The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust - Adam A. Watt [26]
In Jean Santeuil we also find other familiar scenarios, such as the goodnight kiss; childhood reading; the discovery that the family cook’s culinary brilliance is tempered by brutality and sadism towards the kitchen maid; scenes of jealous snooping and suffering; and a little phrase from a sonata by Saint-Saëns whose affective powers anticipate those attributed to Vinteuil’s sonata in the Search. In the previous chapter we saw how political affairs are generally viewed in the Search through the optic of society conversation and not explored as events of interest in their own right. Some of the fragments of Jean Santeuil show that this approach was arrived at after the more conventional tactic of working through the ins and outs of political intrigues had been tried and rejected. Jean Santeuil contains lengthy notes on the Dreyfus Affair, in particular Zola’s trial, which Jean attends religiously, and a semi-fictionalized account of an influential government minister compromised by the 1892 Panama Canal scandal.
Proust’s syntax in the Jean Santeuil notes is not as confidently expansive and elastic as it is in the Search: we can see him testing his range, often reaching dead-ends. His analytical eye and his taste for metaphoric elaboration are clearly maturing but the drafts were abandoned before a coherent whole could take shape. Before Proust could make the critical transition from the third-person narrative of ‘Jean’ to the clinching ‘Je’ of the mature novel, there were still several developmental stages for him to travel.
Ruskin
Proust discovered the work of John Ruskin (1819–1900) most likely through Paul Desjardins, a professor at the School of Political Sciences, and through his reading of Robert de la Sizeranne’s Ruskin et la religion de la beauté [Ruskin and the Religion of Beauty] (1897). Ruskin’s death in 1900 spurred French public interest in the man and his work and Proust capitalized on this, publishing a number of articles as well as heavily annotated translations of The Bible of Amiens in 1904 and Sesame and Lilies in 1906. Sesame and Lilies (1865) is one of Ruskin’s most popular works, combining two lectures, the first discussing reading, the second considering the education of women; the ‘bible’ of Amiens is a metaphor for the city’s cathedral, of which Ruskin’s book (1885) is an architectural appraisal and celebration. In his preface to The Bible of Amiens, while expressing admiration for Ruskin, Proust also takes his distance, identifying in Ruskin’s thinking a tendency towards taking pleasure from erudition rather than from a purer, less egotistical celebration of the beauty of a work of art in its own right. Proust terms this idolatry – ‘an infirmity essential to the human mind’ (ASB, 187; CSB, 134); it was a potential pitfall he sought to avoid thereafter in his own writings. The important preface to Proust’s Sesame and Lilies anticipates many of the major themes and some key scenarios of ‘Combray’ and of the Search more generally.4 Proust worked closely with his mother and Reynaldo Hahn’s cousin Marie Nordlinger on the translations: the two women provided working glosses of Ruskin’s English, which Proust then elaborated and reworked, creating a remarkably rich and fluid French text. Immersing himself in Ruskin taught Proust how to see, charged the universe with ‘infinite value’ (ASB, 191; CSB, 139) and led him yet nearer to his own creative aesthetics.
Pastiches
Pleasures and Days contained an entertaining pastiche of Flaubert’s celebrated novel Bouvard and Pécuchet. The Lemoine Affair offered Proust his subject matter for a series of further pastiches published to great acclaim in Le Figaro in February and March 1908 (see Chapter One above for a summary of the affair). This creative exercise, replicating aspects of style and technique