WAYS OF WRITING ABOUT ONESELF
71
doing. It's one of the reasons Ilike jokes. They are swift, and take advan–
tage of expressive possibilities of the form better than almost anything
else. I'm not trying to genera li ze, and I'm not trying to say that a novel
is a lesser art form. There arc great writers who are novelists and I'm per–
fectly aware of that. I haven't taken a position of the large aesthetic kind.
Jeffrey Mehlman:
I have a question for Norman Manea. Specifical ly, it
has to do with the reference to
Against Sainte-Beuve
by Proust, whose
argument is that between the writer and the man who lives the life there
is an essential distinction. It strikes me that Proust's essay is part of a tra–
dition whose most recent exemplar just happens
to
be the Eastern Euro–
pean book I referred
to
this morning,
Testaments Betrayed,
by Milan
Kundera, which, as I recall, is really a book opposing literary biography.
Interestingly, it is a very Eastern European book, though written in
French, because Kundera's sense is that literary biography is really part
and parcel of the mindset that gave us the Eastern European secret police.
You let these guys go
to
work, and they will end up doing what the secret
police did
to
us in Eastern Europe, which is understandable from Kun–
dera's point of view. However, in the case of Proust, I wonder whether one
doesn't risk an important misunderstanding by buying into the argument
of
Agai!lst Sail1te-Beuve.
And specifically, in the novel itself, there is a
major distinction between life-a man's life, which is essentially awful–
and art, which is essentially wonderful and redeems that life. If you look
more closely, the principal metaphor for the work of art is the French
cathedral. And the principal problem with life is that, in the case of the
two great passions, snobbery and love, they face disaster. In the case of
love, the disaster has everyth ing to do with homosexuality, which Deleuze
says is the hidden truth of love in Proust; and in the case of snobbery-it
would take time
to
demonstrate this-it has everything to do with a cer–
tain Jewishness. The Jews are excluded: Bloch, who dreams of himself as
a baron, is a quintessential snob
(sine !lobilitate)
in Proust. Where Proust's
novel is resonant with the argument of
Against Sainte-Beuve,
you have the
same notion of pure hench art which is to be protected from contamina–
tion by Judeo-homosexual life. That being the case, I wou ld say there is
good reason not
to
rally too quickly to the argument of
Against Sainte–
Beuve.
I don't know if that's clear, but I would like to hear your comment.
Norman Manea:
I don't think we can avoid misunderstandings, what–
ever we say or do. And l don't think that misunderstanding, if it is there,
is a lways counterproductive. [n the climate of today's literary debate,
however, I still feel the need to emphasize the independence of art. As
