Re Creating Eve: Sedgwick's Art and the Practice of Renewal
Eve Sedgwick's forthcoming essay, "The Weather in Proust," begins with the Hubert Robert fountain as a model of Neoplatonic rebirth: millions of lives like water droplets, yearning towards the sky and either being pro pelled by other energetic streams further up or, at their fated height, from exhaustion falling back to be recycled and remade. The fountain provides Sedgwick with a beautiful model for the roman fleuve itself: in the foun tain we can perceive the career of one (call it) "soul" passing through many characters; one character being remade anew, over and over; the carefully bound economy of novelistic elements recycling its components in new forms. The fountain launches her into an inquiry on the relationship of closed systems to open ones. The closed system (of gravity, water propul sion, etc. occasionally erupts in surprise (as when Madame D'Arpajon gets doused with a runaway jet of water) Just so,y4 la recherche often func tions as a closed system (of zero sum love competitions, deadening habits that turn a beloved icon into a farce, etc. except when Proust is seized by the element of surprise. That is to say, when it cracks wide open to express something astonishing and new. Unlike the fountain, this is when Proust's novel is most itself. Sedgwick seeks to articulate what exactly, in Proust, enables the rebirth of self and world out of a dead state of mind, soul, and surround. Sedgwick looks to discover the recipe for this "mysticism," as she dubs it. I've been hunting around for Eve's recipe for refreshment, wondering how it might be different from Proust's, and what it has to teach us.