Proust's letters

Despite a cold and general lousy feeling, I went out into the dark, dark 5:15 last Wednesday to walk a half hour to Wolfson College in order to hear Michael Wood speak on Proust's letters to his mother. It was the inaugural lecture of the Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson. I was pretty neutral on the introduction until after it had passed when I figured out that it must have been Hermione Lee giving it. Then I was really excited -- I've read her wonderful biography of Virginia Woolf and a book on doing biography that I wrote about somewhere in this blog. The talk itself was about ways of reading, looking at letters in general and Proust's letters more specifically. There wasn't too much on Proust, at least there wasn't much I didn't know already, though some of it was funny: Proust's mum used to send him a questionnaire to fill in about how many hours he'd slept, what time he'd gotten up, whether he'd had headaches the day before, etc. Wood's thesis was that there are three modes of reading: just reading (little interpretation, straight absorption of face-value textual meaning), letting the reading sink in (the kind of interpretation that we do when for instance we have an unreliable narrator) and overreading -- where only a considerable stretch beyond our ordinary idiom will allow us to feel we're getting what is written. Psychoanalysis does a lot of this. Maybe (this isn't what Wood said, I'm interpreting) it's that in this overreading what we're doing is bringing separate knowledge of our own (beyond the very general) to interpret what is going on -- that's what psychoanalysis does, it uses its own theories to bring extra meaning to a dream or a story, fleshing it out beyond what a reader could extrapolate from the text itself.
Wood says that Barthes has a similar theory, of three levels of seeing -- communication (straight face-value understanding of the image), signification (bringing in understanding of whatever symbolism is at hand), and the third he calls signifying, though only out of alack of a better term. It's when you feel that there's some meaning beyond the first two, and it's sort of intangible. Maybe my eye is just wandering or maybe there really is something there. I am put in mind of Rembrandt, whose portraits always look curious and alive, and apparently it's because the eyes are always pointing in slightly different directions, giving our brains an impression of movement (I guess there's cognitive dissonance in which the brain assumes movement rather than dealing with the unlikeliness of eyes looking two places at once [speaking of which, it would be cool if someone could train themselves to use their eyes separately -- but I guess there's reasons why that's not possible, but the fact that some people can cross their eyes makes me feel like there's some willful control over eye coordination]).
After the talk there was a reception. I was alone, which made it more awkward to stay, but I went in and had a glass of champagne and ate a few hors d'oeuvres before taking off. After the man next to me and I both waived off a waiter carrying a tray of smoked salmon on circles of brown bread, the man said to me, "It helps when you like the canapes." Unfortunately, I didn't engage him in conversation. Instead I walked home.
But the next day, my friend Jane told me that she's just been elected (if that's the word) to be a fellow at Wolfson, and she invited me to a guest-night dinner there next week. So maybe I'll meet Hermione Lee (turns out she's the president of the college). But I would probably be too shy to go up and talk to her even if she was at the dinner.