I am thinking this week about attention or its absence, how and why the mind calibrates around something (a person, an object, a work of art, a bad affect) beyond itself. Attention is, I think, a bit like memory. We articulate it in spatial terms, often as a matter of depth: flares of energy that surface and again are submerged—or else as an experience of changeable, non-linear intensities. Why is one memory more saturated or present to us than the next? Why is this one a film in Technicolor, and the other only a frozen tableau, a sequence of still images? Why does this book rather than that hold my focus?1 Why, god, does my mind drift in conversation toward how I plan to respond to something a friend has said, what I must do after we’ve parted, or whether I’m appearing as present as I’d like, in point of fact, to actually be?
In an essay for the November issue of Harper’s, Sallie Tisdale writes that neuroscientists speak about memory in terms of “persistence” or “transience”—it’s less a field recording or a chronology and more a kind of “vapor.” Some airs are heavier than others. This put me in mind of Eve Sedgwick’s writing on Proust’s weather2, which I mentioned in (I believe) my immediately previous dispatch; that is, her writing on the atmospheric disturbances that pervade his Search, Proust’s occasionally-Orientalist fascination with metempsychosis and the transmigration of souls, even the recurring description by the narrator of himself as an “animated barometer.”
As Sedgwick notes, the narrator’s attentions to the “weather” have often to do with its most inevident manifestations: shifts in barometric pressure, which—unlike a measurable transformation indicated by a thermometer or the visible climate—are non-perceptible in isolation. They mean “nothing at all outside a dynamic interpretive context.” In a difficult chapter of the book I’m writing I’ve been trying to articulate something of this quality—that notion of a specter, an ambient force hovering along the edges of sense. What do we mean by our attention to a feeling others can’t or don’t wish to recognize? How do we make it legible if it remains unseen? Partly I think this concerns an accumulation of texture; a kind of gathering, invisible weight. Like a feeling of being followed or watched—or the inexplicable shiver that comes over you, what we would call, where I grew up, “a rabbit running over your grave.”
In Proust, it’s true, this isn’t so foreboding a phenomenon3, but his sense of it is, at least in part, about an ontological disorientation of the subject; the atmospheric displacement of the unified self4. Is the air we breathe in us or of us? The fact that the air is Not Us—and also is Not Not Us—suggests something about the interpenetrative capacities of our being-in-the-world. We share the air, which means we are ineluctably entwined. Our bodies are made up of the same stuff. This fact connects us, each and all, and this fact’s shadow side—what has never been more apparent than in our COVID contemporary—is the inescapable threat of contamination.
I was remembering, the other day, the wide berths everyone seemed to extend to one another in those early months of this pandemic. I remember the feeling of holding my breath—even when double masked—as I passed others; I remember thinking this was the thing that would keep me safe. In the relentless repetition of these encounters (nearly four years now!) it became incrementally easier, I suspect, to recognize others as perilous vectors, rather than as fellow sufferers, people as imminently vulnerable as we. As in countless facets of modern life, paranoia took root. Our increasing callousness—which is of course a kind of inattention—became remapped as a necessary instrument of survival. Selfishness was transposed in the key of self-preservation.
The preoccupying query of The Guermantes Way (or in any event, this first half of the volume) is arguably the Dreyfus Affair, which concerned the 1895 conviction of a young Jewish artillery officer, Alfred Dreyfus, for a crime of treason he didn’t commit. In Adam Gopnik’s reading, the trial—and its attendant explosion of anti-Semitism—explodes Proust’s vision of an ethno-culturally assimilated aristocracy, where “intellect and grace” merge (through the happy integration of a figure like Swann), and the prejudices of the upper crust dissolve. Gopnik suggests that this intercession irrevocably alters the tone of the Search, from the “melancholy but high-hearted” feeling of the early volumes to the “straitened and suspicious circumstances” of the latter half.
Speaking historically, Proust was a Dreyfusard from the start: in his brief biography of Proust (Proust: The Search), Benjamin Taylor argues that Proust’s campaigning on behalf of Dreyfus was not, as one might think, because he “felt Jewish,” but because the Affair was a “clear-cut miscarriage of justice that demanded reversal.” Proust, rather, “saw himself as what he was: the non-Jewish son of a Jewish mother.” His politics should nonetheless be understood here as radical, especially considering, as Taylor points out, the fact that “the majority of acculturated Jews did not become Dreyfusard; they tended to remain silent.”
There is an encounter in Guermantes between our narrator and the Baron de Charlus that seems to me especially illustrative of “the” “conflict,” and which felt kin to my fixation on this trouble of attention. On leaving Mme de Villeparisis’s salon, Charlus approaches Marcel about undertaking a sort of strange mentorship. There is nothing, he says,
so agreeable as to put oneself out for a person who is worth one’s while. For the best of us, the study of the arts, a taste for old things, collections, gardens, are all mere ersatz, surrogates5, alibis. From the depths of our tub, like Diogenes, we cry out for a man. We cultivate begonias, we trim yews, as a last resort, because yews and begonias submit to treatment. But we should prefer to give our time to a plant of human growth, if we were sure he was worth the trouble. That is the whole question (v III, p 387).
What must command our notice and time are objects of supposed value, things or people that demonstrate they’ve earned it: our most astonishing cultivars. In being flattered by Charlus’s attentions, however, the narrator has mistaken the man’s objective. Charlus seems interested, not in the narrator himself, but in the possibility that the narrator might lead him to the Bloch family, and they, in turn, would draw Charlus toward “some great festival in the Temple, a circumcision, or some Hebrew chants.” Charlus desires “biblical entertainment” and “exotic spectacles.” His broad disinterest in or political divestment from the Dreyfus case reveals to the narrator an unexpected reading of it: Charlus “pay[s] no attention to the newspapers; I read them as I wash my hands, without considering it worth my while to take an interest in what I am doing. In any case, the crime is non-existent. This compatriot of your friend would have committed a crime if he had betrayed Judaea, but what has he to do with France?”
Something of this framing felt so immediate to me, so embedded in the current moment’s political consciousness—thinking of the ways we turn away from suffering, compartmentalize it, or else objectify it as the Dreyfus case becomes objectifiable in drawing room discourse: it’s an ideological trouble, yes, but even for someone as vociferously anti-Semitic as the Baron de Charlus6, the matter is unworthy of attention (“I read [of this like how] I wash my hands”), because it seems to have nothing to do with him or with France—the injustice is always over there, even as it is on his very doorstep, beholden to the political life he himself shores up. Charlus wishes to manipulate the narrator’s friendship with Bloch so that he can render Bloch (and, in turn, the “Asiatic spectacle” of Jewishness) an aesthetic curiosity, a manner of “sport” that might usefully draw out his interest.
I was thinking of this tension—between injustice and (in)attention—in my encounter with another “text” this week.
The other night I went to the Angelika, a theater I don’t visit often enough, to see Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, an unnerving portrait of Rudolf Höss—the Nazi commandant who converted Auschwitz into a death camp, and introduced the gas chambers, as well as Zyklon B—and the Höss family’s daily life on the outskirts of the camp. It’s not, for obvious reasons, a particularly easy film to watch. Much has been made of the fact that we don’t witness the atrocities being committed inside the camp. This is the film’s meticulously-erected epistemological boundary, one where knowledge is disseminated principally through administrative and bureaucratic minutaie or nit-picking, or else through the objects (and the corporeal remains) of the dead. The historical trauma of the Holocaust is, in the film, largely indirect—an unfathomable specter haunting the film’s visual periphery. It is the smoke that perpetually clouds the often blindingly blue horizon; it is the grotesque overflow of waste in the river; it is the orange glow the Höss family is woken by in the middle of the night; it is the ash that’s spread by a Jewish prisoner as fertilizer over Hedwig Höss’s “paradise garden.”
It’s easy to summon Hannah Arendt’s discourse on the banality of evil here, but Glazer’s Höss is not Arendt’s thoughtless “joiner” Eichmann. Even if we aren’t privy to acts of unambiguous recognition, this family, we know, knows what is going on. For her servants, “Hedy” dispenses clothing that’s been confiscated from those sent to the camp—some or all among them are Jewish (although, to her mother, Hedy insists they aren’t “Jews” but only “local girls”—she attends to their identities only insofar as they benefit her). For her own grim pleasure, she preens before her bedroom mirror in a stolen ermine coat; in its lining she discovers a tube of lipstick, the shade of which she tests first on her hand, before applying it to her mouth. It’s a shocking scene. She keeps the door shut during this indulgence; she delights in the objects but doesn’t wish, at least not in this moment, to be seen prancing about in them.
In a broadly positive (and, I think, sensitive and sharp) appraisal of the film, Robert Daniels suggests that the family “never comments” on the genocide unfolding quite literally beside them, but there are, nonetheless, moments of direct address. Hedy’s mother wonders whether a Jewish neighbor she disliked is in the camp—she is superior and resentful after having been outbid on the woman’s possessions. During an especially chilling moment, Hedy tells one of her “girls” that she could order her husband to spread the woman’s ashes in a field. “Rudi,” she cackles to her mother, “calls me the Queen of Auschwitz.” In the opening of the film we watch Hedy, with her infant daughter in her arms, name the many-colored flora of her garden. The camera creeps closer to a particularly large dahlia7; bees buzz and delight among the petals. Meanwhile, and just over the garden wall—itself adorned with barbed wire—barracks are stood up like monoliths or mausoleums. Smoke rises above the horizon from the trains we cannot see but know are delivering thousands of people each day for eradication. The air is not us, but nor is it not not us.
Unsurprisingly, some critics have argued Glazer’s narrative investment in the life of an architect of the Holocaust (and the film’s depictions of those who shore up Höss’s life through domesticity-as-usual) is a betrayal of those murdered by Höss’s design. Others, like Richard Brody in The New Yorker, have identified his slantwise representation of the camp’s horrors in a tradition of “Holokitsch”: Glazer, he argues, imagines the unspeakable “by way of bathos”—he “shrinks from portraying the horrors … and, as a result, he trivializes them.” Certainly, Glazer’s decision to leave the orientation of his film’s regard so entirely illegible is a risk. I found the experience almost totally disorienting—but then, I’ve long admired Glazer’s willful opacity as a director, his refusal to submit to interpretation.
Glazer has spoken of there being “two films” inside The Zone of Interest’s reckoning with the Holocaust: the visual (what, of horror, is concealed from or displaced by the frame) and the aural (the recognizable, and, indeed, unignorable eruptions of shrieks, guard dogs barking, train engines, gunshots), which compete with one another in the meaning-making process of the narrative. I think this is right, but I felt rather provoked or energized by the way a kind of split looking emerges within the visual politic of the movie. In multiple scenes, the youngest son is asked what he’s doing, and he murmurs “looking,” “I’m looking”—but at what? He wakes in the night, to find the sky suffused by the awful red light coming from the chambers. The grandmother, too, witnesses this. By next morning, she’s fled. What does it mean to look without actually seeing? How do we assimilate the detritus of our regard into a narrative?
Glazer has built his career on this riddle. In 2004’s Birth, Nicole Kidman’s Anna at first refuses to see what is so clearly uncanny about a 10 year old boy who claims to be her dead (and now reincarnated) husband. As the boy’s odd archive of knowledge unfurls, however, the minutiae of her previous life—the woman she had been in that lost love—gather and congeal; the possibility that this boy is telling the truth amasses its material, which is to say: it becomes a story. There is an astonishing extended close-up in the middle of the film where we watch Kidman, and Kidman alone, watching the opera. For two minutes, the camera trains its gaze on her just barely-flickering expression. Anna is looking without seeing; she’s plainly traveled elsewhere. But how can I know this? I suppose I can’t, or not really. I saw the film in the theaters and I remember being brought to tears by this moment, finding, I guess, some affinity in its attempt to visually reckon with dissociation. In 2013’s Under the Skin, there are similar scenes of curious regard—this time, with Scarlett Johannson’s nameless extraterrestrial, as she studies the behaviors and tendernesses and sufferings of human others, attempting to formulate a conception of self-knowledge, self-regard—attempting to come to an account of oneself.
In The Zone of Interest, the Höss family’s bounty, not to mention their very subjectivity, is founded on a violence of exclusion and eradication. Unfathomable atrocities produce the literal bedrock of their “paradise,” their beauty, and their joy: the flowers Hedy arranges on her table thrive through the material overflow of mass death; the luxuries she brags about over tea with friends have been ripped from the bodies of people she looks on without seeing—without compassion or empathy, as subhuman—people her husband burns up each day, just past her line of sight. It was funny (in the most abject sense) to read that Amy Schumer named Zone her favorite film of 2023, because I had to see, as in really see, the ways the film might possibly affirm for her, and those whose line of thought is like hers, a kind of historical and moral justification for the genocide and mass displacement Israel (with American money, consent, and weaponry) is committing against and forcing upon the Palestinian people. This wasn’t, of course, my reading of Zone in the slightest, which seemed to me to concern what horror we allow so our lives proceed most smoothly—what is exiled from the frame of our understanding.
As I watched the movie, it spoke to me, rather, of how we go on turning our faces from what we witness each day: babies being pulled from their incubators at Al Shifa hospital, children being dug out from vast seas of rubble, the men of Gaza rescuing cats and other beloved animals from the devastation of bombings. It was strange to celebrate the holidays these last weeks; it is strange to have my attention drawn, today, to the New Year. It’s no secret our lives do not stop, as time doesn’t, even if it feels like it has. Our lives, though—as we must notice now more than ever—are built on this historical trauma, also, and what we see must demand our attention, our care, our action.
I think, too, that—20 years too late—I’m increasingly despairing over the ways smart phones have rewired us, of how, now, I have to sit in a separate room from where my phone or computer are in order to give my undivided attention to a book I’m reading. Maybe 2024 will be my Luddite year…
I’m including this link and citing from it because it’s accessible, but I’m reading from the published collection The Weather in Proust.
Or perhaps is less attuned to horror—though, as Sedgwick likewise acknowledges, Proust’s abiding attentiveness to changes in “the” air were likely born of his profound challenges as a severe asthmatic.
I mean, really, my suspicion is that the “unified” self in Proust is—as it is for Woolf—an occasionally pleasing fiction, but I’m trying to withhold some judgments until we’re through the whole damn book…
In a second translation I looked at, the word in place of “surrogates” was “succedanea,” which is, it turns out, a medicinal substitute. Just a minor oddity I thought worth notice …
The narrator considers his outpouring “terrible, almost insane.”
Brought to Europe for cultivation, as Jamaica Kincaid notes in My Garden (Book), by the “Spanish marauder” Francisco Hernandez.
As a card-carrying member of the Proust fan club, I was so delighted to come across your Substack—especially since I'm embarking on a reread of In Search of Lost Time this year! I loved your reflection on the atmosphere of the novel, and wanted to share this passage from Anne Carson's The Albertine Workout, in case you haven't come across it yet:
"Air, for example, in Proust can be (adjectivally) gummy, flaked, squeezed, frayed, pressed or percolated in Book 1; powdery, crumbling, embalmed, distilled, scattered, liquid or volatilized in Book 2; woven or brittle in Book 3; congealed in Book 4; melted, glazed, unctuous, elastic, fermenting, contracted, distended in Book 5; solidified in Book 6; and there seems to be no air at all in Book 7. I can see very little value in this kind of information, but making such lists is some of the best fun you'll have once you enter the desert of After Proust."
I also loved your analysis of how Proust's narrator is affected by the Dreyfus affair, and Charlus's wilfully apolitical stance on it all. This is such a sensitive, searching writeup and it was a genuine pleasure to read.
Very thoughtful, provocative piece—thank you for something to get one thinking on New Year’s Day. Regarding footnote 1, I say go for it! Paying attention to a person is the most concrete form of love. Many people now love their smart phones more than people. And in the US version of hyper-capitalism, technology/smart phones/social media basically monetizes hate.