How Proust Can Change Your Life

The tone suggests that Woolf had at last made her peace with Proust. He could have his terrain, she had hers to scribble in. The path from depression and self-loathing to cheerful defiance suggested a gradual recognition that one person’s achievements did not have to invalidate another’s, that there would always be something left to do even if it momentarily appeared otherwise. Proust might have expressed many things well, but independent thought and the history of the novel had not come to a halt with him. His book did not have to be followed by silence; there was still space for the scribbling of others, for Mrs. Dalloway, The Common Reader, A Room of One’s Own, and in particular, there was space for what these books symbolized in this context—perceptions of one’s own.

SYMPTOM NO. 3:

THAT WE BECOME ARTISTIC IDOLATERS

Aside from the danger of overvaluing writers and undervaluing oneself, there is a risk that we will revere artists for the wrong reasons, indulging in what Proust called artistic idolatry. In the religious context, idolatry suggests a fixation on an aspect of religion—on an image of a worshipped deity, on a particular law or holy book—which distracts us from, and even contravenes, the overall spirit of the religion.

Proust suggested that a structurally similar problem existed in art, where artistic idolaters combined a literal reverence for objects depicted in art with a neglect of the spirit of art. They would, for instance, become particularly attached to a part of the countryside depicted by a great painter and mistake this for an appreciation of the painter; they would focus on the objects in a picture, as opposed to the spirit of the picture. Whereas the essence of Proust’s aesthetic position was contained in the deceptively simple yet momentous assertion that “a picture’s beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it.”

Proust accused his friend the aristocrat and poet Robert de Montesquiou of artistic idolatry, because of the pleasure he took whenever he encountered in life an object that had been depicted by an artist. Montesquiou would gush if he happened to see one of his female friends wearing a dress like that which Balzac had imagined for the character of the Princesse de Cadignan in his novel Les Secrets de la Princesse de Cadignan. Why was this kind of delight idolatrous? Because Montesquiou’s enthusiasm had nothing to do with an appreciation of the dress and everything to do with a respect for Balzac’s name. Montesquiou had no reasons of his own for liking the dress; he hadn’t assimilated the principles of Balzac’s aesthetic vision or grasped the general lesson latent in Balzac’s appreciation of this particular object. Problems would therefore arise as soon as Montesquiou was faced with a dress that Balzac had never had a chance to describe, and that Montesquiou would perhaps ignore—even though Balzac, and a good Balzacian, would have been able to evaluate the merits of each dress appropriately had they been in Montesquiou’s shoes.

SYMPTOM NO. 4:

THAT WE ARE TEMPTED TO INVEST IN A COPY OF LA CUISINE RETROUVÉE

Food has a privileged role in Proust’s writings; it is often lovingly described and appreciatively eaten. To name but a few of the many dishes Proust parades past his readers, we can cite a cheese soufflé, a string bean salad, a trout with almonds, a grilled red mullet, a bouillabaisse, a skate in black butter, a beef casserole, some lamb in a béarnaise sauce, a beef Stroganoff, a bowl of stewed peaches, a raspberry mousse, a madeleine, an apricot tart, an apple tart, a raisin cake, a chocolate sauce, and a chocolate soufflé.

The contrast between what we usually eat and the mouthwatering nature of the food Proust’s characters enjoy might inspire us to try to savor these Proustian dishes more directly. In which case it could be tempting to acquire a copy of a glossily illustrated cookbook entitled La Cuisine retrouvée, which contains recipes for every dish mentioned in Proust’s work; it was compiled by a top Parisian chef, and was first published in 1991 (by a company otherwise responsible for a comparably useful title, Les Carnets de cuisine de Monet). It would enable a moderately competent cook to pay extraordinary homage to the great novelist, and perhaps gain a deeper understanding of Proust’s art. It would, for instance, enable a dedicated Proustian to produce exactly the kind of chocolate mousse that Françoise served to the narrator and his family in Combray.

F

RANÇOISE

’

S CHOCOLATE MOUSSE

INGREDIENTS

:

100 g of plain eating chocolate, 100 g of caster sugar, half a litre of milk, six eggs