Proust on the novelist

For what feels like the first time in my academic career, I have lately been consumed by the reading I have been doing for my classes. It feels as though every book I pick up, from Schmitt's Political Theology to Freud's Moses and Monotheism to Rulfo's Pedro Paramo has been chock-full of pieces of advice; keys to the locks of the mysteries of the human condition.

We were assigned a selection from Swann's Way for my "Roots of Modernity" class this week. Even if you've already read bits of Proust before, I really recommend going back and checking it out again. I am open to the possibility that he's speaking to me particularly as I'm in sort of an anxious and undecided state right now, but I have the feeling that he'll touch all of you. Here's a bit from "Combray" where old Marcel is describing young Marcel's love for reading.

None of the feelings which the joys or misfortunes of a

"real"

person arouse in us can be awakened

except through a mental picture of those joys or misfortunes;

the ingenuity of the first novelist lay in his understanding that, as the image was the one essential element in the complicated structure of our emotions, so that simplification of it which consisted in the suppression, pure and simple, of "real" people would be a decided improvement.

A "real" person, profoundly as we may sympathise with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, remains

opaque,

presents a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to life. If some misfortune comes to him, it is only in one small section of the complete idea we have of him that we are capable of feeling any emotion;

indeed it is only in one small section of the complete idea he has of himself that he is capable of feeling any emotion either.

The novelist's happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable to the human soul, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is, which one's soul can

assimilate.

After which it matters not that the actions, the feelings

of this new order of creatures appear to us in the guise of truth,

since we have made them our own, since it in ourselves that they are happening, that they are holding in thrall,

as we feverishly turn over the pages of the book, our quickened breath and staring eyes.

And once the novelist has brought us to this state, in which, as in all purely mental states, every emotion is multiplied ten-fold, into which his book comes to disturb us as might a dream, but a dream more

lucid

and more abiding than those which come to us in sleep, why then, for the space of an hour he

sets free within us all the joys and sorrows in the world, a few of which only we should have to spend years of our actual life in getting to know, and the most intense of which would never be revealed to us because the slow course of their development prevents us from perceiving them.

It is the same in life; the heart changes, and it is our worst sorrow; but we know it only through reading, through our imagination: in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change.

I'm really into this idea—that somehow there is a reality we have created for ourselves as readers that only fiction can ever fully describe; that we are incapable to discerning reality within even ourselves and our consciousnesses without the aid of fiction and prose. Hope you're all reading tons.

LIL