Mrs. Nyman and Monsieur Proust: An Experiment in Comparative Literature

Abstract

Mrs. Nyman and Monsieur Proust:An Experiment in Comparative Literature Matthew Spellberg L Jáakk' ka Yeilt'ooch' Tláa has du jeeyís. For L Jáakk' and Yeilt'ooch' Tláa.1 EVERY POINT IS THE CENTER of some circumference. For readers of this journal, Marcel Proust will be the center of many concentric and overlapping circles. There is the world of his novel, so absolutely drowned in the narrator's consciousness. There is fin-de-siècle Paris, of which Proust is generally esteemed the supreme artist. There is French literature, of which he is a pinnacle, and the canon of modernism, for which he is a touch-stone. And there is the Great Hall of the Novel, where Proust, like a delicate, neurasthenic incarnation of Grendel, wrecks all the mead benches, breaking open the genre, enlarging the possibilities of length, subject, and spirit, and so opening a portal for the angels and demons of twentieth-century literature. Most readers of this journal, on the other hand, will not know the name Elizabeth Nyman—much less her truer name, Sèdayà (Seidayaa)—but she too is the center of many worlds.2 She lived from 1915 to 1999; by the arbitrary and linear measurement of Gregorian time she was a generation or two younger than Proust, though by some other measure she may be his contemporary, or indeed much older. Matriarch of the Yanyèdí (Yanyeidí) Clan of the Tlingit people, mother of eleven children, renowned storyteller and tradition-bearer in a tiny town in what is now western Canada, she was an orphan who rose to become a figure of high honor in a society where kinship is all. From an early age, she was esteemed for her exquisite sense of language. A Jewish fur merchant from Juneau named Charlie Goldstein spoke Tlingit and found young Elizabeth so elegant a speaker that he would request of her father that she stay with him all day while he was buying furs. Decades later Nyman remembered him saying to her father Tom Williams: Tlaxh x'êghà áwé axh tûghà yú xh'ayatánkŁingít xh'ênáxh.A tûx' xh'ashak'wka-ighî,A tûx' áwé tle yan wât yáxh áwé yú xh'atangi nìch,á áwé axh tuwâ sigû.3 I really like the way she speaksTlingit. [End Page 140] For one thing, she has such a cute way of talking,And for another, she speaks like an adult;That's what I like [about her]. The sweetness of the remembered language enacts the skill. What is translated here as "a cute way of talking" is the beautiful and nuanced xh'ashak'wkałighî—this verb means something like "she speaks in a lovely way," or more literally still, "she is little and lovely through the mouth" (the verb for being lovely with xh'ê/xh'a, mouth, incorporated at the front, and with the shak'w morpheme in the middle of the verb incorporating a diminutive). She is little and lovely through the mouth, and yet at the same time she speaks like a "yan wât," a word that can mean adult or even elder. A girl who speaks in a darling way, and yet with exceptional gravity, beyond her years. We can imagine that the compliment becomes flipped for the older Mrs. Nyman, telling these stories: an elder of renown and great knowledge who still conveys a disarming, childlike frankness, not to mention an expressiveness manifest in her elaborate hand gestures, which can be seen in photographs throughout the book of stories that bears as its title one of her Tlingit names, Gagiwdułàt, meaning "Brought Forth to Reconfirm." Let me now trace explicitly the lineaments of this essay: Marcel Proust and Elizabeth Nyman, two verbal artists from completely different worlds, never having heard of each other, having no connections so far as I know—but each a pinnacle of style in his or her respective language; each a lifelong student of memory; each possessed of a sensibility at once young and primordially old; each attempting to split open the ancient earth at...