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Proust had a friend called Gabriel de La Rochefoucauld. He was an aristocratic young man,
whose ancestor had written a famous short book in the seventeenth century, and who liked to
spend time in glamorous Paris nightspots, so much time that he had been labeled by some of
his more sarcastic contemporaries "de La Rochefoucauld de chez Maxim's. " But in 1904
Gabriel forsook the nightlife in order to try his hand at literature. The
result was a novel, The Lover and the Doctor, which Gabriel sent to Proust in manuscript form as soon as it was
finished, with a request for comments and advice.
"Bear in mind that you have written a fine and powerful novel, a superb, tragic work
of complex and consummate craftsmanship," Proust reported back to his friend, who might
have formed a slightly different impression after reading the lengthy letter which had
preceded this eulogy. It seems that the superb and tragic work had a few problems, not least
because it was filled with cliches: "There are some fine big landscapes in your novel,"
explained Proust, treading delicately, "but at times one would like them to be painted with
more originality. It's quite true that the sky is on fire at sunset, but it's been said too often,
and the moon that shines discreetly is a trifle dull."
We may ask why Proust objected to phrases that had been used too often. After all,
doesn't the moon shine discreetly? Don't sunsets look as if they were on fire? Aren't cliches
just good ideas that have proved rightly popular?
The problem with cliches is not that they contain false ideas, but rather that they are
superficial articulations of very good ones. The sun is often on fire at sunset and the moon
discreet, but if we keep saying this every time we encounter a sun or a moon, we will end up
believing that this is the last rather than the first word to be said on the subject.
Cliches are detrimental insofar as they inspire us to believe that they adequately describe a situation
while merely grazing its surface. And if this matters, it is because the way we speak is
ultimately linked to the way we feel, because how we describe the world must at some level
reflect how we first experience it.
The moon Gabriel mentioned might of course have been discreet, but it is liable to
have been a lot more besides. When the first volume of Proust's novel was published eight
years after The Lover and the Doctor, perhaps Gabriel (if he wasn't back ordering Dom
Perignon at Maxim's) took time to notice that Proust had also included a moon, but that he
had skirted two thousand years of ready-made moon talk and uncovered an unusual metaphor
better to capture the reality of the lunar experience:
Sometimes in the afternoon sky, a white moon would creep up like a little
cloud, furtive, without display, suggesting an actress who does not have to
"come on" for a while, and so goes "in front" in her ordinary clothes to
watch the rest of the company for a moment, but keeps in the
background,
not wishing to attract attention to herself.
Even if we recognize the virtues of Proust's metaphor, it is not necessarily one we could
easily come up with by ourselves. It may lie closer to a genuine impression of the moon, but if
we observe the moon and are asked to say something about it, we are more likely to hit upon
a tired rather than an inspired image. We may be well aware that our description of a moon is
not up to the task, without knowing how to better it. To take license with his response, this
would perhaps have bothered Proust less than an unapologetic use of cliches by people who
believed that it was always right to follow verbal conventions {"golden orb," "heavenly
body"), and felt that a priority when talking was not to be original but to sound like someone
else.
--Alain de Bot ton, How Proust Can Change Your Ljfe
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