Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties Read Free Page B

models. On 23 June 1919 Marcel Proust published A l’Ombre des jeunes filles , the beginning of a vast experiment in disjointed time and subterranean sexual emotions which epitomized the new pre-occupations. Six months later, on 10 December, he was awarded the Prix Goncourt, and the centre of gravity of French letters had made a decisive shift away from the great survivors of the nineteenth Century. 22 Of course as yet such works circulated only among the influential few. Proust had to publish his first volume at his own expense and sell it at one-third the cost of production (even as late as 1956, the complete A la Récherche du temps perdu was still seiling less than 10,000 sets a year). 23 James Joyce, also working in Paris, could not be published at all in the British Isles. His Ulysses , completed in 1922, had to be issued by a private press and smuggled across frontiers. But its significance was not missed. No novel illustrated more clearly the extent to which Freud’s concepts had passed into the language of literature. That same year, 1922, the poet T.S.Eliot, himself a newly identified prophet of the age, wrote that it had ‘destroyed the whole of the nineteenth Century’. 24 Proust and Joyce, the two great harbingers and centre-of-gravity-shifters, had no place for each other in the Weltanschauung they inadvertently shared. They met in Paris on 18 May 1922, after the first night of Stravinsky’s Rénard , at a party for Diaghilev and the cast, attended by the composer and his designer, Pablo Picasso. Proust, who hadalready insulted Stravinsky, unwisely gave Joyce a lift home in his taxi. The drunken Irishman assured him he had not read one syllable of his works and Proust, incensed, reciprocated the compliment, before driving on to the Ritz where he had an arrangement to be fed at any hour of the night. 25 Six months later he was dead, but not before he had been acclaimed as the literary interpreter of Einstein in an essay by the celebrated mathematician Camille Vettard. 26 Joyce dismissed him, in Finnegans Wake , with a pun: ‘Prost bitte’.
    The notion of writers like Proust and Joyce ‘destroying’ the nineteenth Century, as surely as Einstein and Freud were doing with their ideas, is not so fanciful as it might seem. The nineteenth Century saw the climax of the philosophy of personal responsibility – the notion that each of us is individually accountable for our actions – which was the joint heritage of Judeo-Christianity and the classical world. As Lionel Trilling, analysing Eliot’s verdict on Ulysses , was to point out, during the nineteenth Century it was possible for a leading aesthete like Walter Paret, in The Renaissance , to categorize the ability ‘to burn with a hard, gem-like flame’ as ‘success in life’. ‘In the nineteenth Century’, Trilling wrote, even ‘a mind as exquisite and detached as Pater’s could take it for granted that upon the life of an individual person a judgment of success or failure might be passed.’ 27 The nineteenth-century novel had been essentially concerned with the motal or spiritual success of the individual. A la Récherche and Ulysses marked not merely the entrance of the anti-hero but the destruction of individual heroism as a central element in imaginative creation, and a contemptuous lack of concern for moral balance-striking and verdicts. The exercise of individual free will ceased to be the supremely interesting feature of human behaviour.
    That was in full accordance with the new forces shaping the times. Marxism, now for the first time easing itself into the seat of power, was another form of gnosticism claiming to peer through the empirically-perceived veneer of things to the hidden truth beneath. In words which strikingly foreshadow the passage from Freud I have just quoted, Marx had pronounced: ‘The final pattern of economic relationships as seen on the surface … is very different from, and indeed quite the reverse of, their inner but