Proust and the Fan Squeal

If I’m cocky about anything in this life, it’s my nerdiness. I can’t really be out-nerded. I don’t have a stamp collection and I don’t spend my time solving math or science puzzles; but I do plenty of other lit-nerd things, like slog through JStor essays and some very dry, academic books. You can’t out-nerd me by dropping titles like Gormenghast or authors like Proust.

Yeah, maybe you’ve read Proust. How cute. I have a Proust shelf. I have two sets of the Moncrieff translation, (the Vintage edition and the Modern Library edition), the Quarto Gallimard edition in French, Eric Karpeles’ Paintings in Proust (which I perused concurrently with the novel). I’ve read the first volume, Swann’s Way, three times, (once at Sarah Lawrence College, once in a book club and once reading the full epic with someone who had previously read it in French) and along my journey I have the collected The Paris of Marcel Proust, his biography by George D. Painter, lighter fare like How Proust Can Change Your Life and his Letters to His Neighbor,  the book that traces the origins of all the characters called A Proust Souvenir (in English and French), and two actual human students of Proust!

And let us not forget the two books of poems based on the novel, Proustiennes by Jean Fremon and The Albertine Workout by Anne Carson.

I have also visited the cork-lined bedroom of Proust at the Musee Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris in Paris, at the suggestion of one of those aforementioned Proust students, Ann Cefola, and I purchased the Lydia Davis translation of Swann’s Way so that Cefola and I could compare the paragraphs of the Davis edition with the Moncrieff edition with the original French novel in a month-long email and phone project to see which translations was more faithful to the original vocabulary of Proust.

It was great!

But none of this is to say I’m a Proust Scholar. That shelf is probably a small fraction of the Proust universe. Actually, I would say I am no Proust expert at all. I only understand In Search of Lost Time in fragments, kind of like I understand the poems of Anne Carson.

And, in fact, after five years of high school French classes, I can’t even speak French! So some of the books on this shelf (like the French ones, for example) are my husbands, a former French major. But I’m still buying and reading essays on Proust and he is not. And I think this is because I am what you would call a fan of Proust, and a pretty flamboyant fan at that (judging by the cock-a-hoop paragraphs preceding).

But even so, it took me a very long time to decide to read Proust. It seemed a pretentious thing to do, even for a lit major. Faulkner, Pynchon, okay; but Proust?

And when I did start reading the world’s most famous novel, I realized it was what we used to call, (in less PC times), very, very gay (as in that is so gay!). Which just means the novel has a queer sensibility and this is most likely because Proust himself was a gay man, a fact I didn’t know and if I had known I would have read the books decades earlier. Because I too have a kitschy, campy sensibility that is very closely aligned to queer culture. Is this because I am a life-long Cher fan? Or am I a life-long Cher fan because I instinctively appreciate camp? It’s a mystery.

In any case, when I describe Proust’s In Search of Lost Time as having a gay sensibility, it’s hard to explain to people what I mean. I keep saying Proust has a kind of exuberance you don’t normally see in straight male writers.

It’s not that certain straight men don’t go on and on about a subject like Proust does but that they might do so in ways like pontificate or lecture. You might hear someone talk about a particular thing they are excited about with words like ‘awesome’ or ‘great’ or, if they’re feeling really compelled, ‘so cool.’ But that’s as hyperactive as they may allow themselves to get; the remainder is at an emotional reserve, intellectualizing, doing what fan-scholar Mark Duffett calls distancing.

And I must say here that when I reference straight males, this is not at all exclusive. Some straight women, gay women, gay men and non-gendered people I know have a tendency to restrain a grand enthusiasm just as much as anybody; but usually they do it for the same reason.

I started putting it all together, myself, very recently while I was reading yet more Proustian analytics, the triad of Living and Dying with Marcel Proust by Christopher Prendergast, The New Yorkers’ May 10, 2021 article “Peripheral Proust,” (where Adam Gopnick ponders why “secondary works on Proust continue to appear in manic numbers”), and the textbook Understanding Fandom, An Introduction to the Study of Media Fan Culture by Mark Duffett.

Today, we have such a plethora of things to be fannish about: tv shows, movie auteurs, music artists, authors, whole food genres. Proust didn’t have many of those things. He had sights (architecture and painting), sounds (both ambient and music), and ideas (books, articles, the Dreyfus affair). Oh, and the Guermantes. He had nobility (which was the celebrity obsession of his time).

In Understanding Fandom, Duffett talks about hierarchies of fandom. All of Proust’s pleasures are high brow, for the most part respectable pursuits. The Proust novel is itself a respectable thing to be a fan of. However, Proust had plenty of what we now define as guilty pleasures including the theater, one of those things that has flipped from low to highbrow for us.

Mark Duffett explains one of the basest of fan gestures is considered to be the fan squeal. It immediately signifies lowliness. And the squeal is most often applied to “girls” because they do it with such lack of inhibition. And by definition this marks these girl fans as a lesser kind of fan because they are offering up an emotional versus intellectual response.  And further, any object that elicits the girlish fan squeal will become quantifiably downgraded in the hierarchy of subjects.

You can easily picture this, girls circled together in a bedroom verbally expressing shrieks of delight over handsome pop objects. At its screechy worst, it becomes a public scream, Beatlemania. When boys were Beatle fans, it means one thing. But when the girls arrived, it got screechy.

Steve Miller explains this repeatedly and unapologetically in his book Detroit Rock City. When girls start offsetting the audience ratio at any heavy metal rock show, the band is no longer cool.

Because bitch, please…

You should be a connoisseur not a sentimentalist.

Girls defy this edict, but so do a certain segment of the gay male population, men who also squeal performatively in public. ‘Flaming’ was once the derogatory term used for this type of very effervescent man.

And some gay boys were probably squealing themselves over John, Paul, George and Ringo…behind closed doors. Squealing is actually a highly acceptable practice within most circles of girls and girls hanging out with gay boys. And I believe this is partly why certain types of girls, (equally reactive ones, I would argue), develop such close friendships with them.

I, myself, do the very act of of distancing Duffett describes as a Cher fan. I do this very likely because I had two disparaging, older straight teenage boy music aficionados in my house growing up. Your ideas about music would be discounted otherwise.

Duffett quotes music critic Caroline Sullivan as using the word credibility in her book about the Bay City Rollers. As a fan of boy bands, your ideas lose credibility.

But there’s something absurd about that. And this was part of my original joke, Cher Scholar. But then when I actually began Cher scholarin’ there was respectability inherent in the endeavor. And I appreciated that. It was helpful to me and to the ways we speak about Cher. There’s nothing innately wrong with intellectualizing. But I was probably doing it just as subconsciously as consciously. So I would include myself as one of the straight females who tends to “tone it down,” to downplay my own version of the flaming squeal.

Another thing I notice that I do, and I noticed it while writing this essay and the one on Philip Levine, is that when I talk about poetry, I tone down my academic vocabulary and sentence constructions and when I talk about music I rev it up.

But I actually do love exaggerated enthusiasms and so it annoys me that I self-protect myself in this way. And so I try to offset my reticence with the occasional, politically-willful, calculated squeal. It’s not hard to find the object that will do it. Usually, it’s a Cher doll. In fact, I can remember my first Cher doll squeal all the way back to Christmas 1976. I can get plenty squealy about the dolls.

Because I can.

Speaking of dolls, I am revamping the nativity of the Christmas Cher doll tree.

I finally bit the bullet and bought the Val Kilmer action figure from the movie Willow.  Then I found a hip, online paper doll artist from Perth, Australia, for our new nativity member, Alexander Edwards, and we had no Robert Cameletti! How did that happen? And while doing that, I decided to upgrade the paper dolls for Gregg Allman and David Geffen.

Anyway, we can see that there are strict boundaries around fandom all the time. And here we come back to Proust. He can go on for pages and pages of happy exuberance about a madeleine in a cup of tea, the passages of the moon or a flower patch. He uses words like bliss and glorious over things like train timetables, steeples and trees.

And although arguably he doesn’t squeal in volume, I would argue he does squeal in the amount of ink dispensed and the emotional particularity he demands from that ink.

Even if you didn’t know Marcel Proust was a gay man, you might consider the long, meandering Proustian sentence feminine just as you may consider the brief, single-syllabled Hemmingway sentences as masculine.  That’s the dichotomy, although it’s inherently unfair (and inaccurate) to both Proust and Hemmingway. Hemmingway famously had his own feminine side and as for Proust, as feminine as any gay man might seem he is still a man.

The dichotomy is false but easy to digest with our primitive ‘othering’ instincts. And intellectual distancing is an armor, which makes straight men particularly good at it. It’s a masculine effort. Women and gay men tend to have less armor, by design or by choice.

In any case, this is my somewhat distanced yet attemptive emotional fan squeal about Proust’s own fan squeal. And such as it is, I value it more dearly than all the nerdy academia of Proustlandia and you’ll have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands.