Reading Proust: Woolf and the Painter's Perspective

Abstract

victim? (Roger Fry 239-40; Pictures 173) To what extent can a writer be a safe guide to the visual arts, or a painter to the world of fiction? (Fry 240) one art superior to another? Are painters happier than writers? Is their world happier? (Diary 5: 315). In her struggle to incorporate into the novel the strengths she associated with painting without betraying the purposes of her own medium, it is not surprising that Woolf sought support in the work of Marcel Proust. He was, in her judgement, far the greatest modern novelist; she envied his extravagant . .command of every resource (Letters 3: 365; D 2: 234). Woolf's reading of Proust, however, was colored by her own ambivalence towards formalist doctrine, itself associated in her mind with painting and the painter's perspective because of its links with the Post-Impressionist aesthetic, articulated in England primarily by Roger Fry. In moments of formalist zeal, Woolf was capable of misreading or misrepresenting Proust, but her efforts to protect the novel from the dangers of excessive formalism led her to defend him and to minimize or to equivocate about what were, by the standards of Bloomsbury aestheticism, his failings. Given Woolf's own embattled and problematic relationship with painting, she may have felt drawn to Proust in part because he seemed to be au-dessus de la mele'e. In this sense, Proust benefited from developments in late nineteenth-century France that favored ... an ever closer rapprochement between men of letters and men of arts. Indeed, the 327