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JOSE
ORTEGA
Y GASSET
TIME DEATH,
cut off our own pleasures.1 Many people, in every country, had
based their budget of future delights upon new books by Proust.
This phenomenon of a public which "waits for" the next work of an
author is extremely rare, and has been for some time. Certainly,
there is no lack of worthy writers whom we receive in our libraries
whenever they present themselves. But that we always receive their
visit with politeness and respect does not mean that we desire it.
For these gentlemen writing consists in forcing oneself to take
positions or poses. With the most commendable constancy they subject us to their meager repertory of stereotyped life-studies. After a
few unavailing performances we feel no urgent need to undergo
the spectacle again.
But there are writers of another sort: those who have the luck or
genius to have stumbled upon a vein of "things." Their situation is
very similar to that of discoverers in science. With simplicity and a
stupefying effortlessness they feel their foot gliding through a new
region of aesthetic possibilities. If, using a vague and mystical term,
we are accustomed to calling the first type of writers "creators," we
shall have to call the second type "inventors" with everything that
word signifies in its Latin root. For they have found the new and
hidden fauna of an unknown countryside; at the very least, they
have discovered a new way of seeing, a simple law of optics in which
a certain unusual index of refraction is formulated. The status of
such authors is much more assured: although their work is, in a
sense, always the same, it promises us new things, fresh displays,
and it is unlikely that eagerness to see them would be lacking in us.
When Plato looks for a suitable classification by which to distinguish
the philosophers, he fixes upon the class of philotheamones,or the
friends of seeing, those who like to look. He thought perhaps that
the most constant virtue in man is a certain visual enthusiasm.
Proust is one of these "inventors." In the midst of contemporary
production, which is so capricious, so lacking in necessity, his work
1 This essay first appeared in January 1923, two months after the death of Proust.
At that time La Prisonniere,La Fugitive, and Le TempsRetrouvehad not yet appeared. (IS)
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ORTEGA
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points which is a Renoir woman may give us supremely the sensation of warm human flesh; but a woman, in order to be beautiful,
must impose upon the mere expanse of her body the correct limit of
a definite outline. Similarly, the literary and psychological method
of Proust prevents him from modeling feminine figures of an attractive sort. Notwithstanding the predilection accorded her, the
Duchesse de Guermantes seems to us ugly and self-assertive and
nothing more. If, however, we were to enjoy anew the torrid years
of our youth, it is certain that we would once again fall in love with
la Sanseverina, that woman of so tranquil a face and so quivering
a heart.
In short, Proust brings to literature what might be called a predominantly atmospheric purpose. The landscape and the charachas been volatiters, the inner world and the outer-everything
lized into an aerial and diffuse palpitation. I would say that the
world of Proust was made to be experienced like respiration, since
everything in it flows like a current of air. In these volumes nobody
does anything, nor does anything happen: there is just a passive
succession of static situations. It could not have been otherwise: in
order to do something, one must first be something definite. The
action of an animal always develops like a line that originates by
its own will and is reborn whenever impeded by obstacles, thereby
revealing the existence of a self in opposition to intervening resistance. For this reason, the broken line that is the action of an animal
-man or beast-is charged with a latent dynamism which lends
dramatic impact to the very development of the action. The
characters in Proust, however, belong to a vegetative order. For the
plant, living is being, not doing. Submerged in the atmosphere and
incapable of opposing itself to it, the plant's passivity eliminates
the dramatic. Likewise, the characters of Proust have a botanical
being, inert within their atmospheric destinies, their lives with vegetative submission reduced to a chlorophyllian function, a chemical
dialogue always the same, quasi-anonymous and one in which the
plant tractably receives the imperatives of its environment.
In these books, the real agents of human change are not the
characters so much as the winds and climates, both physical and
moral, which successively envelop them. The biography of each
character is dominated by certain spiritual trade winds that
alternately sweep against it and polarize its sensibility. Everything
depends upon the direction from which the squall happens to blow;
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ORTEGA
GASSET
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and just as there are freezing blasts and balmy currents, winds from
the north and from the south, so too the Proustian character varies
according as the gust of existence blows from the C6te de Meseglise
or the C6te de Guermantes. There is nothing surprising in the frequency with which this writer speaks of "c6tes" since, the world
being a meteorological reality for him, he naturally thinks in terms
of quadrants.
I suggest, then, that an inspired rejection of the external and conventional form of things forces Proust to define them by reference to
their inner form, their internal structure. But this structure is of a
microscopic sort, which explains why Proust had to get so abnormally close to things, and why he was led into poetic histology.
More than anything else his work resembles those anatomical
treatises that the Germans entitle, for example: UberfeinerenBau der
Retinades Kanninchens,
"On the microstructure of the retina of the
rabbit."
Microscopic interest signifies an interest in details. An interest in
details requires prolixity. The atmospheric interpretation of human
life, and the minute analysis used in describing it, inevitably impose
upon the works of Proust an attribute that might well appear to be a
defect. I am referring to the peculiar fatigue that the reading of
these volumes produces in even their most devoted admirers. If it
were merely a question of the usual fatigue that feather-brained
books secrete, there would be nothing more to say about it. But
the fatigue that comes with reading Proust has very special characteristics and has nothing to do with boredom. With Proust we never
get bored. It is very rare that even a single page should be lacking
in adequate, indeed ample, intensity. Nevertheless, we are always
ready, at any moment, to leave off the reading of Proust. Moreover,
throughout the work we feel ourselves constantly halted, as if we
were not allowed to advance at will, as if the rhythm of the author
were always slower than our own, imposing a perpetual ritardando
upon our haste.
Therein consists both the drawback and the advantage of impressionism: in the volumes of Proust, as I have said, nothing
happens, there is no dramatic action, there is no process. They are
composed of a series of pictures extremely rich in content, but
static. We mortals, however, by our very nature, are dynamic;
we are interested in nothing but movement.
When Proust tells us that the little bell jangles in the gateway of
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the garden in Combray and that one can hear the voice of Swann
who has just arrived, our attention lights upon this event and
gathering up its forces prepares to leap to another event which
doubtless is going to follow and for which the first one is preparatory. We do not inertly install ourselves in the first event; once we
have summarily understood it, we feel ourselves dispatched towards
another one still to come. In life, we believe, each event announces
its successorand is the point of transition towards it, and so on until
a trajectory has been traced, just as one mathematical point succeeds another until a line has been formed. Proust ruthlessly ignores our dynamic nature. He constantly forces it to remain in the
first event, sometimes for a hundred pages and more. Nothing
follows the arrival of Swann; no other point links up with this one.
On the contrary, the arrival of Swann in the garden, that simple
momentary event, that point of reality, expands without progressing, stretches without changing into another, increases in volume
and for page after page we do not depart from it: we only see it
grow elastically, swell up with new details and new significance, enlarge like a soap-bubble embroidering itself with rainbows and
images.
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ORTEGA
GASSET
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