Proust on the Absence of God

In our December 7, 2012, meeting, Jaimey mentioned at one point the notable absence of religiosity in the Narrator's grandmother's death bed scene.

Sure there is a perfunctory priest praying in the corner, but he serves a function not unlike a piece of furniture: he is there simply because he is supposed to be there. We read as the Narrator grapples with many things -- his changeable emotions; the shock he feels when he witnesses what his grandmother has become ("a beast that had put on her hair and crouched among her bedclothes... panting, whimpering, making the blankets heave with its convulsions" (GW, 458)); the "long, joyous song" that she makes as she nears the end; the improprieties of visitors and servants; and so on. But nobody in the chapter appears to grapple with thoughts of the afterlife, God's divine will, etc. Thankfully, there is no talk of how all of this is according to an unknown, but nevertheless perfect, Plan.

It strikes me that this may be a good time to review some of the indications that Proust has given us, so far in our reading, as to his relationship with religion. Here are four few passages that I have underlined along the way:

1. While clinging to a hope that he might rekindle his relationship with Gilberte in the new year, the Narrator comments:

"For all that I might dedicate this new year to Gilberte, and, as one superimposes a religion on the blind laws of nature, endeavor to stamp New Year's Day with the particular image that I had formed of it, it was in vain... [I]t was passing in a wintry dusk.. the eternal common substance, the familiar moisture, the unheeding fluidity of old days and years" (WBG, 82).

(In the margin I scrawled: "Yes! atheist!")

2. While discussing (once again) the unique experience of awakening from sleep, the Narrator off-handedly speculates:

"What is it that guides us, when there has been a real interruption -- whether it be that our unconsciousness has been complete or our dreams entirely different from ourselves? There has indeed been a death... No doubt the room... awakens memories to which other, older memories cling ... And perhaps the resurrection of the soul after death is to be conceived as a phenomenon of memory" (GW, 111).

(Here I wrote in the margin: "Not likely." After all, I ask you, if we ascribe the "resurrection of the soul" to a "phenomenon of memory," doesn't this make absurd the claims of an afterlife? This, it seems to me, is a refutation of religion cleverly disguised as a concession.)

3. When the Narrator first recognizes that his grandmother has suffered a stroke, and is therefore that much closer to death, the Narrator finds that he cannot take her conversation at face value anymore. Her words, he remarks, "assumed a baseless, adventitious, fantastical air, because they sprang from this same being who tomorrow perhaps would have ceased to exist, for whom they would no longer have any meaning, from the non-being -- incapable of conceiving them -- which my grandmother would shortly be" (GW, 425).

(Here, the way I read it anyway, I think Proust is revealing, almost inadvertently, his true estimation of what happens at the expiration of life: i.e., "non-being".)

4. Last one. After recovering from his grandmother's death, the Narrator gladly goes back "into society." One evening, while commenting the unthinking grace and nobility that Saint-Loup brings to everything he does, the Narrator reflects:

"An artist has no need to express his thought directly in his work for the latter to reflect its quality; it has even been said that the highest praise for God consists in the denial of him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect that he can dispense with the creator" (GW, 568).

(This comment strikes me as intended to be a witty one -- not a serious argument against the atheist viewpoint. Note that he does not assume it as his own; he introduces it with the phrase "it has even been said.")

Any more that you have found? Please add them in the comments!

Comments

[Tom]

Sheri writes in with this discussion of the afterlife from pp. 245-246 of Volume V. The Narrator is discussing Bergotte's death:

"He was dead. Dead for ever? Who can say? Certainly, experiments in spiritualism offer us no more proof than the dogmas of religion that the soul survives death. All that we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying a burden of obligations contracted in a former life; there is no reason inherent in the conditions of life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to begin over gain a score of times a piece of work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his worm-eaten body, like the patch of yellow wall painted with so much skill and refinement by an artist destined to be for ever unknown and barely identified under the name Vermeer. All these obligations, which have no sanction in our present life, seem to belong to a different world, a world based on kindness, scrupulousness, and self-sacrifice, a world entirely different from this one and which we leave in order to be born on this earth, before perhaps returning there to live once again beneath the sway of those unknown laws which we obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, not knowing whose hand had traced them there--those laws to which every profound work of the the intellect brings us nearer and which are invisible only--if then!--to fools. So that the idea that Bergotte was not dead for ever is by no means improbable" (ML, 245-246).

This seems an uncharacteristic piece of wishful thinking by the Narrator, to me. Doesn't it to you? Simply because we toil at projects, showing, on occasion, "kindness, scrupulousness and self-sacrifice, why should we therefore assume a "different world" with "unknown laws"? Isn't that a leap too far? I still think the idea that Bergotte is not dead forever remains highly improbable. So why does Proust have the Narrator speculate this way? Is he demonstrating the popular thinking of the day? Is it a slip into sentimentality because of Bergotte's special status as a fellow writer?