affair will play in the novel as a whole, serving as a vehicle for its ongoing autopsy of desire, creativity, identity, and time.
How does the affair begin? “Now and then,” the Narrator recalls in the second half of Within a Budding Grove, “a pretty attention from one or another [of the girls] would stir in me vibrations which dissipated for a time my desire for the rest.” One day, he goes on, during a seaside outing with her friends, Albertine writes a message on a piece of paper, which she then hands to the Narrator. The message says, “I like you.” Yet the Narrator’s response, which will have such seismic repercussions for his whole life, is held at bay until the end of a long scene—a “self-contained whole,” as W. A. A. Van Otterlo might have described it in one of his papers of the 1940s—that is triggered by the words “I like you.” Precisely like the scene in the Odyssey when the nurse Eurycleia recognizes the scar of Odysseus, that dramatic moment which is then frozen while the narrative spins back in time to give us the history of the scar and, beyond that, of Odysseus’s name and identity, the critical moment of pregnant recognition toward the end of Proust’s second volume is held in abeyance until the narration can circle outward and incorporate some crucial information about the characters before returning to the moment of recognition, which is in fact marked here by a repetition of the words “I like you,” and which ultimately illuminates the nature and scope of his own novel, suggesting the enormous range of its themes, techniques, and interests.
Just after the Narrator reads the fateful words, Albertine, as if embarrassed by her note, hastily changes the subject—the subject to which she now addresses herself being, as it happens, the education of young girls. She tells her friends that she has received some mail from their schoolmate Gisèle, who has sent along an exam essay she’s just completed in the hope that it might be useful to them in taking their own exams. Albertine fishes out Gisèle’s letter and rather officiously begins to summarize it for her friends as they picnic on the Normandy beach: the beginning of a scene that charmingly evokes the adolescent schoolgirls’ world, their preoccupations and behavior . . . As once did, in a different context of course, the Polish survivor I’d interviewed in Bondi Beach, who had grinned as he recalled to me how expensive it once had been for my great-uncle to send his four daughters to school (this being an ideal example, as he saw it, of the quotidian, middle-class lives they had all lived before the onset of the Occupation, after which they were being hunted down like animals), and who, despairing of his abilities to convey in words what one of those girls, who during the war would have been about Albertine’s age, looked like when she went to school each day, suddenly picked up a sheaf of papers and stuffed them in a satchel and strode around his living room, enacting the winningly energetic ways that that particular lost schoolgirl had once had.
Gisèle, we learn as Albertine reads on, has had to choose between two prompts, both concerning the theater of Racine, that great favorite of the Narrator’s grandmother. The choice of playwright in this scene is, indeed, carefully prepared. Earlier on, before the action moves to Balbec, we learn a great deal about the Narrator’s obsessive interest in a great actress called Berma and her acclaimed performances in Racine’s Phèdre—a work, based on Euripides’s Hippolytus, whose theme of one-sided erotic obsession underscores the motif of anguished, unrequited passion that courses through Proust’s novel. But the plays about which Gisèle’s teacher has asked are not Racine’s well-known works inspired by classical antiquity; they are, rather, based on incidents from the Old Testament and Jewish history. The first prompt is, “Sophocles, from the Shades, writes to Racine to console him for the failure of Athalie”; the second, “Suppose that, after the first performance of Esther, Mme de Sévigné is writing to Mme de la Fayette to tell her how much she regretted her absence.” Now Esther (1689) is a dramatization of the story from the Book of Esther about the triumph of the eponymous Jewish queen over her enemy, the evil Persian grand vizier Haman (in French, Aman), who had planned to wipe out the Jewish people. Athalie (1691), Racine’s final work for the stage, is about how a virtuous priest of the Temple in Jerusalem triumphs over an evil queen—the ruthless Athaliah, who forsakes the worship of the one true god and shows herself willing to murder even guiltless babes in her mad quest for power. These allusions to Jewish suffering evoked in Proust’s choice of subjects for the girls’ test questions are not incidental to À la recherche, much of which is preoccupied with Jews and their place in French society, from Charles Swann in the first volume to the Dreyfus Affair, by which French society was riven and which becomes central to later installments.
Gisèle had chosen to reply to the first prompt, which requires her to impersonate Sophocles as he writes from the dead to the crestfallen Racine following the debacle of Athalie’s premiere. (The play’s failure, according to the nineteenth-century French critic Gustave Merlet, stemmed in part from the drab simplicity of the cheap sets, which could not come close to reproducing the magnificence of Solomon’s Temple.) Gisèle begins by having Sophocles congratulate Racine for managing to create a moving tragedy in which religious piety, rather than erotic passion, is the “keynote”—for writing a play that (to put it another way) follows the Hebrew rather than the Greek paradigm. Her Sophocles then admires Racine for giving great poetry not only to the various characters but to the chorus: “a veritable novelty in France.” If the play’s moral loftiness and artistic innovations failed to impress the public at its premiere, this fictional Sophocles concludes, it was the fault of the public’s, rather than the author’s, taste.
Albertine is deeply impressed by her friend’s cleverness. But when she finishes reading Gisèle’s letter—the letter, we remember, that is keeping the Narrator in anguished suspense about the love-note he received only minutes before—another member of the little band of girls, Andrée, chimes in with a devastating critique of Gisèle’s exam paper, creating a second ring within the digression initiated by Albertine’s reading and, not incidentally, manufacturing still more agonizing suspense for the Narrator.
Andrée begins by deriding Gisèle’s paper as meandering and disordered. How much better to begin with an outline or rough sketch! For in that way, with a summary to refer to, “you know where you are.” Point by point, she then demolishes her friend’s arguments, dismissing the praise of Athalie’s pious subject matter as woefully ahistorical (the Hebrew and Greek religions were too different for useful comparison, she declares), and deriding the idea that Racine’s lyrical choruses were an innovation (she rattles off examples of much earlier plays—one about Haman and Esther, another about Nebuchadnezzar and his persecution of the Jews—that gave beautiful verse to the chorus). As for placing the blame for the failure of Athalie on the public’s poor taste, Andrée reminds the girls that it was “not for the general public but before the Sun King and a few privileged courtiers that Athalie was first played”—among which privileged courtiers, as Proust, that lover of seventeenth-century literature and court gossip, must have known, was François Fénelon, invited to join the king’s circle as a tribute to his pedagogical services to the royal family. Andrée ends her diatribe by airily recommending that her friends acquaint themselves with the work of the critic Gustave Merlet.
It is at this moment—the moment that confirms Albertine’s inferior intellectual panache and expertise, in comparison to those of Andrée—that Proust’s digression ends and the narrative returns to the urgent present, a return signaled by the repetition of the words “I like you”:
Meanwhile, I had been thinking of the little page torn from a scribbling block which Albertine had handed me. “I like you,” she had written. And an hour later . . . I said to myself that it was with her that I would have my romance.
And so the digression that begins with that scribbled “I like you” and then veers violently away from the quotidian world of adolescent girlish worries, the crushes and the school examinations, to a series of references first to the large outside world and its concerns—royalty, politics, intolerance, war, religion; and thence to the rarefied fields of literature, theater, stage design, art, criticism, history—the digression that begins and ends with the childishly simple “I like you,” which we know will be a harbinger of the most excruciating adult emotions imaginable, has in fact ended up traveling down the two “ways” introduced in Proust’s first volume: the two vast and seemingly discrete geographies which so surprisingly come together to constitute the world itself.
So too, as we learn at the end of Proust’s novel, do the two roads which (the Narrator had thought in his childhood) went in opposite directions from his great-aunt’s house in Combray turn out, in reality, to be one and the same. In the opening pages of the final volume, Le temps retrouvé, “Time Regained,” the Narrator returns as an adult to Combray and there visits his childhood love, Gilberte, who is by now a grown woman trapped in an unhappy marriage. Gilberte surprises the Narrator in a number of ways during their conversations, not least on the occasion when, in the course of one of their pleasant walks around the old town, Gilberte makes a startling suggestion:
Gilberte said to me: “If you like, we might after all go out one afternoon and then we can go to Guermantes, taking the road by Méséglise [‘Swann’s way’], which is the nicest way,” a sentence which upset all the ideas of my childhood by informing me that the two “ways” were not as irreconcilable as I had supposed.
The two routes radiating out from his family home, the Narrator and the reader of the novel now learn, are not vectors but rather arcs of a circle, components of a ring that circumnavigates the town.
That this insight marks the beginning of the final volume is no accident. Here, just as at the end of the Odyssey, a series of climactic recognitions signals the gigantic coherence of the work itself. Some of those recognitions are ironic, even bitter. There is, for instance, the information, revealed to the Narrator by Gilberte during one of their chats, that she had been as attracted to him in their youth as he had been to her. As intensely as he’d been studying her, it turns out, he had been blind to the signal that (as she can now admit) she had been trying to send one day when he passed by Swann’s house and had caught sight of her, a scene described in the novel’s first volume, Swann’s Way. The meaning of the vulgar gesture she had made as he passed by, which had seemed obvious to her, was nonetheless misinterpreted at the time by the Narrator—a mistake, he now realizes, that had determined the course of his entire life. This climactic insight suggests that even the most ardent intellects, the greatest minds, can fail at interpretation, can fail to “read” the world correctly, until it is too late.
The unity of the two ways, Swann’s and the Guermantes’, has in fact already been hinted at by this point in À la recherche, symbolized by a marriage between a Swann and a Guermantes: the union of Gilberte herself, the daughter of Charles Swann, to a beloved friend of the Narrator who belongs, ostensibly, to the “Guermantes way”—a young man called Robert de Saint-Loup, a nephew of the duc and duchesse de Guermantes. The choice of groom is important. More than most characters in Proust, Saint-Loup himself is riven by extraordinary oppositions—as his strange and striking name, whose literal meaning is “Saint-Wolf,” seems to hint—combining within himself many opposite “ways.” A sensitive intellectual and a tradition-bound officer, an aristocrat and a liberal, heterosexual and homosexual, Robert is an enigma who never stops fascinating the Narrator, from his first appearance in Within a Budding Grove to his heroic death at the German front during World War I, referred to in Time Regained.
In the final pages of À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, the author reminds us that we must be on guard against the impulse to locate the reality behind our fictions, since reality is usually so much more dreary. “Geographers or archaeologists may conduct us over Calypso’s island, may excavate the Palace of Minos. Only, Calypso becomes then a mere woman, Minos a mere king . . .” Still, many of the characters and locales we encounter in his novel were based on real people and places, and it is almost impossible to resist the temptation to trace the resemblances between the fictional and the real. We know, for instance, that Saint-Loup was based on a real person. Around the turn of the twentieth century the author had made the acquaintance of a handsome young aristocrat called Bertrand, a diplomat who was posted at one point to the faraway Ottoman capital: a frustration about which Proust complains bitterly in his letters to his friend Antoine Bibesco. But if the thought of Constantinople (as Proust calls Istanbul in his letters) tormented the writer, there was another locale associated with his dashing young friend for which the author could only be grateful. Bertrand was descended from a great family that had thrown off several prominent Catholic prelates, one of whom presided over a see—the very place, in fact, where Proust in his novel locates the front where Saint-Loup is killed—called Cambrai. There can be little doubt that this place, long associated with Bertrand’s family, inspired the fictional name “Combray” in Proust’s novel: the town, with its highly symbolic geographies, where the Narrator encounters the two ways which at first he believed were distinct but turn out to be one.
In a letter to Bibesco dated August 1910, a dejected Proust, recognizing that Bertrand, who was then heading off again to the distant Ottoman capital, was yet another in a long series of loves as unrequited as Phèdre’s, charmingly evokes his friend’s appealing ways and good looks. Of particular beauty, Proust writes, were Bertrand’s eyes, his yeux blu de mer qui viennent en droite ligne de Télémaque et de l’île de Calypso, his sea-blue eyes that come straight from Telemachus and the island of Calypso. The compliment would not have surprised those who, like the future author of À la recherche, had a deep intimacy with the history of the French nobility. For it happens that striking eyes were a noted feature of Bertrand’s family going back several centuries. In the 1680s, for example, Saint-Simon described one of Bertrand’s distant relations as having eyes “whose fire and wit sprang forth like a torrent.” Reading his words, I find it impossible not to think of Auerbach’s gemeinsame Verbindung, that deep connectedness among things which, for the optimist at least, is sometimes detectable in history as well as in literature. The flashing-eyed relative in question was François-Armand de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon, author of Les aventures de Télémaque, tutor to Louis XIV’s grandson, and archbishop of Cambrai.