Proust, James, and Society

“Why, it might be asked, is Proust’s work so different in form [from Henry James’], given the fact that he, too, is drawn by the resplendent image of the ‘great world’ and, presumably, is quite as responsive to some of the values attributed to James?” Philip Rahv asks the question in an essay on James’ heroines. “Proust’s picture of society contains elements of lyricism as well as elements of objective analysis,” he goes on to observe.

He is a more realistic painter of social manners than James, perhaps for the reason that he permits no ethical issues to intervene between him and the subject, approaching the world ab initio with the tacit assumption that ethics are irrelevant to its functions. By comparison James is a traditional moralist whose insight into experience turns on his judgment of conduct. If sometimes…we are made to feel that he is withholding judgment or judging wrongly, that may be because he is either conforming, or appears to conform, to certain moral conventions of the world’s making by which it manages to flatter itself. In Proust such conventions are brought out into the open, but not for purposes of moral judgment.

Whether or not this is true of James I leave to a later time, after I’ve re-entered James’ world. But of Proust, Ravh’s comment seems on the mark. “The sole morality of which the protagonist of his novel is conscious grows out of the choice he faces between two contrary ideals. He must decide whether to pursue the art of life or the life of art…,” a trait that has driven the Richard Hugo House Proust group crazy at times. As they put it, the protagonist is a self-centered adolescent boy with little genuine concern for the people around him. A harsh view of Marcel, perhaps, but not without basis.

It is not until Time Regained “that the world is finally renounced; and through a kind of optical illusion induced by the novel’s astonishing unfoldment, we seem to participate in this renunciation of the world at the precise moment when its alternative—i.e. the world of art—actually comes into being, or more accurately, is at last fully realized.” This “work in the world” is overcome, Rahv concludes, only after it has been possessed. More recently, Joshua Landy develops a similar argument, adding that it is not only Marcel that finally possesses the world, but we who have gained possession of it by reading In Search of Lost Time.

Soon the Hugo House Proust group, have possession of the Proust’s world, will begin its last session to participate in the long-awaited blossoming of Marcel’s life as a writer.