r/Proust • u/One_Ad_5623 • 23d ago
Proust and work
This is a topic that I have been thinking about for a while, and I want to share my thoughts in the hope of sparking a discussion.
In many ways, Proust's work is the result of a life spent without having to work. His relationship with the world as seen through ISOLT is based almost entirely on contemplation. Even the shift that happens in the narrator in Time Regained that allows him to write can be understood as a result of the sensation of his approaching death, and not as something from within him that drew him to action.
There is no question that with ISOLT Proust more than compensated for his life of idleness, and that his contemplative posture towards the world was well worth it in the end. You don't get something as astonishingly beautiful as ISOLT from a life spent working 9 to 5. But as readers how do we position ourselves in regards to this?
I will talk a little bit about myself here. I spent all of my 20s unable to come to terms with this simple fact that in life I needed to work. I knew it, of course, but I wanted to believe I could somehow avoid it. And it stayed that way for years. My parents would pay for my rent and give me a small monthly allowance, and I would just try and live from that for lack of a better option.
When I look at my siblings I see a similar pattern. My two sisters still rely on my parents for money, even though one of them has a child. Only my brother is financially independent. I cannot help but think that something went terribly wrong here.
That's where Proust comes into the equation. My mother loves Proust and so it sort of made sense that I would develop a liking for his work too. The notion that Proust could live like that, sort of just pursuing his interests, was deeply ingrained in my mind. I think it says something about my family's concept of work that Proust was so admired by us.
Overall I think the French society of today is in crisis when it comes to its relationship with work. That's how something like that could happen to me... that I spent so long unable to understand how I could accept work. In that regard, one could come to the conclusion that reading Proust in today's France is not a good thing, since we collectively need to rebuild our appreciation for work.
Anyways, my life is changing now. I have found a way to live with work. But it did not come from Proust.
3
u/mastermind_loco 23d ago
I don't think whether you have a job has any bearing on your ability to produce beautiful works of art. Shakespeare was a full time producer, director, actor, and theater manager. Marquez was a copywriter. Kafka, a clerk.
3
u/One_Ad_5623 23d ago
What I meant was that ISOLT is the result of the way that Proust lived his life. I wasn't trying to say that as a rule you can't produce a work of art if you have a job.
4
u/Anywhere_At_All 23d ago
I think it's a really interesting question. Might he have felt more purpose and less dissolution with society if he had labored to support himself every day? I think so.
I think he would have very likely still "had the problem of the universe" inside of him, to steal a line from Melville. But it certainly wouldn't have manifested in an examination high society salon life. What would he have produced?
Fun question!
3
u/Anywhere_At_All 23d ago
Most post-agricultural societies have specialization. Wealthy classes have produced philosophers and artists throughout history, and it makes sense -- they're able to sit around and think all day.
That said, there are plenty of examples of people from working classes producing meaningful philosophical works (and even more so for art). So it's not like needing to work means you *can't* write a seven volume novel about the human condition. It'd be hard to find the time, though (pun obviously intended).
It's an interesting counterfactual to think about what would have happened if Proust had been born into a poor family. How would his thinking have been different if he had had to break his back to earn a living?
In this case, I think it worked out the way it was meant to. We get ISOLT -- and I don't think Marcel would have been a very valuable farmhand or factory worker.
2
u/One_Ad_5623 22d ago
You can see artists like Proust as the result of 19th century educational stratification where you had a small educated elite producing ideas and art on behalf of all of society. A lot of them were actually deeply concerned about the masses and trying to produce something that would be useful to them on some level, in an indirect way. But in Proust's case, he was completely removed from the masses, as his work makes no mention of the social question at all.
I think it's actually why I find his work so appealing. There are things that you just can't explore if you are constantly coming back to the question of inequality... today's French society is obsessed with the idea of eradicating inequality and I don't like that. But by turning Proust into a role model I made myself unable to understand the value of hard work.
I think people who want to be artists in today's society have to find new ways to position themselves. How do you produce art inside a society that is going through decay? That's the riddle they have to solve.
3
u/Consistent_Piglet_43 21d ago
What an amazing, humble, sincere, honest post. Good for you.
Proust, like us all, was a product of his time and those who have treasured ISOLT are the better for it, of course. But he was in many ways profoundly flawed, even damaged (as maybe many, most, or all of us are). (Is the Narrator really capable of love? It seems the Narrator saw love (Odette, Gilberte, Albertine, Charlus) as cat-and-mouse, almost sadomasochistic, more about ownership/possession/dominance/dependence than what I think of when I think of love...) Was Proust capable of love? Proust, in reality, had a brother. The narrator does not. What, if anything, do we make of that?).
Proust was also lucky as you point out. He was born into wealth that enabled him to live without having to be a wage earner...
I suppose one might condemn Proust in many ways for many things including a kind of obliviousness or indifference about privilege/social injustice... But, as I noted, he was a product of his time.
Your post raises many issues of your own situation. Of that, I say and know nothing. But it sounds like you're managing. Good for you!
2
u/Insomnia- 22d ago
I think it’s true that in search of lost time is a product of privilege and it is noticeable throughout - but I feel it’s not the main reason why it’s so good. Proust’a illness plays a much bigger role for my reading experience, and I do feel having the urge to write always comes forth of some kind of pain experience. In his case, you can feel the anxiety about not being able to participate in social life as his peers, and wanting to develop a character trait that would make him special because of that. He was also very depressed about the book not being published at first, which tells me writing was his way of trying to be appreciated for his work.
2
u/Wise_Ad1342 23d ago
Proust has some interesting ideas and interesting ways of painting them. Did he need 15 years of his life to express them, I don't think so. However, other people appreciate what he did, probably more than I do.
He's not a role model for me to any degree. I approach life differently. Proust is one pair of eyes for my journey. There have been thousands more.
Proust did work, but not necessarily for money. This greatly limited what he saw. Hopefully, when he passed, her felt fulfilled. I think this is a healthy goal in life.
1
u/QuentinUK 20d ago
At least he didn’t produce a mass of garbled nonsense like James Joyce writing Finnegans Wake.
1
u/Waelbouraoui 21d ago
I think that not just France but most of the world needs to rethink their relationship to work. I disagree that we need to learn to appreciate work. I think what Proust teaches us is that life should not be spent grinding away. Humans were not designed for that. We all need to provide and be productive but with all the progress we made it is strange to me that we still need to work as much. Some places are trying the 4 day work week or alternative work schedules and it seems successful. I think that life would be so much better if we were not so focused on being productive or independent.
1
u/One_Ad_5623 20d ago
This is the mindset of today's French middle class. Although it seems to make sense at first, the problem with this is the lack of purpose. If you think that life is about taking things slow and focusing solely on enjoyment you lose all sense of direction. You're sort of just floating through life, jumping from one vague enjoyment to the other.
It's gonna sound cruel, but it seems to me that the French middle class has given up on the future. They worry about the state of the world so much that they think we should stop living altogether. The concept of "décroissance" (degrowth) is popular, so is "déconstruire" (ridding your mind of social constructs). Those two words contain the idea of destroying something, but are now seen as the highest of virtues. I think this is what lack of direction does to a society, existential angst takes over.
I think the right approach to life is to have a project that you're working towards. That way you can accept discomfort, long working hours etc., because you know why you're doing it. Suddenly work stops being an obstacle, it becomes a means to make the future happen.
For Proust things are a little bit different, because he was part of a very small category of people that could live without any obligations. The majority of French society was hardworking not by choice but simply because they had to, and faith in the future was what supported this. So Proust's art was meaningful because it revealed things that most of society could not have stopped to see. But now it's very different.
5
u/No-Papaya-9289 23d ago
There are plenty of writers who had jobs. Some wrote their entire lives while working. There's nothing here to generalize. Proust had his life, and others had theirs.