The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust - Adam A. Watt [29]
These comments show how in the space of a year Proust moved from a projected critical essay through a phase of simultaneous creative and critical compositions to a point where he was comfortable with calling his work to date ‘a real novel’. A developed Charlus narrative was evidently present in Proust’s working drafts at this stage, but in a way that is not clearly distinct from the critical project. The idea of having a theoretical discussion that closes the work whilst exposing the principles of art that have guided its development is one that is carried over to Time Regained where the Narrator, in the Prince de Guermantes’ library, reflects on his experiences and holds forth on the nature of the work of art he hopes to produce, founded on those experiences. Against Sainte-Beuve, then, is the final, transitional stage between Proust’s extended search for a voice and a form and his embarking on the novel proper. Two final pieces should detain us before we consider in detail each of the volumes of the Search in turn.
Late essays
Despite his ill health and endless corrections and revisions to the manuscripts and proofs of the Search, in the post-war years Proust still, from time to time, had letters and other pieces published in newspapers and journals. The essays ‘A propos du “style” de Flaubert’ [On Flaubert’s Style] and ‘A propos de Baudelaire’ [Concerning Baudelaire], published as letters to the editor in the Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF) in January 1920 and June 1921 respectively, merit attention not only for their critical insights but also for what they reveal of Proust’s artistic commitment, his writerly methods, the capaciousness and elasticity of his thinking. The Flaubert essay responds to comments made in the NRF by critic Albert Thibaudet, suggesting that Flaubert was not a first-rate writer to whom verbal mastery came naturally. The Baudelaire piece marked the poet’s centenary. In both essays (which draw on material first developed in the Against Sainte-Beuve drafts), Proust’s approach is unconventional, indirect and extremely effective. ‘It is not that I love Flaubert’s books, or even Flaubert’s style above all others’ (ASB, 261; CSB, 586), he writes, before going on to anatomize and celebrate Flaubert’s stylistic and grammatical singularities. As for Baudelaire, although Proust avers him to be, with Vigny, the greatest poet of the nineteenth century, a number of pages are spent praising Hugo and Vigny before the chosen subject is properly addressed. Once we have navigated these circuitous beginnings we come to realize that what Proust appreciates in his notorious forebears illuminates what is most important in his own art. To read Proust on the positioning and function of adverbs and prepositions in Flaubert is to recognize the care and the musical finesse with which Proust’s own finely spun phrases were formed. To read him privileging over Hugo’s bombast ‘what poor Baudelaire found in the suffering intimacy of his own heart and body’ (ASB, 296–7; CSB, 628) reinforces for us how much of his own writing stems from the extended, painful dialogue between his fervently productive mind and its ever-diminishing corporeal envelope.
In the Flaubert essay Proust, now the established novelist who has his own, assured voice, recommends ‘the purgative and exorcising merits of pastiche’ to budding writers struck with ‘l’intoxication flaubertienne’ [Flaubert-poisoning] (ASB, 268; CSB, 598). Moreover, he uses his corrective to Thibaudet’s misreading of Flaubert to correct misapprehensions of his own work. Certain readers of Swann’s Way had failed to recognize what Proust terms ‘its rigorous though veiled structure’, dismissing it as merely a ‘collection of memories, their sequence determined by the fortuitous laws of the association of ideas’. Proust responds to this ‘counter-truth’ by arguing that ‘in order to move from one plane on to another plane, I had simply made use not of a fact, but of what I had found