life and vocation
featuring Proust and theories of literature
[ I read the Penguin editions, edited by Christopher Prendergast - my references are in the newer Deluxe Editions up through Sodom & Gomorrah, and afterwards in the Penguin Modern Classics printings ]
In the final volume of the Recherche, Marcel Proust sets forward his theory of literature. As something of a snob and a willing participant in the highest echelons of society, narrator Marcel has not had time to engage in the mundane invention of the written word.
Throughout his life and into the last book, Marcel has doubts about his capabilities as a writer and artist.
If ever I could have thought of myself as a poet, I now know that I am not… If I truly had the soul of an artist, what pleasure should I not experience at the sight of this screen of trees lit by the setting sun…
There’s something about art—and literature in particular—that seems to divulge something very intimate about the human soul. Faulkner said as much in his 1949 Nobel Prize speech:
I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
In what way can the poet’s voice be more than the record of man? Proust’s own theory of literature, which we observe in Finding Time Again, describes two approaches (credit to Julia Peters):
The aestheticist approach, meant to depict or evoke phenomena from Marcel’s past life. This is best considered through the idea of involuntary memory, intense experiences of the past where someone is not an active participant in understanding or cognizing the memory but merely experiences it.
The confessional approach, literary creation that “involves active interference with the phenomena of one’s past life” (Peters 149).
Peters mounts the argument that the two approaches, while in tension, are in fact not mutually exclusive. While Proust’s Recherche is largely uncritical in tone (aestheticist), the act of putting the events of his life together into a whole constitutes a “literary work… able to fulfill the standard set by Marcel’s confessional theory of literature precisely by complying with his aestheticist theory” (Peters 154).
I was, at first, rather struck by the claim that Proust’s tome was largely uncritical—it is rather dense with insight and observations about the human experience:
A real human being, however profoundly we sympathize with him, is in large part perceived by our senses, that is to say, remains opaque to us, presents a dead weight which our sensibility cannot lift. If a calamity should strike him, it is only in a small part of the total notion we have of him that we will be able to be moved by this; even more, it is only in a part of the total notion he has of himself that he will be able to be moved himself. The novelist's happy discovery was to have the idea of replacing these parts, inseparable to the soul, by an equal quantity of immaterial parts, that is to say, parts which our soul can assimilate (Swann’s Way 86-87).
Ever-present are hints at a theory of self-identity, vaguely Kantian intuitions like the one at the beginning of this quotation. But it seems fair to say that these are not scrutinizing, and importantly, not self-critical. Marcel is open about his obsessive, manipulative relationship with Albertine. But he stops short of criticizing it or expressing any hint of regret.
Indeed, while Peters notes he is not a full-fledged defender of immediacy, Proust even makes explicit statements against mediating our experience with thought (although this statement is in the context of learning from Andree about Albertine’s infidelity and suicide—these discoveries strike Marcel not as something expressed through signs or even particularly striking, but as pedestrian as any other combination of words that might have been uttered in his presence):
The habit of thinking sometimes prevents us from experiencing reality, inoculates us against it and makes it seem no more than yet another thought. There is no idea that does not carry within it its own possible refutation, no word that does not negate the word that negates it (The Prisoner and The Fugitive 566).
Of course, if conscious cognition prevents us from experiencing reality, shedding thought prevents us from communicating it. Proust’s work is, itself, the description and completion of a development in which Marcel becomes a writer. While Proust’s tome might attempt at presenting his unmediated experience and might succeed in the sense of being uncritical until the end, its mere existence and the act of reading it is subject to mediation and interpretation. Merely experiencing our lives without thought and putting that experience into words are two wholly different things, the latter requiring interpretation, if not criticism.
I find myself returning to Proust because I frequently think about the meaning and role of my (so far, barely existing) career/vocation in the context of my life. In the US and in tech, discussions about careers are frequently accompanied by considerations of work-life balance, impact, and a number of other factors relating to what we would like to do in and out of our working lives. Many people’s life’s work is expressed through their careers, but we often like to think we are “so much more” than that.
As a literal child only just embarking on my own journey, I’m not so sure it makes sense to interpret and scrutinize something that does not yet exist. I will work and form something of a vocation over the rest of my life, but its “meaning” and “purpose” only manifest insofar as it is written and completed. I actively participate at a micro level in the sense that I might choose which jobs and opportunities to pursue, but at a macro level it is something entirely different.
I don’t (and probably shouldn’t) have much to say here because I’m writing about something that doesn’t exactly exist yet. What I can say is continuing to habitually understand the “meaning” of progressions in my life and vocation might obscure what I’m actually looking for. It is in the context of a whole that the role of the parts is realized.