by André Aciman
The problem, clearly enough, is not with place but with me, insofar as place and identity are meshed here in such a way that I may say that I am always, always caught between two points, one of which is always a metaphor of the other. But that’s not quite correct. I am not caught between two points. I am two points caught in the same spot. Correction: I am two points caught in different spots.
This may explain why I am always fond of using the image, the figure, of two foci in an ellipse, or of the two banks of a river, or of the many strands in a cat’s cradle that always manage to reproduce generations of patterns with baffling regularity. The figure in all this is always the same: me tussling between two shadow centers.
I have tried to give a flavor of this figure in many ways here: by showing that once I’m in Italy, I’d really be in New York; that when I’m in New York, I’m already in Italy. In fact, this figure was already present when I described how my superstitious attempts to come to terms with the job offer abroad had almost made me reluctant to accept it, and how, by virtue of countenancing this rejection, I was in fact propitiating my acceptance, even though these propitiatory motions had a way of diluting my desire to leave New York by reintroducing the desire to return, and, in so doing, diluting the joy of leaving till it became a loathing to leave.
The French moralists would have called these antics not just a renversement continuel of one thing for another but, more precisely, a traffic, a commerce, an economy.
Commerce and economy give a transactional character to the psyche; traffic, on the other hand, is much more accurate, because it captures the confused, back-and-forth, up-and-around, congested nature of ambivalence, of love, and of nostalgia. Traffic captures the bizarre nature of the psyche, where the dominant motion is one not so much of ambivalence as of perpetual oscillation. The true site of nostalgia is therefore not a land, or two lands, but the loop and interminable traffic between these two lands. It is the traffic between places, and not the places themselves, that eventually becomes the home, the spiritual home, the capital. Displacement, as an abstract concept, becomes the tangible home. Let me in fact borrow an adjective from Heraclitus to give this traffic of multiple turns and returns a name by calling it palintropic. To quote Diels’s Fragment 51: “They do not comprehend how a thing agrees at variance with itself; it is an attunement turning back on itself, like that of the bow and the lyre.”
“Palintropic” means that which “turns again—which keeps turning,” which loops back or “turns back on itself” or is “backstretched”—a going back to oneself, a flipping back to oneself, a sort of systemic renversement reminiscent of the back-sprung reflex Homeric bow, which was strung in such a way as to counteract the normal curvature of the bow, reversing the curve to gain more power.
This, if I might suggest, is the seat of nostalgia, perhaps not its origin but certainly its end point. This is my home, my emotional, aesthetic, and intellectual home.
My home is a counterhome, and my instincts are counterinstincts. Yet this is my home, my emotional, aesthetic, and intellectual home. Exile, nostalgia, a broken heart, and other profound reversals mean nothing unless they induce a corresponding set of intellectual, psychological, and aesthetic reversals as well. I project these reversals on everything, because it is in finding reversals that I am able to find myself. I consolidate my palintropic relationship with the world by redefining the world as a palintropic construct. I cannot “access” the world and cannot find my bearings in it, I cannot behave in the world nor can I narrate the world unless I’ve unearthed its palintropic moment. A palintropic reading of the world assumes that one is not quite like others and that to understand others, to be with others, to love others and be loved by them, one must think other thoughts than those that come naturally to one. To be with others I must be the opposite of who I am; to understand others, I must read the opposite of what I see, say the opposite of what I mean, think the opposite of what I feel, ask for what I do not want. I might as well be someone else.
And I find this moment, this figure everywhere. I find it, for example, in the life of Emperor Julian the Apostate, who converted from paganism to Christianity, then back to paganism; or in the life of another apostate, Uriel da Costa, Spinoza’s near-contemporary, born into a converso family in Portugal, who later converted to Judaism in Amsterdam, then back to Catholicism, and back to Judaism again, ultimately committing suicide; in the life of the seer Tiresias, who was born a man, became a woman, and became a man again; I find it in my ancestors, who had left Spain to go to Italy, from Italy to Turkey, then back to Italy, some ultimately going to Israel, only to leave the Promised Land to seek out Italy once more. They were at first Jewish, then conversos, then Jews again, some turning to the Christian faith, as my family did, for political reasons, only to turn back to a form of diluted Judaism that longed for a lost Christian past. I find it in the history of my own city, Alexandria, which after being an international commercial center in antiquity was conquered by the Arabs, to become an international city fifteen hundred years later under Western rule, only to return to the Arabs. The history of the Middle East from Troy to Jerusalem is, needless to say, filled with similar instances. I am thrilled when I see street performers who stand still in the middle of sidewalk traffic, imitating a stationary human statue, which itself imitates the human body.
I find it in Stendhal, whose characters, whose voice, and whose prose earn the right to grow sentimental provided they have repressed their initial effusion with gestures of irony. Intuition is always counterintuitive.
I find it in the story I invented about Ulysses, who, suspecting that once he’s returned to Ithaca he may miss his days as an immortal in Calypso’s arms, determines never to leave Calypso and chooses immortality instead. Ulysses, who realizes in fact that nostalgia is not some sort of restless energy that propels him homeward, but that nostalgia is his home, the way that, in exile, only paradox makes sense. He finds his home in the purely intellectual realization that he has no home. The site of nostalgia is nostalgia itself. The site of nostalgia is writing and speculating and thinking about nostalgia.
At the end of Du côté de chez Swann and at the beginning of A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, the adolescent Marcel meets Gilberte Swann in a garden on the Champs-Elysées and is totally taken with her. It should be remembered that this comes just after the Prousts have decided to vacation in Italy one Easter but have since had to change plans: the thrill of going to Italy has so excited the frail Marcel that a family physician forbids the boy to travel to Italy at all. Hence the Champs-Elysées garden, and hence also the eventual displacement of Marcel’s dreams of Venice and Florence by the more ordinary trips each year to Combray.
Combray was always an alibi, an elsewhere, a second-best behind which hovered Marcel’s incessant yet ever-thwarted dreams of Italy. That Marcel should have met the love of his life in Combray, and not Venice, and that he should have had his first parasexual encounter on the Champs-Elysées and not in Italy, and that his dreams and eventual visit to Venice should have been punctuated with powerful and uncanny reminders of Combray, and finally that he should realize at the end of Albertine disparue that what life had to offer him was exactly what he had always wanted if only he had known how to ask for it and seize it when it was offered to him in the least likely of places, Combray, all these ironies and counterintuitive revelations underwrite the fundamentally palintropic texture of Proust’s novel. Life’s painful ironies and coincidences in Proust have ways of becoming “beautiful” and meaningful once they are transferred onto paper, Proust’s true home. The site of nostalgia is nostalgia itself. Paper displaces place, the way writing displaces living.
In A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, Marcel is seen passing by the seemingly inaccessible Swann residence and imagines what it must feel like to be an habitué there. As far as he can tell, everything about the forbidding Swann household seems to bar him access. But one day Marcel is. finally invited. He is invited several ti
mes. So that now he can look out the window and, as though to complete the cycle, try to remember what it must have felt like to have been an outsider once. This move out in the opposite direction not only holds the illusory promise of making him whole but is his way of savoring and resavoring his success. What he finds, however, is that one of the rewards of that success is no longer to be able to remember having longed for it. By another quirk of irony, however, failure to feel whole for the tortured Proustian sensibility is, in fact, a mark of being whole. The pain of realizing that one is fundamentally at odds with the world is ultimately tempered, if not reversed, by the mental agility with which this piece of information is arrived at and ultimately logged down.
Behind all this, of course, hovers the ultimate reversal in the vague inklings that, with Gilberte’s growing indifference, Marcel will soon be on the outside looking in again.
Proustian love always follows an air-with-three-voices pattern. From extremes of loneliness to intimacy and back to loneliness. From indifference to intense jealousy, underscored, as always, by the predictable return of indifference. It’s not that indifference, like loneliness, suddenly reappears; it’s that it has never really gone away. Nor is it that it competes with its opposite, vying with desire for center stage. Irony—Proustian, Stendhalian, Svevian, Ovidian, Austenian—is not characterized so much by the subversion of one voice by another as by an ongoing perpetual traffic between them. It is frequently called a dialectic. It is not. A dialectic is progressive, digressive. Palintropic traffic is static. It’s not that you cannot come back home; it’s that you’ve never really left anything to have to come back to.
The critic Edwin Muir, who was not insensitive to this figure, picked it up in a scene in Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey and, quite appropriately, called it Proustian. In that scene, a man holds a woman’s hand and, anticipating her reaction to his “slight compression of her palm,” reads in her imagined reaction a certain reluctance, thereby opting not to press her hand at all.
You anticipate the reaction to your own gesture and react to the other’s reaction before initiating your own The palintropic traffic, needless to say, is potentially infinite. There are authors who devote their whole attention to that traffic, and hardly any to plot. There are authors who write that way: by the time they’re about to write something, they’ve already thought of its correction. The first thing they write, the original version, is the correction. They are, to use Nietzsche’s words, always “trying to cover up their feet.” As a result, the text is always nostalgic for those stillborn versions of itself that were crossed out before being written down. In fact, palintropic movement has no origin. You cannot leave, but you already long for the place from which you intend to leave. Nostalgia is rooted in the text itself. That Proust, for example, should allude to his text as a translation is no accident; A la recherche is a transposition of an entire lifetime onto paper. The text is nostalgic for the life it is to be a transcription of. But it is just as much a transcription of that life’s own desire to work itself into a book. To put it in very simple terms: the desire to write A la recherche is what the narrator’s life was all about. The real nostalgia, therefore, is not for Combray, or for an evasive Venice behind Combray, or for a lost childhood, but for the book that was to record the passage from Combray to Venice and from Venice to Combray all over again. The real nostalgia is not for a place but for the record of that nostalgia. The real nostalgia has no point of origin; it is dispersed in the palintropic traffic between several points.
Ultimately, the real site of nostalgia is not the place that was lost or the place that was never quite had in the first place; it is the text that must record that loss. In fact, the act of recording the loss is the ultimate homecoming, inasmuch as the act of recording one’s inability to find one’s home on going back to it becomes a homecoming as well. Reading about this paradox is a homecoming. Musing and trying to sort out this paradox is a homecoming. In Proust, even showing how everything is always in the wrong place whenever we go looking for it in the right place is ultimately a way of finding the right thing for the wrong reasons in the right place at the wrong time—which, all told, is very much a homecoming as well.
Let me take this a step further: the true site of nostalgia is not the original place (since there really isn’t one), nor is it just the text that will eventually record the absence of such an origin, or ponder the implied paradox of this. Nor is it the come-and-go traffic between one place and another, or between the text and its multiple versions. The true site of nostalgia is, of course, all of the above—coupled, however, with the realization that to be successful every literary return and every literary reminiscence, like every Proustian insight, must be incomplete and always eager to consider its own failure as such.
I never went to Italy that year. Pensione Eolo remained a whirlpool of fictions and fantasies and of the memory of an imagined winter spent with a defrocked nun, a marine biologist, and a Hungarian musicologist. I remember as though it were yesterday the day I pictured myself running to the ferryboat one evening to get my mail, only to find that none had arrived that day. The woman in New York whose letters I would have craved to read in Italy was in the next room sulking, while I, in her living room, would look outside over to Riverside Park like a prisoner imagining his imminent liberation, envying those lucky enough to be alone in the park that weekday evening. I hadn’t even told her I had applied for a job abroad. I simply wanted to get away, and kept looking for the slightest pretext to tell her that we couldn’t live together, that she should look for someone else, that I couldn’t wait to be back where I thought I’d be among my own.
What I didn’t know was that the woman sulking in the other room was not only already in love with another man but had herself made plans for an extended summer vacation with him in, of all places, Italy.
How better to prevent her from leaving than by not leaving myself? I decided to stay. She, however, left.
That winter, when it was all over, I would walk or ride a bus past her building. Sometimes I’d think how lucky I’d been to have spent a year with her there and how gladly I would give everything I now had to be back with the same woman, staring out those windows whenever she went sulking into the other room, imagining and envying those strolling outside, never once suspecting that one day soon I might be a stroller, too, looking in, envying the man I’d been there once, knowing all along, though, that if I had to do it over again, I’d still end up where I was, yearning for those days when I was living with a woman I had never loved and would never love but in whose home I had managed to fall in love with an ex-would-be-nun whose presence was indissolubly fused to an apartment on the Upper West Side that became dearer to me and made me love New York because from these rooms I had looked out of windows facing the Hudson and invented a woman who, like me, was neither here nor there.
Arbitrage
One afternoon in 1973, during the Indian summer days of my first semester of graduate school, I went to visit a girl who had invited me to her studio after a seminar. She had invited me for tea, but I assumed that it was really for something else, only to find, when we sat down on her sofa, that I’d actually been invited to help her write an overdue paper on Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey.” Seeing that I showed signs of reluctance, her features became flustered, and, without warning, she burst out sobbing. I felt sorry for her and held her in my arms until the crying subsided. When I finally agreed to help, she got up swiftly, disappeared into the kitchen, took out an old-fashioned kettle, and put some water on to boil. Then she led me to a gnarled wooden table that stood against a wall, pulled out two chairs, and, after lighting a cigarette, which made me think that we would be working on this together for quite some time, suddenly stubbed it out, remembering that she had plans to see someone else that evening. Would I mind terribly helping with the paper while she was gone? Sullenly I said I didn’t mind. An uncomfortable moment of silence passed between us. I was welcome to wait for her if I wa
nted, she offered as she hastily slipped on her coat. A few seconds later the large glass panel on the front door downstairs gave a loud, resounding clank.
Still dazed by the speed with which one thing had led to another, I thought about how she had folded a baby-blue paper napkin and set it ever so gently under my teaspoon, saying, with goading irony, before rushing to the door, For the sugar, for the tea, for the writer, as if to suggest with this tiny gesture of solicitude that she wasn’t the inconsiderate sort. I lit a cigarette and let my eyes roam around the tiny studio she had frequently mentioned on our walks but which corresponded to nothing I had expected. From her table, I looked out onto the corner of Mount Auburn and Linden Streets, as the approaching late-summer evening was slowly settling on the adjoining rooftops, and a crowd of students was straggling back from the libraries, some headed for an early dinner. The studio, small, cluttered, and overheated despite the open windows, seemed strangely trusting, candid, and, like a child who’s been told to entertain a stranger while Mother’s getting dressed upstairs, it dutifully reminded me to help myself to anything I pleased: make more tea, look for treats—there were bound to be things, she’d said, indicating the icebox and a tiny kitchen cabinet, which she had flung open both to encourage me to do likewise when she was gone and to indicate, with feigned absentmindedness, that its contents were as unfamiliar to her as they’d be to anyone who happened to drop by. It took me a while to realize that her exaggerated ignorance of her kitchen was simply her way of showing that she was casual about everything else in her life.