Literary Summits

Last night as we watched Inauguration wrap-up coverage, we saw Bryan Williams interview Robin Givhan, a style columnist, about Michelle Obama’s outfits yesterday. She gave a big thumbs up on the First Lady’s fashion sense.

Among all the things that people were buzzing about yesterday, the fact that the First Lady’s style was a major storyline points to the power of style.

Marcel Proust would have been proud.

Proust worships at the altar of style. I just finished “Swann’s Way” and in the closing section of “Place-Names: The Name,” the narrator has an extended reflection on the elegant women of his childhood who strolled along the paths in the Bois de Boulogne.

He remembers “the happy time of my believing youth, when I would avidly come to the places where masterpieces of feminine elegance were created for a few moments among. . . the pines and acacias of the Bois de Boulogne.” (441)

As Lewis Galantière writes in the introduction to my 1956 Modern Library edition, “Proust was reared in the Roman Catholic faith, but he was temperamentally and intellectually incapable of religious belief.”

It’s true, Proust talks a lot about churches, but not much about religious faith. “Faith,” “belief” and “unbelief” are terms related more to Proust’s esthetics – the beauty or ugliness of a thing or person – than to his ethics or metaphysics. Can you say “Sex and the City“?

Yet even this faith in fashion fades over time. By the end of the book, he laments the changing times and the loss of true elegance:

“I no longer had any belief to infuse into all these new elements of the spectacle, to give them substance, unity, life . . . . These were ordinary women, in whose elegance I had no faith and whose dresses seemed to me unimportant.” (442)

At a certain point, the narrator realizes he simply doesn’t care any more. The thrill of the new is gone:

“How could anyone contemplating these horrible creatures under their hats topped with a birdcage or a vegetable patch even perceive what was so charming about the sight of Mme. Swann in a simple mauve hood or a little hat with a single, straight iris poking up from it?”

(Which makes me wonder, What would Proust have thought of Aretha Franklin’s big-bowed beauty of a hat at the inauguration?)

Even when he’s lost his belief in this substitute religion, there is still the “attachment to the old things which our belief once animated, as if it were in them and not in us that the divine resided and as if our present lack of belief had a contingent cause, the death of the Gods.”