Telling someone you have read/are reading/plan to read Proust is somewhat fraught with difficulty, a tinge of anxiety accompanying one’s pronouncement, the fear a direct result of what might seem tantamount to announcing nothing less than social climbing ambitions. One is never sure if it should be proclaimed loud and proud or confessed light and slight. The fear of suggesting, inadvertently or not, one’s superiority to one’s non-Proust reading, more earthly-bound, Oprah‘s book club-loving peers can be difficult to keep at bay.
The Proust reader faces a dilemma: while it seems fair to assume that most appreciate the value of American egalitarianism, sometimes the lure of art, of complexity, of subtle probing, and, yes, a bit of cultural chauvinism (inextricable from all this, I think) prove too great a lure to resist. Alas, these are not American values--they are European generally and French particularly. One fears being judged insufficiently American; it was, after all, not too long ago in the political scene that American chauvinism beat its brawny chest in truculent challenge toward everything French. There are some grounds for American distrust of too much Francophilia, and much of it can be located squarely within Proust himself. The man was a huge snob, after all. The primary motivating factor, I venture to say, in his 3000-page tome was far from modest: to write something for the ages that would lift him up to the empyrean into the august ranks of Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and company. And as a European to whom social rank is a given, Proust would have no difficulty acquiescing (eyes blinking coquettishly, as if to say, “Yes, of course, and your point?“) to charges of rank snobbery and base social climbing—a brand of effete decadence all but unthinkable to an American.
Things are obviously complicated by the social, ethnic, and even biological. Proust, half-Jewish and homosexual, like so many before and after him, sought social respectability in a society that despised him on both counts. Such well-earned respect would be an almost ritual cleansing of the declassé origins from which he emerged, like taking the basest of metals and alchemically transmuting it to the most precious of precious stones.
But we Americans cannot display such naked ambition; our art must at some point speak to the masses. We suffer guilt over attempting to distinguish ourselves in almost any way but the material—we are a nation of immigrants, after all, most of us coming from the humblest of backgrounds (and I am certainly no different from others in that respect). This attempt to distinguish ourselves can manifest itself in even as apparently innocuous a way as reading Proust.
But mainstream culture dictates we are to like sports not books, and certainly not those of effete aesthetes expiring on the fumes of their own rarefied ruminations. We are to enjoy mainstream movies and mainstream fare, not Truffaut, truffles, or anything smacking too much of the esoteric. We are to be fascinated by the daily gossip mill surrounding Lindsay, Paris, and Kim; we are to celebrate the athletic prowess of Kobe and Tiger, even as we tsk-tsk dishonestly at their sexual and politically-incorrect escapades (while secretly envying their superhuman status). We are not to enjoy the life of the mind for its own sake. Such things are foreign to the essentially practical American sensibility, and, in their worst excesses, reflect nothing less than European decadence and debility, spiritual malaise and moral laxity. We are taught in school that everyone is the same in the eyes of the law (those of us with experience in the real world soon learn to question such platitudes). To boldly attempt to stand out from one's non-Proust reading peers is un-American and base: Pride goeth before a fall, our Puritan forebears would have warned. Such notions are those to which others from less enlightened lands still resolutely cling to—an established social pecking order, old guard notions and faith in names, blood lines, and pedigrees.
But here we have emancipation from the old European models. We have separation of church and state; we have a free market economy and the good old American ambition that goes along with it. If the model for European hierarchy is a castle on a hill surrounded by villagers below, the American identity would appear to be a department store of types—a mere elevator ride up to something higher and better above. The message would seem to be if you can’t make it here, it’s really no one’s fault but your own. We reject social stratification and embrace upward mobility; we dispute Christian essentialism and advocate the blank slate; we enshrine pop divas and devalue Shakespeare as a dead, white male for a dead, white male elitist Euroculture foreign to our shores. Social problems can be resolved, lives can be changed, lots can be bettered, as our pop psychologists advise; if they cannot, we just weren‘t trying hard enough. The past can be discounted or, better yet, forgotten entirely. American optimism trumps Old World cynicism, it is proclaimed in almost Pentecostal chants.
Now, none of this ambivalence toward status symbols and our place in the social hierarchy in an ostensibly egalitarian society prevents anyone from wanting to get into the best schools, land the best, highest-paying jobs, live in the most palatial of mansions, etc.--basically, to service the inner consumer-whore of our wildest youth-besotted dreams. Those who attain such heights may suffer the ill effects of lingering humanity, and attempt to assuage their guilt through philanthropy and good works. But those of us for whom such heights of material ecstasy seem remote and unattainable require other compensation, even if forced into the literary closet, as it were. Enter Proust.
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