Proust—what an author, eh? He can be difficult to dig into, and not only because his work can give rise to an infamous snobbery, an ironic response to an author that made much of his undying contempt for snobbery. He can also inspire so much thinking and self-reflection that his winding tome, as many of his critics and readers have already pointed out, can serve as the ultimate self-help book. And it’s great that the book furnishes the reader with this endless supply of advice and wisdom that seems to spring right from the source—but enough about life in general. After reading it myself, I’m also glad to know that I can take away from In Search of Lost Time specific and applicable lessons along with these life-in-general insights that are so plentiful in the book.
This brings me to a critical insight, one of these specific lessons: as I was making my way toward the end of this impossibly long and serpentine odyssey, I came across one of those critical asides in which Proust takes up a certain phenomenon in the lives or actions of his characters and proceeds to analyze it so that we, as readers and fellow travelers, can come to contemplate it through these stylized and glittering passages of his prose. Then it becomes a minor essay in itself, as though he were speaking to us alone, his words coming across with the intimacy of whispers and the forcefulness of an enlightened seer. But this one features a criticism about criticism itself: in the vocation of the critics of his day, the narrator digs up what is factitious by contrasting it with the more authentic value of the artist and his work of art.
“For the ability,” he writes toward the middle of Time Regained, “to launch ideas and systems—and still more of course the ability to assimilate them—has always been much commoner than genuine taste, even among those who themselves produce works of art, and with the multiplication of reviews and literary journals (and with them of factitious vocations as writer or artist) has become very much more widespread.” So the so-called creativity of a work of criticism, working with a currency of ideas rather than undertaking to make them or standing on its own with actual originality—has nothing on the greater achievement of its subject, the work of art, which is the real touchstone and Delphic oracle. But this shouldn’t be too controversial, since the notion that criticism is easier and shallower than creation itself is a no-brainer. The one brings something out of nothing, and the other something else out of something.
It’s what I’m doing right now, for instance, by typing these words about the ideas in Proust’s book: I’m benefiting from the immense edifice of his work of art to arrive at some special application to my life—I’m like a filthy pigeon settling onto a small crossbeam of a construction site with its sprawling lot and sky-high scaffolding, simply in order to get some sun.
Then Proust lets fall a majestic hammer-blow: “The truth,” he goes on to write, “is that as soon as the reasoning intelligence takes upon itself to judge works of art, nothing is any longer fixed or certain: you can prove anything you wish to prove.” And so criticism is a subjective analysis of the work of art, which can be understood this way or that while providing material to support any given opinion, however tasteless or ludicrous. This notion becomes even more dangerous when the critics of the day, armed not only with ideas and concepts but with an ability to write coherent sentences and paragraphs that then become essays to be read by the general public, can be hucksters and falsifiers of whatever they’re doing and get away with it because they can write, they sound intelligent, and they are articulate and educated. And this suggestion worries me, not only because it is an obvious phenomenon that’s out there in the world, but because my own writing could also get out of hand. In fact, it does if I’m writing glibly—for style—and not thinking about what I’m saying.
So in the case of a modern critic of any art, the highest self-awareness should be that these opinions or perceptions offered in the name of this or that critic or public intellectual, however convincing or well-written, are subjective and highly variable—even in the same person over time. But does this mean that critics are just glorified pontificators? In the worst cases, in those of the criticasters, then yes—or some other more scathing pejorative. And yet the substantial critics have something to offer in the way of taste, an idiosyncratic pattern of responses to the works of art that they criticize, a way of illuminating the work of art not only for themselves but for those who choose—blindly or not—to read their criticism.
Maybe this Proustian insight should help scare off the charlatans and so-called critics poisoning the well of aesthetic response. But the terrible and lasting impression of this insight then becomes a question: how do I acquire taste while remaining true to myself—how do I authentically respond to the work of art?
And to my dismay, and maybe to that of readers of this short article looking for a definite conclusion, that is a question that I’m still trying to answer.
