On Proustian Intelligence

Abstract

INTELLIGENCE WAS AN EMBATTLED TERM in Third Republic France. Its constitution and destitution mark a series of philosophic, political, literary, and affective contexts that shape this moment of modern French thought and culture. Literary critical texts from the Belle Époque to the First World War—from Maurras and Massis to Valéry, Bergson, Proust, and the critics of the Nouvelle Revue Française—register dominant attitudes toward intelligence, while also representing alternative modes of relating to or deviating from the faculty.1 Proust’s literary-critical project begins with a disavowal of intelligence, stated with dramatic concision in a famous passage from the Contre Sainte-Beuve drafts, which begins, “Chaque jour j’attache moins de prix à l’intelligence.”2 The Recherche, as we shall see, tells a more nuanced story about the ambiguous necessity of intelligence, and the position one must take toward it to write and read fiction, as well as to relate to others and the world. From its salons to its studios, from its fields to its bedrooms, the novel offers myriad examples of how “intelligence” might feel, look, and especially sound in language. Proust knowingly mobilizes a host of meanings attached to this “complex word” since its emergence as a subject of scientific and philosophical discourse, and his characters use it with no less circumspection in their evaluation of themselves and each other.3 Attending to talk about “intelligence” allows us to view a nexus of questions crucial for Proustian poetics from an acute angle, suggesting insights other than the ones crystallized by the narrator’s theoretical musings in Le temps retrouvé. “It is Proust’s courtesy,” notes Adorno, “to spare the reader the embarrassment of believing himself cleverer than the author.”4 While Adorno’s observation describes one of the pleasures of reading Proust, it does not acknowledge how the novel imagines relational modes other than cleverness, many of which complicate the narrator’s beliefs about the nature and limits of the self. My larger project, to which these pages allude, deals with the rise of “intelligence” in the context of philosophical and psychological explorations in the late nineteenth century, showing how intelligence goes from being a faculty of mind to a sign of interpretive, aesthetic, and cultural power.5 Tracking the mutations of intelligence sharpens our vision of the complex rhetorical status French literature invented for itself as a form of language and thought wrested from intelligence. This dual relation of opposition and origination underscores the difficulty of abdicating intelligence once and