A grand overview

This unassuming book is in fact a valuable addition to the Proust bibliography. The author, himself a painter, has had the apparently simple idea of extracting all references to works of art in the great novel in an attempt to demonstrate Proust’s knowledge of, and reliance on, paintings to give resonance to his characters and to present them to his readers in an indelible physical form. The exercise proves both seductive and enlightening.

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Proust was a translator of Ruskin, yet he rejected Ruskin’s message that art has a moral foundation. For Proust art was a self-explanatory and self-sustaining exercise which excluded praise and condemnation. His work is filled with characters who are undoubtedly venal. Only the Narrator’s mother, his grandmother, and the creative artists — Elstir the painter, Vinteuil the composer, Bergotte the writer and Swann the aesthete — escape the narrator’s fascinated yet impassive gaze. This is due in large part to situating them in a context of wider references in which images function as aide-mémoires. But Proust’s conviction that everything is cyclical overrides their episodic appearance to establish the author as prime mover, battling mortality in a lethal contest from which he emerges triumphant. ‘My book is a painting’, he claimed in a letter to Jean Cocteau, and this was true both literally and metaphorically. In this way appearance becomes reality — a reality decreed by the Narrator and author alike.

References to painters and paintings are numerous in the novel, revealing an attention to detail with which Proust enhances — or, in the present author’s word, accessorises — his characters. Images are used to redeem them from their undistinguished reality. Odette is untutored, Charlus lascivious, but by comparing them variously with Botticelli and Velazquez prototypes, he raises them to a more exalted level, so that they inhabit not only a higher sphere but one which makes them visible to the reader.