NOTES ON PROUST
535
I think the importance of art and its superconscious reality prevents
certain anecdotal novels, however pleasant they may be, from wholly
deserving the rank you seem to give them-so this same reason does not
allow me to make the realization of a dream of art depend on material
just as anecdotal and too directly drawn from life not to be part and
parcel of its casualness and unreality. Besides, put in such terms, the
whole thing seems, if not false, at least banal enough to deserve some
stinging slap in the face from a resentful existence (like Oscar Wilde's
saying that the death of Lucien de Rubempre in Balzac was the greatest
sorrow he had had, and discovering a little later, through his trial, that
there are more real sorrows). But you know that this banal aestheticism
could not be my aesthetic philosophy. . ..
One might, it seems to me, say that you do not lend yourself to the
transfiguration intended by the author, that you place the work of art
(and it is all the more bizarre since you have very sound aesthetic pref–
erences) on the same plane as everyday life... .
Z, delightful writer that he is, wrote me an agreeable but unjust
letter. He says: "You report everything!" But that isn't so; I report
nothing. It is he who is the reporter. Not once does a character of mine
close a window, wash his hands, put on an overcoat, or go through
the forms of an introduction....
I have just been reading something very beautiful which unfortu–
nately slightly resembles what I am doing (only it is a thousand times
better):
The Well-Beloved
by Thomas Hardy. It doesn't even lack
that slight touch of the grotesque which is an essentia l part of all great
works....
As I have implied,
Remembrance of Th ings Past
continually ex–
hibits distortions, eruptions of the grotesque, excursions into conceit
and caricature, diabolical transformations-all of which tend to convert
it into something besides "a realistic panorama of society." The few
lines from Proust's letters quoted above may suggest a more compre–
hensive way of viewing the novel. To show snobbism "inside the person,
like a wonderful kind of imagination,"- this, in particular, seems to
point to depths beyond the "realistic" principle. To be sure, Proust's
characters have a powerful existence on the plane of manners, that is,
in their relation to the city or the land, the period, the classes and
professions, the feudal past, and so on. But their passions give them
another dimension; and what are their passions of love or snobbery but
perversions, as Proust conceives it, of the imaginative faculty-that
faculty of which the free artist-Vinteuil or Bcrgotte or Elstir-alone
knows the proper use? Thus it might be shown that the novel is as much
an anatomy of the imagination as it is a natural history of the Third
Republic.
F. W.
Dupee
