" Every day I attach less value to intelligence. Every day I see more and more aware that only the writer no matter it can recapture some of his impressions, which is something he and the only material of art. "
These sentences of Proust, at the beginning of
Against Saint-Beuve (this is an essay that Proust did not publish because they never got to give it a final shape, and the drafting of which swelled up to be confused with the genesis of
Recherche ; they were published, posthumously, two different versions) show the question about which he is deep thinking will take shape at a time when the idea of \u200b\u200b
Recherche : What is the relationship between life and art? In other words: what is the relationship between the experience of a man's life and works of art that he (eventually) produce? This issue has two sides. Applies to those who, faced with a work, questions the weight in the interpretation of it is attributable to the author's life. But it also applies to those who poses the problem of artistic genesis: how the author came to produce this work? More generally: how
comes to artistic creation?
Proust in Against Sainte-Beuve
, addresses both problems. On the one hand the decisive attack "Biography", played by literary critic Sainte-Beuve, arguing that it makes no sense to judge a work based on the author's life, but it 's
work itself which should be examined thoroughly, know in detail and overall structure. On the other hand develop a theoretical core of the genesis of art, which will boost the production of his masterpiece and which will form the backbone of
Time Regained, the last volume of the Recherche
.
In the passage quoted at the beginning what Proust called "intelligence" will be specified then, in
Recherche as "amicus", which is opposite the famous "involuntary memory".
Also in those lines, Proust uses a fascinating metaphor for me: the "matter of art." It is a metaphor because, obviously, if we are to the 'art' in a general sense we are dealing primarily with a concept, not a concrete object. But even if intendessimo speak of a single work of art (and here we do not necessarily great art, but something that simply can oppose science and technology, in the sense that it aims to have either a cognitive function, or a 'practical use), for example a sculpture, a painting, a novel, a film, it is clear that to which Proust refers is not the matter with which these things are done. He does not speak of it is made of marble sculpture, or paint combined with canvas or paper soaked with ink, or the light filtering through the celluloid film. But then what Proust alludes to the metaphor of a "matter of art?
We can get a response by comparing an artist to children well playing on the beach and build sand castles. What plays with the baby? With the sand, definitely. But his "stuff" is not only the sand also plays with the fantasies around the castle he is building.
play with what the sculptor, painter, the musician, writer, filmmaker? Surely with the colors, tactile sensations, with sounds, with words, with pictures. But even with the patterns, with memories, with emotion, with ideas. They play with their experiences
, in the broadest sense of that term. Not so "experience" in the narrow sense of sense perception, but in the broadest sense has taught us that the phenomenology
: perceptions, memories, imaginations, emotions, desires, thoughts ... (For a first approach to the phenomenology Board
Elements of a teaching experience John Plain).
Path in Time Regained
:
"... understand how life can be considered mediocre, although at times appeared so beautiful, because we judge (and price) on the basis of something else that she herself, in pictures of her, nothing conserved. (...) Yes, if I remember, thanks to oblivion, it was able to make any connection, throw no bridge between himself and the present moment: if it has remained in her own place, its own data, if conserved distance, its isolation in the depths of a valley or on top of a mountain, it suddenly makes us breathe new air, - new because it's who has already an air breathed in the past - that air purest vain poets have tried to reign in heaven, and that could give us this feeling of deep renews if it had not been breathing, because the true paradises are the paradises we have lost. (...)
different impressions of happiness they shared this: that I felt at once in the present moment and at a distance, so as to catch the past on the present, to make me hesitant to establish which of the two I was. Indeed, the resolutions to be in me then that impression (...) in the deliberations that she had to extratemporal: a being who only appeared when, for one such identity between the present and the past, he could be in the one element which is given to live, and enjoy the essence of things:
ie outside of time.
(...) How many times in my life, the reality had disappointed me, because when we perceive the imagination, which was the only body which has had to enjoy the beauty, could not apply to it, which wants to law quell'inflessibile that only things missing are imaginable! And then, suddenly, the effect of the harsh law was neutralized, suspended by a beautiful contrivance of nature, who had flashed a feeling (...) at the same time in the past, which enabled my imagination enjoy it, and this, in which the (...) shock was added to the ghosts of the imagination what they are usually lacking, the idea of \u200b\u200bexistence, and, (...) had allowed my being to grasp, to isolate, to stop, for duration of a flash, what it usually does not capture ever: a fragment of time in pure form. (...)
just a noise, smell, hearing or already breathed once more, they are again, at a time in the past and present, real without being actual, ideal without being abstract, because now the ' permanent and usually hidden essence of things is liberated, and that our true self (...) you awake, you spirits, getting the heavenly food that is offered. A moment freed by the temporal re-created in us, to feel it, man freed by the temporal.
(...) I had to try to interpret the sensations as signs of many laws and ideas, trying to think, that is to get out of the shadows that I had tried to convert it into a spiritual equivalent. Now that half, which seemed the only one, which could consist in if not in creating a work of art? (...) Their first feature was that I was not free to choose, I Came dates as they are. And I sensed that this was to just be a sign of their authenticity.
(...) So, I now come to this conclusion, that we are not free before a work of art, which does not compose at will, but that existing in us, we must, since it is at once necessary and hidden, and as we would for a law of nature, discover it.
(...) Real life, life is finally discovered and the light, then the only life truly lived, is literature. (...) Style, for the writer, (...) is the revelation, not by direct means and conscious of the qualitative difference that exists in the way we see the world, except that if there was not ' art, would remain the eternal secret of each one. Only through art is given to us out of ourselves, to know what another person sees (...) Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply, and many are the original artists, many more worlds are at our disposal, different from each other even more than the infinite worlds spinning.
(...) This artist's work, aimed at trying to see under a certain subject under a certain amount of experience, on certain words, something else, is exactly opposite to what, at any time, when we live reversed by ourselves, pride, passion, intelligence, and also the habit, they engage us, amassing over our genuine impressions, to hide the other classification, practical purposes, we give the wrong name "life".
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