Proust between two centuries

I'm sorry about the book report style of my recent entries... and many of the posts I'll be making over the next several months. It's useful for me to keep these things I'm reading in my memory and to organize my thoughts. I'm going to have to read a phenomenal amount over the next several months, and around thanksgiving I'm going to have to be able to recall a lot of it, and I hope I don't bore you too much in the process. Part of the purpose of this blog was always supposed to be that we could have a bit more insight into what one another are reading and thinking about, and have a sense of what's out there in terms of books we might one day want to pick up, or even just have some sort of vague insight into even if we don't find time to read them ourselves. Anyway, you'll just skip over whatever doesn't interest you... and hopefully in each of these something more interesting or thoughtful will come out than simply 'this was a book that was (or wasn't) worth reading' or insights that only a specialist would care about.
I just finished reading 'Proust between two centuries' by Antoine Compagnon, which I've been meaning to read for years, because of its author, because it is referenced, and because someone I respect who knows Proust well seems to value it pretty highly. It covers two topics that are only vaguely related, and somewhat contradictory. Stendhal, who was one of the most vocal and articulate proponents of romanticism when romanticism was a new and controversial movement (when theater-goers rioted over Victor Hugo's 'Hernani', which overturned classical French theater), wrote a polemical book called something like 'Shakespeare and Racine'. In it, he largely takes Shakespeare as the great model for romantics - Shakespeare was still kind of scoffed at in France. French theater was still largely in verse, killings and deaths happened off-stage, unities of time, place and action were more or less respected, etc. etc. Though Racine seemed to be the negative figure in the book, it was actually just the continued adherence to Racine style composition that Stendhal objected to. He claimed (and I could sort of take issue with this), that Racine was great not because of, but in spite of the restraints he accepted in writing. More importantly, he stated that Racine WAS a romantic in his time, just as the romantics would be classical for future generations, and that in aping past styles and treating them as fixed and unchanging, the classicists of his generation were treating literature as a dead letter. For Compagnon, this idea that the difference between classical and revolutionary writers is nothing but a question of perspective is central to understanding Proust... except that this particular argument, which is supposed to equally condemn the avant-gardes who want to sever all ties to their predecessors (see the surrealists, symbolists, situationists, etc.), and the reactionaries (following his argument, almost any group you can come up with who wrote anything memorable can be shown not to be real aesthetic reactionaries), this argument isn't all that intimately linked to Proust. I shouldn't really say that, because not only does Compagnon show where Proust thematizes and defends this idea (which wouldn't be of much interest), but his reason for picking Proust particularly is clear. For Proust the idea of intermittency is extremely important. He regularly associates Baudelaire with Racine, and follows both of them. He denies the existence of progress in art, and along with it any purely linear development. What he acknowledges is rebirth, family traits, even the transmigration of souls... things lying dormant and resurfacing, authors finding similar goals or tactics treated differently in authors that have preceded them and appreciating this, without any necessary question of influence (I still haven't read Harold Bloom's 'anxiety of influence', though I know I should). Proust thinks it is quite normal and natural to talk about 'the Dostoyevsky side of Mme de Sevigny', despite the fact that Mme de Sevigny died long before Dostoyevsky was born and what's Dostoyevskian in her writing is so only retrospectively (I think I've told you before what Proust considers 'Dostoyeveskian'). This is not to say that Proust denies the influence of context and culture, or puts forth a romantic notion of the artistic genius creating in a vacuum (which would bring him closer to the avant-garde position)... I don't think it's worth talking much in generalities about 'the artist' and his relation to predecessors and successors, particularly not in a normative fashion of talking about what an artist should do, except to say that Proust provides a number of pleasant and useful images, some of which are surprising.
It could be asked what the point is of talking about Proust as being 'between two centuries' or moving forward while looking back if there's a general denial of a deterministic, linear view of literary history (and the tension between the determined and the voluntaristic could be brought into line with the opposition between the Will to Power and the Eternal return in Nietzsche), and it is perhaps a little strange that Compagnon spends so much time tying Proust to the generation that came before him and debates that were already outdated though Proust kept them alive, but for him, the idea of 'the in-between' is important, and he continually brings up dichotomies that Proust straddles. The decadents were reproached with allowing their work to disintegrate into details at the expense of an overarching structure, and when Nietzsche is brought up, it is because he reproached Wagner for this. Compagnon faults those who overemphasize Proust's strong architecture, and the fact that the end is tightly bound to the beginning (a fact Proust himself liked to draw attention to). For him the important thing is the fact that the end is constantly deferred, and there is so much that is inessential and digressive in between. What makes Proust great is precisely the fact that the plan fails, that the work is profoundly flawed. All great works are determined by the flaws and failings - both structured and open, given to intermittences, tied together but not fully determined. The book that Proust's narrator describes would be boring according to Compagnon. Of course, the in-between was important to the decadents, and as with Proust, sexuality is a prime place to discuss indeterminacy. The decadents were practically obsessed with hermaphrodites, particularly in renaissance painting prior to Raphael. But Proust's Man-woman and woman-man inverts (there's a discussion of the rejection of the term homosexual) are not the decadents' hermaphrodites. Somewhere in the course of writing, Proust decides to make his two representatives of Sodom and Gomorra a very feminine girl and a very masculine man (there's a strange connexion in Proust that Compagnon brings up between being an artist, being gay and being Jewish - a connection which Racine becomes weirdly emblematic of - though Racine was neither Jewish [his last two plays took subjects from the old testament] nor gay [at the end of the nineteenth century he did take on a representation as a hysteric, and his last two plays were written to be performed exclusively by school girls in a particular Jansenist girls' school]).
I'll talk later about Deleuze's book on Proust, which is brilliant and shows Proust as being organized around learning to decode signs. To me it accounts better for a lot of what Compagnon sees as purely digressive (in a good way), and for that reason I won't talk here too much about the opposition between the poetic and the historical aspect of names. Place names and family names have a strange importance for Proust, and in his book he has large discussions of etymology. The purely sonorous quality of names causes the hero to daydream as long as they are opaque, and there seems to be a certain amount of disillusion involved in names becoming familiar and transparent (which are two very different things - the destructive power of habit is another topic). But in showing Proust's fixation on name origins and etymology, I think Compagnon overstates the idea that knowing where the names comes from destroys them. I think Proust is rather fascinated with the fact that, beyond the daydreams projected on a mysterious name - which seems to have a mystical link to the spirit of a person, place or family and everything that is metonymically associated with it, the fact that a name has a history, and records a history actually adds to the possible material for fantasy and interest. It's the accretions of generations and the stories that are linked to those accretions that actually add to the opacity of the name and give it a life it wouldn't otherwise have. I think it is rather the banality of the current possessor of that name, and the fact that the person or place the name is currently attached to can seem to have none of the romance the name suggests that destroys the name in the end.