Proust's Background

What is the relationship between art and the world around us? Is art a background to reality, or reality the background to art? Does art enhance the senses we experience, or does the sensual enhance the experience of art?

The narrator links sensory experiences of “background” as more important for him than an isolated conceptual understanding of the world. While the narrator is sharing a carriage with his literary hero, Bergotte, the writer makes the assumption that the narrator “lives the intellectual life” (Penguin 144). This terrifies the narrator, who promises never to tell Bergotte that this is not what he wants at all. He seems to be yearning for a kind of enlightened hedonism where he believes that certain pleasures are “deeper and more durable.” This points towards a complicated idea of what it means to exist in the material world – that it might be possible to live a significant life through one’s sensory experiences. The narrator turns to the smell in a bathroom and the ways that smell remind him of his childhood. In this way, the narrator stresses that he doesn’t want to isolate the conceptual at the expense of the sensory and bodily aspects of experience.

– Dante Kanter

The narrator's impression of characters is also tied to his perception of background. An understanding of each figure, no matter how nuanced, is quite tenuous, as they are all in danger of being transformed based on the environment they find themselves in. While at the party given by the Princesse de Guermantes the narrator remarks, “I was able to recognize under the trees women with whom I was more or less friendly, but they seemed transformed because they were at the Princesses’ and not at her cousin’s, and because I saw them sitting not in front of a Saxe plate but beneath the branches of a chestnut tree” (52). This idea of transformation based on one’s surroundings, which we see in visual examples such as this one, mirrors how characters behave and see themselves as well, as they are taken to similar transformations, whether it be their moral stances (particularly seen in the discussions of the Dreyfus Affair) and social behaviour in general depending on with whom they are spending their time with.

Although there are moments in the novel when the social triumphs over the natural, there are also moments when the opposite happens – the social becomes a "background" to the truly important thing: Nature. In the section Place Names, the narrator discusses the desire to witness a truly great or genius storm. His desire for the storm is less to experience, as he says, “A mighty spectacle than... a momentary revelation of the true life of nature” (Swann's Way). The shore must also be particular in its natural state, left untouched by man’s machines. Moreover, the Balbec coast is cited as the ideal shore for a great storm, “Famed for the number of its wrecks.” The wrecks, while at first glance seem evidence of “man’s machines,” really illuminate the relation of human creation to nature ever more strongly. This necessity for the whole setting of the storm – the experience of the vast web of its components – is essential to have the revelation of “true life.” It shows the key relationality in the impressions the narrator seeks to understand and experience.

— Hugh Ferguson

The narrator’s description of Mme. de Sévigné's letters further emphasizes the importance of the entire web of relations or, in this case, the need for background in the creation of art. Her letters are introduced to the narrator by his grandmother, a Romantic. While Mme de Sévigné might be described in some sense as a proto-romantic, it may be that the proto is more important to Proust than the Romantic. The narrator praises the letters as describing background in the same way that Dostoyevsky describes characters. This mode of description is characterized by describing background first in the way we perceive it rather than first by its cause. The importance of the background and the value in perceiving without first understanding the causal-conceptual framework is also an important part of the narrator's understanding of music and of Vinteuil's sonata. To perceive before understanding is a phenomenon that Proust clearly sees as an important part of the human experience that art must convey.

— Paul Murphy