Patrick O'Donovan

Au seuil de la modernité: Proust, Literature and the Arts

At a certain point in Le Temps retrouve, the Narrator appears to take a clear and insistent line when it comes to the issue of ‘le chagrin’. The impact of ‘le chagrin’, he says, is in the end biological: the pain it causes simply brings us closer to death; before the body comes to be destroyed, all we can do, for the sake of ‘la connaissance spirituelle’, is to extract whatever parcel of understanding we can from the experience (RTP, IV, 484-85). What seems to prompt the conviction that ‘la connaissance spirituelle’ is something of value is the new urgency which attaches to the Narrator’s projected work, in the light of the discoveries which he has just recorded. As the Narrator begins, then, to envisage his book as a realizable project, it seems possible to impose closure on certain of the threads which constitute the quest that has led him to this point, to aspire to the attainment of wisdom in the face of suffering. This gesture represents one view of what it might be to be beyond contingency. This intriguing line of thought is eminently Proustian in that it forms part of the novel’s ceaseless plotting of the dynamics of loss and recovery. At the same time, it can be connected to a line of writing in fiction and indeed in thought which is centred on feeling that is no less singular, on which Proust himself draws. These two issues — the significance we might assign to the insights which shape the Narrator’s resolutions at the end of the novel, on the one hand, and the representation of affect in modern fictional narrative, on the other — are connected in the work of Richard Bales. 1 What I shall comment on here is how, in Proust’s work, these two strands, though they appear to diverge, in fact provide a perspective within which we can engage with his representation of subjectivity. To elucidate this claim, I shall combine my discussion of the Recherche with some comments on Goethe’s Elective Affinities and Constant’s Adolphe, where the issue that dominates each narrative is, by contrast, the apparent futility of certain experiences of passion. It is indeed the case that Proust’s response to the suffering of sorrow can be situated with reference to the emergence within modern European culture of a discourse of affectivity 1 See in particular Proust: ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’ (London: Grant and Cutler, 1995), ch. 6, and Persuasion in the French Personal Novel: Studies of Chateaubriand, Constant, Balzac, Nerval, and Fromentin (Birmingham, AL: Summa, 1997).