How Proust Can Change Your Life

Griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some of their power to injure our heart

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However, only too frequently, suffering fails to alchemize into ideas and, instead of affording us a better sense of reality, pushes us into a baneful direction where we learn nothing new, where we are subject to many more illusions and entertain far fewer vital thoughts than if we had never suffered to begin with. Proust’s novel is filled with those we might call bad sufferers, wretched souls who have been betrayed in love or excluded from parties, who are pained by a feeling of intellectual inadequacy or a sense of social inferiority, but who learn nothing from such ills, and indeed react to them by engaging a variety of ruinous defense mechanisms which entail arrogance and delusion, cruelty and callousness, spite and rage.

Without doing them an injustice, it may be possible to lift a number of these unfortunate sufferers from the novel, so as to consider what is ailing them, the Proustian inadequacy of their defenses, and to propose, in a gently therapeutic spirit, certain more fruitful responses.

PATIENT NO. 1: Madame Verdurin, the bourgeois mistress of a salon that gathers to discuss art and politics, and which she calls her “little clan.” Very much moved by art, she develops headaches when overcome by the beauty of music, and on one occasion dislocates her jaw by laughing too much.

PROBLEM: Madame Verdurin has dedicated her life to rising in the social world, but she finds herself ignored by those she most desires to know. She is not on the invitation lists of the best aristocratic families; she would be unwelcome at the salon of the Duchesse de Guermantes; her own salon is filled only with members of her social class; and the President of the French Republic has never invited her to have lunch in the Élysée Palace—though he has invited Charles Swann, a man she considers to be no more elevated in the world than she is.

RESPONSE TO PROBLEM: There are few outward signs that Madame Verdurin is bothered by her situation. She asserts with apparent conviction that anyone who refuses to invite her or come to her salon is merely a “bore.” Even the President, Jules Grévy, is a bore.

The word is perversely appropriate, for it is the direct opposite of what Madame Verdurin in fact judges any grand figure to be. These figures excite her so much and yet are so inaccessible to her that all she can do is camouflage her disappointment in an unconvincing display of insouciance.

When Swann carelessly lets slip at the Verdurin salon that he is lunching with President Grévy, the envy of the other guests is palpable, and so as to dispel it, Swann quickly adopts a deprecating line:

“I assure you, his luncheon-parties are not in the least bit amusing. They’re very simple affairs too, you know—never more than eight at table.”

Others might have recognized Swann’s remark to be mere politeness, but Madame Verdurin is too distressed to ignore any suggestion that what she does not have is not worth having:

“I can easily believe that you don’t find them amusing, those luncheons. Indeed, it’s very good of you to go to them.… I’ve heard [the President] is as deaf as a post and eats with his fingers.”

A BETTER SOLUTION: Why is Madame Verdurin suffering badly? Because we always lack more than we have, and because there are always more people who don’t invite us than who do. Our sense of what is valuable will hence be radically distorted if we must perpetually condemn as tedious everything we lack, simply because we lack it.

How much more honest to keep in mind that although we might like to meet the President, he doesn’t want to meet us, and that this detail is no reason to reinvent our level of interest in him. Madame Verdurin might come to understand the mechanisms by which people are excluded from social circles; she could learn to make light of her frustration, confess to it directly, even throw out a teasing remark to Swann asking him to return with a signed menu, and in the process might become so charming that an invitation to the Élysée would make its way to her after all.

PATIENT NO. 2: Françoise, who cooks for the narrator’s family, producing wonderful asparagus and beef in aspic. She is also known for her stubborn personality, her cruelty toward the kitchen staff, and her loyalty to her employers.