Proust and Friends

Throughout In Search of Lost Time, Proust’s narrator makes several statements declaring his aversion to the idea of friendship. He writes,

“And friendship is not merely devoid of virtue, like conversation, it is fatal to us as well. For the sense of boredom which those of us whose law of development is purely internal cannot help but feel in a friend's company (when, that is to say, we must remain on the surface of ourselves, instead of pursuing our voyage of discovery into the depths)” (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower).

This declaration, which refers to the narrator’s intimate and intellectual friendship with Saint-Loup, is juxtaposed with the narrator’s feelings about the group of girls with whom he desires to spend all his time with. In reference to the group of girls he writes, “Never, among actresses nor among peasants nor among girls from a convent school had I beheld anything so beautiful, impregnated with so much that was unknown, so inestimably precious, so apparently inaccessible” (In the Shadow). To the narrator, the group of girls aren’t his friends in a classic sense, they are too foreign, too exotic. As with Vinteuil’s Sonata, or one of Elstir’s paintings, the group of girls will never be fully understood, in a concrete sense by the narrator. By spending time with them he is not engaging in a sharing of commonalities as in his friendship with Saint-Loup, but rather in an endless stream of discoveries each more intoxicating than the last.

Through the dichotomy of his relationship with Saint-Loup and the group of girls, Proust reveals one of the most significant values that his work has to impart. Namely, that the well of the unknown does one (and in particular the artist) infinitely more good than the surface level camaraderie offered by friendship. What is empty in friendship, is not solely that it deals with shared knowns, but more specifically, that it is the result solely of the conscious mind. It is an act of goodwill, a compromise; and, in this comfortable and nurturing world of compromise, we can never extend beyond ourselves.