Ambassador Norpois
"At this period of history there are tasks more urgent than the manipulation of words in a harmonious manner"
Volume 2: Within a Budding Grove / Pt. 1: “Madame Swann at Home”
"Bergotte is what I call a flute-player: one must admit that he plays on it very agreeably, although with a great deal of mannerism, of affectation. But when all is said, it is no more than that, and that is nothing very great. Nowhere does one find in his enervated writings anything that could be called construction. No action—or very little—but above all no range. His books fail at the foundation, or rather they have no foundation at all. At a time like the present, when the ever increasing complexity of life leaves one scarcely a moment for reading, when the map of Europe has undergone radical alterations, and is on the eve, very probably, of undergoing others more drastic still, when so many new and threatening problems are arising on every side, you will allow me to suggest that one is entitled to ask that a writer should be something else than a fine intellect which makes us forget, amid otiose and byzantine discussions of the merits of pure form, that we may be overwhelmed at any moment by a double tide of barbarians, those from without and those from within our borders. I am aware that this is a blasphemy against the sacrosanct school of what these gentlemen term 'Art for Art's sake', but at this period of history there are tasks more urgent than the manipulation of words in a harmonious manner. Not that Bergotte's manner is not now and then quite attractive. I have no fault to find with that, but taken as a whole, it is all very precious, very thin, and has very little virility. I can now understand more easily, when I bear in mind your altogether excessive regard for Bergotte, the few lines that you shewed me just now, which it would have been unfair to you not to overlook, since you yourself told me, in all simplicity, that they were merely a childish scribbling." (I had, indeed, said so, but I did not think anything of the sort.) "For every sin there is forgiveness, and especially for the sins of youth. After all, others as well as yourself have such sins upon their conscience, and you are not the only one who has believed himself to be a poet in his day. But one can see in what you have shown me the evil influence of Bergotte. You will not, of course, be surprised when I say that there was in it none of his good qualities, since he is a past-master in the art—incidentally quite superficial—of handling a certain style of which, at your age, you cannot have acquired even the rudiments. But already there is the same fault, that paradox of stringing together fine-sounding words and only afterwards troubling about what they mean. That is putting the cart before the horse, even in Bergotte's books. All those Chinese puzzles of form, all these deliquescent mandarin subtleties seem to me to be quite futile. Given a few fireworks, let off prettily enough by an author, and up goes the shout of genius. Works of genius are not so common as all that! Bergotte cannot place to his credit—does not carry in his baggage, if I may use the expression—a single novel that is at all lofty in its conception, any of those books which one keeps in a special corner of one's library. I do not discover one such in the whole of his work” (61-62).
Before we get into it, here are a few simple facts about In Search of Lost Time.
This is a single novel in seven parts, telling the story of a young man trying to find something to write a novel about.
It is a novel, not a memoir. The geographies and characters, while inspired to varying degrees by real places and people, are composites and creations of Proust.
There are, by the way, many other characters besides the narrator and his family. As I said, this is a novel.
The narrator is certainly inspired by Proust himself, but he’s not Proust. In fact, there are at least three relevant entities in discussions of the narrator: the narrator as the protagonist character, the narrator as an author character, and Proust. And you might, borrowing some of Proust’s ideas about writing, you might split him further into Proust the social being and Proust the author.
Apparently (I am about 2500 pages away from the end of these books, so I don’t know this first hand), the novel ends with the protagonist feeling as though he can now write his novel. According to the group of readers my professor dismissively calls “the swooners,” In Search of Lost Time is that novel. A more skeptical reading, however, would suggest that the process of actually writing the thing is more important than this novel treats it (there are 7 volumes about finding inspiration, and 0 volumes about actually sitting down to write).
The book was very carefully composed over a very long time, with many, many drafts.
Memory is important, but there are many other important themes in the book.
The book is very funny, actually.
I hope that’s helpful. My first week of reading would have been a lot easier if I’d known those things.
To the matter at hand: Ambassador Norpois. He’s a friend of the narrator’s father, an important person in the French diplomatic service, and the speaker of the passage I included above. Norpois has come to have dinner with the narrator’s family, and the narrator has expressed admiration for a writer known as Bergotte. In response, Norpois delivers the speech above explaining his objections to Bergotte, and adding in a few criticisms of the narrator’s writing, which he’d shown to Norpois earlier. There are actually several more objections I’ve cut out, including his affairs and his vulgarity of speech. But, suffice to say, Norpois does not like Bergotte.
(A few side remarks: first, keep in mind that this scene is set before the war - perhaps 1895ish - written just before the war - 1913ish - and published afterwards - 1919. Second, I think it’s worth noting that the narrator is at this point a child or an adolescent, though his exact age (like Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes) is difficult to determine given the gulf between his immaturity of action and maturity of expression.)
In my first reading, I found Norpois’s objections to Bergotte nonsensical, and his character a comic caricature of a pedantic, hide-bound establishment conservative. That said, this is not how Norpois sees himself - in his view, immersed in the world of diplomacy, he sees himself as relatively dynamic and open to change. For example, he spends much of the scene rhapsodizing over a speech given by the King of Greece, which he describes as
“simply masterly: a trifle daring, I quite admit, but it was an audacity which, after all, was fully justified by the event. Traditional diplomacy is all very well in its way, but in practice it has made his country and ours live in a hermetically sealed atmosphere in which it was no longer possible to breathe. Very well! There is one method of letting in fresh air, obviously not a method that one could officially recommend, but one which King Theodosius could allow himself to adopt - and that is to break the windows. Which he accordingly did…”
How did King Theodosius “break the windows”? In a sign of Norpois’s extremely static worldview, what counts as daring and audacious is that the King used the word “affinities” to describe the relationship between France and Greece. To Norpois - a man who claims to be generally “opposed to all innovations in terminology” - this speech and the phrase “affinities” has done more than twenty years of negotiation towards bringing the two countries together” (47). That may be true, but it’s more a sign of the sterility of diplomacy in pre-war Europe than of the incredible power of the King’s speech. In the eyes of a post-war reader, Norpois discredits himself; he’s part of the comfortable, complacent, and conservative establishment - whose pettiness, inflexibility and insufficient urgency led Europe to mass slaughter just a few years later.
So I don’t trust his reading of Bergotte. His rejection of ‘Art for art’s sake’ strikes me as pedantry, his condemnation of “otiose and byzantine discussions of the merits of pure form” strikes me as traditionalism, and his claims that there is nothing “lofty” in Bergotte strikes me as missing the point entirely. It reminds me of a letter of Chekhov, responding to an acquaintance who criticized him for reveling in the “dung heap,” by which she meant that he lacked a moral purpose in his writing. Chekhov’s response was basically that it was the writer’s “duty” to explore the dung heap. Similarly, the alleged lack of “construction,” “action,” “range,” “foundation,” and “virility” all seem to me to point to Norpois’s narrow conception of art. To this sophisticated academician, art is elevated, moral, ideological, and masculine, and his inability to understand modernist literature’s wider purpose and techniques indicates his inability to understand the modern world. The only way the character could be more discredited would be if he were a general - he reminds me of the French generals whose virile, honor-bound passion for the offensive spirit led them to mount Plan XVII in the early days of the war, and many other useless offensives against fortified machine gunners throughout the war.
More interesting to me is his claim that a time of crisis is not the time for art. “At a time like the present,” Norpois says, when life is becoming increasingly complicated, when borders are changing, when the Germans might invade, when socialists might take over the country (this is how I read the “barbarians” from “within” and “without,” there is no the time for abstract, avante-garde games with artistic form. As he says in the next sentence: “at this period of history there are tasks more urgent than the manipulation of words in a harmonious manner.” And in this regard, perhaps he’s right…. Certainly, his diplomatic work is no more fruitful, but this is a strong objection: what is the responsibility of the artist to a world in crisis?
The Realists had an answer to this: their role was to save the world, or at least improve it. Dickens’ novels attacked social problems, and arguably had a real impact on them. Tolstoy attacked social problems as well, especially in his earlier novels, and in his later work, he sought to redeem his readers and his nation spiritually - to lead Russians to a true understanding of God. Proust’s position here is less clear; while I’m not sure to what extent Bergotte’s writing is supposed to stand in for Proust’s, you can certainly image many of Norpois’s criticisms being lobbed at Proust as well. Similarly, Chekhov strenuously resisted the demands that he write a ‘serious novel’ in which he would expound his ideological program for Russian society. In one letter, for example, he wrote that his only goal as an artist is to be a “free artist” - someone who is totally unconnected to political or societal debates of the time.
But this is a privileged position; not every artist has the luxury to write apolitically, or more to the point, to be read apolitically. In the eyes of most reviewers, Black authors’ books are about race; The Sellout is a satire of structural racism, despite that Paul Beatty keeps claiming it’s not - and that it obviously isn’t, or at least that it’s not just that - that book is doing a lot more than satirizing one side of America’s national conversation on race. And more broadly, in a warming world that feels like it’s falling apart at the seams, do any of us have the privilege to escape politics? Aren’t we all on the hook? Don’t we all have an obligation to work to improve the world, whether through art, or whatever else we do? When the ocean rises, we’re all going to get wet. At this period of history there are tasks more urgent than the manipulation of words in a harmonious manner, and there are tasks more urgent than our tweets, more urgent than our jobs, and more urgent than spending a summer reading Proust and taking pictures!
I don’t actually buy this argument. Of course, none of us really do - however seriously you take the world’s problems, we all spend a lot of time not doing anything to fix them. We’re all Bergotte to some degree. We’re also all Norpois - when we do occasionally dedicate ourselves to ‘making a difference,’ most of what we do is meaningless and vapid. We might think our tweet, our sign at a protest, or our impassioned instagram story is breaking the windows in some meaningful way, but I think we all know that most of us aren’t doing much at all.
I’m tempted to argue that good art - new, truthful art that challenges our conceptions of the world and pushes us to think more honestly - changes and improves the world more than just about anything. But I have very little evidence for this view, and I’m not sure it’s true. It might be in the case of Chekhov, but I’m not even sure it’s true for Proust, and it’s certainly not true for me. I spent a long time yesterday taking very close-up pictures of a piece of wood and some lichen. I also took some no-doubt terrible double-exposures with an old, broken film photograph. It’s straining credulity to say that this work is going to do much of anything. And yet, here I am writing long entries about Ambassador Norpois….