The Impressionism of Marcel Proust

In the simplest sense, an object is that which exists independently of a subject. But how can objectivity in art be considered pure?—a thought which brings in question the puristic claims of the Non-Objectivist category of painting. How can any work exist independently of its creator? The school of fictional naturalism essayed a certain kind of impersonality and fidelity to concrete details at the expense of psychology. Nothing, however, can remind us better than the “social” novel of Marcel Proust that the failure of the naturalist school as such was due to the declassification of human personality into animal being. In objectifying the social self-consciousness of his characters (seen through a scientifically intense lens) Proust created the subjectivity of objects: the Parisian society of his time. One never doubts, in the work of one who is as subjective in spirit as any creative artist who ever lived, the objective existence of his subject-matter and its extreme identifiability.

In the unexpectedly recoiling, almost invisibly subsiding and reviving narrative themes of Proust, we become aware of a distinctive motion, a type of duration in the Bergsonian sense, that passes from the author into what he is writing about as an object and back into him; this is a process which seems perpetually to increase the intercourse between subject and object, and to transform them equally. As the subject (Proust) goes through a constant process of objectivization, the object (or the subject-matter) goes through a constant process of subjectivization. In his fundamental moral attitude toward the world, Proust is certainly scientific: interested in investigating the nature of objects. But he is a specialist only in that he is interested in the processes of sensation—that sensation intuited as a common experience of human society. This sensation is wholly positive and thus without the negative qualification of scientific method, which divides the object lifelessly. To Proust, the highest object in the world is the human individual, whose sensations are virtually, to him, sacred. It is not that Proust assumes the existence of a moral conception of social impulse, such as that embodied in Jules Romains’ theory of unanisme: a magnetic attraction of the spirit. It is entirely in the sensibility that Proust’s organizing and unifying principle is lodged—his own sensibility which was attuned to the most fragile “wave-length” of emotion he could apprehend in others.