The Proust Reader's Dilemma - Part 2

Reading Proust is in some ways the best of social compensations for a variety of reasons.

1. Exclusivity. Few read him nowadays, although many claim to (perhaps not all 3000-pages but at least Swann’s Way). His name still very much carries cachet in all the swank circles. We all long to belong to the best of clubs, but since few of us are granted admission, we can at least belong to the clubs that they who dare to reject us could never get into, can reinvent the game on our own terms, rejecting their shallow lot as beneath our older, wiser selves (or so we'd like to believe).

2. Mt. Everest of a Climb. Yes, 3000 pages of painstaking analysis and the subtlest of commentaries. And a panoply of characters, high and low, rich and poor, beautiful and ugly, representing a slice of fin-de-siecle France and a moment perched on the cusp of the modern. To complete all 3000 or so pages of this literary marathon and keep this endlessly rich cast of characters straight is an accomplishment to which few can lay claim.

3. Those sentences. There’s something immensely gratifying about reading a sentence that goes on for three or more pages, keeping track of syntactic sinews tortured beyond easy recognition, and resisting the lure of prepositional phrase decoys seeking to mire one in a befuddled barrage of pronouns with no clear antecedents, of modifiers delicately floating about unanchored to anything as rudimentary as, say, mere sentence structure, of signifiers in a free floating association sans signifieds. (The alleged longest sentence of all is devoted to Proust’s vivisection of the homosexual.) Proust teases out his analysis in small syntactic miracles, balancing acts of forestalled commentary, of subjects dissociated from verbs, gently unfolding, sensitive to every nuance, bringing to light objects half-obscured in shadow. To follow all this, keeping the main thread of meaning unbroken, is no small feat, and the very stuff of which proud self-satisfaction is made.

4. A largely accepted Great Work of Art that is on some level just a gossipy tour of the demimonde and the underside of all that glamorous, social climbing fatuity. All Proust’s philosophizing and aesthetic musing and painstaking teasing out of the subtlest of will o’the wisps deepens the shallow into the valley of the profound while lifting his work into the realm of the magnificent. One feels glory reflected. If I cannot be great myself, I can at least bask in the glory of those select few imbued with the light of inspiration and genius.

5. Somewhat waning Francophilia. Once upon a time in the not-too-distant past, to be an elitist snob was almost synonymous with declaring one’s love for everything French. I’m not sure if that still pertains any longer. Signs of French insecurity of their waning status are surely evident—Anglicisms have been outlawed from the French dictionary (or so I have heard), enrollment in French language courses has declined (or so I have read) while other languages (Mandarin and, Heaven forbid, Spanish!) have ascended. But status-symbols of the old guard die hard, so perhaps French cultural cachet will once again assert its dominance, and we will all be reopening our Sartre while sipping our Dom Perignon and sampling our crepes coquettes.

6. Controversial subject matter. Any work so bold as to deal with the taboo endows its audience with a sort of reflected broadmindedness, a willingness to free oneself from the constrictions of the social and political hegemony of one's immediate, myopic environs and the follies of the past itself and fully embrace modern enlightenment. To wit, Proust’s work must lay some sort of post-Symposium claim to being one of the first modern great works of art ever to seriously and plainly broach the topic of what used to be quaintly termed uranism.  His analysis is, of course, painstaking and all-inclusive, as is his wont--perhaps too much so to truly render the narrator himself entirely innocent of suspicion. Straight men simply would not know so much about the infinite variety and psychological underpinnings of such an abhorrent topic in the 19^th century worldview. Only they of the initiate would be privy to such knowledge, it would seem, or would have considered it in such depth. (Of course, the narrator’s views [and Proust’s, by extension] on the homosexual were nothing to write home about--he thought it a malady, a curse to which none but the children of Israel had experienced anything similar.  Modern ethos instructs us to view this as self-loathing, closeted laceration.) In a broader sense, this focus on the homosexual functions as a sort of check on all the aesthetic philosophizing and preoccupation with the minutiae of rank and title in the novel, giving it an anchor in the realm of the real, albeit one to which few everyday readers would have any firsthand knowledge and perhaps limiting its appeal to all but an elite enlightened few.

These are all compelling reasons to embark upon the Proustian odyssey. But ambivalence persists. The snob must assert his superiority to his less-enlightened peers, even if only in the impervious sanctity of his sequestered, closeted world, which, true snob that he is, he sees as a bulwark against the crashing wave of modern philisitinism, and anti-intellectual American extroversion. His is a modern echo of the glorious boasts of yore, for in reading Proust do we not dare to read the reading that "with no middle flight aims to soar"?