How Proust Can Change Your Life

If Ganderax had worried about the sincerity of what he was saying, he might have resisted capping the thought that 1871 was a bad year with the melodramatic claim that it was in fact “that most abominable of all years.” Paris might have been under siege by the Prussian army at the beginning of 1871, the starving populace might have been driven to eat elephants from the Jardin des Plantes, the Prussians might have marched down the Champs-Élysées and the Commune imposed tyrannical rule, but did these experiences really stand a chance of being conveyed in an overblown, thunderous phrase like this?

But Ganderax hadn’t written nonsensical fine phrases by mistake. It was the natural outcome of his ideas on how people should express themselves. For Ganderax, the priority of good writing was to follow precedent, to follow examples of the most distinguished authors in history, while bad writing began with the arrogant belief that one could avoid paying homage to great minds and write according to one’s fancy. It was fitting that Ganderax had elsewhere awarded himself the title of “Defender of the French Language.” The language needed to be protected against the assaults of decadents who refused to follow the rules of expression dictated by tradition, leading Ganderax to complain publicly if he spotted a past participle in the wrong place or a word falsely applied in a published text.

Proust couldn’t have disagreed more with such a view of tradition, and let Madame Straus know it:

Every writer is obliged to create his own language, as every violinist is obliged to create his own “tone”…. I don’t mean to say that I like original writers who write badly. I prefer—and perhaps it’s a weakness—those who write well. But they begin to write well only on condition that they’re original, that they create their own language. Correctness, perfection of style do exist, but on the other side of originality, after having gone through all the faults, not this side. Correctness this side—“discreet emotion,” “smiling good nature,” “most abominable of all years”—doesn’t exist. The only way to defend language is to attack it, yes, yes, Madame Straus!

Ganderax had overlooked the way that every good writer in history, a history he so strongly wished to defend, had, in order to ensure adequate expression, broken a range of rules laid down by previous writers. If Ganderax had been alive in Racine’s day, Proust mockingly imagined that the Defender of the Language would have told even this embodiment of classical French that he couldn’t write very well, because Racine had written slightly differently than those before him. He wondered what Ganderax would have made of Racine’s lines in Andromaque:

I loved you fickle; faithful, what might I have done?…

Why murder him? What did he? By what right?

Who told you to?

Pretty enough, but didn’t these lines break important laws of grammar? Proust pictured Ganderax delivering a rebuke to Racine:

I understand your thought; you mean that since I loved you when you were fickle, what might that love have been if you had been faithful. But it’s badly expressed. It could equally well mean that

you

would have been faithful. As official defender of the French language, I cannot let that pass

.

“I’m not making fun of your friend, Madame, I assure you,” claimed Proust, who hadn’t stopped ridiculing Ganderax since the start of his letter. “I know how intelligent and learned he is. It’s a question of ‘doctrine.’ This man who is so sceptical has grammatical certainties. Alas, Madame Straus, there are no certainties, even grammatical ones.… [O]nly that which bears the imprint of our choice, our taste, our uncertainty, our desire and our weakness can be beautiful.”