35. The Narrator’s shift from green-eyed grief to welcome indifference...
The thirty-fifth instalment of 'Oh, That More Such Flowers May Come Tomorrow' in which our hero takes aim at the injustice and insanity of the modern world.
The Narrator’s post-Albertine shift from green-eyed grief to welcome indifference is built on the liberation of forgetting…
‘As there is a geometry in space, so there is psychology in time, in which the calculations of a plane psychology would no longer be accurate because we should not be taking account of Time and one of the forms that it assumes, forgetting – forgetting, the force of which I was beginning to feel and which is so powerful an instrument of adaptation to reality because it gradually destroys in us the surviving past which is in perpetual contradiction with it.’
It was after that stormy night on the beach that I began to forget the Travelling Companion, and in doing so found my way to something approaching the kind of love which I hadn’t been able to muster when we were together. Like the final strike of a chapel bell, her voice faded away to nothing. It was a departure doubled, not by death, but by my own repentance and ransom. And the brightness of this new sense of love, which was directed both outward and inward, brought with it the first intimations of emotional recovery, such that I can recall looking in the mirror a week or so later and, for the first time in years, not hating what I saw.
Ironically enough, this same love soon precipitated a new turn in my despair, which, because it wasn’t to do with the personal realm, but the political, was a wholly intellectual affair. I now felt able to look beyond my internalised suffering and begin again to pick apart that correlation between social and individual alienation, of which I’d always been conscious but that had become obscured amid my private agonies. This resurgent empathy (and anger) also grew out of my reading, which had brought about an unplugging from the mesh of illusions that bewitch us, like the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave, allowing me to see more clearly the ugly sinew of a political reality that was suddenly more disturbing than I’d ever imagined.
Proust’s treatment of the Dreyfus Affair, which permeates his book, reveals the social circumstances that complement state persecution and the pathological need of entrenched power to protect itself, regardless of the claims of justice or moral efficacy. Dreyfus was hung out to dry. And even when his innocence became clear, falsehoods were given primacy over facts to protect the narrative established by the power brokers of the ancien regime. In their reactionary minds, old France would not be undone by Jews and progressives. The truth was of little consequence. Hannah Arendt later drew on this in her work, seeing in the affair the grim flowering of an antisemitism which was to reappear three decades later as part of the twisted rationale for the imposition of totalitarian rule across Europe. This refusal to see the just path; this self-interest that leads to an uncritical acceptance of authority – and worse, a readiness to actively defend the structures of power; this unwillingness to challenge the accepted norms and narratives of a political and economic order which effaces democratic principles and hoodwinks the very people it claims to protect: these were all things that suddenly became clear to me as I emerged from the miasma my misery, as much markers of my own time, as they were of Proust’s.
For some reason, though, it had taken me this long to connect such things with the difficulties faced by my father, who’d long ago lost faith in authoritarian structures and party-political platitudes. I’d certainly never fully grasped my own complicity in relation to this reality. Like death, which is way too uncomfortable and inconvenient, we’re generally unwilling to acknowledge those truths that mean confronting the side of ourselves bent on greed, duplicity, and destruction. Although I’d been dimly aware throughout my adult life of the corruptions of head and heart that befoul our species, I’d never felt able to call them out publicly. And it was this that had changed with my reading and with my eventual reclamation of love.
The society Proust portrays is one in gradual dissolution, as the gears of capital and geopolitics turn toward chaos and conflict. It welcomed the so-called exotic and deviant to relieve its elegant boredom; it thrived on the spectacle of its own gilded glamour; it clung to the shibboleths of its own making and held fast to the systems of privilege on which it was built, even as they began to mutate. In short, it rested on notions of inequality and injustice not unfamiliar to us today.
It’s the same society we see some years later in Renoir’s La Règle du Jeu – decadent, self-obsessed, and stupefied by its own petty distractions, unwilling to confront the coming evil, and unable to steer a different course through the dark future that lay ahead. When such a society finally perishes, its mantle is soon carried on by others, all too willing to accept the burdens of wealth and power; an expression, in some ways, of the Hobbesian urge for domination and the latent pleonexia of the human animal; discriminatory, cliquish, cruel… because it thrives on the concentration of that which it covets. At its most cunning, it will begin to devour the institutions and protections put in place over the years to prevent the worst of its excesses, and so begins its march to mastery once again, and always at the expense of the values of freedom and democracy it claims to champion – all of which become nothing more than rhetorical sops to the huddled masses.
But systems of power that fail to justify themselves, that fail in their duty to protect and nurture the majority, should be replaced, which is what Rousseau was getting at when he wrote that ‘force does not create right, and we are obliged to obey only legitimate powers’. I have no idea how it happened, but after my long withdrawal into fiction, it suddenly became clear to me that we existed in just such a state, which was like the lifting of a veil I always suspected, but was never sure, I’d been wearing. My long walks around London became tinged with a new sadness, which was fed by my sudden awareness of the terrible game of which I was part, and the fact that the city in which I lived was at its very heart. A magnet for dirty money and a base for the machines that wash it. A locus for the systems that perpetuate postcolonial peonage and economic injustice around the world. Equally exasperating, was that so few people seemed willing or able to confront what I now saw so clearly around me, writ large in the elegant glass facades of Canary Wharf and the City.
The trouble was that I had no way to articulate what I felt, for this was more like a new article of faith than a pattern of proof or ironclad argument. Nevertheless, I knew in my heart I was right, that we were all, to some extent, helpless stooges adrift on the vast Monopoly board of life. In the middle of all this, I felt unsure and increasingly dissatisfied, which was made more unbearable by the fact that, for the first time since he died, I began to miss my father, who I felt was the one person who could grasp what I was feeling, such was his disdain for those with the audacity to claim authority. It was only as I began to dwell on these matters more often, that I noticed his voice was also fading away, ironically enough at the very moment when I needed it the most.
As this happened, it was instead the voice of the Narrator that came to dominate proceedings, chief interlocutor in a discourse that gradually twisted into a strange confluence of dark and light, of suspicion and contempt on the one hand, newfound love and empathy on the other, which seemed to mirror the tonal transitions that occur in the final volume of the Search, as the Great War grips Paris and the novel’s characters begin to dissolve and decay beneath its dark shadow, just as the Narrator seems to gain a greater understanding of the true nature of reality and finally find his calling.
And it was as I approached this last phase of the book that I too began to feel the foments of change within me; to understand the delicate balance between suffering and love, joy and despair; between those interior forces that must in some way be wrangled before they can be applied to the exterior world in the form of action of one sort or another.
‘But since strength of one kind can change into a strength of another kind, since heat which is stored up can become light and the electricity in a flash of lightning can cause a photograph to be taken, since the dull pain in our heart can hoist above itself like a banner the visible permanence of an image for every new grief, let us accept the physical injury which is done to us for the sake of the spiritual knowledge which grief brings; let us submit to the disintegration of our body, since each new fragment which breaks away from it returns in a luminous and significant form to add itself to our work, to complete it at the price of sufferings of which others more richly endowed have no need, to make our work at least more solid as our life crumbles away beneath the corrosive action of our emotions.’
Somewhere along the line, the grief to which I’d been subject had, as Proust suggests, begun to return to me as ideas; a process catalysed by the reading of his book and the steady accretion of time. The long months of various voices pitching back and forth in my head had begun to resolve themselves into something approaching an autogenic monologue, as my own voice, if such a thing can really be said to exist, emerged anew, signalling the birth of a redemptive trinity of thought and action: I could love her, I could miss him, and I could find a degree of solace in the words on the page.
Out of this strange mixture I began to experience new joys and new despairs, new forces pushing me towards the expression I’d always thought futile and beyond my means. Like the Narrator, almost at the very moment I’d given up on everything, prompted by my reading, and by the notes I’d made along the way (which I’d thought were perhaps terminal efforts), I suddenly felt the compulsion to write as never before – although this was now no longer a matter of mere vanity, but one of necessity, and without which the remaining days of my life, I was sure, would mean nothing.
The need to extricate myself from reality, made possible by the novel, and born of the personal travails I’d experienced; the decay of my father, the abuses we’d foisted on one another, and the implosion of my relationship with the Travelling Companion – had somehow ultimately allowed me to see the world more clearly, throwing up its grubby patina for perusal, which was characterised by the psychopathology of the corporate state and run by apparatchiks whose function it was to hold the masses in material servitude for as long as possible. It all seemed so obvious, so clear. I realised that such ideas were crystallised forms of the same dim political murmurings I’d always felt but could never fully articulate, subsequently magnified in Proust’s portrayal of the callous rich, and then, as Arendt says, ‘reconsidered by the individual’ and transformed through inner experience to frame a new vision of reality, ‘like a mirror in whose reflection truth might appear’. Rousseau pinpoints the origins; words written in 1754 that sound as if they were scribbled down just yesterday:
‘Insatiable ambition, the thirst of raising their respective fortunes, not so much from real want as from the desire to surpass others, inspired all men with a vile propensity to injure one another, and with a secret jealousy, which is the more dangerous, as it puts on the mask of benevolence, to carry its point with greater security. In a word, there arose rivalry and competition on the one hand, and conflicting interests on the other, together with a secret desire on both of profiting at the expense of others. All these evils were the first effects of property, and the inseparable attendants of growing inequality.’
Such is the source of power and coercion that marks our sorry history, in which almost every incremental step toward justice and parity has had to be fought for. Always those vile propensities at work within us that cleave apart the few from the many. Always the few justifying their deceit from behind the ‘mask of benevolence’, while telling themselves they’re the guardians of the good. Now, simply its latest manifestation, the accession of a poisonous plutocracy who’ve wrested control of the reins of government, of banking, of media, of institutional power of all kinds; who’ve monopolised common resources for their own gain, plundered the land and the sea, and transformed the global economy into a giant extortion racket. ‘Twas ever thus.
Suddenly, it seemed impossible to see the world any other way. The things I’d never fully apprehended, began to shine with a terrible brightness. There was another reality of financial mechanisms and instruments set beneath the surface-level system. Many sense it’s there, but the thought of trying to understand it makes most people want to pluck their own eyes out. It’s opaque by design. And the way it functions is the result of a highly conscious, but often distinct, series of decisions which have imposed great complexity on something ultimately rather crude: our boundless cupidity. The attempt to attenuate this ancient urge is an essential element of the drive toward justice, and the clash between these two forces have defined the chaos of civilisation. But mid-century gains have been lost and the devious ranks of the corporate class have re-asserted their egregious claim to own absolutely everything.
‘Accumulation through dispossession’ is the mantra; a global financial system structured to draw wealth upwards, promote private over common ownership, and embed the rights of those who seek to profit from these processes of extraction and accrual. The whole thing is anathema to those classical economists who sought to offer a vision of the world in which unearned rents were taxed and economies were free from the predations of the aristocratic rentier class. In some perverse Orwellian shift, ‘free’ markets have come to mean those in which the super-rich are free to borrow money at virtually no interest, buy up existing assets, inflate the price of real estate, gamble on derivative markets, lend to others via the credit system at extortionate rates, and shift their gains into offshore tax havens exempt from democratic scrutiny. But all of this remains inscrutable, and whenever I tried to explain what I meant, people would simply smile a fatuous smile, change the subject, or more often than not, shuffle off to talk to someone far less sententious.
Hobbes knew that power depended on such passivity. The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin takes this idea and runs with it, describing a demobilised populace created as part of a system of ‘managed democracy’ in which ‘every apathetic citizen is a silent enlistee in the cause of inverted totalitarianism’. Pacified through debt, job insecurity, and suppressed wages; distracted by the spectacle of mass media and popular entertainment, the people become little more than passive consumers; a data pool to be mined; a revenue source to be plundered; and finally, underwriters of the buccaneer financiers and fiduciaries who’ve captured the legislative system to further entrench their power and enrich their friends. This seizure marks the apotheosis of corporate dominance, a partnership with existing elements of the state and various transnational organisations, which is wholly anti-democratic in nature, but that disingenuously clings to the rhetoric of liberty, all the while making the populace subject to the totalising power of capital. Such a system comes into being, says Wolin, ‘not by design, but by inattention to the consequences of actions or especially of inactions. Or, more precisely, inattention to their cumulative consequences.’
Having been slipped a particularly potent mickey, the people must answer to the very overlords who have been steadily superintending their economic disenfranchisement for the last forty years or more. Such forces are the enemy of the open and progressive society, always there, waxing and waning over time, but which fully resurgent, have become the defining agent of contemporaneous political control. At this historical moment, the battle against the diabolical few has largely been lost. The world is being raped, its natural resources reft, its native flora and fauna decimated, its biosphere poisoned. The outcome might be the greatest conflagration the world has ever known.
Need to catch up on previous instalments? You can find links to all the previous chapters here.