In the January 1920 issue of @nrf.larevue 📓, Jacques Rivière responds to the “minor riot” 💥 caused by the Prix Goncourt…

In the January 1920 issue of @nrf.larevue 📓, Jacques Rivière responds to the “minor uproar” 💥 sparked by the 1919 Prix Goncourt. In it, he defends Marcel Proust, the winner for “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower” 🌺, explaining why nothing comparable to “the Search” has been written since Saint-Simon’s “Memoirs”:

🖋️ “I shall one day endeavour to analyse in detail the reasons why our nineteenth century was a period of profound stagnation for the whole field of psychological literature. For now, I shall confine myself to the fact that seems to me indisputable. From the time of Stendhal onwards, there has been a steady decline in our ability—though so ancient and so deeply ingrained—to understand and convey emotion. Flaubert marks the point at which this decline becomes noticeable and alarming. I do not mean to say that “Madame Bovary” and “Sentimental Education” reveal no understanding of the human heart; but neither work contains the slightest direct insight into its complexity; neither work takes us deeper into it, nor reveals new facets of it to us head-on. There is, in the author, a certain sluggishness of the intellect when it comes to sensitivity; it struggles to keep up with it; it can no longer make sense of it; it no longer knows how to grasp it in its capriciousness and subtlety. Hence, I believe, the impression of treading water that these books give us, even though they are so strongly ‘on the move’, and whose style, as Marcel Proust so aptly remarked right here, brings to mind a ‘moving walkway’(1).”

🗳️ Proust: an analyst of the human heart?

(1): Marcel Proust, ‘On Flaubert’s “style”’, @nrf.larevue no. 76, January 1920 💡

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