Molto Marcel Monday

The day when I post something inspired by Proust.

Yesterday was the anniversary of Proust's death.

Just a few days ago, I commemorated the hundredth anniversary of the publication of the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu. If we do the arithmetic, we can see that Proust had just nine years to finish his masterwork following the publication of volume one.

The temptation is to think he didn't know this but the truth is that he did. Always a sickly boy, he knew he wasn't going to have a long life. As he wrote The Novel, he grew increasingly convinced he would die. If anything, he may have been too aware of his coming death.

The other day I was writing of the modernists desire to make certain modernism was not just a  style. They wanted to change the culture. Ironically, the explosion in the popularity of modernism in recent years has been precisely because people like it as an historical style. Looking at Proust and his ill health and his constant awareness of his coming death, we can not only easily understand but also easily sympathize with his desire to be more than a stylist.

But should we? Wanting to do more than contribute to a style is a very ambitious thing to want to do. Perhaps too ambitious. I mean that both prudentially and morally.

I have, as I have noted elsewhere been reading What Ever Happened to Modernism? by Gabriel Josipovici to prepare myself for rereading all of À la recherche du temps perdu beginning  next year (I think this will be my third time of reading the whole thing through, although I have read certain volumes and parts of volumes many times more often). One of the points Josipovoci hammers when he discusses The Novel is that Marcel the narrator is a better person than Charles Swann. And you'd have to say that if you were, as Gabriel Josipovici is, an unreconstructed modernist.

Josipovici's argument is worth reading at some length:

Our existence is radically contingent. And yet the story of Swann himself, placed by the author near the start of his novel, demonstrates that despite the the uniqueness and contingency of each of our lives, there are general laws of existence as well, which make us all behave in similar ways: the story of Swann's love for Odette parallels that of Marcel for Gilberte and then Albertine. At the same time the novel shows us it is possible to react to similar experiences in very different ways, to learn or not to learn from what one goes through. Swann, with that slight coarseness of spirit which characterizes him, says Marcel, dismisses his affair with Odette with the remark" 'To think that I gave up the best years of my life to a woman who was not my type.' Marcel, on the other hand, more intelligent, more dogged perhaps in his desire to understand, comes to see that suffering and joy are not to be dismissed like that, but form part of the fabric of existence, the exploration of which becomes the theme of his life as a writer. All this makes nonsense of the claim, sometimes still heard, that Proust is merely the exquisite chronicler of the upper echelons of French society in the years leading up to 1914.

I'll start with the last sentence for the word "merely" along with some rhetorical sneering is doing a lot of work here. For while Proust certainly is not only an exquisite chronicler he most certainly is an exquisite chronicler and a lot of people read him solely for that reason. Who are we to prevent them from getting the enjoyment they get out of reading it the way they like to read it?

Next, let's return to the first two sentences and particularly to the expression "radically contingent". What can that mean? Does it mean anything that isn't, on more careful analysis, trivial? And how does the second sentence, with it's claim "there are general laws of existence as well" coexist with "radically contingent"? When someone make those two claims one after another is there any reason to believe that they are using words in a meaningful way?

Obviously, I  meant those questions as rhetorical. I think the expression "radically contingent" is just jargon for a modernist like Josipovici. It's the modernist's version of the consultant con, the lit crit version of "applying creative solutions in today's business environment", which is to say, it's a case of throwing words that sound impressive together with the intent of being obscure so was to impress the rubes.

I'm skipping a lot of steps in a long argument here but I think that if we peel away all that consultant con talk, we might ask some very old-fashioned questions about the relative moral stature of Swann and Marcel. For Swann does achieve marriage and his marriage lasts until his death. Marcel achieves no such union. His relationships are either obsessive and yet failed, as is the case with Gilberte, or they are obsessive and creepily possessive as is the case with Albertine. For all Swann's supposed coarseness, if we had to pick between his life and Marcel's, I don't think many of us would pick Marcel.

Ask yourself the heartless question. Here is Proust lying in bed at the end of a life that he has largely wasted on social climbing and the pursuit of crude sexual experience and looking for something to redeem it. Looking at Charles Swann, we can see how the urge to draw parallels between their lives would be tempting can't we?

I'm not sure we should go the next step, though, and imagine that Proust himself saw Marcel the narrator as a better person than Swann. I think that if we read The Novel more carefully than Josipovici has, we will see that the implicit criticism that Proust makes of Marcel is far harder than the explicit criticism our narrator levels at Swann.