My Year With Proust - Day 142

"No sooner had we begun our lunch than we were asked to leave the table on the instructions of M. de Stermaria who had just arrived and, without the faintest attempt at an apology to us, requested the head waiter in our hearing to 'see that such a mistake did not occur again,' for it was repugnant to him that 'people whom he did not know' should have taken his table . . .

   . . . And at night they did not dine in the hotel, where, hidden springs of electricity flooding the great dining-room with light, it became as it were an immense and wonderful aquarium against whose glass wall the working population of Balbec, the fishermen and also the trademen's families, clustering invisibly in the outer darkness, pressed their faces to watch the luxurious life of its occupants gently floating upon the golden eddies within, a thing as extraordinary to the poor as the life of strange fishes or molluscs (and important social question, this: whether the glass wall will always protect the banquets of these weird and wonderful creatures, or whether the obscure folk who watch them hungrily out of the night will not break on some day to gather them from their aquarium and devour them).

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 731-732

A former husband of a friend of mine used to joke about stories where people just lived in big houses and didn't work; essentially, when she would try and speak to the virtues of some novel he would dismissively ask if it was novels where people lived in big houses and didn't work.  In some ways it is a very valid point.  What do these people actually have to tell us about anything?  Of course, part of this is natural in that often the authors who had the time and education to write had the time and education to write because they lived in that environment.  You write what you know.  If I tried to write roman noir novels about hard-edged police detectives it would be, by definition, very artificial if not outright laughable; instead, I'd doubtless write novels featuring over educated and morally ambivalent characters.  And the domination of the wealthy classes as center pieces of the novels is not just the case for the Jane Austens of the world (at least Dickens has working class characters, even if they're often portrayed pretty broadly).  One of the things that makes the ancient Chinese Zhou Book of Songs so amazing it that it featured poems (originally songs) written by peasants, as compared to all the works featuring the adventures of kings and princes and denizens of the central court.  Now, the potential redeeming quality of any "big house" novel, as with any work of fiction, I guess, would be its ability to transcend the boundaries of that life of leisure and speak to some greater essential truth of human nature.  With all of this in mind, what do we make of Proust's world?  On the surface the anguish of the characters seems to be the very manifestation of one of my favorite Twitter hashtags, #FirstWorldProblems.  That said, Proust obviously succeeds in transcending this world to get at more profound issues of love and longing and sadness, so it's not just a novel of manners.  I think it is to Proust's credit that he seems to realize the limited scope of the world he's describing in such depth.  I really like the allegory, featured in this passage, of the aquarium glass separating of the rich from the poor, and he wonders how long the glass will hold.