PROUST'S SOCIETY
Guermantes. Society is violently contrary; it hates to be wooed
and fears to be despised. Marcel can be invited to the Guer–
mantes only when he has ceased to care about being invited.
Society is kinder and less critical than he has expected, but
only with its darlings: society is harder than he has expected,
but only with those who fail to conceal their yearning to enter
it, although it is to just this yearning that society owes what
glamor and reputation it has. One of the reasons that
A La
Recherche
is so long a book is that inconsistency, if des–
cribed at all, must be described in detail.
Most novels that deal with society take on some of
the
meretricious gaudiness that it is their avowed purpose to de–
plore. Their authors become guilty of the snobbishness and
triviality of which they accuse their characters. Octave Feuillet
and Ouida may shake their heads over the empty vanity of the
great world, but they revel in describing it. Proust comes
closest to escaping the contamination of his subject matter
because he does not set society apart from the rest of man,–
kind. To him the differences between class and class are
supet.~
fidal. Snobbishness reigns on all levels, so why does it matw
which level one selects to study? Why not, indeed, pick
the
highest level, particularly if one's own snobbishness is thus
gratified? Society in Proust parades before us, having to rc:'
present not a segment of mankind, but something closer
to
mankind itself. It is the very boldness of Proust's assumption
that his universe is
the
universe, like the boldness of
his - aS–
sumption that all love is jealousy and all men
homose~uaJS,
that gives to his distorted picture a certain universal validity.
It
is his faith that a sufficiently careful study of each part
'Viii
~t;veal
the whole, that the analysis of a dinner party can
~e ~
illuminating as the analysis of a war. It is his glory that he very
nearly convinces us.
