Proust graphs

I recently finished reading the 2002 English translations of the seven volumes of Marcel Proust's In Search Of Lost Time.  My pattern was generally to interleave another book or two between the readings of the Proust volumes, to avoid burnout and allow some time for thought.  The overall book is immense, with something like 1.3 million words.  Depending on the printing and the translation, that works out to about 4000 pages.  In addition to its length, I found it not to be a book that I could read much more than twenty or so pages of at one sitting.  The writing is dense and Proust tends to dwell on ideas (about art, emotions, memory, whether his girlfriend is a secret lesbian, and many other things) for lengthy sections.  It would get my mind going.  When my daughter was young and many nights were spent reading to her, I developed the strange ability to read while paying absolutely no attention to what I was reading.  I could read a kid's book aloud, with proper inflections and everything, while thinking of something completely different, leaving with no memory of what I had read.  I didn't read Proust aloud, but I did find myself occasionally reading a paragraph, then drifting into thought about what that all meant, but unfortunately continuing to read the next paragraph without attention.  Then I'd realize what had happened and have to retrace and reread.  Further, Proust rather famously wrote very long sentences, with many dependent clauses. The plot, to the extent that there is one, moves very slowly.  All of that meant that my reading pace was much slower than for most other books I read.

That doesn't look much of a sales job.  To make it sound even less appealing, most of the characters are not very good, likable people, with the first person narrator no exception.  There are many romantic and sexual relationships described, and not one of them is healthy and loving.  Proust was himself gay, but the depiction of homosexuality is not one a 21st century tolerant liberal would produce.

Despite all of that, the book is profound and moving.  I won't say life-changing, but it's a book that I'll think about and be influenced by for a long time.

The narrative flow of the many characters and their interrelationships have an intricate structure in the novel.  The only one who is present throughout is the narrator (called Marcel a couple of times but mostly nameless).  Early on, Charles Swann is a main focus.  There's a section in the first volume, Swann's Way, in which the narration departs from the first person for the only time, to relate the story of the romance of Swann and Odette, a relationship whose obsessiveness and jealousy are later mirrored in several of the narrator's own relationships.  Swann then retreats in importance, and dies halfway through the greater novel, though what happens to his memory and reputation is a key theme.  Another main character, Baron de Charlus, is barely present early on, then dominates for awhile, then retreats again.  The great romance of the narrator is with Albertine, who does not really show up until the second volume.  Side note: the two main volumes dealing with the Albertine relationship, The Prisoner and The Fugitive, are widely considered the least pleasant to get through.  That was the case for me.  It's such a deranged relationship.  Almost all that Marcel cares about is keeping Albertine away from lesbian affairs, which he does very unsuccessfully.  It ends up being very repetitive.  One wishes he would get on with leaving Albertine, as he threatens to do innumerable times.  These two volumes and the final Time Regained were published posthumously.  It is very likely that Proust would have done some major editing work on them had he lived.  Complicating things further, Proust based Albertine on his chauffeur Alfred Agostinelli, with whom he had a long affair, and who also had relationships with women.  There's a prominent literary theory that other women (Gilberte, Andrée, Lea) in Lost Time are actually based on men also.

To visualize the comings, goings, and relationships in Lost Time, I turned to programming and graphing.  The entire novel is freely available in plain text format from a variety of sources.  The available translation is the original Moncrieff rather than the recent one I read, but I think the methods I use would not show much difference.  The first step was to strip all punctuation out of the text and leave one word on each line.  The next was to identify all the ways in which a character is named in the novel.  For instance, Swann is identified as Swann, M. Swann, Charles, and the possessives of all three.  But the word Swann can also mean his wife or daughter, so Mme Swann, Mlle Swann, Odette Swann, Gilberte Swann must be taken out of his column.  Further, there are a few other Charleses mentioned (Charles Morel and a few kings), which must also be removed.  Finally, Charles Swann would be double counted (Charles and Swann), and such double counts must be accounted for.  I did this for all the major characters, and ended up with a list of every location (word number) in the novel where each character is named.  The giant exception to this is the narrator himself, who is constantly there except for the Swann In Love section.  I actually did count all locations of I, me, my, mine, etc., but there wasn't any good way of separating the personal pronouns from instances when other characters used them about themselves.  And in any case, it wouldn't have told me much except that it's a first person novel.  I decided to do a running count of the number of hits on a name per thousand words, as a way of smoothing the results a bit.  Here is what comes out for the character of Swann (click to enlarge):

The thick vertical lines are the breaks in the volumes of the novel.  The thinner lines are section breaks within each volume.  So one can see that Swann appears early on in the first section of the first volume.  This is the Combray section, and Swann is invited to dinner with the narrator's parents, which leads to the narrator's mother not coming up to kiss him good night.  He then leaves for awhile, and comes back to dominate the Swann In Love section.  In Shadow of Young Girls, he is present in the first section, in which the narrator is attempting to gain admittance into his house so as to pursue a friendship with Odette and a relationship with Gilberte.  Swann is then only mostly referred to occasionally, reappearing dramatically at the end of Guermantes Way, in which he shows up at the house of his friends the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes to inform them that he is dying.  (They don't really care, being concerned about getting dressed for a party.  This is Proust skewering the vestigial nobility of Third Republic France.)    Swann is later said to have died.  This report comes from an offhand remark by another character, which shows the way in which Swann is already fading in the memory of society, having failed to achieve any immortality, because he threw away his artistic gifts.  Afterward he is only occasionally referred to, mostly through his still living wife and daughter, who abandon the Swann name and legacy, leaving him forgotten.  As Swann is one of the more admirable characters, this is all pretty bleak.

Next I wanted to see how interrelated some of the characters were, through the simple method of determining how close the mentions of two characters tended to be.  For each pair of characters A and B, for each mention of that character the closest mention of the other character is found (forward or backward).  The average distance can then be computed.  This can be done in each direction--the average distance of a B mention for each A mention, and vice versa.  For instance if A is mentioned consistently throughout the book and B only one time, from B's perspective A is close (the one mention of B is close to one of the many mentions of A), but from A's perspective B is not close (most mentions of A are nowhere near the sole mention of B).  So I made both calculations and decided the overall distance between the two is the average of the two numbers.  I had to do it this way if I wanted to map the distances for more than two characters.

To make a 2-D map, I reached for some optimization techniques.  I used a multidimensional scaling method.  Basically this method takes the desired distance between each pair of points, and attempts to place those points on a 2-D surface such that each is the proper distance from the other.  Most times, it is impossible to get them all exactly right.  As a trivial example, if you have three points A, B, and C, and AB is 10, BC is 10, and AC is 30, it's physically impossible to place them that way.  If you get AB and BC right, the maximum mapped AC (putting ABC on a straight line) is 20.  Another trivial example is that you can not place four points equidistant to one another on a plane.  (You can in 3-D: make a tetrahedron.)  So the method attempts to do the best possible job, moving points around until the tension (a measure of how close the mapped distances are to the desired distances) is minimized.  That will generally mean accepting small errors on each distance.  If tension is below 0.15, that is generally considered good enough.  All the maps I will present here have tensions below that.  The basic method places the points at random on the map, then nudges them a small amount.  If the nudging improves the tension score, repeat, if not, nudge them a different direction.  I added the twist that if the method stalls out with an unacceptable tension score, blow it up and place the points in a different random location, then start again.  In evolutionary terms, this allows saltation as a solution to leap from one dead end local best solution to a higher peak farther away.  Eventually it settles on a best solution, though the actual map can vary each time I run it, as the initial random guess will be different.

Here is a sample of how the method works, showing all the women to whom Marcel is attracted. Mlle Stermaria is a very minor character, and the other four are recurrent throughout the novel, with Albertine getting a bit more ink than the Odette, Gilberte, and the Duchesse de Guermantes.  Mlle Stermaria's few mentions are mostly in volumes where Albertine is also present.  She appears in the beach town of Balbec, where Marcel meets Albertine and her friends in Shadow of Young Girls.  In Sodom and Gomorrah, Marcel is planning a dinner with and seduction of Mlle Stermaria.  Meanwhile Albertine shows up and Marcel attempts to be rid of her so he can make his date.  So Mlle Stermaria is fairly far away from everyone but closest to Albertine.  Albertine herself generally dominates the two volumes about her so is a little distant from the other three.  The relationships among Odette, Gilberte, and the Duchesse change as the novel progresses.  Early on, Gilberte is a child and is therefore near her mother, Odette.  The Duchesse is Swann's friend and will receive him, but not his wife Odette, who has a scandalous past as a courtesan.  Nor will she receive Gilberte as she grows up, until she inherits a great deal of money and marries the Duchesse's nephew, Robert de Saint-Loup.  At that point (late in The Fugitive), we see Gilberte and the Duchesse get mentions in close proximity to one another.

 

Here is the distance map which results.  The size of the circle is proportional to the number of mentions of each character.

 Gilberte's closeness to the Duchesse relative to her own mother could be seen as a sort of triumph for Swann, who wished his daughter to be accepted in the highest of society, represented by the Duchesse early on.  However, Gilberte only manages this after Swann's death, and by taking the name of his rival, the Baron de Forcheville, after he marries Odette.  Swann himself is forgotten and renounced, but his daughter ,and in the final volume, his granddaughter, achieve social success.

I'll do several other groupings of characters in posts to come.

PRK Journal, Three Months

The last month has brought some significant improvement.  The right eye (distance) has gotten much better.  There is still some residual ghosting, which is mainly noticeable in low light when the pupil is larger.  The left eye (reading) is still lagging, though it has improved some in the last week.  I don't know where it's heading for its final stable value.  It still has some ghosting as well,  more than the right.  

I've noticed that looking at fine print or a computer screen leads to a couple of minutes of less than great distance vision after I stop.  Maybe the distance eye is still trying too hard in those situations when it has to learn to let the reading eye do the work.  Hopefully that improves as well.  

I'm now on just one steroid drop treatment per day.  (For internet memesters, the name of the steroid is actually FML.  It doesn't actually affect ML negatively at all.)

Again the bottom line is that my vision is completely functional, though still a bit short of where I was with glasses.  Driving is fine, though the increased ghosting at night interferes with long distance sign reading a bit.  Improvement continues and will probably do so for several more months before it reaches stability.

PRK Journal, Week 10

There's not much new to say.  If there's been improvement it's been very slight and sporadic.  The astigmatic ghosting is still present, maybe slightly reduced.  I'm still hoping for much better vision than I currently have, and there's still reason to think that the coming months will bring that improvement.

Again, I'm totally functional without glasses.  I'm just not where I was with glasses.
 

Book review, Northanger Abbey

This was the last Austen novel I hadn't read, so I thought it was time.  It's definitely my least favorite, but that only puts it last among greats.  The characters are just not as vibrant as her later creations.  The heroine, Catherine Morland, is something of a mouse with no notable traits other than an overactive imagination due to her reading of gothic novels.  Henry Tilney is amusing, in one sense a typical Austen male lead in that he is of the highest character and sees the virtue in our heroine.  He's also got a bit of Mr. Bennet about him, in that he is more of a bemused observer of the human foibles around him than he is a manly actor like Mr. Darcy or Mr. Knightley.  Partly this befits his status as a country parson rather than master of a large estate.

The villains, the Thorp siblings, are less convincing than their equivalents in the other novels, e.g., Wickham and the Crawford siblings of Mansfield Park.  Austen is more subtle when we meet them in conveying the bad character of those than she is here with the Thorps.  Isabella and John are fairly transparently awful from the get-go, despite Catherine's failure to see so immediately.  Just about the only character with much depth is General Tilney, whose nature is something of a mystery until the end.

The writing is as always very good, and the social observations keen.  There are some fourth wall breaks which strike the modern reader as unusual or postmodern, though it wasn't actually that uncommon at the time for authors to take asides to talk directly to the reader.  Austen for instance at one point notes that the reader will have seen that there are just a few pages left so clearly she had better wrap things up.  At another she notes that the time she has allotted for one character to relate a large amount of information to another isn't really sufficient given the distance she has given them to walk and talk.  She brushes the concern aside, saying something like, well let's just assume he wrote some of it to her in a letter at some other time.  It's a striking nod to the artifice of the fictional construct. The entire ending is the purest deus ex machina, which is partly due to the nature of Northanger Abbey as a parody of the Gothic novel.

Image chosen for general hilarity.  The bad girl in the middle is the exact opposite of Catherine Morland.  The right cover is from a 1960s paperback, trying to sell Northanger Abbey as an actual Gothic horror novel instead of a parody of one

PRK Journal, Week 7

There hasn't been much change in the last couple of weeks.  Each eye still has some ghosting, a second faint image above and to the right of the main image.  This is the result of astigmatism, which is an asphericity of the cornea which prevents it from focusing a single image precisely on the retina.  In the Day 6 report I mentioned a test at the doctor's office which involved looking through a pinhole and seeing a clear image, in contrast to what was still very blurry vision sans pinhole.  That's an astigmatism test.  The pinhole takes away any ghost images because only a small part of the cornea is getting an image in the first place.  

At any rate, the astigmatism and resulting ghosting should go away as the cornea continues to heal.  In other PRK recovery accounts I've read, ghosting starts to go away in week 5 or 6.   However a factor in my case may be the use of steroid drops, whose purpose is to slow healing down.  Others report that they see noticeable improvement in vision when the steroid drops are discontinued.  Frequently that's a month or two after surgery.  For whatever reason, my doc has me continuing the drops for four months after surgery.  Four drops per day the first month, three the second (where I am now), etc.  So my improvement may be correspondingly slower.  There's no reason yet to worry that it won't arrive at the right place eventually.

PRK Journal, Week 5

It has felt like I've hit a vision plateau over the last two weeks, with little or no improvement.  Just some minor ups and downs.  I am fully functional, but not at my pre-surgery level with glasses.  I have begun to notice some ghosting, a fainter secondary image slightly off of the primary image.  That leads to blurring when reading at distance.  When I stare at a difficult target for a few seconds, I'm able to differentiate the two and finally read it, but it's quite different than normal sharp vision.  As I've said in previous posts, this surgery has emphasized to me that vision is a complicated eye/brain process, the subtleties of which are not nearly encompassed by a single acuity measurement.

Today I had my last followup appointment until six months from now when both eyes should be settled at their final level.  The bottom line is that my right (distance) eye is somewhere between 20/25 and 20/30, and my left (reading) eye is at 20/50.  Something of interest I probably should have put in the first post is that pre-surgery the right eye was at -4.00 diopters and the left eye was at -6.50.  Today the doctor said it generally takes on the order of one month per diopter to fully stabilize, so there are still a couple of months of improvement to come (recall that the left eye is purposely being left about a diopter short for reading purposes).  The scan revealed a small remaining astigmatism on the right eye which should smooth out with time.  He's still confident that that eye is on target for 20/20.  The left eye has a larger remaining astigmatism, and still a prominent epithelial ridge.  This is where the regrowing cells collide and form a sort of temporary epithelial Himalayas over the center of the pupil.  He was surprised that I'm able to read as well as I can with that eye right now.  When the ridge is beaten down by a few more weeks of blinking action, he said the reading should get much sharper.

If anyone is carefully reading these, they'll have noticed that my system of estimating acuity is, charitably, way off.  Neither eye is at 20/20 in reality, and the left eye isn't even close.  Perhaps I've been unconsciously biasing the results by convincing myself I can see the legs of the m in "Brahm's Lullaby" at distances where I can't quite.   And maybe my daughter was being more strict with herself when she claimed she could only make it out at 150 inches when using my standard she'd be more like 180 or something.  At any rate, I've altered the scale of the measurements so that today I'm at 20/27.5 on the right eye.  Unfortunately that adjustment leaves the left eye at 20/29, which again is way off what the pros measured today.  Perhaps another possibility is that the improvement will consist more in the time it takes to resolve the m at distance (currently several seconds) than in changing the distance itself.  Regardless, the exercise has been valuable in determining whether things are getting better, worse, or staying the same.

Other notes: the doctor saw a small amount of corneal haze today, which again is normal and should clear up.  He reiterated the need for sunglasses through the summer, which I've been following.  He also gave me a DVD of my surgery, which I'll watch at some point and maybe post here.

Steroid drops continue for the next three months, tapering off as we go.  Currently I'm to continue it three times a day, losing a drop per day per month.  The drops are $42 a bottle which lasts about two weeks at the current rate.  That's $8/gram, which is only about a sixth the price of gold, so what am I complaining about.

PRK Journal, Day 28

It's now been nearly a month since the surgery.  The last week has been pretty steady, with actually a small decline, especially in the left (reading) eye.  It's nothing that has kept me from from doing any normal activities, just a little loss in sharpness.  There's still supposed to be some fluctuations in the course toward the final corrected vision, so I'm not too concerned.  Hope it improves though.

Reading and computer work is all fine and normal now.