A Short View of Proust (continued)

by Edmund Wilson

The next episode, the dinner at the Duchesse de Guermantes's, is followed by the visit of Swann to the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes just as they are leaving for a costume ball. Swann, with one of those lapses of taste which we have been told are characteristic of him, clumsily discloses the fact that he has justbeen warned by the doctors that he is dying. But the Guermiantes are made to behave with far worse taste than Swann, for they are so much preoccupied with getting to the ball, they take their social activities so much more seriously than anything else, that they cannot even attempt to think of anything human to say, in this distressing situation, to a man who is an old friend of both and whom the Duchesse, at least, admires. In the third episode, Swann appears at the reception of the Prince de Guermantes during the bitterest period of the Dreyfus case: Swann is a Jew and has sided with the Dreyfusards; and he is not so wellreceived as formerly. The Prince takes him aside, and the guests murmur that the host has requested him to leave. Instead, we learn at the end of the evening that the Prince, whom Proust, with his masterly skill at what the conjurors call"false direction," has allowed us to suppose not only stiff but stupid, is, with his aristocratic sense of responsibility and his Teutonic seriousness of mind, the only person present who has attempted to form a just opinion of the merits of the case: he has come to the conclusion that Dreyfus is probably innocent and he has simply wished to ask Swann's opinion. (In the latter part of the novel, this formula is twice repeated: first, after the dinner at the Verdurins', in the conversation with the elevator boy, in which the latter explains how his sister, who has risen from the servant class by being kept by a rich man, exhibits her superiority to the other menials; then, in the final social scene of the book, where the daughter and son-in-law of the great tragic actress, "La Berma," who, by returning to the stage, has shortened her own life in order to pay for their social career, desert her in her illness and old age to attend the reception of the Princesse de Guermantes, to which they have not been invited and where the princess herself is Mme. Verdurin.)

In each of these cases, Proust has destroyed, and destroyed with ferocity, the whole social hierarchy which he has just so learnedly expounded. Its values, he tells us, are an imposture: pretending to distinction, it accepts all that is vulgar and base; its pride is nothing nobler than the instinct which it shares with the woman who keeps the toilet and the elevator boy's sister, to spit upon the person whom we have at a disadvantage. And whatever the social world may say to the contrary, it either ignores or seeks to kill those few impulses toward justice and beauty which make men admirable. It seems almost inconceivable that there should have been critics to describe Proust as "unmoral": it would be far nearer to the truth to say that he sometimes tends to deal in melodrama. Proust was himself (on his mother's side) half-Jewish; and for all his Parisian sophistication, there remains in him much of the moral indignation of the classical Jewish prophet. That tone of lamentation and complaint which pervades his book, which, indeed, never deserts him, save for the amazing humor of the social scenes, themselves in their implications so bitter, is really very un-French and in the vein of Hebrew literature.

The French novelist of the line of Stendhal and Flaubert and France, with whom otherwise Proust has so much in common, differs fundamentally from Proust in this: the sad or cynical view of mankind with which these former begin, which is implicit in their first page, has been arrived at by Proust only at the cost of much pain and protest, and this ordeal is one of the subjects of his book: Proust has never, like these others, been reconciled to disillusionment. This fact is clearly one of the causes of that method which we find so novel and so fascinating of making his characters undergo a succession of transformations: humanity is only gradually revealed to us in its vanity, its selfishness and its inconsistency. AnatoleFrance would probably, for example, have put before us the whole of Odette in a single brief description—a few facts exactly noted and two adjectives which, contradicting each other, would have pricked us with the contradiction of her stupidity and her beauty; Stendhal would have stripped her of romance in the first sentence in which he recorded the simplest of her acts. But with Proust, Odette's past life is one of the last things we learn about her; and her mediocrity is never fully exposed until the very last pages. And even then, Proust cannot forgive her her moral insensibility, but must punish her with humiliation.

In that part of the book which we are discussing, we have fully emerged from the Age of Names and are well advanced with the Age of Things, that is, of realities; and we are becoming able to draw a conclusion as to why Proust finds these realities bitter, by considering the standards to which he brings them. These standards are supplied, on the one hand, by such artists as Bergotte, the novelist, and Vinteuil, the composer; but on the other, by Swann and by the mother and grandmother. I do not doubt that both of these latter were drawn, as Swann admittedly is, from Jewish originals; and it is plain that a certain Jewish family piety, a certain Jewish intensity of idealism and a certain rigorous Jewish morality, which never left his habits of self-indulgence and his worldly morality at peace, were among the fundamental elements of Proust's nature. The world is different from Combray, not merely because Combray is provincial, but because it is the world and occupied with the things of the world. It is really not Combray, but the soul of the grandmother, with its kindness, its spiritual nobility, its rigid moral principles and its utter self-abnegation, from which Proust's hero sets out on his ill-fated journey. And, as he is equipped, like many modern travelers, with moral passion but no religion, he will be compelled, as we shall presently see, to make a religion of art.

In the section which I have just been discussing, we have been shown the life of the worldlings and we have seen that it was vanity. Now we shall be shown the world of lovers and we shall find it an inferno. First, however, we may pause a moment to examine the architecture of the structure of which we now stand in the center; and we observe with astonishment that, despite the appearance of careless profusion and the real prolixity of detail, Proust, in handling his material, has practised a deliberate economy. We have noted the regular progression of the social scenes: we see now that Proust has made all sorts of efforts to secure the closest unity: half the characters are Guermantes; and almost the whole of the other balf are people whom the hero knew at Combray (as the Guermantes, in a sense, also are). The Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes, Mme. de Villeparisis and Charlus's tailor all live in the same building in Paris as the family of the hero himself. All the themes have been stated in the first volumes; and all the pieces are now before us. No new elements will be introduced: Proust has provided himself with all that are necessary for his demonstration (the word is his own). We have become aware that the characters all illustrate general principles and that they have been carefully selected by Proust to cover the whole of the world that he knows: Odette is all that is stupid in woman which at the same time arouses men's passions and enchants their dreams; Charlus, the struggle in one soul between the masculine and feminine, and beyond that, the cruel paradox of a fine mind and a sensitive nature at the mercy of instincts which humiliate them; Mme. de Guermantes, the best that a snob can hope to be without becoming a serious person, etc., etc. These colossal figures, without losing individuality—we hear the very sound of their voices take on universal significance. They continue, as Proust would say, to illustrate the same laws throughout their development.

Some readers have been deceived by Proust's method into supposing that the characters of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu have actually no continuity; but they have fallen into an error similar to that of those persons who imagine that the clocks of modern physics are actually accelerated and retarded, and that the measuring rods shrink and expand. In the case of the clocks and the measuring rods, it is the conditions under which we observe them which make them appear to behave in this way; and with Proust, in a similar fashion, it is the point of view of the observer which makes the difference. Proust's method of presentation is one of his great technical discoveries. The more important characters in Proust undergo so many transformations that it would be impossible briefly to indicate their course. But we may consider a subordinate character.