An image presented to us by life brings us in reality, in that moment, multiple and different sensations. The sight, for example, of the cover of a book already read has, woven into the letters of its title, the moonbeams of a distant summer night. The taste of our morning café au lait brings with it the vague hope of good weather which so often, long ago, while we were drinking it out of a creamy-white, rippled porcelain bowl which might almost have been made out of hardened milk, when the day was still intact and full, made us smile at the sheer uncertainty of the early light. An hour is not just an hour, it is a vessel full of perfumes, sounds, plans and atmospheres. What we call reality is a certain relationship between these sensations and the memories which surround us simultaneously – a relationship which is suppressed in a simple cinematographic vision, which actually moves further away from truth the more it professes to be confined to it – a unique relationship which the writer has to rediscover in order to bring its two different terms together permanently in his sentence. One can list indefinitely in a description all the objects that figured in the place described, but the truth will begin only when the writer takes two different objects, establishes their relationship, the analogue in the world of art of the unique relation created in the world of science by the laws of causality, and encloses them within the necessary armature of a beautiful style. Indeed, just as in life, it begins at the moment when, by bringing together a quality shared by two sensations, he draws out their common essence by uniting them with each other, in order to protect them from the contingencies of time, in a metaphor. Had not nature herself, from this point of view, set me on the way to art, wasn’t she herself the beginning of art, she who made it possible for me, often after a long interval, to recognize the beauty of one thing only in another, noon at Combray only in the sound of its bells, mornings at Doncières only in the hiccuping of our water-heater? The relationship may not be very interesting, the objects ordinary, the style bad, but if no relationship has been established, there is nothing.
But that was not all. If reality were a kind of residue of experience, more or less identical for everybody, because when we talk about bad weather, a war, a cab-stand, a brightly lit restaurant, a garden in flower, everybody knows what we mean, if reality were just that, then no doubt some sort of cinematographic film of things would be enough and ‘style’ and ‘literature’ which departed from their simple data would be an artificial irrelevance. But was this really what reality was? When I tried to ascertain what actually happens at the moment when something makes a particular impression on us, whether as on the day when, crossing the bridge over the Vivonne, the shadow of a cloud on the water had made me exclaim ‘Damn!’ and jump for joy, or when, listening to a sentence of Bergotte’s, the only part of my impression that I had been conscious of was the not particularly characteristic phrase ‘That’s marvellous’, or when, annoyed by some piece of bad behaviour, Bloch uttered these words, which were completely unsuited to such a commonplace event: ‘I can only say that such conduct b-b-beggars belief,’ or when, flattered at having been made welcome at the Guermantes’, and also a little drunk on their wines, I could not help saying, half out loud to myself as I was leaving: ‘They really are terribly nice people, it would be lovely to spend all one’s time with them,’ I slowly became aware that the essential book, the only true book, was not something the writer needs to invent, in the usual sense of the word, so much as to translate, because it already exists within each of us. The writer’s task and duty are those of a translator.
But while, in cases where the imprecise language of, say, vanity is involved, realigning interior indirect speech (which as it goes on moves further and further away from the original, central impression) until it coincides with the straight line which ought to have run directly from the impression, while this realignment is a difficult matter and something which our idle nature is reluctant to take on, there are other instances, where love is involved for example, where the same realignment becomes painful. All our pretence of indifference, all our indignation against those lies which are so natural, so like the ones we tell ourselves, in a word all those things we have not only, whenever we felt wretched or betrayed, said endlessly to our loved one, but even said over and over again to ourselves while we were waiting to see her, sometimes speaking aloud, breaking the silence of our bedroom with comments such as: ‘No, really, that sort of behaviour is intolerable,’ and: ‘I consented to see you one last time, but I won’t pretend it isn’t painful,’ to bring all that back to the truth of experience when it has moved so far away from it means putting an end to all that we value most, to everything that, when we have been alone with our over-excited plans for letters and approaches, has constituted our passionate dialogue with ourselves.
Even where the pleasures of art are concerned, although we seek them because of the impression they make on us, we contrive as quickly as possible to dismiss the specificity of this impression as being inexpressible, and to concentrate on whatever allows us to experience the pleasure of it without properly analysing it, and to think that we are communicating it to other art-lovers, with whom conversation will be possible because we will be speaking to them about something we have in common, the personal root of our own impression having been suppressed. Even at the moments when we are the most disinterested onlookers of nature, or society, or love, or art itself, since every impression comes in two parts, half of it contained within the object, and the other half, which we alone will understand, extending into us, we are quick to disregard this latter half, which ought to be the sole object of our attention, and to take notice only of the first, which, being external and therefore impossible to study in any depth, will not impose any strain on us: we find it too demanding a task to try to perceive the little furrow that the sight of a hawthorn or of a church has made in us. But we play a symphony again and again, we go back to look at the church until – in this flight from our own lives, which we don’t have the courage to look at, which people call erudition – we know them as well, and in the same manner, as the most knowledgeable student of music or of archaeology.
Very many people, therefore, leave it at that, extracting nothing from their impressions, growing old useless and unsatisfied, like celibates at the shrine of art! They have the bitterness that goes with virginity and indolence, but which in those instances can be cured by pregnancy or work. They get more excited by works of art than real artists do, because their excitement, not being for them the result of hard introspective investigation, bursts outward, overheats their conversation and makes them go red in the face. They think they are accomplishing something by shouting ‘Bravo, bravo’ at the tops of their voices after the performance of a work they enjoy. But these demonstrations do not force them to clarify the nature of their enjoyment, and they remain unaware of it. Yet, untapped, it overflows even into their calmest conversations, makes them make grand gestures, and grimace and toss their heads whenever they talk about art. ‘I went to this concert. I must say it didn’t do anything for me. Then they started playing the quartet. Lord, what a difference!’ (at this point, the music-lover’s face expresses anxious concern, as if he was thinking: ‘I can see sparks, there’s a smell of burning, something must be on fire’). ‘Damn it all, what I heard was exasperating, it’s badly written, but it’s astounding, though, mind you, it wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea.’ The look is also accompanied by a worried tone of voice, head on one side, more gesticulation, the whole absurd pantomime of a gosling with half-grown winglets which has not solved the problem of wings but is none the less tormented with a desire to soar into the air. And so this barren music-lover spends his life going from one concert to the next, embittered and unsatisfied as his hair turns grey and he enters an unfruitful old age, the celibate bachelor of art, as it were. Yet there is something almost touching about this most unlikeable breed, though they reek of worthiness and though they have not received anything like their due share of contentment, because they are the first half-f
ormed products of the need to pass from the shifting objects of intellectual pleasure to its permanent organ.
So, ludicrous they may be, but they are not totally to be despised. They are the first experimental efforts of nature’s attempt to create artists, as ill-formed and unviable as the original creatures which preceded the animal species we now have, and which were not made to last. These weak-willed, sterile art-lovers are surely as touching as those early machines which could not get off the ground but which embodied, not the secret of flight, which was yet to be discovered, but the desire to fly. ‘Also, old chap, adds the music-lover, gripping you by the arm, this is the eighth time I’ve heard it, and I can promise you it won’t be the last.’ And indeed, since they cannot take in the truly nourishing elements in art, they are permanently in need of artistic pleasures, victims of a bulimia which never lets them feel satisfied. So they go to concert after concert to applaud the same work, believing that by being there they are fulfilling a duty, an obligation, in the way that other people feel a duty to attend board meetings or funerals. Then, whether it be in literature, in painting or in music, new, even diametrically opposed, works start to appear. For the ability to launch new ideas and new systems, and more importantly the capacity to assimilate and reproduce them, has always been much commoner, even among those who produce art, than genuine taste, but it has become much more widespread now with the multiplication of reviews and literary journals (and concomitantly of factitious careers as writers and artists). Thus the best part of the younger generation, the most intelligent and disinterested of them, used to like nothing in literature so much as works that had an elevated moral and sociological, even religious, significance. They imagined this to be the criterion of a work’s value, thereby repeating the error of artists such as David, Chenavard, Brunetière, etc. Instead of Bergotte, whose finest sentences did in fact require a much more profound consideration by the reader, they preferred writers who seemed more profound simply because they wrote less well. The complexity of his artistry was aimed at fashionable society, said the democrats, thus paying the people in society an unmerited tribute. Whenever the rational intelligence decides to start passing judgment on works of art, nothing continues to be fixed or certain, you can prove anything you like. While the reality of talent is a universal possession or acquisition, our primary responsibility being to establish its presence or absence beneath the surface fashions of thought and style, criticism in its classification of authors never goes beyond that surface. It hails a writer as a prophet, on account of his peremptory tone and his very public scorn for the school that preceded him, when in fact he has absolutely nothing new to say. These aberrations on the part of criticism are so constant that a writer might almost prefer to be judged by the general public (if they were not incapable even of recognizing what an artist has tried to achieve in an area of research which they know nothing about). For there is a closer analogy between the instinctive life of the public and the talent of a great writer, which is no more than an instinct religiously listened to while imposing silence on everything else, an instinct perfected and understood, than between it and the superficial verbiage and shifting criteria of the recognized arbiters of judgment. New battles of words take place in every decade (for the kaleidoscope is not only made up of fashionable groupings, but also of social, political and religious ideas which become widespread for a short while thanks to their refraction among ordinary people, but which are none the less still subject to the brief lifespan of ideas whose novelty has been able to seduce only those minds which do not require strict standards of proof). So one school or party had followed another, always winning adherents among the same minds, men with a limited amount of intelligence, always liable to become caught up with things which other minds, more scrupulous and more difficult to convince, keep away from. Unfortunately, precisely because the former are only half-minds, they need to supplement themselves by doing things, so they are more active than the better minds, and attract crowds of followers, and create around them not only exaggerated reputations and unjustified contempt, but civil and foreign wars, which a little Port-Royalist84 self-criticism might have prevented.
As for the enjoyment the beautifully expressed thought of a master gives to a truly discerning mind or a spirit that is genuinely alive, it is probably entirely healthy but, however prized the men may be who can really appreciate it (and how many of them are there in twenty years?), it does reduce them to being no more than the complete consciousness of another. When a man has done everything he can to be loved by a woman who could only have made him miserable, but despite his best efforts over the years has not succeeded even in arranging a meeting with her, then instead of trying to give expression to his sufferings and the danger he has escaped, he reads and rereads this comment of La Bruyère’s, adding to it his own ‘million words’ and some intensely moving recollections of his life: ‘Men often want to love where they cannot succeed, they seek their defeat without being able to bring it about and so, if I may put it like this, they are compelled to remain free.’85 Whether or not this is the meaning the comment had for its writer (for it to have done so, it would have had to read ‘be loved’ instead of ‘love’, which would have been better), there can be no doubt that, taking it this way, this sensitive and well-read man gives it new life, inflates it with meaning until it is ready to burst and cannot repeat it without brimming over with joy, so true and fine does he think it to be; yet despite all that he has added nothing to it, and it remains the thought of La Bruyère alone.
How could a purely descriptive literature have any value at all, when reality lies hidden beneath the surface of little things of the sort it documents (grandeur in the distant sound of an aeroplane, or in the outline of the steeple of Saint-Hilaire, the past in the taste of a madeleine, etc.) so that the things have no meaning in themselves until it is disentangled from them?
Preserved by our memory, it is the piecemeal sequence of all those inaccurate expressions, in which nothing of what we have really experienced remains, which constitutes our thought, our life, reality, and all that the so-called art of ‘real life’ can do is to reproduce that lie, in an art which is as simple as life, devoid of beauty, and such a tedious and pointless duplication of what our eyes see and our intellect records that one wonders where anyone who engages in it can find the joyous, dynamic spark capable of setting his task in motion and then keeping it going. The greatness of true art, on the other hand, the sort of art that M. de Norpois would have called dilettante amusement, lies in rediscovering, grasping hold of, and making us recognize this reality, distant as it is from our daily lives, and growing more and more distant as the conventional knowledge we substitute for it becomes denser and more impermeable, this reality which we run a real risk of dying without having known, and which is quite simply our life.
Real life, life finally uncovered and clarified, the only life in consequence lived to the full, is literature. Life in this sense dwells within all ordinary people as much as in the artist. But they do not see it because they are not trying to shed light on it. And so their past is cluttered with countless photographic negatives, which continue to be useless because their intellect has never ‘developed’ them. Our lives; and the lives of other people, too; because style for a writer, like colour for a painter, is a question not of technique but of vision. It is the revelation, which would be impossible by direct or conscious means, of the qualitative difference in the ways we perceive the world, a difference which, if there were no art, would remain the eternal secret of each individual. It is only through art that we can escape from ourselves and know how another person sees a universe which is not the same as our own and whose landscapes would otherwise have remained as unknown as any there may be on the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing only a single world, our own, we see it multiplied, and have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, all more different one from another than those which revolve in infinity and which, centuries after the fir
e from which their rays emanated has gone out, whether it was called Rembrandt or Vermeer, still send us their special light.
This labour of the artist, this attempt to see something different beneath the material, beneath experience, beneath words, is the exact inverse of that which is accomplished within us from minute to minute, as we live our lives heedless of ourselves, by vanity, passion, intellect and habit, when they overlay our true impressions, so as to hide them from us completely, with the repertoire of words, and the practical aims, which we wrongly call life. To put it briefly, this art, complicated though it be, is actually the only art that is alive. It alone can express for others, and make us see for ourselves, our own lives, lives which are unable to keep a watch on themselves, and whose visible manifestations, such as they are, need to be translated and frequently to be read against the grain and painstakingly deciphered. The work carried out by our vanity, our passion, our imitative faculties, our abstract intelligence, our habits, is the work that art undoes, making us follow a contrary path, in a return to the depths where whatever has really existed lies unrecognized within us.
And of course it was very tempting to recreate real life and rejuvenate one’s impressions in this way. But it called for all kinds of courage, including emotional courage. Because above all it involved giving up one’s most cherished illusions, ceasing to believe in the objectivity of what one had elaborated oneself, and instead of comforting oneself for the hundredth time with the words: ‘She was very nice,’ reading what underlay them: ‘I enjoyed kissing her.’ Certainly what I had felt in these hours of love was what all men feel. One feels, but what one has felt is like those negatives which show nothing but blackness until they are held close to a lamp, and which also have to be looked at from the other side: one does not know what it is until it has been brought into contact with the intellect. Only when that has clarified it, when that has intellectualized it, can one make out, and even then only with difficulty, the form of what one felt. But I also realized that the suffering I had first known because of Gilberte, that our love does not belong to the creature who inspires it, is salutary. To a lesser extent as a means to an end (because, short as our life may be, it is only during suffering that our thoughts, in a sense shaken up by endless and shifting impulses, elevate, as in a storm, to a level at which it becomes visible, all that regulated immensity, which we, stationed at a badly placed window, do not normally see, because the calm of happiness leaves it smooth and at too low a level; perhaps only for some great geniuses does this movement of thought continue all the time without any need for the agitations of grief; yet we cannot be certain, when we contemplate the expansive and even development of their cheerful works, that we are not too inclined to infer from the happiness of the work that the life was happy too, when it may perhaps, on the contrary, have been permanently miserable) – but principally because, if our love is not only the love of a Gilberte (and this is what we find so hard to bear), this is not because it is also the love of an Albertine, but because it is a part of our soul, longer lasting than the various selves which die successively within us and which selfishly would like to hold on to it, and a part which must – whatever pain, and it may even be productive pain, this may cause – detach itself from individuals and recreate its general nature and give this love, the understanding of this love, to everyone, to the universal mind, and not first to this woman and then another in whom one or another of the selves that we have successively been has wanted to be dissolved.
In Search of Lost Time Page 26