Bersani on Proust

I've read three books by Leo Bersani this summer - one one Mallarmé (the Death of Stephane Mallarmé was a particularly short book that I could only get for a week or so before it had to be returned. It was about Mallarmé's 'becoming impersonal', the moment in his career when he ceased to be a person and became what he called an aptitude the universe had for observing itself... I ought to go look up the quote. It will come up again elsewhere, but for the most part I can't really remember Bersani's argument, and I'm not going to try to write about the book that I almost might as well have not read for all I've retained), one on Baudelaire (which I'll try writing about tomorrow), and one on Proust, which I should have a decent chance of describing here. Bersani comes out of a moment before the structuralists were 'in', when two dominant influences in literary criticism were psychoanalysis, which continued to be Bersani's main influence, and Sartrean existential critique, which was a secondary but still important presence for Bersani - particularly in his book on Proust. Sartre is, of course, as anti-psychoanalysis as you can get - in his autobiography he stresses that he never had a super-ego (he grew up without a father), and he's always against discussing 'inner lives', convinced that a person IS their words and actions. Sartre, as Bersani points out, hated Proust.

There is a line the narrator drops in la recherche, which states roughly that a novel with theory in it is like an article from which the price tag has not been removed. This insistence that displaying the theory underlying the creation of a novel is cheap and unworthy is puzzling in Proust, considering how much is in la recherche that is hard to understand as anything other than theory underlying the novels construction. Bersani writes "The narrator's theorizing about his own work often seems inadequate to describe what he has done; his intellectual claims seem both pretentious and thin [...] in comparison to passages written from deeper levels of his mind than the one at which the would-be metaphysician operates". Talk of a 'deeper level of mind', is of course kind of dubious because it is so vague, and impossible to demonstrate (this sort of statement isn't really typical of Bersani), but the tension between theory and practice in the writing of the novel is related to a number of other tensions that he discusses which do point to some of what makes Proust 's work what it is. The narrator, and the hero in la recherche (the same person decades apart and distinct in voice and even interests), are both almost obsessive about finding general rules to explain the world and people's behavior. There clearly are dynamics driving almost everything in the book - the most important and well-known rule underlying human behavior in Proust is that people are attracted to and place value on what resists them, which is why love is more or less equated with jealousy. When everyone is driven by the same set of principals, when a small number of simple rules is altered and varied to make politics and war, social success and love all resemble each other, all be useful to make one another comprehensible, it would be normal to worry that a book would end up deadened by a universal sameness, that at some point you would get the point and reading onward would be a monotonous experience. Either in this book or in the Baudelaire book (I can't remember), Bersani says the same thing Proust always does about Balzac, but in an even more pointed fashion: when Balzac presents a character, he tells you everything you really need to know about who the character is and what drives him. From that first description, you have the necessary information to determine everything he'll do in the rest of the book and how he would react to any given situation - If Proust's general laws were absolute and comprehensive, it might not be one character, but all characters and the entire world whose actions and developments could be predicted without having to be recounted. This might seem even more of a danger when you take into consideration another central aspect of how the narrator interacts with the world. The only things or people that interest the narrator are those that he can project some aspect of himself or his imagination onto. Things and people interest him because he has romantic images of how they'll be, and because they never conform to those images, they always disappoint. Things and people that are truly alien can not be known - the very strong desire for the other is generally a desire to assimilate and control the other, the joy of reducing the strange to the familiar (and thus comprehensible)... right now what I'm saying is straying a bit from exactly how Proust describes things, but the idea is there. So, as Bersani points out, all other characters risk being no more than a projection of the self at the center of the book. What we know of them is a mixture between what he projects on to them, and what he can identify with in them. Extending this, keeping basically with the sense of what Bersani says but veering a bit further off what Proust explicitly says... thinking of Descartes and Berkley... who was it that said Berkeley stated something that may logically hold up but which no sane person could honestly believe (I'm not thinking about Johnson)? Basically the idea that, yes, our knowledge of the external world may not be objective, we can never know that the outside world perfectly conforms to what we imagine it to be, but whether it can be fully known or not, we recognize that out perceptions are necessarily of an outside world that objectively exists - we are not making it up, even if we project certain things onto it or slightly distort aspects of it. The outside world resists us and forces itself upon us - that force and that resistance changes us and changes what we project and how we perceive. Bersani remarks that in Proust, it is amazing that a work that is so dominated by certain general laws, where the only love is jealous love, etc. should end up having such a large number of strongly differentiated characters, who feel real, who cohere, and resist what the main character thinks or says about them. He compares the number and clarity of characters to Tolstoy, and takes as an image from the early chapters of la recherche, the 'magic lantern' the hero has as a small child - a sort of projector that casts images from stories onto the walls of his room, where you can continue to see the doorknob at the same time as you see the light image of Golo that is cast over it. The projections of the main character never seem to be cast out into the void, the book does not give the impression of a single psyche, but of a psyche wrestling with a concrete world that resists him and remains larger and more complex than what he can ever fully grasp. If there is theorizing throughout the book, the theories are the main character trying to make sense of his experiences, but the experiences are not created out of those theories, and they don't ever fully conform to the theories. The book does not read as a controlled experiment.
Proust was obsessed with John Ruskin for a very long time, and I remember a passage in Ruskin... I imagine it was about the Pre-Raphaelites, in which he talks about how in a painting with symbolic imagery, one might, for instance, paint the birth of Christ taking place in the ruins of an old temple. The temple symbolizing Judaism which had fallen into disrepair and which would be supplanted by Christ's coming. In a painting like this, he said, the temple and any other symbolic elements should be painted absolutely naturally and convincingly, so that someone unaware of the significance of those elements would simply accept it as a natural scene. Bersani also talks about the use of simile over in metaphor - two objects brought together in such a way that each maintains their original character...
But I'm trailing off here. Presenting an entire book in a little blurb like this is always an act of violence, but I suppose the couple of central ideas I'm taking away from the thing are here... I'm sure that others will be reactivated in the next Proust book I read. I think the biggest thing missing is the importance and meaning of style, which I can try to address some when I talk about Deleuze on Proust.