How Proust Can Change Your Life

PROBLEM: She doesn’t know much. Françoise has never had any formal education, her knowledge of world affairs is scanty, and she is badly acquainted with the political and royal events of her time.

RESPONSE TO PROBLEM: Françoise has acquired a habit of suggesting that she knows everything. In short, she is a know-it-all, and her face registers the know-it-all’s panic whenever she is informed of something that she has no clue about, though the panic is quickly suppressed so that she can maintain her composure.

Françoise would refuse to appear surprised. You could have announced that the Archduke Rudolf who she had never suspected of existing, was not, as was generally supposed

,

dead, but alive and kicking, and she would only have answered, “Yes” as though she had known it all the time

.

Psychoanalytic literature tells of a woman who felt faint whenever she sat in a library. Surrounded by books, she would develop nausea and could gain relief only by leaving their vicinity. It was not, as might be supposed, that she was averse to books, but rather that she wanted them and the knowledge they contained far too badly, that she felt her lack of knowledge far too strongly and wanted to have read everything on the shelves at once—and because she could not, needed to flee her unbearable ignorance by surrounding herself with a less knowledge-laden environment.

A precondition of becoming knowledgeable may be a resignation and accommodation to the extent of one’s ignorance, an accommodation which requires a sense that this ignorance need not be permanent, or indeed need not be taken personally, as a reflection of one’s inherent capacities.

However, the know-it-all has lost faith in acquiring knowledge by legitimate means, which is perhaps not a surprising loss of faith in a character like Françoise, who has spent a lifetime cooking asparagus and beef in aspic for frighteningly well-educated employers, who have whole mornings to read the newspaper properly and are fond of wandering through the house quoting Racine and Madame de Sévigné—whose short stories she perhaps at some point claimed to have read.

A BETTER SOLUTION: Though Françoise’s knowingness is a distorted reflection of a sincere desire for knowledge, Archduke Rudolf’s true status will sadly remain a mystery until she accepts the momentary, painful loss of face required when asking who on earth this could be.

PATIENT NO. 3: Alfred Bloch, a school friend of the narrator. Intellectual, bourgeois, Jewish, his appearance is compared to that of Sultan Mahomet II in Bellini’s portrait.

PROBLEM: Prone to making gaffes and embarrassing himself on important occasions.

RESPONSE TO PROBLEM: Bloch acts with extreme self-assurance where lesser mortals would offer humble apologies, experiencing no apparent shame or embarrassment.

The narrator’s family invite him for dinner, for which he arrives an hour and a half late, covered with mud from head to toe because of an unexpected rain shower. He might have excused himself for the delay and his muddy appearance, but Bloch says nothing, and instead launches into a speech expressing his disdain for the conventions of arriving clean and on time:

“I never allow myself to be influenced in the smallest degree either by atmospheric disturbances or by the arbitrary divisions of what is known as time. I would willingly reintroduce the use of the opium pipe or the Malay kris, but I know nothing about those infinitely more pernicious and moreover flatly bourgeois implements, the umbrella and the watch.”

It is not that Bloch has no wish to please. It simply seems that he cannot tolerate a situation where he has both tried to please and yet failed despite himself. How much easier, then, to offend and at least be in control of his actions. If he cannot be on time for dinner and is rained upon, why not turn the insults of time and meteorology into his own successes, declaring that he has willed the very things that have been inflicted on him?

A BETTER SOLUTION:A watch, an umbrella, sorry.

PATIENT NO 4: She makes only a fleeting appearance in the novel. We don’t know what color her eyes are, how she dresses, or what her full name is. She is merely known as the mother of Albertine’s friend Andrée.