How Proust Can Change Your Life
Page 15
According to Monsieur Larcher, the author of a leaflet on sale at the tourist office:
If one wishes to grasp the deep and occult sense of In Search of Lost Time, one must, before starting to read it, devote an entire day to visiting Illiers-Combray. The magic of Combray can really only be experienced in this privileged place
.
Though Larcher displays admirable civic feeling and would no doubt be applauded by every patissier involved in the madeleine trade, one wonders after just such a day whether he is not at risk of exaggerating the qualities of his town and unwittingly diminishing those of Proust.
More honest visitors will admit to themselves that there is nothing striking about the town. It looks much like any other, which doesn’t mean it is uninteresting, simply that there is no obvious evidence of the privileged status that Monsieur Larcher accords it. It is a fitting Proustian point: the interest of a town is necessarily dependent on a certain way of looking at it. Combray may be pleasant, but it is as valuable a place to visit as any in the large plateau of northern France. The beauty that Proust revealed there could be present, latent, in almost any town, if only we made the effort to consider it in a Proustian way.
Ironically, however, it is out of an idolatrous reverence for Proust, and a misunderstanding of his aesthetic ideas, that we speed blindly through the surrounding countryside, through neighboring nonliterary towns and villages like Brou, Bonneval, and Courville, on our way to the imagined delights of Proust’s childhood locale. In so doing, we forget that had Proust’s family settled in Courville, or his old aunt taken up residence in Bonneval, it would have been to these places that we would have driven, just as unfairly. Our pilgrimage is idolatrous because it privileges the place Proust happened to grow up in rather than his manner of considering it, an oversight that the corpulent Michelin man encourages because he fails to recognize that the worth of sights is dependent more on the quality of one’s vision than on the object viewed, that there is nothing inherently three-star about a town Proust grew up in or inherently no-star about an Elf petrol station near Courville where Proust never had a chance to fill his Renault—but where if he had, he might easily have found something to appreciate, for it has a delightful forecourt with daffodils planted in a neat border and an old-fashioned pump that, from a distance, looks like a stout man leaning against a fence wearing a pair of burgundy dungarees.
In the preface to his translation of Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies, Proust had written enough to turn the Illiers-Combray tourist industry into an absurdity had anyone bothered to listen:
We would like to go and see the field that Millet … shows us in his Springtime, we would like M. Claude Monet to take us to Giverny, on the banks of the Seine, to
that bend of the river which he hardly lets us distinguish through the morning mist. Yet in actual fact, it was the mere chance of a connection or family relation that gave … Millet or Claude Monet occasion to pass or to stay nearby, and to choose to paint that road, that garden, that field, that bend in the river, rather than some other. What makes them appear other and more beautiful than the rest of the world, is that they carry on them like some elusive reflection the impression they afforded to a genius, and which we might see wandering just as singularly and despotically across the submissive, indifferent face of all the landscapes he may have painted
.
It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not to look at his world through our eyes.
To forget this may sadden us unduly. When we feel that interest is so dependent on the exact locations where certain great artists found it, a thousand landscapes and areas of experience will be deprived of possible interest, for Monet only looked at a few stretches of the earth, and Proust’s novel, though long, could not capture more than a fraction of human experience. Rather than learn the general lesson of art’s attentiveness, we might seek instead the mere objects of its gaze, and would then be unable to do justice to parts of the world that artists had not considered. As Proustian idolaters, we would have little time for desserts that Proust never tasted, for dresses he never described, for nuances of love he didn’t cover and cities he didn’t visit, suffering instead from an awareness of a gap between our existence and the realm of artistic truth and interest.
The moral? That there is no greater homage we could pay to Proust than to pass the same verdict on him as he passed on Ruskin—namely, that for all its qualities, his work must eventually also prove silly, maniacal, constraining, false and ridiculous to those who spend too long on it.
To make [reading] into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it
.
Even the finest books deserve to be thrown aside.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the following: Marie-Pierre Bay, Marina Benjamin, Nigel Chancellor, Jan Dailey, Caroline Dawnay, Dan Frank, Minna Fry, Anthony Gornall, Nicki Kennedy, Ursula Köhler, Jacqueline and Marc Leland, Alison Menzies, Claudine O’Hearn, Albert Read, Jon Riley, Tanya Stobbs, Peter Straus, and Kim Witherspoon. I am particularly indebted to Miriam Gross for her encouragement and a weekly column. For their sharp-eyed proofreading, I would like to thank Mair and Mike McGeever, Noga Arikha, and, as ever, Gilbert and Janet de Botton. My greatest debts are to John Armstrong, for his friendship and two years of extraordinarily insightful conversation; and to Kate McGeever, who endured me throughout the project, and was unfailingly lovely.
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