Get Out of Here!
________
Perry Anderson writes of Balzac’s Comédie humaine that ‘its 91 volumes form no single narrative: they are separate fictions, in which characters may reappear a few times, but the stories are essentially disconnected, at best unified ex post facto by the more or less arbitrary categories of the creator’s “system”’ (LRB, 19 July). This is false both to Balzac and to Proust’s relation to Balzac. When, well into his writing career, Balzac hit on the ‘recurring characters’ principle, it was not as some ‘arbitrary’ linking device. It was an après-coup illumination experienced as a moment of creative joy at the belated discovery of the deep unity of the Comédie. Proust was among the first to appreciate this. In La Prisonnière the narrator speaks of an aesthetic that Proust himself had discovered in reading and translating Ruskin, namely the revelation of an unconscious ‘design’ that comes late, the prime exemplars of which are Wagner, Hugo and Balzac. ‘This unity was an afterthought but not artificial,’ as the narrator puts it.
Anderson repeats the view that the true literary sources of inspiration for Proust were Chateaubriand and Nerval. These two were of course crucial in relation to the place of involuntary memory, and more generally the spaces of interiority, in the architecture of A la recherche du temps perdu. But Proust was a novelist, not a poet in disguise, and for Proust the novelist there are two fundamental sources of inspiration: Dostoevsky and Balzac. He did not, as Anderson (echoing Gérard Genette) suggests, ‘part company’ with the Bildungsroman. He absorbed it. And if there is a guide here, it is supremely the Balzac of Illusions perdues. Without the relation to Balzac, Proust’s project is both unintelligible and, to some extent, pointless.
Christopher Prendergast
Cambridge
The academics pick at their details; peck peck, like a hen after seed, while the glorious country house, the windows alive with light, the terrace ebullient with music and laughter, lives on ignored in the background. Professor Christopher Prendergast - from evidence in the TLS - a rather obese mother hen when it comes to gobbling up the pickings of other critics and excreting them onto the letter pages of our literary journals.
The scholar’s version of Proust must prevail. Someone walks through the door to express his opinions. This will not do! The scholar extremely upset at the intrusion, especially if the newcomer is acute and has a talent for exposition. He’s my Proust. Mine! Mine! Mine! Professors are very protective of their toys. This one is not going to lend his teddybear to anybody else. Certainly not to grown-ups. Give to me! he cries, as Perry Anderson carries it down the stairs; the furious child following in a flurry of fists and tears.
The prof is so upset that this outsider has got one detail wrong that he does not notice the major revaluation that has taken place; while he sidesteps the severe criticisms of the literary establishment: its lack of judgement, its increasing tendency to fawn over a literary saint: we are talking Catholic kitsch not avant-garde art is one of the arguments in Anderson’s brilliant polemic. No, our prof is not interested in any of that. It’s best ignored. Instead: let’s talk about Balzac!
We suspect an idée fixe. “Without the relation to Balzac, Proust’s project is both unintelligible and, to some extent, pointless.” Reading these words we become worried about Prendergast’s literary health. The man is mad! If this statement were remotely true then Anderson’s revaluation doesn't go even half-way far enough: Proust, not good enough to stand alone, is a literary invalid to be carried everywhere upon Balzac’s back. It is a typical academic trope, one repeatedly gainsaid by the writers themselves, that a work of literature is a mere - note that “unintelligible” and “pointless” - agglomeration of influences; the critic’s task, they are geologists of the text, to uncover every one. This man is excited over fossils. Such an approach erases the unique quality of the individual work; its atmosphere and vitality, its originality, all but disappearing under the accumulated weight of a bibliographic archaeology: in excavating the sources the book itself is buried. And criticism too changes. The critic, once a literary creator and seer, usually a writer as much concerned with their own meanings and art, is turned into an academic bureaucrat whose library is a vast filing cabinet overflowing with references. A bureaucrat doesn't read books, he rifles his card index files. No new insights to be had there. Inevitably the sterility of the approach is projected onto the work studied; a novel believed to be a collection of quotations, a data site. The academic unaware that a writer is a different species from himself.
Don’t cry. Please don’t cry professor. I was only having my little joke. There there. Here you are, that bad Perry Anderson has returned your teddy bear.
Is Anderson really wrong? When I read Balzac I don’t see the same carefully constructed structure as with The Dance; a narrative continuity appears lacking. I am not the only one. Even his greatest defender, Professor Christopher Prendergast, argues it is an afterthought - a “belated discovery” - and an “unconscious ‘design’”. Balzac didn't know what he was doing! (This is not strictly true.) The prof, so keen to demolish his antagonist, has been too hasty at the keyboard, his fingers furiously tapping away, he has neither the time nor the serenity to consider the difference between a consciously constructed pattern and one that emerges more or less by accident. Yet the difference is enormous, and is reflected in the reader’s experience of the text. Graham Robb sums it up nicely.
It should be said, too, in light of Arthur Conan Doyle’s assertion ‘that he had never attempted to read Balzac, because he did not know where to begin’, that each novel can be read without any knowledge of the others, and they can be read in any order. (Balzac. My italics.)
In his illuminating book on Proust Roger Shattuck does argue that À la recherche du temps perdu is intricately constructed, although he respects the views of other critics - Gilles Deleuze - who argue otherwise. He quotes Proust to confirm this view. Unfortunately, Marcel is not his own best witness. According to Shattuck:
As sovereign proof, he frequently cited the fact that the first page and the last page were written together, a demonstration of the convergence or circular form of the story.
Anybody who has written a book knows this is no proof at all. Indeed, this argument implies the opposite; such weak evidence suggesting a novelist who knows his work lacks a close unity. You must do better Marcel! Luckily, a more sophisticated defence is offered by Shattuck.
Proust’s story does not emerge steadily from his text like news on a ticker tape. The narrative current is highly intermittent. Incidents collect in a series of great pools, like the social scenes just discussed. These pools engulf the landscape and give the impression of near motionlessness while we plumb the depths. Then, usually with little transition, we are carried to another wide basin of incident…Three significant sections stand outside these pools. The seven pages that open the book and the fifteen that close it frame the story by presenting it first as dream and last as art. Spanning the centre of the novel is located a third sequence split into two parts that form an internal frame… (My italics)
The opening and closing pages, written on the same day, are a “frame”… Do I need to get the mallet out and hammer this point in? From Shattuck’s analysis we perceive a continuity of tone, feeling and atmosphere, the sequence embodying the flow and growth of a personality: À la recherche du temps perdu exhibiting the continuity we associate with a human being not the “artificial” construct of a novel. Our prof hasn’t noticed the difference. Perhaps, as Bertrand Russell once said, he, like many academics, cannot distinguish between a text and a human being. We will concede that. But we are clear: no life is constructed like the The Dance to the Music of Time. Proust, the mallet has its last swing, has not written a novel sequence like Powell’s. Professor Christopher Prendergast and Perry Anderson are talking about different things.
We see the light when we read Martin Turnell.
The word ‘theme’ is an important one. The construction of the book is largely musical and Mr Edmund Wilson has well described the famous first sentence ‘Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure’ - as the opening chord in a vast symphony. In the first three pages, Proust refers to nearly all the principal ‘themes’ of the book: childhood, memory, time, love, music, art, sleep, society, the historic France. In these first two volumes each of the principal themes is picked up again, isolated, examined, dropped, then taken up again in the later volumes and ‘combined’. (The Novel in France)
The structure is organised around the mind and sensibility of a person; cleverly done, complex and with immense subtlety, but, and the point must be stressed, this is not the same as a plot or narrative design, with its own development and order. Turnell’s talk of themes also helps explain Proust's unhelpful comment about writing the first and last pages together: the broad structural themes were set out right at the start of the project, but this is very different from constructing an intricate story, which relies more on a plan than organic growth. The actual working out of Proust’s narrative, its details, its events, its ramifying entanglements, evolved during the mechanics of composition that occurred over many years, but they were subordinate to this themes, his intellectual obsessions. In consequence the voice is consistent the action less so; À la recherche du temps perdu a curious mixture, as Turnell notes, of novel and the memoir; the latter known for its continuity in tone but apt to be episodic in event.
Perry Anderson has proven himself a brilliant literary critic, judging almost to perfection the balance between foreground and background; the quiddity of the novel - that most important of all qualities - rightly stressed against the social, historical and literary environment, whose influence is elucidated with touches of illuminating detail and revelatory analysis. Crucially, Anderson offers a judgement as to literary worth. In so doing, he forces us to re-evaluate both Proust and Powell, both now seen afresh. It is a marvellous performance. We hear the cheering in the stalls, the shouts of acclamation in the street. Let’s give the man a clap: clap! clap! clap!
Of course our prof wants to belittle it. Anderson has committed heresy. He has crossed a professional boundary. Worse! Whilst in this foreign country he proves himself better than the natives. How they puff and thump and bluster. But they are impotent. Unable to read a novel for all the others on the shelf, and secure in the interpretation of others, his habit of authority, the prof cannot open himself up to this radical intervention. There will be no revolutions here, he thunders. The prof would like to expel this interloper, he wants this bloody foreigner out of the room. It is too late. Helpless, he throws his filing cabinet down the internet…
Peck, peck the hens go around the yard, oblivious to the extravaganza exploding over their heads. Whizz! Bang! Whoosh!
___________
1. Is Perec’s Things a parody of this academic game (see the David Bellos biography Georges Perec: A Life in Words)?
2. His version of the story is different:
In a letter to Paul Souday in 1922, he could declare that the novel was so ‘meticulously composed’ that the last chapter of the last volume was written immediately after the first chapter of the first volume.
3. See Turnell’s discussion of M. Albert Feuillerat’s work on the novel.
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