Monday, November 24, 1997
In his own way, author interprets work of Proust
BOOK:
Botton’s book gives hints on self-help through examplesBy
Michael Gillette
Daily Bruin Contributor
Northrop Frye, in his book "The Natural Perspective," suggests
that there are two types of critics: those for whom the study of
literature is a conventionalized and entertaining endeavor, and
those for whom its end is allegorical and instructive. The former,
Frye says, tend toward comedy and romance and the latter toward
tragedy.
To stretch Frye’s implication, one could say that for the latter
group, great works are like recipe books, containing not just plot,
characters and settings, but the secrets to living as well, with
their job being to find and record them.
In Alain de Botton’s new book "How Proust Can Change Your Life,"
this second style of commentary reaches a giddy, and at times
delightful, apex.
Botton, who at 28 has published three novels, takes for his
subjects Marcel Proust’s great masterpiece "In Search of Lost Time"
and Proust the man himself.
Rather than organizing his book according to an analytical plan,
Botton presents the reader with something closer to a self-help
book, with chapters bearing titles like "How to Love Life Today"
and "How to be a Good Friend." Recipe book, indeed.
As one gathers from this glance at the contents page, Botton’s
book makes no claims to serious scholarship. What it offers is a
unique hybrid: part literary biography, part meditation on living
and part appreciation of Proust.
Of these three areas, Botton is most successful in the first.
Without tying himself to any chronological structure, Botton frees
himself to present Proust’s life in clever, original ways.
For example, in the chapter entitled "How to Suffer
Successfully," Botton presents for the reader a "list of physical
afflictions" that the famously ill Proust suffered. He organizes
the four-page list alphabetically, including not just ailments, but
phobias and pet peeves as well, and provides brief explanations
after each.
Sections like this are brisk and well-managed, as are the
portions pertaining to Proust’s family. When the reader comes
across the fact that Marcel’s brother Robert, a surgeon, was so
famed for his prostatectomies that the procedure has henceforth
been known in the French medical community as a proustatectomy, one
gets a glimpse of the exhaustive research Botton must have done.
But, thankfully, the strain never shows in the writing itself,
which remains chipper and pleasantly off-hand throughout.
Botton’s good taste and tact shows further in his sidestepping
of that most obnoxious feature of literary biography: the drawing
of cause and effect conclusions between the incidents in a writer’s
life and those of the characters’ in his or her works.
Botton quaintly draws a "moral" at the end of each chapter, but
he never applies it to Swann or Albertine.
These sections on biography acquit Botton quite well and
certainly are slimmer than any lives of Proust one is likely to
find in print. The sections he allots to praising Proust, however,
come off naive and a little bizarre, and have little to recommend
them. In these parts Botton takes incidents from Proust’s life,
always well-supported by evidence from letters and journals, either
Proust’s own or those of his friends, draws morals from the events,
presumably for us, the readers, and pats Proust on the back for his
impeccable character.
Likewise, when0 Botton does treat Proust’s work itself, his
practice is to isolate one line or phrase and show how keeping it
in mind when you’re lonely or upset can be helpful.
One can’t fault Botton’s intentions in offering up such advice,
and neither can one fault his source for it, but one can question
the strategy Botton takes and its value to any reader. In that
light, a reader, considering the question Botton asks in his title,
would probably opt to pick up Proust and find out the answer for
himself.