20. If, in the first volume, the Narrator sticks chiefly to the way past Swann’s...
The twentieth instalment of 'Oh, That More Such Flowers May Come Tomorrow' in which our hero ventures some dismal thoughts about the state of the world.
If, in the first volume, the Narrator sticks chiefly to the way past Swann’s, and in the second straddles the two paths, then by the third, he more fully starts down the ‘Guermantes Way’…
After making the acquaintance of several members of this famed aristocratic dynasty while holidaying in Balbec – including the urbane Robert de Saint-Loup (perhaps the closest he ever has to a real ‘friend’) – the Narrator’s own family then move into an apartment in a sprawling edifice near the banks of the Seine owned by the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes.
For the Narrator, the move precipitates a reckoning with this ancient name, which has reverberated throughout his youth due to its association with the heraldic majesty of old France and connection with the village of Combray. Both his friendship with Saint-Loup (the Duchess’s nephew) and these new living arrangements bring him into an ever-closer orbit around this esteemed family, the crème de la crème of Parisian society, ‘in a class of its own in the Faubourg Saint-Germain’.
This produces a kind of spatial dissonance in his mind, distinctly comic in its effect, which sees him become ‘perplexed by certain difficulties’, such that ‘the presence of the body of Jesus Christ in the host seemed to me no more obscure a mystery than this leading house in the Faubourg being situated on the right bank of the river and so near my bedroom that in the morning I could hear its carpets being beaten.’
The Duke and Duchess take on the mantle of Olympian gods, and despite being so close to them in physical terms, the Narrator can no more picture being granted access to their empyrean kingdom than I might imagine myself breaking bread with Beyoncé and Jay-Z. ‘Alas, those picturesque sites, those natural features, those local curiosities, those works of art of the Faubourg Saint-Germain,’ he says, ‘doubtless I should never be permitted to set my feet among them. And I must content myself with a shiver of excitement as I sighted from the open sea (and without the least hope of ever landing there), like a prominent minaret, like the first palm, like the first signs of some exotic industry or vegetation, the well-trodden doormat of its shore.’ For him this mystic realm is defined by the seductive syllables of the Duchess’s name, through which he can imagine the taste of its manifold delights, without ever consuming them.
As I was reading, I couldn’t help but think of this passage in relation to the world around me. Of how certain similarly seductive realities were paraded in front of the eyes of people to whom access was near impossible. Hadn’t the very idea of the trinity itself been twisted into a new form, where the godhead was wealth and fame; the ghost the illusory images of paradise let loose across the vast network of digitised media; the son the elusive dream of success, the possibility of having more?
The problem was that no matter how near one might get, there was always a nagging desire to get even nearer, to make landfall proper. I’d experienced the feeling myself many times; and this despite my hunch that it had been part of what had made me sick in the first place. And the more I turned this over in my mind, the more I came to suspect the rationale behind it, which was to keep people like me in check, compliant and avaricious. In more sanguine moments, I sometimes thought of this state as a sort of dark privilege, although one built on a foundation of vast suffering and quiet ignorance.
Thankfully, Proust seldom spares his most callous characters. Their blithe sense of entitlement is the equivalent of taking a razor to the throat of the poor and dispossessed; their gilded lives built on the back of the servants who serve their boeuf en daube, the workers who keep their factories going, the apparatchiks who administer their stock options. The Duchesse du Guermantes and her dreadful husband live in a world that benefits predatory monsters like them, because it has been designed to do so, built by and for their kind. It’s within this world’s dark underbelly that the ideals of ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ are eroded by a million hidden forces, by unseen algorithms and secret decisions, but also by mute participation and a failure to dissent.
This brings me back to Father Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov: ‘The world has proclaimed the reign of freedom, especially of late, but what do we see in this freedom of theirs? Nothing but slavery and self-destruction! For the world says “You have desires and so satisfy them, for you have the same rights as the most rich and powerful. Don’t be afraid of satisfying them and even multiply your desires.” That is the modern doctrine of the world. In that they see freedom… They maintain that the world is getting more and more united, more and more bound together in brotherly community, as it overcomes distance and sets thoughts flying through the air. Alas, put no faith in such a bond of union. Interpreting freedom as the multiplication and rapid satisfaction of desires, men distort their own nature, for many senseless and foolish desires and habits and ridiculous fancies are fostered in them. They live only for mutual envy, for luxury and ostentation. To have dinners, visits, carriages, rank, and slaves to wait on one is looked upon as a necessity, for which life, honour and human feeling are sacrificed… and therefore the idea of the service of humanity, of brotherly love and the solidarity of mankind, is more and more dying out in the world, and indeed this idea is sometimes treated with derision. For how can a man shake of his habits? What can become of him if he is in such bondage to the habit of satisfying the innumerable desires he has created for himself? He is isolated, and what concern has he with the rest of humanity? They have succeeded in accumulating a greater mass of objects, but the joy in the world has grown less.’
Dostoevsky presses this point home in the ‘parable of the Grand Inquisitor’, in which Jesus returns to fifteenth-century Spain, only to be imprisoned as a danger to the Church. It seems his message of love, selflessness and the kind of liberty it brings doesn’t go down too well with the patrician class who run the show. Christ offers ‘too much freedom’, and mankind can’t really stomach that. What human beings really want is to be led by those in authority, to avoid having to think, and to be perpetually fooled by the idea that more is never enough.
The modern, secular world offers a similar compact which keeps us staring into those miniature scrying mirrors we carry around in our pockets, vainly smitten by, but rarely satisfied with, what they show us. I’m reminded of a passage from the book Voltaire’s Bastards by the philosopher John Ralston Saul: ‘the death of God combined with the perfection of the image has brought us to a whole new state of expectation. We are the image. We are the viewer and the viewed. There is no other distracting presence. And that image has all the godly powers. It kills at will. Kills effortlessly. Kills beautifully. It dispenses morality. Judges endlessly. The electronic image is man as God and the ritual involved leads us not to a mysterious Holy Trinity but back to ourselves. In the absence of a clear understanding that we are now the only source, these images cannot help but return to the expression of magic and fear proper to idolatrous societies.’
These images of ourselves are found so wanting, our only resort is to augment them with yet more, in the hope that accrual might engender meaning. But it never does. How diligently we set the gears of commerce, technology and politics toward this end, thinking ourselves at liberty, when all we’re really doing is firming up the walls of our prison. Like the young Narrator, we’re left gazing with envy at the gilded guards on the other side of the wall, the equivalents of the Guermantes, overseers and architects of the great panopticon in which we dwell.
Such were my thoughts as I began the third volume of the novel. And such deeply dismal thoughts were they, that I couldn’t help but connect them to the despair that had consumed me for so long; which was proof enough that personal grief shares a causal connection to political grief. And I remembered Le Règle du Jeu, that wonderful film by Jean Renoir, which surely draws on Proust in its portrayal of the careless rich, who, on the brink of war, take refuge on a grand country estate, where they idle away the hours in parties, gossip and petty intrigues. No wonder it was banned by the French government.
Were people really this corrupt and corruptible? Was the world really this awful? I was finding it difficult to come up with anything other than an affirmative. And if so, what was anyone doing about it? Weren’t we just like the Romans, who, rather than face the inevitable decline of their civilisation, preferred the spectacle of the Coliseum? Wouldn’t we rather gawp at the idiot famous and their gimcrack riches, rather than confront the truth of our own imminent dark demise?
But the worst of it was that, even having contemplated all this (and deciding that I was right), I was still unable to completely repudiate my longing for acclaim, my desire to ascend, like the Narrator, into the glittering world of the jailers. I took at least some solace in the fact that the he is a deeply fractured character; and so perhaps this version of me, the one desperate for prestige and all the shallow nonsense we’re told will make us whole, was not the only one either. For in the novel, the narrator described is also the narrator describing; the older man reflecting with ironic detachment and some embarrassment on the person he once was.
Over time, it was from this sense of duality that there eventually grew a greater awareness of my own, as I began to conceive some future version of myself, thrust forward in time, looking back and grimacing at what he sees, just as it was possible to apply the same optics to the boy, or the teenager, or the younger man, from the vantage point I then occupied, which offered up such great views of the mistakes and missteps to which Elstir refers, and which I came to understand might someday bear redemptive fruit. And in this, I saw a gift from the Narrator; a way to prize apart my own folly under the auspices of literature, and ultimately a means to reject the ugliness of the cupidity to which I was still bound.
Need to catch up on previous instalments? You can find links to all the previous chapters here.