My Years With Proust - Day 729

Then suddenly a word in my letter reminded me that Mme Sazerat had lost her son and I wrote to her as well, after which, having sacrificed a real duty to the factitious obligation to appear polite and sympathetic, I fell back exhausted and closed my eyes, not to emerge from a purely vegetal existence before a week had elapsed.  During this time, however, if all my unnecessary duties, to which I was willing to sacrifice my true duty, vanished after a few moments from my head, the idea of the edifice that I had to construct did not leave me for an instant.  Whether it would be a church where little by little a group of faithful would succeed in apprehending verities and discovering harmonies or perhaps even a grand general plan, or whether it would remain, like a druidic monument on a rocky isle, something for ever unfrequented, I could no tell.  But I was resolved to devote to all my strength, which ebbed, as it seemed, reluctantly and as though to leave me time to complete the periphery of my walls and close "the funeral gate." Before very long I was able to show a few sketches.  No one understood anything of them. Even those who commended my perception of the truths which I wanted eventually to engrave within the temple, congratulated me on having discovered them "with a microscope," when on the contrary it was a telescope that I had used to observe things which were indeed very small to the naked eye, but only because they were situated at a great distance, and which were each one of them in itself a world. Those passages in which I was trying to arrive at general laws were described as so much pedantic investigation of detail.  What, in any case, was I hoping to achieve?  In my youth I had had a certain facility, and Bergotte had praised as "admirable" the pages which I wrote while still at school.  But instead of working I had lived a life of idleness, of pleasures and distractions, of ill health and cosseting and eccentricities, and I was embarking upon my labour of construction almost at the point of death, without knowing anything of my trade.  I felt that I no longer possessed the strength to carry out my obligation to people or my duties to my thoughts and my work, still less to satisfy both of these claims.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 1098-1099

"Before very long I was able to show a few sketches.  No one understood anything of them." According to the legends associated with Remembrance of Things Past three different publishers turned down the first volume of the work before Proust himself decided to pay for the publication for what we become Swann's Way.  The editors just didn't know what to make of it.  Later Andre Gide, one of the editors, wrote a personal letter to Proust and told him, "For several days I have been unable to put your book down . . . The rejection of this book will remain the most serious mistake ever made by the NRF and, since I bear the shame of being very much responsible for it, one of the most stinging and remorseful regrets of my life." Even those who "got it," clearly didn't get it.  As Proust tells us, "Even those who commended my perception of the truths which I wanted eventually to engrave within the temple, congratulated me on having discovered them "with a microscope," when on the contrary it was a telescope that I had used to observe things which were indeed very small to the naked eye, but only because they were situated at a great distance, and which were each one of them in itself a world." As we've discussed, one of my pet theories is that one of the hallmarks of genius is the individual who comes along and completely changes the rules, not simply because they're trying to do so (although sometimes that is true, Cezanne being a great example), but because they cannot not change the rules.  However, in the process of sharing this new world view the artist almost inevitably asks the audience, and the critics, to think a dramatically different way and to do more, to bring more to the artistic interchange, and thus people either don't get it or they are actively opposed to it.  Clearly, people didn't understand Proust, and in many ways still don't, but that doesn't alter the fact that he changed the world forever.