The original author | Peter Watson
Excerpt from | Luodong
The Age of Nothingness: How We Live After God's Death, by Peter Watson, translated by Gao Lijie, Shanghai Translation Press, April 2021.
"Proust's novel is a sociology in itself"
Marcel Proust's greatest work, À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Lost Years), in its title "remembrance" encompasses the meanings of "to explore" and "to study", even if it is not necessarily a study in the scientific sense. At the same time, beginning with the famous plot of the Madeleine Cake evoking partial memories of the Catholic Mass, the entire book contains the sound of religion. The narrator now savors the fusion of cake and tea on the taste buds, experiencing the impact of the transcendental "omnipotent happiness": "I feel that this pleasure is related to the taste of tea and cake, but it transcends these tastes infinitely, and in fact there is no same nature between them. ”
Marcel Proust was a French writer and novelist.
The name madeleine cake originates from Marie Madeleine, and the echo of Catholic theology continues throughout the book. Many commentators argue that Proust's "artistic religion" reached the point of imitating confession, a Christian theological writing tradition.
Pericles Lewis's views differ from those described above and are more original. He argues that Proust focused on the views of the early French sociologist Émile Durkheim. This idea appeared in the 1912 issue of Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, a year before the first volume of the seven-volume Remembrance of the Lost Years, "Going to Svan's House." Much of Durkheim's theories are based on the study of the "primitive" religions of the Aboriginal Australians. He argues that totemism was (and still is) the basic form of religion, encompassing all the elements of later religions. The totemic system refers to the worship of a particular sacred flora and fauna by a family or tribe, and they acknowledge an anonymity that is intrinsic to the natural world. In totemism, primitive families or tribes worship the totem as a form of "power," exerting moral power among their peers and members, ensuring the safety of the group, confirming and sanctifying the identity of the group.
According to this statement, Proust's novel is a sociology in itself, which regards the family as a source of value. For example, Madame Verdulin's salon was treated as a small family. All of Proust's stories express an interest in objects in the secular world that are considered sacred and totemic through a single character, or whether they have a "magical" ability to transfer us to another time and space (like the shamans of primitive families). "Those sacred objects remind the narrator of the kind of communion that can no longer be attained even in the most intimate relationships", and the Madeleine Cake is only the most famous of them.
"Remembrance of the Lost Water Years" French title page.
Proust intersected with Durkheim's life and thought
Lewis argues that Durkheim's profound influence on Proust was more or less overlooked, but some of the connections between them were clear. Durkheim, for example, was a classmate of Henry Bergson's high school in Paris, and Durkheim married Proust's distant cousin. Durkheim studied philosophy at the High School in Paris and later received his doctorate from the Sorbonne. Proust also studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, and two of his supervisors reviewed his doctoral dissertation on Bergson. One of his mentors was Emile Butroux, who discussed William James's writings with great influence and wrote spiritual works. Proust described Boutru as one of his heroes, and specifically mentioned Boutru's work in Remembrance of the Lost Years. There is no evidence that Durkheim and Proust ever met, nor that Proust read Durkheim's important writings. But Lewis says there is no doubt that there is an intersection between their social and intellectual lives. In addition, Proust's high school teacher, Alphonse Darlu, founded a magazine where an introduction to Durkheim's Book The Basic Forms of Religious Life was first published.
Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist and one of the founders of sociology, whose major works include The Theory of The Division of Social Labor, The Theory of Suicide, and The Basic Forms of Religious Life.
Furthermore, both Proust and Durkheim came from Jewish families in Alsace, when the Jewish faith was still considered a private matter, with no political or social dimension. But this solidity did not last, as in the novel, when a conflict between church and state broke out in France, sparked by the Dreyfus Affair, a scandal triggered by the miscarriage of a Jewish officer. Both Proust and Durkheim played an active role in the incident, supporting Dreyfus. The incident turned into a public event in which secularists confronted traditional religious believers. The sociologist Durkheim saw that the convergence of the great forces of modernity, including urbanization, industrialization, materialism, popularization, and technological progress, is now more necessary than ever to assert the sanctity of the individual, for the individual is "a touchstone that distinguishes good from evil, which is regarded as sacred... It has a certain a priori solemnity that the churches have endowed upon their respective gods." Personal life has thus become the focus of attention of various forces in society.
And this also aptly describes the purpose of proust's huge production. In this work, the narrator is looking for a "true group," a group that can be seen in the early church (and in his childhood), but such a group "is now no longer found in institutionalized religions, in social groups that present themselves as another religion." Proust also understood that technical and social forces controlled modern life in religious-like ways, but did not depend on the omniscient God, but on the various forces, spirits, spiritualities, and lowercase gods rooted in primitive folk religions. (Pericles Lewis: Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel, p. 83)
Cover of Durkheim's Basic Forms of Religious Life in Chinese translation (Qudong and Ji Zhe, The Commercial Press, April 2011).
Proust used anthropological metaphors or references such as totemism, animism, pagan worship, and magic to polish his work. Even narrative mode can be seen as a post-monotheistic phenomenon, an exploration of sacredness, magic, and transcendental moments. The narrator is constantly moving, close to the different families, observing their legendary stories circulating in the family itself. Henry James would have thought that they shared these stories in order to ensure the unity of their family. Proust was constantly disappointed, but found salvation from what he called "les moments bienheureux" (les moments). He shows that involuntary memories bring "blissful moments," which are the main road to the past, to our unconscious.
In Lewis's view, what Durkheim and Proust have in common is not that they cared about the relationship between the individual and God, but rather "the divine power that associates the individual with modern society, and with the new gods of modern society." In Durkheim," the new sacred universal principles were things like "fatherland," "freedom," and "reason" (which were particularly powerful in France after the Enlightenment and the Revolution). Proust does not deny the sanctity of these things, but he also shows that "moments of bliss" always have individuality, even solitude, and that "each individual opens his door to the social world as a whole." Proust focuses on meticulously reconstructing a coherent self "from the pure impulses (desires) of unconscious life." Theodor Adorno emphasizes that Proust was fascinated by "concreteness and uniqueness, fascinated by the taste of madeleine's small cake, or the color of a lady's shoes at a party". Through these concrete things, he shows that the deepest self within us does not grow spontaneously, is not separated from society, "but on the contrary is shaped from the outset by forces that precede and control the self."
The narrator, for example, says that in order to be recognized by Madame Verdulin's "little family," one must agree with her that the pianist she found was the best pianist within reach. Her family exhibits various elements of a sect, and entering this family requires full participation in its rituals and observance of its beliefs. Madame Verdulin is even portrayed as "an 'ecclesiastical authority' who considered Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and Wagner's opera to be the 'supreme prayer', and she could not allow anyone to object to his artistic religion" in the slightest." Those who have the intention of criticism, those pagans become scapegoats.
The private experience and sacredness of "desire"
Another feature of Remembrance of the Lost Years is the narrator's repeated experience of disillusionment, in the fact that he discovers that the sacred rituals of his group are not unexpectedly of transcendental power. These rituals have only social power, only social salvation, and instantaneous bliss is the only transcendentality to choose from.
Although critics argue that Proust established a religion of art, in fact he argues that both religion and art regard social cohesion as their primary social function. "When the pious think they are worshipping Wagner, Beethoven, or Vinteuil, they are worshipping the family standards themselves... Special works of art thus provide a certain function for small families, similar to that provided by Durkheim's totems for Australians. ”
Stills from the film adaptation (1999) of "Remembrance of the Lost Years".
Proust noted that after God's death, or rather after the Death of the Christian Monotheistic God, more primitive religious rituals, such as totemism, might fill the void left by God. This is because people love the divine experience, and "modern sanctity is still sacred." But he also said that those experiences are fundamentally hypocritical because they cannot provide transcendence, but only confirm our membership in various communities. It may not be a trivial matter, but it is also not a big deal. In the narrator's view, this sacred experience is disappointing.
Proust and Henry James agreed on this point. The involuntary recollections in the book are based on an explanation of the narrator's desires. And he has seen the desires of others and is curious about the desires of others. Desire is explained by the unconscious, and it is desire that confuses our world. Desire makes us feel like we are a "whole, or makes us feel "whole." After Albertina's death, the narrator thinks carefully about life in the afterlife. "Desire is in fact very powerful; it gives rise to faith... I began to believe in the immortality of the soul. But that didn't satisfy me either. After I die, I hope to find her again in her, as if life were eternal. This echoes James's statement: "The belief in the afterlife is not really a matter of faith... On the other hand it is a matter of desire. ”
We are bound to others by the power of desire. From this, desire is sacred. It is important that desire becomes part of a group, but on the other hand, the individual's desire for others is a very different experience. Proust says that from a group standpoint, no matter how desirable the establishment of stability, identity, or even other public life may be, it is far less interesting, fulfilling, and fascinating than the private experience of desire. Desire is special, as special as involuntarily recalled. Henry James, Proust, and the established Church saw clearly that attachment to desire was destructive and dangerous. This is why desire is the basis of sacredness.
Peter Watson (born 1943) is a British intellectual historian. Domestic translations and publications include his History of Ideas: From Fire to Freud and History of Ideas in the 20th Century: From Freud to the Internet.
The content of this article is authorized by Shanghai Translation Publishing House from the book "The Age of Nothingness: How We Live After God's Death". The title is taken by the extractor.