More on Consolation in Proust

Rather than adding a comment to Antonia's post about consolation in Proust I thought I will write a separate one. May be it was because I read Hofmannsthal's Lord Chandos Letter recently (a few weeks back actually) and in general trying to read some introductory essays about language and consciousness, the passage that Antonia quoted seemed strikingly similar to what Hofmannsthal talks of in his letter -- Trees you have nothing to say to me, how can one communicate an experience if one hasn't felt it, what if the only thing one has is an awareness of emptiness inside the soul? It is true Hofmannsthal is more concerned about the language but essentially both reaching at the same conclusion. The dissolution and fragmentation of human experience.

But. If only you read a few paragraphs further Proust becomes much more hopeful about the role of literature. The experience of alienation and emptiness is the result of a particular way of looking at the world, that is with an indifference. The narrator says just in the sentence after the excerpted passage:

"I had made these various observations with the indifference I might have felt if, when walking in a garden with a lady, I had remarked a leaf of glass and further on an object like alabaster the unusual colour of which would not have distracted me from agonising boredom but which I had pointed at out of politeness to the lady and to show her that I had noticed them though they were coloured glass and stucco. "

And further when one madeleine moment even seems to restore his "faith in literature" he repudiates his earlier grim and depressing conclusions. And finally what further proof of consolation one needs when we have one such in our hands, in front of our eyes, the very book we are reading. The very existence of the book itself is a consolation. The way out is to open oneself to more and more such madeleine moments in our lives, and that can happen only by living and experience life primarily through our aesthetic faculties, and the way an aesthetic experience combines desire, memories and mourning.

"As at the moment when I tasted the madeleine, all my apprehensions about the future, all my intellectual doubts, were dissipated. Those doubts which had assailed me just before, regarding the reality of my literary gifts and even regarding the reality of literature itself were dispersed as though by magic. This time I vowed that I should not resign myself to ignoring why, without any fresh reasoning, without any definite hypothesis, the insoluble difficulties of the previous instant had lost all importance as was the case when I tasted the madeleine.

The servant in his ineffectual efforts not to make a noise had knocked a spoon against a plate. The same sort of felicity which the uneven paving-stones had given me invaded my being; this time my sensation was quite different, being that of great heat accompanied by the smell of smoke tempered by the fresh air of a surrounding forest and I realised that what appeared so pleasant was the identical group of trees I had found so tiresome to observe and describe when I was uncorking a bottle of beer in the railway carriage and, in a sort of bewilderment, I believed for the moment, until I had collected myself, so similar was the sound of the spoon against the plate to that of the hammer of a railway employee who was doing something to the wheel of the carriage while the train was at a standstill facing the group of trees, that I was now actually there. One might have said that the portents which that day were to rescue me from my discouragement and give me back faith in literature, were determined to multiply themselves, for a servant, a long time in the service of the Prince de Guermantes, recognised me and, to save me going to the buffet, brought me some cakes and a glass of orangeade into the library."

Passages copied from the Scott Moncrieff translation.