Proust and Habit

My response to The English Teacher's Reading Proust (Part 2). The response was originally published on October 6, 2006.

Edmund White, in his quirky Proust biography, characterizes the novelist’s philosophy as “You can only have what you want when you no longer want it.” The passage describing Marcel’s glimpse of Mme. de Villeparisis seems to support White’s reductionist view. We are charmed by a place as long as we cannot visit it; life would be delightful, Marcel remarks, if one of the defining characteristics of being human—habit—didn’t exist. We nod in agreement; habit is a veil that prevents delight. But then there’s the perplexing phrase that ends the passage: stripped of habit, “life must appear delightful to those of us who are continually under the threat of death—that is to say, to all mankind.”

Habit is the “regulator” of our nerves. Unregulated nerves cause unpleasant sensations. Excessive nerves, the jumps. Nerves shut down, depression. Uncontrollable itchiness or bone-numbing lethargy. Habit protects us from life’s terrors, among them the terror of death, at the cost of a kind of insensate existence. Citing the passage you quote, Samuel Beckett observes that in Proust’s fictional world

The fundamental duty of Habit, about which it describes the futile and stupefying arabesques of its supererogations, consists in a perpetual adjustment and readjustment of our organic sensibility to the conditions of its worlds. Suffering represents the omission of that duty, whether through negligence or inefficiency, and boredom its adequate performance. The pendulum oscillates between these two terms…

The relationship between habit and perception is not as cozy as I implied in my reply to your first Proust entry. We need both: habit to avoid suffering, and perception to live more than a merely organic—that is, non-human—life. However, both habit and perception have their dangers. In the volume Sodom and Gomorrah, Marcel returns to the hotel where he customarily stays when visiting the seaside village of Balbec. He recalls the first time he entered the hotel, and contrasts the strangeness of that first experience with the comfort he now feels:

This time, on the contrary, I had felt the almost too soothing pleasure of passing up through a hotel that I knew, where I felt at home, where I had performed once again that operation which we must always start afresh, longer, more difficult than the turning inside out of an eyelid, and which consists in the imposition of our own familiar soul on the terrifying soul of our surroundings. Must I now, I had asked myself, little suspecting the sudden change of mood that was in store for me, go always to new hotels where I shall be dining for the first time, where Habit will not yet have killed upon each landing, outside each door, the terrible dragon that seemed to be watching over an enchanted existence, where I shall have to approach those unknown women whom grand hotels, casinos, watering-places seem to bring together to live a communal existence as though in vast polyparies?

Confronted by new surroundings, Marcel must assimilate them, make them habitual. Without the “imposition of our familiar soul,” they would remain terrifying. Marcel then makes a sudden shift away from this embrace of habit to ask if he must always seek out new hotels where habit has not yet had a chance to kill “enchanted existence.” Is Marcel contradicting himself? No. Both are true: unfamiliar surroundings have a terrifying soul and habit is a “terrible dragon” because it kills that terrifying soul. In Beckett’s terms, we need Boredom to escape the terror of the unfamiliar, and must endure Suffering if we are to create for ourselves more than a base life.

Still, the phrase that ends the encounter with Mme. de Villeparisis remains perplexing to me. I can’t take Marcel at his word. Stripped of habit, death would become The Terrifying Soul unrelentingly confronting us. Ungaretti has it right. Sleep follows illumination. I think Proust would agree.