Comedy and Conversion in Marcel Proust
French novelist Marcel Proust in c.1891. Photograph: Apic/Getty Images
The idea that Marcel Proust is a funny writer isn’t new. Nancy Mitford insisted on this point in a letter to Evelyn Waugh, and in the decades since more than a few noted Proustians have emphasized the humor of In Search of Lost Time. Still, Nicola Shulman’s recent piece in The Spectator, “Getting the Jokes in Proust,” offers an especially witty corrective to the clichéd image of the French novelist as a melancholy aesthete trafficking exclusively in lost paradises and sentences with too many subordinate clauses. Calling the Search “one of the world’s greatest comedies of manners,” bursting with “comic set-ups” and “absurd set-pieces,” Shulman compares its protagonist, Marcel, to Larry David’s character on the show Curb Your Enthusiasm and likens Proust himself to a stand-up comedian.
In highlighting this aspect of the Search, Shulman has done both the work and its readers a valuable service. Yet over her piece looms a huge unanswered question, one she addresses only glancingly: how did Proust acquire the ability to write such a funny book? After all, he had not always been a comic genius—neither of the mediocre works of fiction he labored over in his twenties offer much in the way of humor, and at times they are even downright humorless. This gaping absence of comedy suggests that something happened in the time between those early efforts and Proust’s mature masterpiece, a paradigm shift that made the author capable of transferring his legendary gifts as a comic dinner-table raconteur “onto the page,” as Shulman puts it.
René Girard, who in 1962 edited Proust: A Collection of Critical Essays, has offered a persuasive account of the Proustian paradigm shift and its relationship to the comic. The French thinker is known for his insight into the mimetic nature of desire and his theory of the scapegoat. At the very heart of his work, however, is the idea of “novelistic conversion,” according to which the greatest works of literature get written twice, first as a reflection of the author’s pose of autonomy, and then, after a painful personal reckoning, as the revelation of his actual enslavement to some deified victorious model, be it an idolized hero, a social or amorous rival, or an elusive love interest.
For instance, in the conclusions of classic novels such as Don Quixote and The Red and the Black, Girard suggests, the hero’s illness or death alludes to and even enacts the author’s own rejection of pride, opening up a distance between the character, who embodies the author’s former dream, and the author, who now has the power to describe both his own and others’ delusion with comic irony. When Madame Bovary takes arsenic, says Girard, it is Flaubert killing off the romantic he had once been—a horrible end for the character, but a symbolic marker of Flaubert’s creative rebirth after the failure of his youthful tries at novel-writing. Girard came up with this idea in part by studying Proust’s life in parallel with Time Regained, the last volume of his masterpiece, which relates a grave illness followed by spiritual and artistic awakening. But it also grew out of comparisons between the French fiction writer’s unfinished first novel Jean Santeuil and the Search.
Born in 1871, at the dawn of the French Third Republic, Proust came of age at a time when his country’s hereditary nobility played a diminished role in public life. Although the great titled families were still massively wealthy, the up-and-coming industrialists had surpassed them, and many aristocrats were retreating from political affairs into social and artistic pursuits—though even here they were often a step behind the Wagnerian vanguard. Yet for some this dwindling influence actually contributed to the nobility’s appeal. The duke who invited you to one of his dinner parties might not have the clout to get you a job or a title, even in the unlikely event that he was willing to try, but he could make you feel like you were stepping into a lost world of mystery and glamor.
As a young man Proust was obsessed with getting into the salons of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, where displays of overeagerness were swiftly punished and an air of disdain was comme il faut. To win acceptance, the snob must fool others into thinking he isn’t one, that his presence at the garden party springs from a lofty interest in discussing the latest trends in modern painting rather than from a craven yearning to drink orangeade with princes of the blood. To avoid the searing humiliation of coming face to face with his true motives, he must also convince himself that the duchess in whose drawing room everyone is smothering yawns is in fact a paragon of wit and intelligence, rather than a boring mediocrity. This Proust managed to do for many years.
He became friends with socialites Count and Countess Greffulhe and with poet and dandy Robert de Montesquiou. At the same time he sought a career in literature. Published in 1896, his short story collection Pleasures and Days fizzled in spite of a preface from then-celebrated novelist Anatole France. Undaunted, the author began drafting Jean Santeuil, a novel about a young aesthete who hobnobs with the aristocratic set. Prestigious noble ladies take Jean under their wing, showering him in flattering attention in their box at the theater. A foreign king adjusts his tie and offers him his arm for a public stroll while his snobbish enemies look on helplessly from the cheap seats below, brows furrowed by envious rage.
Like his hero, Proust could flatter himself that he played the social game with skill. His literary output, however, was underwhelming, as even he seemed to realize—after setting to work with feverish energy he eventually became discouraged and abandoned the novel, which at its best is psychologically astute and written with ravishing style, but at its worst radiates a kind of narcissism via its idealized hero. Surrounded by doting aristocratic friends, basking in the glow of social triumph, Jean always comes out on top, like an avatar used to realize Proust’s fantasies. This early attempt at fiction is a “romantic lie,” as Girard would say, an authorial pose transferred onto the page.
With the help of his mother, Proust would go on to translate two works by John Ruskin. He also chronicled the beau monde in society pieces for Le Figaro. But he was not a novelist, and, by now in his early thirties, he had perhaps given up hope of ever becoming one. “Marcel’s friends recognized his intelligence, his talent, and his remarkable ability with words,” writes his biographer William C. Carter, “but they were convinced he was squandering his gifts in the glitter and chic of salon life.”
Then, in 1905, Proust’s mother died. The author had loved her with needy, overbearing intensity. He suffered a wrenching grief. He accused himself of having shortened her life by causing her anxiety with his many ailments and demands. He saw himself as a criminal son. In a piece in Le Figaro about another family tragedy he implicitly compared himself to Oedipus gouging out his eyes. He wrote to his friends of suicide. Eventually he checked himself into a clinic. Although his mother’s death inspired horror, this involuntary trial—the “Proustian dark night of the soul,” as Girard described it—proved to be of great benefit to him as both a man and an artist, wounding his superficial, public self in his own eyes and granting new insight.
About three years after his mother’s death, Proust began to sketch out a work that revisited much of the same subject matter as Jean Santeuil. Four years later, the first volume, Swann’s Way, was ready for publication. Where the youthful novel was flat, lacking in drama and humor, the new work abounded in life and energy. Proust multiplied metaphors in dazzling, serpentine sentences whose tension gradually builds, clause by clause, until the snap of an ironic flourish. And he molded his material into an overall structure that he would liken to a cathedral, replacing the episodic patchwork of his unfinished first attempt with a powerful, coherent series of scenes and storylines framed by the narrator’s search for his artistic vocation.
Most tellingly, he rewrote certain episodes in the early novel from a radically new perspective. In the theater scene in Jean Santeuil he had put his protagonist at the enviable center, fawned over by high society’s crème de la crème, even as he consigned his rivals to the outer darkness, caricaturing them as villainous snobs. After his great change, Proust identified with his former scapegoats. In The Guermantes Way he places his hero, Marcel, down in the orchestra seats. There he gazes up with envy and longing at the aristocrats ensconced in their loge high above him. As Girard would remark in a radio interview with David Cayley, Proust had accepted that he, too, was a snob:
The great creative act is always a second time around. There is a first time around which is just the vanity of the writer. If you look at the earlier writings, instead of being down in the orchestra looking up in great envy and appetite and inability to reach, you have Marcel up in the box, flattered and very well treated by the best people. So you feel that the earlier writing is wishful thinking written out as truth. And that is what all beginning writers do. The secret of great writing is giving that up, just like the secret of great comedy is putting yourself in the bad position. And then you become able to write truthful things about life, when you put yourself in the worst possible position.
The aristocratic salons had seemed to Proust to be objectively desirable, incommensurably sublime. Now he saw through to the dullness and stupidity that prevailed among his fellow social butterflies. Parisian high society was, he would write, “the kingdom of nothingness.” This discovery was a painful blow, entailing “the abrogation of [his] dearest illusions,” as he put it in Time Regained.
In Search of Lost Time is founded on this disillusionment, which gives rise to both high comedy and gorgeous lyricism. The novelistic conversion makes the author capable of describing his former pose of autonomy qua pose. It puts him in touch with the lived reality of his desire, his craving to visit the country estates of dukes and duchesses who have little but their particules to recommend them. In the end, what Girard’s idea of novelistic conversion teaches us is that the humor of Proust’s novel cannot be separated from its notes of anguished yearning. The Search is funny because the author dares to plumb the depths of the very real psychological suffering he endured in the pursuit of frivolous social distinctions and vacuous love interests. Puncturing his characters’ ostensible motives, making us laugh at their feigned detachment, he reveals their true wretchedness, their enslavement to the false idols of exclusivity, glamor, and sexual seductiveness.
Marcel Proust on holiday with his family, circa 1892. Photo: docphotos/ Corbis via Getty
Although Proust never became Christian, and although his novel, which focuses on love affairs, socialites, and the homosexual underworld, is hardly religious, he glosses nothing over. Proust “never resorts to the vocabulary of sin,” writes Girard, but “the reality of sin is present. The exploration of the past very much resembles a discovery of one’s own sinfulness in Christianity. The time wasted away is full of idolatry, jealousy, envy, and snobbery…” The French novelist’s stand-up act is at once last judgment and mea culpa.
Trevor Cribben Merrill is the author of Minor Indignities (Wiseblood Books).