Conclusion: A Good Buy?

Summary

In La Prisonnière, volume vi of A la recherche du temps perdu, Proust famously depicts the death of Bergotte, a writer for whom the narrator has a great deal of admiration and whose work constitutes a step on the way to his own vocation as novelist. The narrator muses on the posthumous fate of the deceased author, and concludes his meditation as follows:

l'idée que Bergotte n'était pas mort à jamais est sans invraisemblance. On l'enterra, mais toute la nuit funèbre, aux vitrines éclairées, ses livres, disposés trois par trois, veillaient comme des anges aux ailes éployées et semblaient, pour celui qui n'était plus, le symbole de sa résurrection.

Significantly, Bergotte's afterlife is portrayed through the evocation of his books on display in a shop window. The imagery of a chapel of repose watched over by angels with open wings is redolent of spirituality, but the underlying implication is that Bergotte will live on because his books have become marketable commodities.

At the other end of the twentieth century, Pascal Lainé, winner of the Goncourt prize for his novel La Dentellière (1974), bemoaned the fact that the commodification of the entire culture was all but complete. In his 1997 essay Le Commerce des Apparences he declares: ‘La logique de la marchandise achève, en ce moment même et sous nos yeux, de coloniser tout l'espace de ce qui aurait pu être “l'humain”.’