By Chris Hedges
November 22, 2022:
Information Clearing House
-- During the war in
Bosnia, I worked my way through the
seven volumes of Marcel Proust’s “In Search
of Lost Time.” The
novel, populated with 400 characters, was
not an escape from the war. The specter of death
and the expiring world of
La Belle Époque haunts Proust’s work.
He wrote it as he was dying; in fact, Proust was
making corrections to the manuscript the night
before his death in his hermetically sealed,
cork-lined bedroom in Paris.
The novel was a lens that allowed me to
reflect on the disintegration, delusions and
mortality around me. Proust gave me the words to
describe aspects of the human condition I knew
instinctively, but had trouble articulating. He
elucidates the conflicting ways we perceive
reality, exacerbated in war, and how each of us
comes to our own peculiar and self-serving
truths. He explores the fragility of human
goodness, the seduction and hollowness of power
and social status, the inconstancy of the human
heart and racism, especially antisemitism.
Those who see in his work a retreat from the
world are poor readers of Proust. His power is
his Freudian understanding of the subterranean
forces that shape human existence. The novel is
grounded in the bitter
wisdom of Ecclesiastes: The beauty of youth,
the allure of fame, wealth, success, power,
along with literary and artistic brilliance,
reap a horrendous toll on those beguiled by
them, for they are transitory, and perish.
I was in Croatia as Serb villages were being
ethnically cleansed by the Croatian army. I
watched an elderly veteran of the partisan war
being pushed out of his home, which he would
never again inhabit, in a wheelchair, bedecked
with his World War II medals on his chest. The
rise of ethnic nationalism had extinguished the
old Yugoslavia and with it his status and place
in society.
The last volume of “In Search of Lost Time”
is populated with the aged shells of once-great
actors, writers and aristocrats, forgotten as
the crowd flocked to new luminaries. The
celebrated actor La Berma, a thinly disguised
Sarah Bernhardt, too infirm to take to the
stage, is ignored. The courtesan Odette de Crécy,
the passion of Charles Swann, one of the central
characters in the novel, was once a great beauty
who entranced Paris but in senility is relegated
to a corner of her daughter’s fashionable salon
where she is a figure of ridicule.
She had become “infinitely pathetic; she, who
had been unfaithful to Swann and to everybody,
found now that the entire universe was
unfaithful to her,” Proust writes of Odette.
The pedestals the powerful and the famous
stand upon — and believe are immovable —
disintegrate, leaving them like King Lear, naked
on the heath. When Swann denounces the
persecution of the Jewish army Captain
Alfred Dreyfus, wrongly accused of treason,
he becomes a nonperson and, along with other “Dreyfusards,”
is blacklisted.
Émile Zola, France’s most famous novelist at
the time, was forced into exile because he
defended Dreyfus.
“For the instinct of imitation and absence of
courage govern society and the mob alike,”
Proust notes. “And we all of us laugh as a
person whom we see being made fun of, though it
does not prevent us from venerating him ten
years later in a circle where he is admired.”
War elucidates these Proustian truths. Death,
as in the novel, permeated my existence in
Sarajevo, a besieged city being hit with
hundreds of shells a day and under constant
sniper fire. Four to five people were dying
daily, and perhaps another dozen or so were
wounded. But even with death all around us,
those desperately clinging to life sought to
obscure its reality. Death was something that
happened to someone else.
This denial of death, and our impending
mortality, is captured by Proust when Swann
informs the Duke and Duchesse de Guermantes that
he is ill and has only three or four months to
live. On their way to a dinner party and not
wanting to cope with the finality of death, the
Duke and Duchesse dismiss the prognosis as
fiction. Swann warily accepts that “their own
social obligations took precedence over the
death of a friend.”
“You, now, don’t let yourself be alarmed by
the nonsense of those damned doctors,” the Duke
tells him. “They’re fools. You’re as sound as a
bell. You’ll bury us all!”
The death of the narrator’s grandmother, as
well as the death of his lover Albertine, a
version of Proust’s lover and chauffeur Alfred
Agostinelli, who was killed in a plane crash in
1914, exposes the mutations of the self. Marcel,
the narrator, does not lament grief, for it
retains the connections to those we have lost.
He laments the day he no longer grieves, the day
the self that was in love no longer exists. He
writes:
I too still wept when I became once again
for a moment the former friend of Albertine.
But it was into a new personality that I was
tending to change altogether. It is not
because other people are dead that our
affection for them fades; it is because we
ourselves are dying. Albertine had no cause
to reproach her friend. The man who was
usurping his name was merely his heir. We
can only be faithful to what we remember,
and we remember only what we have known. My
new self, while it grew up in the shadow of
the old, had often heard the other speak of
Albertine; through that other self, through
the stories it gathered from it, it thought
that it knew her, it found her lovable, it
loved her; but it was only a love at second
hand.
Inanimate objects carry within them a
mystical force that can awaken these lost
feelings of grief, joy and love. They return not
by an act of will, but through involuntary
memory. A smell, sight or a sound suddenly
ignites what is buried and otherwise
inaccessible, the most famous example being the
dipping of the petite madeleine into the tea
that evokes a sudden memory of Marcel’s
childhood at Combray.
“I find the Celtic belief very reasonable,
that the souls of those we have lost are held
captive in some inferior creature, in an animal,
in a plant, in some inanimate thing, effectively
lost to us until the day, which for many never
comes, when we happen to pass close to the tree,
come into possession of the object that is their
prison,” Proust writes. “Then they quiver, they
call out to us, and as soon as we have
recognized them, the spell is broken. Delivered
by us, they have overcome death and they return
to live with us.”
Art – literature, poetry, dance, theater,
music, architecture, painting, sculpture – give
the fragments of our lives coherence. Art gives
expression to the intangible, nonrational forces
of love, beauty, grief, mortality and the search
for meaning. Without art, without imagination,
our collective and individual pasts are
disparate, devoid of context. Art opens us to
awe and mystery. Art is not, as the painter
Elstir says in the novel, a reproduction of
nature. It is the impression nature has on the
artist. It wrestles with the transcendent.
Imagination, however, is a blessing and a
curse. It can be self-destructive when we
mistake what we imagine for reality. Swann’s
infatuation with Odette, for example, is driven
by her resemblance to the women painted in the
Florentine Renaissance by
Sandro Botticelli. It is the painting, the
image, not Odette that Swann worships, a fact he
eventually faces, amazed that he has courted a
woman “who was not my type.” Marcel will come to
a similar conclusion at the end of the novel,
seeing the aristocratic elites who dazzled him
in his youth as mediocrities, elevated to the
status of demigods by his imagination.
At the same time, imagination is the fuel of
art. Art, Proust reminds us, takes work — as in
the fictional piece of music, the “Vinteuil
Sonata,” which Swann associates with Odette.
“Often one hears nothing when one listens for
the first time to a piece of music that is at
all complicated,” he writes. “For our memory,
relatively to the complexity of the impressions
which it has to face while we are listening, is
infinitesimal, as brief as the memory of a man
who in his sleep thinks of a thousand things and
at once forgets them, or as that of a man in his
second childhood who cannot recall a minute
afterwards what one has just said to him.”
It is, he writes, “the least precious parts
that one at first perceives.” He goes on, “But,
less disappointing than life, great works of art
do not begin by giving us the best of themselves
[…] But when those first impressions have
receded, there remains for our enjoyment some
passage whose structure, too new and strange to
offer anything but confusion to our mind, had
made it indistinguishable and so preserved
intact; and this, which we had passed every day
without knowing it, which had held itself in
reserve for us, which by the sheer power of its
beauty had become invisible and remained
unknown, this comes to us last of all. But we
shall also relinquish it last. And we shall love
it longer than the rest because we have taken
longer to get to love it.”
The external world of the five senses in
Proust is always defeated by the inner world
constructed by imagination. Nothing could be
truer in war. Those in war work incessantly to
make sense of the senseless. They form stories
out of chaos. They seek meaning in
meaninglessness. In a firefight you are only
aware of what is happening a few feet around
you. But once that firefight is over, two things
happen. Those who emerge victorious from the
firefight rifle through the pockets of the dead,
examining the photos and documents on the bodies
of those they killed. At the same time, they
piece together a narrative of what happened.
This narrative is largely a fiction, for only
bits and pieces are available to be cobbled
together to make a coherent whole. But without
that narrative, the experience, like life
itself, is not bearable.
Proust chronicles the poisonous effects of
World War I on French society, embodied by the
hostess Mme. Verdurin, who uses the war to
elevate her social prestige while the suicidal
tactics of French generals leads to six million
casualties, including 1.4 million dead and 4.2
million wounded, along with numerous army
mutinies. Generals and war ministers are
celebrities. Artists are reviled or ignored,
unless they produce wartime kitsch. Women adorn
themselves in “rings or bracelets made out of
fragments of exploded shells or copper bands
from 75 millimeter ammunition.” The rich,
bursting with patriotism, while sacrificing
little, busy themselves with charities for the
soldiers at the front, benefit performances and
afternoon tea parties. Wartime clichés,
amplified by the press, are mindlessly parroted
by the public. “For the idiocy of the times
caused people to pride themselves on using the
expressions of the times,” Proust notes. The war
eradicates the demarcation between civilians and
the military. It degrades language and culture.
It fuels a toxic nationalism. It ushers in the
modern era of industrial war where nations turn
their resources over to the military and, with
it, outsized political and social power. The
war, the backdrop of the final chapter, signals
the end of La Belle Époque.
The public fell into line with the modernists
of war, “after resisting the modernists of
literature and art,” Proust writes, because it
is “an accepted fashion to think like this and
also because little minds are crushed, not by
beauty, but by the hugeness of the action.”
Proust captures the disparity between the
sensory world of war and the mythic version of
war that plagues all conflicts, leading to a
bitter alienation between those who experience
war on the battlefield and those who celebrate
it in safety. Those who imbibe the myth of war
engage in an orgy of self-exaltation, not only
because they believe they belong to a superior
nation but because as members of that nation
they are convinced that they are endowed with
superior virtues.
The flip side of nationalism is racism and
chauvinism, for as we elevate ourselves we
denigrate others, especially the enemy. Proust,
when he writes about antisemitism, makes an
important distinction between vice and crime, a
distinction quoted at length by
Hannah Arendt in “The
Origins of Totalitarianism.” In the
decadence of La Belle Époque, Jews were
admitted to the great salons, until the Dreyfus
affair. They were seen as exotic, albeit tainted
with the vice of Jewishness. Vice is not an act
of will but an inherent, psychological quality
that cannot be chosen or rejected. “Punishment,”
Proust writes, “is the right of the criminal” of
which he is deprived if “judges assume and are
more inclined to pardon murder in inverts
[homosexuals] and treason in Jews for reasons
derived from…racial predestination.”
The difference between vice, which can never
be removed, and crime, defines war, as it
defined fascism a few years after the
publication of Proust’s novel. Enemies embody
evil not solely because of the acts they commit
but because of their intrinsic nature.
Eradicating evil, therefore, requires the
eradication of all those infected with vice. The
only way to survive is to renounce and hide your
essence.
Jews in France converted to Christianity.
Homosexuals pretended to be heterosexual.
Muslims and Croats in Serb-held Bosnia pretended
to be Serbs. Serbs and Muslims in Croatia
pretended to be Croats. These mutations, Proust
warned, turn the blessed and the damned into
caricatures easily manipulated by demagogues and
the mob. The hostility to difference is an
ominous step toward tyranny, either the petty
tyranny of the ruling class or the larger
tyranny of totalitarianism.
Proust has a dark view of human nature. Those
who carry out acts of charity and kindness in
the novel almost always have ulterior or, at
best, mixed motives. We betray people for
bagatelles. We surrender our professed morality
for self-advancement. We are indifferent to
human suffering. We attack the faults of others
but succumb to the same faults if “sufficiently
intoxicated by circumstances.”
But because Proust expects so little from us,
he extends pity, compassion and forgiveness to
even the most loathsome of his characters, as
they fade away at the end of the novel in a
danse macabre. Our inner life, he
concludes, is finally unfathomable, for it is
always in flux. As we age we become shells,
faded masks identifiable only by our names.
Human folly, however, is redeemed because of our
childlike yearning for the impossibility of the
eternal and the absolute in the face of the
destructive maw of time.
Proust reminds us of who we are and who we
are to become. Lifting the veil on our
pretensions, he calls us to see ourselves in our
neighbor. By immortalizing his vanished world,
Proust exposes, and makes sacred, the vanishing
world around us. His perceptions were a balm, a
deep comfort, in the madness of war, where the
mob bays for blood, death strikes at random,
delusion is mistaken for reality and the
impermanence of existence is terrifyingly
palpable.
Chris Hedges, spent nearly two decades as
a foreign correspondent in Central America, the
Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has
reported from more than 50 countries and has
worked for The Christian Science Monitor,
National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News
and The New York Times, for which he was a
foreign correspondent for 15 years.
https://chrishedges.substack.com
Views expressed in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
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