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À la Récherche du Temps Perdu
Remembrance of Things Past In Search of Lost Time December 23, 20032.1.6 Mme Swann at Home: Bergotte HimselfThere is something very particular about Bergotte that I want to point out because I believe it illustrates how cagey Proust is about letting "authority" seep into his novel. I've already mentioned how the people who have most influenced young Marcel, like Bloch and Bergotte, but also Swann and Odette, are invariably undercut by being painted in a very different light, either in their interactions with others, or through being seen differently in the past or the future. In the case of Bergotte, you have the first character who could be considered a genius. His effects on people are mixed. He can be so novel in his verbiage that people are disappointed, because they cannot attach it to anything in their experience. The impression he makes is decidedly not rational:
This "kind of harmony" is more insidious than the substance of what Bergotte is saying. We've already seen his impact on Marcel, which contained as much of Marcel as it did of Bergotte, and Bergotte's attunement to a certain type of intellectual disposition at the expense of his interactions with those around him, but the emphasis on his mode of speaking further points away from the substance of what he says and more towards the style, one which fosters agreement even when the reader isn't sure with what he is agreeing. The influence of the style seems unavoidable:
What the younger writers take from Bergotte is not his ideology, which they reject, but the power in his style. Yet it is through his style that he wields his influence, both over people who cannot quite comprehend what he is saying, and in the next generation of writers. The notion of speech that is more about style and influence than ideological substance puts me in mind of Mynheer Peeperkorn, from Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. Let me start by saying that I find Mynheer one of the most irritating characters in literature, and he's a good part of my low estimation of the book. But his flaws and Mann's flaws are relevant to what Proust does with Bergotte. Let's take a look at some of Mynheer's speech:
(This surely must be less annoying in German.) After thirty pages of this sort of thing, you can't wait for the impotent old life force to off himself. Yet in the book, this sort of logorrhea gains him a little cult following who cheerfully follow him and his irrational ramblings off the cliff of reason. The protagonist Hans Castorp decides that the rational characters "simply shrank beside Peeperkorn" and discusses how Mynheer being drunk "only made him grander and more awe-inspiring," and it's all very uninspiring, no more so than when Mynheer opens his mouth. That he's patently saying nothing is a fact; it's his mystical life force or whatever ineffable thing Mann was thinking about on that day that is the attractive force. It's unconvincing because there is nothing of that attraction communicated in the book. Bergotte, on the other hand, does come across as a great spirit, less in what he says or what he does, more in the description of that effect. It's made more convincing by the portrayal of it as only part of his nature, and the description of how his particular genius can sometimes estrange him from people as much as enamor people of him. With Mann, Mynheer is the nonnegotiable life force, while with Proust, Bergotte is presented in terms of his effects on particular types of people. There's some, but not much, "there" there. So while Mynheer Peeperkorn belongs to a line that eventually extends down to Jubal Harshaw and "Henry Miller" the character(not in their positions in the novel, but in their universal effects on those around them--see also Wyndham Lewis), Bergotte is Oz and the man behind the curtain simultaneously, as well as a heterogeneity of experience that does not permit him to be one thing to all people. The contrast is deeper than the nature of the individual character; it's a question of approach, and it reminded me of a passage from way back in "Combray" in the first volume:
What is Proust doing if not to portray, first, the repetitions and lack of change amongst characters, and second, the simultaneous coexistence of contradictory characteristics in a character depending on the situation? I find this to be the best answer to the charges of myopia that I and plenty of others have leveled against the novel, of asking why the vagaries of these high-class French people have any significance. Well, to do the sort of examination here, I believe that Proust had to stick very close to his own past experience, mutating it but hardly abandoning it. I don't see how he could have constructed such elaborate characters except by starting from known exemplars and then reconstructing/reshuffling them. I could be wrong, but that's my best guess. Proust's endless efforts to detach his writing from one particular view of his situations also goes a way to redeeming the choice of subject matter, since it becomes secondary to the approach. This is probably the penultimate entry on "Mme Swann at Home," which is by a wide margin the richest section in the first two books. (The remaining section of Within a Budding Grove is thankfully much more linear and breezy.) It's hardly self-contained, so it's bizarre that it begins the second volume, but there you have it. The message that I take from it, above all else, is that everything--past, present, and future--is subject to revision over time. Of course, a thousand pages of showing that principle in action over everything and everyone Proust can think of has a far more profound effect than just saying it. Posted by at December 23, 2003 01:21 AM | TrackBackMail Waggish |