Modern European Intellectual History

1. Modern EuropeanIntellectual History Lecture 19 The Novel of the 1920s: Time, Death, Epiphany

2. outline • intro • Marcel Proust: art against death • Thomas Mann: love against death • conclusion

3. Marcel Proust (1871-1922)

4. data • A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) (1913-27) • roman fleuve • Prix Goncourt • goal: the end of the novel (Le Temps retrouvé = Time Regained) as a theoretical proposal

5. flaws of bourgeois lifestyle • poisoned by the unavailability of deep or “true” self • In ordinary life “we live with our gaze averted from ourselves” and attend to “vanity and passion and the intellect, and habit too” which “smother our true impressions, so as entirely to conceal them from us, beneath a whole heap of verbal concepts and practical goals which we falsely call life” (252-3) • poisoned by intellect and by utilitarian attitude 

6. cont’d • poisoned by collective lif • “The unreality of the other [pleasures] is indicated clearly enough — is it not? — either by their inability to satisfy us, as is the case with social pleasures, the only consequence of which is likely to be the discomfort provoked by the ingestion of unwholesome food, or with friendship, which is a simulacrum, since, for whatever moral reasons he may do it, the artist who gives up an hour of work for an hour of conversation with a friend knows that he is sacrificing a reality for something that does not exist (our friends being friends only in the light of an agreeable folly which travels with us through life and to which we readily accommodate ourselves, but which at the bottom of our hearts we know to be no more reasonable than the delusion of the man who talks to the furniture because he believes that it is alive)” (248).

7. cont’d • poisoned by the fact that all pleasures are comparatively fleeting “…by the sadness which follows their satisfaction, …. which seemed trivial simply because I had achieved it” (248). • “reality” — “remote from our daily preoccupations, from which we separate ourselves by an ever greater gulf as the conventional knowledge which we substitute for it grows thicker and more impermeable” so much so that “it is very easy for us to die without ever having known [what] is, quite simply, our life. Real life, life at last laid bare and illuminated. … But most men do not see it because they do not seek to shed light upon it” (252).

8. the Bergsonian background • “The immobility of things” as “forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves and not anything else, by the immobility of our conception of them” (234). memory involuntary v. voluntary memory “the memory of the intellect”; “the pictures which that kind of memory shows us preserve nothing of the past itself”; “It is a labor in vain to attempt to recapture [the past]: all the efforts of our intellect prove futile” (237).

9. involuntary memory • “It depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die” (238). • “essential character … that I was not free to choose them, that such as they were they were given to me. And I realized that this must be the mark of their authenticity” (251) • “fortuitous and inevitable” (251) • dreams as “one of the modes of rediscovering lost time” (256). • “the pleasure which this contemplation had, at rare intervals, given me in my life, was the only genuine and fruitful pleasure that I had known” (248)

10. involuntary memory as a response to human finitude • “I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal” (238) • “a joy which was like a certainty and which sufficed, without any other proof, to make death a matter of indifference to me” (242) • “the word ‘death’ should have no meaning for him; situated outside time, why should he fear the future?” (246)

11. the meaning of time • time as the Realm of impending death; memory as a way beyond time • “This explained why it was that my anxiety on the subject of my death had ceased at the moment when I had unconsciously recognized the taste of the little Madeleine, since the being which at that moment I had been was an extra-temporal being and therefore unalarmed by the vicissitudes of the future” (245). • but how to convert the experience of memory into permanent life • “the task before me was to discover what — disappointed as I had always been by the actuality of places and people — I had … come to think of as unrealizable” (244). • action useless • “the reality of life must reside elsewhere than in action” (249). “our inherent powerlessness to realize ourselves in material enjoyment or in effective action” (250).

12. the solution: a work of art • “life—the only life … which can be said to be really lived — is literature” (252). • “Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us” (253). • “And I understood that all these materials for a work of literature were simply my past life” (255). • “a life … can be realized within the confines of a book.”

13. implausibilities about/threats to this solution • “all the time immanent in ordinary men no less than in the artist” (252) • “the contemplation, through it was of eternity, had been fugitive” (248) • “How many … turn aside from writing! What tasks do men not take upon themselves in order to evade this task! Every public event … furnishes the writer with a fresh excuse for not attempting to decipher this book… The intellect supplies us with pretexts for evading it” (251). • “the true paradises are the paradises we have lost” (244) • “What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking and where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not yet exist which it alone can make actual, which it alone can bring into the light of day” (238).

14. cont’d • “As for the inner book of unknown symbols…, if I tried to read them no one could help me with any rules, for to read them was an act of creation in which no one can do our work for us or even collaborate with us” (251). • “When I awoke first in the middle of the night, not knowing where I was, I could not even be sure at first who I was; I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal’s consciousness; I was more destitute than the cave-dweller; but then the memory — not yet of the place in which I was, but of various other places where I had lived and might now very possibly be — would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being…” (234). • death as “a threat not to myself but to my book” (262). • “By a strange coincidence, this rational fear of danger was taking shape in my mind at a moment when I had finally become indifferent to the idea of death” (261). • “No doubt my books too, like my fleshly being, would in the end one day die. But death is a thing that we must resign ourselves to. We accept the thought that in ten years we ourselves, in a hundred years our books, will have ceased to exist. Eternal duration is promised no more to men’s works than to men” (264). • “giants plunged into the years”

15. Thomas Mann • Reflections of a Non-Political Man (1918) • The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg) (1924) • Nobel prize, 1929

16. the effect of war • “Thoughts on War” (1914) • “Frederick and the Great Coalition” (1914) • Death in Venice: “he too had been a soldier and a warrior: for art was war, an exhausting struggle.” • “France has a way of putting its opponent in the wrong — feminine to such an extent that one lowers one’s arms.” • Reflections of a Non-Political Man (1918) • “‘Intellect’ presses for humanity; but what would  humanity be that had lost its masculine component? Whoever honors, loves, and affirms human nature must above all wish for it to remain complete. He will not want, in its variety of forms, to miss that of the warrior, he will not want humans beings to divide up into merchants and literati — which is what makes democracy.”

17. the reversal • “On the German Republic” (1922) • “Even the manliest among contemporary spirits, whose poetry is an austere cult of manliness … has also seen in the reality of war today ‘only destruction without value’.” “Freedom is not a game, not a recreation… Its other name is responsibility — and so it becomes clearer that it is a heavy burden: and particularly for the spiritually talented. There is reason to doubt that everyone who calls for it … is up to the task.”

18. The Magic Mountain • Hans Castorp • Settembrini • Leo Naphta • Clavdia Chauchat • “Snow” • epiphany

19. love as strong as death? • “I have made a dream-poem of humanity. I will cling to it. I will be good. I will let death have no mastery over my thoughts. For therein lies goodness and love of humankind, and in nothing else. Death is a great power. … Reason stands simple before him, for reason is only virtue, while death is release, immensity, abandon, desire. Desire, says my dream. Lust, not love. Death and love — no, I cannot make a poem of them, they don’t go together. Love stands opposed to death. It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death. Only love, not reason, gives sweet thoughts. And from love and sweetness alone can form come: form and civilization, friendly enlightened, beautiful human intercourse … I have taken stock. I will remember. I will keep faith with death in my heart, yet will remember that faith with death and the dead is evil, is hostile to humankind, so soon as we give it power over thought and action. For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts. — And with this, I awake.” • “Out of death, and the rebellion of the flesh, there came to you, and you took stock of yourself, a dream of love. Out of this universal feast of death, out of this extremity of fever, kindling the rain-washed evening sky to a fiery glow, may it be that Love one day shall mount?”

20. “A Brother” (1939) • “there is absolutely no limit to the extent the unconscious can go in effective projection of itself upon reality” (300) • the barbarism and passion of Death in Venice “twenty years later were to be the property of the man in the street” (301) • “I like to think, yes, I am certain, that a future is now on the way in which art uncontrolled by mind, art as black magic, the issue of brainlessly irresponsible instinct, will be as much condemned as, in humanly frail times like ours, it is reverenced. Art, certainly, is not all sweetness and light. But neither is it all a brew of darkness, not all a freak of the tellurian underworld, not simply ‘life.’ More clearly and happily than ever will the artist of the future realize his mission as a white enchanter, as a winged, hermetic, moon-sib mediator between spirit and life. And mediation itself is spirit” (302). • “this notion of disease and death as a necessary route to knowledge, health, and life is what makes The Magic Mountain a novel of initiation,” providing “a conception of future humanity that has passed through and survived the profoundest knowledge of disease and death.”