Lectures 1949-1968, Volume 1 E-Book

Theodor W. Adorno

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 633

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

When Theodor W. Adorno returned to Germany from his exile in the United States, he was appointed as a lecturer and researcher at the University of Frankfurt and he immediately made a name for himself as a leading public intellectual. Adorno’s widespread influence on the postwar debates was due in part to the public lectures he gave outside of the university in which he analysed and commented on social, cultural and political developments of the time.

This first volume brings together Adorno’s lectures given between 1949 and 1968 on music, literature and the arts. With an engaging and improvisational style, Adorno spoke with compelling enthusiasm on subjects as diverse as Marcel Proust’s prose, Richard Strauss’s composition technique and Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire. Germany, restoring its social and intellectual institutions, needed to embrace the new music and writers who had been neglected, particularly with regards to Proust. To rebuild was taken to mean rediscovery, but Adorno also nurtured a vision of tradition which – far from being unthinkingly conservative – would attest to society’s honestly-appraised relationship to the past while it underwent the process of modernization. The volume illustrates Adorno’s deep commitment to holding contemporary music and culture to standards commensurate with the aspirations of a modern world emerging from the horrors of war.

This volume of his lectures is a unique document of Adorno’s startling ability to bring critical theory into dialogue with the times in which he lived. It will be of great value to anyone interested in the work of Adorno and critical theory, in German intellectual and cultural history and in the history of modern music and the arts.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright Page

On Proust

(1954)

Notes

An Introduction to the New Music

(1954)

Notes

Culture and

Kultur (1957)

Notes

Problems of Music Criticism

(1958)

Notes

Musical Education Today

(1962)

Notes

Improvisations on Wedekind

(1962)

Notes

Richard Strauss – Questions of Compositional Technique

(1964)

Notes

Principles of Form in Contemporary Music

(1966)

Notes

Music in Europe Today – Germany

(1968)

Notes

Introduction to a Performance of

Pierrot lunaire (1968)

Notes

Editor’s Afterword

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

Pages

iii

iv

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

51

52

53

54

55

56

57

58

59

60

61

62

63

64

65

66

67

68

69

70

71

72

73

74

75

76

77

78

79

80

81

82

83

84

85

86

87

88

89

90

91

92

93

94

95

96

97

98

99

100

101

102

103

104

105

106

107

108

109

110

111

112

113

114

115

116

117

118

119

120

121

122

123

124

125

126

127

128

129

130

131

132

133

134

135

136

137

138

139

140

141

142

143

144

145

146

147

148

149

150

151

152

153

154

155

156

157

158

159

160

161

162

163

164

165

166

167

168

169

170

171

172

173

174

175

176

177

178

179

180

181

182

183

184

185

186

187

252

253

254

255

256

257

258

259

260

261

262

263

264

265

266

267

LECTURES 1949–1968

Volume 1: Music, Literature and the Arts

Theodor W. Adorno

Edited by Michael Schwarz

Translated by Nicholas Walker

polity

Copyright Page

Originally published in German as Vorträge 1949–1968, herausgegeben von Michael Schwarz. Taken from Nachgelassene Schriften, Abteilung V (Band I): Vortrage und Gesprache. Copyright © Suhrkamp Verlag AG Berlin 2019. All rights reserved by and controlled through Suhrkamp Verlag AG Berlin.

This English edition © Polity Press, 2025

The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International – Translation Funding for Work in the Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association).

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

111 River Street

Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5238-2 – hardback

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5239-9 – paperback

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2024936236

by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

ON PROUSTJanuary 1954

Ladies and gentlemen, dear fellow students:

If anyone had told me thirty years ago that it would fall to me to introduce a new edition of Marcel Proust to the German public, I should emphatically have rejected the task, with a certain disbelief, not simply because of the extraordinary difficulty of such a task but also because a plan of that kind would have seemed superfluous to me, for the simple reason that the power and authenticity of Proust’s work is so strong that I should hardly have been able to imagine that there would be any call, thirty years on, for anyone to be obliged specially to point it out to an intellectually receptive audience.

Yet the situation seems to be otherwise. Proust has been neglected in Germany, and not only as a result of the Third Reich, which forcibly suppressed the publication of the Recherche du temps perdu. The whole German edition of Proust, in fact, fell through. From the very start, it stood under a most unlucky star. The translation of the first novel, Du côté de chez Swann, was reviewed with extreme disfavour by a highly authoritative judge.1 I leave open the question of whether this review was fair or unfair, but the individual points made were certainly correct. But the result was that people who were in no way qualified to judge the matter in question considered themselves as able to drop Proust, on the grounds that he had been so poorly translated, and the German reception of Proust never really recovered from this initial shock. Even when the magnificent translations by Benjamin and Hessel2 became available, comprising the second and third novels in the series3 – A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs and Le côté de Guermantes, that is – the connection had already been seriously disrupted, and the various houses which had been engaged in publishing these translations failed one and all to survive the affair,4 so that the publication of the real centrepiece of the whole work [Sodome et Gomorrhe] never took place at all. One curiosity which I am perhaps permitted to mention to you here is that it can no longer be precisely ascertained whether this centrepiece of the novel, which, in the original plan, was to have been the whole of the book, was ever actually translated or not. Benjamin often told me that the manuscript was ready, but that, in the course of its migrations between the publishing houses, it was then lost;5 but it is possible, as is often the case with authors, that this was itself [wishful thinking]6 and that, in reality, the manuscript was never completed. In any event, it is entirely of a piece with everything surrounding the German Proust that the matter is so uncertain. I believe that it does no injustice to the history of the German Proust to say that, even at the time when his work first appeared, that is in the late twenties and early thirties, Proust collided with a climate in which, in the jargon of those years, he proved too ‘unacceptable’; and when I read Proust, it seems to me as though the whole Third Reich had been invented for the sole purpose of destroying and prohibiting everything which is embodied by this novel, not excluding all the forms of response which it embodies. Nothing is entirely clear-cut here, however, and in some ways this is all the more surprising as Proust himself was anything but a revolutionary or a critic of society, with respect either to his own attitude or to the political content of his work. Certainly, he was on Dreyfus’s side in the Dreyfus affair,7 which is no real surprise in his case, since he was ‘half-Jew’; but, apart from that, one can in no way say that either Proust or his whole mode of life contained anything revolutionary in the external sense. Despite this, this work, because of a kind of inner explosive force, a kind of inner nonconformity, triggered a sort of shock from which it has never been possible wholly to recover. And I am in the most literal sense of the word fortunate that, at the moment when my friend Suhrkamp8 is organizing the new edition9 of Proust, all that is over. At this moment, the new translation of the first volume, that is, the translation of Du côté de chez Swann, has already sold out,10 and that is at least a very good sign for the work as a whole. It is not, however, quite the case that what has been lost in Germany with the loss of Proust is a model. There are indeed novels, German novels, which have oriented themselves towards Proust. I will name only two – one by my late friend Hermann von Grab, Der Stadtpark [The municipal park],11 and the other, Farben zu einer Kinderlandschaft [Colours for a child’s landscape], by Count Erik Wickenburg,12 both of which are extraordinarily delicate and subtle creations which it would have been impossible to conceive of without Proust’s example.

It is much less a question, however, of the model which Proust provides than of the standard which he sets. Just as, for any given poem in the German language, even those which are at an infinite remove from his school, one can hear whether it dates, intellectually, from before or after Stefan George, the same must be true, I believe, of imaginative prose in Germany: one has to be able to discern whether it is pre- or post-Proustian. I should like to put into other words the formula that Proust combines an exemplary with an advanced character, by saying that Proust’s work is indeed avant-garde – that is to say, that it is removed from all conventional and pre-established norms but, at the same time, it contains within itself a kind of universal bindingness and necessity, which elevates it above the whole sphere that is usually designated by concepts such as those of the experimental, or the arbitrary. In what, then, does the exemplary quality of this work lie? I should like to remain faithful to the micrological character of Proust’s writing by not trying, say, to give you a general characterization either of the man or of his work – an attempt which would necessarily fall apart and would necessarily fail to evoke for you what is really at stake here. I should also prefer not (as might be a severe temptation for one defined by vocation as a philosopher) to go into the philosophy contained in Proust, such as an applied Bergsonism,13 or, as some would have it, a Platonism in the form of a novel.14 I am absolutely convinced – and here we are touching on an error which is very widespread in aesthetics today – that whatever philosophical material is pumped into his work by an author is in no way identical with the philosophical content of the work itself. If I were being mischievous, I might say that the philosophy which is pumped in, that is, the so-called world-view of the author, is very often only there so as to conceal the absence of any objective philosophical content in the way the material is handled. And this goes for Proust too, even though his work is interspersed with long and often very difficult theoretical observations, such as that on the nature of time. Here, perhaps, I may add something which I tried to argue in an essay which will appear in the next issue of the Neue Rundschau, that even these reflections of Proust’s are not to be interpreted as abstract considerations set apart from the form as a whole, but that, instead, they themselves actually form part of the monologue intérieur – that is, that they are only at all valid as being themselves a portion of the material which is treated in the novel according to the a priori of the novel form and in no way claim (as they do, for example, in the work of Gide,15 and occasionally in that of Thomas Mann) actually to represent integral theoretical productions independent of the form of the novel.16 Now, I do not wish, today, to tell you anything about all this, nor to tell you anything, or at least not substantively, about the famous principle of involuntary recollection, the mémoire involontaire, which Marcel Proust adopted from Bergson, and which he applied in a particular sense.17 I also promise to tell you nothing about the celebrated madeleine,18 which has, indeed, in the meantime, become a sort of mass-market foodstuff. Instead of all this, let me, rather, try to take as my starting point my own experiences of this work and, in this way, to get inside its objective character. This somewhat unusual approach will perhaps – so at least I hope – justify itself by means of what I have then to tell you by way of explanation.

I first came across the name ‘Proust’ on a motoring trip through the Dolomites in 1925.19 It was in an issue of the Neues Wiener Journal, a filthy Viennese rag made notorious by the polemics of Karl Kraus.20 In this atrocious rag was to be found a not especially distinguished essay by Stefan Zweig, saying a few things about Proust’s life, his way of working, and the nature of his novel.21 Although even then I harboured few illusions about Stefan Zweig’s literary quality, reading this essay seized me with a sense of fascination long before I had read a single word of the work itself. What happened to me was something like what happens to us when (and here, I think, we are already moving within Proust’s magic circle) we can fall in love with the name of a woman even if we have never seen the woman in question, and know nothing of her other than this very name. It seemed to me that the material with which Proust was dealing must in an almost idiosyncratic way be connected to my own most intimately personal matters, and those which were also most hidden from me myself – almost as if I would have had to blush at the mere sound of the name ‘Proust’. And this sense of diffident enthralment only strengthened as I engaged more closely with Proust. Benjamin once said to me, in just this spirit, that he had decided never to read a word more of Proust than he had to translate, because otherwise he would fall into the grip of a sort of addiction to the work and would no longer feel capable of writing anything of his own. The expression ‘addiction’, I may say, does indeed capture well a good deal about the atmosphere of Proust’s work, not only because Proust, in the final years of his illness, was himself an addict in the clinical sense of the word,22 but because his relation to life and, above all, his relation to his own literary production possess an atmosphere of obsession, of addiction, which then all too easily communicates itself to the reader.

Now you will ask me, ladies and gentlemen, what the private passions of a couple of writers can really have to do with the matter itself, that is, with Proust’s work. But the remarkable thing is that Proust’s magnetic power attracts every reader who is to any extent capable of perceiving creations of this level, even if those readers are people whom Proust had never imagined, as far as their intellectual and social life is concerned. One might say that Proust blurts out everybody’s secrets, and this points to the exact starting point at which I should like to show you a small path into this thicket.

Proust’s work is, of course, apparently of the most private character imaginable. The presentation is anything but communicative. Think only of the long sentences, excessively complicated even for German ears, let alone for French or English ones, or of the long paragraphs, which, for all those stupefied by mass culture, make it an endlessly laborious task to find their way through Proust. For all its contemplative self-immersion, all its charm and all its allure, it is extraordinarily uncomfortable, demanding and disconcerting reading. In addition to this, the concerns, if I may use such a blunt expression, with which the Recherche du temps perdu is preoccupied are those of an extremely wealthy individual, such as hardly a single one of its readers in Germany will be able to identify with without qualification, and what is more, a privileged individual who exhibited a perverse and distorted libidinal economy. The society of which it treats is the French aristocracy of the late capitalist period, the society, that is, of an epoch in which the group which is portrayed here, and the social stratum which is portrayed here, no longer really possessed any decisive social significance. And with this comes a circle of people, of snobs and parasites, connected to this world, as well as (admittedly) the world of the servants; and, at all events, it is a pure sphere of consumption, while what is essential – that is, the whole sphere of social production, the sphere of politics, the sphere of the social dynamic – is kept entirely distant from this work, almost as if one could say that it had been screened off; and nothing of the whole authentically social tendency of our age is to be detected, not even in the handling of the material, except negatively, that is, in the decomposition of this esoteric luxury society. To this extent, it is the direct opposite of what is today described as poésie engagée.23 Now, most people wish to know nothing whatever of this social sphere, perhaps because they are obliged to suppress something in themselves which responds all too strongly to the allure of this exclusivity, which forms one of Proust’s great themes, and because for just this reason they must deny themselves what charms them. But what Proust says about all these unusual matters does not concern their structure – anyone who is looking for anything like a sociology of French high society or of snobbery in Proust’s work will be severely disappointed – but instead is always and only concerned with the most specific, singular and irreplaceable forms of experience. If ever a work were individualistic in its own spirit and in its own attitude, it is Proust’s. It is determined by the exceptional situation of the person who wrote it, just as much as it is determined by his will, so far as possible, only to let in whatever escapes universal access, whatever is not already pre-formed by universal concepts, of which Bergson once said that they are like ready-made clothes draped over the bodies of things, and hanging off them, baggily.24 Now, in Proust, the ideal of haute couture is at issue in a double sense. A sick man wanted to show this to a world which excludes him from it. If I were not fearful of natural-scientific comparisons, and if I did not know what damage is being done today by the unprecedented development of the natural sciences, when their categories are transferred to the phenomena of objective spirit, I would say that what we see in Proust is an attempt to split the atom in the spiritual sense. What is really at stake for him is thinkingly to represent the τόδε τι [tode ti], despite its being the most individual thing of all, that which eludes the concept’s grasp, to penetrate this τόδε τι by means of the concept, and to become aware within this, rather than within the universal,25 of the forces which really matter – forces, admittedly, which exceed many times over those which are actually grasped by normal, everyday, classificatory concept-formation.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, this is quite a claim, and since I accept that most of you, as citizens of this university, will not let this sort of assertion go by unchallenged, and that you are quite unwilling to be imposed upon, you will nevertheless say to me, first of all, ‘Yes, how is that possible, how can it be, that in this case the representation of the most individual and most exceptional thing of all is to have objective meaning?’26 And I would now like to justify my position to you in the face of this question. Please do not misunderstand me. I do not wish, for instance, to repeat to you the universal cliché to the effect that the binding validity and power of works of art increase in any one case with the force of the individual cast of their form. Here, in Proust’s case, we are dealing with something much more specific and also with something more exciting, that is, with the actual power of the mea res agitur [this is my concern], which, in hermetic isolation, comes back not to the mea res [my concern] but to the res [concern] of the other, that is, the concern of the writer. To exaggerate a little, one might say that anyone who is a match for literary compositions of this kind has the feeling in the presence of Proust’s most personal meditations that ‘that’s exactly what it’s like, that’s what I’m like myself, that could have happened to me too.’ I should like at least to give you an example of this; I don’t know whether it will convince all of you, but it made a great impression on me, in any case. In a very late passage of this great work – I think it is either in Albertine disparue or in the first volume of Le temps retrouvé – the narrator receives a friendly greeting by telegram signed with Albertine’s name. Albertine, one of the main female characters in the novel as a whole, was the narrator’s beloved. At this point she has long been dead, but a chain of events has led to the telegram’s being signed with the name ‘Albertine’, although it has actually originated with another of the narrator’s youthful loves.27 Now, I believe that one can hardly react to this story with any other feeling than that ‘That’s what it’s like, that’s exactly how it happens’; and perhaps I may add to this that, wherever Proust’s work produces this sort of self-evidence, there is hurt of some kind in play. Now, I ask, what is this – this immediate, almost bodily feeling of the universal validity of that which is most singular? By providing you with an answer to this question, and this question alone, I hope to be able to make present to you the central impulse of Proust’s work, at least.

You know that a great part of this work is dedicated to childhood, and everyone knows that Proust saw the precise recovery of childhood memories as one of his most essential tasks. Here lies the often noticed analogy between Proust’s works and psychoanalysis. Now28 I believe that it is here that we can find the key for this element of fascination, and in a way which contradicts Proust’s apparent esotericism, and does so, I should almost like to say, in a democratic way. Every child, that is, who has not had the capacity for response driven out of them in their earliest years, has at his or her disposal the possibility of infinitely differentiated experience. I remember one of my classmates, who did not become anything special in the subsequent course of our lives. We were perhaps twelve years old when, in our French lesson, we read Molière’s The Miser.29 This classmate of mine pointed out to me how the teacher pronounced the title, L’Avare, in a particular way which betrayed his lack of cultivation and lower social level. He said ‘L’Avarre’, and the hard r in ‘L’Avare’ was the sound of a provincial dialect, that of the Westerwald region.30 My classmate thought that there was such a conflict between the pronunciation of this r and the subject matter that it was no longer possible to believe this otherwise excellent teacher to have a command of the French language. Now, this remark by a twelve-year-old boy could have come out of Proust, and, if I am not mistaken, every bourgeois child who has grown up in conditions which are to some extent sheltered would be capable of observations of this sort; but we lose the capacity to make these observations, we lose the capacity to respond in this way. The drive to fit in forbids us this precise listening in to, or tapping at, reality. Proust gives an account of precisely this point in a relatively early passage of the work, and, if I can give you a tip for reading Proust, it is that many of the scattered observations which are made in the early part of the novel are kinds of signals which are preparing you for the path to be taken later, and which will be made good on only when you know the whole work. I should like to read this little passage to you, because I think it will characterize for you, better than anything else can, that particular impulse which I take to be a key to the work.

When these turns around the garden of my grandmother’s took place after dinner, one thing had the power to make her come back: it was – at one of those moments when the cycle of her walk brought her back, periodically, like an insect, to the lights of the little room where the spirits were served on the gaming table – if my grandmother called out to her, ‘Bathilde! Come and stop your husband from drinking cognac!’ In order to tease her, indeed (she had brought into my father’s family a man of such a different cast of mind that everyone made fun of her and tormented her), since my grandfather was forbidden to drink spirits, my great-aunt made him drink a few drops. My poor grandmother came in, ardently imploring her husband not to try the cognac; he became angry, drank his mouthful all the same, and my grandmother left again, sad, discouraged, yet smiling, for she was so humble-hearted and so gentle that her tenderness for others, and the small importance that she attached to herself and her sufferings, were reconciled in her look, in a smile where, in contrast to what one sees in the faces of many human beings, there was no irony except for herself, and for all of us there was only something like a kiss from her eyes, which could not see those whom she held dear without passionately caressing them with her look.

And then the narrator says of himself:

But as soon as I heard, ‘Bathilde, come and stop your husband from drinking cognac!’, already a man in my cowardice, I did as we all do once we are grown up, when there are sufferings and injustices in front of us: I did not wish to see them; I went up to sob right at the top of the house, in a little room next to the study which smelt of iris, and which was also perfumed by a wild blackcurrant which had come up between the stones of the wall outside, and which had put a branch of flowers through the half-open window.31

Now, this ‘already a man in my cowardice’ is a motto for the whole of Proust. One might say that this most pampered of all writers, by ordinary standards, escaped from this one thing at least, from being a man in his cowardice; that is, [he sought] to retain for himself the reactions which one has as a child and which are otherwise actually driven out of one by life. The compulsion to fit in forbids us, later, this precise listening in to and tapping away at reality, insofar as we immediately encounter the latter in our living experience. If we were to behave in this way our whole life long, life would hardly be bearable for us. I think almost anyone can test this if, in the course of a conversation, they take the trouble to notice, not what is being talked about, but the overtones, especially the moments of falsity, contrivance, domineering behaviour, flattery, self-applause, or whatever it may be, moments present in one’s own voice just as they are in those of one’s interlocutor. If, for example, one listens to a tape on which one’s own voice is recorded, one can almost always have this to some extent shocking experience. Now, Proust, one might say, listened in, his whole life long, to his own voice, and those of everyone else, with roughly that close proximity and that simultaneous distance with which we listen to a tape recording or a radio recording of our own voices. If one were fully conscious at every moment of all these overtones, it would necessarily import such a despair of the world and of ourselves, such despair at what the world has made of any individual, that one would lose the desire and perhaps even the strength to play along with it any longer. Proust’s secret, then, was that he did not go along with the renunciation of this capacity for response, that he stayed faithful to the possibility of undiminished experience which is ours in childhood, and that, with all the reflectiveness and conscious awareness of the adult, he perceived the world in as undeformed a way as is possible for us when we are children. Now he certainly was an adult, and he was, I can assure you, anything but infantile. This means, however, that in order to carry off this achievement, which is self-evident for the child, one must make an effort which is nothing short of heroic, and this heroism runs through all of Proust’s work and is, in a certain way, the counterpoint to his sensitivity; and it is this heroism alone that really removes the danger of being excessively pampered, of falling in love with oneself. In this preservation of the capacity for response we are dealing almost with something like the technique of a yogi. Proust’s naivety is that of a second naivety, is a second, almost artificially produced naivety, as Jens Peter Jacobsen, who has a good deal in common with Proust’s work, once introduced the idea of second naivety.32 I might, moreover, perhaps say to the philosophers among you that we find a similar motif in Hegel himself at the point where he says that at every stage of the dialectic, that is, right through every mediation, a new immediacy, or, if you like, a new sort of vividness is recovered, and that it is not the case that, say, immediacy or naivety would be lost as a result of reflection, but that they are in a certain sense created over and over again, in an unending process.33 Now this, then, is how it is in Proust too. One might say that something of this naivety lingers in the posture of the spoiled child or in that of the fastidious amateur, stances which Proust took up with such far-reaching consequences. When, for example, a passenger on a ship, a first-class passenger on a ship, converses with the sailors, then what the traveller says to the sailors, however cultivated and complex a person he might be, always, when compared with the toughness of the actions expected of the sailors, has something naive and childlike about it, and if the sailors are not completely hard-boiled they will then also have a certain inclination to smile a little over someone who is amicably talking to them in this way, without having any real idea of the difficulties of their lot. Now one might say that Proust actually has a great deal of this naivety of not being on the inside, this naivety of the spectator, of the mere observer, and that his specific stance is, precisely, connected with his keeping on the outside in this way, with his not quite participating, which at one and the same time permits him to reflect, yet also keeps him outside what is going on, something which people generally take for childishness; and that there persists, precisely in his very intellectualization and complexity, I should almost like to say, the moment of childlikeness, but not of infantility – of the childlike in a great and authentic sense.

Now, the overwhelming feeling of the familiar within the most exceptional, which comes from Proust, comes from the fact, if I am not mistaken, that as a result of this unexampled self-discipline he remained in command of what every individual knew as a child and then suppressed, and which now speaks to him with the power of what is familiar. What appears so individual and, if I may say so, so unusual in Proust is not at all individual and unusual in itself, but is so because of the fact that we no longer trust ourselves, that we no longer have the strength or the courage to perceive it in the same way. Just this, in reality, is the promise of the universal, and Proust recovers this promise. I may perhaps say that this is where we can find a decisive difference from Bergson, who was related to Proust both literally and in the superficial sense.34 In both Proust’s and Bergson’s work the intention is to recover life and experience from reification, from the world of convention. Bergson, however, sees the path to such a recovery as lying in an unfettered self-adaptation to changing situations, or, if you like, in blind conformity;35 Proust, by contrast, sees it as lying in withdrawing from such adaptation and keeping the perceptual organs of childhood intact. Hence Bergson trusts himself to intuition36 as to a pure passivity and guards himself against all active ‘labour of the concept’,37 whereas Proust demands precisely for intuition the exertion of a fencer, and also bolsters and fills his work with an extraordinary summoning of rationality, I should like to say of healthy common sense, and of actual psychological knowledge; and only on the basis of this fund of healthy common sense and actual experience of the world does he then extol that power of intuition – that is, that power to recover, by means of recollection, what has been forgotten, which really constitutes his work. He thus has a much less simple stance towards the problem of ratio and intuition or of rationality and unconscious recollection than does Bergson. He has a much more dialectical standpoint towards all this in the cast of mind of his work itself, but I shall do no more than point this out to you, since I have promised not to go into the problem of [mémoire involontaire] in detail.

Now one may not, admittedly, imagine this in any simple way, since even this capacity of Proust’s about which I am speaking to you also presupposes an extraordinary capacity for adaptation, and, if we are rightly informed, Proust’s life stood under the sign of an exaggerated and almost injurious sense of tact. I cannot quite escape from the impression, in reading the biographical accounts of him and, above all, in reading his own work, that this was a matter of a kind of cunning, that he wanted in a certain way to bribe or captivate life, and it is not without its irony that this most tactful of all people, as is coyly admitted in his biographies, received the favour of those people whom he wished to cultivate as objects of his study by showering them, without distinction of sex, with extravagant gifts, as he could afford to do. Now, in saying this to you, I am pointing to a moment of something shocking and something extremely uncomfortable in Proust, and I am certainly of the opinion that a writer’s substance is always located at the places where he shocks us. I believe that this is also true of Proust. Now, this is by no means merely for the reason that he challenged the bourgeois taboo on so-called hothouse plants38 – that is, on those who have never seen anything of the world. Nor is it connected to the fact that he concerned himself with the theme of snobbery, a theme which is indeed especially suspect in the age of totalitarian regimes of both [kinds], according to the maxim that one should stop the thief. I do not even believe that the reason for it is that among the book’s main themes is homosexuality, an apologia for which did indeed originally form one of the most essential concerns at least of [the volume Sodome et Gomorrhe], but it is, rather, much more a question of the fact that … each of Proust’s far-flung and difficult sentences amounts to an act of changing the course of some received opinion or other. It could be said that the law of this novel, the law of this novel’s form, is that life goes against the grain. Things always turn out differently.

I want to give you at least one short example of this. In Du côté de chez Swann there is the story of an uncle, uncle Adolphe, whom he somehow loved very much, and he visits this uncle, and at his uncle’s house he meets that uncle’s ‘mistress’ – this is the expression which must be used, in accordance with the antiquated atmosphere of this social sphere – and he, the narrator, immediately falls head over heels in love with the mistress, and is infinitely grateful and happy that he has encountered such an alluring and at the same time such a forbidden being. And his uncle gives him to understand that he is not permitted to say anything about this at home, but he is so overflowing with happiness that he is unable to keep silent about it and somehow blurts the story out, and his thoroughly bourgeois parents then take terrible offence and forbid him ever to visit the uncle again. What happens next is as follows: a few days later, he sees his uncle in the street; he wants to go over to his uncle and take his hat off to him, and at the moment when he takes his hat off it occurs to him that this act of taking off his hat in no way corresponds to the warmth of his feeling or to his overflowing gratitude for having been made acquainted with that lady, and so he must instead throw himself upon his uncle and embrace him or kiss his hand or something of that kind, and by the time he has made his decision his uncle has already disappeared. His uncle, for his part, however, has correctly inferred that the family has forbidden the narrator to have anything more to do with him after this meeting, never forgives the narrator for this, and neither the narrator nor the family ever again in their lives exchange a word with this uncle.39

Now, this example is an example of that idea of going against the grain, of defamiliarization, of everything always going differently, which is characteristic of Proust’s work as a whole. I may, perhaps, say – and I say this thinking of the writers among you, who will now get stuck in to Proust, and for whom it will be a temptation to imitate him, a temptation which I myself know plenty about – it is a questionable business to attach oneself to Proust in the sense of imitating him, in however sophisticated a way, because without this capacity to defamiliarize, without, that is, this power to suspend the accepted course of things, all this so-called subtlety actually becomes a somewhat silly navel-gazing, somewhat vain. Now, this capacity for defamiliarization not only relates to details such as the example which I have just mentioned to you but also in a certain way relates to the categorial structure, to the context in which Proust’s work actually stands as such, in other words, to the person himself. And here I think I can make good what I said to you at the beginning, that Proust’s work combines the exemplary with the avant-garde. Through his infinitely meticulous attention to individual experience, Proust destroyed the illusion of the unity of the individual. He is a dialectical writer in the further sense that, in his work, the most consistent perfecting of the psychological novel brings about the dissolution of the psychological novel, that the gripping interior image of the imago replaces the fiction of the whole undivided person. I found this idea, to my delight, confirmed in Arnold Hauser’s sociology of culture,40 which first came to my notice after I had already drawn up these ideas about Proust.41 So when two people who come at things from such different angles as Hauser and I do hit upon the same idea, there is indeed some hope that we have got something right.

Now, to the extent, therefore, that the unity of the person is dissolved and that, thereby, the whole sphere of the psychological is at the same time negated by being radicalized, Proust’s work, despite [Elstir] and Bergotte, that is, despite Monet42 and Anatole France,43 postdates impressionism. It brings impressionism to a consciousness of itself and thus to the threshold of objective construction. The analogy to Cézanne suggests itself.44 I should rather leave this analogy to be developed, however, by those who are better versed in questions of painterly technique than I may claim to be. Proust’s work is an attempt to represent interior and exterior reality, using the instrument of the existence of a person without a skin. But a price has to be paid for this. It is well known that in later years Proust always wore his fur coat, even in company, only to take it off for a moment just as he was leaving, so as to soften the contrast between the temperature of the room he was in and the cold outside, even on a summer evening. This thin-skinned person lived his life in fur coats – in an intellectual and spiritual sense, too. The case is very paradoxical: in order to retain a limitless capacity for suffering for himself, a capacity to which, for Proust, the chance of being happy was attached, he attempted by means of the most artificial arrangements to keep suffering at a distance. Proust’s fairy-tale model is the princess bruised by a pea. Proust’s father, a famous doctor and the head of the French health service, coined an expression which became internationally current, that of the cordon sanitaire.45 Proust internalized this notion. His whole life stands under the law of the cordon sanitaire, so as to make it possible to keep whatever might blunt the child’s capacity for response far away from him. Proust’s narcissism, by which one might very easily be put off, has just this function. On metaphysical grounds, as it were, that is, for the sake of the possibility of undiminished response, good manners are more important to him than character and friendliness more important than goodness, and his manic connection to ‘society’ is also fed from this source.46 The question of whether he led a life in the salons for the sake of the work, or whether his work was separate from his life in the salons, I consider to be futile, as also the often risible defences of Proust against the charge of snobbery, such as those mounted by, for example, [Paul Morand].47 If Proust had not given his heart’s blood to these matters, if he had not been, through and through, that which is shocking, his work would never have attained the universality of the particular. In this, he finds himself indeed in the tradition of Baudelaire, to the title of whose book that of the second volume of Proust’s novel, A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, in a certain way alludes, for these jeunes filles en fleurs actually indeed are fleurs du mal. In Proust it is really a matter of a spleen which has been driven to the point of the dissolution of his self, driven to the point of self-illumination. Perhaps his homosexuality even has something to do with the cordon sanitaire. If it did not fly in the face of all the psychological theories recognized today, one might be tempted to say that Proust became a homosexual so as never to expose himself to the risk of an unkind response from a lady. To speak seriously, there is also in this the enigmatic need not to step outside of one’s own magic circle, to remain with what one is oneself, so as, by means of this precaution, to expose none of the organs which are needed for the registration of psychic events to any danger, rather in the way that Proust arranged his room, especially in later years, as a sort of maternal womb. But nothing could be more mistaken than to suspect all these arrangements of cowardice or weakness. Rather, Proust converted all these impulses of his timidity – which must have been prominent impulses, for one fixated on the image of his mother – into a strength. The excessive susceptibility of his psychological organs in the face of hurt is what in the first place made these organs sufficiently discriminating to hit upon and retain images, instead of working them up into concepts. The capacity to remain within oneself, to withdraw into oneself and at the same time to retain the most tremendous capacity for contact, is only the façade of a spiritual discipline which does not wish to let go anything which has been experienced. Nothing could more precisely describe this aspect of Proust than that, in the most brilliant of his novels, A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, he, who had perhaps never experienced the desire for a woman, conjured up the imago of the young girl more perfectly and more compellingly than anyone else ever has. If he said of Renoir that after Renoir’s paintings it was impossible to see the world without something of Renoir’s paintings entering into every glance,48 then I would say that one cannot any longer see a young girl without something of Proust’s gaze at the jeunes filles en fleurs entering into this act of looking.

Fidelity to the way in which a child responds is fidelity to the idea of happiness, which Proust did not wish to be made to relinquish at any price. Moreover, he is, apart from Bachofen,49 the only case of a multimillionaire’s having been intellectually productive in the grandest style. But he thought of this social position really in the sense of noblesse oblige. He took that privilege which had permitted him his limitless and almost offensive refinement as a duty, a duty to be just as everyone ought actually to be and as everyone will one day become. Pierre[-Quint], in a generally very unassuming book,50 at one point says justly of Proust, with reference to his so-called social ambition, that in every modern salon he saw a fabled castle and in every decayed old princess a fairy from the Thousand and One Nights, rather as Proust himself describes matters in the passage portraying his first encounter with aristocracy, that is, his observation of the duchesse de Guermantes, [Oriane] de Guermantes, at the wedding which is described in Du côté de chez Swann.51 But he made this intention of his, to be happy, infinitely hard for himself. For him, it means not letting himself be fobbed off, and so it is intimately entwined with knowledge; Proust’s need for happiness is one with the need for a truth which is undiminished and unadulterated by any convention. This truth, however, is pain; and, for this reason, the organ with which Proust latches on to images of happiness is his almost unlimited capacity for suffering. Even his illness, asthma, which can hardly have lacked a psychological element, seems calculated to permit him to suffer for the sake of unfettered experience. Here, however, Proust joins the great tradition of the French novel, for all the life that he describes is nothing other than this grasping for a happiness which it finds denied to it on every side. Proust is treading in the footprints of Stendhal, Balzac and Flaubert, the last romantic of disillusionment. What he relates is the story of an unattainable or endangered happiness; jealousy, for this reason, stands high among his psychological subjects. This rhythm is the only thing which is repeated amid the unrepeatable – in Swann’s relationship with Odette, in the narrator’s with Albertine,52 and in that of the real central figure, the baron de Charlus, with the lowly violinist, Morel. To the question whether happiness is possible, Proust answers by depicting the impossibility of love. The theme of homosexuality is thus in his work in the profoundest way entangled with [the fact that] love is denied fulfilment a priori. There are lovers in Proust, but only unhappy ones. The perfection of individual differentiation means at one and the same time isolation and radical alienation. The unfettered possibility of happiness, readiness for happiness, at the same time makes its own fulfilment impossible. Thus in the work of Proust – whom the French, not without reason, felt to be German, and criticized as a German – everything singular and transient becomes nugatory, as in Hegel’s philosophy.53 It is the polarity between happiness and transience that Proust refers to recollection, as the only medium in which undamaged experience is recovered far beyond immediacy, and in which transience appears to have been overcome. This, the lasting quality of what is not immediate, but a recollected image, is at the root of Proust’s so-called aestheticism, which in its culmination attains, as it does in Valéry’s work, a dimension of abyssal profundity.54 Nietzsche’s assertion that ‘all joy wants eternity’55 is the fundamental principle of this approach to art. Happiness, which will never let itself be bought off, means an absolute refusal of consolation. It would rather relinquish its whole life for the sake of the whole of happiness than accept one feature of it which does not meet the measure of the utmost happiness. This relinquishment is the inner story which is told by the Recherche du temps perdu. Total recollection is the answer [to] total transience, and hope lies only in the capacity unerringly to become aware of this transience, and to hold it fast in writing. Proust in a literal sense described his own death; he is a martyr to happiness.

Notes

Abbreviations

GS: Adorno’s writings are cited from the German edition, Gesammelte Schriften (ed. Rolf Tiedemann, in collaboration with Gretel Adorno, Susan Buck-Morss and Klaus Schultz. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986); where available, English translations have also been cited and corresponding references and publication details added to the editor’s notes.

Adorno gave his lecture on the new German edition of Marcel Proust’s novel A la recherche du temps perdu for the first time at the Frankfurt publisher’s evening reception, on 12 November 1953. The occasion was the appearance of In Swanns Welt [In Swann’s world] with the Suhrkamp publishing house. The lecture was repeated in other forms, once more without a fixed script, in January 1954, at the Collegium Academicum in Heivdelberg, and on 5 February 1954, in the main hall of the University of Göttingen. Finally, Adorno gave it once again on 14 May 1955 in Freiburg, at the literary salon held by Maria Proelss (1890–1962) and Hanni Rocco (1896–1990), whom he had known since his youth.

The lecture which serves as the basis of what is printed here is that given in Heidelberg; it displays minor overlaps with both of the texts On Proust [Zu Proust] which appear in GS 11, pp. 669–75. Among the audience in Heidelberg was Alexander Mitscherlich (1908–1982), to whom Adorno wrote a letter of thanks on 27 January 1954; the lecture must therefore have been given before this date.

The nine-page typescript draft of the lecture, with various handwritten sections, is extant (Vt 44) under the title ad Proust [on Proust]. The typewritten material, which dates from 8 November 1953 (that is, three days before the Frankfurt reception) was later supplemented by Adorno in his own hand using ballpoint pen, pencil and ink. He evidently relied on this draft not only for the lecture given in Frankfurt but also for that given in Heidelberg; the draft not only fixes keywords but is in places identical with the lecture as delivered. For this reason, it has been decided not to reproduce the draft, Vt 44, in the present volume.

The copy-text for the lecture is provided by the typescript with handwritten corrections and supplements, Vt 47. On its first page Adorno has noted in pencil: ‘exact transcript / of the Heidelberg lecture / Jan. 1954 / Freiburg, 14 May 1955’. The typewritten material in the typescript represents the transcription of the Heidelberg lecture, which was recorded on tape. Unfortunately, the sound recording is not extant. The transcript Vt47 contains some lacunae, above all where the transcriber did not understand titles mentioned by Adorno. Most of these omissions were later filled up with a typewriter or in an unknown written hand, and, of course, it was not possible to have recourse to the tape recording. Adorno did not thoroughly work through the transcript but did consult it several times, and certainly before the lecture on 14 May 1955. There are at any rate a number of corrections, marginalia and additions to Vt47 in Adorno’s hand with pencil and ballpoint pen. The transcript as a whole nevertheless continued to contain errors and lacunae. The text given approximates as closely as possible to what Adorno said in January 1954 in Heidelberg. The title Ad Proust [On Proust] is the editor’s.

 1

  Under the title

Der Weg zu Swann

[The way by Swann’s] the publishing house Die Schmiede published the first volume of Proust’s cycle of novels in a translation by Rudolf Schottlaender (1900–1988). This translation was subjected to devastating criticism by the scholar of Romance languages Ernst Robert Curtius (1886–1956). See Curtius, ‘Die deutsche Marcel-Proust-Ausgabe: Eine Umfrage’ [The German edition of Marcel Proust: a survey], in

Die literarische Welt

2/8 (1926), p. 4. Curtius summarizes his view as follows in the final paragraph of his review: ‘

Du côté de chez Swann

has – as may already have become clear – been badly mishandled by its German translator. It is rather as though Debussy had been “arranged” for the mouth organ. It is not only that there are individual slips, but that there are hundreds of mistakes, which when added up go beyond what is acceptable.’

 2

  The writer, editor and translator Franz Hessel (1880–1941), who was a friend of Benjamin’s.

 3

  See Marcel Proust,

Auf den Spuren der verlorenen Zeit. Zweiter Roman. Im Schatten der jungen Mädchen

[In search of lost time. Second novel. In the shadow of the young girls], trans. Walter Benjamin and Franz Hessel (Berlin, n.d. [1927]); Marcel Proust,

Auf den Spuren der verlorenen Zeit

.

Dritter Roman. Die Herzogin von Guermantes

[In search of lost time. Third novel. The duchess de Guermantes], trans. Walter Benjamin and Franz Hessel (2 vols, Munich, 1930). Both translations were republished by Hella Tiedemann-Bartels as supplementary volumes 2 and 3 of Benjamin’s

Gesammelte Schriften

(Frankfurt am Main, 1987).

 4

  The publishing house Die Schmiede, founded in 1921, was obliged to file for bankruptcy in 1928. The German rights to Proust’s work, which had been acquired in 1922, were transferred to the Piper publishing house, which expanded its list to cover international literature from the end of the 1920s onwards.

 5

  Benjamin wrote to Gershom Scholem on 18 September 1926 that the translation of

Sodome et Gomorrhe

had been ‘with the publishing house in manuscript form for a long time’ (Walter Benjamin,

Gesammelte Briefe

, vol. 3:

1925–1930

, ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt am Main, 1997), p. 195). The manuscript of Benjamin’s translation has been lost.

 6

  The typewritten copy indicates a lacuna here. It has been filled in an unknown hand with the word

Wunschphantasi

e.

 7

  The French artillery captain Alfred Dreyfus (1859–1935) was in 1894 sentenced to life-long deportation on the grounds of a supposed betrayal of military secrets. In 1896, falsifications of documents, irregularities, and an antisemitic background to the trial came to light. Doubts as to the condemned man’s guilt grew. The affair attracted a great deal of public interest and split France into Dreyfusards, who demanded a retrial, and their opponents (anti-Dreyfusards). On 15 January 1898, the newspaper

Le Temps

published a petition, signed by Proust among others, for the trial to be reheard. The appeal hearing imposed a ten-year prison sentence, which was converted to a pardon. Only in 1906 was Dreyfus completely rehabilitated.

 8

  On the friendship and collaboration between Peter Suhrkamp (1891–1959) and Theodor W. Adorno, see

‘So müßte ich ein Engel und kein Autor sein’: Adorno und seine Frankfurter Verleger

[‘I would have needed to be an angel rather than an author’: Adorno and his Frankfurt publishers].

Der Briefwechsel mit Peter Suhrkamp und Siegfried Unseld

, ed. Wolfgang Schopf (Frankfurt am Main, 2003).

 9

  Adorno answered a survey on the participants’ strongest impressions of 1953 as follows: ‘I should like first of all to mention the new edition of

Du côté de chez Swann

, which inaugurates the publication of a complete translation of

A la recherche du temps perdu

by my friend Suhrkamp’ (

Die Neue Zeitung

, 25 December 1953; see, now, GS 20.2, 734). The volumes were translated by Eva Rechel-Mertens (1895–1981), a former colleague of Ernst Robert Curtius’s, and appeared with Suhrkamp as follows:

In Swanns Welt

[In Swann’s world], 1953;

Im Schatten junger Mädchenblüte

[In the shadow of blossoming young girls], 1954;

Die Welt der Guermantes

[The world of the Guermantes], 1955;

Sodome und Gomorra

[Sodom and Gomorrah], 1955;

Die Gefangene

[The captive], 1956;

Die Entflohene

[The escapee], 1957;

Die wiedergefundene Zeit

[Time found again], 1957.

10

In Swanns Welt

had appeared in an edition of 4,000 copies with the Surhkamp publishing house, as well as 200 copies for sale in Switzerland by the Rascher house. The cloth edition cost 19.80 deutschmarks, and the half-bound edition 25 deutschmarks.

11

 The Prague writer Hermann Grab (1903–1949), who also worked as a lawyer, pianist, music critic and music teacher, had been a friend of Adorno’s since 1924 or so. In 1935 he published the novel

Der Stadtpark

[The municipal park]. When the book appeared with the Zeitbild publishing house (Vienna and Leipzig), the blurb contained the following assessment: ‘It is real poetry that this book breathes. We are told the story of a delicate boy, who is removed from material cares as well as from all the other problems of life, but who makes an acquaintance which leads to conflicts. Childhood friendships arise and pass by, a childhood love blossoms, school throws a shadow over his existence. Everything is taken seriously and leaves behind melancholy incisions into the life history of this precocious boy. Over the whole book lies the delicately breathed twilight of an autumn afternoon’ (quoted from

Lexikon deutsch-jüdischer Autoren

[Dictionary of German-Jewish authors], ed. Renate Heuer, vol. 9 (Munich, 2001), p. 270). Grab emigrated to the USA in 1939, via France and Portugal, and taught in music schools in New York until his death. Adorno’s obituary for Grab can now be read in GS 20.2, pp. 465f. For the correspondence with Grab, see Malte Spitz,

Theodor W. Adorno/Hermann Grab: Bericht einer unveröffentlichten Korrespondenz

[Theodor W. Adorno/Hermann Grab: account of an unpublished correspondence],

Sonderdruck

5 (Berlin, 2017).

12

 The Austrian journalist and writer Erik Wickenburg (1903–1998), who was of noble descent, became the features editor of the

Frankfurter Zeitung

in 1928. In 1932 he published the autobiographical novel

Farben zu einer Kinderlandschaft

.

13

 Henri Bergson (1859–1941), professor of philosophy at the Collège de France from 1900 onwards and an important proponent of vitalism.

14

 On this, see, above all, Ernst Robert Curtius,

Französischer Geist im neuen Europa