APPEARANCE AND REALITY in THE WAY BY SWANN'S
We thought while dedicating our whole life to solving them [cf. supra: problems1] that we would not misuse it, since it would allow us to know things that we loved above all, to understand the secret relationships, the necessary metamorphoses that exist between a writer's life and his work, between reality and art or rather, as we thought, between the appearances of life and reality itself even by creating a lasting depth that art has revealed.
Marcel Proust (Jean Santeuil p. 53).
After the remembrance of a life of "lost time" dissipated in vain worldly occupations that diverted him from a literary vocation he had once felt by "Swann's way", Proust, having returned to the places of his childhood, in Tansonville, "at Swann's" meditates on the literature whose call he feels once again. It is then that he reads a few unpublished pages of the Journal des Goncourt - it is in fact a clever pastiche of the supposedly realistic descriptions of these novelists - devoted to the Salon des Verdurin. And Proust notes that the Goncourts attribute value and originality to characters that he considers, having long frequented them, "insipid", and exquisite beauty at a salon where he has often noticed "vulgarities". This pastiche allows him to denounce the dangers of these descriptions that seek to reproduce life itself and only succeed in casting doubt on the value of literature since, he tells us,". I could have concluded from them that life teaches us to lessen the value of reading, and shows us that what the writer praises was not worth much" (Time Regained t.3 p.720).
Yet Proust's pastiche reproduces exactly, as much by its subject as by its style, the tone of the Goncourt writings. His subject, the depiction of a rich and relatively worldly environment, is one of those loved by Edmond de Goncourt who, in opposition to Zola's and his disciples' naturalism, wrote in the Zemganno Brothers' preface "Realism (.) came into being to define, in artistic writing, what is grand, pretty, smells good, and also to give the aspects and profiles of refined beings, and rich things." . As for the style, Proust's pastiche is nourished by these documents, of which the Goncourts laid the very foundation of the novel. It was said that "The current novel is made from documents told or recorded from nature, as history is made from written documents" This taste for testimonies and notations led the Goncourts to keep a diary where they accumulated material for their future novels : everything they had seen, heard or learned. Proust renders it admirably with a touch of irony as shown in this sentence, with its conditionals, that would not be denied by the current journalistic style: "The lady of the house, who will place me next to her, kindly tells me that she has solely flowered her table with Japanese chrysanthemums, but chrysanthemums arranged in vases that would be extremely rare masterpieces, one of them made of a bronze on which reddish copper petals would seem to be the vivid shedding flowers" (Time Regained t.3 p.710).
The reader, aware of the vanity, the affectation of the Verdurins, remains confused with the credulity of the Goncourts. However, this credulity can be explained: it is a challenge to claim that a moment of observation is enough to know and appreciate objects and beings to their true value; as for the testimony, it can often be mystifying. The error of the "realistic" novel of the nineteenth century also stems from the attitude of the novelist who, erasing himself before the facts like a scholar, accepts them without judging them, with the passivity of a camera lens. Baudelaire was already sensitive to the artificial nature of such a vision of the world and he wrote: "He who calls himself realistic, a word with a double meaning and whose meaning is not well determined, and whom we will call, to better characterize his error, a positivist, says: "I want to represent things as they are, or as they would be, assuming that I do not exist. This objective, "cinematographic" vision of things, cannot correspond to that of readers because no one deprives himself of his own personality in his perception. Proust writes: "Some people wanted the novel to be a kind of cinematographic parade of things. This conception was absurd. Nothing can be more distant from what we have actually perceived than such a cinematographic view. "(Time Regained t.3 p. 885). However, it can be said that many readers of the nineteenth century recognized in the novels of the Goncourts or Zola a reality that seemed to them to be their own. Proust is not surprised by this public approval, because, for him, the vision that men have of the world varies according to the times; and he notes in Guermantes' Way: "In Bergotte's books, which I often read again, his sentences were as clear before my eyes as my own ideas, the furniture in my room and the cars in the street. All things were easily seen there, if not as we had always seen them, at least as we were used to seeing them now. However, a new writer had begun to publish works in which the relationships between things were so different from those who read them in my opinion that I understood almost nothing of what was written (---). There was a time when things were easily recognizable when Fromentin had painted them and unrecognizable when it was Renoir. "(t.2 p. 326-327). Conformity with the common vision is the criterion of this relative reality that each literary school wrongly believes to be absolute. The romantic movement had set itself the goal of a more accurate painting of reality, but its vision of the world seemed very conventional to the Goncourts and the naturalist novelists who had risen up against it in the name of reality. It was also in the name of reality that they were in turn eclipsed and that Proust criticized their documentary method. Because what they painted was less real than the conventional ideas of their time. Their mistake lies not only in their objective attitude towards the things they describe, but also in their ignorance of the true nature of reality in which they have no problems, and which seems directly observable to them. If reality were this kind of waste of experience, almost identical for everyone, because, when we say bad weather, a war, a car station, a lit restaurant, a blooming garden: cinematographic images of these things would suffice and the "style", the "literature" that would deviate from their simple data would be an artificial hors' d'oeuvre. Was that really reality? (Time Regained) (t.3 p.890.)
Flaubert already thought that the novelist could not stick to the general and commonly accepted aspect of things; without affirming that this aspect was only an appearance, he considered it as only a part of reality and wished that the novelist would free himself from it to go beyond it. Maupassant, in the preface of Pierre & Jean reports these words from his master: it is a question, he said, of looking at everything we express long enough and with enough attention to discover an aspect of it that has not been seen and told by anyone else. There is, in everything, the unexplored side unexplored side, because we are used to using our eyes only with the memory of what was thought before us concerning what we contemplate. The slightest thing contains a little something unknown. Let's find it ."
Soon this unknown reality would appear to be essential and Valéry would write this judgment which is the condemnation of the documentary novel dear to Naturalists : "What could be more misleading than these truthful men who reduce themselves to telling us what they have seen as we would have seen it ourselves? What is the effect on me of what can be seen ? (.) It concerns our spirit as well as our flesh: They surround by mystery what they feel as most important, they hide it from themselves; they point it out and defend it by this depth where they place it. Everything that matters is well hidden; witnesses and documents darken it; acts and actions are made expressly to distort it".
A deep and hidden reality is for Proust the only reality, and everything else is only appearance. Whether it is the material universe or the social universe in which our lives take place, whether it is this very life, everything that is visible and observable is not only superficial but false; at most it is an indication of a reality that the novelist has the responsibility of revealing. His art becomes more difficult but: "In short, this extremely complicated art is precisely the only living art. By itself it expresses for others and makes us see our own life, this life that cannot «be noticed». These appearances we notice need to be translated and often read backwards and painfully deciphered. (Time Regained t. 3 p. 896). This denunciation of appearances of which we are fooled when we perceive the world, when we judge others, when we try to understand our "self", this deciphering of reality dominate, from the beginning with The Way by Swann's, the first part of this vast work that represents In Search of Lost Time.
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From the world of appearances to reality rediscovered
When the hero of In Search for Lost Time wonders if he becomes a writer, he meditates on realism in literature, a crucial problem to him since his decision depends on it. Proust then makes a pastiche of the descriptions full of documents and testimonies of the Goncourt brothers. He shows us that these novelists paint only the most...
