Chapter 11 - Painting

Summary

Of the three art forms that Proust chooses to feature in À la recherche du temps perdu – painting, music and literature – painting is undoubtedly given the greatest prominence: first, through the sheer number of references to works of art and their creators that abound throughout the novel and, second, through the relative levels of detail devoted to the descriptions of the work of the three fictional artists portrayed: Vinteuil, the composer, Bergotte, the writer, and Elstir, the painter. It is also significant that Proust's imagery has been shown to be predominantly visual.

The music of the composer Vinteuil is an important motif in Un amour de Swann: the ‘little phrase’ from his violin sonata is the ‘national anthem’ of Swann and Odette's affair, and his septet makes a profound impression on the Narrator later in the novel. But Vinteuil himself is a relatively minor character whose genius is not recognized until after his death. Conversely, although we receive a somewhat more detailed impression of the writer Bergotte, we learn little about his work in terms of its subject matter. The most significant insight into his writing is Bergotte's own analysis of a painting, the View of Delft, which compares prose with paint, the textual with the visual. But his perception of a lack of richness in his own writing leads to a sense, at the moment of death, of having failed as an artist. Style thus takes precedence over content as a criterion for judging the worth of a work of art – a conviction Proust never fails to underline, as we shall see. And the description of Bergotte's books in the window of a bookshop: ‘his books, arranged three by three, kept vigil like angels with outspread wings’ (5: 209; iii, 693), as guardians of Bergotte's resurrection, presupposes the survival of the artist's work beyond death, as also in the case of Vinteuil. In contrast to this immortality is the relative insignificance of individual artists' lives.