Even when you think you’re a Proust mega-fan, there are characters you forget about entirely. Take the two aged sisters of the narrator’s grandmother, who appear mostly as hilariously pretentious comic relief. These two ladies are well-intentioned and far more politically decent than most of the more famous characters in Proust: when Swann recounts an anecdote in which the Duc de Saint-Simon refused to shake a subordinate’s hand, for instance, the two of them are horrified that one might take social rank to be indicative of human value. (Many of Proust’s aristocrats profess to believe something like this, but, as we’ll see, a kind of involuntary instinct prevents them from sullying their reputation by acting on it.) But their interests — restricted to art, literature, and music — are so pure as to be ridiculous, and the narrator insists that they literally can’t hear any conversation on less sublime subjects. Likewise, the idea of simply thanking Swann for the wine he brought them on his last visit strikes them as terribly vulgar; instead, they drop a series of indirect allusions and puns that are totally lost on everyone but themselves.
Dear daffy old Céline and Flora never surface again (fellow mega-fans, correct me if I’m wrong) after the “overture”, as the first subsection of the first section of the first volume of the Search is known. They’re trivial characters, but they happen to introduce a theme that becomes extremely important to Proust, and should be important to anyone trying to write about him. We might call this the social-aesthetic problem or the criticism motif; put plainly, though, it’s the question of how to talk about art with other people. It’s often been noted that, for Proust, social engagements have the potential to enrich one’s own artistic production or to wither it: enrich, if approached as a set of case studies meant to build to a larger system of human behavior; wither, if used as a distraction from the real labor of making a novel or a sonata. But I’ve seen less acknowledgement of the sheer percentage of social conversation devoted, in Proust’s world, to discussing the arts, from Mme. Verdurin’s insistence on serving as a patroness to the Princesse de Guermantes’s tentative attempts to update her taste in music and literature (Victor Hugo strikes her as alarmingly modern). Fittingly for a writer obsessed with the diversity of character, Proust represents a wide spectrum of approaches to the problem of talking about art with friends or acquaintances, matching and perhaps exceeding the wide spectrum of motivations one might have for doing so. (The Proustophile who reads Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction, an important sociological work on how taste serves to signal social class, finds in it a leitmotif of the Search transformed into a systematic empirical study.)
One of the most interesting approaches, I’d argue, is Swann’s own, which almost perfectly inverts Flora and Céline’s selective deafness. Swann is a connoisseur on a semi-professional level, with a distinguished private collection of paintings and an infallible eye for visual beauty. When surrounded by his aristocratic and fashionable friends, though, he develops a kind of sheepishness that leads him to avoid all apparently “serious” conversation. If he must speak about a work of art, he prefers to mention some concrete detail about its provenance rather than give an opinion about its quality. In part, this says something about Swann as an individual: as a young man of the lower middle class who rose to the most rarified social circles, a Jew who (at least until his old age) avoids any reference to his heritage, a practiced code-switcher and people-pleaser, Swann habitually keeps a part of himself in reserve. Whether he’s smoking a cigar with the Duc de Guermantes or having an ice cream with the narrator’s definitely bourgeois family, Swann takes care to be exactly what the occasion requires without hinting at how he might really feel about his surroundings. But he’s not alone in avoiding discussions of art or philosophy: his aristocratic social circle shares the habit, believing without ever quite stating it to themselves that nothing could be more vulgar than to invite a novelist to dinner and make him talk about literature.
I share the habit, too, whether as a direct result of all my Proust reading or in an example of convergent evolution. When I’m introduced to a scholar whom I admire and whose prestige precedes her, I usually try to talk about anything but her work, especially if we meet at a dinner party or some other social event. I justify this by telling myself that the Admired Scholar is sick of talking about her landmark book and would rather be asked about her garden or the meal, and sometimes that’s true. But my real reason is probably closer to cowardice: I’m afraid of being wrong, particularly in a high-stakes situation — a professional dinner for me, a ball or a sought-after salon for the average Proust character. And I’m also worried about trivializing the work simply by talking about it, as if the integrity of art and scholarship depended on their isolation from the merely social.
Both Proust and Bourdieu, of course, know how crazy it is to imagine that they could be so isolated; one of the reasons I’m writing this blog is to convince myself that they shouldn’t, either. Evaluating stories and artworks, from Sorry to Bother You to “Apeshit,” really is as ubiquitous a practice as Proust’s novel would suggest, and has perhaps become even more essential to social life in our era of endlessly regenerating content. In any such conversation, each statement about an artwork is both an attempt to approach something durably true and a move in an interpersonal game, whether friendly or hostile. Doubly difficult, in other words, but with double the opportunities for grace, elegance, surprise — all the features of socializing done right, which Proust even at his most pessimistic seems to allow for. When the narrator’s mother is interrupted during a delicate conversation with Swann, she “manage[s] to extract from the restriction itself a further refinement of thought, as great poets do when the tyranny of rhyme forces them into the discovery of their finest lines.”
The Arborescent Page 