Marcel Proust, like his fellow modernist icons, Kafka and Joyce, produced a literature which is entirely personal, devoid of the kind of universality which had, up until their time, characterized the Western Canon. If it is a coincidence, it is a revelatory one, that the key moment in Swann's Way, if not in all of In Search of Lost Time, comes with a perversion of the Communion. A bite of madeleine and a sip of tea sends Proust's narrator/Proust reeling back through the years, turns him entirely inwards, and inundates him with personal memories and feelings. During this reverie, Proust's older self essentially communes with his younger self, or selves. Here we have the individual, whole unto himself, needing only his own feelings and memories to find those things which give his life meaning.
This stands thousands of years of the Judeo-Christian tradition on its head. It has been the dream of Western man, and a noble one, that we might rise beyond purely personal concerns and achieve something together as a species, achieve one day a kind of godhood ourselves. In no small part, it is this shared dream, and its requirement of communality, which has led us to create the liberal protestant capitalist democratic institutions which have made possible social progress over the past several centuries. Though these institutions vindicate individual rights, they are focussed on the ways in which men can co-exist and work together. Each in its own way is premised on the Golden Rule : Do unto others as you would have done unto you. Each of us, as individuals, will reap the benefit of the general adherence to this stricture, but it is primarily concerned with how we behave towards others. Similarly, during the Communion we turn not inwards but outwards, remembering the sacrifice that Christ made, taking our sinfulness upon himself, that we might approach closer to God.
It is unsurprising then that the 20th Century, with Proust (and Darwin and Nietzsche and Freud and Marx and Joyce) leading the intellectual way, saw the near collapse of Judeo-Christian tradition and Western institutions and a descent into barbarism, as people acted out the ideas of the vanguard, with every man seeking only his own self interest. What is surprising is that so many chose to listen to the utter blather of such men. And none of those men, bizarre as they generally were, made a more unlikely prophet than Proust.
A truly curious conceit animates the cult of Proust, the belief that the very characteristics which made Marcel Proust so completely aberrant, also made him uniquely perceptive about the human condition. Here's how de Botton puts it :
The magnitude of Proust's misfortunes should not
be allowed to cast doubt on the validity of his
ideas.
...
Though philosophers have traditionally been concerned
with the pursuit of happiness, far greater
wisdom would seem to lie in pursuing ways to be
properly and productively unhappy. The stubborn
recurrence of misery means that the development
of a workable approach to it must surely outstrip
the value of any utopian quest for happiness. Proust,
a veteran of grief, knew as much.
Meanwhile, here's as good a one sentence description of Proust as I could find :
A mother's boy who never really grew up, a part-genuine,
part-imaginary invalid totally incapable
of looking after himself, a reluctant homosexual
who may never have known genuine fulfillment, he
spent his early manhood in Parisian high society
and then retired, hermit-like, to his famous
cork-lined room, where he turned day into night
and night into day.
-John Weightman,
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Unlimited review of How Proust Can Change Your Life
Okay, so that would make him a gay, hypochondriacal, mama-loving, French, recluse. And it necessarily raises the question : what does someone who was little more than a bundle of neuroses--someone who seemingly incorporated most of the pathologies of a 20th Century which we generally consider to have been a blood soaked disaster--have to tell us about life in general ?
Alain de Botton believes Proust has quite a bit to tell us, and he tries mightily to make Proust seem pertinent to our lives. In effect, de Botton reads In Search of Lost Time as a huge self help manual. This is often very funny, and is presumably intended to be ironic, but is ultimately unconvincing. The many stories he tells about Proust and about contemporary reaction to his writing are quite amusing, but he can never quite get us convincingly past that first big hurdle : Proust was simply too screwed up for us to accept that he has much to say to us. Having successfully turned inward himself, he found nothing but himself, and an unpleasant self at that. The resulting fiction is necessarily idiosyncratic and personal, rather than universal. In the end, all Proust really had to say was what it was like to be Proust, which does not seem to have been a particularly enjoyable experience. Combine that with the fact that he said it in the most stultifyingly boring fashion and at interminable length and there's just no compelling reason to read him.
Each chapter of de Botton's book is based on something he maintains
Proust can teach us, and the final chapter is called "How to Put Books
Down." One has to assume that this is intentionally humorous on de Botton's
part, because there may be no other author who has forced as many readers
to put his book's down as Proust. They are truly unreadable, as the
comments
of even his friends and family acknowledge. If, like me, you
feel some obligation to at least familiarize yourself with Proust's work,
do yourself a huge favor and read How Proust Can Change Your Life
instead of the original novels. Despite its ostensible intent, it
will cure you of any desire to pick up a Proustian tome in the first place.
(Reviewed:05-Mar-01)
Grade: (B+)
