On Reading by Proust Marcel

Author:Proust, Marcel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hesperus Press
Published: 2011-07-23T16:00:00+00:00

Makeshift Memory

I have here translated The Bible of Amiens, by John Ruskin, but this does not seem to be enough for the reader, in my view. To read only one book by an author is to see him only once. You can distinguish someone’s individual traits in a single conversation, but it is only through repeated encounters in different circumstances that you can recognise these traits as characteristic and essential, and for a writer, for a musician or a painter, the varying circumstances that allow you, by a sort of controlled experiment, to discern the permanent aspects of his character are his various works. We find again, in a second book, in another painting, the particularities which, the first time, we might have believed depended on the subject matter. Putting the different works side by side brings out the common elements whose interrelation constitutes the moral physiognomy of the artist. When multiple Rembrandt portraits painted from different models are reunited in a gallery, we are struck at once by what is common to them all, the very features of the Rembrandt face. So, by adding a footnote every time a passage of The Bible of Amiens awakened in me, by analogies and correspondences however remote, the memory of other works of Ruskin’s, and by translating in the footnote whatever text came, or returned, to mind, I have tried to enable the reader to put himself in the position of someone who has been in Ruskin’s presence before, someone who, having conversed with him already, can recognise in his words that which is permanent and fundamental to Ruskin himself. I have tried in this way to provide for the reader a kind of makeshift memory, in which I have stored away recollections of Ruskin’s other books - a sort of echo chamber where the words of The Bible of Amiens can resonate more deeply by awakening the echoes of their brothers. But doubtless these echoes will not, as they would in a memory which had formed on its own, answer the words of The Bible of Amiens from the horizons that are generally hidden from our sight, horizons at various distances which our life itself, day by day, measures out. The echoes will not rejoin this word, whose similarity has drawn them to it, by crossing the gentle resistance of that intervening atmosphere which has the dimensions of our life itself and which is the entire poetry of memory.

The fact is, the primary task of every critic should be to help the reader to notice these particular traits and to draw his attention to the similar traits which will enable him to see them as the essential characteristics of the writer’s genius.

If the critic has felt this, and has helped others to feel it, his duties are more or less fulfilled. If he has not felt it, he can write all the books in the world about Ruskin - Ruskin the Man, the Writer, the Prophet, the Artist; The Range of

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