Proust and the (fateful) question of culture: or, art and its phantoms

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes The passages from Freud and Wordsworth quoted here are taken from the unnumbered liminary page of The Fateful Question of Culture, immediately preceding the Contents page. See my essay “A partir du Jardin des plantes: Claude Simon's Recapitulations.” In admiring the seagulls flying into the setting sun, Mme de Cambremer confuses them with albatrosses, and attempts to impress her interlocutors with her allusion to a line from Baudelaire's “L'albatros,” which she tailors to her purposes, as “Leurs ailes de géants les empêchent de marcher.” The actual line is in the singular: “Ses ailes de géant l'empêchent de marcher” (v. 16). See the section entitled “La Méthode de Sainte-Beuve” in Proust's Contre Sainte-Beuve, in which the future author of the Recherche begins a sustained polemic against the Beuvian critical method with the topic sentence: “En aucun temps de sa vie Sainte-Beuve ne semble avoir conçu la littérature d'une façon vraiment profonde. Il la met sur le même plan que la conversation” (225). For a development of this point, see Kant's condemnation of lying in The Metaphysics of Morals (1797) and his opposition of the notions of honesty, sincerity, and rectitude to the labyrinthine deceptions of mendacity: “By a lie a human being throws away and, as it were, annihilates his dignity as a human being. A human being who does not himself believe what he tells another (even if the other is a merely ideal person) has even less worth than if he were a mere thing; for a thing, because it is something real and given, has the property of being serviceable so that another can put it to some use. But communication of one's thoughts to someone through words that yet (intentionally) contain the contrary of what the speaker thinks on the subject is an end that is directly opposed to the natural purposiveness of the speaker's capacity to communicate his thoughts, and thus a renunciation by the speaker of his personality, and such a speaker is a mere deceptive appearance of a human being, not a human being himself … Truthfulness in one's declarations is also called honesty and, if the declarations are promises, sincerity; but, more generally, truthfulness is called rectitude” (183). In this perspective, Swann, Odette, Charlus, Morel, Marcel, and Albertine can be said to have “thrown away” their dignity as human beings. Perhaps there is no room for dignity as such in the love situation as described by Proust. Additional informationNotes on contributorsDavid R. EllisonDavid R. Ellison is professor of French at the University of Miami, where he chaired the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures from 1993 until 2003. He is the author of The Reading of Proust (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), Understanding Albert Camus (The University of South Carolina Press, 1990), Of Words and the World: Referential Anxiety in Contemporary French Fiction (Princeton University Press, 1993), and Ethics and Aesthetics in European Modernist Literature: From the Sublime to the Uncanny (Cambridge University Press, 2001). He is currently at work on a book project entitled Gide, Proust, and the Crisis of European Culture. His research interests include literature and philosophy, narratology, French-German literary relations, and literature and psychoanalysis.