Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Adolescent Aesthetics

The temptation to compare Philip Roth and Marcel Proust is one I can’t resist. Both Goodbye Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint seem to me inverted interpretations of Proust’s Within the Budding Grove. Using the same technique of relentless interior monologue, all are coming of age novels featuring sex, taste of one kind or another, and social class set against a background of contemporary manners and Jewish assimilation.

All three books assay the problems of male adolescence - hormones, separation from family, impending career - and their possible solutions. But whereas Roth views these problems as arising from perceived cultural deprivation, Proust shows how inadequacies emerge equally among the privileged in much the same way. And while Roth treats the evolution from child to adult in terms of neurosis to be overcome, Proust describes milestones in psychological and social realisation that are necessary steps to becoming a person.

Proust would likely agree with Roth’s take on adolescence: “A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature.” Marcel’s warring self is in essence not much different from Portnoy’s, although a tad more refined, “…our virtues themselves are not free and floating qualities over which we retain a permanent control and power of disposal..” says Marcel, inverting St. Paul's observations about vice.

But the aims of each author/protagonist differ fundamentally. Roth’s ambition through Portnoy is “to raise obscenity to the level of a subject.” Marcel’s goal is to experience romantic love in which he “penetrates the soul of another.” Sexual intimacy for the latter is an expected consequence of this spiritual union but not its objective, perhaps because of his access even as a young teenager to the brothels of Paris which he found unsatisfying.

As the son of a senior government official, Marcel is exposed to ministers of state, the nobility and other VIP’s from infancy. What he learns without knowing what he is learning is protocol, how to act formally in social situations: What to say and not to say, how to stand, who to quote, the techniques of assessing relative social standing, and distinguishing the outre from the avant garde.

Roth’s characters come from the antithesis of Paris, namely Newark, New Jersey. They too learn skills, those that are equally necessary to survive in a dominant culture which is not their own and in a political environment which may be just as brutal as that of Paris but far less gentile. Nevertheless the ‘manners’ each acquires because of his background are equally problematic for all.

For the Newark boys, their lower class immigrant Jewish roots impede assimilation into middle class American society; for Marcel, his learned reserve and internalised emotional calculation inhibit his naturalness and makes him shy in the company of the relatively free-wheeling middle classes. For all, their backgrounds get in the way of relations with women, the former with Gentile girls, the latter with modern females unimpressed by ‘breeding’. All persistently pursue the same ‘types’ with predictable, disappointing results.

What Roth seems to lack almost totally, however, and which Proust emphasises, even in his stylised accounts of sex and class, is the development of taste, the aesthetic sense which substitutes in Proust's work for religious belief. It is this sense of the beautiful that provides an increasingly important guide for Marcel’s actions.

Early in Within the Budding Grove, Marcel marks the centrality of the aesthetic even in relationships of love, “The bonds that unite us to another human being are sanctified when he or she adopts the same point of view as ourselves in judging one of our imperfections.”

He then goes on to make love instrumental to the appreciation of beauty rather than vice versa: “…fully as much as retirement, ill health, or religious conversion, a protracted love-affair will substitute fresh visions for the old…” This aesthetic sense is the pivot around which all of Proust’s writing in this volume rotates. It is what makes the work a coherent whole. And it is the lack of an equivalent centre of gravity in Roth that makes his work somewhat unsatisfying in comparison.

Marcel is aware of himself in a way that the Newark boys can’t be without a sense of the aesthetic. In Jungian terms (and there can be little doubt that Proust is a natural if not a well-read Jungian), Marcel is an Objective Introvert, that is he is particularly sensitive to his environment and he tends to adapt himself to that environment rather than to try to change it. He comes to know this towards the end of the volume: “…contrary to what I had always asserted and believed, I was extremely sensitive to the opinions of others…[and] I feel it is eminently sensible of them to safeguard their lives, while at the same time being unable to prevent myself pushing my own safety into the background.” That is, he learns; something that is not possible without an aesthetic standard of what constitutes learning.

But because Marcel has a developed aesthetic sense, he also has a solution to his, rather common, problem of objective introversion. He has another aspect to his personality which on its own also causes him additional and frequent trouble: he constantly projects himself onto other people. He believes that they are either like himself in terms of desires and likely responses, or that they conform to his primitively articulated ideal. This causes recurring disappointment - a famed actress is far less talented than he expects, church sculptures are less impressive than he had believed, a prospective friend turns out less approachable than he anticipates.

Marcel comes to know he does this and he begins to appreciate the consequences. But instead of trying to eliminate this tendency toward projection from his personality, something he recognises as impossible, he seeks to make it conscious as a sort of control on the other part of his personality, his natural introversion, “For beauty is a series of hypotheses which ugliness cuts short…” Projections are no longer neurotic (if they ever were), but a means to test the world, in an almost scientific way through hypotheses, to find out what is really there. This is a very clever psychological strategy that neither Freud nor Jung ever considered, a sort of pragmatic aesthetics which allows the parts of his psyche to function productively together. And it works.

Moreover, in the manner of St. Augustine, Marcel, recognises that aesthetically driven desire leads beyond itself, like a religious icon which points to a reality not yet occurring, “The most exclusive love for a person is always a love for something else.” It is this ‘something else’ which he first brings up in volume 1 and alludes to subtly throughout volume 2. Always just beyond our linguistic grasp, it is that which draws language forth. He goes even further and creates a quasi-religious ontology of that which lies beyond, “For a desire seems to us more attractive, we repose on it with more confidence, when we know that outside ourselves there is a reality that conforms to it, even if, for us, it is not to be realised.”

Therefore, Marcel’s/Proust’s aesthetic is, remarkably, both pragmatic and spiritual. Even more remarkably, it is also ethical. The advice of his painter friend Elstir is precise, “We do not receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves.” Although Marcel’s aspiration is to become a writer, this advice is general. ‘Discovery’ implies that there is something new to be seen, heard, touched, painted, talked about, invented. He is able to come to several conclusions therefore, which are rather more insightful than anything in Roth.

Regarding which of a gang of girls to woo, for example, he puts all his newly acquired skills together to picture the future somewhat longer than the subsequent few hours:

“As in a nursery plantation where the flowers mature at different seasons, I had seen them, in the form of old ladies, on this Balbec shore, those shrivelled seed-pods, those flabby tubers, which my new friends would one day be. But what matter? For the moment it was their flowering time.”

Innovative indeed for a man on the make.

The recognition and maturing of this aesthetic sense is the necessary next step from Marcel's insights in volume 1 about purposefulness, the capacity to choose appropriate purpose. The aesthetic criteria he is developing apply not only to appreciating beauty but to understanding what is important, that is, what is valuable. Value is not an economic category in Proust but an aesthetic one; therefore inseparable from taste. And it in taste that Marcel is more than a bit advanced over his New Jersey fellow-adolescents.

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