Proust and disappointing reading

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Abstract

Even if John Ruskin wanted to find in works of art a moral and spiritual value capable of elevating the soul, there is in him a valorization of sensation as such, which explains Marcel Proust's interest in his thought. However, Ruskin's idea that the literary text is the receptacle of a revealed truth, to the height of which the reader must rise by annihilating his or her own personality, still remains, and here the difference with Proust is notable.

For the French writer, it's less a question of understanding a text, as Ruskin thought, than of letting the text act within us. Reading is a process of self-construction, with the text as a catalyst or external adjuvant. The work does not propose a world different from our own, as is commonly believed, but a different vision. The work calls on us to convert our gaze, to see as the painter or writer sees.

The value of a book cannot be assimilated as such, as the direct communication of knowledge from author to reader. On the contrary, the reader must feel a sense of lack. Reading is fundamentally disappointing, and this disappointment is the starting point for good reading. From this point of view, Proust's position is close to that of his contemporary Paul Valéry, who formulates a radical break between author, text and reader.

The problem with the book is that it doesn't live up to what it claims to be. With its limited dimensions, it creates an artificial world that in the end bursts like a soap bubble. Art creates a desire it can never satisfy :" it's just when [artists] have told us all they can tell us that they give us the feeling that they haven't yet told us anything " (Proust).

But is this disappointment in reading indestructible ? With La Recherche, Proust seems to have sought to compose a work that is not insufficient, a work that doesn't leave the reader to do all the work, a work that says more about the gaze itself than about the object looked at ; that, rather than merely lifting a corner of the veil cast over the world, draws our attention to the very gesture of lifting the veil, that is, to the very secret at the heart of all art. The means Proust found was precisely the form of the novel essay, a novel that never ceases to reflect explicitly on the very conditions of the formation of an artist's personality, the formation of a writer-narrator, who would discover over the course of pages and years the essence of his own vision of the world ; a novel that would be at once a treatise on art, an aesthetic reflection and a psychological sum. La Recherche was thus conceived as a response to the impasses in art highlighted in Sur la lecture .

To promulgate the general law of failure, as Proust does in his work, is not only to excuse a possible failure, but also to make this failure a different failure, in the sense that he will have integrated the awareness of this failure into the failure itself. And this is why the question of the disappointing reading is at the heart of Proust's system : a reading cannot be totally disappointing if it announces that it will be.

Authors and works cited

André Devambez, Reading, ca. 1914-1915, private collection. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time. John Ruskin, Sesame and the Lilies. Matthew Arnold. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Oscar Wilde. Plato. François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoires d'outre-tombe. Horace. John Milton, Lycidas. Marcel Proust, " Sur la lecture " (or " Journées de lecture "), in Essais, ed. Antoine Compagnon, Christophe Pradeau and Matthieu Vernet, Paris, Gallimard, " Bibliothèque de la Pléiade ", 2022. Maurice Maeterlinck. Anna de Noailles. Jean-François Millet. Claude Monet. Émile Zola, Mes haines. Paul Valéry, Cours de poétique ; " Commentaires de Charmes ", in Variété. Honoré de Balzac, La Comédie humaine. Émile Zola, Les Rougon-Macquart. Jules Romains, Les Hommes de bonne volonté. Roger Martin du Gard, Les Thibault. Georges Duhamel, Chronique des Pasquier. John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga. Charles Baudelaire. George Sand, François le Champi. Johannes Vermeer, View of Delft, The Hague, Mauristhuis.