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The Writing of Fiction
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Proust as Renovator: Vision, Life-Giving & Moral Sensibility

The Writing of Fiction Edith Wharton
proust renovator life-giver moral-sensibility tradition

Key Principle

Proust is the book's thesis proved on its hardest case. He is "a renovator," not an innovator: "His strength is the strength of tradition. All his newest and most arresting effects have been arrived at through the old way of selection and design." He seemed revolutionary only on the surface — "his desultory manner and parenthetical syntax, and chiefly because of the shifting of emphasis resulting from his extremely personal sense of values." New vision, old technique.

Why This Matters

Proust's case settles the originality question. "It is as much the lack of general culture as of original vision which makes so many of the younger novelists ... attach undue importance to trifling innovations. Original vision is never much afraid of using accepted forms." False novelty is "reversion to a discarded trick of technique" mistaken for the genuinely new — the very error that genuine vision never needs to commit.

Good Examples

  • The life-giver (the touchstone of greatness). "The quality the greatest novelists have always had in common is that of making their people live" — Jusserand's phrase for Shakespeare, "un grand distributeur de vie," applied to Proust. "Not all the other graces and virtues combined seem to have in them that aseptic magic." His characters survive even his own endless analysis — "they resist in their tough vitality his perpetual nervous manipulation, and keep carelessly on their predestined way" — the inverse of the situation-novel's puppet failure.
  • Design as brooding, not plot-weaving. "A peculiar duality of vision enabled him to lose himself in each episode ... and all the while to keep his hand on the main threads of the design." This organic unity comes "through something like the slow ripening processes of nature" — Tyndall's "brooding upon facts," which Wharton calls "perhaps as near an approach as can be made to the definition of genius." Order that grew rather than was assembled.
  • The anticipatory flash. The "Combray" goodnight-kiss is the illuminating incident at its peak (see The Illuminating Incident).

Counterpoints

  • Moral sensibility as the tuning-fork — Proust's one grave flaw. The defect is not portraying vile characters fully ("On the contrary, he increases [the work's value]" — Iago, Lord Steyne, Charlus, Falstaff). The defect is failing to see the evil: "when he fails to see the blackness of the shadow they project, and thus unconsciously flattens his modelling, does he correspondingly empoverish the picture." The exact link between moral and aesthetic failure: "wherever the moral sensibility fails, the tremor, the vibration, ceases ... reversing Pygmalion's gesture, the author turns living beings back to stone." A lapse in moral perception directly kills the life-givingness that is his supreme gift.
  • Fear as the limiting horizon. The root cause: courage is simply absent from Proust's moral world. "Fear ruled his moral world: fear of death, fear of love, fear of responsibility, fear of sickness, fear of draughts, fear of fear. It formed the inexorable horizon of his universe."

Key Quotes

"His strength is the strength of tradition. All his newest and most arresting effects have been arrived at through the old way of selection and design." — Edith Wharton, Chapter V: Marcel Proust

"Wherever the moral sensibility fails, the tremor, the vibration, ceases ... reversing Pygmalion's gesture, the author turns living beings back to stone." — Edith Wharton, Chapter V: Marcel Proust

Rules of Thumb

  • Judge your own gift by whether your people live — it is the touchstone no other virtue replaces.
  • Reach unity by brooding a subject into ripeness, not by mechanically weaving plot.
  • Guard moral perception as a craft faculty: where it fails, the life goes out of the characters.
  • Don't mistake a new manner for vision; original vision freely uses accepted forms.

Related References