Abstract
proust's book," Reynaldo Hahn wisely said back in 1913, "is not a masterpiece, if we call something perfect and flawless a masterpiece . But it is, without a doubt (and here my friendship has nothing to do with it), the most beautiful book to have appeared since L'Éducation sentimentale [1] ". La Recherche as complexity and contradiction, as the embodied memory of literature, is an impure and somewhat monstrous composite whole, not a modern novel of the clean slate and the blank page.
It is not a classical work, in the usual sense, but a total work, a Summa. It was certainly conceived "from top to bottom": Proust always said that the beginning and the end, "Combray" and "Le Temps retrouvé", were thought out at the same time, like a system, a doctrine or a theory of art. But the novel was built "from the bottom up", from fragments, details, echoes and encounters. On one side intelligence and on the other intuition, or rationalism and empiricism, or philosophy and the novel.
He is "our Saint Thomas Aquinas", said Anatole France of Sainte-Beuve. "Every age has the Thomas Aquinas it deserves", added Maurras [2]. If Les Lundis was the Summa of the 19th century, La Recherche is the Summa of the 20th century: the sum of literature, the totality of culture, the condensed heritage or embodied memory. Neither history nor theory, the Beuvian Summa - the "Natural History of Minds" - is based, as Maurras put it, on analysis and recomposition, not on systems but on "lucky breaks" or coincidences: it's the "Science of Good Fortune". Everything is in memory, but memory depends on luck, or grace. La Recherche also belongs to the "Science of Good Fortune", not to the Summa Theologica, with the irony of Maurras's expression: "good fortune" is the occasion of love, like the meeting of Charles and Jupien.
Indeed, the novel contains numerous developments on bottom-up elaborations that oppose top-down conceptions. Berma's art, for example: "Thus, in the phrases of the modern dramatist as in Racine's verses, Berma knew how to introduce those vast images of pain, nobility and passion, which were her own masterpieces, and in which she was recognized as, in portraits painted from different models, one recognizes a painter" (II, 51). The family resemblance that animates all La Berma's roles is a complexity made up of multiple details and tenuous clues, from which emerges an "ordered complexity".
The most developed reflection on this question is to be found in La Prisonnière, when the narrator, playing Vinteuil's sonata on the piano, recalls Wagner and ponders the great works of the 19th century: "[...] I was thinking how much all the same these works participate in that character of being - though marvelously - always incomplete, which is the character of all the great works of the 19th century" (III, 666). Balzac, Hugo, Michelet and Wagner are called upon, and Proust testifies to his deep ambivalence between the two models of the total work, from top to bottom or from bottom to top. Isn't the success of La Recherche linked to the interweaving of these two strategies, top-down and bottom-up?
