Proust’s quarrel with ‘accessible’ art

Pierre-Auguste Renoir hardly lacks admirers. His pictures sell for millions and his Luncheon of the Boating Party (1881) has become one of the defining images of Impressionism. Another vote of confidence in his market value, albeit in unusual style, was cast earlier this month when thieves broke into the museum at his former home in Cagnes-sur-Mer and escaped with two of his works.

It was not always so. In The Guermantes Way (1920), the third volume of his novel series, In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust remembers a time when people could recognise the world perfectly well in paintings by Eugène Fromentin and scarcely recognise it at all in Renoir. ‘People of taste’, he observed, were happy to pronounce Renoir a great 19th-century painter, while forgetting the special ingredient of Time: it had taken rather a lot of it for anybody to agree on Renoir’s qualities.

Proust thought artists were a species of oculist. Renoir had changed the audience’s eyewear prescription and people complained that the world had gone blurry. A generation later, women, water and forests looked perfectly Renoir-like; it was the old eyesight that had become difficult to imagine. Success, in other words, disguises the scale of the original offence. Once an artist has taught us ‘how to see’, it becomes remarkably difficult to remember how the world looked before him.

Throughout his theoretical writing on literature and art, Proust returned to this paradox. What distinguishes, for him, the great artist from the average is not principally subject matter. Rather, it is the imposition upon the world of a form peculiar to a single consciousness. In The Prisoner (1923), Proust understands Vermeer’s interiors to be fragments of one such world. The same table and carpet, the same woman are transformed each time by the same unmistakable vision.

Something similar happens in Stendhal, where Proust notices an odd affinity between the quality of spiritual life and altitude: Julien Sorel in his prison (The Red and the Black, 1830), Fabrice in his tower, and the Abbé Blanès studying the stars from his belfry (The Charterhouse of Parma, 1839). Here is a deeper consistency in the artist’s vision.

This is because great artists have discovered what Proust calls a ‘qualitative difference’: something in experience that belongs to their way of seeing alone. Such an artist creates, in effect, one world, and his different works are fragments of it.

The difficulty is that artistic quality is easiest to recognise when the rules are already known. We know what a convincing portrait looks like because we have seen convincing portraits; we know how a novel ought to proceed because other novels have taught us how they should. Proust’s original artist is awkward precisely because he alters those expectations. To complain that Renoir’s forests did not look like forests was, in retrospect, to miss the possibility that the trouble lay with the generally received idea of a forest.

The narrator of In Search of Lost Time discovers this when confronted by a fashionable new writer whose sentences seem almost wilfully perverse, disturbing the ‘normal’ relations between words. Trying to make his way through them, he repeatedly falls off, comparing himself to an inept schoolboy attempting gymnastics. After several attempts, he begins to suspect that the sentence is not badly made; he is simply not yet agile enough to follow it.

Proust could hardly have devised a less fashionable account of ‘accessibility’. Difficulty is not automatically a virtue; indeed, plenty of bad writing is difficult, including text generated by large language models. But neither is immediate comprehension proof that the artist has succeeded.

Style, in this account, is far more than polish. It is the means by which an artist makes his particular vision perceptible to others, a way of thinking that did not quite exist before the work brought it into being. For example, Proust thought Gustave Flaubert’s strange handling of tense, pronouns and conjunctions had altered our vision of things almost as profoundly as Immanuel Kant’s categories had altered theories of knowledge. This is an extraordinary, and thrilling, claim to make about grammar.

That explains in part why Proust had so little patience with the style of documentary realism and straight biography, celebrated by the critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve. For Proust, these genres mistake the visible for the real, and risk merely duplicating a world we already have easy access to. Reality, he believes, is a complex system of correspondence, of visible and invisible suggestions, encapsulated by the madeleine whose smell and taste restore the vanished childhood of his narrator.

This helps explain Proust’s otherwise rather mysterious insistence, in Against Sainte-Beuve (1895-1900, first published in 1954), that a book is made by ‘another self’ from the person who lunches, gossips, and answers letters. Sainte-Beuve’s mistake had been to look for the writer in that social self, made up of correspondence, conversation, habits and friendships. The work’s self could not be reconstructed from anecdotes about its author, because it had its origins only in the act of creation, in those perceptions and correspondences that ordinary life tends to obscure. To understand an artist was therefore not to know more about him, but to learn, however briefly, to see through the particular consciousness preserved in his work.

Proust was no more persuaded by attempts to make art ‘accessible’, in the sense that now governs our cultural policies across the West. In Time Regained (1927), he ridicules the notion of an art populaire stripped of formal refinement for the benefit of ordinary people. Having spent enough time in high society, he knew that the ‘true illiterates’ were quite as likely to be found at the Jockey Club as among electricians in the CGT.

Nor did choosing supposedly popular subjects solve the problem: novels written for ‘the people’, Proust observed, bored them much as books written especially for children bored children. The condescension behind such degraded literature was aesthetic as much as social, since it assumed that an audience could only enjoy what it already knew to be enjoyable. A serious work makes the opposite wager. It assumes that the audience can acquire capacities it does not yet possess.

Time further complicates the picture. Here Proust was close to his cousin by marriage, the philosopher Henri Bergson, whose Time and Free Will (1889) had distinguished the measurable time of clocks from durée (time as consciousness actually experiences it). For Bergson, past and present continually bleed into one another. Making that distinction his own, Proust argued that the past is not simply behind us; it survives, inaccessible to the will but liable to return through a taste, a sound, or a change in light. That is why art, not only literature, has a similarly awkward relation to chronology. Although an artwork belongs to its moment, the vision it contains may take years to become visible and, once absorbed, may alter the very past against which we judge it.

This is what makes Proust’s account of artistic reputation more interesting than familiar accounts of misunderstood geniuses vindicated by posterity. In The Guermantes Way, one artistic ‘cult’ has scarcely established itself before another, still obscure, begins to supplant it. Renoir’s world is therefore not the terminus of taste but, in Proust’s wonderfully grand phrase, a ‘new and perishable universe’, destined to last only until the next ‘geological catastrophe’ brought about by another original painter or writer.

Time can make the canon strange again. In Days of Reading (1905), Proust went to Jean Racine for the ‘beautiful forms of language now abolished’. The newest art of quality asks us to acquire eyes we do not yet possess, while the oldest asks us to retrieve traces of a way of speaking the present has forgotten.