How Proust Can Change Your Life

Aunt Léonie would no doubt have preferred to die under torture rather than admit to harboring such “unnatural” thoughts—which does nothing to stop them from being very normal, if only rarely discussed.

Albertine has some comparably normal thoughts. She walks into the narrator’s room one morning and experiences a rush of affection for him. She tells him how clever he is, and swears that she would rather die than leave him. If we asked Albertine why she had suddenly felt this rush of affection, one imagines her pointing to her boyfriend’s intellectual or spiritual qualities—and we would of course be inclined to believe her, for this is a dominant societal interpretation of the way affection is generated.

However, Proust quietly lets us know that the real reason why Albertine feels so much love for her boyfriend is that he has had a very close shave this morning, and that she adores smooth skin. The implication is that his cleverness counts for little in her particular enthusiasm; if he refused to shave ever again, she might leave him tomorrow.

This is an inopportune thought. We like to think of love as arising from more profound sources. Albertine might vigorously deny that she had ever felt love because of a close shave, accuse you of perversion for suggesting it, and attempt to change the subject. It would be a pity. What can replace a clichéd explanation of our functioning is not an image of perversity but a broader conception of what is normal. If Albertine could accept that her reactions only demonstrated that a feeling of love can have an extraordinary number of origins, some more valid than others, then she might calmly evaluate the foundations of her relationship and identify the role which she wished good shaving to play in her emotional life.

In his descriptions both of Aunt Léonie and Albertine, Proust offers us a picture of human behavior that initially fails to match an orthodox account of how people operate, though it may in the end be judged to be a far more truthful picture than the one it has challenged.

The structure of this process may, rather obliquely, shed light on why Proust was so attracted to the story of the Impressionist painters.

In 1872, the year after Proust was born, Claude Monet exhibited a canvas entitled Impression, Sunrise. It depicted the harbor of Le Havre at dawn, and allowed viewers to discern, through a thick morning mist and a medley of unusually choppy brushstrokes, the outline of an industrial seafront, with an array of cranes, smoking chimneys, and buildings.

The canvas looked a bewildering mess to most who saw it, and particularly irritated the critics of the day, who pejoratively dubbed its creator and the loose group to which he belonged “impressionists,” indicating that Monet’s control of the technical side of painting was so limited that all he had been able to achieve was a childish daubing, bearing precious little resemblance to what dawns in Le Havre really looked like.

The contrast with the judgment of the art establishment a few years later could hardly have been greater. It seemed that not only could the Impressionists use a brush after all, but that their technique was masterful at capturing a dimension of visual reality overlooked by less talented contemporaries. What could explain such a dramatic reappraisal? Why had Monet’s Le Havre been a great mess, then a remarkable representation of a Channel port?

The Proustian answer starts with the idea that we are all in the habit of

giving to what we feel a form of expression which differs so much from, and which we nevertheless after a little time take to be, reality itself

.

In this view, our notion of reality is at variance with actual reality, because it is so often shaped by inadequate or misleading accounts. Because we are surrounded by clichéd depictions of the world, our initial response to Monet’s Impression, Sunrise may well be to balk and complain that Le Havre looks nothing like that, much as our initial response to Aunt Léonie and Albertine’s behavior may be to think that such comportment lacks any possible basis in “reality.” If Monet is a hero in this scenario, it is because he has freed him self from traditional, and in some ways limited, representations of Le Havre, in order to attend more closely to his own, uncorrupted impressions of the scene.