Cultural Amnesia (88 page)

“There is no man, however wise,” he said to me,
“who has not, at some time in his youth, said things, or even led a life, of which his memory is disagreeable and which he would wish to be abolished. But he absolutely should not
regret it, because he can’t be assured of becoming a sage—
to the extent that that is possible—without having passed through all the ridiculous or odious
incarnations that must precede that final incarnation.”

—MARCEL PROUST
(ELSTIR’S ADVICE TO MARCEL),
À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur
, P. 457

I
N PROUST
THERE
are few figures that the narrator finds lasting cause to trust, but Elstir, the veteran and venerable painter, is one of them. The sage, said Elstir, must forgive himself his past
faults. Elstir forgot to add that the sage should also correct them. Proust says it for him elsewhere: those we like least are those most like us, but with the faults uncured. It is always
dangerous to say “
This
is what we read Proust for.” There are people who read Proust just for the clothes. But those of us who read Proust for
his remarks about life will always be wondering whether
À la recherche du temps perdu
is really a work of art at all. A work of imagination: yes, of
course, and supremely. But is it a novel? Isn’t it a book of collected critical essays, with the occasional fictional character wandering in and out of it? After the composer Busoni read
Du côté de chez Swann
, he complained to Rilke that although he had quite enjoyed the opinions about music, he thought the rest of the book was
a bit like a novel. Isn’t it a work of encyclopaedic synthesis? Thomas Mann, in his diaries, took notes on the way that Proust had taken notes. He especially praised the detail of
Proust’s interest in flying beetles. Isn’t it a work of philosophy? Jean-François Revel, in his brief book
Sur Proust
—the
commentary on Proust that almost gives you the courage to do without all the others—is clearly fascinated with the possibility that Proust might have restored philosophy to its position of
wisdom. Often, in the long shelf of his writings, Revel argues that philosophy, having ceased in the eighteenth century to be queen of the sciences, has, in modern times, no other role except to
be wise. In
Sur Proust
he casts his author as a character in a drama: the drama of philosophy reborn. Revel calls
À
la recherche
one of the rare books that even in their weaknesses offer an example of “totally adult thought.”

Proust’s example drives Revel to philosophical aperçus of his own. Passion, says Revel,
consists of seeing in the finite an infinity that doesn’t exist. Revel floats the notion that Albertine might have been an
even more interesting jailer had she been
faithful: the thin end of a wedge into Proust’s view of sex and jealousy. (E. M. Forster, from closer to home, had similar reservations, and erected them into a principle designed to cover
Proust in general: he said that Proust’s analytical knife was so sharp it came out the other side.) On the political plane, Proust is praised by Revel for keeping a level head against
collective barbarism through his moral intransigence and his
perspicacité psychologique
. The collective barbarism was the anti-Semitic nationalism
already poisoning French politics when Proust the social butterfly was preparing to write his novel. Revel is only one reader of Proust, but his readings are enough to hint at the richness that
À la recherche
would offer us even it were only a collection of critical remarks. It is, of course, much more than that: but one of the reasons it is
much more than that is that it is never less. These qualities of non-fiction are useful to remember when we realize how many qualities of fiction the longest of all novels does not possess. It
has, for example, no structure worth speaking of, and probably would not have attained to one even if Proust had been given another ten years to work on it. Characters would still have shown up
twenty years too young at the last party, or twenty years too old, or simply still alive when they should have been dead. Devotees who say that
À la
recherche du temps perdu
reminds them of a cathedral should be asked which cathedral they mean. It reminds me of a sandcastle that the tide reached before its obsessed constructor could
finish it; but he knew that would happen, or else why build it on a beach?

Edgar Quinet

EDGAR QUINET

Edgar Quinet (1803–1875) was born in the aftermath of the French Revolution
and lived out his life in its long shadow. Nowadays he is hardly ever read for himself, and only rarely cited, and then usually for a single remark. In his lifetime, however, he was a public
intellectual of the type we know today, his opinions argued over by everyone who had an opinion. An admirer of religion who drew the line at the Jesuits, he gave lectures on the latter
subject that caused so much controversy they were suppressed by government order. In the next revolution, in 1848, he was on the barricades, and voted with the far left in the National
Assembly. Exiled to Brussels after the coup d’état, he settled in Switzerland in 1857, not returning to Paris until the fall of Napoleon III. During the siege of Paris in 1870 he
was conspicuous as a patriot. Before he died in bed, five years after the Commune, he had written a shelf of books about the philosophy of history. Apart possibly from his autobiographical
fragment
Histoire de mes idées
, published in 1855, most of his books now excite no-one. But a single line, the one quoted below, made it all the
way to the 1990s, because it had presaged an idea whose time had come.

But this success, where is it?

—EDGAR QUINET, QUOTED BY
JEAN-FRANÇOIS REVEL IN
Fin du siècle des ombres
, P. 246

Q
UINET’S
CELEBRATED
single line came from a less celebrated single paragraph, but the paragraph is worth quoting in full, because it evokes a specific context that has refused to go away. He
wasn’t just giving us a handy witticism to trot out every time somebody made a mess and called it a triumph. He was talking specifically about the connection, in the absolutist mentality,
between claims and crimes.

The persistent illusion of the terrorists is to invoke a success
in order to justify themselves before posterity. In effect, only the success can absolve them. But this success, where is it? The terrorists devoured by the scaffolds that they themselves
erected, the Republic not only lost but rendered execrable, the political counter-Revolution victorious, despotism in place of the liberty for which a whole nation swore to die: is that
success? How long will you go on repeating this strange nonsense, that all the scaffolds were necessary to save the Revolution, which was not saved?

But we need the paragraph only to remind us of the context. With that given, the line stands alone,
ready to be imported into any argument about the event that did most to shape modern poltical history. Quinet’s unsettling sound bite about the French Revolution was echoed by
Jean-François Revel and François Furet, both of them careful to give Quinet the credit. “Far enough from the revolution to feel only fleetingly the passions that troubled the
view of those who made it,” said Tocqueville in
L’Ancien Régime et la révolution
, “we are yet still close enough to be able
to enter into and comprehend the spirit that brought it about. Soon one will have difficulty doing so: because the great revolutions that succeed make the causes that produced them disappear,
thus becoming incomprehensible through their very success.” But the question “Where is the success?” was already being heard under the Second Empire, from a few awkwardly
sceptical voices of
which Quinet’s was one. There had always been aristocrats to ask it, but Quinet was an intellectual. Had the French Revolution been worth the
agony?

“Where is the success?” is another version of Orwell’s answer to the contention,
vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, that you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. Orwell asked: “Where’s the omelette?” Nobody sane seriously doubts that in the
case of eighteenth-century France, democracy had to come: but was the Revolution the best way, and didn’t it help to ensure that the democracy was incomplete? The question has always turned
on whether the Jacobinist terror was inevitable. (The most gargantuan expression of Jacobinist terror, the massacre in the Vendée, did not become a question until late in the twentieth
century: the bones were a long time coming to light. Nowadays, mass graves can be seen by satellites.) The same question divided the
gauchiste
left and the
independent left in modern France, and still does divide them everywhere in the world. If you can’t have a revolution without Jacobinism, then it becomes a matter of how to have reform
without revolution. Anyone who “accepts the necessity of Jacobinism” wants to try his hand at it. When François Furet hinted at this conclusion in his truly revolutionary book
on the French Revolution, he found himself immediately tagged by the left as a diehard spokesman of the reactionary right. It was assumed that if he was against the Terror, he was against the
people. His contention that the Terror had been against the people was not accepted. More than a hundred years had passed since Quinet had contended the same thing, and the idea was still
considered too paradoxical to be entertained. One can safely conclude that the impressive combined death toll of revolutions in the last century will go on being considered as justifiable well
into the next.