![]() Although the great titled families were still massively wealthy, the up-and-coming industrialists had surpassed them, and many aristocrats were retreating from political affairs into social and artistic pursuits-though even here they were often a step behind the Wagnerian vanguard. But it also grew out of comparisons between the French fiction writer’s unfinished first novel Jean Santeuil and the Search.īorn in 1871, at the dawn of the French Third Republic, Proust came of age at a time when his country’s hereditary nobility played a diminished role in public life. Girard came up with this idea in part by studying Proust’s life in parallel with Time Regained, the last volume of his masterpiece, which relates a grave illness followed by spiritual and artistic awakening. When Madame Bovary takes arsenic, says Girard, it is Flaubert killing off the romantic he had once been-a horrible end for the character, but a symbolic marker of Flaubert’s creative rebirth after the failure of his youthful tries at novel-writing. ![]() At the very heart of his work, however, is the idea of “novelistic conversion,” according to which the greatest works of literature get written twice, first as a reflection of the author’s pose of autonomy, and then, after a painful personal reckoning, as the revelation of his actual enslavement to some deified victorious model, be it an idolized hero, a social or amorous rival, or an elusive love interest.įor instance, in the conclusions of classic novels such as Don Quixote and The Red and the Black, Girard suggests, the hero’s illness or death alludes to and even enacts the author’s own rejection of pride, opening up a distance between the character, who embodies the author’s former dream, and the author, who now has the power to describe both his own and others’ delusion with comic irony. The French thinker is known for his insight into the mimetic nature of desire and his theory of the scapegoat. René Girard, who in 1962 edited Proust: A Collection of Critical Essays, has offered a persuasive account of the Proustian paradigm shift and its relationship to the comic. This gaping absence of comedy suggests that something happened in the time between those early efforts and Proust’s mature masterpiece, a paradigm shift that made the author capable of transferring his legendary gifts as a comic dinner-table raconteur “onto the page,” as Shulman puts it. Yet over her piece looms a huge unanswered question, one she addresses only glancingly: how did Proust acquire the ability to write such a funny book? After all, he had not always been a comic genius-neither of the mediocre works of fiction he labored over in his twenties offer much in the way of humor, and at times they are even downright humor less. ![]() In highlighting this aspect of the Search, Shulman has done both the work and its readers a valuable service.
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