Bersani: art
“It is only superficially that art appears in Proust’s novel as an escape from an unsatisfactory life; it is rather through art that his narrator lives most fully and most deeply, that he can satisfy his extraordinary appetite for experience. His profound pessimism, and his decision to exclude everything from his life except the book he discovers it is his vocation to write, should not deceive us. For both Proust and his principal character, art is first of all a psychological process present in all our responses to life; the work of art is the isolation and cultivation of a particular way of reacting to and acting on the world. It is creative because it creates more life than is possible outside of art.” (16-17)
“For the work of art does not reflect an already existing self; in a sense, it creates the man whose existence it reveals and contains.” (17)
“The writer who claims he puts down only ‘what he feels’ is strangely insensitive to the obvious fact that the act of writing creates new feelings, can never be simply a translation of states of mind that exist before the moment of writing.” (18)
Vinteuil quotes on page 201-2; (1954: 1, 530)
“It is as if exhaustive description were the equivalent of possession, and since, in a work of art, another personality offers itself to Marcel’s tireless scrutiny, it naturally seems to him that in art the barriers to knowledge of others dissapear.” (204)
“The narrator suggests that Elstir’s genius depends on his marvelous aptitude for forgetting. More precisely, he so completely forgets what he knows when, for example, he looks at the sea that he can remember—and express in his painting—a past impression analogous to his present impression.” (205)
“When most of us look at the sea, we immediately recognize it as the sea. But there seem to be three stages in perception, although we are generally aware only of the last one; the first two would be an absence of any identification at all, and then an incorrect identification. When our eye falls on something there is a fraction of a second in which we make a mistake.” (205)
• Bersani has it partly right. I don’t think Marcel sees the conflation of the sea and the land, to take one example, as a mistake. Though certainly, with respect to the intelligence, it is a mistake—which is to say that we have not properly delimited the categories—with respect to perception, to the world as we subjectively [wc?] experience it, it is not a mistake at all.
• see 1954: III, 573 (La Fugitive: “ ‘Our mistake [is to present things] as they are in reality, names as they are written, people as photography and psychology give an unalterable idea of them. As a matter of fact this is not at all what we ordinarily perceive. We see, we hear, we conceive the world quite topsy-turvy.’ The artist should render ‘this perceptual error which is precisely ‘life’....’ (205)”)
“Marcel continues to consider artistic genius as the ability to transcribe the ‘residuum’ of individuality that we are ordinarily forced to leave unexpressed when we use a language designed to emphasize what men share, and thus to strengthen our belief in a human community.” (210)
Prisonniere quote: “But is it not the fact then that from those elements [that compose the soul] all the real residuum which we are obliged to keep to ourselves, which cannot be transmitted in talk,...., that ineffable something which makes a difference in quality between what each of us has felt and what he is obliged to leave behind at the threshold of the phrases in which he can communicate...” (III 257-8) cf. Bersani: 210
from the section “Involuntary memory and the work of art”: “In danger of losing his sense of himself both in a succession discontinuous personalities and in a hostile, unfamiliar external world, Marcel comes to see the work of art as his only chance of saving himself from the deaths that make up life. [...] The work of art can give to the artist’s life a permanence during his life, and, from the point of view of Marcel’s anguish about the self, this fixed image of his individuality is felt as a kind of immortality of the self.” (211)
• Is the experience of permanence during life specific to the relationship between the artist and his art, or is this simply a sense of permanence (possibly illusory) that emerges from the artist’s success in his vocation. To put it plainly, would a baker who wins a baking competition experience the same sense of permanence?
“For Marcel, such experiences are overwhelming evidence of the persistence in time, and therefore of the reality of the self. They are a necessary preliminary to his literary activity, for they prove the existence of exactly those levels of the self that must enter into the artist’s style if his style is to include that most personal accent. There is, then, a profound connection—which at first may seem tenuous or artificial—between the moments of involuntary memory and the work or art as the narrator conceives it. The source of inspiration for his own book is the evidence of self given by the involuntary memories of ...” (214)
“It is, furthermore, obvious that language itself and therefore the literary work are necessarily a fall from the paradise of involuntary memory.” (215-6)
“The narrator notes that he failed to realize fully, in Dr. Percepied’s carriage, that ‘... what lay buried within the steeples of Martinville must be something analogous to a charming phrase, since it was in the form of words which gave me pleasure that it had appeared to me...’ (I, 181) It would seem, then, that his pleasure is caused by an unexpected discovery of literary language. Tadié’s claim is a development of this: ‘The reality which is revealed in the instants of profundity [instants profonds] is the reality of the world in the work of art, it is the world already transformed into a work of art.’ [see 264n43] But the world becomes art only when Marcel writes down a description of his different views of the three steeples.” (228)
• this is partly right, but Bersani has the emphasis wrong. The point is, as Marcel says while visiting Elstir’s atelier, to see the world [nature] as it is, poetically. Thus, it is already artistic even if it is not yet an art object.
• see p.229 for more about Martinville steeples
see interesting discussion of some elements of the tension between the individual perspective of an individual—which is the basis for artistic originality—and then tendency to universalism and essential, objective essences. (pages 237-8)
“For the work of art does not reflect an already existing self; in a sense, it creates the man whose existence it reveals and contains.” (17)
“The writer who claims he puts down only ‘what he feels’ is strangely insensitive to the obvious fact that the act of writing creates new feelings, can never be simply a translation of states of mind that exist before the moment of writing.” (18)
Vinteuil quotes on page 201-2; (1954: 1, 530)
“It is as if exhaustive description were the equivalent of possession, and since, in a work of art, another personality offers itself to Marcel’s tireless scrutiny, it naturally seems to him that in art the barriers to knowledge of others dissapear.” (204)
“The narrator suggests that Elstir’s genius depends on his marvelous aptitude for forgetting. More precisely, he so completely forgets what he knows when, for example, he looks at the sea that he can remember—and express in his painting—a past impression analogous to his present impression.” (205)
“When most of us look at the sea, we immediately recognize it as the sea. But there seem to be three stages in perception, although we are generally aware only of the last one; the first two would be an absence of any identification at all, and then an incorrect identification. When our eye falls on something there is a fraction of a second in which we make a mistake.” (205)
• Bersani has it partly right. I don’t think Marcel sees the conflation of the sea and the land, to take one example, as a mistake. Though certainly, with respect to the intelligence, it is a mistake—which is to say that we have not properly delimited the categories—with respect to perception, to the world as we subjectively [wc?] experience it, it is not a mistake at all.
• see 1954: III, 573 (La Fugitive: “ ‘Our mistake [is to present things] as they are in reality, names as they are written, people as photography and psychology give an unalterable idea of them. As a matter of fact this is not at all what we ordinarily perceive. We see, we hear, we conceive the world quite topsy-turvy.’ The artist should render ‘this perceptual error which is precisely ‘life’....’ (205)”)
“Marcel continues to consider artistic genius as the ability to transcribe the ‘residuum’ of individuality that we are ordinarily forced to leave unexpressed when we use a language designed to emphasize what men share, and thus to strengthen our belief in a human community.” (210)
Prisonniere quote: “But is it not the fact then that from those elements [that compose the soul] all the real residuum which we are obliged to keep to ourselves, which cannot be transmitted in talk,...., that ineffable something which makes a difference in quality between what each of us has felt and what he is obliged to leave behind at the threshold of the phrases in which he can communicate...” (III 257-8) cf. Bersani: 210
from the section “Involuntary memory and the work of art”: “In danger of losing his sense of himself both in a succession discontinuous personalities and in a hostile, unfamiliar external world, Marcel comes to see the work of art as his only chance of saving himself from the deaths that make up life. [...] The work of art can give to the artist’s life a permanence during his life, and, from the point of view of Marcel’s anguish about the self, this fixed image of his individuality is felt as a kind of immortality of the self.” (211)
• Is the experience of permanence during life specific to the relationship between the artist and his art, or is this simply a sense of permanence (possibly illusory) that emerges from the artist’s success in his vocation. To put it plainly, would a baker who wins a baking competition experience the same sense of permanence?
“For Marcel, such experiences are overwhelming evidence of the persistence in time, and therefore of the reality of the self. They are a necessary preliminary to his literary activity, for they prove the existence of exactly those levels of the self that must enter into the artist’s style if his style is to include that most personal accent. There is, then, a profound connection—which at first may seem tenuous or artificial—between the moments of involuntary memory and the work or art as the narrator conceives it. The source of inspiration for his own book is the evidence of self given by the involuntary memories of ...” (214)
“It is, furthermore, obvious that language itself and therefore the literary work are necessarily a fall from the paradise of involuntary memory.” (215-6)
“The narrator notes that he failed to realize fully, in Dr. Percepied’s carriage, that ‘... what lay buried within the steeples of Martinville must be something analogous to a charming phrase, since it was in the form of words which gave me pleasure that it had appeared to me...’ (I, 181) It would seem, then, that his pleasure is caused by an unexpected discovery of literary language. Tadié’s claim is a development of this: ‘The reality which is revealed in the instants of profundity [instants profonds] is the reality of the world in the work of art, it is the world already transformed into a work of art.’ [see 264n43] But the world becomes art only when Marcel writes down a description of his different views of the three steeples.” (228)
• this is partly right, but Bersani has the emphasis wrong. The point is, as Marcel says while visiting Elstir’s atelier, to see the world [nature] as it is, poetically. Thus, it is already artistic even if it is not yet an art object.
• see p.229 for more about Martinville steeples
see interesting discussion of some elements of the tension between the individual perspective of an individual—which is the basis for artistic originality—and then tendency to universalism and essential, objective essences. (pages 237-8)
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