Reading Proust: The Recherche in an Extra-Moral Sense
By CAROLINE WEBER
Over the next week,
Sam Tanenhaus, Caroline Weber and John Williams are holding a conversation
about “In Search of Lost Time,” and welcome readers to join their discussion by
leaving comments on the right-hand side of the blog. Ms. Weber is reading
Proust in the original French. All translations — of Laclos, Flaubert, Proust,
Gide and Benjamin — are Ms. Weber's own.
Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times
French editions of “In Search of Lost Time,” recently
on display at the Morgan Library, including one, front left, from 1913 for
“Swann’s Way.”
Beckett is
absolutely right to stress the “shamelessness” of the Recherche (1913-1927),
though it was by no means the first French novel to evince this quality.
Already in “Dangerous Liaisons” (1782), Pierre Choderlos de Laclos had
subverted the genre’s morally edifying function by prefacing his
cool-as-a-cucumber tale of unabashed libertine depravity with a
mock-conciliatory note: “At very least, it seems to me a service to public
morality to unmask the means by which the wicked corrupt the good.” This proviso
did not deter the vice squad from forbidding Parisians to read Laclos's novel
in public places. Similarly, Gustave Flaubert stood trial for “offending public
morality” with “Madame Bovary” (1857), a meticulously observed portrait of a
vacuous, petite-bourgeoise adulteress.
Like these
antecedents, the Recherche offers an unvarnished, markedly non-judgmental
portrayal of sexual activities traditionally deplored as vices or even — in the
context of French Catholicism — as sins. As the title of his novel’s fourth
volume, “Sodom and Gommorah” (1921-1922), makes clear, male and female
homosexuality are essential to Proust’s worldview, generally surfacing
alongside other so-called perversions. While seducing her girlfriend, Mlle
Vinteuil desecrates her late father’s portrait; the Prince de Guermantes and
the Marquis de Saint-Loup both cheat on their wives with the
gigolo-cum-violinist Morel; another Morel paramour, the Baron de Charlus, also
indulges in whips-and-chains sex play at a tawdry gay brothel.
Yet no matter how
shocking the content of these vignettes (André Gide, Proust’s contemporary and
fellow “invert,” feared they would “set back the issue [of homosexuality] by 20
years”), their real import relates less to sex as such, as to the much
farther-reaching moral subversion that Proust effects by rigorously
investigating humanity’s most essential but elusive “enigmatic truths” — erotic
and otherwise. (In the Proustian cosmos, these truths provide the “scattered
lightning-flashes” to which Sam so eloquently alludes in his post.) As outlined
in “Time Regained” (1927), the seventh and final volume of the Recherche, the
novelist’s foremost task lies in “teasing out and illuminating our feelings,
our passions; which is to say, the passions and feelings of humanity as a
whole.” According to Proust, those passions and feelings operate according to
“general laws” that remain constant even when surface particularities are
different; for instance, even the seemingly unconscionable penchants of a
Charlus illustrate a truth with which we all, sooner or later, are forced to
reckon: that love can come to us in the most extravagantly improbable,
inexplicable and inconvenient forms. (Witness the eponymous hero of “Swann’s
Way,” declaring at what he mistakenly believes to be the end of his disastrous
affair with the faithless Odette: “To think that I wasted years of my
life,…[and] felt the greatest love I’ve ever known, for a woman whom I didn’t
even find attractive, who wasn’t my type!”)
In this light, the
writer’s work is important because it alone enables us to penetrate the thick
fog of perceptual laziness and distraction and delusion that otherwise blinds
us to the truth about ourselves and those around us. And it can only perform
that function if its vision is undistorted by the author’s own moral judgments,
whether favorable or condemnatory; what Beckett calls a “complete indifference
to moral values and human justices” is thus a, even the, necessary precondition
of the Proustian enterprise. In fact, Beckett’s observation echoes that of one
of Proust’s earliest German translators, Walter Benjamin, who notes in a 1929
essay that
[t]here is no individual suffering,
however revolting, and no social injustice, however glaring, against which
Proust would have protested with a candid “No” or an intrepid “But wait!” Quite
the opposite: we find in him a profound acceptance of the world just as it is,
even in its saddest and most bestial manifestations.
More often than
not, the world of the Recherche proves sad and bestial indeed. And yet the
writer himself cannot be faulted if its hard-won insights make it appear — to
borrow Proust’s own ironic epithet for Laclos’s “Dangerous Liaisons” — “the
most frighteningly perverse of books.” That perversity is simply the chaff from
which the novelist endeavors, fearlessly and tirelessly, to separate the wheat
of elemental human nature. Put another way, Proust explains:
It was not the goodness of his virtuous
heart, which happened to be considerable, that made Choderlos de Laclos write
“Les Liaisons dangereuses,” nor his fondness for the bourgeoisie, petite or
grande, that prompted Flaubert to choose Mme Bovary as his subject...
These authors
selected their material not because they were immoral, but because they sought
the truth; and so it is with Proust as well. For this reason, he concludes:
The vulgar reader is wrong to think the
author wicked, for in any given, ridiculous aspect [of human behavior], the
artist sees a beautiful generality; and he no more faults his subject for being
ridiculous than a surgeon looks down on a patient for being afflicted with
persistent circulation problems.
The son and the
brother of noted surgeons, Marcel Proust knew whereof he spoke: in literature,
as in medicine, there is no place for shame. Or as Flaubert — who was also a
doctor’s son, and whose exacting prose style, likened by at least one critic to
a scalpel, Proust brilliantly parodied in his 1919 volume of literary pastiches
— remarked just before his obscenity trial: “Writing well is its own kind of immorality.”
Ms. Weber is currently at work on a book titled “Proust’s Duchess: In
Search of the Exquisite in Belle Époque Paris,” to be published by Knopf in
2014.
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