Proust's Mock Goncourt Journal

A recently published collection of short parodies that Proust wrote for Le Figaro includes a mock Goncourt Journal entry concerning the Lemoine diamond fraud. Proust creates his own obituary at the end of the parody.

Goncourt Journal 21st December 1907

Dined with Lucien Daudet [Proust’s lover] who spoke to me with a touch of whimsical humour about the fabulous diamonds seen on the shoulders of Mme X..., diamonds said by Lucien in vigourously amusing language, to be sure, always the artist in his notation, revealing the wholly superior writer by the savoury choice of his epithets, to be in spite of everything a bourgeois stone, rather silly, in no way comparable, for example to emerald or ruby. And at dessert Lucien almost knocked us to the floor by what he had been told by Lefebvre de Béhaine that evening, to he Lucien, and as opposed to the opinion held by that charming woman Mme de Nadaillac, that a certain Lemoine had discovered the secret of the manufacture of diamonds. According to Lucien all this was causing furious anxieties in the world of business, in the face of the possible depreciation of unsold diamond stocks, anxieties that could well end by prevailing over the magistracy and leading to the imprisonment of this Lemoine for the rest of his days, in a sort of in pace, for the crime of lèse-bijouterie. It is more powerful than the story of Galilee, more modern, lending itself more to the artistic evocation of the times, and all at once I saw an excellent subject for one of our pieces, a piece which could contain some robust things about the power of today's high industry, a power guiding, in the main, government and judiciary and resisting any new invention which could be calamitous to it. Like a bouquet, Lucien is brought the news, giving me the details of the tale which had just been sketched out to him, that their friend Marcel Proust had killed himself, after the fall in price of diamond shares, a fall which had annihilated part of his fortune.

Proust parodies the Goncourt brothers again in Time Regained, using a much longer mock Goncourt journal entry to describe the ascent of the Verdurins to the pinnacle of Parisian society.

Proust's Unchanging Characters

“Proust’s characters change without changing,” writes Jean-Francois Revel in On Proust. “Sometimes they undergo a complete change without anything remarkable happening to them. On the other hand, there are times when their existence undergoes a major transformation without their changing.”

… it is in spite of and within the limits of the unchanging character and destiny that the Proustian characters undergo a process of renewal. The head waiter is always the same head waiter; I shall come across him tomorrow in the same place, but he will renew himself because his mimicry will be even more fetching that it was yesterday… Proust enjoys showing us personal renewals, which are not merely changes in social status (there are few of them or they only happen to secondary characters) as though they had no roots in the past and are therefore not the result of a process of evolution, but the equivalent of the birth of a fresh individual…. Proustian time is not creative. Its role, while bringing about change in the social situation—minimal changes which nevertheless seem of capital importance to the interest parties and are always announced with surprise by the narrator—is to reveal the true nature of the characters, to unveil what men already were without our knowing it. The Albertine of whom we catch a glimpse on the beach is already everything which will be discovered by the narrator as a result of his posthumous investigation of her liaisons.

This strikes me a largely true. So, to use an example provided by Revel, we discover that Octave, the apparently shallow-minded teenage golfer at Balbec, has become a successful writer “whose latest work has just turned modern literature upside down!” The two cannot be linked. On the other hand, Mme. Verdurin devolves into deeper and deeper viciousness as the Search unfolds. If we are not surprised that this character trait continues to define her, we are stunned by the degree to which she unleashes it. Mme. Verdurin may be the exception to Revel’s observation, however. Just as the two ways are revealed in the last novel to be one and the same path, Proust’s characters seem to circle about themselves and one another, their personalities unchanged as they weave the fabric of Time.

Regaining Time

I have been reading Time Regained, reading and pondering it, underlining, noting this and that passage. My reading had seemed perfunctory, though pleasurable, until I came to the passage in which Marcel has finally been allowed into the salon of the Prince and Princess Guermantes. As you remember, he was asked to wait until a music recital finished, and sat outside the grand hall, musing about his past and eating tidbits brought to him by the Guermantes servants. Now Marcel is talking with Gilberte.

Bored I may have been as I stood talking this afternoon to Gilberte or Mme. De Guermantes, but at least as I did so I held within my grasp those of the imaginings of my childhood which I had found most beautiful and thought most inaccessible and, like a shopkeeper who cannot balance his books, I could console myself by forgetting the value of their actual possession and remembering the price which had once been attached to them by my desire.

Here, in a sentence, Marcel squarely faces the choice that has confronted him throughout the Search: Will he choose (to use Edmund Wilson’s phrase) “the life of art or the art of life”? He is bored by society people. Even the beloved Gilberte has become boring. Yet, “at least” (as if they were his lifeline) he has retained “the imaginings” of childhood. At this point in the unfolding of Proust’s sentence, Marcel has not thrown his weight to his imaginings; the word “imaginings” suggests something standing apart from the substantial and putatively real world of adulthood, a world Marcel has been a part of for years.

This is a moment of foreshadowing. Proust looks forward to the end of the sentence by introducing two contrary ideas, the beautiful and the inaccessible. How would anything we perceived as beautiful be inaccessible? Unachievable, perhaps, but not inaccessible. Proust’s words suggest we are still in childhood. When Marcel turns, in the sentence’s final clause, to the present moment—his presence in the Guermantes salon—we once again confront the initial dilemma. Marcel can find relief from the conflict between art and life only by forgetting the value of “actual possession” and remembering the price (the value) he once attached to his youthful imaginings. The simile of the shopkeeper is striking. He is the shopkeeper, balancing the value of actual possession with youthful imaginings. We do not yet know the result; this is a waypoint along the route that Marcel has journeyed now for 3000 pages. Nor are we shocked by his attempt to balance one way of living with another, for in the first pages of Time Regained Marcel put forth the choice: before him stood Swann’s Way or the Guermantes Way. Which would he choose? In this short sentence the choice has become more pressing, if not resolved. Marcel, like the shopkeeper, cannot yet balance his books.

I put down Time Regained, rose from my chair, and took from the shelf my copy of Irving Penn’s Moments Preserved. Haphazardly, I opened Penn’s book of photographs and looked. Before me lay portraits I had first seen nearly fifty years ago, and which retained the price that I had once attached to them by my youthful desires. Turning the pages, I stared at Corbusier, Mauriac, Carlo Levi, Gioni, Marin, Charlie Parker, Montale, T.S. Eliot. Marcel’s effort to balance actual possession with the price of past desire had suddenly become my own.

A Proust Comic

I missed Charles Mudede's review of a Swann's Way comic book when The Stranger published it earlier this year. As always, his critical take is worth reading.

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.

The Bleak World of The Captive

Sometimes, as Poe showed in The Purloined Letter, the clue to a puzzle may be so obvious that we are unable to see it. The puzzle, in my case, is Marcel’s jealousy in The Captive. The emotion has been prominent in the Search. Swann’s courtship of Odette, Marcel’s friendship with Gilberte, Charlus’ pursuit of Morel—all have been memorable portraits of jealousy. But The Captive portrays extreme, almost unimaginable jealousy. Marcel’s interest in Albertine has grown into an obsession large even by Proustian standards. Yet that explanation, while true, isn’t sufficient, at least to me.

John Rawls has noted that jealousy arises from the wish to keep what one has. Does Marcel have Albertine? Marcel fears not, even though he has attempted to fulfill this wish in a literal way, by making Albertine a prisoner in his parents’ house. The lock on the prison door is the lie. The opposite appears (falsely) to be the case—a lie exposed would result in Albertine’s expulsion from the house. Marcel is constantly fabricating lies to catch Albertine in what he supposes is one dalliance or another. The motive for Albertine’s lies is more ambiguous; she sometimes tells lies to protect herself, other times to protect Marcel. The Captive tells the story of people struggling to gain control of someone.

One of the great themes of In Search of Lost Time is this struggle. The struggle is bound to fail because the feelings and thoughts of others are always beyond our control. This is a truth Marcel discovers again and again, yet has not be able to act upon on his journey toward becoming a writer. It is “a charming law of nature,” Marcel tells us in The Guermantes Way, “and one that is evident in the heart of the most complex societies, that we live in perfect ignorance of those we love.” I take “charming” to be an ironic touch. “Such a society,” he goes on to explain, “where every being is double, and where the most transparent person, the most notorious, will be known to others only from within a protective shell, a sweet cocoon, as a charming natural curiosity.” Control requires knowledge of others, which Marcel denies possible. Later, in The Captive, he is on a tear to prove himself wrong in his relationship with Albertine. As we know, the effort is futile; the novel ends with her escape from the hôtel and ends the illusion of his control.

Throughout the novel, as the struggle between Marcel and Albertine plays itself out, the possibility of understanding anyone is raised and dismissed. Deception is the social norm. “The fact of a man’s having proclaimed… that it is wicked to lie obliges him as a rule to lie more than other people, without on that account abandoning the solemn mask, doffing the august tiara of sincerity.” The one we love wears the mask and ( in a reversal of the expected Janus face) “is to us like Janus, presenting to us a face that pleases us if the person leaves us, a dreary face if we know him or her to be at our perpetual disposal.” Social events are not what they seem, but “resemble those parties to which doctors invite their patients, who utter the most intelligent remarks, have perfect manners, and would never show that they were mad if they did not whisper in your ear, pointing to some old gentleman going past, 'That’s Joan of Arc.'” Medicine too has its lies in remedies that created “artificially grafted illnesses.” Even the Search itself has its lies. “If we were not obliged, in the interest of narrative tidiness, to confine ourselves to frivolous reasons, how many more serious reasons would enable us to demonstrate the mendacious flimsiness of the opening pages of this volume,” Marcel/Proust tells us.

If life includes redemption from the bleak world that Marcel portrays, we find it in art:

All the residuum of reality which we are obliged to keep to ourselves, which cannot be transmitted in talk, even from friend to friend, from master to disciple, from lover to mistress, that ineffable something which differentiates qualitatively what each of us has felt and what he is obliged to leave behind at the threshold of the phrases in which he can communicate with others only by limiting himself to externals, common to all and of no interest—are brought out by art…

And so Marcel thinks again of the steeples of Martinville and the trees near Balbec. In these experiences lie the possibility of escape from the sterile, mendacious world that permeates The Captive. Albertine is beyond his control; perhaps art is not. If only he could resume writing.

In the Footsteps of Proust

I'm rarely drawn to places which writers or their fictional characters have inhabited (though several years ago I couldn't resist walking past Stanley Kunitz's home in Provincetown, Massachusetts).

If you are traveling to France and are interested in seeing Proust sites in Paris and Illiers (Combray), here's a guide for you.