Standing on a street corner with Marcel, the Baron de Charlus explains his admiration for all those German manly men he has known (and we can guess there have been many), as opposed to their less impressive counterparts in France.
"You see," he says,
"...that splendid sturdy fellow the Boche soldier is strong and healthy and thinks only of the greatness of his country, Deutschland über Alles, which is not as stupid as you might think, whereas we, while they were preparing themselves in a virile fashion, were hopelessly sunk in dilettantism" (TR, 171).
Marcel interrupts Charlus' flow at this point, for his reader's benefit, so as to add a gloss explaining Charlus' (mis)use of the term 'dilettantism':
"This word probably signified for M. de Charlus something analogous to literature" (TR, 171).
Back on the street corner, however, Marcel says nothing. So, assuming that he has a sympathetic listener, Charlus continues:
"Yes, we were sunk in dilettantism, all of us, you too, you may remember. Like me you may say your mea culpa. We have been too dilettante."
Again, Marcel has to add a gloss. Commenting on this conversation from a safe remove, Marcel cannot let this accusation go unanswered.
"I replied as though I too, as he suggested, had cause to beat my breast -- an idiotic reaction, for I could not be accused of the slightest suggestion of dilettantism" (TR, 273).
And that's that.
M. de Charlus bids Marcel goodbye, and they part.
This brief exchange leapt out at me when I read it, though, due to the vehemence of Marcel's language ("idiotic," not "the slightest suggestion").
I wondered what made Marcel so sure -- or at least feel so compelled to emphasize to his readers -- that he is not a dilettante.
So you can see why, a little later in the novel when the term came up again, my ears perked up.
Sitting in the library at the Prince de Guermantes' house, Marcel is arguing against realism in art, with its false claims of "objectivity"... He remarks that a "lie"
“… is all that can be reproduced by the art that styles itself “true to life,” an art that is as simple as life, without beauty, a mere vain and tedious duplication of what our eyes see and our intellect records, so vain and so tedious that one wonders where the writer who devotes himself to it can have found the joyous and impulsive spark that was capable of setting him in motion and making him advance in his task. The greatness, on the other hand, of true art, of the art which M. de Norpois would have called a dilettante’s pastime, lay, I had come to see, elsewhere: we have to rediscover, to reapprehend, to make ourselves fully aware of that reality, remote from our daily preoccupations, from which we separate ourselves by an ever greater gulf as the conventional knowledge which we substitute for it grows thicker and more impermeable, that reality which it is very easy for us to die without ever having known and which is, quite simply, our life” (TR, 298).
Now, what is going on here?
We saw how, when Charlus in passing suggests that Marcel may have cause to regret his years of "dilettantism," Marcel calls any affirmation of this notion an "idiotic reaction." Yet when he himself talks later of the greatness of true art, he acknowledges that Norpois might call it a "dilettante's pastime." Which is this, then, an appropriate or inappropriate association to make, between dilettantism and literature?
Or are Charlus and Norpois both using the term in the wrong way?
And finally, If Marcel thinks they are mistaken, then why doesn't he bother to explain how he distinguishes himself (and by implication, a life devoted to literature) from this insult of dilettantism?
After he stumbles on that paving-stone, which sets off a series or revelations, I think Marcel does answer this question -- in his fervent praise for the effort of "true" artists:
"From ourselves comes only that which we drag forth from the obscurity which lies within us, that which to others is unknown" (TR, 276).
The work of the artist, to Marcel, is a strenuous one.
Dragging forth is never easy, you know. Proust makes this point quite vividly when he compares writing to things that make us sweat:
"... to write, is for the writer a wholesome and necessary function... it does for him what is done for men of a more physical nature by exercise, perspiration, baths" (TR, 308).
Somehow he manages to make writing sound like an Olympic training regime, doesn't he?
This is why, I think, the association of "dilettantism" with literature just won't work for Marcel (and, perhaps, Proust). There's just too much effort involved.
And I realized, in pursuing this, a slightly different nuance on the closing philosophy of this novel that I had missed before.
Marcel's notion of an artist is not someone who is simply preternaturally gifted.
For, knowing as he does how hard an artist has to work to "drag forth" something good, Marcel would never deem such a person superior merely because of his or her raw talent.
A true artist, for Marcel (and again, by extension, Proust) attains his or her elevated status through serious effort.
If nothing else, then, it occurs to me that this may (very slightly perhaps?) temper our disappointment in Marcel's seeming self-aggrandizement near the end of the novel. Seen for its broader implications, Proust can be interpreted as saying: whatever your "wholesome and necessary function" (writing this novel is his... but it could be chemistry... or even power lifting...), expect it to be hard, and go for it.
In other words, whatever you choose, don't be a dilettante.
Now that's something we can all agree upon... as this definitively non-dilettantish novel draws to a close.
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