Cultural Amnesia (99 page)

In his fine long essay “Nationalism, Human Rights and Interpretation” (appearing as chapter 36 of
Reflections on Exile
) there is an encouraging sign that he has already reached it. He notes that the Lebanese writer Adonis, like Salman Rushdie, was reviled for
suggesting that a strict literalism in the reading of sacred texts kills the spirit. Said is only a step away from saying that no text is sacred. He is brave enough to take that step: he is used
to having his life threatened. His other fear is the disabling one: the fear of giving aid and comfort to the automatic enemies of Islam. But one is not necessarily an enemy of Islam for saying
that although all good books are holy, no book is the word of God. Even the greatest books are the work of human beings, in all their frailty. Without the frailty, there would be no art, or even
any thought. When Said saw the general up there on the screen looking so seductive, he thought that he had caught Pontecorvo in a weak moment. But the weak moment was a moment of strength.
Pontecorvo had asked himself: “How would I have reacted, if I had been a French Algerian, and had been there in the street for the arrival of the strongman who had come to reassure me that
my life had not been wasted?” By looking into himself, he was able to see everything else: the sign of the artist. As for Pontecorvo the ex-artist, he made those commercials in
order to maintain his way of life as a figure of prestige, a man who counts. And after all, the prestige was impressively brought into play when Pontecorvo strode forward as a
headline act in the demonstrations against the bombing of Afghanistan. There he was, up there on the screen: the great director, being lavished with the camera’s admiring caresses. One
imagines that Said was pleased enough to see that.

SAINTE-BEUVE

Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804–1869) was the illustrious nineteenth-century French man
of letters who got a bad press from a long line of good writers, from Flaubert through Proust to Vladimir Nabokov: it was his bad reputation, rather than his renown, that outlived him. The
student should be slow to join in the denigration. Sainte-Beuve really was the greatest literary critic of his time, even though he sometimes gave too much praise to mediocrity, and not
enough to genius. Nor did he miss out on every genius. His advocacy and understanding of Victor Hugo led to a close friendship, although his love affair with Madame Hugo was not calculated to
reinforce it. That was probably the best thing about Sainte-Beuve’s multifarious energy (he was poet and novelist as well as critic): he was willing to live outside the categories. He
had a nose for the everyday, and he found the everyday everywhere. For such a writer to make criticism his main creative effort was without precedent. Throughout his life, the weekly essay
was his characteristic form, and finally it was the wealth of observation, invention and reasoning that he was ready to pour into an apparently casual piece that marked him out. Read today,
his volumes of weekly pieces are still a good way of building up
strength in one’s reading of French, because even when the subject was ephemeral he gave it
permanence with his registration of contemporary detail, so the reader is usefully driven to the dictionary and the Larousse. (The presence of that latter volume on your desk is a sure sign
that you are on the right track.) As a literary grandee, Sainte-Beuve took a prominent place at the celebrated Parisian restaurant Magny’s, where all the literary world came to dine and
the brothers Goncourt surreptitiously wrote down the conversation. (
Dinner at Magny’s
, by Robert Baldick, can be recommended as ranking high in
the sumptuous genre of gossipy books about Parisian artistic life.) The concept of a literary world—a milieu which surrounds the outstanding literary figures, ameliorates their natural
isolation and incidentally provides an honourable and useful life for those who are not outstanding—was represented for nineteenth-century France by Sainte-Beuve, as it was represented
for eighteenth-century England by Dr. Johnson. The literary world turns the café into a campus, with conversation as a permanent seminar. Sainte-Beuve’s triumph was to have his
conversations with the public as well as with the writers. In the universities he was less uniformly successful. Appointed by Napoleon III as professor of Latin poetry at the College de
France in 1854, he was shouted down by rebellious students. Later on, as a senator, he retrieved his reputation as a champion of liberal thought. He had set the style for the public
intellectual speaking through a newspaper column to an audience of those either literate or aspiring to be so. The role was open to abuse, but it became the natural centre of critical energy,
and modern civilization owes Sainte-Beuve a permanent debt for having played his part without stinting his talents.

Every circle of society is a little world apart; to the extent
that one lives in it, one knows everything and believes that everyone must know the same things; and then, ten years, twenty years, thirty years having gone by, the circle is broken and
vanished, not a sign is left, nothing is written
down, and one is reduced to guessing about the whole thing, to bringing it back on the basis of the vaguest hearsay and
through feeble echoes.

—SAINTE-BEUVE, FROM A LETTER
COLLECTED IN VOL. 17 OF HIS
Correspondence générale
, AS QUOTED IN THE
Times Literary Supplement
, OCTOBER 3, 1975

Q
UITE APART
FROM
its manifest truth, this is Sainte-Beuve at his best: a best we can’t afford to ignore. Plenty of his critics—critics of the critic—have striven to help us forget
all about him. Ernst Robert Curtius thought that Sainte-Beuve’s long critical career had given French literature a coherence and a continuity that were absent from German literature because
no comparable figure to Sainte-Beuve existed. But very few figures comparable to Curtius have ever shown the same enthusiasm about Sainte-Beuve, and many of them have decried him as a shameless
puffer of journey-work, the exemplar and protector of the second-rate. Nabokov, always on the lookout for novelists unjustly praised, loathed him, and with some reason. Sainte-Beuve certainly had
a gift for slighting the gifted while rabbiting on endlessly in praise of mediocrities. Flaubert poured the energy of genius into the job of demonstrating how thoroughly Sainte-Beuve had
misunderstood him in the matter of
Salammbô
. As for Proust himself, it can be said that his whole career was one long version of his polemic
Contre Sainte-Beuve
. The music critic Edward Hanslick carried a comparatively slight burden: as the object of Wagner’s scorn, he was the involuntary
model for Beckmesser in
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
, but at least he had only one opera aimed at him. Sainte-Beuve was the target for the whole of
À la recherche du temps perdu
. He was lucky to be dead.

But in literature there is, or ought to be, such a thing as a right of precedence, and the chronological
facts say that Sainte-Beuve sounded like Proust before Proust did. At one stage I read all the way through the collected
Causeries du lundi
columns in a
bunch of disintegrating paperbacks I bought from a
bouquiniste
on the Left Bank. With torn and faded yellow wrappers thinner than their pages, the books
were sadly battered little bundles that fell open anywhere and eventually fell
apart. It was one of the ways I learned French: a
lundi
a
day, underline every word you don’t know, keep going for as long as you get the sense, look up the hard words afterwards. Later on I replaced those tatty collections of Sainte-Beuve’s
weekly output with a glistening Pléiade set, and although I never took the Pléiade volumes down from the shelf with the same alacrity, they had their use, principally for checking
up on just how completely the star critic had missed the point of most of the great writers of his time. Had Nabokov exaggerated about Sainte-Beuve’s peculiar tolerance for the uninspired?
Not really. Eventually, in a fit of madness, I supplemented the set of Sainte-Beuve’s literary criticism with a complete Pléiade three-volume set of his unwieldly sociological
masterpiece
Histoire de Port-Royal
, just in case I ever wanted to get on top of whatever he had had to say about Jansenism. It hasn’t happened yet,
but might. My point now is that with all these books of his on my shelves, I still would have missed this particular paragraph, because even though I read him for his tone rather than as a guide,
and therefore could have read him writing about anything, it still would have been unlikely that I would have read the correspondence through. I have all the correspondence of Voltaire, and enjoy
dipping into it: but I will probably never read it through. You need to be very mad about an author to follow him down all his alleys, because you will be spending time on his minutiae that you
could be devoting to someone else’s main event. (Sometimes the correspondence
is
the main event: Madame de Sévigné put everything she
had into her letters, and there is nowhere else to find out who she really was.)

The blunt truth about all the attendant writings of even the greatest writers is that we must almost wholly rely on the
machinery of scholarship, publishing and reviewing to draw our attention to the little things that piece out the big picture. Somebody had to edit at least seventeen volumes of
Sainte-Beuve’s general correspondence, and somebody else had to read them with reasonable thoroughness, before a piece could appear in the
TLS
from
which I could seize this paragraph and copy it out into my journal. I did so for two reasons: for the truth of what it said, and because it reminded me of Proust. At the time—more than a
quarter of a century ago—I had not yet lived with Proust long enough to realize that the connection might go a long way beyond mere coincidence, or the fact that the two men wrote in the
same language.
As the years went by, however, the way Proust’s mind worked became a more open book—his book, always, but less puzzling, if even more daunting.
Proust the great writer stood more and more revealed as Proust the great critic. He was a great critic because he responded to all the arts at the level of their creation. He could not see a
painting, hear a piece of music or read a stretch of prose without joining in with the painter, the composer or the writer. It was always as if he had been there, collaborating.

He had been there even with the despised Sainte-Beuve. In Sainte-Beuve’s prose, the vehicle for
opinions Proust found fatuous, he had found something profound that he could use, as he found something he could use in everyone to whom he paid attention, even if all they did was make cakes.
With Sainte-Beuve I think it was the additive measure: the way the paragraph steadily unfolds an argument. In Sainte-Beuve’s weekly grind of journeyman judgement, most of the arguments did
not reach very distinguished conclusions. He said himself that he praised the dullards because “for me it is truly an affair of equity.” A pretty damning confession.