Social Climbing and Proust
Social Climbing and Proust
The Guermantes Way is about social climbing and entering high society, and I don't like it. I find social climbing gross, and high society is something distant and foreign. This book deals with people I dislike - aristocracy who are famous for being famous and who are largely superficial and shallow. It reminds me of someone who wants to get to know Hollywood actors or rock stars. It's the third book of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. The second book is one of my favorites; it was about flirting and young love, all things I like, or at least like to read about.
I wonder if part of my antipathy to The Guermantes Way is rooted in self-recognition? I'm not mirrored in the brilliant social climber of Proust, but in the facile and fickle charmer of Mme. de Guermantes. Mme. de Guermantes is a social maven, surrounded by the brightest, the well-read, and the charming, but ultimately more concerned with witticisms then truth or honesty. Her concern with society dampens her learning, and her thrill to shock leads her to lies. As Proust slowly penetrates her illustrious social circle, he is slowly disillusioned with the mundanity and mediocrity of high society. At the same time, he is accepted as one of their own and he goes with it. Who wouldn't, at least at first? Who doesn't want to be accepted and loved? Who isn't lonely? And who doesn't want to be accepted and loved by those who are desired by everyone?
I don't know where I stand. This book bores me with the litany of titles and names and the ceaseless superficiality of the characters and their obsession with hierarchies (even when pretending to hate hierarchies). Still, Proust's observations are frightening and penetrating and lay low hoary myths about social interaction. He is a keen observer of the highest order.
I think of my life and how I have always had a group of friends I considered illustrious. To me, it mattered little if they were successful, only if I found them charming or interesting. But in retrospect, their charm was predicated on their looks, their abilities, their intellect, their wit, or in short, their potential for success if not success itself. I created those little groups. Created them out of a desire for a family of my own, unconstrained by ancestry or locale, unconstrained by money, blood, or sex. For me it wasn't ever about social climbing, but about creating a world of my own, a world I wanted to live in.
Now many former friends and acquaintances are successful, but I don't see their success as evidence of genius, but on the contrary, a lack of fortitude in myself.
I have never been concerned with a litany of names and titles. I don't care about your pedegree or where you went to school, only what you are doing now. Other friends are entranced by the glamour of titles - and unlike the public world of celebrity and its corresponding glamour, the world of titles is hidden from the public. It is a secret world; a secret world of power and beauty, which celebrities gravitate towards and not the other way around. The world of pedegree and titles is self-contained in a way that mirrors Proust's aristocratic salons, and is opposite to our society's obsession with fame.
But in the end the families changed with time. My family now is different from my family five years ago, or even from my family three years ago, and my family from eight years ago is scattered to various other continents. Ten years ago? Who knows. My fickleness and facileness is reflected in my inability to call my blood-family, and my comfort in drifting from family to family.
Proust quotes:
A misunderstanding that is entirely natural, and one that will always exist between a young dreamer and a society woman, but nevertheless profoundly disturbs him, so long as he has not yet discovered the nature of his imaginative faculties and has not yet resigned himself to the inevitable disappointments he is destined to find in people, as in the theatre, in travel and indeed in love. (690)
His hatred of snobs derived from his snobbishness, but made the simple-minded (in other words, everyone) believe that he was immune from snobbishness. (691)
How many they are in our memories, how many more we have forgotten - those faces of girls and young women, all different, on which we have superimposed a certain charm and a frenzied desire to see them again only because at the last moment they eluded us! (538)
One has seen a woman, a mere image in the decorative setting of life, like Albertine silhouetted against the sea, and then one has been able to take that image, to detach it, to bring it close to oneself, gradually to discern its volume, its colours, as though one had placed it behind the lens of a stereoscope. It is for this reason that women who are to some extent resistant, whom one cannot possess at once, of whom one does not indeed know at first whether one will ever possess them, are alone interesting. For to know them, to approach them, to conquer them, is to make the human image vary in shape, in dimension, in relief, is a lesson in relativity in the appreciation of a woman's body, a woman's life, so delightful to see afresh when it has resumed the slender proportions of a silhouette against the back-drop of life. (496)
...for Albertine's way of pronouncing her words was so carnal, so seductive that merely in speaking to you she seemed to be caressing you. A word from her was a favour, and her conversation covered you with kisses. And yet it was highly gratifying to me, this invitation. It would have been so, indeed, coming from any pretty girl of Albertine's age; but that Albertine should be now so accessible to me gave me more than pleasure, brought before my eyes a series of images fraught with beauty. (493)
When you come to live with a woman you will soon cease to see anything of what made you love her; though it is true that the two sundered elements can be reunited by jealousy. (481)
Those who have played a big part in one's life very rarely disappear from it suddenly for good. They return to it at odd moments (so much so that people suspect a renewal of old love) before leaving it for ever. ... Jealousy, which prolongs the course of love, is not capable of containing many more ingredients than the other products of the imagination. (476)
... they forget the element of Time, and that it took a great deal of time, even at the height of the nineteenth century, for Renoir to be hailed as a great artist. ... To succeed ... in gaining recognition, the original painter or the original writer [gives us] a treatment [that is] not always pleasant. [A]t [the] end the practitioner says to us: "Now look!" And, lo and behold, the world around us (which was not created once and for all, but is created afresh as often as an original artist is born) appears to us entirely different from the old world, but perfectly clear. Women pass us in the street, different from those we formerly saw, because they are Renoirs, those Renoirs we persistently refused to see as women. The carrriages, too, are Renoirs, and the water, and they sky... Such is the new and perishable universe which has just been created. It will last until the next geological catastrophe is precipitated by a new painter or writer of original talent. (445-6)