"But the little woman was an actress who had never tasted success, and had vowed a deadly hatred against Berma. The latter had just come on to the stage. And then, miraculously, like those lessons which we have laboured in vain to learn overnight and find intact, got by heart, on waking up next morning, and like those faces of dead friends which the impassioned efforts of our memory pursue without recapturing and which, when we are no longer thinking of them, are there before our eyes just as they were in life, the talent of Berma, which had evaded me when I sought so greedily to grasp its essence, now, after these years of oblivion, in this hour of indifference, imposed itself on my admiration with the force of self-evidence. Formerly, in my attempts to isolate this talent, I deducted, so to speak, from what I heard, the part itself, a part, the common property of all the actresses who appeared as Phedre, which I myself had studied beforehand so that I might be capable of subtracting it, of cleaning as a residuum Mme Berma's talent alone. But this talent which I sought to discover outside the part itself was indissolubly one with it. So with a great musician (it appears that this was the case with Vinteuil when he played the piano), his playing is that of so fine a pianist that one is no longer aware that the performer is a pianist at all, because (by not interposing all that apparatus of digital effort, crowned here and there with brilliant effects, all that spattering shower of notes in which at least the listener who does not quite know where he is thinks that he can discern talent in its material, tangible reality) his playing has become so transparent, so imbued with what he is interpreting, that one no longer sees the performer himself - he is simply a window opening upon a great work of art."
Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, pp. 43-44
Proust has the opportunity to see the actress Berma perform in the role of Phedre once again. Allegedly Berma is supposed to be based on some amalgam of Sarah Bernhardt and the French actress Gabrielle Rejane. The passage opens with an anonymous woman ranting at the stage, "Not a clap! And did you ever see such a get-up? She's too old; she can't do it any more; she ought to have retired ages ago." Proust, while never identifying the woman, dismisses her as an actress "who had never tasted success," and thus hated Berma. Doubtless that is true, although I suspect it is also a lot deeper. There is nothing that the talentless hate more than people who have talent, pure undeniable talent. It's like a magic gift that the gods have proffered to some, but not to them. It reinforces their view in an unfair universe where the benighted few are showered with gifts while they are made to suffer in ignominious anonymity. What is more, however, and you can begin to see it in the "little woman" Proust notices, is that they hate not only the person with talent, but also their field itself. They chose a certain field and devoted years of their life to it, and it was supposed to be, not so much their ticket to success, but rather the instrument that was going to rectify the unfairness at the heart of the system. Instead, it has only cheated them all the more cruelly; and so they begin to hate their own field and its sullied dream intensely; because, as you know, nothing matches the hate you feel for something you once loved. And this is how administrators are born . . .
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