Proustian Uncertainties by Saul Friedländer

Author:Saul Friedländer [Friedländer, Saul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2020-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

In Proust there is little dying altogether,” Taylor noted, comparing In Search to George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. He added: “Having dramatized the death of the grandmother in The Guermantes Way, he’ll dramatize that of Bergotte in The Captive and will then have had enough of dying” (Taylor, Proust, 85–86). The remark is not convincing to me. The Narrator may well not describe death on more than the two occasions mentioned by Taylor, but he discusses death in general and his own death at length in several episodes.

It is true that, notwithstanding some deeply felt reflections, the theme is kept within narrow limits, possibly untypical in modern European literature; it may lead us to a general remark about an emotional characteristic of Proust’s chef d’oeuvre: it is a social satire on the grandest scale and an incomparable analysis of complex emotional constructs, but it mostly lacks a sense of tragedy. And here we accede to the wider aspects of this “moral accounting.”

At some point, in his conversations with Albertine, a chance remark leads the Narrator to a discussion of modern writers, particularly Stendhal, Thomas Hardy, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. This, of course, is but a short conversation on a topic of which Proust was a master, but that Albertine could not have sustained. (For more on Proust’s vast and deep knowledge of classical and modern literature, see his Contre Sainte-Beuve and, among many specialized studies, Anka Muhlstein’s Monsieur Proust’s Library and Antoine Compagnon, Proust entre deux siècles.)

The main criticism, in the conversation with Albertine, that the Narrator directs to each of the authors aims at proving that from one novel to the next, quasi-identical patterns are used by each of them as symbolic markers and, more concretely, in the description of the main characters. “Isn’t the Dostoievsky woman…with her mysterious face, whose engaging beauty changes abruptly, as though her apparent good nature was only play-acting, into terrible insolence (although at heart it seems that she is more good than bad), isn’t she always the same…?” (Search, V, 508).

The Narrator’s remarks may be applicable to some of Dostoevsky’s women, but they do not fit his male characters. Gide devoted a convincing essay to the intrinsic difference between each of the brothers Karamazov (Gide’s essay was published in 1923 but he lectured about it in 1922; Proust could have heard of the argument). In Gide’s essay, while Ivan embodies cold intellect, and Dimitry the world of passion, it is Alyosha, the youngest brother, who represents the religious dimension, the intimation of transcendence.

Let me add that the Narrator’s remark regarding Dostoevsky’s female types is puzzling, as the Narrator himself writes, when reflecting on memory, that he aims at discovering general characteristics under the appearance of diversity: “There is a feeling for generality which, in the future writer, itself picks out what is general and can for that reason one day enter into a work of art” (Search, VI, 306).

Notwithstanding the Narrator’s ability to discern under general

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.