bon mot

“At its best the late nineteenth century reminds one of a sentimental farce, at its worst of a heartless joke.”

I've been typing up my notes from Art (from which comes the above, pg 181). Clive Bell is quite insufferable. Raymond Williams is too gentle by half to the whole Bloomsbury crowd, unless we assume they allowed him to hand around out of good manners. The fellow can occasionally turn a phrase, though. (unless he stole this line, which is quite possible).

Thibaudet, Bell, Proust -- Anti-Semitism

So: I’ve been working towards a paper on Clive Bell’s Proust book. Clive Bell, especially later in his life, was objectionable elitist. Proust has, especially at the beginning, a light tone of genteel anti-Semitism. Marcel Proust is, for instance, an “exquisitely civilized Jew,” no doubt praise, but still we wince to read it today. These qualities, and the likelihood that Bell read Thibaudet, make the two treatments of Proust interesting to compare.

I’ve been reading the Nouvelle Revue Française memorial issue on Proust (Tome XX, 1923, no 1.). It is, taken as a whole text, fascinating, and deserves some study in its own right. Possibly I’ll write something about it here when I’m done. I have just now finished Albert Thibaudet’s contribution, which is called “Marcel Proust et la tradition française.” Bell must have read this little essay. First of all, Thibaudet claims that there are corners—“ces jardins secrets”—of every national literature into which foreigners simply cannot penetrate. Of course there are also very cosmopolitan gardens as well, into which greenhouse he puts Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe. Bell mentions this book as well, echoing Thibaudet’s vocabulary, in the opening pages of Proust. He mentions it as part of a list of other books, possibly as great as the Recherche, “even Jean Christophe—which the French have put in the corner quite as much because it was written by a Protestant and a pacifist [note, in passing, that Clive Bell is himself both those things] as because it is written in a woefully undistinguished manner” (7-8). (As I copy out that quote, I notice the was/is written tense shift—because authorship is past, but the writing itself is always in the present).

For Thibaudet, though, the Recherche is clearly especially French, somehow unavailable to foreigners. Bell’s name (along with a clutch of other Bloomsberries) appears later in the volume appended to an awkwardly written “Hommage d’un groupe d’écrivains anglais” (248-9), which itself strongly suggests some of the themes Bell will later work on his own. Probably in reference to this, or at least this sort of activity, Thibaudet says, “de consiencieux Anglais ont fondé pour l’étudier une société Marcel Proust. Que le ‘monde’ français ait pu se faire aimer et admirer d’un Marcel Proust, cela doit bien étonner un romancier anglais. Cela ‘étonnera moins s’il cherche le fil qui relie Proust à une tradition authentique” (133).

This authentic ‘tradition française’ in terms of which Thibaudet wants to situate Proust is, first, Saint-Simon, the diarist of the court of Louis XIV, and then, Montaigne. Again, Bell will follow Thibaudet. The comparison with Saint-Simon is instructive, “Proust comme Saint-Simon est de ces écrivains qui, ne voyant et ne sentant pas simple [qui n’a rien à voir avec la simplicité], ser refuseraient comme à une trahison à écrire simple. Il faut que chaque phrase conserve la complesité, l’épaisseur, l’intensité émotionnelle ou la joie descriptive, qui étaient au principe des pensées et des images” (135). Compare that to Bell’s “Proust wanted to speak his mind, and his was a mind not easily spoken” (21). Bell’s idea, that style is, or should be, radically determined by process of thought even to the point of rupturing the surface of ‘good writing’ (characteristic, I think, of Bloomsbury), is also Thibaudet’s, who says, describing Proust’s writing: “Un tel style est vraiment consubstantiel à la chose pensante et vivante. Trop consubstantiel pour être clair et correct, dira-t-on. Et le fait est qu’il tient plutôt à la main et au corps de l’écrivain, qu’à la pointe délié de la plume” (136).

The conclusion, the ‘punt,’ of Thibaudet’s little contribution is fascinating. It is, I think, probably an example of some of the best that liberalism had to offer in the 1920s. Thibaudet has been describing Proust’s affinities to Montaigne, an interesting comparison because Proust writes very much about and from his own memory, while Montaigne is famously bad at remembering, and confined entirely to the present of his own writing. Thibaudet, having just called established the dynamism, the process-orientation, of this writing, pauses, and says, “On aura reconnu dans ces dernières ligns des expressions bergsoniennes, et elles nous amènent à des vues suggestives que j’introduis avec quelque réserve” (138). Before quoting, at length, the next paragraph, I wanted to pause and note the hesitance, almost trepidation, which marks Thibaudet’s plunge out of pure stylistic analysis, and into blood.

“Ces analogies entre Proust et Montaigne, leur singulier mobilisme à tous deux, ne seraient-elles pas en liaison avec un autre genre de parenté? Il est certain que la mère de Montaigne, une Lopez, était juive. Montaigne, voilà le seul de nos grands écrivains chez qui soit présent le sang juif. On connaît l’hérédité analogue de Marcel Proust. Et telle est également l’hérédité mixte de grand philosophe que je viens de nommer...[mentions other examples]...Je songe à cette mobilité, à cette inquiétude d’Israël, à ces tentes dont Bossuet, dans le Serment sur l’Unité de l’Eglise, fait le symbole du peuple de Dieu...l’Odyssée, a cristallisé, lui-même, comme l’a montré Bérard, autour de doublets gréco-sémitiques. Un Montaigne, un Proust, un Bergson, installent dans notre complexe et riche univers littéraire ce qu’on pourrait appeler le doublet frano-sémitique, comme il y a des doublets littéraires franco-anglais, franco-allemand, franco-italian, comme la France elle-même est un doublet du Nord et du Midi. Mais ne prenons cela que de biais, et, nous aussi, en une mobilité qui n’appuie pas. La tradition française à laquelle nous devons rattacher un Marcel Proust, c’est une tradition vivante, imprévisible, singulière, une tradition en mouvement irréguliere, en ligne serpentine, en tours et en retours, qui, comme une phrase même, comme une page de Proust, dépasse toujours sa matière précise par son élasticité intérieure et par la profusion de son débordement” (138-139).

So this little chunk of text, which I’ve edited down a bit, first postulates a link between heredity and style—but as is typical of humanist racial discourse, there is a great deal of ambiguity about the exact mechanism of transmission of these stylistic traits. Clearly, style is here an expression of the functioning of the writer’s mind, we might now say personality, or perhaps character. Style of writing is closely linked to style of thought. (But also, in the quote from pg 136, it is close to the writer’s body). This style of thought is linked to blood, which is a way of saying what, exactly? Historical experience is tied up in this (the tents of Israel—simple metaphor, or is this the content of the claim? To what register, we might ask, does this image belong?)

Thibaudet then mentions the Odyssey, which everyone agrees is a foundation of ‘our’ civilization, and which, according to the French hellenist (Victor?) Bérard, is a greco-semitic ‘doublet.’ From this point on, we have a theory of hybridization circa 1920. (We might notice that, as generous as he is with his doublets, they all start ‘franco-...’). This hybridization takes place strictly between national-linguistic groups, which makes it sound, I think, more obsolete than it is. This vision of mixing blood (understood to mean national, in the mystic sense, tradition) is profoundly progressive. The French tradition is living and vibrant, elastic and always overflowing its boundaries—this is a result of all the mixing, especially the Jewish blood.

This sort of talk is reprehensible for what seem to me obvious reasons. The Nazis (or even, Thibaudet’s contemporary and the object of one of his studies, Charles Maurras) have only to say exactly the same thing as Thibaudet—and they are able to use it to justify doctrines of racial purity. The logic is, I think, exactly the same as in the argument about the Jews as a modernizing force in the economy of Europe. ‘Progressive’ historians, a number of them Jewish, re-wrote the history of European capitalism with Jewish bankers in the staring role, from the middle ages on. Everyone loves capitalism, right? But as politics radicalize, especially, I think it must be said, with the rise of radical socialist ‘scientific’ re-valuation of bourgeois society and its capitalist/industrialist underpinnings, the very narrative which had been understood to praise ‘the Jews’ (I introduce quotes now, because the category becomes problematic) is widely available to damn them. All this is what was discussed at Julie Mell’s IHS session, but grows out of many sources. I don’t think Arendt puts it quite this way, but it is in her spirit.

So Thibaudet is, in literature, doing the same kind of thing that liberal, philosemitic historians did. His discourse is inside the same frame as Maurras’s, even as they disagree. Where does Bell stand in relation to this? Probably not far off.

clive bell on france

This is most of the last paragraph from an essay reproduced in William Bywater's 1975 'rehabilitation' of Bell. I especially like: "Her literature is to English what her painting is to Italian, only more so."

From “Order and Authority, I” Athenaeum. 1919.

“France, the greatest country on earth, is singularly poor in the greatest characters—great ones she has galore. Her standard of civilization, of intellectual and spiritual activity, is higher than that of any other nation; yet an absence of vast, outstanding figures is one of the most obvious facts in her history. Her literature is to English what her painting is to Italian, only more so. Her genius is enterprising without being particularly bold or original, and though it has brought so much to perfection it has discovered comparatively little. Assuredly France is the intellectual capital of the world, since, compared with hers, all other post-Renaissance civilizations have an air distinctly provincial. Yet, face to face with the rest of the world, France is provincial herself.” (pg 172)

messy, almost provoked

"I do not suggest that in the spring of 1914 English society was brilliant or anything of that sort: I think it was tired of being merely decent. One or two fine ladies had made open-mindedness and a taste for ideas fashionable: snobisme was doing the rest. And we may as well recognize, without more ado, that, Athens and Florence being things of the past, a thick-spread intellectual and artistic snobisme is the only possible basis for a modern civilization."

...

"Even before the war we were not such fools as to suppose that a new world would grow up in a night. First had to grow up a generation of civilized men and women to desire and devise it. That was where the intellectual dilletanti came it. Those pert and unpopular people who floated about propounding unpleasant riddles and tweaking up the law wherever it had been most solemnly laid down were, in fact, making possible the New Age. Not only did they set chattering the rich and gibbering with rage the less presentable revolutionaries, it was they wh poured out the ideas that filtered through to the trades-union class; and, if that class was soon to create and direct a brand-new State, it was high time that it should begin to handle the sort of ideas these people had to offer. Doubtless the trade-unionists would have developed a civilization sweeter and far more solid than that which flitted so airily from salon to studio, from Bloomsbury to Chelsea; before long, I dare say, they would have dismissed our theories as heartless and dry and absurd to boot; in the end, perhaps, they would have had our heads off—but not, I think, until they had got some ideas into their own. The war has ruined our little patch of civility as thoroughly as a revolution could have done; but, so far as I can see, the war offers nothing in exchange. That is why I take no further interest in schemes for social reconstruction."

Clive Bell, “Before the War.” 1917.

The above paragraphs, I think, summarize nicely the most important bits of Bell’s essay. There’s a remarkably poignancy, for me, in Bell’s whole perspective. He’s an intolerable snob, but he believes firmly that, although such snobisme as he practices is itself bad, it is still the best way to move forward with what is undeniably good. Of course, the ‘undeniably good’ is a purely experiential value. That is, for Bell, culture is good in so far as it provides a maximum of aesthetic experience. There can be no other serious criteria—which position is honest, beautiful, and, to me, totally unacceptable.

The ‘dilletanti’ tweaking the law, to whom he refers—it’s hard not to read them, if we’re going to be very historical, as the Bloomsbury kiddies who pulled the prank on the battleship. Any aspiring marxist would point out how meaningless this gesture was. Yes, navy officers are terribly ignorant and humorless—what do you want from the armed forces, poetry?

So the question, for me, is how to rescue a tone, a sort of moral self-positioning, from what I cannot help but regard as an ‘objectively’ reprehensible moral position. At the very least, it’s naive, it’s a political position taken with no reference to the experience—and let there be no mistake about it, for Bell, one cannot have a politique in the french sense of the word if one is not essentially concerned with experience—with no reference whatsoever to the experience of the laboring, benighted, luckless poor.

The position is perhaps salvageable now for the very reason that it is so hard to make any sense out of an abstract ‘poor.’ Even marxisant terms make no sense any more, at least to me. So if there is no unitary underclass, no single field determined by a defined set of social conditions, occupation of which could serve to mark an individual or sociability as part of ‘the underclass,’ then what the hell are we to do?

Certainly, one adopts irony as a working technique. It is bitter, it is mean. One must build a social theory which no where requires anything like ‘authenticity.’ It is a twisted word. One must learn to build—which is to say, imagine—a social world which enforces the GOOD, but is built not on truth, rather, on its negation. Not even a lie, simply the social fact of a dropped value. That is the meaning, I think, of snobisme as social progress. Finally, people begin to act right, even if it is for an utterly contingent, terribly fragile reason.

The lesson I want from Clive Bell is the jouissance of the ephemeral.

[i should have stopped there, but i didn't. in the interests of objectivity, such as it is, i preserve below the drivel with which I continued. (9.3.07)]

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From a metacritical perspective, there are two ways to take one’s jouissance in the ephemeral. One is blind. There, in the image the protestant imperialist cast of the savage, one sees only that which is before one—always with the terrible, destabilizing suggestion that indeed, what the savage sees is all that there is. The route of vision relies, similarly, on a destruction of the space of subjectivity. One sees, one reacts. That is all. Therefore, vision, as a revelation of the world as it is, provokes ecstasy. Of course, in conversation, one would reject such an idea. One would scoff at the claim that there is such a thing as ‘the world as it is;’ and yet. In silence and solitude, it is hard to deny, short, at least, of paranoia, that the water of the individual washes always up against the shores of reality—and these days this is not so much an ocean around as island as a shrinking lake, provoked by intemperate winds, testing its earthen prison. Still, there is the foam at the top of the wave, there is the deep, the shallow, the sunset; there remain, even in our little lake, the drowned, the saved, and those who, paddling in good faith on the surface, know not what they do.

Clearly, there can be only one way to enter into jouissance outside of the metacritical. Yet, I think, this last is a myth. In the sense that it can never, has never happened. Yet, and this is the crucial thing about myths, it’s what people use to understand the world. So that, both of what I have called the ‘metacritical’ routes into jouissance are essentially mythic—they both are attempts to approximate this immediate, unmediated experience. That is to say, pure experience is never possible, but therefore neither is the 'once-removed-experience' of the metacritical.