And yet if the snob is blessed with any sense of self-aware irony, he must realize his is a tenuous position and that American values of extroverted egalitarianism benefit him as much as anyone else. Moreover, in his more candid moments, he surely must admit futility as one inevitable result of all such cultural excursions, glittering and transporting though they may be, given their essentially narrow appeal and application. To be an American snob is a conundrum indeed.
On the one hand, many, no doubt, embark upon their Proustian voyage for nothing less than enlightenment, for insight into the foibles of humanity and the sheer aesthetic pleasure of art. At its best, art transports us; one feels etherealized, elevated above all this base matter: vita brevis, ars longa. True art asks (and perhaps provides an answer) to the essential question of what is the point? Of life? Love? Death? Of Art itself? But these are impractical questions best answered by those in ivory towers, our stern American forebears would tell us. Or better answered in the guise of tried and true Christian ideology than in the quicksilver, inconstant inspiration and insight provided by art. But in our modern world without God where religion is demoted to a quaint child’s fiction, how does one sustain hope? For Proust, the answer was that art itself made its own meaning--hardly new. He sought answers in an art that halted the inevitable decay of time, of time’s consignment of the young and beautiful to the grave of oblivion, that which froze what was extraordinary in a moment imbued with the breath of eternal life.
And yet the very pragmatic question remains of what exactly is one to do with all this Olympian refinement, after all? Spend hours in some beatific trance proferred by the hard, gemlike flame of experience, as Pater counseled? Few have the time nowadays or the diligence for such vocations; furthermore, American emphasis on the practical and prosaic ensures a guilty conscience to be the end result. Why read Proust when one can achieve? Improve others’ dejected lot? Make real changes to the plight of our fellow man?
Perhaps one should make a distinction between those who come to art for insight and those who come to it for an appearance of insight--i.e., the snob. One can further distinguish between the out snob and the closeted snob, the second of whom suffers pangs of guilt over his snobbish occupations and confesses his aspirations in tentative lurches toward embarrassed self-revelation. He is timid about admitting his love of Proust, the opera, the poetry of John Donne--of wanting to know those worlds with their subtle machinations and refined etiquette so far removed from our less rigidly classist American one. One risks being seen as too fey, too fruity, insufficiently masculine and rugged, inappropriate refinements given the crass crudity of the world surrounding us.
In his pivotal treatise on the plight of the snob, Joseph Epstein notes that the snob is essentially an impotent, insecure bystander in the American cultural circus ruled by extroverts and not aesthetes, who can do nothing to console their nagging sense of inferior status, and can only blend in with the callow crowd. They must allay their anxious frustration with their Proustian, Jamesian, or Miltonic sorties, by furtive evenings at the opera, skittish afternoons in sterile art galleries. Like Proust, they may be compensating for some perceived defect or attempting to legitimize their own humble origins through exposure to and appreciation of all this high toned culture. Others of his stamp understand intrinsically but to the uninitiated few such endeavors are confessed shamefacedly, if at all. In the end, his is a marginal role in society--the high priest of art and culture to a culture more and more deaf to his direst mumblings, a voice too dim, too obscure to be heard above the shrill pop culture din.
Groucho Marx allegedly said he would never join a club that would accept him as a member; the guilt-ridden, begrudging snob is similarly paradoxically self-annihilating. Only the best for him but if the best is vouchsafed to him, was it really the best after all? He would desire others to view him so, all the while fastidiously harboring his doubts.
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