Proust as Artist and Patient

...This definition is the key to his understanding of Proust's life and work...

...The moral majority would reject him because he dared to speak of the subject at all, while the homosexuals themselves were certain to complain that he did not picture their plight with sufficient sympathy...

...In the great essay on homosexuality which preceded Cities of the Plain, Proust made it clear that the homosexual's effort to rationalize his social position was only a symptom of what troubled him, a symptom which merely aggravated his alienation from normal reality...

...Unlike Gide, who expended his rational faculties upon a vain effort to justify his sexual abnormality in the face of an unsympathetic and uncomprehending world, Proust regarded himself as a sufferer from "an incurable disease...

...not 1914 as Dr...

...The doctor's favorite adjective is "famous," but he never comes to grips with the quality which accounted for the fame...

...As effectually as Freud himself, perhaps more so, he succeeded in spreading tolerance and understanding, though not indulgence perhaps, toward one of the lesser known ills of mankind...

...It is, indeed, reasonable to suppose that a neurosis is an incubus upon talent and that the cure of the former need not result in the elimination of the latter...

...It arises out of Proust's own mixture of literary types—hinted at by his reference to his 4,000-page work as "a novel, an autobiography, and a history of a certain period in the form of memoirs...

...it contains about 30 titles relating to the sciences or social sciences and only 20 dealing with literature or Proust...

...For instead of pointing out those limitations of Proust's talent which may have conceivably been due to his illness, the author is continually emphasizing the greatness of that talent...

...is literary insight...

...Reviewed by Milton Hindus Professor of literature, Brandeis University...

...Miller is capable of responding to a work of imagination in such a way that he apprehends distinctly what makes it an imaginative work...

...I do not think so...

...Toward the end of the book, there is an interesting idea which, had it been developed, might have led to something...

...Confused by such a description and himself not gifted evidently for the appreciation of fine writing (the poorness of his own sentence structure and his general awkwardness would suggest this), Dr...

...What is lacking, however...

...One of the less intelligent doctors in Proust's own cast of characters in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu enunciates the theory so grateful to many of his patients that "neurotics are the salt of the earth...

...The facts of his life prove otherwise, and the temptation of the medical man, who is incapable of grasping any work of art as an autotelic object as divorced from its creator and as anonymous as the drawing in prehistoric caves, is to trace a connection between his disabilities and his talents...

...Who would believe that Milton was blind when he composed his greatest poems...

...It is clear that no method can substitute for taste and intelligence...

...Charles Swann is not "a successful Jewish stockbroker" but the son of stockbrokers...

...Miller has read Proust's work as if it were merely a document...

...Miller, in spite of his familiarity with the text, never once convinces us that he has gotten inside the book...

...The two most important manifestations of his disturbance were the chronic asthma from which he suffered and his homosexuality...

...On the other hand, Freud has fathered much in contemporary critical writing that is useless, pretentious or simply dull...

...The same may be said of Jung and of a number of lesser disciples...

...Where one or the other of these is deficient, the method functioning in a vacuum will produce something that is simply irrelevant to the subject under discussion...

...I realize that I am making Proust's work sound like a tract or a document...

...One purpose of this essay," writes Dr...

...Freud himself is both interesting and significant whenever he chooses, as he so often does, to deal with authors or books...

...But, by a miracle of mediation and sensitivity, Proust succeeded in making the most diverse species of men more intelligible to each other...

...he was 42...

...He did so by showing to the world the situation of the sufferers from within, and from then on they could never be regarded with the same complacence or contempt again...

...The truth is that from Proust's work we would never know that he was neurotic...

...In Dr...

...This essay is not one of literary criticism," he tells us in his foreword...

...Sollier, where he stayed for a period of six weeks...

...Proust was quite certain that his pioneering treatment of so strange a subject in literature would displease all sides...

...Before the problem of the creative artist," he wrote in his essay on Dostoyevsky, "analysis must lay down its arms...

...There are mistakes, to be sure, which will loom excessively large in the eyes of scholars...

...Unfortunately, he is not himself one of those who seems sufficiently gifted to make it any less intangible...

...Still, in spite of these little mistakes...

...Miller, "has been to question the myth that a neurosis must be left to run its course, and not be altered, if an artist is to produce great creative work...

...That great men have been able to accomplish so much in spite of their handicaps is no argument for supposing that the handicaps themselves were necessary to the accomplishments...

...Or Beethoven deaf when he wrote his last quartets...

...Instead of developing it, however, Dr...

...This fear of insight is an ungrounded one, because with true insight the artist should be further liberated...

...Proust himself was well enough to see through this rationalization...

...But for me, at least, it is a key which refuses to turn the lock...

...Is this failure due to the method which he uses...

...Miller unconsciously contradicts it in the greater part of the book...

...The blunt truth seems to be that the doctor would never himself have been capable of discerning the quality of the talent had it not been pointed out to him by men of taste...

...It is the triumph of art that it makes us forget the limitations of the artist...

...In spite of his continual obeisance in the direction of Proust as an imaginative writer, there is scant evidence in this book that Dr...

...Now the chickens have come home to roost...

...He voluntarily committed himself to the care of the physicians after his mother's death in 1905 and entered the sanitarium of Dr...

...Miller shows himself to be intimately conversant with Proust's work, so familiar in fact that the reader who is not himself steeped in it may find it hard at times to follow his discussion...

...One might as well argue that Milton's blindness or Beethoven's deafness improved the quality of their art...

...Miller thinks...

...Miller's special usage of the term, "the first experience of nostalgia [is] an urge to return to the passivity of uninterrupted relationship to the mother, with a sense of omnipotence through having one's wishes anticipated and gratified...

...The central thesis of his book is indicated by its title...

...His bibliography bears this out...

...All of his observations upon it seem to come "from the top of his head...

...Miller himself speaks of "the new, difficult, intangible" field of psychiatry...

...Are the stigmata of Proust's illness more evident in his work...

...Yet it is possible to see how an error regarding it should arise...

...Miller would disarm us in advance by disclaiming the intention to stray beyond his province...

...The narrator of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, unlike the author himself, was not a homosexual...

...The psychoanalysts (or, at least, one of them) have taken up the challenge and are investigating Proust...

...Proust was not only an artist but a "case" in the technical sense of the word, and he himself realized it...

...Otherwise repression inhibits some aspects of artistic expression, despite the expressive nature of certain types of neurotic drives...

...Proust was not 48 at the time of the publication of Du Cote de Chez Swann...

...author, "The Proustian Vision'' F. L. Lucas, while conceding Proust's greatness as an artist, criticized him for what appeared to be his amateur tampering with the science of psychoanalysis...

...Nostalgia, coming from two Greek words, denotes a feeling of homesickness which, when it is intense enough, is capable of causing severe melancholia...

...If they are, the author should have clearly pointed out where they are to be found...

...Many of our critics— Lionel Trilling and Edmund Wilson come to mind—use things which they have learned from Freud, in conjunction with others which they have learned elsewhere among the scientists and social scientists of the last century, profitably and with discretion...

...The answer to many of Proust's general problems," wrote Lucas, "is to be found not in Proust but in Freud...

...The great example of homosexuality in the book and, by common consent, one of the best realized characters in modern literature, the Baron de Charlus, is portrayed by Proust as a sick man, a man whose sickness grows progressively and dangerously worse in the course of the story until he is almost entirely helpless, has to be protected against himself, and is with difficulty distinguishable from a driveling idiot...

...And the date of the publication of this initial volume is 1913...

...Freud himself knew better...

...It is not diligence that seems to be lacking here but something else...

...The word neurotic is an adjective, and the nouns it modifies might be as different from each other as fool and genius...

...In speaking of it in this way...

...It is certainly anything but that...

...Here is a thought worth entertaining...