Proustian Desire

But it is sometimes just at the moment when we think that everything is lost that the intimation arrives which may save us; one has knocked on the doors which lead nowhere, and then one stumbles without knowing it on the only door through which one can enter—which one might have sought in vain for a hundred years—and it opens on its own accord.

—Proust, In Search of Lost Time

Undoing the Novel Genre in Order to Understand Desire

According to Germaine Brée, the deepest characteristic of Proust's psyche was to create. ¹ The desire to be creative was no doubt essential to the young Proust. Yet, if being creative as such had been his highest aim, Proust would no doubt have tried to publish Jean Santeuil. There would seem to be a deeper, more profound drive behind the creation of In Search of Lost Time, a drive to depict the desires of man. The later Proust seems very far from a writer who typically savors images and characters. He appears to be uncomfortable with the genre of the novel as he constantly expands his narration into reflection, even into philosophy and psychology. His uneasiness about genre is, ² as I see it, the result of his trying to fulfill his obligation to describe the way desire works within the time-span of a lifetime. By beginning with Marcel's childhood and ending up at the gathering at the Guermantes's house, where everyone has grown old, Proust wants to depict the total effect of the workings of desire. Space cannot fathom the way desire works; only time can reveal how desire changes, modifies, and destroys people. Also, time is essential in order to show how desire may be extinguished, how it can lose its grip on human beings and liberate them toward time regained.

The most characteristic understanding of Proustian desire is the way people try to hide their original desires and create other desires in order to preserve their illusions about themselves. Desire is the force behind deceptive appearances. Snobbism should, in Proust's understanding, be seen to be governed by desire toward the other. Also, erotic life is seen to be something fleeting and determined by models. The other main characteristic is the way Proust reveals how desire changes people's outlook on things. In society, desire is the force behind the breaking down and building up of hierarchies and the constant changes of values. Desire becomes the main drive in establishing attitudes and worldviews. Proust seems to want to tell us that before there is politics, religion, and culture there is desire. And by the act of ridding oneself of metaphysical desire, Proust seems able to pave a way for depicting true art and experiencing a kind of resurrection, not unlike a Christian conversion.

Thus, Proust is not, as some critics claim, a writer governed by the norm of l'art pour art. He consistently tries to reveal the inner meaning of phenomena and constantly refers to ethical problems. The smells, the tastes, the forms are ways of recapturing and revealing the truth of (Marcel's) life. But at the same time, the desires he so vividly experiences among people are brought into Proust's bedroom laboratory, in order to understand the governing principles of life. It would seem as though Proust's background, where science and realism dominated the outlook on life, also governed, or at least edited his literary project. Proust's academic background, his attempt to write in a different way than was usual in a novel is, in my view, governed by Proust's attempt to reveal the nature of desire. And desire for Proust is something that is capable of governing and decomposing one's whole life. Desire is something lent or acquired by desiring other people's desires and ends up by sapping a person of any profound feeling and understanding. At the same time, the process of uncovering desire may lead one into discovering the truth of one's life.

As this article is a Girardian reading of Proust, it could be...