RSS Feed MenuMy newest bookshelf entry reviews Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way.
Marcel Proust is the writer to whom I have returned most often over my life. Now that Audible.com is at last releasing an unabridged audiobooks edition of Remembrance of Things Past, I am returning once more.
One of Proust’s great themes is the transformation of personality across time. Our earlier selves cannot begin to imagine our later selves; our later solves are baffled if not horrified by our earlier selves. Swann’s Way, the first novel in the great novel series, ends with the eponymous Swann marveling at his own earlier life:
“To think that I have wasted years of my life that I have longed for death, that the greatest love that I have ever known has been for a woman who did not please me, who was not in my style!”
On each of the half dozen times I’ve read Swann’s Way, I’ve taken something different. Proust would of course say, that’s because I am different.
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cnathan // Dec 28, 2009 at 12:27 pm
Interesting. I take as the principal subject matter of David’s essay the assertion that “Groups are typically bound less by their purposes than by their accepted valuations and verities – less by their adhesion to ideas, more by their loyalty to persons.” At first he seems to have introduced a contradiction: are “valuations and verities” not themselves a form of “ideas”? And do not most groups coalesce fairly effortlessly around some statement of their organizing purpose? They say, sometimes tacitly but often enough explicitly: “we are for human dignity,” or “there is nothing worse than cruelty,” or “we love beauty,” or “we are against prejudice in any form” or some such thing. Whatever our assessment of their objective merits, or the integrity of their definitions, or the rigour of their thinking, groups tend to believe these things about themselves. They do not normally say, except in satire or caricature: “we are for ourselves, and the exclusion and repudiation of others.”
But I think Proust is showing – and David highlighting by this curious choice of subject matter at this fraught time of year – that in practice personal and group associations are not reliably constituted for the actual accomplishment (”purpose”) of dignity, kindness, beauty, toleration and so on. That in practice groups are ill-suited to the rigorous pursuit of purposes or ideals, and that they exhibit an acrobatic talent for delineating membership on the basis of eccentric and idiosyncratic norms, but above all, personal loyalty.
So, given the ambitious committment of David Frum’s intellectual venture – and its less than fully comfortable place at the contemporary conservative dinner party – this rather subtle gloss on the manners of our community strikes me as almost aristocratic in its tone and discretion. He chides us, but gently. I have not read Swann, but I take away this point from David’s essay: let us resolve to distinguish carefully between our loyalty to people and our committment to ideas and purposes. Where the two seem to be at odds let us at least tell ourselves the truth, or be silent, rather than trading our very integrity for the approval or affection of a group that does not please us, and is not – when fully considered – genuinely in our style.